RoyMogg's Blog

We wore ankle-length blue coats at my school, in the Tudor-style. When it rained, the wool of the coat gave off a pungent smell, rather like wet dog. Now when I encounter a similar scent, it propels me back in time to my school days. This effect is called the “Proustian phenomenon”. The name comes from Proust’s description in Remembrance of Things Past of how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine biscuit transported him back in time to his childhood.

Smells do have this uncanny, evocative power, don’t they? It’s because of the relative proximity of the olfactory bulb (which processes smells) and the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in memory and emotions. Right?

Not so fast. In fact very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt.

Marieke Toffolo and her collaborators invited 70 female student participants to watch a disturbing 12-minute film featuring road traffic accidents, surgery and reports on the Rwandan genocide. Whilst the students watched the film, the smell of Cassis, a neutral berry-like odour, was sprayed into the room; coloured lights were projected onto the back wall; and inoffensive background music was played over speakers (no mention was made to the students of these cues; pilot work established that they were equally noticeable, pleasant and arousing). The researchers chose to focus only on female participants to keep things simple, because it’s known that there are sex differences in olfactory perception.

A week later the students were called back and asked to write down as many memories about the film as they could. As they did so, either the smell, the lights or the music were presented again. The students also answered questions about the quality of their memories. The main finding is that students exposed again to the smell of Cassis rated their memories of the film as more detailed, unpleasant and arousing (but no more transporting or vivid) than students re-exposed to the music. However, the students re-exposed to the odour rated their memories no differently from students re-exposed to the lights. In other words, smell appeared to be more evocative than music, but no more evocative than lights.

“It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odours are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers,” the researchers said. “Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odour is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odours.”
_________________________________

Toffolo, M., Smeets, M., and van den Hout, M. (2012). Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories. Cognition and Emotion, 26 (1), 83-92 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2011.555475

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/RBnQXwc0ylM/do-smells-really-trigger-particularly.html

More women than ever go out to work and yet surveys in Western countries show that wives continue to take on the lion’s share of domestic chores.

A new study has quizzed 389 couples in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to build up the most comprehensive picture yet of how this uneven distribution of domestic chores is associated with men’s and women’s marital satisfaction.

These were all dual-earning couples with young children, with both spouses working at least 15 hours per week. Eighty-nine per cent of the couples were married. The average professional work load for women was 30.2 hours per week; for men it was 48.6 hours. Consistent with past surveys, the women in this sample took on nearly two thirds of the domestic chores.

The researchers Gerold Mikula, Bernhard Riederer and Otto Bodi asked their participants several things: what share of the chores they took on; whether they thought that was fair; whether they felt the way the share had been decided was fair (so-called “procedural justice”); how much conflict they experienced in their relationship; and how happy they were with their relationship. They threw all these factors into a statistical pot and looked to see how they related to each other.

First, Mikula and co focused only on the direct associations between housework distribution and women’s and men’s answers. For women, it wasn’t the precise share of housework they did that was correlated with their experience of conflict and satisfaction, but rather how fair they thought that share was. Women who thought the division of household chores was unfair tended to experience more relationship conflict and less marital satisfaction. Women’s sense of whether the decision process for housework had been fair also had its own independent link with levels of conflict. So feeling that they did an unfair amount of housework was bad enough, but conflict was even more likely when women felt the unfair arrangement had been arrived at unfairly.

Men, by contrast, seemed largely detached from the way housework was shared. There was no direct correlation between the division of housework and their reports of fairness. And even men who said the arrangement was unfair didn’t tend to report more relationship conflict or less satisfaction – no doubt because the unfair arrangement was usually in their favour. In fact, the only direct association of housework distribution with men’s answers, was that the greater share their female partners took on, the more satisfied they tended to be.

But here’s where the picture gets more complicated. The researchers also looked at associations between participants’ answers and their partners’ reported sense of justice and experience of conflict and satisfaction. This suggested that men suffered when their female partners believed the housework arrangements were unfair. In fact, the negative correlates for men (more conflict, less satisfaction) of having a female partner who sensed injustice in the division of housework, outweighed the satisfaction associated with having a female partner who did lots of housework.

“The results support the proposition that it is not the balance of the division of labour itself but rather the subjective sense of justice associated with the division that matters primarily to the relationship satisfaction of the persons concerned,” the researchers concluded. “Spouses should exchange their personal views and preferences in open discussions to arrive at an agreement that considers the wishes of both parties … “

_________________________________

MIKULA, G., RIEDERER, B., and BODI, O. (2011). Perceived justice in the division of domestic labor: Actor and partner effects. Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01385.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/iNPBvhm_31c/when-wives-believe-they-do-unfair-share.html

Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we’re instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we’re poor self-psychologists.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various scenarios. This included whether or not they or others would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality.

When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd “lay psychologists” and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people’s beahviour, the students anticipated this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn’t think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.

It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they’d give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.

Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own altruism (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people’s altruism more reliably. This is consonant with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.

“The good news,” Balcetis and Dunning concluded, “is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situational variations to shape potential actions that their peers will choose. The bad news is that people fail to reaslise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well.”
_________________________________

 
Balcetis, E., and Dunning, D. (2011). Considering the situation: Why people are better social psychologists than self-psychologists. Self and Identity, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2011.617886

See also: We’re unable to read our own body language (earlier Digest post).
Strangers to ourselves (Psychologist magazine article).

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/Ou3vafj5vqU/why-were-better-at-predicting-other.html

Anglo-Saxon troops confront the invaders
No doubt you’ve noticed that the Entente Cordiale has been looking a little strained lately. That’s mostly due to contemporary European politics and economics. Isn’t it? We can’t blame 1066. Can we?

In fact, British attitudes towards the French today probably aren’t helped by memories and myths surrounding the Norman Conquest. This may seem like an odd claim, but a timely and intriguing new study focuses on the Norman Conquest of Britain as an example of a “distant memory” that could be affecting contemporary attitudes towards the French specifically, and towards immigrants more generally. Where psychologists usually study short-term or autobiographical memory in individuals, this study is an academic investigation of our collective or cultural memory.

Siobhan Brownlie‘s data comes from two main sources: a search of Norman Conquest mentions in ten British newspapers between 2005 and 2008 (she found 807 relevant articles) and a survey of 2,179 members of the UK population.

Our

Continue reading How our collective memory of 1066 could be souring Anglo-French relations

Psychology-themed gifts:

Inception DVD – Jungian symbolism, action adventure and Leonardo DiCaprio!

A subscription to Scientific American Mind magazine.

“I’m statistically significant” and other stats-themed t-shirts.

Memento DVD - the best amnesia movie that we can remember.

The Force Trainer – Become a Jedi: wireless headset interprets your brainwaves and moves an object.

 “Connect it” brain/usb t-shirt.

Mindflex brainwave game - go head to head with a friend.

A subscription to The Psychologist magazine.

Serotonin necklace.

Freudian slippers.

Dopamine t-shirt.

Inflatable brain.

Ramon y Cajal t-shirt.

Make a donation to Mind – the UK’s leading mental health charity.

The best psychology books of 2011 (and there’s always the new Rough Guide to Psychology by the editor of the Research Digest!)

Gift-giving research

If in doubt, give them what they want. A study published this year suggested people prefer receiving what they asked for, rather than a surprise gift.

Don’t bundle your gifts. Gift receivers rate a single high-value gift more positively than a big gift bundled with a stocking filler.

This study,

Continue reading Xmas special: gift psychology and psychology gifts

“Love begets love.” Proverb
French researchers say that adding the text “donating=loving” to a charitable collection box almost doubled the amount of money they raised.

Nicolas Guéguen and Lubomir Lamy placed opaque collection boxes in 14 bakeries in Brittany for two weeks. All the boxes featured the following text in French: “Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support”, together with a picture of a young African woman with an infant in her arms. Some boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: “DONATING=LOVING”; others had the text “DONATING=HELPING”; whilst others had no further text below the slot. Different box types were placed in different bakeries on different days and the amount of money collected each day was recorded.

The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in

Continue reading Mention of the word "loving" doubles charitable donations