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Issue 197 (22.09.11):
1. We underestimate the benefits of nature 2. Money makes mimicry backfire 3. Exploring people's beliefs about their memory problems 4. How not to spot personality test fakers 5. Brain training for babies actually works (short term, at least) 6. How psychology helped locate HMAS Sydney II, lost for over 60 years

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We underestimate the benefits of nature
People underestimate the psychological benefits of spending time in nature. That's according to Elizabeth Nisbet and John Zelenski who say the consequence is that people spend less time outside in green spaces than they would do otherwise: this undermines their affiliation with the natural world and reduces the likelihood that they will care about the environment. One hundred and fifty Carleton University students participated in what they thought was a study of "personality and impressions of the campus area". Carleton is located in Ottawa, with a green corridor that runs through the city located nearby. Half the students took a 17 minute walk - either along a canal path near the campus to an arboretum, or via underground tunnels used on campus for getting around. Afterwards they completed questionnaires about how they felt. The other students predicted how they would feel, either after the outdoor, nature-filled walk or after the tunnel walk, but they didn't actually take the walk. Both routes were equally familiar to all the students. The study was conducted on dry Autumn days with temperatures ranging from 2.5 to 14.6 degrees celsius. The key findings are that students felt more positive emotions after the natural walk than they did after the tunnel walk, but that those in the forecasting condition underestimated the positive benefits of a natural walk and overestimated the positive benefits of the tunnel walk. The students in the natural walk condition also reported feeling more connected to nature, an association that was mediated by their more positive emotions. A second study was similar to the first, but this time the students who took the walks were the same ones who made predictions about how they'd feel afterwards. Also, different indoor and outdoor routes were used. Exactly the same findings were observed - students felt in a better mood after outdoor, natural walks and more connected with nature, yet they failed to anticipate the magnitude of these benefits. "Together our results are consistent with the idea that, although people are innately drawn to nature, a general disconnection prevents them from fully anticipating nature's hedonic benefits," the researchers said. "When people forgo the happiness benefits of nearby nature, they also neglect their nature relatedness, a construct strongly associated with environmentally sustainable attitudes and behaviours." A weakness of their argument, as they acknowledge, is that there's no evidence yet that time spent in nature leads to long-term changes in one's affiliation with the natural world. The findings come as the UK government is seeking to revise the country's planning laws to make it easier to build on green land. The results show the quandary faced by a small, densely populated island. Green, open spaces are vital to our psychological health, which argues in favour of strict planning laws. Yet such laws can lead to dense development with fewer pockets of urban greenery. We shouldn't underestimate the value of these green oases in urban environments. As Nisbet and Zelenski observe: "Our findings suggest that even natural spaces in urban settings can increase happiness; the grandeur of national parks is not required." _________________________________ Nisbet, E., and Zelenski, J. (2011). Underestimating Nearby Nature: Affective Forecasting Errors Obscure the Happy Path to Sustainability. Psychological Science, 22 (9), 1101-1106 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611418527

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Money makes mimicry backfire
It's one of the first rules of persuasion: mimic subtly your conversation partner's movements and body language (with a slight delay), and they'll perceive you to be more attractive and trustworthy. Being mimicked, so long as it's not too blatant, apparently leaves us in a better mood and more likely to be helpful to others. It all sounds so easy, but now Jia Liu and her colleagues have thrown a spanner in the works. They've demonstrated that reminders of money reverse the benefits of mimicry - leading mimics to be liked less, and the mimicked to feel threatened. It all has to do with the selfish, egocentric mindset triggered by money. And in that context, the researchers say, being mimicked is uncomfortable because it gives people the sense that "their autonomy is being threatened." Liu's team had 72 undergrads complete some irrelevant questions on a computer on which the screen background was either filled with shells or currency signs. Next, each participant chatted for ten minutes with a stranger who either did or didn't mimic them. Finally, the participants rated how much they liked that person and they completed an implicit measure of threat. Words were flashed subliminally on a screen and, after each one, participants had to try to guess the word from a subsequent list. Choosing more threat-related words was taken as a sign that they were feeling more threatened. Without the initial reminder of money on the computer screen, mimicry had its usual beneficial effects participants in this condition who were mimicked felt less threatened and liked their conversation partner more. By contrast, mimicked participants reminded of money at the outset, liked their partner less and felt more threatened (compared with participants in the money condition who were not mimicked). Feelings of threat were found to mediate the links (positive or negative, depending on the condition) between mimicry and liking. "Being mimicked typically leaves people with positive feelings," the researchers concluded, "but this experiment showed that mimicry can diminish liking of the mimicker if people have been reminded of money. "... The findings take the psychology of money in a new direction," they added, "by demonstrating money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom." _________________________________ Liu, J., Vohs, K., and Smeesters, D. (2011). Money and Mimicry: When Being Mimicked Makes People Feel Threatened. Psychological Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611418348

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Exploring people's beliefs about their memory problems
We think of memory complaints as being more common among older people. A recent colloquialism has even emerged for older folk to refer good humouredly to their "senior moments". Performance on lab-based memory tests also tends to deteriorate with age. So how come researchers have found that subjective complaints about memory don't correlate reliably with lab-based memory performance? And why are the links between age and subjective memory complaints not as robust as we'd expect? Part of the answer may have to do with the complicating influence of factors like personality and depression. But to probe deeper, Peter Vestergren and Lars-goran Nilsson have surveyed hundreds of people of various ages about their memory concerns and their perceived reasons for their memory problems. Three hundred and sixty-one participants (aged 39 to 99) answered a simple question about their memory: "Do you experience problems with your memory?", by choosing between "no problems at all", "small problems", "moderate problems", "big problems", and "very big problems". Anyone answering "moderate problems" or above was categorised as feeling that they had a memory problem, and they were further asked to say what they felt the causes were for their memory problems. Thirty per cent of the sample said they had memory problems, and the proportion increased with rising age (although age only accounted for 4% of the variance in subjective memory problems). Cited reasons for memory problems fell into three main categories: ageing (26.6%), stress (20.2%), and multi-tasking (12.8%), with the reasons given varying with age. Older participants (aged 69-99) tended to say that ageing was the cause of their problems more often than did middle-aged participants (aged 39-64) - the proportions being 61 vs. 18 %. By contrast, stress and multi-tasking were more often given as reasons by the middle-aged group than the older group (50% vs. 8.3%). Vestergren and Nilsson think these results could help explain past inconsistencies in the literature. Perhaps, they reasoned, subjective memory complaints are more frequent in middle age, versus older age, than we might expect, because of the stress and work demands experienced by people in mid life. The results "may also to some extent explain a lack of relations between subjective and objective measures of memory," the researchers said. "Assuming that many subjective measures of memory are sensitive to transient effects of varying degrees of stress and cognitive load on memory performance, events influenced by these variables will not be replicated by laboratory tests under constant conditions." Based on this, the researchers called on their fellow memory researchers to gauge subjective and objective stress levels and multi-tasking demands alongside their tests of objective memory - to do so will help illuminate instances when subjective memory scores diverge from objective memory. The current study complements an earlier Digest item that covered diary research into people's memory lapses or "d'oh moments" (http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/06/recording-peoples-doh-moments.html). Healthy participants were found to experience an average of 6.4 such lapses per week - with younger participants actually reporting more than older participants. _________________________________ Vestergren, P., and Nilsson, L. (2011). Perceived causes of everyday memory problems in a population-based sample aged 39-99. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 641-646 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1734

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How not to spot personality test fakers
Personality tests are an effective recruitment tool: higher scorers on conscientiousness and lower scorers on neuroticism tend to perform better in the job. But a major weakness of such tests is people's tendency to answer dishonestly. A study now shows that a popular approach to spotting cheaters is likely to be ineffective. This approach, which has gained momentum in the research literature, is to focus on applicants' response times. Honest test-takers show an inverted U-shaped response profile, being fast when they strongly agree or disagree with test items (these come in the form of statements about the self, such as "I pay attention to details"), and slower when they answer more equivocally. This is thought to reflect a process whereby test takers refer to their self-schema and find it easier to answer when statements clearly conform or contradict this schema. At least two theories predict that fakers won't show this inverted U-shape, and that response times therefore offer a way to expose those who are cheating. One theory has it that fakers refer to their self-schema and then exaggerate the truth on key statements. This has the effect of extending answer times for unequivocal answers, flattening out the inverted Ushape response time profile shown by honest answerers. Another theory says that fakers don't refer to a self-schema at all - they simply assess the social desirability of each item and exaggerate answers where necessary. This is a cognitively simpler task than referral to a self-schema, and again the inverted U-shaped response profile is predicted to flatten. To test these predictions, Mindy Shoss and Michael Strube had 60 undergrads (38 women) complete a personality test (the Revised NEO Personality inventory) three times: once honestly, once to create a general good impression, and lastly, either to create a good impression specifically for a public relations role, or specifically for an accountant role. The key finding is that participants showed the inverted U-shaped response time profile regardless of whether they were answering honestly or not. Response times were faster overall for the fakery conditions, and the inverted U-shape was actually accentuated in the specific public relations fakery condition. Shoss and Strube said these results are consistent with the idea that fakers form, and refer to, an idealised personality schema in their mind when completing a personality test, and so their answers show a similar response time profile to an honest test-taker. The accentuated inverted U-shape for the PR-role condition comes from the fact that the schema for such a role is like a caricature, making unequivocal answers for certain items even easier to provide than usual. Digging deeper, the researchers found that when striving to make a good impression, participants scored higher on extraversion, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism. The inverted U-shape in response times was greater for agreeableness and conscientiousness in the fake conditions than when answering honestly. "This study casts doubt on the validity of response times for detecting faking in general," the researchers said. "... it seems that researchers and practitioners interested in detecting and reducing faking would do well to focus on other strategies." An alternative approach to reducing test fakery is to force applicants to choose between pairs of equally appealing statements about themselves, as reported previously on the Digest: http://bps-researchdigest.blogspot.com/2008/10/personality-test-that-cant-be-faked.html. _________________________________ Shoss, M., and Strube, M. (2011). How do you fake a personality test? An investigation of cognitive models of impression-managed responding. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116 (1), 163-171 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.05.003

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Brain training for babies actually works (short term, at least)
Products designed to give babies and young children an educational headstart are hugely popular but they're mostly backed up by weak science. In some cases, for example with educational DVDs, there's even evidence of potential harm to language development, albeit that this evidence has been challenged by the creators of the DVDs. Meanwhile, research with adults suggests that so-called brain training exercises (puzzles and memory and attention tasks on a computer) rarely lead to general intellectual benefits. Instead people just get better on the specific training tasks they complete. Given this background, the prospects for brain training for babies look decidedly shaky. And yet in a new study, a team led by Sam Wass has shown brain training exercises for babies (focused on attention) led to widespread cognitive benefits over a twoweek period. "To our knowledge, this is the first report of distal transfer of training effects following cognitive training in participants younger than 4 years old," they write. Wass and his colleagues invited 42 healthy, 11-month-old babies to their lab five times over two weeks. Whilst there, half the babies undertook an average of 77 mins of training in screen-based tasks that varied in difficulty according to each baby's performance. The other babies spent the same time watching TV clips and animations. The four attentional training tasks all required the babies to use their direction of gaze to create various effects. For example, in the butterfly task, so long as the baby fixated on it, a butterfly "flew" across the screen as distractors (e.g. house) scrolled in the other direction. As soon as the baby stopped fixating the butterfly, the distractors disappeared and the butterfly remained stationary. In another "elephant" task, the babies were rewarded with animations when they succeeded in fixating an elephant rather than a similarly sized distractor. Compared with the control group, the babies who undertook the training showed improvements in basic lab measures of cognitive performance, completed at the beginning and end of the two-week training period, including: task-switching ability (a sign of cognitive control), in sustained attention, faster eye movement reaction times and quicker attention disengagement. The effect sizes ranged from .54 up to 1.06 (generally considered medium to large). The researchers argued this was unlikely to be simply due to greater motivation in the trained babies - for example, the improvements to sustained attention were larger towards "interesting stimuli", indicating a selectivity in the effects. The researchers were surprised that there were no working memory benefits, but said this could be because working memory "is weak at this early age". In free play in front of a puppet theatre, somewhat paradoxically (given their increased ability at sustained attention), the trained babies showed a trend toward more, shorter glances. The researchers reasoned this could be because the training had given the babies' greater flexible control of their attention, depending on context. This is an important result because past research has linked this gaze style at 9 months with superior language development at 31 months. In general, Wass and his team said attentional control could be a "tool for learning" that aids the later acquisition of other skills. " ... It is striking that we found changes following briefer training periods than those used by other studies [with older children]," the researchers said. " ... Further work is required to assess whether this is because infant brains are more plastic and more readily amenable to training or because eye-gaze contingent training is more immersive in comparison with the point-and-click computer interface [using a mouse] used by other groups." Wass and his colleagues conceded that more research was needed to assess whether the observed training effects would last into the medium and long term. A possibility is that training effects in babies are incredibly fast, but also quick to dissipate. Regardless, for the time being, this is a study that's bound to excite competitive parents and educational entrepreneurs alike. _________________________________ Wass, S., Porayska-Pomsta, K., and Johnson, M. (2011). Training Attentional Control in Infancy. Current Biology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.004

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How psychology helped locate HMAS Sydney II, lost for over 60 years
The next time an ignoramus asks you what psychology has ever achieved, here's a new answer for you: it only helped in the 2008 discovery of the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney II, lost in deep water off the west coast of Australia since its sinking in November 1941. John Dunn and Kim Kirsner have documented in a new paper how they used insights from research into memory transmission to analyse the testimony from the German survivors of the ship, HSK Kormoran, that battled with Sydney not long before both vessels were lost. Whereas, tragically, all the crew of Sydney perished, 317 of the German crew survived and many were interrogated by Australian authorities about what happened. Finding Kormoran was the key that would unlock the location of Sydney, as the ships were proximate at the time of their sinking. Dunn and Kirsner applied many principles from cognitive psychology to the testimony provided by the German survivors, which included 72 references to the last known location of Kormoran, many of them contradictory. One of these principles is that as memory becomes degraded, either over time in an individual, or through transmission from one person to another - it becomes progressively influenced by a person's top-down expectations and expertise. Consider a study in which participants were asked to recall pictures of fruit and veg, some portrayed larger, some smaller, than their real-life sizes. People's memories for the pictures were distorted in the direction of prior knowledge, so that large vegetables were recalled as having been portrayed as larger. Based on this idea, and with reference to the status and opportunity of the various witnesses, Dunn and Kirsner identified seven "source statements" about the location of Kormoran which had informed the testimony of the other witnesses and been (further) distorted by them. For example, one of the statements, now known to be inaccurate, was from the Kormoran captain Theodor Detmers. To confirm this assessment of the available data, the researchers exploited techniques used in the analysis of species evolution, to identify clusters of statements, with each cluster containing statements of various levels of degradation or "mutation" from the key source statements. Once the source statements were confirmed, the researchers tested candidate locations for Kormoran and worked out the potential of each one in relation to its distance from the seven source statements. A key facet of Dunn and Kirsner's approach was to use all the available testimony to arrive at a prediction of where Kormoran would be found. By contrast, other non-psychological experts involved in the search had tended to rely on just one or two key witnesses, such as Detmers. By combining the best fit approach from the seven source statements with two further physical landmarks - drift objects lost from Kormoran and an emergency signal sent by Kormoran just prior to battle - Dunn

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and Kirsner identified a recommended search area. On 16 March 2008, the Finding Sydney Foundation located Kormoran just 5km from Dunn and Kirsner's best prediction of where she lay. Five days later, Sydney was found 21km away. The discovery helped heal a scar in Australia's history. "The method we developed in response to the problem that was placed before us was necessarily tailored to the specific details of that problem," the researchers said. "Nevertheless, it may provide a blueprint for potential solutions to other similar problems. Such problems may include, but would not necessarily be restricted to, search problems for missing objects. In our view, the critical feature of a problem that would make it suitable for our methodology would be a set of statements or similar data that can be regarded as a set of constraints on a state of affairs that can be evaluated quantitatively. For example, and to move away from the present spatial domain, a relevant problem may involve the evaluation of eyewitness descriptions of a particular person, e.g. a criminal." _________________________________ Dunn, J., and Kirsner, K. (2011). The search for HMAS Sydney II: Analysis and integration of survivor reports. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 513-527 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1735

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