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

Continue reading Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

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;

Continue reading When wives believe they do an unfair share of the housework, everyone loses

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

Continue reading Why we’re better at predicting other people’s behaviour than our own

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

Cruijff – the best ever player?Ask a friend to name the best ever footballer and they’re likely to pick someone who was mid-career when they (your friend) was aged around 17. That’s according to a new investigation into the “reminiscence bump”. This term describes the fact that when you ask people to name the most memorable events in their lives, they tend to refer to things that happened to them in their teens and early twenties. Recently it’s been shown that a similar effect occurs when you ask people to name their favourite music, books and films, with them tending to pick out content from their youth. Now David Rubin and his colleagues have extended this line of research to people’s judgement of the best footballers of all time.

Six hundred and nineteen people (aged 16 to 80) took part in the study online, conducted in Dutch and hosted on the

Continue reading What your choice of best ever footballer says about human memory

Newton worked hard and had an inquisitive natureScience suffers from an image problem. Many students see the subject as too difficult and they think scientists are aloof boffins with big brains. A new study out of Taiwan tests the benefits of teaching high-school physics pupils about the struggles of eminent physicists – Galileo, Newton and Einstein.

Over the course of three computer-based lessons during one week, 88 low-achieving students were taught not just about the relevant theories developed by these characters but also about their frustrations and perseverance. For instance, they heard about Newton’s hard work and inquisitive nature (including his comment “I keep the subject constantly before me, till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into the full and clear light.”), and they heard about Einstein’s efforts, but ultimate failure, in seeking to develop a unified field theory – an endeavour that he spent the last 25

Continue reading Hearing about scentists’ struggles helps inspire students and boosts their learning

Questionable research practices, including testing increasing numbers of participants until a result is found, are the “steroids of scientific competition, artificially enhancing performance”. That’s according to Leslie John and her colleagues who’ve found evidence that such practices are worryingly widespread among US psychologists. The results are currently in press at the journal Psychological Science and they arrive at a time when the psychological community is still reeling from the the fraud of a leading social psychologist in the Netherlands. Psychology is not alone. Previous studies have raised similar concerns about the integrity of medical research.

John’s team quizzed 6,000 academic psychologists in the USA via an anonymous electronic survey about their use of 10 questionable research practices including: failing to report all dependent measures; collecting more data after checking if the results are significant; selectively reporting studies that “worked”; and falsifying data.

As well as declaring their own use of questionable research

Continue reading Questionable research practices are rife in psychology, survey suggests

Positive psychology exercises work by developing people’s strengths and emotional resources, thereby building their resilience to depression. For a new study, Susan Sergeant and Myriam Mongrain wanted to test the idea that these exercises will be more effective if they’re tailored to people’s particular personality type. They focused on two traits associated with vulnerability to depression: being excessively self-critical and being excessively needy.

Sergeant and Mongrain predicted that a gratitude exercise would be especially effective for self-critics by replacing a negative self-focus with an appreciation for the external world. And they thought a positive-music listening exercise would be particularly suited to needy people, offering them a practical tool that they could use independently. A control condition involved recalling early childhood memories.

The take-home finding is that whilst there was some evidence that self-critical people benefited more from the gratitude exercise than the music or control exercises (in terms of a greater happiness boost), the high

Continue reading Positive psychology exercises can be harmful for some