Social Psychology Headlines

Social Psychology Headlines

Perceived Empathy Can Expedite the Healing Process

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently published findings that suggest empathy, provided by your physician, may be the fastest way for you to get over the nagging cold that has been plaguing you for the past week, above and beyond the benefits of taking cold medicines, vitamins, and other common remedies. In their study, participants were divided into three experimental groups, which manipulated the amount of attention they received from their doctor and ranged from having no interaction at all to the physician asking lots of relevant questions about the participants’ symptoms, providing detailed information, and displaying genuine compassion to the patient. The participants then rated their physician along several dimensions, including perceived interest in their problem, helpfulness, compassion, empathy, and concern. The researchers found that participants who had rated their doctors highly across all of these dimensions recovered from their colds a full one day earlier than other participants who had no scored their physicians as highly. Furthermore, by measuring the number of immune cells found in the secretions of participants’ nasal washes, they determined that participants that gave perfects scores to their physicians on this questionnaire had developed immunity to their cold 48 hours sooner than their counterparts who gave their doctors lower scores. Most importantly, however, is that the key finding from this study is that it was only when participants perceived their doctors as being compassionate and empathetic did they harness the rewards of a faster recovery from their cold. As the researchers point out, not everyone perceives empathy in exactly the same way and so the actions of any given doctor may be perceived differently when viewed by two different people. Regardless, this study has great potential for practical application, with one being that if you can find a doctor that you perceive as empathetic and genuinely concerned about your welfare, then you are in a much better position to be able to reap the benefits of faster recovery.

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Can Subliminal Messages on the TV Really Motivate You to Buy Expensive Jeans?

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Conspiracy theorists have often expressed fear that the government or other powerful conglomerates interested in controlling public behavior may use subliminal messages in television and radio to motivate people to act and respond in certain ways, such as voting for a specific presidential candidate or buying a specific brand of clothing. Are these concerns justified? Can our behavior be instigated and controlled by nefarious forces through subconscious priming? Recent research conducted by Dutch researcher Martijn Veltkamp suggests that behavior can indeed be modified subliminally but that these covert manipulations are only successful if the primed behavior supplies a biological need and is associated with a positive effect. In one experiment, Veltkamp deprived participants of water thereby making them thirsty. Some of these participants were allowed to eat a cucumber to alleviate (but not attenuate) their thirst. They were then exposed to the experimental stimuli which consisted of the words ‘drinking’ and ‘thirsty’ flashing briefly on a computer screen fast enough that they could not have been consciously perceived by participants (this procedure is known as ‘priming’). Afterwards, he measured their desire to drink a glass of water after the completion of the study. Interestingly, Veltkamp found that participants who had eaten a cucumber were more likely to drink a glass of water than their equally deprived counterparts who had not eaten a cucumber and a control group. His reasoning argues that the subliminal messaging influenced participants’ behavior to drink the glass of water but had a greater subconscious effect on the participants who had eaten the cucumber because the priming encouraged a behavior that met a biological need – thirst – and was associated with a positive stimulus – the eating of the cucumber. Together, these two motivational states operated in unison to signal to participants that the act of drinking a glass of water was worth striving for. Though interesting, this research still leaves many questions for psychologists to answer regarding the influence and motivational power of subliminal priming, but it does paint a comforting picture which suggests that subliminal messages can at their best only encourage you to do what you already wanted to do in the first place.

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Sensitivity to Blood, Guts, and Gore Is Associated with Political Attitudes and Moral Beliefs

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Do feelings of disgust have predictive validity about our political attitudes and moral beliefs? A recently published series of studies by psychologists at Cornell University appears to suggest that this is indeed the case. In one study, the researchers administered the Disgust Sensitivity Scale (DSS) and a political ideology scale to a sample of politically-mixed individuals and found a strong correlation between sensitivity to disgust and having a politically conservative outlook. In a second study, participants were asked to respond to the DSS and several questionnaires that assessed their opinions about several relevant moral and political issues. The investigators found a link between disgust and support for gay marriage and abortion such that participants who were found to have a higher susuceptibility to disgust were also less likely to endorse abortion or passing federal legislation to legalize gay marriage. One argument offered by the researchers to account for these findings is that conservatives have argued that disgust is inherently an internal compass for whether a particular issue - aborting an unborn fetus, for example - should be considered morally acceptable or repugnant. In contrast, liberals tend to adopt a more functional perspective and rely predominately on the outcome of a particular issue to determine whether it should be viewed as positive or negative. Regardless, the researchers caution the use of disgust as a ruler for measuring the moral worth of attitudes and beliefs since this faculity is thought to have evolved in order to ward our early ancestors away from disease and contaminants within the environment thereby increasing their likelihood of survival, not as a means to form moral judgments.

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Providing Care to Ailing Loved Ones Can Actually Extend Your Life

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Typically the thought of caring for an ailing loved one in the throes of old age and poor health is associated with feelings of hassle and stress, but a new study by Brown and colleagues at the University at Michigan suggests that taking care of a partner in need can actually extend your life. While past research has often found the opposite effect to be true (e.g., caring for a needy partner shortens the life of the caregiver), Brown argues that this confusion has resulted from earlier work on this topic conflating two very distinct and separate issues – the stress associated with caring for a loved one and the actual act of caring itself. Specifically, this study found that participants who provided more than 14 hours of care to a loved one in poor health (per week) over the course of the study were significantly less likely to die over the course of the 7 year study than were participants who provided no care. Astonishingly, the researchers reported that these caregivers were, on average, 36 per cent less likely to die to over the course of the study when compared to their non-care-giving counterparts, even when baseline health and medical history were controlled for in the analyses. While no formal account detailing the processes underlying this finding were proposed, one theory put forward implicates the hormone oxytocin which has been found to play in a role in caring behaviors, cellular repair, and storage of cell nutrients. Unfortunately, just because an individual had a needy partner did not subsequently mean these protective benefits were be bestowed upon him or her, and, in fact, participants living with a partner who was experiencing poor health were often found to die earlier. Even though this finding may seem to contradict the previous finding that care-giving lengthens the life of the caregiver, having a needy partner was not synonymous with providing care to that partner.

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Why Moral Transgressions Leave A Bad Taste

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Recent research in morality has been rather critical of the original idea that thinking morally requires rational thinking. Instead, a shift of focus has occured to the idea that various emotions play a very important role in our moral lives. In a recent article, researchers Chapman and collegues demonstrate that disgust is one of the emotions that plays a role in our moral thinking. In a series of studies, they demonstrate that people use the same facial muscles when exposed to moral transgressions as when exposured to classic disgust eliciting stimuli, such as a bad taste or contaminants. The present research adds further evidence that primitive, originally 'selfish' emotions, might very well have developed over evolutionary history to shape one of our highest abilities: to see right from wrong.

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Why Guys Love A Lady in Red

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A recent study by a group of researchers from the University of Rochester reported how color might change our perception of people. To be more precise, their study reports that men are more attracted to women dressed in red. Though there is ample knowledge on the physiology of color, there is very little knowledge about the psychology of color. This study is one of the first to look at how color might, in certain situations, affect our behavior without our own explicit awareness. The researchers link this preference for the color red among males in their dating and mating choices to a similar attractiveness to red in other species, thus pointing to possible evolutionary origins. The current findings have implications for fashion, product design and give some advice on what a girl might want to wear on a date.

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What's Up with Plain Guys and Gorgeous Girls Getting Together?

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Have you ever wondered why Hollywood marriages almost always include an older man settling down with a much younger woman? More specifically, how successful are these marriages given the great age disparity and that exists between husband and wife? A recent study by researchers at the Univeristy of Tennessee may provide an answer to this daunting question and it may not be what you expect. They compared the facial attractiveness of husband and wife across 82 newly-wed couples and then tested this comparison against the quality of their marriage. Their finding suggests that men who were rated as more attractive than their partner demonstrated a tendency to be less likely to offer emotional and practical support to their wives. The researchers offer an evolutionary account of this finding and argue that attractive men have more short-term mating opportunities available to them and this in turn may lead them to feel less satisfied and less committed to their marriage. In fact, they report that men are rated as more likeable and friendly when they are in a martial relationship with a partner who is very attractive. Likening this finding back to the question concerning the success of Hollywood marriages, it is not necessarily the age discrepancy between men and women that unites celebrities in matrimony but instead the ostensible difference in their levels of attractiveness.

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Punish and Perish

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Does the use of punishment lead to greater cooperation within interpersonal situations? Researchers at Harvard University emphatically suggest that it does not. Using a slight variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, a classic paradigm used to study cooperation, they found that the use of punitive behavior to coerce others into cooperation causes less overall cooperative behavior from others, leads to reduced individual pay-off, and provides no benefit for the group as a whole. Even more, the researchers found that the top-ranked players in the game rarely used punishment at all, opting instead to employ a tit-for-tat strategy, whereas the lowest ranked players, in contrast, made use of costly punishment. The study’s authors suggest that punishment can lead to a downward spiral of retaliation which can have negative consequences for everyone involved. One question of interest then is why does there exist such a strong motivation in humans to punish when engaged with others in a competitive task. One answer suggested by the researchers is that punitive behaviors may serve to establish a dominance hierarchy or to defend ownership of property and good. However, the overall conclusion that can be drawn from this study is clear: the use of costly punishment does not promote cooperative behaviors and those who readily employ it are often left at a severe disadvantage; in other words, punish and perish!

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Threatening Environmental Stimuli May Lead to More Extreme Judgments

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Kees van den Bos and colleagues at Utrecht University report an intriguing study where they found that mundane aspects of the environment, like, for instance, the mere presence of blinking lights, can lead us to make quicker and more extreme judgments of fairness. In one experiment, the researchers asked pedestrians shopping along the streets of the Netherlands to mentally simulate a scenario whereby a coworker received either the same or a greater job bonus than they did. The (very neat!) manipulation in this study was that half of the participants were asked to imagine this scenario while standing next to a flashing road-work light. Their results are shocking! – When asked to judge the fairness of this unequal bonus distribution, participants standing next to the blinking light generated more extreme judgments than those who were not in its presence. The researchers suggest that this happens because environmental stimuli detected as a potential threat (such as the blinking light) initiates what they refer to as the ‘human alarm system’, which, when activated, leads to the production of quicker and more extreme justice-related judgments (among others). The implications for this research are many and include application to judicial systems and public policy decision-making.

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Researchers Attempt to Uncover the Keys to Happiness

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Why do some things make us happy while others do not? This intriguing question, which has fascinated philosophers for centuries, is finally being given the empirical treatment by a host of researchers who are attempting to find out what factors contribute to whether something make us feel a sense of happiness or not. The Washington Post reports on several of the findings uncovered by this research program, led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, such as that people who are forced to make irrevocable choices often feel happier about their decisions than do people who are asked to make choices that can be altered in the future. He also found that, while most people do actively attempt to minimize their uncertainty about negative life events, this same principal is not applied to positive life events, such as receiving anonymous compliments or being bestowed gifts for no apparent reasons. Gilbert argues that the inherent uncertainty contained within these events amplifies the emotional consequences of these events thereby causing a greater sense of happiness to be felt than, say, if it were known who made the compliment or the reason why the gift was given. Understanding the essence of what it means to be happy and how feelings of happiness can be generated is vitally important, since being happy is correlated with a host of positive physical and psychological outcomes, and, therefore, this research provides a significant contribution to our knowledge about the factors that promote happiness and perhaps even a better life.

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