2009 Science News

The  Effect of Valence on Younger and Older Adults' Attention in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task

Katherine Mickley Steinmetz, Keely Muscatell, and Elizabeth Kensinger will have an article published in the journal Psychology and Aging. The data published in this article suggests that emotion influences attention in a similar fashion for younger and older adults. This result was significant as older adults can sometimes show a "positivity effect"  in memory. However, this study revealed that the positivity effect does not extend to increased detection of positive words for older adults.

Music training shapes structural brain development

Fifteen months of instrumental music training begun at age 6 leads to structural brain changes that diverge from typical brain development. Brain growth correlated with improvements in musically-relevant motor and auditory skills. These findings demonstrate training-induced structural brain plasticity in childhood. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(10):3019-3025.

Addiction: A Disorder of Choice

Gene Heyman's new book, Addiction: A Disorder
of Choice, was published in June 2009 by Harvard University Press. From the publisher's website:

"In a book sure to inspire controversy, Gene Heyman argues that conventional wisdom about addiction—that it is a disease, a compulsion beyond conscious control—is wrong.

Drawing on psychiatric epidemiology, addicts’ autobiographies, treatment studies, and advances in behavioral economics, Heyman makes a powerful case that addiction is voluntary."

Reviews
This is an important book. In clear and compelling prose Heyman lays out evidence from real-world observation and psychological and pharmacological laboratories that addiction is a choice not a disease. He shows that the causes of addiction, its control, and its potential reduction are the same as the causes, control, and reduction of all voluntary behavior. The book has the potential to revolutionize the behavior of anyone involved in the control of addiction including, most importantly, addicts themselves.
--Howard Rachlin, author of The Science of Self-Control

Most medical practitioners believe that addiction is a disease. By showing that self-destructive drug consumption actually responds to information and incentives, Gene Heyman's path breaking book should make us rethink our conventional, and inadequate, drug policies.
--David Laibson, Harvard University

A Functional MRI Study of the Circumplex Model of Affect

A paper co-authored by Jim Russell, titled "Neural Systems Subserving Valence and Arousal during the Experience of Induced Emotions: A Functional MRI Study of the Circumplex Model of Affect," was accepted for publication in the journal Emotion.

Author(s): Colibazzi, Tiziano; Posner, Jonathan; Wang, Zhishun; Gorman, Daniel; Gerber, Andrew; Yu, Shan; Zhu, Hongtu; Kangarlu, Alayar; Duan, Yunsuo; Russell, James; Peterson, Bradley.

Aging and memory

Emotion and visual processing

Emotion recognition measures

The psychological insight of actors

Doctoral student Thalia Goldstein's program of research demonstrating that actors have a particular skill in psychological insight (theory of mind) and empathy has recently been featured in OnFiction, an online magazine on the psychology of fiction.

Psychological states must be studied scientifically

The future of psychology depends upon recognizing that complex psychological states are constructed and that their study cannot be entirely replaced by the study of brain states, argues Lisa Feldman Barrett in the lead article in Perspectives in Psychological Science's special issue devoted to the "Next Big Questions in Psychology." To read the article, click here.

Elizabeth Kensinger's book published

"Pleasure and Utility in Emotion Regulation"

Maya Tamir has published a paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. "In short," she says, "the paper presents an instrumental approach to emotion regulation, according to which people want to feel even unpleasant emotions, when these emotions promote the attainment of long-term goals."

Abstract

It is typically assumed that people always want to feel good. Recent evidence, however, demonstrates that people want to feel unpleasant emotions, such as anger or fear, when these emotions promote the attainment of their long-term goals. According to an instrumental approach to emotion regulation, when immediate benefits outweigh future benefits, people should want to feel pleasant emotions. However, when future benefits outweigh immediate benefits, people may want to feel useful emotions, even if they are unpleasant. The article describes this instrumental approach, reviews relevant empirical evidence, and discusses the implications of this approach to promoting adaptive emotional experiences.

Local Processing Bias in Children Gifted in Drawing

Some autistic individuals have a talent for realistic drawing and show a local processing bias, which could explain the astonishing precision in their drawings. Appearing in May's issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, an article by Jennifer Drake and Ellen Winner ("Precocious realists: Perceptual and cognitive characteristics associated with drawing talent in non-autistic children") reports that children with a precocious ability to draw realistically show this same bias. This study provides the first evidence that a local processing bias may be a continuous trait found in both autism and in non-autistic individuals with drawing talent.

On the Transition to College

Appearing in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Maya Tamir's new article, titled "The Social Costs of Emotional Suppression: A Prospective Study of the Transition to College," reports that suppressing emotion causes "lower social support, less closeness to others, and lower social satisfaction."

New Theory on Play

Professor Peter Gray's new article, "Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence," presents a new theory about early human adaptation to a highly cooperative way of life. It suggests that our ancestors capitalized on our capacities for play as a primary means of overcoming our inherited primate tendencies toward aggression and dominance, which would have made such cooperation impossible. The article will appear in April's American Journal of Play.

Abstract

The thesis here is that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature, and that this made possible their egalitarian, non-autocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gather bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social play groups, which people could freely join or leave. Freedom to leave the band set the stage for the individual autonomy, sharing, and consensual decision-making within the band. Hunter-gatherers used humor, deliberately, to maintain equality and stop quarrels. Their means of sharing had game-like qualities. Their religious beliefs and ceremonies were playful, founded on assumptions of equality, humor, and capriciousness among the deities. They maintained playful attitudes in their hunting, gathering, and other sustenance activities, partly by allowing each person to choose when, how, and how much they would engage in such activities. Children were continuously free to play and explore, and through these activities they acquired the skills, knowledge, and values of their culture. Play, in other mammals as well as in humans, counteracts tendencies toward dominance, and hunter-gatherers appear to have promoted play quite deliberately for that purpose.

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

Appearing in February's Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Thalia Goldstein's article titled "Psychological Perspectives on Acting" outlines the links between acting training, Theory of Mind, Empathy, and Emotion Regulation, and discusses the implications of acting training on malleability of these skills. As a "New Scholar in the Field," she was asked to write an article on a topic she found important to the Psychology of the Arts.

Elizabeth Kensinger's book published

The Value of Psychology 101

"Psychology has replaced philosophy as the discipline at the core of liberal arts education," says Peter Gray, whose article, titled "The Value of Psychology 101 in Liberal Arts Education: A Psychocentric Theory of the University," was recently published in the American Psychological Society's Observer (Oct. 2008, Vol. 21, #9, pp 29-32).

The Thin Ideal

Graduate student Shannon Snapp has found that adolescent girls who strongly internalize the thin ideal have more negative self-evaluations of competence and body image. This finding appeared in the September 2009 issue of Body Image: An International Journal of Research in an article titled “Internalization of the Thin Ideal Among Low-Income Ethnic Minority Adolescent Girls.

Professor Elizabeth Kensinger was recently interviewed for an article in Seed Magazine on negative advertising in political campaigns: The Double Negative.

Emotional Valence

Katherine Mickley conducted an fMRI study that examined whether emotional valence modulates the neural processes engaged during the encoding of information that is later vividly remembered versus only known to be familiar. The results suggested that memories for negative items may be vividly recollected due to increased sensory processing during encoding, while enhanced gist-based processing of positive information may lead to increased feelings of familiarity. Her results are published in her paper for Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience titled "Emotional Valence Influences the Neural Correlates Associated with Remembering and Knowing."

Constructing Fear

Sleep and Memory

A study by Elizabeth Kensinger on sleep and memory, featured in  ScienceDaily this August, "offers new insights into the specific components of emotional memories, suggesting that sleep plays a key role in determining what we remember – and what we forget." Described in Sleep Selectively Preserves Emotional Memories, the study explains how sleep helps the brain remember emotionally important details and ignore everything else.

Elizabeth Kensinger in @BC

Elizabeth Kensinger research is described in Partial Recall, an article in the June @BC bulletin.

Maya Tamir in APS Observer

Maya Tamir's research on the value of negative emotions is described in the current issue of the APS Observer in the article "The Upside of Anger." Manipulating your emotions by electing to feel anger is a good way to prepare for an aggressive task, according to Maya, whose research shows that listening to angry music before playing an aggressive computer game like Soldier of Fortune improves game performance, whereas it does not help with a game like Diner Dash, about waiting tables.

Suffering from SAD?

Joseph Tecce writes about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a winter disorder caused by the loss of normal light in the environment, affecting approximately 15 million people. More