Imagine yourself fifty years into the future standing in line at a local convenience store to pay for the micro-wave pizzas and cases of soda you need for a party you’re hosting over the weekend, and, as you approach the counter, the clerk greets you in a kind, easy-going manner, and asks you about day with genuine concern splashed across his face and mirrored in his voice. You respond excitedly about the party you’re throwing over the weekend and the friends you cannot wait to see there, and, as you gab about how you hope your best friend leaves her awful boyfriend at home, you notice that the clerk seems to take a real interest in your conversation, his eyes following your hand gestures as he scans and bags your groceries. On the surface it’s just another typical day, in a typical grocery mart, making a typical purchase from a typical grocer. Only, there is something very atypical about this typically commonplace interaction, an element that is very much out of place with our usual 21st century expectancies-the grocer is not made of flesh and bone, not sentient, and is not even human-the grocer is an android. Recently, social psychologist Neal Roese at the University of Illinois published several predictions about what human-android social interactions may be like 50 years into the future based upon our present-day knowledge about technology and robotics. In this article, Roese makes the somber prediction that, by the year 2060, first-generation androids will be replace human labor in menial jobs, such as tollbooth collectors and factory floor workers, despite their likely limitations, which include being unable to detect aspects of natural language and processing social cues, like actions, motives, and emotional states. A central question this researcher proposes is whether people would be uneasy interacting with androids given the readily identifiable differences that exist between man and machine, such as body language and blinking, social behaviors that we often take for granted. Is it possible that these differences could engender stereotype formation about androids and ultimately lead to the creation of a human inclusive in-group, and an exclusory android out-group, us and them? Roese concludes that the psychological ramifications of human-android interaction must be considered now, in the present, and treated as an issue beyond mere fantasy/science-fiction, in order to positively shape android development in the future.
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.
While not deriving fully from the pages of social psychological literature, this experiment is just too good to pass up on reporting. In a recent study published by researchers at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, participants were asked to place absorbent pads underneath their armpits an hour before taking their final oral exam for the academic year and again before exercising. Another group of participants, tasked with sniffing the sweat collected on these pads, could not distinguish any difference between the sweat generated before taking the exam or exercising. However, when their brains were scanned while sniffing the sweat formed during these two diverse activities different parts of their brains were found to be activated, with the sweat collected before the exam causing areas of the brain responsible for social and emotional processes, as well as empathy, to become active. Given these findings, the authors of this study concluded that anxiety cause by the approaching exam in the first set of participants led to the release of a chemical that caused the second set of participants to feel fear and anxiety after it was sniffed and that this experience is conducted at a subconscious level of awareness, which provides evidence for one biological mechanism that may operate to motivate us to more quickly move away from harmful situations, like oncoming traffic or even a hazardous exam.
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.
Earlier psychological findings have implicated unconscious thought as being superior to conscious thinking when considering complex decision problems. For instance, researchers at the University of Amsterdam in 2004 reported findings demonstrating that participants who were distracted made better decisions about selecting from a series of apartments than did their counterparts who were not distracted. Further, the wildly popular book Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell, provides numerous illustrations of people making superior decision using their unconscious thought processes rather than conscious thought. However, several recently published studies offer evidence that diminishes, and, in some cases, even contradicts these earlier findings supporting the unconscious's superiority for complex decisions. For example, a research team operating at the University of New South Wales and the University of Essex conducted a series of four studies that sought to replicate previous studies that showed the alleged power of unconscious thought using the apartment decision paradigm. Interestingly, all of these studies pointed unanimously to the conclusion that, contrary to the claims in the literature, there was very little evidence for the power of the unconscious over the conscious when making decisions. Another recent study analyzed the results of over 17 published studies that pitted unconscious against conscious thought in at attempt to determine if the purported benefits for unconscious thought were real and found that across the majority of these studies it was conscious rather than unconscious thought that was most effective when making complex decisions. While these recent studies side favorably with conscious thought providing more desirable outcomes than unconscious thought when making judgments, it is important to recognize that even conscious thought has it disadvantages, such as thinking too much, which has been found to yield suboptimal decision making. In addition, even though the unconscious may produce inferior decision outcomes, these outcomes are typically not that inferior to decisions made consciously.
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.
Do you find yourself constantly stressed out due to the demands of school, work, and life? New research has emerged from investigators at West Virginia University which suggests that mindfulness training can actually relieve stress. Mindfulness, which is an age-old concept that dates back to early Buddhist teachings, refers to deliberately giving your full attention to everything that you are involved in from one moment to the next. In this experiment, half of the participants were assigned to an experimental group that received training over the course of an 8-week period on a variety of techniques designed to improve mindfulness, including breathing exercises, yoga, and meditation, whereas the other half of the participants were provided with written instructions on how to handle stress in life and at work. After the conclusion of the study, all participants were subsequently followed for 3 months to record their response to everyday stressful situations in light of either the written instructions about stress reduction or mindfulness training they had received from participation in the study. Findings from this 3 month follow-up showed that participants who had received the mindfulness training experienced significantly less psychological distress, daily hassles, and medical problems, such as fewer bodily pains and lower blood pressure, than their counterparts in the study who had not been provided with this training. Several other universities, including UCLA and Yale, have also tested the effects of mindfulness training on stress and found similar results suggesting mindfulness techniques are an excellent way to bust stress and reduce everyday anxiety. Indeed, these findings go a long way in demonstrating the power of mind over matter.
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.
Recent studies by Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan demonstrate that, unlike what was previously thought, religious devotion is far less predictable of support for parochial altruism - the act of doing good deeds for the ingroup that disadvantage the outgroup, among which suicide attacks are the most extreme example. Instead of religious devotion, the amount of time one engaged in collective religious rituals (such as attending church) was the strongest predictor to support suicide attacks. This raises the interesting issue that those who support parochial altruism (and thus serve as a likely stimulus for certain members to commit acts of parochial altruism) are not necessarily the extremely religious, but rather those with a stronger sense of community spirit.
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.
A recent study by a group of researchers from the University of Chicago reported on the experience of seeing others in pain among aggressive youths and a control group of similar age. Using fMRI, the researchers observed that aggressive youths who see other people suffer, either through accident or intend, showed an activation in the reward areas of their brain. The control group showed strong activation of the moral centers in the brain, in addition to areas that are associated with experiencing pain yourself; one of the requirements for empathy. The current findings could aid in a deeper understanding of aggressive conduct disorder and how, through for example therapy or medication, such disorders can be treated.
