If I have time.

Which I don’t many days, and I confess that on those days, dinner is often as not a salad or sandwich on my lap, as I watch NCIS reruns. I know this is a bad habit, but it’s just easier not to fuss.

A lot of people are opting out of traditional meals in this way. Indeed, one study says that more than half of Americans’ meals are now eaten in a room with the TV on. This trend has been taking place for some time, and what’s more, we are also eating a lot more fast food than ever before, which means much more salt and sugar than we really should be eating.

Some new research now suggests that these two trends may be interconnected. That is, it may be that combining eating with mental work—even something as mindless as watching reruns—diminishes the taste of food. With our attention focused elsewhere, the mind becomes less sensitive to tastes like saltiness and sweetness, and the flattening of the taste experience causes us to eat more in order to be satiated.

That’s the theory in any case, which two psychological scientists set out to explore in the laboratory. Reine van der Wal of Radboud University Nijmegen and Lotte Van Dillen of Leiden University wanted to see if what and how we eat is affected by our limited cognitive resources. In other words, does mental activity compete for attention with the sensory experience of eating, and shape our diet in the process?

To study this, they ran some simple experiments, all fairly similar. Volunteers tasted various concentrations of sourness or sweetness or saltiness in beverages and food while doing more or less demanding mental tasks. They rated what they ate on these particular tastes. The scientists anticipated that volunteers who were engaged in a difficult task would rate the tastes as less intense—and that they would eat more as a result.

And that’s just what they found, and describe in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science.  Whether the taste was sour or sweet or salty, the more preoccupied the volunteers were, the less intense their tasting experience was. As a result, they consumed more—or, in one experiment, concocted a sweeter version of lemonade to satisfy their sweet tooth. In short, taxing the mind led to more, and less healthy, eating.

We all have very limited self-regulation capacity, and impulsiveness often leads to overeating. These results suggest that limited attention may be an important cause of this overeating. TV may be the worst distraction, but it’s not the only one. Driving a car, listening to the radio—even reading a good book while having lunch at the deli—they are all forms of multitasking, which impairs our ability to taste the food we are eating.

And before traditionalists start claiming the moral high ground, it’s worth noting that the “family meal” is often combined with arguments or family business or homework, all of which compete for the mind’s limited attention. Turning off the TV may be a good start, but only a start toward truly mindful mealtimes. When it comes to cognitive resources, family matters can be as depleting as NCIS reruns.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post A Good Meal: The Science of Savoring appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

1. Lyndon Johnson

2. Theodore Roosevelt

3. Andrew Jackson

4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

5. John Kennedy

6. Richard Nixon

7. Bill Clinton

8. Chester Arthur

9. Andrew Johnson

10. Woodrow Wilson

…

33.  James Garfield

34. William McKinley

35. Rutherford B. Hayes

36. James Madison

37. William Howard Taft

38. Calvin Coolidge

39. Ulysses Grant

40. Grover Cleveland

41. James Monroe

42.Millard Fillmore

For those interested in the modern presidency, George W. Bush ranked 11, much higher than his father, George H.W. Bush, who ranked 26. Ronald Reagan ranked 15. Jimmy Carter ranked 20, just below George Washington. And Ford ranked 31, just above Abraham Lincoln. The study did not include Barack Obama.

The post The 10 Most Narcissistic U.S. Presidents appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

Yet our greatest leaders often have dark sides as well. Old Hickory was a violent man, a duelist and killer. The macho TR, the youngest and most popular president sworn into office, was ultimately rejected by the nation. LBJ waged the most unpopular war in American history, withdrawing from public life in the face of certain defeat.

Historians and biographers have commented on the curious co-existence of excellence and malignance in individual presidents. But does this personality type—this mix of brightness and darkness—actually predict presidential greatness? A team of psychological scientists has been exploring this idea. Emory University professor Scott Lilienfeld and graduate student  Ashley Watts hypothesized that a personality type called “grandiose narcissism” might explain both the positive and negative aspects of the more enigmatic U.S. presidents.

Grandiose narcissism is one sub-type of the broader narcissistic personality. Narcissists are typically deceitful and self-serving and over-confident in their decisions, and grandiose narcissists do all of this with showmanship. The scientists predicted that this personality—in contrast to the withdrawn and fragile narcissistic personality—would correlate with overall leadership and accomplishment—and also with scandal and ethical indiscretion.

To test this theory, they gathered data from several sources, both historical and psychological. They got their estimates of presidential narcissism from a previous investigation of presidential leadership. Experts—presidential biographers and other scholars—rated the personalities and behavior, including unethical behavior, of the 42 presidents up to and including George W. Bush—the most recent complete presidency at the time of the study.

In addition, the scientists included independent historical surveys of presidential performance, including public persuasiveness, crisis management, Congressional relations, economic management, and so forth. They also gathered other objective indicators of presidential success—measures like years served, years as a wartime president, legislative successes, scandals in office, impeachments, and assassinations.

When they crunched all the data together, this is what they found:

Grandiose narcissism—but not the more vulnerable kind of narcissism—was linked to overall greatness in presidential performance. More specifically, this flamboyant personality type was associated with persuasiveness, adept crisis management, agenda setting and legislative initiative. However—and it’s a big however—grandiose narcissists were also more likely to be involved in unethical and criminal acts. In short, this personality type is a double-edged sword for American presidents.

A more detailed analysis, plus the complete narcissistic rankings of U.S. presidents, is included in an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science. In general, the scientists found that presidents are much more likely than the rest of us to be grandiose narcissists. And what’s more, it appears that grandiose narcissism is on the rise among our presidents. The reasons for this change are unclear. It could be the result of increasing demands on presidents to be more publicly charismatic, which might be a consequence of increased media coverage. Or it could reflect a broader increase in narcissism in the country itself, which means that our presidents truly represent the people who put them into office.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post Hail to the Narcissist: POTUS and Personality appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

A couple years later, an earthquake hit the Iranian city of Bam, a tourist center once famous as a Silk Road trading post. This disaster took the lives of almost 27,000 and affected another 270,000.

Every natural disaster, whatever the WHO tallies, is tragic for somebody, and the world’s citizens always respond in humanitarian ways. But these responses don’t always make sense. In the case of Bam, for example, private donors responded by giving more than $10 million in aid to the victims. By contrast, donors contributed a mere $94,000 to the Yunnan survivors—despite the fact that so many more were left in need.

Psychological scientist Ioannis Evangelidis calls this lukewarm response in Yunnan a “humanitarian disaster,” one that compounds the tragedy left behind by the Earth’s natural fury. He and colleague Bram Van den Bergh of Erasmus University Rotterdam have been studying the disproportionate humanitarian responses to natural disasters, looking for an explanation in how we perceive and process disasters—and how we make decisions about charity.

The scientists have a theory, which is that we respond to deaths more decisively than we respond to other, undefined suffering—even though it is obviously not the dead who need help. They set out to test this idea, and also to see if there might be a way to increase sensitivity to those left behind.

To verify the basic idea, Evangelidis and Van den Bergh analyzed actual natural disaster relief data for a decade, beginning at the time of the Yunnan quake. They expected that the number of fatalities—rather than those more vaguely “affected”—would determine the likelihood that people would give money. And that’s what they found. Indeed, donors came up with an additional $9000 for each additional person killed—compared to nothing for each additional living victim. There was no correlation between the number of fatalities and the number of people in need, meaning that donors give more aid as the number of dead climbs—yet remain insensitive to the real need of survivors.

These data are what scientists call “correlational.” That is, they suggest but cannot prove a link between donors’ perceptions and thoughts and their actual giving. To better illuminate the actual decision making dynamics, the scientists ran a series of small studies to examine donors’ sensitivity to varying combinations of high and low fatalities and affected survivors. For example, volunteers might hear about a flood in which 4000 (or 8000) were killed and 4000 (or 8000) were affected. The volunteers were then asked to imagine these events and make the appropriate donations.

They ran this basic study in different ways. Sometime it was a flood, other times an earthquake. Sometimes the “affected” were referred to as “survivors,” which was made more concrete by defining them as people “in need of assistance such as food, shelter, sanitation and/or medicine.” The imaginary disasters were placed in Asia, Africa and South America, to control for any biases having to do with locale.

The results were clear. As described in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, across all scenarios volunteers felt that they should give much more generously when a disaster had a high death toll. That is, donors were highly sensitive to fatalities, and unfazed by the actual numbers of needy.

Why would this be? Evangelidis and Van den Bergh believe it has to do with the nature of cognitive cues—the rules that automatically shape our inferences about the world. The death toll is a reliable cue—that it, it’s fairly easy to validate this cue just by counting dead bodies. But that does not make it a valid cue, if what we are trying to infer is true human need. To make a judgment of need, we need to use a different cue—the number of affected—but this cue is vague and less trustworthy. It’s hard to judge need objectively, because sanitation and health threats are harder to measure. We tend to trust the death toll because it is simple and easy to process, even though it’s an irrational gauge of real need.

At least that’s the theory, which if true could offer a solution to future humanitarian crises. The scientists ran another study, very similar to the others, but with this difference.  Prior to making a donation, only some of the volunteers were asked to imagine that two earthquakes had taken place simultaneously. One killed 4,500 and affected 7,500, while the other killed 7,500 and affected 4,500. The volunteers ranked the two disasters based on total humanitarian aid that should be given.

When people are faced with such a choice problem, they have to slow down and think. They are less likely to respond automatically to easy heuristic cues, and more apt to examine the validity of different cues—leading to sounder judgments.  And that’s what happened in this study. The volunteers who were not primed with the choice problem acted just as before—responding unthinkingly to the death toll. But those who were forced to deliberate—these volunteers became very sensitive to the number of living survivors. They felt that they should give more money when there was a high number of affected victims—a rational response. Their humanitarian decisions were unaffected by the death toll.

In real life, of course, we are not going to solve choice problems as a priming exercise. So in a final study, the scientists actually succeeded in making people more sensitive to the needs of survivors by offering a cue that was more reliable. Instead of using the WHO’s vague number of “affected,” they replaced it with number of “homeless.” The homeless, like the dead, are fairly easy to count, and as predicted, using this easy-to-trust cue made donors more sensitive to true human need.

The bottom line appears to be that any strategy that can divert attention from the death toll, as tragic as it is, should rationalize charitable giving, and diminish the chances of humanitarian disasters.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post A Cognitive Earthquake: Who’s Really In Need? appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

But you may have no choice, since the Dark Triad is not a literary phantasm at all. This threatening title comes out of formal personality theory, and refers to three traits that, taken together, capture the worst of humanity. They are the three faces of what’s considered an anti-social human core, and their formal, scientific names reflect their inhumanity: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism.

The Dark Triad of personality theory has been studied for years, and is fairly well accepted in psychological science. But now a triad of scientists is challenging the Dark Triad. Erin Buckels and Delroy Paulhus of the University of British Columbia and Daniel Jones of the University of Texas at El Paso are not questioning the legitimacy of the three traits, but suggesting that the construct is incomplete. The true dark core of human personality, they say, is a Dark Tetrad. The missing villain is sadism.

Sadism is most often associated with cruel sexual fetishes, thanks to the Marquis de Sade, but this notion is both inaccurate and unfortunate, these scientists believe. A true sadistic disposition, they argue, is one that craves cruelty. Sadists find the act of hurting innocent people—including killing—pleasurable and exciting, and what’s more, they seek out opportunities to satisfy this appetite for brutality.

That at least is the construct that these scientists are proposing in the journal Psychological Science, along with some preliminary evidence to bolster their claim. It’s obviously difficult to study horrific behavior in a laboratory setting, so it took some ingenuity to illuminate this dark corner of human personality. Here’s what the scientists did.

To study sadists’ appetite for killing—since human murder was out of the question—the scientists used crunching bugs as a proxy. Under the pretense of studying personality and job preferences, they asked volunteers to choose among four tasks that mirrored odious real-life jobs: If they liked working in the cold, they could choose to endure pain from ice water. If sanitation work was more appealing, they could clean a dirty toilet. Or if exterminator was their job of choice, they could choose to kill bugs, or to assist in the killing of bugs.

The scientists were most interested in the aspiring exterminators, and to study them more closely, they invented a “killing machine.” This machine was actually a coffee grinder, but it was modified to maximize gruesomeness by producing a distinct crunching sound. The exterminators were given three cups, each containing a pill bug with a name: Muffin, Ike and Tootsie. The cute names were intended to humanize the bugs. The job was to drop Muffin, Ike and Tootsie into the killing machine, one at a time, and grind them up. (Don’t worry. This was also a ruse. No bugs were hurt in the experiment.)

The scientists measured how many bugs the volunteers crunched, and also their pleasure afterward. In addition—before the task—the volunteers completed standard measures of sadistic tendencies, sub-clinical Dark Triad tendencies, and their sensitivity to disgusting things. The idea was to see if those with a sadistic personality trait would actually act sadistically—choosing the cruelest job option and deriving the most pleasure from killing.

And they did, unquestionably. Those who scored high on sadism clearly preferred the visceral experience of crunching the bugs over the other tasks, and importantly, this connection was independent of any other dark personality traits—psychopathy, narcissism or Machiavellianism. Also notable, the sadists were not especially prone to disgust, which means that their cruelty cannot be explained by a high tolerance for blood and excrement and bugs.

The volunteers’ post-killing emotions were intriguing. Surprisingly, the sadists experienced less positive emotion than non-sadists, no matter what task they chose. The scientists think that the sadists who opted out of the killing opportunity regretted their choice, and indeed the sadists who crunched Muffin, Ike and Tootsie did experience more pleasure. This pattern suggests the disturbing possibility that sadistic types use cruelty to compensate for a general lack of positive emotion in their lives.

All of this suggests that sadism may be another, equal dark power—and perhaps even more sinister in a way. Psychopaths have no qualms about hurting others, but their aggression usually has a purpose. Narcissists are usually hurtful only when threatened. And Machiavellians are too calculating to risk retaliation unless there is a lot on the line. Sadists may be unique in engaging in unprovoked cruelty—cruelty that takes effort and has no discernible benefits.

To test this, the three scientists ran another experiment.  They again administered the standard personality inventory to volunteers, who proceeded to play a computer game. They believed they were competing with another volunteer in another room, and whenever they won, they had the option of blasting their opponent with loud noise. They chose the loudness and duration of the penalty. Importantly, the opponents never blasted back, so there was to justification for retaliation.

Half of the volunteers also had to “work” for the opportunity to be cruel. Once they won a round, they had to complete a tedious and monotonous counting task before administering the blast of noise. The idea was to see who would make that effort to engage in unprovoked cruelty.

The sadists did, and only the sadists. All of those with dark personality traits were cruel to an innocent opponent when it was easy to exert pain. But the sadists increased the intensity of their attack when they realized the innocent person would not fight back. And what’s more, they were the only ones willing to spend time and energy for the opportunity to be cruel.

All of this suggests that sadists are motivated by an intrinsic appetite for cruelty. The act of inflicting suffering on innocent people is apparently pleasure-driven and so rewarding that sadists will pay a price for the chance. In that sense, these scientists conclude, sadism is arguably more morally upsetting and more dangerous than the other dark personalities—and deserves a place in a new Dark Tetrad.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post Everyday Sadism: Throwing Light on the Dark Triad appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

These ads are required to list the most serious side effects for the prescription drugs they promote, and some are indeed serious—nausea and bleeding and blindness and suicidal thoughts, even death. The warnings are so dire that they must scare some consumers away, yet drug marketers continue to flood the airways.

Are they smart to do so? Do consumers take these warnings seriously, and do these frightening catalogs of symptoms change their attitudes toward the drugs? Psychological scientist Ziv Carmon, of INSEAD in Singapore, has been studying the way TV viewers process product warnings—not just for drugs but for cigarettes and artificial sweeteners as well. Working with Yael Steinhart of Tel Aviv University and Yaacov Trope at NYU, Carmon has been exploring how warnings stack up against the seductive benefits that marketers hope for.

Carmon and colleagues ran four simple experiments, all basically the same, though with different products and slightly different measures of their impact. In one, for example, they recruited a group of men to watch an advertisement for an erectile dysfunction drug, which listed heart disease as one of the potential side effects. Half of the men were told that the drug was about to come on the market, while the others were told that it would not hit the pharmacy until the following year. Then they all rated the attractiveness of the drug. They also said if the warnings concerned them, or if they boosted their trust in the drug.

I know. Why would dire warnings boost anyone’s trust in a product? Well, the scientists theorize that the warnings can have an ironic effect of boosting trust under certain circumstances. Specifically, time can create psychological distance, and this distance can make us interpret messages in an abstract way. Accordingly, the scientists expected that those men who heard warnings about a future product would react to the ad as an honest “conversation” between themselves and the drug maker—actually boosting trust. By contrast, those who heard the same scary warning about a readily available drug would focus on the here-and-now, including the risk of heart disease.

And that’s precisely what they found in the study. As described in the journal Psychological Science, men who saw an ad for an immediately available drug were very concerned about the risks. But the men who were thinking of the ED drug as a future possibility—they viewed it more favorably, and they also viewed the ad as more trustworthy. Psychological distance had the ironic effect of diminishing worry about side effects.

This experiment simulates real life, in the sense that most our important decisions involve some contemplation over time. As time passes, our immediate fear of side effects gives way to general feelings of trust. Carmon and his team ran similar experiments with ads for cigarettes, artificial sweeteners and hair loss medications, and got basically the same results. In each case, the product was immediately available—or a more distant option. In some cases, only some saw a warning of side effects, while others saw no warning. In every case, psychological distance boosted trustworthiness, which led to more favorable views of products with warnings. The consumers didn’t focus on the actual bleeding and nausea, but rather on the marketers’ good intentions in describing those symptoms.

Cigarette makers have long been prohibited from hawking their product on American TV, but the drugs now being promoted directly to consumers are not benign. The presumption is that the explicit warnings about dangerous side effect will make people think twice before taking medical risks. This research shows why this presumption may be naïve. The more time that elapses after the warning message, the more likely it is that the warning will backfire—with the ironic and worrisome effect of boosting trust in the drug makers.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post “Consult your physician immediately if . . .” appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

But how do we make these quick judgments? Well, the most obvious rule-of-thumb might be something like this: Is this face familiar or strange? Familiar faces are easy to process and categorize—as a brother or neighbor or member of the tribe. So early on, we came to link familiarity and ease-of-processing with safety and trust and good feelings.

Psychological scientists call this “cognitive fluency,” and it’s a powerful bias that still shapes many of our everyday decisions. Unless we deliberately slow down and second-guess our automatic judgments, we are going to prefer what we know to what we don’t.  Our world is not so perilous as it once was, but we still tend to operate by this ancient bias.

But there’s a big problem with this view of human decision making. It doesn’t explain attractiveness, or at least not fully. Attractiveness is the modern equivalent of what our ancient ancestors saw as trustworthy and safe, so we would expect any deviation in the faces we actually know to diminish attractiveness. Yet a huge amount of research says the opposite—that in fact average faces are the most attractive. Blends of human traits are far more appealing than faces that are identifiable as individuals.

This automatic judgment—beauty equals average—is also a powerful cognitive bias, at least as predictable is the cognitive fluency rule. Indeed, according to psychological scientist Jamin Halberstadt, there is not a single study that has failed to show this effect. So how do humans reconcile these competing impulses in making decisions today?

Halberstadt, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, working with colleagues in the US and the Netherlands, has been trying to sort out this cognitive paradox. Why would average faces—more ambiguous, less identifiable faces—be more appealing? One possibility, he thought, is that average faces are more attractive in a large, universal sense, but less attractive at the local level. That it, if we know a unique face from personal experience, then that deviation from the norm is more appealing, because of its familiarity, than a prototype human face. He decided to test this idea with morphed faces.

Halberstadt recruited equal numbers of volunteers from New Zealand and the Netherlands. He collected pictures of national (but not international) celebrities—that is, people who were famous in either New Zealand or the Netherlands but not both. He then used morphing software to blend pairs of faces of the same nationality and gender. All the volunteers viewed all the morphed faces and rated their attractiveness.

So the New Zealanders were rating morphs of faces they knew from New Zealand TV and sports, plus morphs of totally unfamiliar faces; and the Dutch volunteers were doing the equivalent. After they had rated all of them, they viewed and rated all the original faces, from which the morphed faces had been created. The idea was to see if judgments of attractiveness are universal—and always favor the average face—or  if these judgments vary from locality to locality.

The results were unambiguous. As reported in the journal Psychological Science, both Dutch and New Zealand volunteers rated the unknown celebrity morphs as more attractive than the celebrities themselves. That is, they confirmed the “beauty in average” rule-of-thumb. But they also rated the local celebrity morphs as less attractive than the originals. This is the first evidence that, under some circumstances, the average is unattractive, Halberstadt says.

So why would the very same faces be more or less attractive to different people, depending on their experience? It must be the potency of the fluency bias, Halberstadt concludes. It appears that a morphed face is a good and easy-to-process example of a universal human “face”—but it is a poor and difficult-to-process example of the original, locally known faces. The ease of processing the prototypical faces boosts positive emotions, and these emotions generalize to make average faces generally appealing.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post The Two Faces of Attractiveness appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

We do have the cognitive ability to project days or weeks or even years into the future, but we don’t do it when we’re making food choices in the here and now. What if we could trick ourselves into keeping our heads in the future? That’s the idea that a team of University of Buffalo psychological scientists has been exploring. Leonard Epstein and his colleagues wanted to see if overeaters might make less impulsive decisions if they were able to project themselves into the future at times of temptation.

The psychological jargon for this is “episodic future thinking”—or EFT for short. Think of it as remembering the future. This technique uses visual imagery and the power of personal memory to “experience” positive future events. For example, I might look into the future and see myself at my own wedding, a year from now, feeling joyous and optimistic and stylish. The more vivid the image, the better. This imagined experience becomes a memory, which I can then cue whenever I am tempted to do something that might sabotage that future.

At least that’s the theory, which Epstein tested in a couple simple experiments. He recruited a group of overweight or obese women, mid-20s, who wanted to have better control over their eating and weight. Half of these volunteers generated cues for positive future memories—some days, some weeks, some years into the future. The others, the controls, also imagined vivid events, but ones they had recently experienced. So in other words, only half the volunteers had the tools to project themselves into the future whenever they wanted to.

They used the cues to help them in real-time decision making. First, all the volunteers used their cues during a delayed gratification task. They were given the choice of $10 now, or $100 at various future times—tomorrow, in a week, a month, two years from now. Most of us would wait a day or even a week for that sweetened reward, but how about six months or a year? That’s the kind of self-control it takes to value long-term health over a pepperoni pizza, and that’s what Epstein measured for both future thinkers and controls. He expected that those who cued positive future experiences would be more disciplined about waiting for the hundred bucks.

And they were, clearly. Those who cued future memories were much more likely to take the long view when it came to rewards, valuing distant future outcomes over the fast $10. In other words, by bringing the future to life with mental imagery, they were able to make decisions as if the future were now. Their decisions were more rational.

But what does money have to do with obesity? Well, it’s the same principle at work, which is what Epstein demonstrated in a second experiment. In this study, he simulated a typical experience of hard-to-resist temptation involving actual food—unhealthy food.  It was mid-afternoon—about an hour and a half after lunch, so plenty of time enough to get hungry—and the volunteers were asked to rate the sensory appeal of garlic bread, meatballs, fries, cookies, and so forth. Then, feeling hungry and focused on rich snacks, they were given free rein. For 15 minutes, they could eat as much of these foods as they liked, while ostensibly evaluating them for another purpose.

Again, the future thinking did the trick. As described in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science, those who cued future memories during snack time consumed far fewer calories than did the controls.

It’s not entirely clear why such future thinking has this effect on self-control. It’s possible that being in the future—through imagery—somehow improves they ability to perceive the real value of delaying rewards. That is, we may know the value in the abstract, but it’s tough to make real-life decisions based on abstractions. When we actually put ourselves into the future, we’re experiencing the consequences of our decisions rather than merely calculating them.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

The post For Obesity, the Future Is Now appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

In a recent Radiolab interview, Duke talked about how she weighs risk and certainty and doubt in deciding to hold or fold. It’s largely math, but not the straightforward odds of drawing to an inside straight. She computes odds and acceptable losses over long periods of time. Surprisingly, she said, she gets very little help from other players’ “tells”—the inadvertent facial expressions that give away emotions and intentions. Pros are very good at “disappearing” into the well-known “poker face.”

We all know the expression “poker face” because the face is where we expect to find meaningful information. But what if poker players are looking in the wrong place? New research out of Stanford University now suggests that poker players’ arm movements may betray the strength of the hands they are holding, even when their faces remain expressionless. What’s more, it appears that even non-players can detect these motion “tells” in professional card players.

Michael Slepian, a graduate student in Nalini Ambady’s psychological science lab, has been studying the way observers perceive poker players’ non-verbal signals, specifically arm motions, as cues to their intentions—and the value of their poker hands.  In a simple experiment, he extracted 20 very brief video clips—less than two seconds each—of players in the 2009 World Series of Poker. He recruited non-expert volunteers to view the clips, but only some saw whole-body shots, while others saw faces only, and still others arms only. Based on what they saw, the volunteers judged the quality of the hands that the players were holding.

The findings were clear-cut. Judgments based on facial expression were worse than chance. That is, the poker players succeeded not only in hiding their thoughts about their chances, but in deceiving onlookers. By contrast, those who saw arm movements accurately judged the quality of the players’ hands. The movements were unintentional “tells” about players’ hidden thoughts and intentions.

Players who are holding strong hands—a full house rather than a low pair—should be more confident, and it’s possible that this confidence is expressed through the arms. But what about the arms, specifically, is revealing? Slepian knew of previous work showing that anxiety disrupts the smoothness of body movement, so he figured that confidence—lack of anxiety—might be embodied in smooth motion. In a second experiment, he had volunteers judge players’ confidence and then, independently, judge the smoothness of the players’ arm motions. He figured that if confidence is indeed embodied in smooth movement, then smooth arms movements might be the “tell.”

And that’s just what he found. As described in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, both judgments—player confidence and smooth arm movement—were strong indicators of the quality of players’ cards. So it seems quite likely that players who are holding winning hands reveal their confidence when they push their chips to place a bet.  Remember that these players were the best in the game, competing in the high-stakes World Series of Poker—so they were motivated to hide every thought and emotion. Yet based on observing minimal information during less than two seconds of play, average people were able to decode the hands at the table—and call the bluffs.

Wray Herbert’s blogs—We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

The post Calling a Bluff: Is It All In the Arms? appeared first on Association for Psychological Science.

Okay, okay. I wrote all those superlatives in part to provoke a reaction. There are people who dispute this claim, and indeed some are among my own friends and family. They say that ‘60s music just seems incomparable to me because I was a young man when I encountered it.  If I keep going back to Leonard Cohen and the Doors even today, they say, it’s only because those melodies were seared into my neurons when I was youthful and impressionable.

It’s hard to prove, one way or the other. But my critics do have some psychological science on their side. My musical preferences could be part of what scientists call the “reminiscence bump”—a peak in personal memories, of all kinds, that consistently comes in late adolescence and early adulthood. That is, we all remember more detail, more clearly, from this stage of our development. Since music is so emotional and personal and memorable, doesn’t it make sense that it would peak the same way?

That’s the question that Cornell University psychological scientist Carol Lynne Krumhansl set out to explore—or one of the questions. She wanted to see just how our early musical memories intersect with, and shape, our other autobiographical memories. She also wanted to see how music is transmitted from generation to generation, and to explore whether this pattern may have changed along with dramatic cultural shifts of the past half century.

To answer these questions, she took short excerpts from the top two Billboard hits from each year, from 1955 to 2009. She recruited a group of 20-year-olds, and had them respond to each song on several scales: Did they recognize the song? Did they like it? Did they have personal memories associated with the song? If so, was this memory from growing up and listening with parents? From listening alone? With others? Finally, what emotions did they associate with each song? Did they feel energized, or nostalgic? Sad, happy, angry? Krumhansl also gathered demographic information, including parents’ age, and information on listening habits, both growing up and current.

For analysis, Krumhansl grouped these song samples into five-year periods, so that each of 11 periods contained excerpts from ten songs. As she describes in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, she found that personal memories associated with songs increased steadily from birth to present day. This was not surprising: These music-evoked memories would presumably be part of the reminiscence bumps that these 20-year-olds would experience later in life.

What was surprising was this: There was a spike in personal memories associated with the music of the early 1980s, and also a sustained spike in personal memories linked to music of the ’60s — the entire decade. Remember that these young listeners were born around 1990, which means that they’re experiencing reminiscence bumps for music of previous generations. What do we make of these rich personal memories for music from before they were born?

Krumhansl interprets the ’80s spike as an intergenerational influence. That is, the subjects’ parents were born around 1960, so they would have encountered late-’80s music in their own formative, early-adult years. They established their tastes and then played this music at home, including during their child-rearing years. The young subjects reported nostalgic feelings about this music, which makes sense.

The ’60s spike is a bit more puzzling. It could be that this music was transmitted through the family — but through two generations. In other words, the 20-year-olds may have learned this music from their grandparents. It could also be that new listening technologies — cassette tapes, for example — made ’60s music more available. Or — the interpretation I favor — it could simply be that the music of Led Zeppelin and Dylan is better music, unparalleled before or since.

Excerpts from Wray Herbert’s blogs—“We’re Only Human” and “Full Frontal Psychology”—appear regularly in The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

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