Getting the message
Text Messaging Reduces Analgesic Requirements During Surgery
Jamie Guillory et al.
Pain Medicine, April 2015, Pages 667–672
Objective: This study aims to determine whether communicating via short message service text message during surgery procedures leads to decreased intake of fentanyl for patients receiving regional anesthesia below the waist compared with a distraction condition and no intervention.
Methods: Ninety-eight patients receiving regional anesthesia for minor surgeries were recruited from a hospital in Montreal, QC, between January and March 2012. Patients were randomly assigned to text message with a companion, text message with a stranger, play a distracting mobile phone game, or receive standard perioperative management. Participants who were asked to text message or play a game did so before receiving the anesthetic and continued until the end of the procedure.
Results: The odds of receiving supplemental analgesia during surgery for patients receiving standard perioperative management were 6.77 (P = 0.009; N = 13/25) times the odds for patients in the text a stranger condition (N = 22/25 of patients), 4.39 times the odds for those in the text a companion condition (P = 0.03; N = 19/23), and 1.96 times the odds for those in the distraction condition (P = 0.25; N = 17/25).
Conclusion: Text messaging during surgery provides analgesic-sparing benefits that surpass distraction techniques, suggesting that mobile phones provide new opportunities for social support to improve patient comfort and reduce analgesic requirements during minor surgeries and in other clinical settings.
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Social Identity and Socially Shared Retrieval-Induced Forgetting: The Effects of Group Membership
Alin Coman & William Hirst
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a conversation, speakers and listeners will often influence each other's memories, and in doing so, promote the formation of a shared, or collective, memory. One means by which a mnemonic consensus emerges is through socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SSRIF). When listeners attend to the speakers' selective retrieval of previously encountered events, they forget unmentioned but related information more than they forget unrelated, unmentioned previously studied information. As a consequence, both speaker and listeners come to remember—and forget—the event in a similar way. SSRIF appears to be dependent on listeners concurrently retrieving the information with the speaker. We asked here whether such concurrent retrieval is a function of group membership, thereby underscoring the connection between a basic mnemonic mechanism — retrieval-induced forgetting — and a social function of communicative interaction — building a shared representation. In Experiment 1, Princeton students listening to a speaker selectively recall previously studied material showed SSRIF when the speaker was identified as a fellow Princeton student, but not when he or she was identified as a Yale student. In Experiment 2, activating a common student identity before the listening task triggered concurrent retrieval in Princeton students when listening to both Princeton and Yale speakers. Thus, similar patterns of selective forgetting are more likely to occur between speakers and listeners if they belong to the same social group. Basic mnemonic mechanisms seem to be adapted to promote the emergence of shared mnemonic representations that preserve group membership and group identity.
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Physical Experience Enhances Science Learning
Carly Kontra et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three laboratory experiments involving students' behavior and brain imaging and one randomized field experiment in a college physics class explored the importance of physical experience in science learning. We reasoned that students' understanding of science concepts such as torque and angular momentum is aided by activation of sensorimotor brain systems that add kinetic detail and meaning to students' thinking. We tested whether physical experience with angular momentum increases involvement of sensorimotor brain systems during students' subsequent reasoning and whether this involvement aids their understanding. The physical experience, a brief exposure to forces associated with angular momentum, significantly improved quiz scores. Moreover, improved performance was explained by activation of sensorimotor brain regions when students later reasoned about angular momentum. This finding specifies a mechanism underlying the value of physical experience in science education and leads the way for classroom practices in which experience with the physical world is an integral part of learning.
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The Simultaneous Extraction of Multiple Social Categories from Unfamiliar Faces
Douglas Martin et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2015, Pages 51–58
Abstract:
Recent research suggests that when viewing a face two social categories (e.g., sex and race) can be activated simultaneously. However, multiple social categories – including age, race and sex – can be extracted from faces. In the present study we present a new method, previously used to explore the costs and benefits associated with language-switching, to examine whether performance on an attended social categorization task (e.g., sex classification) was impacted by changes – switches – in two unattended social category dimensions (e.g., race and age). We predicted an interaction between the effects of transition (switch versus repeat) on an attended social categorization task and transition on both of the two unattended social category dimensions. Specifically, we hypothesized that when, across two trials, the attended categorization repeated (e.g., male – male) people would be quicker and more accurate when the unattended social categories also repeated (e.g., younger face – younger face) relative to when they switched (e.g., younger face – older face). Conversely, when, across two trials, the attended categorization switched we expected people would be quicker and more accurate when the unattended social categories also switched relative to when they repeated. These predictions were supported across three experiments, in which it was found that when unfamiliar face stimuli were categorized according to age (Expt. 1a), race (Expt. 1b) or sex (Expt. 1c) performance was impacted by the switch/repeat status of the unattended categories. These results suggest that, even when cognitively occupied we automatically and simultaneously extract information from faces that pertains to two unattended, task-irrelevant social categories.
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Thinking about the future can cause forgetting of the past
Annie Ditta & Benjamin Storm
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are able to imagine events in the future that have not yet happened, an ability referred to as episodic future thinking. There is now compelling evidence that episodic future thinking is accomplished via processes similar to those that underlie episodic retrieval. Drawing upon work on retrieval-induced forgetting, which has shown that retrieving some items in memory can cause the forgetting of other items in memory, we show that engaging in episodic future thinking can cause related autobiographical memories (Experiments 1–3) and episodic event descriptions (Experiments 3–4) to become less recallable in the future than they would have been otherwise. This finding suggests that episodic future thinking can serve as a memory modifier by changing the extent to which memories from our past can be subsequently retrieved.
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Aleksandra Sherman, Marcia Grabowecky & Satoru Suzuki
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
What shapes art appreciation? Much research has focused on the importance of visual features themselves (e.g., symmetry, natural scene statistics) and of the viewer's experience and expertise with specific artworks. However, even after taking these factors into account, there are considerable individual differences in art preferences. Our new result suggests that art preference is also influenced by the compatibility between visual properties and the characteristics of the viewer's visual system. Specifically, we have demonstrated, using 120 artworks from diverse periods, cultures, genres, and styles, that art appreciation is increased when the level of visual complexity within an artwork is compatible with the viewer's visual working memory capacity. The result highlights the importance of the interaction between visual features and the beholder's general visual capacity in shaping art appreciation.
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Thrill of Victory or Agony of Defeat? Perceivers Fail to Utilize Information in Facial Movements
Hillel Aviezer et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the distinction between positive and negative facial expressions is assumed to be clear and robust, recent research with intense real-life faces has shown that viewers are unable to reliably differentiate the valence of such expressions (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012). Yet, the fact that viewers fail to distinguish these expressions does not in itself testify that the faces are physically identical. In Experiment 1, the muscular activity of victorious and defeated faces was analyzed. Higher numbers of individually coded facial actions — particularly smiling and mouth opening — were more common among winners than losers, indicating an objective difference in facial activity. In Experiment 2, we asked whether supplying participants with valid or invalid information about objective facial activity and valence would alter their ratings. Notwithstanding these manipulations, valence ratings were virtually identical in all groups, and participants failed to differentiate between positive and negative faces. While objective differences between intense positive and negative faces are detectable, human viewers do not utilize these differences in determining valence. These results suggest a surprising dissociation between information present in expressions and information used by perceivers.
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Fiona Crichton & Keith Petrie
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, forthcoming
Objective: The Internet has expanded the scope for creating health scares and increased the risk of nocebo responding in individuals exposed to misinformation about threats to personal health posed by aspects of modern life, such as exposure to new technologies. It was the aim of this experiment to investigate whether the delivery of positive expectations might reduce or reverse symptoms triggered by negative expectations formed from such misinformation.
Method: In the context of a study investigating symptoms during exposure to windfarm sound, 64 volunteers assessed their symptomatic experiences during two discrete sessions, throughout which they listened to wind turbine sound containing audible and sub-audible (infrasound) components. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either positive or negative information about the health effects of infrasound prior to their first infrasound exposure session. They were then shown the alternate information and exposed to infrasound during their second session.
Results: Participants receiving negative expectations were less symptomatic during exposure if they had previously received positive expectations about infrasound. Further, participants given positive expectations after the earlier delivery of negative expectations exhibited a placebo response, reversing the nocebo response exhibited in their first exposure session.
Conclusion: Results suggest accessing positively framed health information may reverse or dilute the effect of negative expectations formed from exposure to media warnings about health risks posed by new technologies, such as wind turbines.
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Controllable Objects Seem Closer
Cheryl Wakslak & Kyu Kim
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
More and more we interact with other people across varying amounts of geographical distance. What shapes our categorization of a fixed amount of such distance as near or far? Building upon and expanding prior work on the association between spatial distance perception and reachability, we argue that people judge a given geographical distance as subjectively smaller when they can exert control across that distance. Studies 1–4 demonstrate this effect of control on spatial distance judgment in disparate contexts, including political, work, and family domains, and explore implications of such judgments for the downstream judgment of travel time to a location (Study 2). We do not find that one's desire for control moderates these effects (Study 4). Supporting a cognitive association argument, we find evidence that the association between control and distance is bidirectional, with subjective distance influencing perceived controllability (Study 5). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Anne Kever et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, June 2015, Pages 582-589
Abstract:
Nowadays, the idea of a reciprocal influence of physiological and psychological processes seems to be widely accepted. For instance, current theories of embodied emotion suggest that knowledge about an emotion concept involves simulations of bodily experienced emotional states relevant to the concept. In line with this framework, the present study investigated whether actual levels of physiological arousal interact with the processing of emotional words. Participants performed 2 blocks of an attentional blink task, once after a cycling session (increased arousal) and once after a relaxation session (reduced arousal). Concretely, participants were instructed to detect and report 2 target words (T1 and T2) presented among a series of nonword distractors. T1 and T2 were either neutral, high arousal, or low arousal words. Results revealed that increased physiological arousal led to improved reports of high arousal T2 words, whereas reduced physiological arousal led to improved reports of low arousal T2 words. Neutral T2 remained unaffected by the arousing conditions. These findings emphasize that actual levels of physiological arousal modulate the cognitive access to arousal (in-)congruent emotional concepts and suggest a direct grounding of emotion knowledge in our bodily systems of arousal.
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Want to block earworms from conscious awareness? B(u)y gum!
Philip Beaman, Kitty Powell & Ellie Rapley
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, June 2015, Pages 1049-1057
Abstract:
Three experiments examine the role of articulatory motor planning in experiencing an involuntary musical recollection (an "earworm"). Experiment 1 shows that interfering with articulatory motor programming by chewing gum reduces both the number of voluntary and the number of involuntary — unwanted — musical thoughts. This is consistent with other findings that chewing gum interferes with voluntary processes such as recollections from verbal memory, the interpretation of ambiguous auditory images, and the scanning of familiar melodies, but is not predicted by theories of thought suppression, which assume that suppression is made more difficult by concurrent tasks or cognitive loads. Experiment 2 shows that chewing the gum affects the experience of "hearing" the music and cannot be ascribed to a general effect on thinking about a tune only in abstract terms. Experiment 3 confirms that the reduction of musical recollections by chewing gum is not the consequence of a general attentional or dual-task demand. The data support a link between articulatory motor programming and the appearance in consciousness of both voluntary and unwanted musical recollections.
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Visualizing Trumps Vision in Training Attention
Robert Reinhart, Laura McClenahan & Geoffrey Woodman
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mental imagery can have powerful training effects on behavior, but how this occurs is not well understood. Here we show that even a single instance of mental imagery can improve attentional selection of a target more effectively than actually practicing visual search. By recording subjects' brain activity, we found that these imagery-induced training effects were due to perceptual attention being more effectively focused on targets following imagined training. Next, we examined the downside of this potent training by changing the target after several trials of training attention with imagery and found that imagined search resulted in more potent interference than actual practice following these target changes. Finally, we found that proactive interference from task-irrelevant elements in the visual displays appears to underlie the superiority of imagined training relative to actual practice. Our findings demonstrate that visual attention mechanisms can be effectively trained to select target objects in the absence of visual input, and this results in more effective control of attention than practicing the task itself.
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How Far Away Is That? It Depends on You: Perception Accounts for the Abilities of Others
Richard Abrams & Blaire Weidler
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perception is believed to scale the world to reflect one's own capabilities for action — objects that are more effortful to obtain are perceived as further away. Somewhat surprisingly, perception is also influenced by observing another person attempt an action, even though others cannot directly alter one's own capabilities. It is unknown, however, whether the effects of observation reflect a simulation of one acting as if from the perspective of the actor, or whether they reflect simulation of the potential effects of the actor on the environment, but from the observer's own point of view. In 2 experiments, we had an actor and an observer view a scene from opposing viewpoints. Enhancement of the actor's capabilities to reach a target object caused the target to appear further from the observer. Thus, in addition to indexing one's own capabilities, the perceptual system also scales the world to account for the potential effects of others.
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Mobile Persuasion: Can Screen Size and Presentation Mode Make a Difference to Trust?
Ki Joon Kim & Shyam Sundar
Human Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Guided by the Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability (MAIN) model of technology effects and the heuristic–systematic model (HSM) of information processing, this study explicates underlying mechanisms by which variations in screen size (large vs. small) and presentation mode (video vs. text) contribute to user perceptions of media content on their smartphones. Results from a between-subjects experiment (N = 120) indicate that large screen size and video mode promote heuristic processing while small screen size and text mode encourage systematic processing. Heuristic processing leads to greater affective and behavioral trust while systematic processing is associated with cognitive trust. Phantom model analysis reveals the effects of large screen size and video mode on purchase intentions are sequentially mediated by type of information processing and multidimensional trust.
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Freezing Behavior as a Response to Sexual Visual Stimuli as Demonstrated by Posturography
Harold Mouras et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2015
Abstract:
Posturographic changes in motivational conditions remain largely unexplored in the context of embodied cognition. Over the last decade, sexual motivation has been used as a good canonical working model to study motivated social interactions. The objective of this study was to explore posturographic variations in response to visual sexual videos as compared to neutral videos. Our results support demonstration of a freezing-type response in response to sexually explicit stimuli compared to other conditions, as demonstrated by significantly decreased standard deviations for (i) the center of pressure displacement along the mediolateral and anteroposterior axes and (ii) center of pressure's displacement surface. These results support the complexity of the motor correlates of sexual motivation considered to be a canonical functional context to study the motor correlates of motivated social interactions.
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Grasp Posture Alters Visual Processing Biases Near the Hands
Laura Thomas
Psychological Science, May 2015, Pages 625-632
Abstract:
Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; these biases may assist them in evaluating items that are candidates for action. I investigated the hypothesis that hand postures that afford different types of actions differentially bias vision. Across three experiments, participants performed global-motion-detection and global-form-perception tasks while their hands were positioned (a) near the display in a posture affording a power grasp, (b) near the display in a posture affording a precision grasp, or (c) in their laps. Although the power-grasp posture facilitated performance on the motion-detection task, the precision-grasp posture instead facilitated performance on the form-perception task. These results suggest that the visual system weights processing on the basis of an observer's current affordances for specific actions: Fast and forceful power grasps enhance temporal sensitivity, whereas detail-oriented precision grasps enhance spatial sensitivity.