Making sense
Universal Cognitive Mechanisms Explain the Cultural Success of Bloodletting
Helena Miton, Nicolas Claidière & Hugo Mercier
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Bloodletting — the practice of letting blood out to cure a patient — was for centuries one of the main therapies in the West. We lay out three potential explanations for bloodletting’s cultural success: that it was efficient, that it was defended by prestigious sources — in particular ancient physicians — and that cognitive mechanisms made it a particularly attractive practice. To test these explanations, we first review the anthropological data available in eHRAF. These data reveal that bloodletting is practiced by many unrelated cultures worldwide, where it is performed for different indications and in different ways. This suggests that the success of bloodletting cannot only be explained by its medical efficiency or by the prestige of Western physicians. Instead, some universal cognitive mechanisms likely make bloodletting an attractive form of therapy. We further test this hypothesis using the technique of transmission chains. Three experiments are conducted in the U.S., a culture that does not practice bloodletting. Studies 1 and 2 reveal that stories involving bloodletting survive longer than some other common therapies, and that the most successful variants in the experiments are also the most successful variants worldwide. Study 3 shows how a story about a mundane event — an accidental cut — can turn into a story about bloodletting. This research demonstrates the potential of combining different methodologies — review of anthropological data, experiments, and modeling — to investigate cultural phenomena.
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Placebo effect of medication cost in Parkinson disease: A randomized double-blind study
Alberto Espay et al.
Neurology, forthcoming
Objective: To examine the effect of cost, a traditionally “inactive” trait of intervention, as contributor to the response to therapeutic interventions.
Methods: We conducted a prospective double-blind study in 12 patients with moderate to severe Parkinson disease and motor fluctuations (mean age 62.4 ± 7.9 years; mean disease duration 11 ± 6 years) who were randomized to a “cheap” or “expensive” subcutaneous “novel injectable dopamine agonist” placebo (normal saline). Patients were crossed over to the alternate arm approximately 4 hours later. Blinded motor assessments in the “practically defined off” state, before and after each intervention, included the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale motor subscale, the Purdue Pegboard Test, and a tapping task. Measurements of brain activity were performed using a feedback-based visual-motor associative learning functional MRI task. Order effect was examined using stratified analysis.
Results: Although both placebos improved motor function, benefit was greater when patients were randomized first to expensive placebo, with a magnitude halfway between that of cheap placebo and levodopa. Brain activation was greater upon first-given cheap but not upon first-given expensive placebo or by levodopa. Regardless of order of administration, only cheap placebo increased activation in the left lateral sensorimotor cortex and other regions.
Conclusion: Expensive placebo significantly improved motor function and decreased brain activation in a direction and magnitude comparable to, albeit less than, levodopa. Perceptions of cost are capable of altering the placebo response in clinical studies.
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You Turn Me Cold: Evidence for Temperature Contagion
Ella Cooper et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2014
Introduction: During social interactions, our own physiological responses influence those of others. Synchronization of physiological (and behavioural) responses can facilitate emotional understanding and group coherence through inter-subjectivity. Here we investigate if observing cues indicating a change in another's body temperature results in a corresponding temperature change in the observer.
Methods: Thirty-six healthy participants (age; 22.9±3.1 yrs) each observed, then rated, eight purpose-made videos (3 min duration) that depicted actors with either their right or left hand in visibly warm (warm videos) or cold water (cold videos). Four control videos with the actors' hand in front of the water were also shown. Temperature of participant observers' right and left hands was concurrently measured using a thermistor within a Wheatstone bridge with a theoretical temperature sensitivity of <0.0001°C. Temperature data were analysed in a repeated measures ANOVA (temperature × actor's hand × observer's hand).
Results: Participants rated the videos showing hands immersed in cold water as being significantly cooler than hands immersed in warm water, F(1,34) = 256.67, p<0.001. Participants' own hands also showed a significant temperature-dependent effect: hands were significantly colder when observing cold vs. warm videos F(1,34) = 13.83, p = 0.001 with post-hoc t-test demonstrating a significant reduction in participants' own left (t(35) = −3.54, p = 0.001) and right (t(35) = −2.33, p = 0.026) hand temperature during observation of cold videos but no change to warm videos (p>0.1). There was however no evidence of left-right mirroring of these temperature effects p>0.1). Sensitivity to temperature contagion was also predicted by inter-individual differences in self-report empathy.
Conclusions: We illustrate physiological contagion of temperature in healthy individuals, suggesting that empathetic understanding for primary low-level physiological challenges (as well as more complex emotions) are grounded in somatic simulation.
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The consequences of suggesting false childhood food events
Daniel Bernstein, Alan Scoboria & Robert Arnold
Acta Psychologica, March 2015, Pages 1–7
Abstract:
We combined data across eight published experiments (N = 1369) to examine the formation and consequences of false autobiographical beliefs and memories. Our path models revealed that the formation of false autobiographical belief fully mediated the pathway between suggesting to people that they had experienced a positive or negative food-related event in the past and current preference for that food. Suggestion indirectly affected intention to eat the food via change in autobiographical belief. The development of belief with and without memory produced similar changes in food preferences and behavior intention, indicating that belief in the event drives changes in suggestion-related attitudes. Finally, positive suggestions (e.g., “you loved asparagus the first time you tried it”) yielded stronger effects than negative suggestions (e.g., “you got sick eating egg salad”). These findings show that false autobiographical suggestions lead to the development of autobiographical beliefs, which in turn, have consequences for one's attitudes and behaviors.
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Manuel Varlet & Michael Richardson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, February 2015, Pages 36-41
Abstract:
Despite the desire of athletes to separate themselves from their competitors, to be faster or better, their performance is often influenced by those they are competing with. Here we show that the unintentional or spontaneous interpersonal synchronization of athletes’ movements may partially account for such performance modifications. We examined the 100-m final of Usain Bolt in the 12th IAAF World Championship in Athletics (Berlin, 2009) in which he broke the world record, and demonstrate that Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay who ran side-by-side throughout the race spontaneously and intermittently synchronized their steps. This finding demonstrates that even the most optimized individual motor skills can be modulated by the simple presence of another individual via interpersonal coordination processes. It extends previous research by showing that the hard constraints of individual motor performance do not overwhelm the occurrence of spontaneous interpersonal synchronization and open promising new research directions for better understanding and improving athletic performance.
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On the Importance of Being Vocal: Saying “Ow” Improves Pain Tolerance
Genevieve Swee & Annett Schirmer
Journal of Pain, forthcoming
Abstract:
Vocalizing is a ubiquitous pain behavior. Here we investigated whether it helps alleviate pain and sought to discern potential underlying mechanisms. Participants were asked to immerse one hand into painfully cold water. On separate trials, they said “ow”, heard a recording of them saying “ow”, heard a recording of another person saying “ow”, pressed a button, or sat passively. Compared to sitting passively, saying “ow” increased the duration of hand immersion. Although on average, participants predicted this effect, their expectations were uncorrelated with pain tolerance. Like vocalizing, button pressing increased the duration of hand immersion and this increase was positively correlated with the vocalizing effect. Hearing one's own or another person's “ow” were not analgesic. Together, these results provide first evidence that vocalizing helps individuals cope with pain. Moreover, they suggest that motor more than other processes contribute to this effect.
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Exploring the Secrecy Burden: Secrets, Preoccupation, and Perceptual Judgments
Michael Slepian, Nicholas Camp & E.J. Masicampo
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work suggests that secrecy is perceived as burdensome. A secrecy–burden relationship would have a number of consequences for cognitive, perceptual, social, and health psychology, but the reliability of these influences, and potential mechanisms that support such influences are unknown. Across 4 studies, the current work examines both the reliability of, and mechanisms that support, the influence of secrecy processes upon a judgment that varies with diminished resources (i.e., judgments of hill slant). The current work finds that a manipulation of secret “size” fails to reliably predict judged hill slant, whereas measurement and manipulation of preoccupation with a secret does reliably predict judged hill slant. Moreover, these effects are found to be mediated by judged effort to keep the secret, consistent with a resource-based mechanism of the burdens of secrecy.
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Margot Darragh et al.
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, forthcoming
Purpose: To investigate suggestion-induced placebo effects in inflammatory skin reactions.
Methods: A healthy sample of volunteers (N = 48) attended two laboratory sessions. In each, a local short term inflammatory skin reaction was induced with histamine. Participants were told that one session was a control session and the other was a treatment session in which an antihistamine cream would be applied to the arm to reduce the size of the weal and the experience of itch. Inert aqueous cream was applied in both sessions. Participants were randomly allocated to undergo either the control or the treatment session first.
Results: The placebo manipulation successfully reduced self-reported itch from the control to the placebo treatment session, but no placebo effect was demonstrated in weal size. Order effects were observed such that only those who underwent control procedures first had a smaller weal in the placebo treatment session as compared to the control session. The same order effect was seen for reported itch at one minute post histamine administration, but this disappeared at the three and five minute measures.
Conclusion: Findings suggest that explicit verbal suggestion can reduce the experience of itch. In addition to conscious awareness, a concrete representation of the suggested changes gained from prior experience to the stimulus may be an important component of placebo effects on inflammatory skin reactions.
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Threat is in the sex of the beholder: Men find weapons faster than do women
Danielle Sulikowski & Darren Burke
Evolutionary Psychology, October 2014, Pages 913-931
Abstract:
In visual displays, people locate potentially threatening stimuli, such as snakes, spiders, and weapons, more quickly than similar benign stimuli, such as beetles and gadgets. Such biases are likely adaptive, facilitating fast responses to potential threats. Currently, and historically, men have engaged in more weapons-related activities (fighting and hunting) than women. If biases of visual attention for weapons result from selection pressures related to these activities, then we would predict such biases to be stronger in men than in women. The current study reports the results of two visual search experiments, in which men showed a stronger bias of attention toward guns and knives than did women, whether the weapons were depicted wielded or not. When the weapons were depicted wielded, both sexes searched for them with more caution than when they were not. Neither of these effects extended reliably to syringes, a non-weapon — yet potentially threatening — object. The findings are discussed with respect to the “weapons effect” and social coercion theory.
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Ausaf Farooqui & Tom Manly
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We showed that anticipatory cognitive control could be unconsciously instantiated through subliminal cues that predicted enhanced future control needs. In task-switching experiments, one of three subliminal cues preceded each trial. Participants had no conscious experience or knowledge of these cues, but their performance was significantly improved on switch trials after cues that predicted task switches (but not particular tasks). This utilization of subliminal information was flexible and adapted to a change in cues predicting task switches and occurred only when switch trials were difficult and effortful. When cues were consciously visible, participants were unable to discern their relevance and could not use them to enhance switch performance. Our results show that unconscious cognition can implicitly use subliminal information in a goal-directed manner for anticipatory control, and they also suggest that subliminal representations may be more conducive to certain forms of associative learning.
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Joseph Forgas
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who are highly visible may be perceived as also more important and influential. Can good or bad moods influence the extent to which people rely on such irrelevant visual fluency cues when forming impressions? Based on recent work on affect and cognition, two experiments predicted and found that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency on impressions. In Experiment 1, after an autobiographical mood induction participants read about two people whose visual fluency was factorially manipulated by changing the size and colour of their photos. Both mood and visual fluency influenced impressions, and there was a significant mood by visibility interaction such that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a different mood induction, and also found that mood-induced differences in information processing style mediated these effects. The relevance of these findings for impression formation in everyday situations is considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.
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What have I just done? Anchoring, self-knowledge, and judgments of recent behavior
Nathan Cheek, Sarah Coe-Odess & Barry Schwartz
Judgment and Decision Making, January 2015, Pages 76–85
Abstract:
Can numerical anchors influence people’s judgments of their own recent behavior? We investigate this question in a series of six studies. In Study 1, subjects’ judgments of how many anagrams they were given assimilated to numerical anchors. Subjects’ judgments of how many math problems they correctly solved and how many stairs they had just walked up were also influenced by numerical anchors (Studies 2A and 3A), and this occurred even when the anchors were extreme and nonsensical (Studies 2B and 3B). Thus, our first five studies showed that anchors can affect people’s judgments of their own recent behavior. Finally, in Study 4, we tested the hypothesis that self-knowledge, despite not eliminating anchoring effects, does still attenuate anchoring. However, we found no evidence that self-knowledge reduced anchoring: subjects’ judgments of their own recent behavior and subjects’ judgments of other people’s recent behavior were equally influenced by anchors. We discuss implications of these findings for research on domain knowledge and anchoring, as well as for research on the malleability of memory.
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A Sign of Things to Come: Behavioral Change Through Dynamic Iconography
Luca Cian, Aradhna Krishna & Ryan Elder
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that features of static visuals can lead to perceived movement (via dynamic imagery) and prepare the observer for action. We operationalize our research within the context of warning sign icons and show how a subtle differences in iconography can affect human behavioral response. Across five studies incorporating multiple methodologies and technologies (click-data heat maps, driving simulations, surveys, reaction time, and eye tracking), we show that warning sign icons which evoke more (vs. less) perceived movement lead to a quicker propensity to act because they suggest greater risk to oneself or others and increase attentional vigilance. Icons used in our studies include children crossings signs near schools, wet floor signs in store settings, and shopping cart crossings near malls. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating dynamic elements into icon design to promote imagery thereby eliciting desired and responsible consumer behavior.