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Issue 194 (04.08.11):
1. How a simple point of grammar could affect our voting decisions 2. The psychology of gift giving - just give them what they want 3. The hypnotised brain 4. Pre-school kids reveal their instincts for science 5. Brain scans could influence jurors more than other forms of evidence 6. On when it feels good to be under-estimated

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How grammar can affect our voting decisions
A simple tweak in the tense of a verb could make the difference between electoral victory and defeat, according to a study by US researchers. Imagine you encountered the following text: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy championed human rights, and was fiddling his expenses." Now compare with this version: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy was championing human rights, and fiddled his expenses." How does each version affect your view of Timmy Tucker? New findings from Caitlin Fausey and Teenie Matlock suggest that the first version is more likely to damage Timmy's re-election prospects. The researchers found that the imperfect tense (e.g. "was fiddling") exacerbates the effect of a negative claim about a politician, compared with the perfect tense (e.g. "fiddled"). Fausey and Matlock aren't certain why this is, but they think the imperfect tense gives the sense that an action is ongoing, whereas the perfect tense brings closure. For an initial study, 354 participants were split into four groups, with each reading one of four versions of a description of a politician who was up for re-election. Participants who read a version in which the man was described as last year "taking hush money" were more confident that he wouldn't be re-elected and estimated that he'd taken more money, as compared with participants who read a version in which it was written that last year "he took hush money". This subtle change in verb tense made no difference to the verdict of participants who read a positive account of the politician ("was collecting donations" vs. "collected donations"). A second study with a further 127 participants was similar except this time they all read a version that featured both a positive and negative claim about the politician. Those participants who read the description featuring a negative claim in the imperfect tense with the positive claim in the perfect tense ("was removing homes and extended roads") were less likely to say he would be re-elected (40 per cent vs. 56 per cent), compared with those who read the same claims with the tenses the other way around ("removed homes and extending roads")*. "Because scandals involving political candidates are a hot topic in media coverage and campaign ads, insight into the power of the grammar used to communicate negative information will likely improve our understanding about how linguistic media shapes voting patterns," the researchers said. _________________________________ Fausey, C., and Matlock, T. (2011). Can Grammar Win Elections? Political Psychology, 32 (4), 563-574 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00802.x
*In this example, extending roads is assumed by the researchers to be a positive activity - environmentally minded readers might not agree with that assumption!

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The psychology of gift giving - just give them what they want
By spending days hunting for that special gift for your friend or partner, you'll show them just how much you care, and also what incredible insight you have into their needs and interests. Right? Not exactly. A new study by a pair of researchers at Harvard and Stanford suggests that most people, at least in North American culture, would prefer that you simply buy them something that they've told you they want. They said romance was dead, it is now. Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn demonstrated this phenomenon across three studies. First off, nearly two hundred participants were asked to recall a time they'd either received or given a wedding gift. Those who were specifically asked to recall receiving a gift from their set list reported being more appreciative than those who recalled receiving a surprise gift that they hadn't asked for. By contrast, participants who recalled giving a gift, thought it was probably appreciated just as much whether it was selected from a list or chosen independently. A second study required 160 participants to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they'd either bought a birthday gift for a significant other, or received one. Gift-givers didn't think it would make any difference, in terms of appreciation levels, whether they bought a surprise gift or something explicitly asked for. By contrast, those participants who imagined receiving a gift said they'd appreciate more a gift they'd asked for, than a surprise gift. What's more, this extra appreciation for an asked-for gift was mediated by their feeling that the gift-giver had been extra thoughtful. So far, the results are based on thought experiments or memories. The third study involved 90 participants creating Amazon wish-lists and half of them playing gift-givers and half gift-receivers. Among the gift-givers, half were asked to choose a listed item to give to a recipient; the other half saw the list, but were instructed to choose a surprise item. Consistent with the first two studies, participants in a giving role didn't anticipate that it would make any difference to appreciation levels whether a gift was a surprise or selected from the wish-list. By contrast, participants in a receiving role were more appreciative of gifts selected from their wish-list and they perceived these gifts to be more thoughtful and more personal. It seems gift-givers and receivers are at odds with each other. Gift-recipients prefer to receive items they've asked for, and they think givers who fulfil this ideal are more thoughtful. Yet when we're the one who is doing the giving, we suffer a temporary blind-spot and fail to realise that people tend to prefer receiving what they told us they want. Are there any exceptions to this odd state of affairs? Yet another study found that if a recipient only mentions one desired gift, as opposed to a list of desirables, then gift-givers are able to see the value in offering what's asked for. Money also changes the results. A final study with 107 student participants found that gift-givers thought money wouldn't be appreciated as much as an asked-for gift, but recipients expressed the opposite opinion and said they'd actually appreciate money more than items they'd asked for. Gino and Flynn said their results fit into a larger literature showing people's relative inability to take other people's perspectives into account. For example, in buying and selling it's been shown that we tend to overestimate how much other people will share our own views. The researchers also noted the practical lessons to take from their findings: "Gift givers would be wise to pay attention to gift registries, wish lists, and explicit requests from friends and significant others," they said. "Conversely gift recipients can facilitate the gift-giving process by not only being more direct about making suggestions for gifts, but being more specific as well. Rather than putting together one big 'wish list', they should instead list one big wish." _________________________________ Gino, F., and Flynn, F. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (5), 915-922 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.015

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The hypnotised brain
Forget swinging pocket watches and unedifying stage antics, hypnosis is a genuinely useful tool for studying psychogenic symptoms - that is, neurological symptoms with no identifiable organic cause (known in psychiatry as "conversion disorder", the idea being that emotional problems are "converted" into physical ailments). Consider hand paralysis, which some patients complain of in the absence of any neurological injury or disease. In a new study led by Martin Pyka at the University of Marburg, hand paralysis was induced in 19 healthy participants through hypnosis, thus providing a model of what may be going on in conversion hand paralysis. The hypnotised participants had their brains scanned while they rested calmly, and these results were then compared against a second scanning session in which the participants were not hypnotised. The main result is that hypnosis-induced hand paralysis was associated not with brain areas involved with inhibiting movement (e.g. the supplementary motor area, located towards the front of the brain), but with increased coupling between regions associated with representation of the self (especially the precuneus, located in the parietal lobe, and the posterior cingulate cortex), and with regions that represent and monitor one's own movements (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests it's not so much that the participants' hand control was suppressed, but that they no longer believed they had the power to move their hands. This fits the findings from an earlier brain imaging study of a woman with conversion paralysis, which found changes in brain areas associated with self-monitoring and auto-biographical memory, but not areas associated with motor inhibition. "We believe that the suggestions given during induction of hypnosis, which started with metaphors such as 'the left hand feels weak, heavy, adynamic,' 'any energy leaves the hand,' and continued with direct instructions like 'the left hand is paralysed, you cannot move the hand anymore,' induced an altered selfperception of the participants and their motor abilities," the researchers said. They acknowledged that a weakness of their study was that they'd deliberately recruited highly suggestible participants: "Thus, it is unclear whether the reported functional coupling can only be attributed to the neurofunctional impact of hypnosis or also to the selection of the subjects," they said. As an aside, Jean-Martin Charcot, the "Napoleon of neurology", considered hyponosis-proneness to be a hallmark of patients with hysteria - a now defunct catch-all diagnosis, which included patients with conversion disorder. At the end of the 19th century at the Salptrire Hospital in Paris, Charcot often hypnotised his hysterical patients during his series of hugely popular public demonstrations of the condition. Hypnosis also became a common means of treatment for hysteria (although Charcot himself was not an advocate), whereby the entranced patient revealed, often via new emerging "personalities", the past traumas and fixed ideas at the root of their physical ailments. Hypnosis as a treatment fell out of favour with Freud's rise to prominence: he believed it was possible to get to the root of a patient's subconscious problems by talking to them directly, without the need for hypnosis. _________________________________ Pyka, M., Burgmer, M., Lenzen, T., Pioch, R., Dannlowski, U., Pfleiderer, B., Ewert, A., Heuft, G., Arolt, V., and Konrad, C. (2011). Brain correlates of hypnotic paralysisa resting-state fMRI study. NeuroImage, 56 (4), 2173-2182 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.078

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Pre-school kids reveal their instincts for science
No wonder those introductory chemistry kits sell so well. By four years of age there's already a little scientist inside us, just bursting to get out and into the laboratory of life. That's according to Claire Cook and her colleagues, who have provided further evidence for the precocious scientific skills of young children. Sixty 4- and 5-year-olds were shown a box-shaped toy that played music and lit up when beads were placed on it. Crucially, some of the children were shown that each of four beads, placed one at a time on the toy, activated it. This was the "unambiguous condition" that implied any old bead is capable of activating the toy. Other children were in an "ambiguous condition": they were shown, by placing beads one at a time on the box, that two of the beads activated it, but two of them didn't. In both conditions, the researchers said afterwards: "Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?", followed by: "Go ahead and play". Next came the key exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads (different from those seen earlier). One pair was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play. Here's the take-home finding: children who'd earlier seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair to test which beads activated the toy and which didn't. In fact just 1 out of 20 children in that condition bothered performing this "experiment". By contrast, 19 out of 40 children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the snappable bead pair and tested which specific beads were capable of activating the toy and which weren't. A second study was similar to the first, but this time the children were only given a single bead pair that was permanently fixed. This time, to identify precisely which beads activated the toy and which didn't, the children had to come up with the entirely original idea of placing the pair on the toy in such a way that one bead made contact with its surface whilst the other bead hung over the edge. Again, children presented initially with ambiguous evidence (some beads activated the toy, some didn't) were far more likely to perform this original "experiment" to isolate the beads with the activating effect (9 of the children did so; 45 per cent of the group). By contrast, kids shown unambiguous evidence earlier (in which all beads were shown to have an activating effect), almost never performed the "experiment" (just one of them did so; 5 per cent of the group). It's not simply the case that children played in a more varied manner after seeing the ambiguous demonstration at the study start. Children differed from each other in the variety of their play, but kids in the unambiguous group played on average with just as much variety as kids in the ambiguous group. It's just that the latter kids were specifically more likely to perform the crucial bead "experiment" to find out which were the activating ones. "These results suggest that pre-schoolers attend to the kinds of evidence that distinguish states of knowledge from states of uncertainty, and generate novel interventions that isolate variables and maximise the potential for information gain," the researchers said. "... [S]cience requires knowing where there is something to be learned and also how to learn it. Our results suggest that children are sensitive to all of these factors and integrate them to guide exploratory play. We believe these results tighten the analogy to science that has motivated contemporary theories of cognitive development." _________________________________ Cook, C., Goodman, N., and Schulz, L. (2011). Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers exploratory play. Cognition, 120 (3), 341-349 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.03.003

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Brain scans could influence jurors more than other forms of evidence
It's surely just a matter of time until functional MRI brain scans are admitted in US and UK courts. Companies like No Lie MRI have appeared, and there have been at least two recent attempts by lawyers in the USA to submit fMRI-based brain imaging scans as trial evidence. Functional MRI gauges fluctuating activity levels across the brain, with experts divided on the merits of using the technology as a high-tech lie detection measure. The late David McCabe who died earlier this year, and his colleagues, have put that debate to one side. They asked: if fMRI evidence were to be allowed in courts, would it have a particularly influential effect on jurors' decisions? There's good reason to think it might. For example, a 2008 study by Deena Weisberg found that lay people and neuroscience students (but not neuroscience experts) were more satisfied by bad scientific explanations when they contained gratuitous mentions of neuroscience. For the new study, 330 undergrads at Colorado State University read a vignette about a criminal trial in which a defendant was accused of killing his estranged wife and lover. Various points of evidence were mentioned and summaries of testimony and cross-examination were provided (the vignette amounted to two pages). Crucially, a sub-set of the participants read a version in which fMRI evidence was cited: "... there was increased activation of frontal brain areas when Givens [the defendant] denied killing his wife and neighbour, as compared to when he truthfully answered questions." For comparison, other participants read a version that either included incriminating evidence from polygraph, from thermal imaging technology (which measures changes in facial skin temperature), or that contained no lie-detection technology. The key finding was that participants who read the brain-imaging version were far more likely (76 per cent) to say they considered the defendant guilty, compared with participants who read the other versions (47 to 53 per cent). Moreover, the lie-detection evidence was more likely to be cited by participants in the fMRI condition as key to their decision, as compared with participants who read versions that didn't mention fMRI. The participants were not entirely seduced by fMRI. Some of them were given a slightly different version of the fMRI vignette, in which the expert witness warned about the technology's unreliability. These participants came to a similar proportion of guilty verdicts as the participants who read the vignette versions that lacked fMRI evidence. So it seems the persuasive influence of fMRI evidence can be tempered easily enough if people are reminded of its limitations. The researchers acknowledged the obvious weaknesses of their study: the use of students as mock jurors, the use of vignettes rather than a real trial, and so on. These caveats aside, they said their data show that fMRI evidence could be more influential than other types of evidence. "... [T]hough determining whether that indicates the evidence would lead to unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, misleading the jury, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence is a complex issue," they said. "At the very least, it appears that juries should be informed of the limitations of fMRI evidence." _________________________________ McCabe, D., Castel, A., and Rhodes, M. (2011). The Influence of fMRI Lie Detection Evidence on Juror DecisionMaking. Behavioral Sciences and the Law DOI: 10.1002/bsl.993

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On when it feels good to be under-estimated
Imagine that you're a media mogul and you over-hear people estimating how much of the newspaper market you control. Would it be preferable, do you think, to hear an under-estimate or an over-estimate? Xianchi Dai at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have addressed this very question, producing some findings that they say have practical social lessons for us all. Based on classic findings in psychology showing that most of us like to see ourselves in a positive light, the researchers said you'd think that on a valued measure, people would always like to hear overestimates about themselves. Yet the researchers' new studies have demonstrated that the opposite can also be true. In the first, recent graduates in a large Chinese city reported feeling happier after a former classmate under-estimated their salary. In a second study, business students in the USA said they'd feel happier in a hypothetical scenario in which they heard class-mates under-estimate their GMAT score (a standard admissions test to management school), as oppose to over-estimate it, or guess spot on. Why should people sometimes like to hear others under-estimate their success? Dai's team propose an explanation based on the precise circumstances. If you don't actually know the answer to whatever valued measure others are estimating about you, then the researchers believe it is always preferable to hear an over-estimate because of the ego-boosting effects this will have. On the other hand, if you do know the precise amount or score about yourself that other people are estimating, then the researchers believe your preference for an over- or under-estimate will depend on whether your priority is (a) creating a good impression or (b) the true answer. For (a) they think an over-estimate will again be preferred because of the advantage for your image, but for (b) they think an under-estimate will be preferred because it has the effect of making the true answer, which is higher, seem more appealing to you. Dai's team tested these predictions. Over two hundred business students in the USA were asked to imagine that they over-heard colleagues estimating the size of their (i.e. the participant's) annual bonus. As you'd expect, those participants told they didn't yet know the size of their bonus reported feeling happier after hearing colleagues estimate that they were to be awarded a larger amount. For participants told to imagine that they already knew their bonus size ($15,000), their preference for hearing an underestimate ($3000) or over-estimate ($30,000) depended on whether they'd additionally been told their priority was that they needed extra cash for a property purchase, or that they wanted their colleagues to think they were valued by the boss. For the participants seeking to impress their colleagues, hearing an over-estimate was preferred. By contrast, for participants saving for a property purchase, hearing an under-estimate was preferred, presumably because it made the true, larger amount seem all the more gratifying. These findings suggest some rules for the etiquette of guessing, as the researchers explained: "Imagine that, at a party, you have learned that your friend, Linda, is selling her house, which you believe is worth approximately $500,000. Her friends, including you, are guessing how much she can sell it for.

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Because Linda does not yet know the truth (the actual sale proceeds), we suggest that you should guess high, if you intend to make her happy. You might say, 'it's such a nice house, I guess you can sell it for $600k.' Now, imagine an alternative scenario, in which Linda has just sold her house, is desperately in need of money, and cares more about the actual proceeeds than others' impressions. In this case you should guess low. Rather than saying, 'It's such a nice house. You must have sold it for $600k,' you should say, 'I'm not sure. Would $400k sound reasonable?' Now Linda can say to herself, 'Wow, I am glad I sold it for $500k ...' and savour the pleasure." _________________________________ Shen, L., Hsee, C., Zhang, J., and Dai, X. (2011). The art and science of guessing. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0022899

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