Research Digest: June 2010

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Are you fluttering your eyelashes at me or just feeling creative?

An intriguing new study has found that the rate at which students blink (as measured over six minutes using electrodes placed near the eyes) is associated with both their divergent and convergent creativity scores, but not their intelligence. Divergent creativity was measured with the 'alternate uses task', which required the students to come up with as many original uses for a brick, shoe and newspaper as possible. Lower and higher eye blink rate was associated with poorer performance, whilst medium eye blink rate was associated with superior performance at this task.

Convergent creativity was tapped with the 'remote associates test', which required the students to identify the one word that matched three other words (e.g. for 'time', 'hair' and 'stretch' the answer would be 'long'). In this case, eye blink rate was negatively related with divergent creativity - the less a student blinked the better they tended to do at this task.

Why should eye blink rate be associated with creativity? The study authors Soghra Chermahini and Bernhard Hommel explained that eye blink rate is a marker for dopamine activity and in turn, dopamine has previously been linked with creativity.

The researchers pointed to evidence showing, for example, that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is associated with excess dopamine, tend to have high eye blink rates. Patients with Parkinson's, by contrast, which is associated with reduced dopamine, show low eye blink rates. They also highlighted past research linking dopamine with creativity. For example, there's evidence that positive mood - which is related to dopamine levels - can enhance creativity, although the results in this area have been extremely inconsistent.

Chermahihin and Hommel said their research adds to the literature by showing that the dopamine-creativity link is far from straight-forward. There was a negative linear relationship with convergent thinking but a positive, inverted U-shaped relationship with divergent thinking. This could help explain the inconsistent research findings linking mood with creativity, as they explained:

'Participants with a relatively low level of dopaminergic functioning would be likely to benefit from better mood, whereas people with a relatively high level of dopaminergic functioning, such as individuals scoring high in psychoticism, would actually be expected to suffer from better mood. Depending on which part of the distribution happens to be more strongly represented in a given sample, the corresponding study may find a positive, negative, or no relationship between mood and the given performance measure.'

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Chermahini, S., & Hommel, B. (2010). The (b)link between creativity and dopamine: Spontaneous eye blink rates predict and dissociate divergent and convergent thinking. Cognition, 115 (3), 458-465 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.03.007

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Bloggers behind the blogs: Neurowhoa!

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, 'Hesitant Iconoclast' of the NeuroWhoa! blog.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

I was a psychology undergraduate and, in the course of my studies, was astounded at how much high-quality science content was available on the Net. I stumbled across ScienceBlogs one day and gravitated almost immediately to Mo Costandi's excellent Neurophilosophy blog, where I became a regular reader. After a few weeks of reading a selection of different psych-oriented blogs I just felt an inspiration to create a blog of my own, where I could talk about the issues that interest me as well as share the knowledge that I was and am learning.

What's your blog's mission?

I'd say a large part of it is public education as well as stimulating interest in psychology and neuroscience issues. I've come across so many misconceptions about 'the mind' and its functions that I've often felt driven to correct them in some way. For example, I have heard people suggesting that thinking too much or too long about something is a bad idea because it risks destroying valuable brain cells! Seriously. I know that's pretty wild, but it just goes to show some of the crazy ideas people can have about the most simplest of things like memory, emotions, personality, etc. And yet the fact is that the subject is so full of beautiful and illuminating examples of the ways the mind and brain really do work that we cannot know if we will fully plumb the depths. In any case, one can only wonder why we seem to only discuss these things among ourselves and not putting the knowledge 'out there'.

So that's my angle; a combination of educational and interesting things to engage with and inform the public. My own efforts may be quite small, but I trust that the motivations for doing so are quite common among the majority of science bloggers and I am confident of collegial approaches going quite far in that direction.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes, I'm @NeuroWhoa. Twitter is fantastic in the way it can make automatic announcements every time I write a new article, but especially greater is the facility to keep in direct contact with other psychologists, neuroscientists, researchers, writers - people who are both notable and knowledgeable in their fields. Not only is there the capacity to learn new things in short and snappy conversations, but the fact that almost every tweet contains a link to some new announcement or article means a great proliferation of sharing information and resources endlessly! It's popular to muse about learning something new every day, but with Twitter it's really true.

Also, it's quite possible to gauge the 'buzz' about whatever makes the news of the day and that's what gives me the ideas to write about. A lot of my posts have been inspired by something I've read via Twitter, and when it is a case of blogging about some new finding it helps to know what other people are saying about it and that in turn helps to write up a balanced view of the subject. It is great that when you are stumped sometimes, you can just ask a question and get an answer almost straightaway. I'm always grateful for the help I've received from fellow Twitterers that makes a direct contribution to whatever post I'm writing, and always try to repay that by crediting them wherever possible.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I use the Blogger platform, mainly because that's the one where I've had most experience with. I've flirted with the idea of moving to Wordpress, Typepad or some other free service and have explored some of them, but in many cases I found the controls somewhat elaborate and I get the feeling I'd be spending more time twiddling knobs to prettify the blog design than writing. So in that respect Blogger suits me well - it gets the job done by simply letting you write whatever you want, and you're set!

I'm open to the possibility of a change, however. If I can be convinced that another platform has better facilities that are both user-friendly and audience-orientated then I'd be willing to give it a try.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

I'd say that, whatever motivated you to write in the first place, remember that regularly and try to keep true to it. Stick to a pace that's comfortable for you and don't feel obligated to churn out postings too fast. Sometimes quality is better than quantity, there's no substitute for a well-crafted and thoughtful post that enables people to learn something than just posting two or three lines of comment on something obscure because you feel you have to or you may lose readers. Also, make an effort to be easily understood. We all know that academic papers can be hard to read, so it is essential to strike a balance between transmitting valuable information and keeping the jargon to a tolerable or minimum level. This is a skill to be learnt in time and with experience, however.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

Mind Hacks is my daily fix, with Neurophilosophy coming a close second. I like to be eclectic in my science reading so as to be informed of developments elsewhere. So aside from a few other neuro-blogs like Neurocritic and Neurologica, I also skim through Pharyngula, Why Evolution Is True, and Respectful Insolence.

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

Ha! It's good that you ask me to list up to five because I always tend to have my nose buried in several books at a time! At this moment I'm reading David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives. Eagleman is a neuroscientist and, while I don't believe in an afterlife, it's interesting to approach the subject from forty different and interesting scenarios of 'what could be'. I'm also reading Theodore Millon's Masters Of The Mind, which is a general history of mental illness and how definitions and treatment have changed throughout history. Other items on my reading list include Antonia Fraser's The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and D.J. Enright's Oxford Book of Death.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I've written many posts that I'm proud of so it's hard to pick, but I guess What Is Self-Transcendence? was good in that I did something different than the usual. This post referred to a recent paper that reported how neurosurgery performed on certain brain structures effected personality changes in patients which made them feel more 'spiritual', giving further credence to the idea of spirituality having a neurobiological origin. The study drew interested comment from various quarters when it was released, but my curiosity was piqued by the mention of a personality construct called Self-Transcendence (ST), the increase and manifestation of which was said to be the evidence of increase of spiritual feelings. I wanted to know about the measurements involved in determining this construct and what its essential elements were. It involved hunting down papers from 1993 in a bid to track the development of ST as a concept and discovering the actual items of ST that were used to determine the personality changes of the neurosurgical patients. To display the ST items and comment on how they could properly define spirituality (or not, as was the case) made the whole thing a detective story of sorts, so I was a little pleased with myself for managing to find an interesting angle and doing some real investigation for a change instead of doing what everyone else was doing and blogging about the study itself.

I guess if I could find more such angles in papers that highlight the studies in a different and interesting way, I would be that much more satisfied with my writings and hopefully my readers will too!

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Bloggers behind the blogs: Neuroskeptic

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Neuroskeptic of the Neuroskeptic blog.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

I'd long had an interest in science communication. Growing up I was a big fan of the great science writers like Stephen J Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan, but until I started blogging I'd never written much beyond occasional pieces for student newspapers. My main inspiration to start came from Ben Goldacre's blog (and book) Bad Science - because it showed me that the print media coverage of science was very often terrible but more importantly that they really had no interest in making it good. So it's often up to amateurs to do it right.

And I was struck by something Ben said at a talk he was giving: someone asked him for advice in doing the same kind of thing in another country and his advice was 'just go ahead and do it'. So I did. I started reading a lot of science blogs at around that time, and really admired them, so I tried to get in on the act.

What's your blog's mission?

Well I write about what interests me, I think that's the only thing you can do really - your mission should be to tell people about what interests you in a way that makes them interested in it too. But I suppose my mission is to show that there are lots of really interesting things in neuroscience, and you don't need to be a neuroscientist to understand them.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

I think it improves it. On the one hand it takes some time out of the day, though not very much, but it means I read papers I wouldn't otherwise have, it's improved my writing skills enormously (which is very useful for writing papers, proposals and grant applications ) and it's given me contacts.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I use Blogger just because it was the first one I found when I typed 'blog' into Google... and I've stuck with it because it does the job. I think Wordpress is probably objectively a bit better, you can do more with it, but I see no reason to move.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Start off by reading blogs, read them for a couple of weeks, decide which ones you really like and try to work out why. Then 'Just go ahead and do it' sums it up I suppose - if you're thinking of starting a blog or thinking of writing about something in particular, go for it. Of course you need to know your stuff before you do, but don't be put off by the idea that someone must have already done it, or that someone will come along and do it better than you. That held me back for a long time. I was overestimating 'someone'! There's loads to write about and most interesting science doesn't get blogged about at all.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

I read the 'big' neuroscience/psychology/psychiatry blogs but here's 5 that are perhaps less well known:

[Citation Needed]
Wiring the Brain
The MacGuffin
Women's Mag Science
Providentia

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

At the moment I'm reading Daniel Carlat's Unhinged, for a review. Also embarrassingly I am about to read The Da Vinci Code.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I'm very pleased by how fMRI in 1000 words turned out - because it took me hours of head-scratching to understand fMRI when I first read about it a few years back, but I managed to compress it into 1000 words that will be, hopefully, useful to people learning about it for the first time. I can see it being useful to me if I had had it back then! It's proven very popular so I think it turned out well.

How hunger affects our financial risk taking

The hungrier an animal becomes, the more risks it's prepared to take in the search for food. Now, for the first time, Mkael Symmonds and colleagues have shown that our animal instinct to maintain a balanced metabolic state influences our decision-making in other contexts, including finance.

Nineteen male participants performed the same gambling task on three occasions, a week apart: either after a fourteen hour fast; immediately after eating a standard two-thousand calorie meal; or one hour after eating a two-thousand calorie meal. The task simply required participants to choose repeatedly between pairs of gambles, one of which was always riskier but more lucrative than the other.

The immediate effect of the meal was to neutralise risk aversion. For the men with more adipose tissue and higher baseline levels of leptin (a hormone that suppresses appetite), who are generally more risk averse, this meant they became less risk averse when performing the task right after eating. By contrast, for men with less adipose tissue and lower leptin levels, who are generally low risk averse, their risk aversion was increased immediately after eating, just as you'd expect based on the behaviour of hungry animals.

An hour after eating gives time for hormonal effects to kick in. As expected, men who reported feeling less hungry an hour after eating, and whose levels of acyl-ghrelin (a hormone that increases appetite) in the blood stream had fallen, played the gambling game in more cautious fashion. 'This parallels findings in foraging animals,' Symmonds told the Digest, 'where changes in metabolic state promote changes in behaviour to maintain or reach a metabolic benchmark (to take more risk if intake rate is relatively low, and less risk if intake is relatively high), but here we see the effect in the economic domain.'

The researchers said their findings have implications for understanding the behaviour of dieters, the obese and people with eating disorders. 'Prandial ghrelin suppression is reduced in obesity,' Symmonds and his co-authors wrote. 'Thus we predict greater risk-seeking in obese individuals following feeding, augmented by larger immediate post-prandial effects on risk taking due to higher baseline adiposity. This mechanism may underpin a component of the aberrant decision-making seen in obese individuals, including impulsivity and reward-seeking behaviour. We also predict profound effects on decision-making for individuals operating at very low baseline energy reserves [i.e. dieters and people with eating disorders]'
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Symmonds, M., Emmanuel, J., Drew, M., Batterham, R., & Dolan, R. (2010). Metabolic State Alters Economic Decision Making under Risk in Humans. PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011090

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Bloggers behind the blogs: David Dobbs

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, David Dobbs of Neuron Culture.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

Though mind and brain has probably been my steadiest and most frequent topic — and will almost surely be so now that I'm writing a book about genes and behaviour, I still think of psych and neuroscience as just one of several things I blog about.

They do seem in my wheelhouse, however. I went years without writing about psych or neuroscience, but when I started a few years ago, it felt as if I'd come home. Both my background and the nature of my interest in science areas make natural fodder for me. For starters, my mom was a shrink (no jokes, please), which probably played a role; my dad was a surgeon, and I've always been interested in that too.

Yet it scarcely requires having a shrink as a mom to take a keen interest in how people behave, or misbehave, for this is life's fundamental puzzle. I don't mean from just an intellectual standpoint. You must understand how people behave — and manage your own behavior accordingly — to survive and thrive. This holds for individuals and also accounts for humanity's success, however mixed it is. Small wonder, then, that most of us take a keen interest in how others think and why they behave the way they do.

So that's the behaviour. But why your interest in the sciences that study it?

Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world — and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether researching, treating patients or both, are trying to discern and treat enormously complex and opaque dynamics. Some do brilliant work. Others, both now and through the centuries, have come up with some really fascinating wrong ideas, some of them, like phrenology, hare-brained and obviously corrupt, and others, like Freudian psychology, more rigorous but in the end almost as badly flawed empirically. Freud created a brilliant, beautiful, and disciplined body of work — a gorgeously developed account of how we think and behave — that ultimately fails as science because you can't falsify it. Meanwhile, Cajal was figuring out the neuron — and quietly laid a path now being followed to much greater effect.

At their best, these disciplines try to find empirical ways to understand human behavior, mood, and thinking, and to treat problems in the same areas. And even as we're starting to get a few real insights into the brain, these disciplines offer one object lesson after another in the challenges and dangers of science. Take neuroimaging alone. You get brilliant people like Helen Mayberg, who uses imaging to create and test deep, complex, substantial ideas about how depression works. And you get others who claim they can read an fMRI and tell you whether someone is lying. And in between you encounter — sometimes starkly, sometimes subtly — every kind of intellectual, financial, cultural, and personal issue that generate what we call conflicts of interest — that is, the desires and motivations that pull scientists or medical people away from solid, empirically based science and practice and into murky terrain. Meanwhile you get the very cool technical solutions people devise, and the lovely long detective-story-level intellectual puzzles they solve.

All that, and a million alluring ideas about why we act, think, and feel the ways we do. There's no end to the richness.

What's your blog's mission?

Same as my writing in general, only faster. I want to write about science, nature, medicine, culture, and — the big fun — how they overlap. Blogging lets me do this in quicker, more provisional takes. It lets me revise my provisional takes and respond more fluidly to other people's provisional takes. It lets me elaborate or post sources on longform articles I've written for print. It lets me write about things I'll deal with more deeply in my book on behavioral genetics — and on related issues I won't have room for in my book. All that, and I can post YouTube mashups of Soviet soldiers dancing to hip-hop. I can write about curveballs and Sandy Koufax. Twice.

So I suppose the mission is to write seriously, to have and deliver some fun, and to participate in a range of conversations that are going on online.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

I've really taken to Twitter, and it complements and feeds my blogging enormously. It provides an even faster, more fluid way to communicate and share ideas. And feeds me faster and richer than any other medium.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

I'm a freelancer, so my day job is what I make it. (That sounds so leisurely; it really means I work all day and then again at night. Though I do sometimes go fishing.) I used to view blogging as eating into my real job of writing. Now I see it more coherently as part of it. Though I do have to limit it, since it doesn't pay — not directly, anyway.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

Scienceblogs uses MovableType, so I've no choice there; I find it clumsy and would rather use Wordpress instead. I use MarsEdit (a Mac program) to write most of my posts. I usually write on my big-screen iMac so I have plenty of working room for cutting and pasting and linking and such.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Read and heed Strunk and White, William Zinsser's On Writing Well, and all three of the annual science writing anthologies. Read Strunk and White every year. And read your own stuff out loud (to yourself); you'll be amazed at how quickly it exposes the lame passages.

Finally, read some history and philosophy of science and intellectual history — The Metaphysical Club; A Short History Of Nearly Everything; Newton and the Counterfeiter; Reef Madness; The Great Betrayal. Seeing how clumsy and wrong-headed even great scientists were in the past will help you develop a good bullshit detector — essential to any good writing, especially needed in writing about psychology.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

This is representative rather than most visited. A few I find particularly valuable, fun, or interesting lately are Not Exactly Rocket Science, where Ed Yong puts out a stunning combination of quality, quantity, and sheer WTF wonder; Vaughan Bell's Mind Hacks, which offers a lovely combination of bullshit detection and previously undiscovered wonders; and some fine pairs: SuperBug and Speakeasy; Genetic Future and Gene Expression; Neuroanthropology and Neurophilosophy. The Loom. And for literary illumination, n+1, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, and the New York Review of Books. I could list another dozen quite easily, some it pains me to leave out.

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

Heavy on genetics lately. Recently or presently on my reading table: The Selfish Gene; Here is a Human Being by Misha Angrist, still in galleys; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Not By Genes Alone; John Cacioppo's Loneliness; and James Schwartz's absorbing history In Pursuit of the Gene — another one for that recommended history of science list.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I may be missing some early ones. But the one I like the most at present is probably Does depression have an upside? It's complicated. I was responding to 'Depression's Upside,' a feature in the New York Times Magazine in which my friend Jonah Lehrer presented, and largely sided with, an argument for the 'analytic-ruminative' theory, which holds that depression is adaptive because it creates a ruminative focus that generates valuable insight. I disagreed. But as I wrote the post, I realized I disagreed from a side-angle rather than head-on. I badly wanted to convey that, both because the evolutionary foundation of depression is highly important but tricky and multidimensional, and because I so value Jonah's writing. I wanted to convey all that. And when I finished the post I felt I'd done pretty much what I'd hoped. This pleased me and still does, because the time constraints of blog posts make it hard to write clearly about such subtle and complex points — such things usually take me a while, for lo I am slow — and this time I felt I got it.

Now if I can just clean up the typos.

Bloggers behind the blogs: Mo Costandi

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Mo Costandi of Neurophilosophy.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

Out of boredom. Ten years ago, I was doing a Ph.D. at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, but I left the lab without completing it, for various reasons. After a short stint as a secondary school science teacher (which I didn't enjoy) I ended up working as a security guard. The job involved long hours but very little work. I had always enjoyed writing, so I decided to set up a blog. On the Ph.D., I was getting bogged down in the technical details of my experiments, and began to lose sight of the bigger picture, of why I had become interested in neuroscience in the first place. The blog really helped me to rediscover my passion for the subject, because I read and write about virtually all aspects of brain research.

What's your blog's mission?

At the beginning, its purpose was to stop me from going mad in a mind-numbingly boring job. But about three years ago, once I had built up a readership, I started thinking about earning a living as a writer. I decided to stop posting YouTube vids, quick links, and so on, so that I could focus on writing short essay-type posts. The idea was to turn the blog into a sort of portfolio, or showcase, of good quality writing about neuroscience. It paid off - various editors noticed it and offered me freelance work, and a while ago I was contacted by a wonderful literary agent, with whom I'm now working on a book proposal.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes, I'm on Twitter (@mocost), and I enjoy using it. Blogs were once thought of as being interactive, but in fact they're quite static. Twitter, however, really is interactive, and it's by far the best of all the social media websites I've used. I mainly follow researchers and science writers, and it's a great way of engaging them, as well as anybody else who's on there - my readers, editors, and even some of my favourite musicians. It's also very useful for posting quick links, which I no longer do on the blog, and for finding interesting new stuff too (although it still hasn't replaced my beloved feed reader).

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I started off on Wordpress.com, which I still think is one of the best blogging platforms there is. Three years ago, I moved my blog to the ScienceBlogs network, which uses another platform called Movable Type. As for hardware, I use a desktop PC, a laptop and a netbook. I've used Macs in the past, mainly to analyse DNA sequences while I was in the lab, but I've always preferred PCs.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Write about what you know and are passionate about. Try to write regularly, but don't force yourself to update your blog just for the sake of it. Blogging should be fun, so if the mood doesn't take you, then log out and come back to it later. Building a blog takes time, so it needs perseverance, but if you know what you're talking about, you'll be recognized sooner or later. Also, read and comment on other blogs - that'll help you get noticed - and, although it's nice watching your visitor number increase, don't get too obsessed with your stats.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

Other than yours, Mind Hacks, The Neurocritic and Neuroskeptic are essential reading for anyone interested in neuroscience and psychology. I love Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, and also BibliOdyssey. There are thousands of great blogs out there, so it's very difficult to list just five. I'd urge everyone to browse my blogroll, which is full of excellent blogs that I try to read when I can.

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

I usually have three or four books on the go at any one time. At the moment I'm reading The Phenomenology of Perception, by the existentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Body, by Michael Sims. I like to buy The Guardian on Saturdays, mainly for the Review section, and have been subscribed to The Economist for about 10 years - it's conservative, but very well written and informative.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

That'd have to be my post about the pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. It's very long - about 6,000 words - but that's not why I'm proud of it. A lot of research went into that post, including reading Penfield's original papers from the 1930s, which I really enjoyed. When I posted it, there were some lovely responses in the comments section and elsewhere. Vaughan Bell - who writes one of my favourite blogs - linked to it, calling it 'probably the best article on Penfield you're likely to find on the net', and I also got an email from William Feindel, the director of the Wilder Penfield Archive, telling me how much he enjoyed reading it. Those are some of the things that make blogging worthwhile.

Bloggers behind the blogs: Vaughan Bell

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks.

How did you become a psychology blogger?

Tom Stafford and Matt Webb wrote an amazing book called Mind Hacks that explains psychology through self-experimentation and asked me for a few short contributions. At the launch party (aka: meeting in a pub) they asked me if I'd like to write a few 'guest posts' for the blog. Six years later I am still guest posting, normally about 2-3 times a day.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

I do use Twitter, and I'm @vaughanbell on the service. Early on when writing for the blog, I started writing a weekly 'Spike Activity' post on Friday that consists of lots of interesting links from the week that were worth checking out but didn't merit a full post with a one line description. For me, Twitter is just like an instant version of Spike Activity. I think of it like a news ticker but just for things I find interesting, and I also use it to subscribe to other people who make interesting news tickers themselves - so it functions like a custom built news wire service where you can choose your reporters from a selection ranging from the BBC to your friends.

Twitter also seems to have an interesting property: the limited message size lends itself to informality so people are less concerned, and indeed, less able to be 'self-important' and so will post about their own work and opinions more than in other mediums. For example, imagine you're working with someone who makes a point of telling you every time they have an article published or read something they found useful. You'd probably get pissed off with them pretty quickly. But for some people, I would like to know this information. Sophie Scott (on Twitter as @sophiescott) is a good example of this. She's a professor of neuropsychology at UCL who studies speech and language - an area I'm by no means an expert in. When Sophie Scott thinks a new study is important, I'd like to know that. Twitter is the internet equivalent of making these announcements by writing them on post-it notes on your office door. We all know people who have expertise we value - whether that includes neuroscience, football or new music, and I want to read their post-it notes, but without breaching social etiquette and hassling people. Like all communication technology, it's useful primarily because it addresses a social issue.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

It just kind of slots in. I'm not really sure to be honest. In the old days [cue music] people used to take extensive notes on the things they'd read to make them more accessible. I have memories of researchers with card index summaries of books and papers. I think it works like that except I write my notes up for public consumption and just include anything I find interesting. It's easy to kid yourself you've understood something and trying to explain it is a good way of making sure you've got it clear in your own mind. You could be wrong of course, but with the internet you'll quickly find this out. This sucks by the way, but it is a useful way of learning, even if you don't realise it until a week afterwards and you're no longer wound up about being flamed in public. I also love writing and I don't really see it as work, so I'm happy to sit down and write even after a busy day.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

Matt Webb is a talented digital designer and we have the luxury of having the blog managed by professional web people without having to put too much thought into it. A lucky position to be in.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

People like pictures. The best way of getting good at something is to spend lots of time doing it badly. Expect synchronicity. The rewards are in the process, not the product. Readers like regular updates. Explain why something is important: motivate people and they'll teach themselves. Get used to being wrong. Aim for differing levels of understanding but not necessarily at the same time. PubMed is your co-pilot. Actually, just give it a bash, you'll learn everything you need to know as you go along.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

There are lots of fantastic blogs I read on a daily basis, and I notice that most have already been mentioned by other people in the series, or, are by people in the series! So instead I'll mention three that I read that I think are under-recognised or you may not know about, probably because they tackle specialist areas.

In the News is a fantastic blog on forensic psychology by a US-based practitioner. Don't be put off by the fact it looks a bit sparse, it's a fantastic source of news and recently broke a big story about legal shenanigans in psychopathy assessment that got picked up by major internationals. Sadly, possibly the only blog on UK forensic psychology closed down last year.

Addiction Inbox is a blog by a journalist that covers addiction science in the sort of depth you would expect from a specialist in the field. I sometimes find I don't agree with his take on things but the issues are covered in enough detail that I have to ask myself why, which strikes me as being a sign of being a good writer.

Advances in the History of Psychology is a group blog by the people behind the popular internet resource 'Classics in the History of Psychology'. Very well informed writing backed up by a real enthusiasm (they recently announced they would take a break for the summer but keep posting things that are 'too important' to miss!) [Having read Vaughan's comments, the Digest has contacted Advances in the History of Psychology to take part in this interview series].

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Anna Freud (not a lesbian, as I'd previously thought).
Tenebrario by Nina Melero (a collection of Spanish-language short stories by my ex-Spanish teacher).
Hallucinations by André Aleman and Frank Laroi (no academic book should cost 50 quid but it is excellent).
Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks (again).
One River by Wade Davis (my arm-chair training for a long-promised voyage into the Amazon).

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

Any that I've managed without undetected typos. I am guessing there are not many.

Bloggers behind the blogs: Petra Boynton

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Petra Boynton of Dr Petra.

How did you become a psychology blogger?

Initially because I was doing a lot of work with mainstream media and was concerned over how they frequently misreported sex/relationships issues and I wanted a space to correct this and be able to write about all the things I thought the media were missing.

What's your blog's mission?

To share independent, evidenced and linked information about sex and relationships health with a Social Psychological slant. It's a combination of education, entertainment, critical appraisal and activism. Sometimes it serves as therapy for me as a place to shout about things that frustrate (or inspire) me.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes am @drpetra on twitter. I feel twitter is more immediate, great for sharing resources, networking with practitioners/colleagues, and for activism. Particularly challenging the mainstream media as a few of us recently did when Danny Dyer/Zoo magazine printed 'advice' suggesting a ditched boyfriend should cut his girlfriend's face as revenge. That led to Dyer's column being pulled and the magazine censured. Because I can now alert people to good/bad practice plus resources quickly via twitter the blog has now become a place to investigate issues or unpack/discuss academic papers/reports in depth.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

My day job as an academic (lecturing in International Health and specialising in research on sex and relationships) and sex educator (teaching health and social care staff, teachers and parents) undoubtedly inform my blogging. However I've traditionally kept blogging separate
from work and had it as a 'spare time' activity. That's something I'd like to see change as blogging, to me, is an extension of my academic/researcher/educator role.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Read around blogs, you'll notice what comes under 'psychology' is very broad, styles vary as do the way bloggers tackle issues. Some use their blogs to talk through their research journey, others to focus on unpacking or sharing evidence, still more to reflect/discuss on their practice. It's important to abide by ethical standards, and have a sense of who you are
writing for. Don't feel you have to be too fixed though, the beauty of blogs is how they evolve and when they work well are a collaborative effort with you and your readers.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

I spend far too much time reading blogs, there are loads of great ones out there, but the ones I read most regularly are: www.mindhacks.com - Vaughan Bell's fantastic neurology/psychology blog; Neuroskeptic - critical appraisals from a neuroscientist; Matt's Random Selection - Matthew Greenall writes about health/development issues; About.com:sexuality - Cory Silverberg's education, analysis and awareness of sexual health issues; and Ed Yong's Not exactly rocket science.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

In five years of blogging there've been several posts on exposing poor practice in media, bad surveys, dodgy resarch, and unethical practice in psychology I've been privileged to write. But the one I feel is currently most important is focusing on the medicalisation of female sexual functioning.

Children as young as six can tell when you're faking a smile

Whether it's the awkward coincidence of meeting your boss in the supermarket aisle or a humourless joke by a new date, what would we do without the fake smile? It's not that the fake is all that convincing. Apparently most adults can tell the difference - the lopsidedness of the mouth and lack of creasing around the eyes gives it away. But the fact that the faker is trying their best to send a positive signal somehow saves face all round. Well, most of the time anyway.

Of course when you're dealing with a child you'd probably like to think you can pull a fake smile and they won't realise. 'Yes darling, that's a beautiful drawing' - big smile, encouraging voice. Indeed, past research suggested children can't tell a fake smile from a genuine one until about the age of nine or ten. But now a new study with a different methodology suggests that estimate may have to be brought forward to age six.

Pierre Gosselin's team at the University of Ottawa and Laurentian University devised a simpler paradigm than used previously. Sixty boys and girls aged six to seven and nine to ten watched pairs of videos of actors pulling either: a genuine smile (symmetrical, eyes creased); a lop-sided fake (eyes creased but asymmetrical intensity); or a mouth-only smile (symmetrical, no eye creasing). Each pair contained either two smiles of the same type or two different types. The children's task was to say whether the smiles were the same type or not.

Their accuracy wasn't great (around 60 per cent) but it was high enough to show that, based on either creasing around the eyes or symmetry, the kids were able to tell the difference between the smile types better than if they had simply been guessing. The younger children were also just as accurate as the older children.

Telling the different types of smile apart visually is only half the job. A second study tested whether another batch of children could read the appropriate meaning into the different smiles. The stimuli were the same as before but this time children successfully identified that the faces with genuine smiles were happier than those with lopsided or mouth-only smiles. At around 60 per cent, accuracy once again wasn't brilliant but was better than if they'd been guessing. This time, performance was better among the older children thus suggesting, as you'd expect, that detecting fake smiles is a skill that improves with age.

'The fact that six- and seven-year-old children are sensitive to the asymmetry of smiles and Cheek Raiser activity [creasing around the eyes] suggests they already have a significant amount of experience with social influence, and particularly with the use of smiles in social interactions,' the researchers said.
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Gosselin, P., Perron, M., & Maassarani, R. (2009). Children's ability to distinguish between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. Infant and Child Development DOI: 10.1002/icd.648

You have read this article Developmental with the title June 2010. You can bookmark this page URL https://psychiatryfun.blogspot.com/2010/06/children-as-young-as-six-can-tell-when.html. Thanks!

Bloggers behind the blogs: David DiSalvo

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, David DiSalvo of Brainspin and Neuronarrative.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

I've always been curious about psychology and spent a lot of time in college reading Erickson, Piaget, Freud, Jung, Adler and others (though I wasn't pursuing a psychology degree). I eventually took a class on 'Neurobiology' that cemented my interest in the psych-neuroscience vector. I've been an active follower of research developments in those fields ever since -- and have applied the knowledge in research I've conducted to support public health and other public education outreach campaigns. A few years hence, I finally got around to documenting my interests in a blog.

What's your blog's mission?

My mission is to make research findings accessible to a broad audience, and to engage experts in various psych-neurosci related disciplines to share their knowledge with my blog's readers.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes, I'm on Twitter as @Neuronarrative and I find that the two complement each other very well. I use Twitter mainly to send new post updates, but also to generate interest for other blogs that I enjoy reading.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

At times it can be a difficult balance to maintain, but in general it works without too much difficulty. Very often I pull late nights working on posts, but it's worth it.

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I use Wordpress, chiefly because it was the easiest platform to launch quickly and change over time. I house the blog on their server, which means I don't have the same flexibility I'd have if I housed it myself, but the logistics of doing so just weren't practical when I launched. Eventually I may shift to a more customizable platform.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

My advice is that you should follow your passion for the subject and make that passion evident in your blog. But, never lose sight that the discipline deserves your full investment. Don't try to take on something you aren't prepared to thoughtfully, judiciously and honestly engage. There are too many mediocre and barely credible blogs out there (to say nothing of the flatly bad ones), so don't waste time creating another one. If you're going to do it, do it right —which includes (but is certainly not limited to) devoting a substantial amount of time to research and writing, and reading voraciously.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

Tough question because I read so many. If I had to limit the list to the top 5, I'd say: Mind Hacks, BPS Research Digest, Psyblog, The Neurocritic, and Changizi Blog.

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

I'm reading Timothy Ferris' The Science of Liberty, and recently finished Shenna Iyengar's The Art of Choosing (for which I'm writing a review in Scientific American Mind), and also recently read The Vision Revolution by Mark Changizi. I enjoyed Mark's book so much that I asked him to do an interview with me for Neuronarrative, which he graciously did.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

You know, I'm not really sure how to answer that question, so I'm going to shift the emphasis just a little and say that I'm very proud of the interviews I've conducted with notables in psych, neuroscience and related disciplines. Taken together as a singular body of work, I'm most proud of them.

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

People think their hands are shorter and fatter than they really are.

People don't Tweet to combat social exclusion but rather to counter existential angst [pdf] via @vaughanbell

The backgrounds and characteristics of arsonists.

'These results provide, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence that both men and women can accurately assess men's physical strength from the voice'. Quite how remains unknown. According to New Scientist - estimates of strength weren't linked to timbre or pitch of voice.

More evidence that repeated checking, as exhibited by people with obsessive compulsive disorder, backfires, leading to less confidence in one's memory (but same does not apply for attention or perception). Also see earlier.

Recall of worst moments of ordeal by patients with PTSD are characterized by 'more unfinished thoughts, more use of the present tense and lower levels of cognitive processing.'

Consistency in personality from toddlerhood to middle childhood.

No surprises here: high scorers on neuroticism are more likely to grind their teeth (which is called bruxism, by the way).

The reaction of elite lacrosse players to losing.

Musicians display superior auditory working memory performance, probably because of enhanced cognitive control.

You have read this article Extras with the title June 2010. You can bookmark this page URL https://psychiatryfun.blogspot.com/2010/06/extras.html. Thanks!

Bloggers behind the blogs: Anthony Risser

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

Next up, Anthony Risser of BrainBlog.

How did you become a psychology/neurosci blogger?

My interest in using and promoting the use of online applications in psychology and medicine dates to 1994. Like everyone else at the time, I started playing with rudimentary HTML tagging; I loved the instant nature of the results online. Being part of several virtual communities later in the 1990s, the constructive feedback from others was reinforcing. I looked around neuropsychology to see what might emerge (not much did at the time!) and did a fair amount of freelance work dealing with management of online content. Within several years, I was trying my hand at developing and providing online courses for undergraduate and graduate programmes. Online outlets seemed ideal for psychological resources.

I opened BrainBlog in September 2004 while drinking an espresso, without having any particular plan or goal for it in mind. The ease of using blog applications was too attractive to pass up and slowly my website gave way to content on the blog. I decided to watch the blog grow and let it dictate what I would do with it, rather than trying to direct it in a specific direction.

What's your blog's mission?

I try to provide educational information to my readers, usually by pointing to additional online resources and recommending readings such as the papers I choose for my 'Neuropsychology Abstract of the Day.' Based upon the blog’s visitors, comments, and links, I have a high yield of university and graduate-programme students, so I try to give them something interesting to pursue after they click away from the blog.

I also like to post entries to point visitors to lesser-known academic and clinical centres around the world to try to get these sites some additional visitors.

My blog’s weakness is that I do not provide enough of a narrative or an analysis about what it is to be a neuropsychologist and the work that we do. Given the wide-open public nature of a blog, I’ve always struggled with what to say and what not to say.

Are you also on Twitter - if so, how do the two outlets complement each other?

Yes. BrainBlog has a Twitter voice at @neuropsychblog. I use that voice to RT [re-tweet] additional neuropsychology-related content that might not find its way into a blog posting.

How does your blogging affect your day job?

Blogging and related online activities help keep a neuropsychologist thinking about new and creative things. I wish more of us did it!

What are your weapons of choice - i.e. what blogging platform / hardware do you use and why?

I’ve used Blogger in the past (where BrainBlog resides), but I am currently impressed with Posterous. I converted my Blogger-based photo-blog to Posterous and enjoy the ease with which it accepts media files (photos, podcast files, video). Posterous has a simple and clean appearance, too. The video/livestream options like Vimeo and Ustream are pretty cool, too, for those individuals who might opt for creating a non-text-based blog presence – Google 'Howard Rheingold' and 'Joi Ito' for academic-based examples of such tools.

What advice do you have for any budding psychology bloggers out there?

Blog and Tweet, Tweet and Blog. It keeps you on your toes, it is fun, it is creative. Find your narrative voice if you can (I am still searching for mine!). More likely than not, you’ve had an online presence in other parts of your life – try one specific to your life as a psychologist or as a psychology student or as someone who just has a keen interest in understanding behaviour.

What blogs do you read (list up to five)?

color me katie [life as a photographer by katie sokoler]; londonist [life in london]; wooster collective [life as street art]; jill/txt [life online by jill walker]; cool hunting [life in the cool lane].

What books or other traditional media are you reading at the moment? (up to five)

The current fiction I am reading is Rose Tremain’s recent work, The Road Home. The current non-fiction book I am reading is The End of the Party – Andrew Rawnsley’s account of New Labour. And, daily, The Guardian.

And finally, what blog post of yours are you most proud of and why?

I am most proud of being able to lend support in BrainBlog to some participants of last year’s One & Other Trafalgar Square art project on the Fourth Plinth by Antony Gormley. A surprising number of plinthers promoted awareness of various CNS [central nervous system] conditions and support groups during their hour on the plinth. Two in particular, Laura Hickman and Gavin Cross, received a number of additional viewers from my blog entries. It pleased me to be able to provide them with some extra viewers when they were on the plinth and to provide an educational venue about the brain for some 'One & Other' viewers and participants who did not know much about neuroscience.

Memory performance boosted while walking

Psychologists usually think of attention as a limited resource. The more of it you use on one task, they say, the less you have left over for others. Supporting this, countless studies have shown that performance deteriorates under dual-task versus single-task conditions. But what if, rather than having one pool of attention to share around, we have multiple pools for fueling different types of activity. By this account, if two tasks are different enough from each other, there should be no performance decrement under dual-task conditions. That's exactly what Sabine Schaefer has shown in a new study that looks at memory performance whilst walking. In fact Schaefer's research goes further, showing that memory performance is actually superior whilst walking compared with sitting down.

Schaefer's team had 32 nine-year-olds and 32 adults (average age 25) complete the N-back working memory task in three conditions: walking on a treadmill at their own chosen speed; walking on a treadmill at a set speed chosen by the researchers; or sitting down. The N-back task requires that participants listen to a stream of numbers and indicate, in the easiest version, whenever the current number was the same as the number one back. For more difficult versions, it's a repeat of a number further back in the stream that must be spotted.

The headline finding was that the working memory performance of both age groups improved when walking at their chosen speed compared with when sitting or walking at a fixed speed set by the researchers. This was especially the case for more difficult versions of the working memory task, and was more pronounced among the children than the adults. So, this would appear to be clear case of mental performance actually being superior in a dual-task situation.

Why should the secondary task of walking aid, rather impair, mental performance? The researchers aren't sure of the mechanism, but they think the attentional pool tapped by a sensori-motor task like walking is likely separate from the attentional pool tapped by working memory. Moreover, physical activity increases arousal and activation, 'which then can be invested into the cognitive task,' they said.

What about the fact that memory performance wasn't improved when participants walked on the treadmill at a speed set by the researchers? The set walking speed was actually substantially slower than the participants' preferred speed so one possibility is that it wasn't rigorous enough to provide the increased arousal that could be beneficial to memory. Alternatively, perhaps the challenge of walking at a set speed is cognitively demanding, tapping the same attentional pool needed for the memory task.

Schaefer's team speculated that a useful application of their finding could be in relation to childhood ADHD. '...[H]yperactive children might also be able to profit from some type of consistent movement that does not require much attention, even though it is often argued that those children have more problems than healthy controls when they have to divide their attention between two concurrent tasks.'
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Schaefer, S., Lovden, M., Wieckhorst, B., & Lindenberger, U. (2010). Cognitive performance is improved while walking: Differences in cognitive-sensorimotor couplings between children and young adults. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7 (3), 371-389 DOI: 10.1080/17405620802535666

You have read this article Cognition / Developmental with the title June 2010. You can bookmark this page URL https://psychiatryfun.blogspot.com/2010/06/memory-performance-boosted-while-walking.html. Thanks!

Research Digest