Out-of-body experience
The world can look better: Enhancing beauty experience with brain stimulation
Zaira Cattaneo et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Aesthetic appreciation is part of our everyday life: it is a subjective judgment we make when looking at a painting, a landscape, or - in fact - at another person. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) plays a critical role in aesthetic judgments. Here we show that the experience of beauty can be artificially enhanced with brain stimulation. Specifically, we show that aesthetic appreciation of representational paintings and photographs can be increased by applying anodal (excitatory) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the left DLPFC. Our results thus show that beauty is in the brain of the beholder, and offer a novel view on the neural networks underlying aesthetic appreciation.
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Hoody, goody or buddy? How travel mode affects social perceptions in urban neighbourhoods
Birgitta Gatersleben, Niamh Murtagh & Emma White
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, November 2013, Pages 219-230
Abstract:
When travelling through a new environment people can and do make very quick judgments about the local conditions. This paper explores the idea that such judgments are affected by the travel mode they use. We hypothesise that drivers generate a more superficial impression of the things they observe than those who walk because they are exposed to less information. This prediction is based on social psychological research that demonstrates that information that becomes available in "thin slices" affects superficial judgments. A survey study (n = 644) demonstrated that perceptions of a less affluent area are indeed negatively related to more driving and positively related to more walking, but only for those who do not live there. Perceptions of a neighbouring affluent area are positively related to more driving. Two experimental studies (n = 245 and n = 91) demonstrated that explicit (but not implicit) attitudes towards a group of young people in an ambiguous social situation are more negative when they are viewed from the perspective of a car user in particular in relation to a pedestrian perspective. These findings suggest that mode use may affect communities by influencing social judgments.
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Adam Brasel & James Gips
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
As mouse-driven desktop computers give way to touchpad laptops and touchscreen tablets, the role of touch in online consumer behavior has become increasingly important. This work presents initial explorations into the effects of varying touch-based interfaces on consumers, and argues that research into the interfaces used to access content can be as important as research into the content itself. Two laboratory studies using a variety of touch technologies explore how touchscreen interfaces can increase perceived psychological ownership, and this in turn magnifies the endowment effect. Touch interfaces also interact with importance of product haptics and actual interface ownership in their effects on perceived product ownership, with stronger effects for products high in haptic importance and interfaces that are owned. Results highlight that perceptions of online products and marketing activities are filtered through the lens of the interfaces used to explore them, and touch-based devices like tablets can lead to higher product valuations when compared to traditional computers.
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Virtually numbed: Immersive video gaming alters real-life experience
Ulrich Weger & Stephen Loughnan
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
As actors in a highly mechanized environment, we are citizens of a world populated not only by fellow humans, but also by virtual characters (avatars). Does immersive video gaming, during which the player takes on the mantle of an avatar, prompt people to adopt the coldness and rigidity associated with robotic behavior and desensitize them to real-life experience? In one study, we correlated participants' reported video-gaming behavior with their emotional rigidity (as indicated by the number of paperclips that they removed from ice-cold water). In a second experiment, we manipulated immersive and nonimmersive gaming behavior and then likewise measured the extent of the participants' emotional rigidity. Both studies yielded reliable impacts, and thus suggest that immersion into a robotic viewpoint desensitizes people to real-life experiences in oneself and others.
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Gustatory pleasure and pain: The offset of acute physical pain enhances responsiveness to taste
Brock Bastian, Jolanda Jetten & Matthew Hornsey
Appetite, January 2014, Pages 150-155
Abstract:
The idea that pain may serve to produce pleasurable states has been noted by theorists and, more recently, substantiated by empirical findings. We explored the possibility that, beyond producing positive hedonic states, the offset of pain may serve to enhance the capacity for gustatory pleasure. Across three studies we examined whether pain offset may enhance responsiveness to taste. In Study 1 participants enjoyed chocolate more after the experience of pain compared to completing a similar but non-painful task. In Study 2, pain offset increased the perceived intensity of a range of tastes, both pleasant and unpleasant, indicating that the effects of pain offset are not limited to the processing of positive hedonic stimuli. In Study 3, pain offset increased sensitivity to different flavors. The findings suggest that the offset of acute pain increases awareness of, and therefore sensitivity to, gustatory input, thereby enhancing the capacity for gustatory pleasure.
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Nonconscious Learning From Crowded Sequences
Anne Atas et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can people learn complex information without conscious awareness? Implicit learning - learning without awareness of what has been learned - has been the focus of intense investigation over the last 50 years. However, it remains controversial whether complex knowledge can be learned implicitly. In the research reported here, we addressed this challenge by asking participants to differentiate between sequences of symbols they could not perceive consciously. Using an operant-conditioning task, we showed that participants learned to associate distinct sequences of crowded (nondiscriminable) symbols with their respective monetary outcomes (reward or punishment). Overall, our study demonstrates that sensitivity to sequential regularities can arise through the nonconscious temporal integration of perceptual information.
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Dentists Make Larger Holes in Teeth Than They Need to If the Teeth Present a Visual Illusion of Size
Robert O'Shea, Nicholas Chandler & Rajneesh Roy
PLoS ONE, October 2013
Background: Health care depends, in part, on the ability of a practitioner to see signs of disease and to see how to treat it. Visual illusions, therefore, could affect health care. Yet there is very little prospective evidence that illusions can influence treatment. We sought such evidence.
Methods and Results: We simulated treatment using dentistry as a model system. We supplied eight, practicing, specialist dentists, endodontists, with at least 21 isolated teeth each, randomly sampled from a much larger sample of teeth they were likely to encounter. Teeth contained holes and we asked the endodontists to cut cavities in preparation for filling. Each tooth presented a more or less potent version of a visual illusion of size, the Delboeuf illusion, that made the holes appear smaller than they were. Endodontists and the persons measuring the cavities were blind to the parameters of the illusion. We found that the size of cavity endodontists made was linearly related to the potency of the Delboeuf illusion (p<.01) with an effect size (Cohen's d) of 1.41. When the illusion made the holes appear smaller, the endodontists made cavities larger than needed.
Conclusions: The visual context in which treatment takes place can influence the treatment. Undesirable effects of visual illusions could be counteracted by a health practitioner's being aware of them and by using measurement.
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Rough primes and rough conversations: Evidence for a modality-specific basis to mental metaphors
Michael Schaefer et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does our brain organize knowledge? Traditional theories assume that our knowledge is represented abstractly in an amodal conceptual network of formal logic symbols. The theory of embodied cognition challenges this view and argues that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences. We tested this hypothesis by examining how the concept of social coordination is grounded metaphorically in the tactile sensation of roughness. Participants experienced rough or smooth touch before being asked to judge an ambiguous social interaction. Results revealed that rough touch made social interactions appear more difficult and adversarial, consistent with the rough metaphor. This impact of tactile cues on social impressions was accompanied by a network including primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, amygdala, hippocampus, and inferior prefrontal cortex. Thus, the roughness of tactile stimulation affected metaphor-relevant (but not metaphor-irrelevant) behavioral and neural responses. Receiving touch from a rough object seems to trigger the application of associated ontological concepts (or scaffolds) even for unrelated people and situations (but not to unrelated or more general feelings). Since this priming was based on somatosensory brain areas, our results provide support for the theory that sensorimotor grounding is intrinsic to cognitive processes.
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Brain white matter structural properties predict transition to chronic pain
Ali Mansour et al.
Pain, October 2013, Pages 2160-2168
Abstract:
Neural mechanisms mediating the transition from acute to chronic pain remain largely unknown. In a longitudinal brain imaging study, we followed up patients with a single sub-acute back pain (SBP) episode for more than 1year as their pain recovered (SBPr), or persisted (SBPp) representing a transition to chronic pain. We discovered brain white matter structural abnormalities (n=24 SBP patients; SBPp=12 and SBPr=12), as measured by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), at entry into the study in SBPp in comparison to SBPr. These white matter fractional anisotropy (FA) differences accurately predicted pain persistence over the next year, which was validated in a second cohort (n=22 SBP patients; SBPp=11 and SBPr=11), and showed no further alterations over a 1-year period. Tractography analysis indicated that abnormal regional FA was linked to differential structural connectivity to medial vs lateral prefrontal cortex. Local FA was correlated with functional connectivity between medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens in SBPr. As we have earlier shown that the latter functional connectivity accurately predicts transition to chronic pain, we can conclude that brain structural differences, most likely existing before the back pain-inciting event and independent of the back pain, predispose subjects to pain chronification.
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Relationship between oxytocin receptor genotype and recognition of facial emotion
Martin Melchers et al.
Behavioral Neuroscience, October 2013, Pages 780-787
Abstract:
The ability to understand thoughts and feelings of another person is an important prerequisite for successful social interaction. One part of this ability is the recognition of emotions in the face of the counterpart. Knowledge on genetic contributions to emotion recognition is still scarce. In the present study, 105 healthy participants were experimentally tested for their ability to recognize complex emotions in faces. As prior studies outlined the importance of the oxytocin system for emotion recognition, the functional rs2268498 polymorphism on the OXTR-gene was investigated. Although there were no differences in reaction times between genotype groups, carriers of the T-allele exhibited more accurate recognition skills than subjects carrying the CC-genotype. There was no influence of gender or age. Results support recent findings, demonstrating the importance of the oxytocin system for affect processing and related social behavior.
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Christopher Cardoso, Mark Ellenbogen & Anne-Marie Linnen
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Evidence suggests that intranasal oxytocin enhances the perception of emotion in facial expressions during standard emotion identification tasks. However, it is not clear whether this effect is desirable in people who do not show deficits in emotion perception. That is, a heightened perception of emotion in faces could lead to "oversensitivity" to the emotions of others in nonclinical participants. The goal of this study was to assess the effects of intranasal oxytocin on emotion perception using ecologically valid social and nonsocial visual tasks. Eighty-two participants (42 women) self-administered a 24 IU dose of intranasal oxytocin or a placebo in a double-blind, randomized experiment and then completed the perceiving and understanding emotion components of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. In this test, emotion identification accuracy is based on agreement with a normative sample. As expected, participants administered intranasal oxytocin rated emotion in facial stimuli as expressing greater emotional intensity than those given a placebo. Consequently, accurate identification of emotion in faces, based on agreement with a normative sample, was impaired in the oxytocin group relative to placebo. No such effect was observed for tests using nonsocial stimuli. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that intranasal oxytocin enhances the salience of social stimuli in the environment, but not nonsocial stimuli. The present findings support a growing literature showing that the effects of intranasal oxytocin on social cognition can be negative under certain circumstances, in this case promoting "oversensitivity" to emotion in faces in healthy people.
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Thin slices of creativity: Using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition
Ranjani Prabhakaran, Adam Green & Jeremy Gray
Behavior Research Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in creative cognition can be manifest even in brief responses, such as single-word utterances. Participants (n = 193) were instructed to say a verb upon seeing a noun displayed on a computer screen and were cued to respond creatively to half of the nouns. For every noun-verb pair (72 pairs per subject), we assessed the semantic distance between the noun and the verb, using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Semantic distance was higher in the cued ("creative") condition than the uncued condition, within subjects. Critically, between subjects, semantic distance in the cued condition had a strong relationship to a creativity factor derived from a battery of verbal, nonverbal, and achievement-based creativity measures (β= .50), and this relation remained when controlling for intelligence and personality. The data show that creative cognition can be assessed reliably and validly from such thin slices of behavior.
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Ljubica Damjanovic et al.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explored how varying levels of professional expertise in hostile crowd management could enhance threat detection capabilities as assessed by the face in the crowd paradigm. Trainee police officers and more experienced police officers specialized in, and having extensive experience with, riot control, were compared with participants with no experience in hostile crowd management on their search times and accuracy levels in detecting angry and happy face targets against a display of emotional and neutral distractor faces. The experienced officers relative to their trainee counterparts and nonpolice controls showed enhanced detection for threatening faces in both types of display along with a greater degree of inhibitory control over angry face distractors. These findings help to reinforce the ecological validity of the face in the crowd paradigm and provide a new theoretical link for the role of individual differences on the attentional processing of socially relevant stimuli.