RoyMogg's Blog

Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?

Stephanie — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:18:11 +0000

Most of us have done it – told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.

Some participants were told they’d be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer’s self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.

The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we’re judging. If people’s motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback, but only if they had low self-esteem (specifically low self-liking, as opposed to low feelings of self competence). “If one accepts that people with relatively low self-esteem are expected to place greater emphasis on wanting to be perceived as likeable or attractive to others, then this lends support for the self-protection motive,” said the researchers, led by Carla Jeffries. By contrast, undergrad participants with high self-esteem gave the same kind of feedback regardless of whether it was delivered anonymously, face-to-face, or not at all.

There was further evidence of a self-serving motive. Students with low self-esteem who were told their ratings would not be fed back to the writer tended to give particularly critical ratings – it’s as if judging the essay harshly made them feel better about themselves. “A particularly harsh assessment creates a downward social comparison and, in turn, a gain for one’s self-esteem,” the researchers said.

The results did throw up some modest evidence of altruistic motives. Ratings by low self-esteem students were more generous in the anonymous condition versus the undelivered feedback condition. Seeing as their identity would be concealed in both cases, this suggests they gave inflated feedback in the anonymous condition purely to protect the feelings of the writer. However, this empathy only went so far – none of the participants moderated the tone of their feedback in line with the writer’s self-esteem scores.

Jeffries and her team said their findings could have implications for organisations. For example, bolstering people’s self-esteem prior to their rating another person’s performance could help them to be more honest. “The data … speak to the importance of developing cultures that encourage frank and fearless feedback giving and non-defensive feedback receiving,” the researchers said. “Strong and positive feedback cultures might help overcome some of the fears of feedback-givers, and reduce the tendency for feedback to be adjusted as a function of who is watching.”

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Jeffries, C., and Hornsey, M. (2012). Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others? British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/ot0VJYM4uYg/who-are-you-protecting-when-you-praise.html

People prefer the middle option

Stephanie — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:00:40 +0000

When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item jumps up and down and calls out to you “Pick me, pick me!” Well, not literally, but in a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what’s called the “Centre Stage effect” – our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

Paul Rodway and his colleagues showed 100 participants (65 women) a questionnaire consisting of 17 questions, wherein each question featured five different pictures of the same item or type of item (e.g. five scenic views or five border terriers). Each set of five pictures was arranged in a horizontal row and the task for participants, depending on the question, was either to pick their most preferred or least preferred item. When picking out their favourite, the participants showed a clear preference for the central items; by contrast, no position bias was found when selecting their least favoured items.

The size of the preferential bias for central items was statistically significant but relatively modest in percentage terms. Central items were selected approximately 23 per cent of the time compared with the 20 per cent you’d expect if choices were random. The selection rate for items in other locations averaged below 20 per cent.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time each array of five items was arranged vertically – once again there was a bias for the central item. A final study used real objects – five pairs of identical white socks - pinned in a vertical array on a large piece of cardboard. Again, participants were asked to pick out their preferred option and again they showed a bias for the middle choice. Additionally, they showed a bias against picking the lower two options. The fact that the Centre Stage effect occurred for vertical arrays argues against explanations for the effect related to the brain’s hemispheres biasing attention either to the left or right. Perhaps the cause has to do with cultural beliefs linking importance or prestige with being centrally located.

Rodway’s team pondered the real-world implications of their findings. ‘”If item location influences preference during the millions of purchasing choices that occur every day, it will be exerting a substantial influence on consumer behaviour,” they said. “Moreover, choices from a range of options are made in many other contexts (e.g. legal and occupational), and it remains to be investigated whether the central preference remains with other formats and whether it extends to other types of decision.”

The new findings build on previous research showing that observers tended to overestimate the performance of quiz show contestants located in central positions, and tended to favour job candidates located centrally in a photograph.

Complicating matters, other research that’s looked at items presented in a sequence or one at a time, has found that people show a bias towards items located in extreme positions in the sequence. For example, Wandi de Bruin in a 2005 study found that ice-skating competitors and Eurovision singers tended to receive higher scores if they performed later. On the other hand, if a choice array is perceived as a continuum – as in a questionnaire rating scale – there’s evidence for a left-ward bias, perhaps caused by the dominance of the right hemisphere, which directs attention to the left-hand side of space.
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Rodway, P., Schepman, A., and Lambert, J. (2012). Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26 (2), 215-222 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1812

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/I2RsqvbvU5Y/people-prefer-middle-option.html

People assume it’s hillier up north

Stephanie — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:06:35 +0000

Give people a choice of two cross-country routes to the same destination, one more northerly, the other more southerly, but both covering similar terrain, and they’ll tend to favour the southerly route, and to anticipate it being quicker and easier going. According to a new study, this is true for people who’ve been tested from regions such as Southern New England in the USA, where the north is more mountainous, but it’s true too for people who live in regions such as Sofia in Bulgaria, where the south is mountainous and the north is flat. Tad Brunyé and his colleagues think this spatial bias may have to do with our life-long association of north with up (with additional connotations of being uphill) and south as down – as is the convention on maps.

Brunyé’s team tested this idea with a series of implicit association tasks. Student participants from Tufts University in Boston looked at pictures of landscapes and categorised them as either flat or mountainous. They also saw aerial shots of geographic areas and had to indicate whether a star on the picture was located north or south. The main finding here is that the participants were quicker to respond during experimental blocks when the same keyboard response key was used for answering “north” or “mountainous” (and another key was for answering “south” or “flat”) compared to the contrasting situation where the same key was used for indicating “north” or “flat” (and another key was for “south” or “mountainous”).

This finding suggests that the participants implicitly associated the concepts of “north” and “mountainous” in their minds. The same result was obtained when the images for north vs. south consisted of a large compass in the middle of the screen (with a large N in the centre denoting north or a large S denoting south). Although most Tufts students are from areas outside of Southern New England, where the university is based, the researchers also repeated the study with a student sample based in Ohio, where there are mountains to the south east. Again, despite living in an area where the south is more hilly, the same implicit association of north with hills and mountains was again exhibited by the students.

A final study measured participants’ implicit associations and their more explicit associations. This latter task came in the form of a free association test – participants were given a word such as “north” or “south” and they had to write the first five words that came to mind (the researchers were interested to see if they’d mention words like “up” or “hilly”; past research has generally found that most people don’t explicitly associate the north with a mountainous landscape). This study also involved the participants choosing between pairs of routes through similar terrain to the same destination – one more northerly, one more southerly. Once again the usual bias for southern routes was obtained (these were picked 62 per cent of the time); participants who showed a stronger implicit association of north with mountainous terrain, as revealed on the implicit association test, were more likely to pick the more southerly route.

“Given physical experiences associating upward mobility with relative difficulty, the north-south canonical axis becomes misperceived as indicative of physical effort,” the researchers said. “Thus if participants misperceive northward areas as higher elevation (or ‘uphill’) then it logically follows that they would strategically avoid travelling through what they perceive as relatively demanding areas. Indeed, everyday colloquialisms such as heading down south or going up north may reflect how pervasive such associations are throughout cognition.” The researchers added that their finding could have practical implications – for example, affecting driving behaviour within towns and cities and also over greater distances, which could be of interest to city planners and civil engineers.

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Tad T. Brunyé, Stephanie A. Gagnon, David Waller, et al (2012). Up north and down south: Implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : 10.1080/17470218.2012.663393

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/4_LkWf-OHpE/people-assume-its-hillier-up-north.html

How do women and girls feel when they see sexualised or sporty images of female athletes?

Stephanie — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:08:30 +0000

The potentially harmful effect of ultra-thin models and air-brushed female celebrities on the body image and self-esteem of women is well-documented. Could the increasing participation of women in professional sport prompt the media to portray female role models in a different, more beneficial light? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. To take just one example, prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics, female Olympic skiers and snowboarders appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in - you guessed it - bikinis. A new study of 258 US school girls and 171 female undergrads by Elizabeth Daniels has investigated how women and girls feel when they see sexualised images of female athletes.

The participants were allocated to one of three conditions – they either looked at five images of female athletes in a sporting context in their full sporting attire (the basketball player Anne Strother; the skateboarder Jen O’Brien; the tennis player Jennifer Capriati; the surfer Lisa Anderson; and the football player Mia Hamm), or they looked at five images of female athletes in a sexualised context with lots of flesh on display (the basketball player Lauren Jackson; the ice-skater Ekaterina Gordeeva; the swimmer Jenny Thompson; the softball player Jenny Finch; and the tennis player Anna Kournikova), or they looked at five images of bikini-clad magazine models given random names.

After looking at the first and last of their five allocated photographs (this was Lauren Jackson and Anna Kournikova in the sexualised athletes condition and Anne Strother and Mia Hamm in the sporty athletes condition), the participants were asked to write a paragraph “describing the woman in the photograph and discussing how this photograph makes you feel”.

The key finding is that the girls and undergrads who viewed the sexualised athlete images tended to say they admired or were jealous of the athletes’ bodies, they commented on the athletes’ sexiness, and they evaluated their own bodies negatively. Some also said they found the images inappropriate. The participants who viewed the bikini-clad glamour models responded similarly, except they rarely commented on the inappropriateness of the images, as if they’d come to accept the portrayal of women in that way. Daniels said that sexy images of female athletes “are no more likely to prompt viewers to reflect on their own physical activity involvement or appreciation of sport than sexualised model images.”

By contrast, participants who viewed the female athletes in a sporting context tended to comment on the athletes’ determination, passion and commitment; they wrote about feeling motivated to perform sport; and they reflected on their own sporting participation or sports they followed. “Infusing more performance images of female athletes into the media may be helpful in promoting physical activity among girls and young women,” Daniels said. “Currently, female athletes are largely absent from magazines targeted at teen girls.”
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Daniels, E. (2012). Sexy versus strong: What girls and women think of female athletes. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 33 (2), 79-90 DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2011.12.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/ZKTwcsRcAuc/how-do-women-and-girls-feel-when-they.html

Is Outsourcing Profitable? – Lecture by Prof Strassmann

Royston — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:10:12 +0000

In this video Prof Strassmann considers, in a very careful way, whether Outsourcing can be profitable. The short answer to this is yes if it is done corrrectly and he points to the main reasons for failure steming from managements inability to manage the process correctly. Especially it seems when it comes to deciding which functions should be considered.
Overall a very erudite and insightful contribution.

The woman who grew phantom fingers that she’d never physically had

Stephanie — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:32:44 +0000

Inside the human brain there is a map of the body drawn in neural tissue. When a person loses a limb, the neural representation of that body part still exists in the map, and more often than not, it continues to give rise to “phantom” sensations. Sometimes neurons in adjacent areas of the body map invade the tissue that represents the missing limb. This can lead to the curious situation where stimulation of a person’s face (or other areas) provokes feelings in their phantom limb, as documented by the great neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Cases like this are often cited as evidence for the brain’s plasticity.

Now Ramachandran and his colleague Paul McGeoch have reported a phantom limb case that illustrates how aspects of the body map are apparently hard-wired. The case is a 57-year-old woman (known as R.N.) who was born with a deformed right hand consisting of only three fingers and a rudimentary thumb. After a car crash at age 18, R.N.’s deformed hand was amputated, which gave rise to feelings of a phantom hand. Curiously, R.N. experienced her phantom hand as having a full complement of five fingers, albeit that some of the digits were foreshortened. In other words, she was experiencing the sensation of having fingers that she’d never physically possessed.

R.N. was referred to the researchers more than 35 years after her accident, after her phantom hand had become unbearably painful and uncomfortable, including two of the fingers feeling as if they’d become twisted and bent until their tips touched. McGeoch and Ramachandran trained R.N. in using “mirror visual feedback”, in which the reflection of her healthy left-hand was seen as superimposed onto where she felt her phantom right hand to be. After two weeks of 30-minutes daily feedback, R.N. was able to move her phantom fingers and was relieved of pain. Crucially, she also experienced that all five of her phantom fingers were now normal length.

McGeoch and Ramachandran said this case provides evidence that the brain has an innate template of a fully-formed hand. Freed from the visual, proprioceptive and tactile sensations of her deformed hand, and aided by the mirror training, R.N.s brain re-instated its innate map of a normal hand. “There appears to be a ‘hard-wired’ innately specified scaffold for body image,” the researchers said. This account also helps explain the occurrence of phantom limbs in people born with missing limbs.

The researchers conceded that they were taking R.N.s account of her feelings on trust. It’s possible she was confabulating – although they think this unlikely. If she were, McGeoch and Ramachandran think it more likely that R.N. would have claimed to have had normal length fingers prior to the mirror training.

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McGeoch, P., and Ramachandran, V. (2012). The appearance of new phantom fingers post-amputation in a phocomelus. Neurocase, 18 (2), 95-97 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2011.556128

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/sV_KJEp3LtA/woman-who-grew-phantom-fingers-that.html

A cautionary tale about using psychology to boost your Valentine’s chances

Stephanie — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:55:48 +0000

As he prepared for his blind date, Kevin was determined to leave nothing to chance. For starters, his date for Valentine’s evening thought his name was Jake. You see, Kevin was a shrewd chap who’d decided he was going to use all the latest psychological science to boost his romantic chances. A recent paper showed that unfashionable names could put people off. He’d even made a name badge with Jake written in bold, and pinned it to his (carefully chosen) bright red shirt.

That was one of the easier lessons to implement. The fake scar, a long, jagged line down his right cheek, was trickier to get hold off. Of course, he was also wearing his boots with the chunky heels. He’d also been listening to Barry White tapes to help practise speaking with a more manly voice than usual. Attention to detail, that was key, Kevin kept telling himself, attention to detail. And so he slid onto his ring finger a rubber witch’s finger (he’d spotted that at the shop that sold the scar make-up) – he reasoned this should help him achieve the ideal digit-ratio.

Time was ticking, she was due to arrive soon. Kevin suppressed his nerves and pressed play on his stereo. “Je l’aime à mourir” by French songwriter Francis Cabrel filled his apartment – this was the very song they’d used in another pertinent research paper he’d read. “Ha! The lyrics are perfect,” Kevin thought to himself as he implemented another of his strategies, leaning near the front door a coffin he’d borrowed from a theatrical friend.

Oh dear, you can’t control everything … Kevin cursed his rumbling stomach – was it the nerves or his recent (carefully selected) vegetable-only diet? Kevin wasn’t sure. “Never-mind, nearly there,” he thought as he pulled on his Porsche cap and pinned an RSPCA badge to his lapel. Now, fingers crossed his neighbour and her friend would do their part just as he’d asked.

Lisa, a French student at the local university, climbed the stairs, nervously excited about the evening that lay ahead. A mutual friend had said that Jake was interested in psychology, which sounded promising. Lisa knocked gently on the white, scuffed door. To this day, she will never forget what happened next.

The door opened revealing a tall man, a livid scar running down his face, a baseball cap atop his head. This was obviously Jake – a badge on his bright shirt said as much. The words “I love her to death” (in French) blasted out from the apartment’s interior. Over the man’s shoulder Lisa could see a large, cardboard coffin leaning against the wall. Suddenly two young women burst forth from the neighbouring apartment. They drew nearer and began gazing at the man silently, big smiles on their faces. Awkwardness hung in the air.

“Hi, erm, I’m Lisa,” Lisa managed to mutter, just about controlling her urge to run. “Hi, I’m Lisa,” the man echoed her words with a gravelly voice and a nervous chuckle. “Please come in,” he said, reaching out and touching her on the arm, a wrinkly witch’s finger protruding from his hand.

Lisa turned and ran, and ran.

–
If this hasn’t put you off, here’s a list of evidence-based Valentine’s advice I put together earlier.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest, with apologies to people called Kevin.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/btTF8jSS_8I/cautionary-tale-about-using-psychology.html

The particular pleasure of scratching an itch on the ankle

Stephanie — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:38:49 +0000

It’s only in recent times that scientists have discovered there are dedicated nerve pathways for communicating the sensation of itch. This troublesome skin signal provides us with a mixed experience. The prickly discomfort of an itch can be agonising. Yet to scratch an itch is one of life’s great pleasures. In fact, it often seems that the more intense the itch, the more unreachable its source, then the greater the ultimate pleasure that’s derived from finally reaching and clawing at it.

Now the aptly named Gil Yosipovitch and his colleagues have performed one of the first comparisons to see if itches are itchier on some body parts than others. They also investigated whether scratching itches in some places brings more satisfaction than others.

The researchers used cowhage spicules to induce itchiness on either the forearm, ankle or the back of 18 healthy volunteers (10 women; mean age 34). After the spicules were applied, each volunteer indicated from one to ten the intensity of the itch every 30 seconds for five minutes. The itch was then scratched by an experimenter using a cytology brush (a brush with stiff bristles and an elongated handle). The participants again indicated every 30 seconds the intensity of the itch and the pleasure derived from the scratching.

The main findings were that itches were perceived as more intense on the ankle and back, as compared with the forearm. Similarly, scratching was more pleasurable on the ankle and the back than on the forearm. The greater the itch intensity on the forearm and ankle, the more pleasure came from the scratching. Meanwhile, for the back and forearm, as the itch subsided, the pleasure from scratching faded. By contrast, scratching an ankle itch continued to provide pleasure even after the itch had been relieved. “The pleasurability of scratching the ankle appears to be longer lived compared to the other two sites,” the researchers said.

“The present study uncovers a topographical relationship between itch attenuation by scratching and the accompanying pleasurability in healthy individuals,” they concluded. “Future studies should also examine the scratching pleasurability associated with other itchy areas such as the scalp …”.

Why should itches and scratches be experienced differently on different parts of the body? Yosipovitch and his colleagues discussed a number of potential mechanisms, including differences in nerve density between body regions and regional variations in levels of neuropeptides known to be involved in itch induction. Prior research suggests the pleasure derived from scratching is associated with deactivation in brain areas – such as the anterior cingulate cortex – that are involved in the unpleasantness of itch, and the concomitant activation of other areas – such as the putamen – involved in the anticipation of reward.

How do these findings match your own experience? Do you find ankle itches particularly satisfying to scratch?
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bin Saif, G., Papoiu, A., Banari, L., McGlone, F., Kwatra, S., Chan, Y., and Yosipovitch, G. (2012). The Pleasurability of Scratching an Itch: A Psychophysical and Topographical Assessment. British Journal of Dermatology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2133.2012.10826.x [h/t @mocost].

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/efiAoiKzdeY/particular-pleasure-of-scratching-itch.html

Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?

Stephanie — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:18:54 +0000

Social networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on who you are and who you know. Twitter restricts users to 140-character updates and is more about what you say than who you are. A new study asks whether and how the way people use these sites is related to their personality, and whether there are personalty differences between people who prefer one site over the other.

David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online – most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond. There were 207 women and the age range was from 18 to 63. Participants answered questions about the way they used Facebook and Twitter and which site they preferred. They also answered questions about their personality based around the “Big Five” personality factors of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness and Agreeableness, as well as the dimensions of sociability and “need for cognition” (this last factor is about people’s need to be mentally engaged and stimulated).

Perhaps the most glaring finding is that personality actually explained little of the variance - less than 10 per cent (rising to 20 per cent alongside age) - in the way participants used these sites. This suggests that other factors not explored here, such as intelligence and motivation, have a big influence.

However, the associations with personality were interesting. People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don’t use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination.

What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”. Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”, but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation – as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).

Finally, what about people’s overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in “need for cognition” tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information.

These results should be treated with caution. The sample was biased towards young females and the data were entirely self-report. Nonetheless, the findings suggest there are some meaningful differences in the personality profiles of people who prefer Twitter vs. Facebook and some intriguing personality links with the way the sites are used. “Different people use the same sites for different purposes,” the researchers said.
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Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., and Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 561-569 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/2cW-4jt9Ifo/facebook-or-twitter-what-does-your.html

Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

Stephanie — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:23:35 +0000

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.”
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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