Embodied Cognition

I mentioned Embodied Cognition briefly in my talk at SILS yesterday so thought I would post a bit more about it here. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice definition, which begins: "Embodied Cognition is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes."

What sparked my interest was this article in the January/February issue of Scientific American Mind: Body of Thought by Siri Carpenter which includes these tantalizing tidbits: "...a rapidly growing body of research indicates that metaphors joining body and mind reflect a central fact about the way we think: the mind uses the body to make sense of abstract concepts." Carpenter cites some interesting examples, two of which stand out to me:

• Just in the past few years studies have shown that holding a hot cup of coffee or being in a comfortably heated room warms a person's feelings toward strangers ...
  
• [T]hat sitting on a hard chair turns mild-mannered undergraduates into hard-headed negotiators.

Fascinating stuff!

library note: this article is not freely available on the Internet, but it is available to UNC and other institutional subscribers to Scientific American.

Go Team! Ill-Will to the Other Team!

Here's some interesting neuroscience research to ponder as you watch the Superbowl this weekend.

In the January 2011 issue of Psychological Science, Mina Cikara and colleagues studied baseball fans' reactions to play of their & their rival's teams and have shown that "the failures of an in-group member are painful, whereas those of a rival out-group member may give pleasure—a feeling that may motivate harming rivals." As a long-time NY Football Giants fan, this is not a surprise to me.

Frankly, I was most entertained by the methods they used to elicit fans' pleasant and painful feelings. They tested "die-hard" Red Sox (n=11) or Yankees (n=7) fans. To determine die-hard fan status, the authors asked participants to

correctly identify photos of three Red Sox players and three Yankees players that we selected, as well as the position of a fourth player we selected from each team. Participants also had to give extreme responses to questions regarding how they felt about their favored team and how they felt about their rival team (scale from 1, love them, to 10, hate them).

The stimuli, illustrated at right, involved several plays, yielding four possible conditions: favorite team's (let's call them the Red Sox) success against the rival team (ok, it's the Yankees); Yankees' failure against the rival team (both of these, are, of course, subjectively positive); favored team's failure against the rival team (subjectively negative) and the rival team's failure against a neutral team (the Orioles. How did they get to be neutral, I wonder?). This last is the "pure schadenfreude" condition -- which is both amusing and so true.

The study's participants "rated the subjectively negative plays as significantly more angering and painful than the plays in the subjectively positive and control conditions." (emphasis mine). When the authors followed up with the participants two weeks later, the fans indicated that they were 'significantly more likely" to heckle, insult, threaten, and even hit a rival fan than an Orioles fan. Yikes! (tho', if I'm honest, this is not news to me).

To me, the methods were as entertaining as the conclusion, so I'll leave the conclusion to the folks at Psychological Science's Daily Observations, to ensure accuracy:

When the rival team hit a home run against the favored team, the brain’s pain network was engaged. Most strikingly, participants who showed the greatest pleasure when watching their rival fail were also the most prone to say they might act aggressively, even violently, toward a rival fan. These results establish an initial neural link between social-mediated emotion and socially-directed action.

Please note that I do not advocate sports violence in any way. Also note that I chose my team in the above example purely at random and in no way wish harm to the New York Yankees or their fans. As for the Superbowl: go Steelers! go Packers!

For More Information

• Cikara, Mina, Matthew M. and Susan T. Fiske. Us Versus Them: Social Identity Shapes Neural Responses to Intergroup Competition and Harm. Psychological Science January 2011. doi:10.1177/0956797610397667 (abstract free; full-text available @ your library).
• the Association for Psychological Science's Daily Observations are fascinating and worth following on the web or via Twitter (@PsychScience).
  
• Thanks to UConn's Dr. Ross Buck for alerting me to this paper.
  
• No discussion of the condition of schadenfreude is complete without a link to the Avenue Q song of the same name: Schadenfreude.
  

Thoughtful Talk about Positive Psychology

Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology ("a field of study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism") spoke at the Ted Conference back in 2004, and the video has just been made available online:



He talks clearly about the state of positive psychology today, including some background. Psychology (arguably, clinical psychology, though he doesn't explicitly say this) has long been known for making "miserable people less miserable" - but Seligman argues that there is a cost to this: we become "victimologists," ignore "normal people" and genius, and we don't work on developing "interventions" on helping people become happier.

He describes three kinds of "happiness:"

1. The "pleasant life" includes having as many pleasures and pleasant emotions as possible. Some drawbacks: much of this is "heritable," meaning that you are born with it or you're not; and like tasty food, pleasant emotions can be "habituated," (Seligman analogizes French vanilla ice cream: the first bite is scrumptious, but by the sixth bite, you forget it's the best ice cream you've ever had).
2. The "good life," which Seligman describes as being about "flow:" when time stops, you have intense concentration, and you are totally consumed by what you're doing.
3. Meaning. Knowing what your strengths are and using them to good effect for yourself and others.
   

Finally, Seligman talks about successful "positive interventions" which help improve people's happiness. He assures the audience that studies for these interventions are done in the same "rigorous" manner in which drug effectiveness is tested, including long-term studies, placebo controlled, and random assignment of therapies. He describes some interesting activities which enhance the pleasant life:

1. Plan a beautiful day
2. Gratitude visit
3. Strengths date (with couples)
   
4. Fun vs. philanthropy (note: philanthropy has longer-lasting "pleasant" results than fun)

Watch the video for details about these activities, and check out his web site for even more information.

For More Information

• Seligman, Martin. What Positive Psychology Can Help You Become. TED Talks, February 2004.
• Authentic Happiness, Seligman's home page at the University of Pennsylvania. It includes:
• Strengths test - find what your strengths are to improve meaning, and a whole bunch of other questionnaires.
  
• Seligman, Martin, Tracey Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson. "Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions." American Psychologist 6.5 (2005):5-14.
• Links to more resources about positive psychology.
  
  

Olympic Medals & Emotions

My favorite brain science podcaster alerted me to a new-to-me psychology podcast called the Psych Files. In this week's episode, Psych Files host Michael Britt talks about the emotions of (some) Olympic medal winners.

Quick, who do you think is happier:
Silver medal winners?
Bronze medal winners?

(I think we can probably surmise that gold medal winners are the happiest of the three, but that isn't addressed in the podcast)

Answer: Bronze medal winners.

Britt summarizes a neat 1995 study in which non sports fans analyzed video of silver and bronze medal winners in the 1992 Olympics to see which winners were happier. With some degree of reliability, subjects agreed that bronze medal winners were happier. Britt and the study's authors suggest that this is because the bronze medalists were happy because they won a medal, while silver medalists were less happy because they didn't win the gold.

Britt's podcast summary is: "Psychologists say that winning the silver medal - coming in second - is actually less satisfying than coming in third - the bronze. Why is that? Sounds weird, but it also sounds right, doesn’t it? Have you ever come in second in a contest or received an A- instead of an A? Find out why winning the silver is…a bummer."

The article's abstract is:

Research on counterfactual thinking has shown that people's emotional responses to events are influenced by their thoughts about "what might have been." The authors extend these findings by documenting a familiar occasion in which those who are objectively better off nonetheless feel worse. In particular, an analysis of the emotional reactions of bronze and silver medalists at the 1992 Summer Olympics -- both at the conclusion of their events and on the medal stand -- indicates that bronze medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists. The authors attribute these results to the fact that the most compelling counterfactual alternative for the silver medalist is winning the gold, whereas for the bronze medalist it is finishing without a medal. Support for this interpretation was obtained from the 1992 Olympics and the 1994 Empire State Games. The discussion focuses on the implications of endowment and contrast for well being.

I particularly enjoyed Britt's analysis of the article, and his (minor) critique. He also offers some intriguing suggestions for extensions of the study. If you want some psychology to go along with your Olympics, this is a good place to look.

For More Information

• Britt, Michael. The Olympic Silver Metal? What a Bummer! The Psych Files, episode 67.
• Medvec, Victoria Husted; Madey, Scott E.; Gilovich, Thomas. When Less is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists (pdf at Cornell). Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Oct 1995, Vol. 69 Issue 4, p603-610. (cited by 85 in Scopus [subscription required])
  

Reading Fiction Improves Empathy

Stephen Abram pointed out a fascinating article from the (Toronto) Globe and Mail, citing some research which shows that folks who read fiction have "exceptionally strong" social skills. The Globe and Mail interview Keith Oatley about his research, and they quote him as saying:

"Fiction is really about how to get around in the social world, which is not as easy as one might think," said Keith Oatley, one of the researchers and a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto. "People who read fiction give themselves quite a bit of practice in understanding that. And also, I think reading fiction sort of prompts one to think about these questions - you know, what are these people up to?"

The newspaper refers to a June 2008 New Scientist article in which Oatley describes work done in his (and others') 2006 article "Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-Fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds." They identified fiction readers as those who knew names of novelists compared with those who were mostly familiar with non-fiction authors (hmmm, what about readers' advisors?) and gave them two tests. The first, Simon Baron-Cohen's "mind-in-the-eyes" test, measures empathy and social acumen, while the second is an "interpersonal perception" test. They found that fiction readers "had substantially greater empathy and performed somewhat better on the interpersonal perception test" than those who were more familiar with nonfiction authors. (emphasis mine)

Oatley wonders which was the cause and which the correlation; that is, perhaps people who are more empathetic are drawn to fiction, rather than the idea that reading novels promotes empathy. In fact, Mar randomly assigned subjects to read a short story or a non-fiction essay and found "that those who read the story performed better on social reasoning" and that the effect is immediate. Oatley and colleagues performed a similar exercise on 166 participants and found that those who read a Chekhov short story "... underwent larger changes in personality than those who read the control text... Results from the emotions questionnaire indicated that the personality changes were mediated by the emotions experienced while reading: a person's emotional state is known to influence their scores on personality tests."

Oatley suggests that fiction is "a simulation that runs on the software of our minds. ... Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life." (emphasis mine)

Ah, fiction. Fiction is good for you. I'm going to read my novel, now.

For More Information

• Abram, Stephen. You'll like this post. Stephen's Lighthouse, July 11, 2008.
  
• Baron-Cohen, Simon; Wheelwright, Sally; Hill, Jacqueline. The 'Reading the mind in the eyes' Test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol 42(2), Feb 2001. pp. 241-251.
  
• Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan B. Peterson. "Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-Fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds." Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 5 (10, 2006): 694-71. (pdf preprint on Mar's web site)
  
• Mick, Hayley. "Socially Awkward ? Hit the Books." The Globe and Mail, July 10, 2008.
• Oatley, Keith. "The Science of Fiction; Reading Novels Isn't just Entertaining, it Helps You Navigate the Complex Social World." New Scientist, June 28, 2008. 42. (preview; or find the full-text @ your library)
  

(Laughing) Rats in the News

Did you know that rats laugh?



Jaak Panksepp, neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University, talks about how rats actually laugh. Science News Online quotes him as saying "but you have to know the rat."

And in this week's Science Times, Natalie Angier wrote about rats: "A host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy."

For More Information
* Don't look now, but is that dog laughing?, Science News Online, July 28, 2001.
* Panksepp, J., Burgdorf, J. "Laughing" rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy? Physiology and Behavior, (2003) 79 (3), pp. 533-547.
* Angier, Natalie. Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?, New York Times, July 24, 2007.

Do Animals Feel?

Interesting article at New Scientist about whether or not animals have emotions. Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, writes about animals and their possible feelings. He gives examples of several emotions he claims to have seen / heard animals feeling, such as empathy, grief, gratitude, and love.

Those of us who share our lives with animals would surely be able to come up with our own examples; Emma seems to be grateful when I clean her litterbox, and it is conceivable that Boomer stayed alive with a huge tumor as long as he did out of love for me. But I also hear Ray Coppinger in my head scoffing at this notion.

Following his examples of animal emotions, Bekoff does an nice job of arguing the case for and against animal emotions.

FOR
"... it is bad biology to argue that humans are the only emotional beings. Emotions serve as a 'social glue' to bond individuals with one another and to catalyse and regulate their social encounters.
...
"A decade ago, neurobiologists identified specific nerve cells that are associated with empathy - the bedrock of social emotions. These so-called mirror neurons have been identified in non-human primates, and it is likely that they exist in humans and other mammals, and perhaps even in birds."

... transition discourse on anthropomorphising ...
"... careful anthropomorphism is not a way of foisting human attributes onto animals, but rather a means of identifying commonalities and then using human language to communicate what we observe."

AGAINST
"if unchecked, [anthropomorphism] leads to a complete absence of scientific rigour in the way we look at animals. Using anecdotes as data only makes matters worse, because this allows anyone to speculate on what a given animal is experiencing, without any standard for what counts as evidence."

Bekoff concludes by urging for scientific, evidence-based analysis of what it's like to be a cat, dog, bird, horse, or your animal of choice. A little anthropomorphism is good; too much is unscientifc.

Can't wait to read more about animal emotions!

For More Info
* Bekoff, Marc. "Are You Feeling What I'm Feeling?" New Scientist, 194: May 26, 2007, pp. 42-47. Full-text available in LexisNexis & possible on ScienceDirect.

Brain Science Podcast

I've just discovered a new podcast about cognitive science called the Brain Science Podcast, created by an emergency physician, Dr. Ginger Campbell.

The most recent episode is about Emotion; Campbell reviews the 2001 book Emotion : The Science of Sentiment, by British philosopher Dylan Evans.

Here are the show notes, which is a good summary of what Campbell discussed:

"This episode is a short introduction to the idea that our emotions are an essential part of our intelligence.

* We discuss the Basic Emotions based on the work of anthropologist Paul Eckman.
* We learn about culturally learned emotions such as “being a wild pig,” which is observed among the Gurumba people of New Guinea
* Paul Griffiths introduced the idea of “higher cognitive emotions”
* Emotions seem to exist on a continuum from the highly innate basic emotions to the culturally specific emotions
* The work of Joseph Ledoux and Antonio Damasio reveal that our emotions are an important element of normal intelligence
* We consider how fear actually follows two pathways in the brain
* We consider the role of the limbic system including the amygdala
* We consider the relationship between emotions and mood
* We consider how mood effects memory and decision making
o This includes Robert Zajonc’s discovery of the “mere exposure” effect
* We briefly consider the question of whether computers could ever display emotions"

Other topics have included neuroplasticity (in which Campbell covered Sharon Begley's book Train your mind, change your brain : how a new science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves and consciousness).

Highly recommended.

Emotion & Cognition

Interesting article in last month's Wall Street Journal about emotions & cognitive performance.

The free abstract sums it up:
"After years of studying situations such as choking under pressure or succumbing to 'stereotype threat' (in which you perform worse if you're reminded that your sex, race or age group tends to muff the test you're about to take), scientists are learning how emotion combines in the brain with memory, attention and other cognitive skills to make your spear miss the mammoth."

Begley cites a study reported at last month's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting which found a surprising effect of emotion on memory & cognition:

Jeremy Gray of Yale University studies the interrelationship between emotion & cognition.

"In one study, Prof. Gray and colleagues had volunteers watch a comedy video. Then the volunteers tried to keep three words in mind ... Feeling amused improved verbal working memory; the volunteers got more answers right. But it made spatial memory -- tested with faces -- worse.

"Horror videos had an opposite effect. The mild anxiety they induced improved spatial memory but hurt verbal memory..."

Fascinating!!

Towards the end of the article Begley referes to two recent studies about the "stereotype threat", wherein women do worse on math tests when they are somehow made aware of their gender (either by filling in a box indicating their sex or explicitly being reminded that "girls are spatially challenged".

Studies Take Measure Of How Stereotyping Alters Performance (abstract only from the WSJ site)
Sharon Begley. Wall Street Journal: Feb 23, 2007. p. B.1 full-text at ProQuest, if you have it.

Neuroscience & Real Life

Interesting application of neuroscience to real life over at the Creating Passionate Users blog. Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain.

Kathy Sierra posted (almost a year ago; I'm slow sometimes) three reasons why it's good to avoid spending gobs of time with angry/negative people:

1. mirror neurons
2. emotional contagion
3. explanation of "happy people"

Kathy quotes neurologist Richard Restak:

"If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, try to surround yourself with people possessing these qualities. And try to limit the time you spend with people given to pessimism and expressions of futility. Unfortunately, negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones, thanks to the phenomena of emotional contagion."

My take?

1. Mirror neurons are hot in the field of neuroscience. Wikipedia says "A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron 'mirrors' the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action."

This may be a large contributor to how we learn, and is likely involved in empathy. Possibly / probably? we can mirror the emotions of other people as well.

2. Emotional contagion, Wikipedia says, "represents a tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994)."

Almost like a virus! We smile when others smile, yawn when others yawn (even cats), mimicking them and "catching" their emotion.

3. Happiness & the brain. According to Kathy, "Happines is associated most heavily with the left (i.e. logical) side of the brain, while anger is associated with the right (emotional, non-logical) side of the brain."

I'm not as convinced about this, but Australia's ABC Radio National has a nifty feature on Left Brain, Right Brain and suggests that "recent studies suggest that the left brain may play a part in human happiness and the immune system."

Kathy concludes that "happy people are better able to think logically."

My non-scientific advice? Smile more and stick with the winners. :-)

Emotions are All in the Mind

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind just ran a 4 part series on emotion. They covered Sexual Desire (arguably not an emotion), Anger, Jealousy, and Joy.

They feature comments from real people who experience the emotion in question, interspersed with interviews with scientists in the field. Tidbits that I liked:

From Jealousy:
David DeSteno (Associate Professor, Psychology Department, Northeastern University):
“Engaging in satisfying relationships is associated with all kinds of wonderful things: lower cardiovascular threat, greater immune system response, greater wellbeing. And so what jealousy does is it alerts you and impels you to the threat that your relationship is going to be lost.”
DeSteno categorizes jealousy as a “social emotion” rather than a more basic emotion like anger and fear, adding that social emotions “help us navigate our social landscape, much as more basic emotions help us navigate the physical one.”

From Joy:
Lea Williams (Associate Professor, Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney) and Susan Turk Charles (Assistant Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of Southern California) suggest that as we age we get happier. Well, they can’t prove it in so many words, but Williams has found “the part of that that regulates negative emotion actually becomes better able to do that with older age, and, in a sense, takes the brakes off the positive emotions.”

Charmin Härtel (Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Department of Management, Monash University):
“There’s an old saying that if you took three people and you put them in a room and two of them were positive and one of them was negative that they’d all come out depressed. And there’s a little bit of truth in that, it’s a lot easier for the emotional tone of a place to go negative than it is for it to go in a positive way or create a positive environment.”

Transcripts, citations to articles for more information, as well as podcasts & RealAudio of the show are available for all stories.

Trust = Love?

An article in a recent issue of Science suggests that the emotion of trust "lives" near the emotion of love in the brain. Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine Human Neuroimaging Laboratoryused fMRI imaging and an investment game to pinpoint a trust response to the caudate nucleus at the base of the brain -- the same area where researchers 5 years ago think love "lives."

Read more at RedNova or track down the April 1 issue of Science (not available at Hampshire online, but we do have it in print!)