Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 25 of 28

A Desensitized Fool Can Be a Little Monster

On June 13, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Students

By Nonie Arora

Lady Gaga Caution Tape Outfit, Credit: New York Magazine

Look at the Lady Gaga photo, how shocking do you find it?

Many people find Lady Gaga’s outfits shocking. But they don’t always think so the fifth time they see the same outfit. According to a recent study, extra exposure to photographs of Lady Gaga changes how subjects predict others will react to seeing the image for the first time.

Troy Campbell, a marketing PhD student in Fuqua, conducted a study to determine whether people who are desensitized by repeated exposure to a shocking picture will be able to accurately predict how someone else will react. He conducted the research with Ed O’Brien at the University of Michigan and other social scientists at Duke University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Colorado. Their overall finding is that desensitized subjects don’t do as well at predicting others’ reactions.

A simple example of desensitization would be hearing the same joke five times. It gets less funny. Generally people believe that experience leads to predictive knowledge, so it’s interesting that that test subjects got worse at predicting how others would respond to the Lady Gaga photographs.

In follow-up studies, Campbell and colleagues found that more exposure to the same jokes made people worse at selecting a joke that unexposed audiences would find the funniest. According to Campbell, people generally understand that they and others desensitize at times, but they frequently fail to notice and correct for it in themselves and others, and that can lead to poor decisions.

Troy Campbell

“Desensitization can not only turn us into ‘fools’ who tell the wrong jokes but also ‘monsters’” Campbell says. In one study, the researchers exposed two groups of human subjects to a painful noise for 5 or 40 seconds and then asked how painful the last few seconds of the noise was. The people who heard the sound for longer found the last few seconds to be less painful. The subjects were also asked to predict how painful 5 seconds of the noise would be for a person who had never heard the sound. People who had heard the sound for longer said the next five seconds would be less painful. Now what is fascinating is that people exposed to the sound for 40 seconds reported that they would feel less guilty when exposing the noise to someone else. Presumably, this is because the group of people exposed to the noise for 40 seconds perceived less pain in the last few seconds because they became desensitized.

Campbell says it can be dangerous when people project their sensibilities on to other people.

Campbell and O’Brien are looking to continue this line of work by investigating whether people are forgetting their original response of how they felt when they first saw the Lady Gaga image. This is one way to consider the bigger question: “Are memories we’re not thinking about truly gone or can they be accessed completely or in a flawed way?” How about you, do you remember distinctly finding the Lady Gaga photograph less shocking a minute ago? Campbell and his colleagues want to know; leave a comment below and help them with their future research.

Before coming to Duke, Campbell studied psychology at UC Irvine where he was mentored by Elizabeth Loftus and Peter Ditto. He began his undergraduate studies focused on creative writing, but became more interested in psychology. He thinks that social science is exciting because it can test competing theories of conventional wisdom. Good ideas can come from day to day conversations, according to Campbell. Campbell also worked for a summer as a Disney Imagineer, which gave him the opportunity to improve visitors’ Disney experience. Now, Campbell is collaborating with Peter Ubel and Dan Ariely as he pursues his doctoral degree in marketing from Fuqua.

Unions: They Do a Body Good

By Karl Bates

On June 5, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics

By Eric Ferreri, News & Communications

Union members say they're healthier than non-union employees.

A new Duke study suggests that labor unions are good for your health.

The research finds that more unionized American workers consider themselves healthy than do their non-union counterparts, an indication that membership is good for the body as well as the paycheck, said David Brady, a Duke sociology professor and co-author of the study.

“Unions are taking a beating in American culture,” Brady said. “But here we can say that not only are unions better for your wages, they’re good for your health.”

The study, which appears in the latest issue of Social Forces, examines survey results of more than 11,000 full-time workers, both union and non-union, who answered questions about their general health. The data is from the General Social Survey, a massive effort of the National Opinion Research Center providing more than three decades of data.

One finding: 85 percent of union workers reported being in good health, compared to 82 percent of non-union workers.

In real numbers, that 3 percent gap represents 3.7 million American workers.

“Three percent may not seem like a lot,” said Megan Reynolds, a Duke doctoral student and lead author of the study. “But when you start looking at the number of workers in the United States, that’s a lot of people.”

Brady and Reynolds say the difference is comparable to the physical benefits found to be associated with being married rather than divorced or being five years younger.

Union workers comprise just about 11 percent of the American workforce.

Brady and Reynolds culled the data to compare workers with largely similar characteristics aside from their union membership. They believe this is the first study to do so and illustrates that union membership is another factor – like age, education level and marital status – that affects a person’s health.

CITATION: “Union Membership and Self-Rated Health in the United States.” Megan Reynolds and David Brady. Social Forces. March 2012. DOI: 10.1093/sf/sor023

People, Embedded in a Network

By Karl Bates

On April 30, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Visualization

Guest Post By Steve Hartsoe, Office of News & Communications

“While social network analysts 20 years ago struggled with networks of hundreds of nodes, we now routinely face networks of hundreds of thousands,” according to James Moody, a Duke sociology professor and director of the school’s Network Analysis Center.

James Moody analyzes networks.

Moody, who was studying social networks long before they became a movie title, says that the abundance of material now available has created new opportunities to test scientific models for cultural behavior. But that growth has also generated a need for new tools and investments in computational social science.

He was one of the featured speakers at an April 26 symposium in Chapel Hill called “Social Networks. Analysis: Opportunities and Realities.” The event also featured speakers from Duke’s Social Science Research Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Odom Institute for Social Science Research, and the iLab at North Carolina A&T State University.

A common thread was how to adapt to the abundance of information now available via the Web, and how to make the best use of high-tech tools for analyzing social networks.

Moody urged the audience to stay focused and consider the merits of working with smaller samples. He also told participants to think of social networks as simply “people embedded in a context.”

An image from one of Moody's earlier studies on social networks.

“There’s a lot of data out there, but a lot of that data doesn’t answer the question you want to answer, right?” Moody said. “So I think there’s a data-question mismatch in some cases.”

Moody also stressed the importance of using the right tools for analyzing social networks. “Don’t trade a good idea for a bad instrument,” he said. “Global networking tools can easily apply to a network of 20 or 30 nodes.”

Speaking remotely via an audio feed, John Haaga, deputy director at the National Institute on Aging, urged researchers seeking federal funding to follow a basic tenet for hitters in baseball: Start smaller “and then swing for the fences.”

More than one attendee in the rapid-fire, three-hour discussion likened it to being on the receiving end of a fire hose of information.

Solving the mystery of the American psycho

By Ashley Mooney

On April 23, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience

by Ashley Mooney

New studies show that psychopathy in criminals is the best predictor of future offenses.

Kent Kiehl, associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, spoke Friday, April 20 on his research on psychopathy—a personality disorder characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for the rights of others and the rules of society—in prison populations in the United States and Canada. Using a trailer equipped with a mobile MRI unit that could travel to prisons, Kiehl scanned the brains of 2,000 inmate volunteers, which included 200 female offenders and 250 juvenile offenders, in medium and maximum-security prisons in Wisconsin and New Mexico.

Mugshot of Charles Manson, an infamous psychopath. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“Psychopathy is currently considered the single best predictor of future behavior,” Kiehl said. “If you have a diagnosis of psychopathy and you’re going for parole or something, they view that as a risk factor.”

He found that compared to the average offender, 60 percent of psychopaths reoffend within the next 200 days. Maximum-security juveniles showed a similar pattern: 68 percent of individuals who were at high risk for psychopathy reoffended.

Using images of the brain, Kiehl said he could predict psychopathy as well as one can with clinical error.

“If you have different behavior, you’re going to have a different brain. Just like men and women: different behaviors, different brains.”

Kiehl noted the role of the MAOA gene in violent behavior. He said if one has the gene and comes from a stressful environment, he or she has a significantly elevated risk for committing a violent offense. The gene may contribute to variability in grey matter density in some parts of the brain, which is a risk factor for psychopathy.

Although Kiehl noted the strengths of group therapy in prisons, he said treatment might actually make things worse. Treating psychopaths leads to “violent failure,” meaning that they have a high chance of violent recidivism (relapsing into the behavior).

In juveniles, however, Kiehl said positive reinforcement techniques have reduced recidivism by deemphasizing punishment and treating impulsivity. The kids in the program show a 50 percent reduction in violent recidivism compared to those who undergo normal treatment. Besides the reduction in violent recidivism, the juveniles are also less likely to commit the same types violent crimes, such as murder.

Diagnosing psychopathy and using cost-effective treatments, such as positive reinforcement, can help alleviate the burden of the prison system in the United States.

“We have a problem in the United States: We incarcerate a lot of people,” he said. “We incarcerate more per capita than any other country. It’s expensive—it costs $2.34 trillion per year, which is about the same as the annual estimate for all health care [in the country].”

Non-human Apes Cooperate, Negotiate

By sa160@duke.edu

On April 19, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Lecture

By: Nonie Arora

The Scientist and Nature Credit: Nonie Arora

A large bronze camel resides on Science Drive. Students may think it’s a landmark or a place to take scavenger hunt photos, but the camel has greater meaning.

At the annual Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Memorial Lecture, students learned that the Scientist and Nature statue depicts Schmidt-Nielsen and his research subject for 20 years, the camel. Dr. Brian Hare explained how Schmidt-Nielsen, a pioneer in animal physiology, hoped to learn more about humans by studying camels.

Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology, works on what he calls the “exciting problem of human cooperation” by comparing animal species. He is interested particularly in cognition and evolution with goal of understanding what it is that makes us human and how we got that way.

Hare defines cognition as the “the inferential abilities that allow for flexibility and understanding.” He wants to see if species can solve a problem in a new situation with flexible problem solving. Two of the species Hare studies are bonobos and chimpanzees, the two closest living relatives of humans.

People often say that collaboration, negotiation and altruism are unique human traits, Hare said. But he has seen non-human apes exhibit these traits in his experiments. He believes that to see how we are special, we need an accurate assessment of differences between humans and non-human apes.

Many researchers believed non-human chimps could not negotiate when they had conflicting interests because these animals don’t have norms and language like humans. For a while researchers were faced with a paradox: animals were exhibiting cooperative behavior in nature but not in experiments. The problem was the small sample sizes of these trials. When Hare began working at sanctuaries in Africa – Ngamba, Tchimpounga, Lola ya Bonobo – with large numbers of apes, he found evidence of cooperation.

He observed that changing chimp pairings could turn on spontaneous cooperation, and if the chimps were tolerant of their partners, they were much more likely to work together to get the banana.

In another set up, dominant and subordinate apes were paired together. Although subordinates initially refused selfish offers by the dominant ape, after negotiation, a cooperative decision was made within a few minutes in 95 percent of the trials. Hare said he was surprised at the extent of cooperation given the apes’ lack of norms and language.

Bonobos at the Cincinnati Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Hare also found that bonobos will voluntarily share food with a stranger, but not with a member of their in-group. He hypothesizes this is because sharing with a stranger enables them to expand their social network, but sharing with an in-group member does not significantly alter that relationship.

Hare’s research has shown that traits traditionally associated with humans like tolerance and negotiation, among others, are also present in other non-human apes, suggesting that we may not be as different from them as we thought.

TEDxDuke 2012

By Becca Bayham

On April 11, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Lecture, Science Communication & Education, Students

By Becca Bayham

You may have some superhero in you, according to a speaker at TEDxDuke, March 31. Borrowing the format of TED, a popular lecture series, the second-annual event featured 12 mini-lectures spanning subjects from poetry to ballet to historical architecture. Below, I discuss the three speakers that resonated with me the most.

Dasan Ahanu, poet and spoken word performer

Batman might win in a popularity contest, but fellow superhero the Green Lantern has a lot to teach us, according to Dasan Ahanu.

Ahanu described several parallels between artists and the green-garbed superhero. The Green Lantern overcomes his fear and protects the Earth by tapping into an energy source with a magic ring. Artists channel power too, Ahanu said — but with a pen, paintbrush or microphone instead of a fancy ring.

Artists, too, have to overcome fear, but it’s fear of criticism and embarrassment, rather than fear of interstellar criminals (fortunately). Also like the Lantern, artists access a central source of energy — creativity.

“The only limit to their power is imagination,” Ahanu said.

Patty Kennedy, marketing and communications professional

Patty Kennedy opened with a clip from the Matrix, when Morpheus tells Neo to jump from one building to another. Neo tries… and fails.

“Sometimes we jump, and we fall really hard,” Kennedy said. “What we’ll talk about today is why you need to jump anyway.”

Babies fall all the time when they’re learning how to walk, but that doesn’t keep them from trying.

“If we’re born with the willingness to move forward, what happened to us?” she asked. “My theory is that we unlearned courage.”

Courage doesn’t imply the absence of fear, she said. It means overcoming your fear — jumping even though you know you might fall.

“In all respect to this esteemed university, it’s not what made you great — you started that way.”

Jimmy Soni, Duke ’07 and chief of staff at the Huffington Post

History is like castor oil, Jimmy Soni said. It’s good for us, but it tastes bad.

“I might be going out on a limb, but I think we can make history taste better.”

To demonstrate, he told a story. He described how the Eiffel Tower was heavily criticized by Parisians during the years after its construction in 1889 (indeed, it was almost torn down in 1909). One particularly-vocal critic could be seen eating at a cafe under the landmark every day. When questioned about this, he said: “It’s the only place where I can’t see the Eiffel Tower.”

Our cultural past is full of interesting stories, Soni said. Working those stories into the curriculum could make history a lot more appetizing.

Improve science to explain everything, Dawkins says

By Becca Bayham

On April 3, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Lecture, Science Communication & Education, Students

By Becca Bayham

Have you ever wondered what people in the Middle Ages would have thought about airplanes? Or automatic doors? What would we have thought about iPhones 10 years ago?

Advanced technology can seem like magic, scientist Richard Dawkins said at a public lecture on March 29. But as cool as these technologies are, we know there’s nothing mystical about them.

Dawkins made the case that science, too, can seem magical or divinely-inspired. Take human evolution; some people believe that God, instead of natural selection, is responsible for the incredible complexity of life on Earth.

In response to that idea, Dawkins described a card game where a straight flush in any suit gives you a perfect hand. The odds of all four players getting a perfect hand are infinitesimally small, almost impossible. (If that happened to you, you might consider divine influence.)

“Evolution is not like that, but a lot of people think it is,” Dawkins said.

“Changes come about through the process of natural selection, which is often thought to be random chance, even though it is the opposite of random chance. It works because every one of those steps is only slightly improbable. But after 1,000 steps, you can end up with something beautiful, looking improbably like it was designed,” he explained.

Given a sufficiently large number of generations, very significant changes can occur. But evolution doesn’t guarantee change, Dawkins said. Chimpanzees, for example, have had as much time to evolve as we have. And yet they resemble our African ape ancestor more closely than we do.

When Christian academic John Lennox spoke at Duke earlier this year, he argued that science and religion are not mutually exclusive. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, falls on the other end of the faith vs. science spectrum. He said he doesn’t believe in religion, instead advocating an evidence-based approach to life.

“There are lots of people who actually do believe that a first century prophet turned water into wine, walked on water and fed the 5,000. There’s no more reason to believe that than to believe Cinderella’s fairy godmother turned a pumpkin into a carriage,” Dawkins said.

If something happens that science can’t explain, he argued that we should keep improving our science until we can explain it.

“Don’t ever be lazy enough to say ‘I can’t explain it, so it must be a miracle,'” Dawkins said. “The proper and brave response to any such challenge it to tackle it head on.”

Meet Joel Bray, Lemur Enthusiast

By sa160@duke.edu

On March 20, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Lemurs, Students

By Nonie Arora

Joel the Lemur and the rest of the Crazies meet Dick Vitale at the March 3 UNC game. (Duke Photo)

You may have been wondering who the student dressed as a lemur was for the Duke-Carolina game. Meet Joel Bray, lemur enthusiast and Trinity Junior.

Joel works in Brian Hare’s cognitive psychology lab where he does research on the psychology and evolution of nonhuman primates.

“Primates are an amazing way to understand human behavior, and specifically cognition,” Bray says. He studies lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center, which is home to the largest population of lemurs outside of Madagascar. Lemurs, most similar to the last common ancestor of all primates, are interesting because all 100 species are closely related at the genetic level, but they live in very different social and ecological environments.

In his first project, Joel studied inhibitory control in lemurs to understand how cognition evolves. This was part of a larger effort under NESCent, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. The project sought to compare dozens of species, including primates, birds, and rodents, on the same tasks using the same methods.

Joel tested the lemur’s inhibitory control by presenting them with an opaque cylinder with openings on both ends and food inside. The animals first learned how to retrieve the food. Then, the opaque tube was replaced with a transparent one. The impulse is to reach directly for the food item through the obstructed barrier, but to successfully retrieve the food the lemurs had to inhibit that response and reach from the side. Inhibitory control is considered to be important in both social and foraging contexts, and certain environments are expected to exert more selective pressure for the ability. In human children, it is predictive of future academic and social success.

Joel, out of costume, studies a troop of ringtailed lemurs because he's a method actor. (Courtesy of Joel Bray)

More recently, Joel has investigated social cognition, specifically asking what lemurs understand about the perception of other individuals. Humans display “theory of mind,” the notion that other individuals have perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs different from one’s own. While lemurs are unlikely to have a complex understanding of the minds of other individuals, they may display more basic abilities.

In his current project, Joel is asking whether lemurs will take advantage of information about a human competitor’s visual perspective to acquire food. One food item is visible to the experimenter and the other is not, and the lemur must decide which to approach. It is expected that that species in large or complex social groups will perform better because their evolutionary history has selected for being able to understand what other individuals can perceive (i.e. “social intelligence”).

Ultimately, this research may lead to a better understanding of human cognition and whether our “big brains” evolved because of complex social environments.

Animal emotions may mirror our own

By Becca Bayham

On March 19, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education

Photo by Becky Phillips, WSU

By Becca Bayham

Did you know that rats can laugh?

All you have to do is tickle them. Oh, and get a supersonic noise detector so that you can hear their happy chirps. [Click here for video]

“It’s one of the most remarkable phenomena I’ve seen in my life,” renowned researcher Jaak Panksepp said during a lecture at Duke, March 15. Panksepp spoke as part of Brain Awareness Week, a series of events dedicated to increasing public awareness about brain research.

Panksepp is well-known for his work in the field of affective neuroscience, or the study of the neural mechanisms that underlie emotion. He argues that important inferences about human emotions can be made from studying emotion in animals. However, this idea has met resistance in the neuroscience community.

“Most scientists are skeptical that animal feelings can ever be studied,” Panksepp said. At this, he gestured toward the audience.

“Well, I will never know what any of you feel, nor will you ever know what I feel,” he said. “But do we close discussion on this important topic, or do we try to work past it?”

Panksepp considers the idea worth investigating, and he has conducted many experiments to test the relationship between human and animal emotions. For example, he found that rats exposed to cat hair exhibited signs of fear, even when they’d never seen a cat before.

“I think you can identify a category of human feelings that correspond with animal feelings. There are going to be differences – there have to be … [But] if we understand their basic feelings, we will begin to understand our own.”

Ewwww, Squishy! …and Kind of Cool

By Karl Bates

On March 19, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education

A museum volunteer shows an ACTUAL HUMAN BRAIN -- ewwwwww -- to some kids.

Guest post by Sandra Ackerman, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

Cries of “Eew!” and “Squishy!” and a fair amount of giggling marked the arrival of Brain Awareness Week at the North Carolina Museum of Life + Science last week as it offered visitors some great hands-on activities.

The museum’s second floor demonstration lab became the Brain Lab, where kids and adults learned about the three layers of protection that nature has provided to our brains. First the visitors examined half a dozen animal skulls and tried to identify them. There was a beaver, a boar, a deer… What was that huge one, a toothed whale? No way!

The next step was to check out a few specimens of preserved brains, each tightly encased in the tough membrane called the meninges. The most courageous or curious visitors even got the opportunity, after donning latex gloves, to touch the surface of a human brain—an experience they will not soon forget.

Finally, for the purpose of active experimentation, each lab visitor was given a raw egg in its shell, representing the human brain within the meninges. If the egg was shaken vigorously inside a plastic container (the “skull”), the shell often cracked, spilling its precious contents. However, after adding water (“cerebrospinal fluid”) and a new egg to the container, a participant could shake the container or even slam it down on the counter, most often with the result that the egg just bobbed gently in the protective liquid. In cases of extreme trauma, the eggshell sometimes cracked after all—thereby showing vividly why cyclists and skateboarders should always wear a fourth layer of protection, a helmet.

Skulls were compared for their relative brain cases.

Nearby, kids wearing vision-distorting “prism glasses” took turns throwing sponge balls at targets marked on the wall. Before putting on the glasses, most participants took a few tries to hit the target, then quite a few more to home in on it while their vision was distorted by the prisms. What really shocked them, though, was how hard it was throw accurately once they had taken the glasses off again.

Asked to give her overall opinion of the scientific experience, one tired participant said, “Hmm, kind of dumb.”

“You think it’s dumb?” her mother asked, surprised.

“Except—except the squishy part!”