Research Digest Free every fortnight Issue 157 Contents: 1. Early risers are more proactive than evening people
2. Scared face processed more quickly when seen out of the corner of the eye
3. Witnessing school bullying carries its own psychological risks
4. Researchers aren’t paying enough attention to debriefing their participants
5. How to brag
6. Morbid warnings on cigarette packs could encourage some people to smoke
Further information Email the editor: [email protected]
Download past Digest issues as PDFs: www.researchdigest.org.uk
Visit the Digest blog: www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog
Download a free Digest poster: http://tinyurl.com/59c63v
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Early risers are more proactive than evening people I've always envied early risers, those who spring out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready, it seems, to take on the
world. Of course their early vitality could be short-lived. Morning friskiness gives the impression of a positive
nature but are 'larks' really more proactive people than 'owls'?
Yes, according to Christoph Randler who surveyed 367 student participants and found a correlation between their
self-reported 'morningness' (as revealed by their answers to questions about how easy they find it to get up in the
morning and how alert they feel) and their self-reported proactivity (measured by their agreement with statements
like 'I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself' and 'I feel responsible for my own life'). The correlation
was relatively weak (.11, where 1 would be a perfect match) but was statistically significant.
Randler also found proactivity to be (inversely) correlated with so-called 'social jetlag'. This is caused by the
mismatch between one's biological time-keeping and the demands of social time, as betrayed by the difference in
students' choice of rise times between weekdays and weekends.
These findings suggest that morning people really are more proactive. What's not clear is why - whether it's
because they really do have an inherent energy and drive or if instead it's simply easier for morning people to be
proactive in a world that is generally tailored towards rising early, rather than working late.
'... [W]hether evening people could be more proactive in their lifestyles if they had less restrictive schedules (e.g.
they could start work later in the day)' is a question for future research, Randler said.
This is far from being the first study to look for associations between people's sleep habits and other personality
factors. Prior research suggests that evening people are more extraverted, pessimistic and creative, whilst morning
people are more conscientious. Twin studies suggest that genetic differences explain a lot of the variation in
people's morningness and eveningness.
_________________________________
Randler, C. (2009). Proactive People Are Morning People. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39 (12), 27872797 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00549.x
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Scared face processed more quickly when seen out of the corner of the eye The brain processes fearful faces more quickly when seen out of the corner of the eye than when viewed straight
on. Dimitri Bayle and colleagues, who made their finding using magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain scanning,
believe this bias has probably evolved because threats are more likely to come from side-on.
Eleven participants had their brains scanned while they judged whether faces on a computer screen were happy or
not. Unbeknown to the participants, each of these visible faces was actually preceded by a subliminally presented
fearful face, either straight ahead or in the periphery.
The striking finding was that a peripherally presented fearful face led to much quicker activation of brain regions
known to be involved in emotion processing. Specifically, a peripherally presented fearful face was followed by
increased activation in the right anterior fronto-medial region - including the famous amygdala - within just 130ms.
By contrast, a fearful face presented straight on triggered activity in these emotional-processing centres only after
210ms.
Bayle's team think that fearful stimuli seen out of the corner of the eye are processed more quickly because of the
preponderance of so-called 'magnocellular' receptors in the eye's periphery. These feed into the magnocellular
visual pathway, known for its fast and dirty processing, which routes subcortically via the superior-colliculus. In
contrast, stimuli viewed straight ahead in our full attentional glare are preferentially processed by the so-called
parvocelluar pathway, which is more thorough and travels rather more leisurely via the visual cortex at the back of
the brain.
The researchers concluded: 'An adaptive advantage is conferred by the fast automatic detection of potential threat
outside the focus of attention, as danger in the external world mostly appears in the peripheral vision, requiring a
rapid behavioural reaction before conscious control.'
_________________________________
Bayle DJ, Henaff MA, & Krolak-Salmon P (2009). Unconsciously perceived fear in peripheral vision alerts the
limbic system: a MEG study. PloS one, 4 (12) PMID: 20011048
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight
Witnessing school bullying carries its own psychological risks We hear a lot about the harmful consequences to children of seeing their parents argue or watching violence on TV,
but very little about the potential harm of witnessing school bullying. But now Ian Rivers and colleagues have
published findings suggesting that being a bystander to bullying can often be just as psychologically harmful as
being directly involved.
The researchers asked just over 2000, predominantly white, children aged 12-16 at 14 state schools in the north of
England about how much they'd been bullied, been a bully or witnessed bullying, over the last school term.
Bullying appeared to be part of the daily lives of most of the children, with 63 per cent saying they'd seen bullying
going on; 20 per cent admitting that they'd bullied someone else and 34 per cent reporting they'd been bullied.
The pupils were also asked questions about their mental health and their use of cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs.
The findings showed that being a witness to bullying was associated with increased mental health problems and
substance abuse, above and beyond the effects of being directly involved in bullying. In other words, witnessing
bullying was still significantly associated with psychological measures like anxiety and depression, even after the
potential influence of being a bullying victim or perpetrator was factored out. Pupils who'd witnessed bullying (but
not been a victim or bully) also tended to report drinking more alcohol than victims or those not at all involved in
bullying.
The researchers acknowledged that their study was not longitudinal so it only offered a snapshot of the relations
between the various bullying roles and mental health measures. And there's also a need to treat pupils' self-report
data with caution. Nonetheless, Rivers' team said their study suggests school psychologists should consider the
effects of bullying on bystanders, not just on those directly involved.
Possible reasons why witnessing bulling could be psychologically harmful include being reminded of one's own
past experiences of being bullied; being made to feel that one is at risk of being bullied; and also feeling guilty for
not intervening to help the victim.
'It’s well documented that children and adolescents who are exposed to violence within their families or outside of
school are at a greater risk for mental health problems ...' said Rivers. 'It should not be a surprise that violence at
school will pose the same kind of risk.'
_________________________________
Rivers, I., Poteat, V., Noret, N., & Ashurst, N. (2009). Observing bullying at school: The mental health
implications of witness status. School Psychology Quarterly, 24 (4), 211-223 DOI: 10.1037/a0018164
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Psychology researchers aren't paying enough attention to debriefing their participants Deception was a fundamental part of some of the most famous experiments in psychology - just think of Milgram's obedience studies,
in which participants thought they were administering an electric shock, or Asch's conformity research, during which participants
were tricked into believing everyone else in the room thought a line was a different length than it was. Although ethical standards
have been tightened, deception is still used widely in psychology. It's not uncommon for even the most sedate studies to involve
giving participants false test feedback or misleading them about the true aims of the research. A vital element of psychological
science, therefore, is to debrief participants after experimenting on them - telling them the truth about what happened and why, and
listening to their feedback.
Even studies that don't deploy trickery have the potential to leave a lasting impression - consider all the tests of new interventions
aimed at outcomes from improving memory to ameliorating depression. We know from past research that simply asking someone
about a behaviour, such as drug taking, increases their likelihood of indulging in that behaviour. Of course, telling participants too
much up front can be detrimental to the results, and fully informed consent is therefore far rarer than most researchers would care to
admit. That's why it's so important to debrief them fully afterwards. And yet, having said all this, an alarming new survey of
researchers by Donald Sharpe and Cathy Faye suggests that debriefing is a neglected practice in contemporary psychology. Ironically
for a science that's supposed to be about people and behaviour, there's also scant research on what kinds of debriefing are even
effective - for example is it enough to tell participants they were given false feedback or should they have the chance to complete a
real test?
Sharpe and Faye surveyed over two hundred researchers who'd published during a twelve month period from 2006 to 2007, either in
the American Psychological Association's flagship social psychology journal The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology or in
the Journal of Traumatic Stress. Just one third of articles in the social psychology journal had mentioned debriefing and fewer than
one in ten of the trauma journal articles had done so. Those mentionings that were found were usually cursory, such as 'Participants in
this and all following experiments were debriefed prior to dismissal.' If the purpose of a particular study was obvious, the survey
suggested most researchers considered debriefing to be unnecessary, with nearly all their focus placed instead on informed consent
prior to the study.
Set against this worrying picture, Sharpe and Faye make a strong case for just how vital debriefing ought to be to good quality
research. Taking their lead from a provocative article published on this topic thirty years ago by Frederick Tesch, the pair say that
effective debriefing is vital not only for the ethical reasons outlined above, but for educational and methodological functions too.
Explaining to participants why and how a study was performed ought to be given far higher priority, they argue, especially when one
considers how many studies are performed on psychology students. Even with non-psychology students, the exercise of carefully
explaining the rationale, methodology, and perhaps even results, of a study, could help to promote the scientific cause. 'Participants
would learn about doing research, the joys and frustrations, and the excitement of discovery,' Sharpe and Faye said.
Regarding the methodological benefits of debriefing, the authors said that the process ought to be two-way, and that information
garnered from participants can illuminate study findings and help improve future procedures. 'Researchers would learn about how
participants view the experimental task, what makes sense and what does not, and what the participants think it was all about,' Sharpe
and Faye said.
Their paper ends with seven recommendations for how to improve the situation, including greater discussion of debriefing in the
research literature; more thorough reporting of debriefing practices in journals' methods sections; use of online overflow pages for
discussing debriefing; and formalising the debriefing procedure. 'Progress will be made when researchers recognise the importance of
debriefing or when some unfortunate circumstance forces such recognition,' the authors said.
_________________________________
Sharpe, D., & Faye, C. (2009). A Second Look at Debriefing Practices: Madness in Our Method? Ethics & Behavior, 19 (5), 432-447
DOI: 10.1080/10508420903035455
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight How to brag No one likes a show-off. But to get ahead in this world, you're going to need to let at least some people know what you're
capable of. Thankfully Nurit Tal-Or has arrived with a pair of studies that offer some insight into how to brag without coming
across as big-headed.
Over a hundred undergrads were presented with the script of a conversation between two people - a 'show-off' called Avi who
boasted about his A-grade in stats exams, and his friend. Crucially, there were four versions of the conversation, with each
undergrad participant reading just one version. In two versions, the friend raised the topic of the exam before he either did or
did not ask Avi what grade he got; in the other two versions, Avi first raised the topic of the exam, which either did or did not
provoke a question from his friend about his grade. In every version Avi ended up boasting that he got an 'A+'. Afterwards, the
students rated Avi's character based on the version they'd read.
The crux of it: context is everything when it comes to boasting. If Avi's friend raised the topic of the exams, Avi received
favourable ratings in terms of his boastfulness and likeability, regardless of whether he was actually asked what grade he got.
By contrast, if Avi raised the topic of the exams, but failed to provoke a question, then his likeability suffered and he was seen
as more of a boaster. In other words, to pull off a successful boast, you need it to be appropriate to the conversation. If your
friend, colleague, or date raises the topic, you can go ahead and pull a relevant boast in safety. Alternatively, if you're forced to
turn the conversation onto the required topic then you must succeed in provoking a question from your conversation partner. If
there's no question and you raised the topic then any boast you make will leave you looking like a big-head.
The study author Tal-Or thinks the asking of the question is all-important because of our usually mindless approach to
conversations. As a kind of mental short-cut we assume that if a conversant asks a question on a topic then they were probably
the ones to have raised that topic in the first place. And once a topic has been raised, a subsequent boast is not seen as such a
social sin because it's in context.
Tal-Or tested this idea with a second study, almost identical to the first, but instead of the participants rating Avi's character,
they were given a memory test on the conversation. As Tal-Or expected, when participants read the story version in which
Avi's friend asked Avi about his grades, they tended to mistakenly remember that the friend had also raised the topic in the first
place, even when he hadn't.
'In situations ranging from a first date to a job interview, people commonly face the dilemma of how to make their listeners
aware of their success without being perceived as braggers,' Tal-Or said. 'The present research provides a possible solution to
this dilemma.'
Before you takes these tips onto the streets, there's one major caveat worth noting. Tal-Or only looked at the perception of the
boaster in the eyes of onlookers, not in the eyes of one's actual conversation partner.
_________________________________
Tal-Or, N. (2010). Bragging in the right context: Impressions formed of self-promoters who create a context for their boasts.
Social Influence, 5 (1), 23-39 DOI: 10.1080/15534510903160480
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight
Morbid warnings on cigarette packs could encourage some people to smoke
Every now and again a finding comes along that provides perfect ammunition for psychologists confronted by the
tiresome claim that psychology is all 'common sense'. Researchers have found that death-related health warnings on
cigarette packs are likely to encourage some people to smoke. The surprising result is actually consistent with
'Terror-management Theory', according to which thoughts of mortality cause us to cling more strongly to our
cultural beliefs and to pursue ego-boosting activities.
Jochim Hansen and colleagues first measured how important smoking was to the self-esteem of 39 student
smokers. Example questionnaire items included 'smoking allows me to feel valued by others'. Next, the smokers
were divided into two groups: one group looked at two cigarette packs that featured death-related warnings, such as
'Smokers die earlier'. The other group looked at cigarette packs that featured death-neutral warnings, such as
'Smoking makes you unattractive.'
Fifteen minutes later all the students reported their attitudes to smoking; the questionnaire included items such as
'Do you intend to quit smoking?'. Among the students for whom smoking was important to their self-esteem, those
who looked at packets with death-related warnings subsequently reported more positive attitudes to smoking
compared with those who looked at death-neutral packets. The exact opposite pattern was found for students for
whom smoking was not important for their self-esteem.
In other words, for smokers who derive a self-esteem boost from smoking - perhaps they see it as a key part of their
identity or they think it makes them look cool - a death-related cigarette packet warning can have the ironic effect
of making them want to smoke more, so as to buffer themselves against the depressing reminder of their own
mortality. The findings suggest that for these kinds of smokers, packet warnings that target positive beliefs about
smoking (e.g. 'Smoking makes you look unattractive') could well be more effective.
'To succeed with anti-smoking messages on cigarette packs one thus has to take into account that considering death
may make some people smoke,' the researchers concluded.
_________________________________
Hansen, J., Winzeler, S., & Topolinski, S. (2010). When the death makes you smoke: A terror management
perspective on the effectiveness of cigarette on-pack warnings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1),
226-228 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.09.007
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog