Right ear more responsive to requests than left ear, study finds

Wired reports:

You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.

Statistical literacy influences one’s understanding of weather forecasts

I’ve long been interested in the phenomenon of statistical literacy – that is, the ability understand (or misunderstand) statistical information, especially information dealing with probability.

This USA Today article illustrates this phenomenon:

When your local weather forecaster announces that there is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, not everyone knows what that means.

Some think it means 30% of an area will get rain. Others think it will rain for 30% of the day. In fact, of all the forecast terms used by meteorologists, this remains one of the most baffling to the public.

Some people don’t understand that the forecaster simply means there’s a 30% probability it will rain at some point during the day. Susan Joslyn, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have been studying such confusion.

More information on statisical literacy can be found here.

Changing emotion with gaming simulations

Note: this is cross-posted with my Education Blog.

Science Daily reports:

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The researchers set out to create virtual worlds with characters that children could interact and empathise with powerfully enough to change their own attitudes and behaviour.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

Finding new ways to resolve such problems is important, says eCIRCUS coordinator Ruth Aylett, because they are pervasive, hurtful, and can cause lasting psychological damage.

“Knowledge-based interventions don’t necessarily succeed,” says Aylett. “If we’re able to reduce victimisation, we’re giving people a way to get out of a very painful situation and improve the quality of their lives.”

FearNot! – help for bullied children

The eCIRCUS researchers first focused on primary school children who were the victims of bullying. They drew on recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other.

“Emotion is an essential part of human interaction,” says Aylett, “so education about human social interaction must include feelings.”

The theories led them to expect that if they could get children to empathise with and try to help victims of bullying in a virtual world, the children could try out different strategies, experience the results, and develop better ways to deal with bullying in their own lives.

The researchers used a computer program, called FearNot! (Fun with Empathic Agents to Achieve Novel Outcomes in Teaching), that had been developed as an initial small prototype by an earlier European research effort called VICTEC.

The eCIRCUS team made FearNot! much richer in content and more open-ended. For example, they provided virtual bullying victims with the ability to remember strategies that they have tried. Those memories allow the virtual characters to reject approaches that have failed and ask the children who are helping them in the simulation to come up with better ideas.

“We are the first people to produce software for dealing with bullying that is not pre-scripted,” says Aylett. “We’ve produced something that is genuinely interactive to the individual responses of each child.”

To test the effectiveness of FearNot!, the eCIRCUS team tried it out with close to 1000 students in 30 primary schools across Germany and the UK.

The researchers tested FearNot! by comparing a group of users and a control group of non-users, similar to the method used for testing medical treatments.

Students in selected classes spent a total of 1.5 hours playing FearNot! over the course of three weeks.

The results were encouraging. “It definitely reduces victimisation in the short term,” says Aylett. “It has a significant positive effect even at this low exposure.”

Although further work is needed to demonstrate long-term effects, Aylett is confident that if all the children in a school experienced FearNot! over a longer term, and as part of a social learning curriculum, bullying and victimisation would be reduced.

“FearNot! has achieved its objectives very well,” says Aylett. “You’d need a games or educational software company to take it further.”

ORIENT – empathising with newcomers

While FearNot! has younger children interacting with cartoon-like characters in a simple world, ORIENT immerses older students in a much more vivid and complex virtual world, where they learn to empathise with and accept newcomers from other cultures.

In ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and “beamed down” as a team to save the planet Orient.

Planet Orient is populated by aliens called Sprytes, who look rather like large bipedal tree frogs and who have their own language and customs. Students have to learn a lot about the Sprytes and empathise with them in order to help them.

“We wanted users to feel adrift in this alien culture,” says Aylett. “How can you empathise with new people in your own culture if you’ve never experienced being adrift yourself?”

The software that shapes what happens as students interact with the Sprytes acts like the director of an improvisational drama. The software starts and ends scenes, chooses which characters appear, and can impose challenges such as a storm.

Each Spryte has its own goals, feelings and memories that control what it does and that can change based on experience. The interaction between the Sprytes and the students produces an unpredictable “emergent narrative”.

“There’s no fixed plot,” says Aylett. “Our characters are acting autonomously, making up their minds as they go.”

According to Aylett, students standing in front of a large screen and interacting with these psychologically believable aliens soon respond as if they were real. “ORIENT produces the feeling of really being there,” she says.

Although ORIENT needs further development and testing, Aylett believes it has the potential to help solve a major social problem by spurring students to change their attitudes toward students from other cultures.

“It’s the attitudes of the host community that can either make new students welcome or make their lives miserable,” she says.

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

The eCircus Web site is here.

The influence of ’stereotype threat’ on cognition

TIME Magazine reports:

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

Brain perceives happiness more quickly than it perceives fear, study finds

Science Daily reports:

…An international group of experts has carried out an in-depth study into how we process emotional expressions, looking at the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in the perception of positive and negative facial signals…

The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Laterality, show that the right hemisphere performs better in processing emotions. “However, this advantage appears to be more evident when it comes to processing happy and surprised faces than sad or frightened ones”, [study co-author J. Antonio Aznar-Casanova] points out.

“Positive expressions, or expressions of approach, are perceived more quickly and more precisely than negative, or withdrawal, ones. So happiness and surprise are processed faster than sadness and fear”, explains Aznar-Casanova.

This research study adds to previous ones, which had revealed asymmetries in the way the brain processes emotions, and enriches the international debate in cognitive-emotional neuroscience in terms of how to define the exact way in which human beings process these facial expressions.

The ’science of change’ comes to the White House

TIME Magazine reports:

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama’s campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. “BUT, BUT, BUT,” deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama’s GOTV operatives nationwide, “What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!”

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation’s leading behaviorists. The key guideline was a simple message: “A Record Turnout Is Expected.” That’s because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. “People want to do what they think others will do,” says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. “The Obama campaign really got that.” (See pictures of Obama taken by everyday Americans.)

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country.

Survey on judgment and decision-making

A research team at Brown University led by Dr. Steven Sloman has asked me to help them publicize a survey they are conducting that focuses on judgment and decision making.
Please help this fellow researcher by responding to his survey. Thank you!

Can watching TV hurt children’s language development?

USA Today reports:

For every hour in front of the TV, parents spoke 770 fewer words to children, according to a study of 329 children, ages 2 months to 4 years, in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Adults usually speak about 941 words an hour.

Children vocalized less, too, says author Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In some cases, parents may have spoken less because they sat a child in front of a TV and left the room, he says. In others, parents simply zoned out themselves while watching TV with a child. Researchers didn’t note the content of the TV shows.

 

The study is available here.