Woman uses brain implant to stimulate her brain’s pleasure center, study reports

io9.com reports:

The 1986 case of a woman addicted to stimulating herself with a brain implant is chronicled in a scientific article from Pain journal called Compulsive thalamic self-stimulation: a case with metabolic, electrophysiologic and behavioral correlates.

The unnamed woman had been suffering from chronic pain… and had tried a number of drugs to deal with it. Though she was an alcoholic, doctors prescribed opium-based painkillers to her and she had been known to take more than her recommended dose. With her history of drug addiction, it’s easy to see why doctors would have imagined that a brain implant would be the best course of action for the treatment of her chronic pain. Little did they know that the woman would become addicted to that, too…

The cognitive benefits of a bad mood

The BBC reports:

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly. In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed. While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

Is dopamine the neural basis for motivation?

The NY Times reports:

People talk of getting their “dopamine rush” from chocolate, music, the stock market, the BlackBerry buzz on the thigh — anything that imparts a small, pleasurable thrill. Familiar agents of vice like cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol and nicotine are known to stimulate the brain’s dopamine circuits, as do increasingly popular stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin.

In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don’t watch out, you’ll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?

Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading…

In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last week in Chicago, dopamine is less about pleasure and reward than about drive and motivation, about figuring out what you have to do to survive and then doing it. “When you can’t breathe, and you’re gasping for air, would you call that pleasurable?” said Nora D. Volkow, a dopamine researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Or when you’re so hungry that you eat something disgusting, is that pleasurable?”

Is a bullying boss trying to hide incompetence?

New Scientist reports:

“Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don’t feel they can show that legitimately, they’ll show it by taking people down a notch or two,” says Nathanael Fast, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led a series of experiments to explore this effect.

In one, Fast and his colleague Serena Chen, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, asked 90 men and women who had jobs to complete online questionnaires about their aggressive tendencies and perceived competence. The most aggressive of the lot tended to have both high-power jobs and a chip on their shoulder, Fast and Chen found.

NEWSWEEK asks: Is your baby racist?

NEWSWEEK reports:

We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills necessary for a diverse world. The question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?

New study suggests we learn more from successes than from failures

Science Daily reports:

If you’ve ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail.

In the July 30 issue of the journal Neuron, Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and MIT colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy have created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain — nor was there any improvement in behavior.

TIME Magazine: “Self-help through negative thinking”

TIME Magazine reports on new research into the so-called ’self-help’ phenomenon (termed cognitive restructuring by mental health experts).

A study just published in the journal Psychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are.

Reflections on the Implicit Association Test

NEWSWEEK’s Raina Kelley writes:

…I have spent the next 12 years leaving my purse wide open and at least six feet away from me. It’s my penance for having automatically assumed a black man in L.A. was a criminal. Being black doesn’t get me a pass on unconscious negative feelings about African-Americans or the shame we feel when they become conscious. We see the same cultural indicators as everybody else—back then, hours of riot footage, rap videos, and the O.J. trial had created an automatic connection in my mind between African-American Los Angelenos and danger.

So, I was actually excited to read about a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which researchers from the University of Washington confirmed the validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT made a lot of news late last year when results showed that 70 percent of those who took it harbor an unconscious preference for white people over black people. And no, I’m not talking about 70 percent of white people—I mean people of all races who took it, including African-Americans.

The Implicit Association Test can be accessed here.

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.

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.