Study: Best way to memorize stuff? It depends...

Recent experiments by psychologists at Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh shed new light on how we learn and how we remember our real-world experiences.

The research, described in the March 12 online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggests that varying what we study and spacing out our learning over time can both be helpful for memory -- it just depends on what we're trying to remember.

"Lots of prior research has shown that learning and memory benefit from spacing study sessions out," said Benjamin Rottman, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Causal Learning and Decision-Making Lab at Pitt.

"For example, if you cram the night before a test, you might remember the information the next day for the test, but you will probably forget it fairly soon," he added. "In contrast, if you study the material on different days leading up to the test, you will be more likely to recall it for a longer period of time."

But while the "spacing effect" is one of the most replicated findings in psychological research, much of this work has been predicated on the idea that what you are trying to learn -- the content of the experience itself -- repeats identically each time. Yet that is rarely the case in real life, when some features of our experiences may stay the same, but others are likely to change. For example, imagine repeat trips to your local coffeeshop. While many features may stay the same on each visit, a new barista may be serving you. How does the spacing effect work in light of such variation across experiences?

In two experiments, Temple and Pitt researchers asked participants to repeatedly study pairs of items and scenes that were either identical on each repetition or in which the item stayed the same but the scene changed each time.

One of the experiments asked participants to learn and to test their memory via their smartphones -- an unusual approach for learning and memory research. This enabled researchers to ask participants to learn pairs at various times of the day across 24 hours, more accurately representing how people actually learn information.

In the second experiment, researchers collected data online in a single session.

Emily Cowan, lead author on the PNAS paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Temple's Adaptive Memory Lab, explained: "The combination of these two large-scale experiments allowed us to look at the timing of these 'spacing effects' across both long timescales -- for example, hours to days -- in Experiment No. 1 versus short timescales -- for example, seconds to minutes -- in Experiment No. 2. With this, we were able to ask how memory is impacted both by what is being learned -- whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes -- as well as when it is learned over repeated study opportunities.

"In other words, using these two designs, we could examine how having material that more closely resembles our experiences of repetition in the real world -- where some aspects stay the same but others differ -- impacts memory if you are exposed to that information in quick succession versus over longer intervals… from seconds to minutes, or hours to days."

As in prior experiments, researchers found that spaced learning benefited item memory. But they also found that memory was better for the items that had been paired with different scenes compared with those shown with the same scene each time. For example, if you want to remember a new person's name, repeating the name but associating it with different information about the person can actually be helpful.

"In contrast," Rottman said, "we found that for associative memory -- memory for the item and which scene it was paired with -- benefited from stability. Spacing only benefited memory for the pairs that were repeated exactly, and only if there were pretty long gaps -- hours to days -- between study opportunities. For example, if you are trying to remember the new person's name and something about them, like their favorite food, it is more helpful to repeat that same exact name-food pairing multiple times with spacing between each."

The Pitt-Temple experiments represent basic memory research. "Because of how nuanced memory is, it is hard to provide clear advice for things like studying for a test because the sort of material can be so different," Rottman said. "But in theory our findings should be broadly relevant to different sorts of tasks, like remembering someone's name and things about them, studying for a test, and learning new vocabulary in a foreign language.

"At the same time, because all these sorts of tasks have lots of differences, it is hard to make really concrete advice for them. We would need to do follow-up research to provide more concrete guidance for each case."

Cowan continued: "This work demonstrates the benefits of spaced learning on memory are not absolute, instead depending on the variability present in the content across repetitions and the timing between learning opportunities, expanding our current understanding of how the way in which we learn information can impact how it is remembered. Our work suggests that both variability and spacing may present methods to improve our memory for isolated features and associative information, respectively, raising important applications for future research, education, and our everyday lives."

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Low voice pitch increases standing among strangers

If you're looking for a long-term relationship or to boost your social status, lower your pitch, according to researchers studying the effects of voice pitch on social perceptions. They found that lower voice pitch makes women and men sound more attractive to potential long-term partners, and lower voice pitch in males makes the individual sound more formidable and prestigious among other men.

The results of the cross-cultural study, published in the journal Psychological Science, have implications for understanding human evolution and how people today confer and evaluate social status.

"Vocal communication is one of the most important human characteristics, and pitch is the most perceptually noticeable aspect of voice," said David Puts, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Understanding how voice pitch influences social perceptions can help us understand social relationships more broadly, how we attain social status, how we evaluate others on social status and how we choose mates."

To study how voice pitch influences social perceptions, the researchers selected two male and two female voice recordings all repeating the same sentence. They edited the clips to produce the average pitch for the speaker's sex plus a higher-pitched and lower-pitched version of each voice, for a total of 12 clips, and divided the clips into male-male and female-female pairings. The researchers then asked more than 3,100 participants across 22 countries, representing five continents and New Zealand, to listen to the paired recordings and answer questions about which voice sounded more attractive, flirtatious, formidable and prestigious.

The researchers found that women and men preferred lower-pitched voices when asked which voice they would prefer for a long-term relationship such as marriage. They also found that a lower male voice pitch made the individual sound more formidable, especially among younger men, and more prestigious, particularly among older men. Perceptions of formidability and prestige had a larger impact in societies with more relational mobility -- where group members interact more often with strangers -- and more violence.

"We looked at homicide rate as a way of quantifying the degree of physical violence in a society, which was probably an important factor for our male ancestors' reproductive success," Puts said, explaining that human males often experienced threats of violence in competition over mates and those who were bigger -- or seemed bigger -- tended to have more success. "Human males have sex traits, such as upper body muscle mass, that look like they were shaped by male use of force or threat of force to win mating opportunities. A low voice pitch exaggerates size. It makes an organism, whether it's a person or non-human primate, seem big and intimidating."

The fact that study participants across cultures perceived a lower male voice pitch as conferring formidability and high social status suggests that these characteristics were likely conferred to our ancestors as well, Puts said. He likened the effect to that of Darth Vader's voice in the Star Wars franchise: no matter where the character goes in the galaxy, his low pitch is perceived as formidable because larger beings tend to produce lower frequencies.

"The findings suggest that deep voices evolved in males because our male ancestors frequently interacted with competitors who were strangers, and they show how we can use evolutionary thinking and research from nonhuman animals to predict and understand how our psychology and behaviors vary across social contexts, including cross-culturally," Puts said. "Male traits such as deep voices and beards are highly socially salient, but this new research shows that the salience of at least one of these traits varies in predictable ways across societies, and it suggests that others, such as beards, do too."

In addition, the researchers found that men perceived females with higher-pitched voices as more attractive for short-term relationships, and women perceived higher pitches as sounding more flirtatious and being more attractive to men. In societies with lower relational mobility, where group members are more likely to know one another, women may perceive these flirtatious voices as a threat to existing social networks, according to the researchers.

"Female secondary sex traits, like voice, look like they're much better designed for mate attraction rather than threatening each other physically," Puts said. "We found that we could use relational mobility to predict women's sensitivity to raised voice pitch in competitors. Sensitivity may have been higher in societies with lower relational mobility because flirtatious behavior is not just a threat to your romantic relationship but your friendships as well."

A common misconception is that early humans lived only in small-scale societies where everybody knew each other, Puts said. This was sometimes true, but the ethnographic and archeological records show that group sizes were often large. And although many people lived in small societies, he added, mounting evidence suggests that they periodically joined other groups to form large-scale societies numbering in the hundreds or thousands. They sometimes lived in these larger groups for months at a time and maintained these social networks even when they returned to living in smaller communities.

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What makes sustainable consumption so difficult

While many people want to achieve major long-term goals -- such as improving their diet, quitting smoking or adopting a more sustainable lifestyle -- they often find it difficult to do so. Is it all down to a lack of self-discipline? No, it's not, according to social psychologist Professor Wilhelm Hofmann from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. For a review article in Nature Reviews Psychology, Hofmann has analyzed numerous research studies and highlighted the extent to which the physical and social environment influence individual behavior. He criticizes the fact that many psychological studies still tend to focus on the individual while ignoring crucial structural factors. The article was published online on November 20, 2023.

Environmental factors have enormous impact on decisions

Traditional approaches such as self-determination theory focus on personal autonomy.

This means that an individual's freedom of choice must be preserved at all costs.

"The public policy recommendations that result from this are to make no restrictions, provide sufficient information about the identified risks and side effects of the various options and then trust that people will make the right decisions and act appropriately," says Hofmann.

But this formula doesn't work.

To illustrate this, the Bochum-based psychologist cites the example of an eco-conscious consumer who'd like to reduce their meat consumption, but occasionally also finds themselves tempted by a meat dish.

"In conventional psychology, this is regarded as a conflict within the individual," he explains.

If the person could only muster enough willpower, they would achieve their long-term goal.

According to Hofmann, this view is misguided, because decisions are very much influenced by the environment: For example, if there are five meat dishes in the canteen, but only one vegetarian option -- and the latter might even be more expensive.

People also wish to conform to social norms: If many of your friends and relatives drive a big car, you're more likely to want one yourself.

It's not enough to hope for individual discipline

In his article, Hofmann combines psychological research with public policy research to illustrate that psychological research has implications for other areas and should take a broader view.

In particular, he argues that we need to be more aware of the fact that people don't have the power to shape many of their own environments.

"Many people try to live in a more sustainable manner, but fail to do so in reality," says Wilhelm Hofmann.

Unsustainable options are often cheaper, more visible and more available than sustainable ones.

"Relying on individual discipline, willingness to make sacrifices and a sense of guilt won't get us very far. We need to question and change the structures that contribute to social problems such as the overuse of natural resources and make sustainable behavior more difficult. And in order to achieve this, we need sound and effective political decisions." Many people would like to see more regulation so that they no longer have to swim against the tide.

Growing awareness of the problem, combined with the realization that some social challenges and crises can't be solved through personal responsibility or free markets, is driving the desire for government intervention and solutions.

In essence, society needs to agree on good rules in order to provide individuals with the best possible support on the path to the desired change towards greater sustainability.

Greater focus on the common good

"The accelerating climate crisis is the best example of how the unlimited exercise of personal consumer freedoms leads to negative consequences for society as a whole," explains Wilhelm Hofmann.

"We've forgotten to a certain extent to look at the collective benefit, i.e. the common good, and need to recognize the importance of good regulation once again. By this I mean that we need to agree on effective and fair rules that protect us from risks and that apply to everyone equally. Such as are standard practice in road traffic, for example."

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Why emotions stirred by music create such powerful memories

Time flows in a continuous stream -- yet our memories are divided into separate episodes, all of which become part of our personal narrative. How emotions shape this memory formation process is a mystery that science has only recently begun to unravel. The latest clue comes from UCLA psychologists, who have discovered that fluctuating emotions elicited by music helps form separate and durable memories.

The study, published in Nature Communications, used music to manipulate the emotions of volunteers performing simple tasks on a computer. The researchers found that the dynamics of people's emotions molded otherwise neutral experiences into memorable events.

"Changes in emotion evoked by music created boundaries between episodes that made it easier for people to remember what they had seen and when they had seen it," said lead author Mason McClay, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA. "We think this finding has great therapeutic promise for helping people with PTSD and depression."

As time unfolds, people need to group information, since there is too much to remember (and not all of it useful). Two processes appear to be involved in turning experiences into memories over time: The first integrates our memories, compressing and linking them into individualized episodes; the other expands and separates each memory as the experience recedes into the past. There's a constant tug of war between integrating memories and separating them, and it's this push and pull that helps to form distinct memories. This flexible process helps a person understand and find meaning in their experiences, as well as retain information.

"It's like putting items into boxes for long-term storage," said corresponding author David Clewett, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA. "When we need to retrieve a piece of information, we open the box that holds it. What this research shows is that emotions seem to be an effective box for doing this sort of organization and for making memories more accessible."

A similar effect may help explain why Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour" has been so effective at creating vivid and lasting memories: Her concert contains meaningful chapters that can be opened and closed to relive highly emotional experiences.

McClay and Clewett, along with Matthew Sachs at Columbia University, hired composers to create music specifically designed to elicit joyous, anxious, sad or calm feelings of varied intensity. Study participants listened to the music while imagining a narrative to accompany a series of neutral images on a computer screen, such as a watermelon slice, a wallet or a soccer ball. They also used the computer mouse to track moment-to-moment changes in their feelings on a novel tool developed for tracking emotional reactions to music.

Then, after performing a task meant to distract them, participants were shown pairs of images again in a random order. For each pair, they were asked which image they had seen first, then how far apart in time they felt they had seen the two objects. Pairs of objects that participants had seen immediately before and after a change of emotional state -- whether of high, low, or medium intensity -- were remembered as having occurred farther apart in time compared to images that did not span an emotional change. Participants also had worse memory for the order of items that spanned emotional changes compared to items they had viewed while in a more stable emotional state. These effects suggest that a change in emotion resulting from listening to music was pushing new memories apart.

"This tells us that intense moments of emotional change and suspense, like the musical phrases in Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' could be remembered as having lasted longer than less emotive experiences of similar length," McClay said. "Musicians and composers who weave emotional events together to tell a story may be imbuing our memories with a rich temporal structure and longer sense of time."

The direction of the change in emotion also mattered. Memory integration was best -- that is, memories of sequential items felt closer together in time, and participants were better at recalling their order -- when the shift was toward more positive emotions. On the other hand, a shift toward more negative emotions (from calmer to sadder, for example) tended to separate and expand the mental distance between new memories.

Participants were also surveyed the following day to assess their longer-term memory, and showed better memory for items and moments when their emotions changed, especially if they were experiencing intense positive emotions. This suggests that feeling more positive and energized can fuse different elements of an experience together in memory.

Sachs emphasized the utility of music as an intervention technique.

"Most music-based therapies for disorders rely on the fact that listening to music can help patients relax or feel enjoyment, which reduces negative emotional symptoms," he said. The benefits of music-listening in these cases are therefore secondary and indirect. Here, we are suggesting a possible mechanism by which emotionally dynamic music might be able to directly treat the memory issues that characterize such disorders."

Clewett said these findings could help people reintegrate the memories that have caused post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Want to achieve your goals? Get angry

While often perceived as a negative emotion, anger can also be a powerful motivator for people to achieve challenging goals in their lives, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"People often believe that a state of happiness is ideal, and the majority of people consider the pursuit of happiness a major life goal," said lead author Heather Lench, PhD, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. "The view that positive emotion is ideal for mental health and well-being has been prominent in lay and psychological accounts of emotion, but previous research suggests that a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes."

The functionalist theory of emotion, which has been studied for decades, suggests that all emotions, good or bad, are reactions to events within a person's environment and serve the purpose of alerting that person to important situations that require actions, according to Lench. Each emotion may call for a different response. For example, sadness may indicate that a person needs to seek help or emotional support, while anger may suggest they need to take action to overcome an obstacle.

To better understand the role of anger in achieving goals, researchers conducted a series of experiments involving more than 1,000 participants and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 respondents. In each experiment, researchers elicited either an emotional response (such as anger, amusement, desire or sadness) or a neutral emotional state, and then presented participants with a challenging goal.

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In one experiment, participants were shown visuals designed to elicit specific emotional or neutral responses and then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. In another, the goal was to attain high scores on a skiing video game, with one game that involved challenging play (avoiding flags on a slalom course) and one easier game that involved only a jump.

Across all the experiments, anger improved people's ability to reach their goals compared with a neutral condition in a variety of challenging situations. In some cases, it was associated with increased scores or shorter response times. In one experiment, it also increased cheating to achieve a better outcome.

The researchers also analyzed data from a series of surveys collected during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Before the elections, people were asked to rate how angry they would be if their favorite candidate did not win. After the elections, they reported whether they voted and whom they voted for. Survey participants who indicated they would be angry if their candidate did not win were more likely to vote in the election, but anger had no effect on which candidate they voted for.

"These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Lench.

The effects of anger in spurring people to reach for and frequently achieve their goals were specific to situations where the goals were more challenging, according to Lench. Anger did not appear to be associated with reaching goals when the goals were easier, such as in the ski-jump video game.

Lench also noted that while anger was associated with increased success across the board, in some cases, amusement or desire were also associated with increased goal attainment.

The results suggest that emotions that are often considered negative -- such as anger, boredom or sadness -- can be useful, according to Lench.

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Older people have better mental well-being than 30 years ago

This was observed in a study conducted at the Gerontology Research Center at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä (Finland). The study examined differences in depressive symptoms and life satisfaction between current 75- and 80-year-olds and the same-aged people who lived in the 1990s.

The results showed that 75- and 80-year-old men and women today experience fewer depressive symptoms than those who were 75 and 80 years old in the 1990s. The differences were partly explained by the better perceived health and higher education of those born later.

"In our previous comparisons, we found that older people today have significantly better physical and cognitive functioning at the same age compared to those born earlier," says Professor Taina Rantanen from the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. "These new results complement these positive findings in terms of mental well-being."

Today, 75- and 80-year-olds are more satisfied with their lives to date. However, there was no similar difference in satisfaction with their current lives. In fact, 80-year-old men who lived in the 1990s were even more satisfied with their current lives than 80-year-old are men today.

"These men born in 1910 had lived through difficult times, which may explain their satisfaction with their current lives in the 1990s when many things were better than before," says postdoctoral researcher Tiia Kekäläinen.

"Individuals adapt to their situation and living conditions. Both in the 1990s and today, the majority of older adults reported being satisfied with their current lives."

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Most people feel 'psychologically close' to climate change

When spurring action against climate change, NGOs and governmental agencies frequently operate on the assumption that people are unmotivated to act because they view climate change as a problem that affects distant regions far in the future. While this concept, known as psychological distance, seems intuitive, researchers report in the journal One Earth on April 21 that most people see climate change as an important and timely issue even if its impacts are not immediately noticeable.

"There is no consistent evidence that perceiving climate change as psychologically distant hinders climate action, with studies reporting mixed results," write the authors, led by Dr. Anne M. van Valkengoed of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

van Valkengoed and her colleagues collected results from public opinion polls surveying people about their views on climate change, some of which included over 100,000 people from 121 different countries. The polls showed that over 50% of participants actually believe that climate change is happening either now or in the near future and that it will impact their local areas, not just faraway places.

The team also looked at the results of several studies designed to test the relationship between psychological distance and climate action. Out of 26 reviewed studies, only nine found a positive association between psychological distance and climate action. In fact, some studies showed that viewing climate change as impacting distant places and communities made people want to take more action. The researchers also found that 25 out of 30 studies failed to prove that experimentally decreasing psychological distance increased climate action.

The pervasive misconception about the relationship between psychological distance and climate action could actually be impeding progress in mitigating climate change due to social influence, suggest the authors. For example, if people think others perceive climate change as psychologically distant and therefore aren't taking action, they might be less likely to act themselves. Also, they might think that their efforts are futile because real environmental change relies on the combined efforts of many.

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Lonely people's divergent thought processes may contribute to feeling 'alone in a crowded room'

Common wisdom suggests that a core difference between solitude and loneliness is choice. Whereas a person who appreciates solitude might choose to enjoy a quiet night in or a solo trip abroad, a lonely person may feel disconnected from other people even in a crowded room. New research published in Psychological Science supports this notion, suggesting that lonely people may think differently regardless of the size of their social networks.

"We found that lonely individuals are exceptionally dissimilar to their peers in the way that they process the world around them … even when taking into account the number of friends that they have," said lead author Elisa C. Baek (University of Southern California) in an interview. Her study showed that lonely individuals' neural responses differ from those of other people, suggesting that "seeing the world differently than those around you may be a risk factor for loneliness, even if you regularly socialize with them."

Baek and colleagues Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Meng Du, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson (University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA]) came to this conclusion by comparing the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 63 first-year university students.

During each 90-minute scan, participants viewed 14 engaging video clips in the same order. After the scan, they self-reported their feelings of social connection using the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Earlier in the academic year, each participant had also completed a social network survey in which they were asked to list the names of each person with whom they studied, ate meals, or otherwise hung out during their first several months as students.

In order to analyze these data, Baek and colleagues divided participants into two groups: a "lonely" group with participants who scored higher than the median on the loneliness scale and a nonlonely group with participants who scored under the median.

When the researchers compared these participants' scans, they found that the brain activity of lonely participants was very dissimilar to that of both nonlonely participants and other lonely participants. By comparison, the brain activity of nonlonely participants was similar to that of other nonlonely participants. This was especially true in the default-mode network, in which shared brain activity appears to be associated with interpreting narratives and friendships in a similar manner, and in the reward-processing areas of the brain, the researchers wrote. These findings remained significant even when the researchers controlled for demographic characteristics and the size of participants' social networks.

"Lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness," the researchers explained.

Additional research is needed in order to determine the underlying cause of these results, however, Baek said.

"One possibility is that lonely individuals do not find value in the same aspects of situations or scenes as their peers," Baek and colleagues wrote. "This may result in a reinforcing feedback loop in which lonely individuals perceive themselves to be different from their peers, which may in turn lead to further challenges in achieving social connection."

Another possibility is that loneliness itself could lead people to process information differently, the researchers added.

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How dogs are used impacts how they are treated

Research into the unique cognitive abilities of dogs often leads to surprises, including dogs' ability to form mental representations of things they smell, or that they know when their owners do something by accident. However, dog cognition research suffers from the same biases as general psychology: in both fields, studies are usually done in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies.

Although nearly everything we know about dog-human bonds, dog behavior, and dog cognition comes from WEIRD societies, the majority of dogs in the world live outside of these conditions. To address this bias and form a better understanding of dog-human relationships in societies around the world, a team of researchers from the MPI of Geoanthropology and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology assessed data on the functions and treatment of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies.

The researchers found that, across all societies, dogs' functions are a good predictor of how they are treated by their owners. Analysis showed that the more functions dogs have in a society, such as guarding, herding, or hunting, the closer the dog-human relationship is likely to be.

To conduct the study, the researchers investigated ethnographic data from the eHRAF cross-cultural database and identified societies in which dogs serve any of five main functions: hunting, defense, guarding herds, herding, and carrying or transporting supplies. They then collected data on how dogs are treated in those societies and coded it into three dimensions: positive care (e.g. dogs are allowed indoors, dogs receive healthcare, puppies are raised), negative treatment (e.g. dogs are not fed, dogs are physically abused, dogs are regularly culled), and personhood (e.g. dogs are named, dogs are buried and/or mourned, dogs are perceived as family members).

By analyzing the relationship between dog functions and treatment, the researchers showed that the number of functions is positively associated with positive care and personhood and negatively associated with negative treatment. However, they also found that not all of a dog's jobs influence treatment equally. For example, herding is particularly likely to increase positive care, whereas hunting has no impact on positive care or negative treatment, but does increase the odds of personhood. Thus, in societies where dogs are kept for hunting, humans are more likely to name their dogs and perceive them as family members.

Additionally, the study showed that negative treatment and positive care are not mutually exclusive. In fact, of the 77 societies with data for all three dimensions of dog treatment, 32 showed the presence of both positive care and negative treatment. This suggests that the dog-human relationship is not as simple or straightforward as "man's best friend," but involves a complex balance between offering care and minimizing costs.

"Our study adds a systematic test for explaining the cultural drivers that shape the variety of dog-human bonds around the world," says Juliane Bräuer of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. "This represents a first step into understanding whether the cognitive and social skills associated with dogs are universal or are influenced by the cultural environment the dogs live in."

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Hunter-gatherer childhoods may offer clues to improving education and wellbeing in developed countries

Hunter-gatherers can help us understand the conditions that children may be psychologically adapted to because we lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of our evolutionary history. And paying greater attention to hunter-gatherer childhoods may help economically developed countries improve education and wellbeing.

Published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, a new study by Dr Nikhil Chaudhary, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, and Dr Annie Swanepoel, a child psychiatrist, calls for new research into child mental health in hunter-gatherer societies. They explore the possibility that some common aspects of hunter-gatherer childhoods could help families in economically developed countries. Eventually, hunter-gatherer behaviours could inform 'experimental intervention trials' in homes, schools and nurseries.

The authors acknowledge that children living in hunter-gatherer societies live in very different environments and circumstances than those in developed countries. They also stress that hunter-gatherer children invariably face many difficulties that are not experienced in developed countries and, therefore, caution that these childhoods should not be idealised.

Drawing on his own observations of the BaYaka people in Congo and the extensive research of anthropologists studying other hunter-gatherer societies, Dr Chaudhary highlights major differences in the ways in which hunter-gatherer children are cared for compared to their peers in developed countries. He stresses that "contemporary hunter-gatherers must not be thought of as 'living fossils', and while their ways of life may offer some clues about our prehistory, they are still very much modern populations each with a unique cultural and demographic history."

Physical contact and attentiveness

Despite increasing uptake of baby carriers and baby massage in developed countries, levels of physical contact with infants remain far higher in hunter-gatherer societies. In Botswana, for instance, 10-20 week old !Kung infants are in physical contact with someone for around 90% of daylight hours, and almost 100% of crying bouts are responded to, almost always with comforting or nursing -- scolding is extremely rare.

The study points out that this exceptionally attentive childcare is made possible because of the major role played by non-parental caregivers, or 'alloparents', which is far rarer in developed countries.

Non-parental caregivers

In many hunter-gatherer societies, alloparents provide almost half of a child's care. A previous study found that in the DRC, Efe infants have 14 alloparents a day by the time they are 18 weeks old, and are passed between caregivers eight times an hour.

Dr Chaudhary said: "Parents now have much less childcare support from their familial and social networks than would likely have been the case during most of our evolutionary history. Such differences seem likely to create the kind of evolutionary mismatches that could be harmful to both caregivers and children."

"The availability of other caregivers can reduce the negative impacts of stress within the nuclear family, and the risk of maternal depression, which has knock-on effects for child wellbeing and cognitive development."

The study emphasises that alloparenting is a core human adaptation, contradicting 'intensive mothering' narratives which emphasise that mothers should use their maternal instincts to manage childcare alone. Dr Chaudhary and Dr Swanepoel write that 'such narratives can lead to maternal exhaustion and have dangerous consequences'.

Care-giving ratios

The study points out that communal living in hunter-gatherer societies results in a very high ratio of available caregivers to infants/toddlers, which can even exceed 10:1.

This contrasts starkly with the nuclear family unit, and even more so with nursery settings, in developed countries. According to the UK's Department of Education regulations, nurseries require ratios of 1 carer to 3 children aged under 2 years, or 1 carer to 4 children aged 2-3.

Dr Chaudhary said: "Almost all day, hunter-gatherer infants and toddlers have a capable caregiver within a couple of metres of them. From the infant's perspective, that proximity and responsiveness, is very different from what is experienced in many nursery settings in the UK."

"If that ratio is stretched even thinner, we need to consider the possibility that this could have impacts on children's wellbeing."

Children providing care and mixed-age active learning

In hunter-gatherer societies, children play a significantly bigger role in providing care to infants and toddlers than is the case in developed countries. In some communities they begin providing some childcare from the age of four and are capable of sensitive caregiving; and it is common to see older, but still pre-adolescent children looking after infants.

By contrast, the NSPCC in the UK recommends that when leaving pre-adolescent children at home, babysitters should be in their late teens at least.

Dr Chaudhary said: "In developed countries, children are busy with schooling and may have less opportunity to develop caregiving competence. However, we should at least explore the possibility that older siblings could play a greater role in supporting their parents, which might also enhance their own social development."

The study also points out that instructive teaching is rare in hunter-gatherer societies and that infants primarily learn via observation and imitation. From around the age of two, hunter-gatherer children spend large portions of the day in mixed-age (2-16) 'playgroups' without adult supervision. There, they learn from one another, acquiring skills and knowledge collaboratively via highly active play practice and exploration.

Learning and play are two sides of the same coin, which contrasts with the lesson-time / play-time dichotomy of schooling in the UK and other developed countries.

Dr Chaudhary and Dr Swanepoel note that "Classroom schooling is often at odds with the modes of learning typical of human evolutionary history." The study acknowledges that children living in hunter-gather societies live in very different environments and circumstances than those in developed countries:

"Foraging skills are very different to those required to make a living in market-economies, and classroom teaching is certainly necessary to learn the latter. But children may possess certain psychological learning adaptations that can be practically harnessed in some aspects of their schooling. When peer and active learning can be incorporated, they have been shown to improve motivation and performance, and reduce stress." The authors also highlight that physical activity interventions have been shown to aid performance among students diagnosed with ADHD.

The study calls for more research into children's mental health in hunter-gatherer societies to test whether the hypothesised evolutionary mismatches actually exist. If they do, such insights could then be used to direct experimental intervention trials in developed countries.

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The Mozart effect myth: Listening to music does not help against epilepsy

Over the past fifty years, there have been remarkable claims about the effects of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music. Reports about alleged symptom-alleviating effects of listening to Mozart's Sonata KV448 in epilepsy attracted a lot of public attention. However, the empirical validity of the underlying scientific evidence has remained unclear. Now, University of Vienna psychologists Sandra Oberleiter and Jakob Pietschnig show in a new study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports that there is no evidence for a positive effect of Mozart's melody on epilepsy.

In the past, Mozart's music has been associated with numerous ostensibly positive effects on humans, animals, and even microorganisms. For instance, listening to his sonata has been said to increase the intelligence of adults, children, or fetuses in the womb. Even cows were said to produce more milk, and bacteria in sewage treatment plants were said to work better when they heard Mozart's composition.

However, most of these alleged effects have no scientific basis. The origin of these ideas can be traced back to the long-disproven observation of a temporary increase in spatial reasoning test performance among students after listening to the first movement allegro con spirito of Mozart's sonata KV448 in D major.

More recently, the Mozart effect experienced a further variation: Some studies reported symptom relief in epilepsy patients after they had listened to KV448. However, a new comprehensive research synthesis by Sandra Oberleiter and Jakob Pietschnig from the University of Vienna, based on all available scientific literature on this topic, showed that there is no reliable evidence for such a beneficial effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy. They found that this alleged Mozart effect can be mainly attributed to selective reporting, small sample sizes, and inadequate research practices in this corpus of literature. "Mozart's music is beautiful, but unfortunately, we cannot expect relief from epilepsy symptoms from it" conclude the researchers.

From Science Daily

Does more money correlate with greater happiness?

Are people who earn more money happier in daily life? Though it seems like a straightforward question, research had previously returned contradictory findings, leaving uncertainty about its answer.

Foundational work published in 2010 from Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton had found that day-to-day happiness rose as annual income increased, but above $75,000 it leveled off and happiness plateaued. In contrast, work published in 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania's Matthew Killingsworth found that happiness rose steadily with income well beyond $75,000, without evidence of a plateau.

To reconcile the differences, the two paired up in what's known as an adversarial collaboration, joining forces with Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Barbara Mellers as arbiter. In a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, the trio shows that, on average, larger incomes are associated with ever-increasing levels of happiness. Zoom in, however, and the relationship becomes more complex, revealing that within that overall trend, an unhappy cohort within each income group shows a sharp rise in happiness up to $100,000 annually and then plateaus.

"In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness," says Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn's Wharton School and lead paper author. "The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you're rich and miserable, more money won't help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees."

Mellers digs into this last notion, noting that emotional well-being and income aren't connected by a single relationship. "The function differs for people with different levels of emotional well-being," she says. Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Joining forces The researchers began this combined effort recognizing that their previous work had drawn different conclusions. Kahneman's 2010 study showed a flattening pattern where Killingsworth's 2021 study did not. As its name suggests, an adversarial collaboration of this type -- a notion originated by Kahneman -- aims to solve scientific disputes or disagreements by bringing together the differing parties, along with a third-party mediator.

Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers focused on a new hypothesis that both a happy majority and an unhappy minority exist. For the former, they surmised, happiness keeps rising as more money comes in; the latter's happiness improves as income rises but only up to a certain income threshold, after which it progresses no further.

To test this new hypothesis, they looked for the flattening pattern in data from Killingworth's study, which he had collected through an app he created called Track Your Happiness. Several times a day, the app pings participants at random moments, asking a variety of questions including how they feel on a scale from "very good" to "very bad." Taking an average of the person's happiness and income, Killingsworth draws conclusions about how the two variables are linked.

A breakthrough in the new partnership came early on when the researchers realized that the 2010 data, which had revealed the happiness plateau, had actually been measuring unhappiness in particular rather than happiness in general. "It's easiest to understand with an example," Killingsworth says. Imagine a cognitive test for dementia that most healthy people pass easily. While such a test could detect the presence and severity of cognitive dysfunction, it wouldn't reveal much about general intelligence since most healthy people would receive the same perfect score.

"In the same way, the 2010 data showing a plateau in happiness had mostly perfect scores, so it tells us about the trend in the unhappy end of the happiness distribution, rather than the trend of happiness in general. Once you recognize that, the two seemingly contradictory findings aren't necessarily incompatible," Killingsworth says. "And what we found bore out that possibility in an incredibly beautiful way. When we looked at the happiness trend for unhappy people in the 2021 data, we found exactly the same pattern as was found in 2010; happiness rises relatively steeply with income and then plateaus."

"The two findings that seemed utterly contradictory actually result from data that are amazingly consistent," he says.

Implications of this work Drawing these conclusions would have been challenging had the two research teams not come together, says Mellers, who suggests there's no better way than adversarial collaborations to resolve scientific conflict.

"This kind of collaboration requires far greater self-discipline and precision in thought than the standard procedure," she says. "Collaborating with an adversary -- or even a non-adversary -- is not easy, but both parties are likelier to recognize the limits of their claims." Indeed, that's what happened, leading to a better understanding of the relationship between money and happiness.

And these findings have real-world implications, according to Killingsworth. For one, they could inform thinking about tax rates or how to compensate employees. And, of course, they matter to individuals as they navigate career choices or weigh a larger income against other priorities in life, Killingsworth says.

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Learning with all your senses: Multimodal enrichment as the optimal learning strategy of the future

Many educational approaches assume that integrating complementary sensory and motor information into the learning experience can enhance learning, for example gestures help in learning new vocabulary in foreign language classes. In her recent publication, neuroscientist Katharina von Kriegstein from Technische Universität Dresden and Brian Mathias of the University of Aberdeen summarize these methods under the term "multimodal enrichment." This means enrichment with multiple senses and movement. Numerous current scientific studies prove that multimodal enrichment can enhance learning outcomes. Experiments in classrooms show similar results.

In the review article, the two researchers compare these findings with cognitive, neuroscience, and computational theories of multimodal enrichment. Recent neuroscience research has found that the positive effects of enriched learning are associated with response in brain regions that serve perception and motor function. For example, hearing a recently learned foreign language word, may elicit activity in motor brain regions if the word was associated with the performance of a congruent gesture during learning. These brain responses are causal to the benefits of multimodal enrichment for learning outcome. Computer algorithms confirm this hypothesis.

"The brain is optimized for learning with all the senses and with movement. Brain structures for perception and motor skills work together to promote this type of learning. We hope that our deeper understanding of the brain's learning mechanisms, will facilitate the development of optimal learning strategies in the future," explains Brian Mathias.

Katharina von Kriegstein adds, "The results of the literature we reviewed contribute to our understanding of why several long-used learning strategies, such as parts of the Montessori method, are effective. They also provide clear clues as to why some approaches are not as effective. Recently uncovered neuroscientific mechanisms may inspire the updating of cognitive and computational theories of learning, providing new hypotheses about learning. We anticipate that such an interdisciplinary and evidence-based approach will lead to the optimization of learning and teaching strategies in the future, for both humans and artificial systems."

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Playing the piano boosts brain processing power and helps lift the blues

A new study published by researchers at the University of Bath demonstrates the positive impact learning to play a musical instrument has on the brain's ability to process sights and sounds, and shows how it can also help to lift a blue mood.

Publishing their findings in the academic journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team behind the study shows how beginners who undertook piano lessons for just one hour a week over 11 weeks reported significant improvements in recognising audio-visual changes in the environment and reported less depression, stress and anxiety.

In the randomised control study, 31 adults were assigned into either a music training, music listening, or a control group. Individuals with no prior musical experiences or training were instructed to complete weekly one-hour sessions. Whilst the intervention groups played music, the control groups either listened to music or used the time to complete homework.

The researchers found that within just a few weeks of starting lessons*, people's ability to process multisensory information -- i.e., sight and sound -- was enhanced. Improved 'multisensory process' has benefits for almost every activity we participate in -- from driving a car and crossing a road, to finding someone in a crowd or watching TV.

These multisensory improvements extended beyond musical abilities. With musical training, people's audio-visual processing became more accurate across other tasks. Those who received piano lessons showed greater accuracy in tests where participants were asked to determine whether sound and vision 'events' occurred at the same time.

This was true both for simple displays presenting flashes and beeps, and for more complex displays showing a person talking. Such fine-tuning of individuals' cognitive abilities was not present for the music listening group (where participants listened to the same music as played by the music group), or for the non-music group (where members studied or read).

In addition, the findings went beyond improvements in cognitive abilities, showing that participants also had reduced depression, anxiety and stress scores after the training compared to before it. The authors suggest that music training could be beneficial for people with mental health difficulties, and further research is currently underway to test this.

Cognitive psychologist and music specialist Dr Karin Petrini from the University of Bath's Department of Psychology, explained: "We know that playing and listening to music often brings joy to our lives, but with this study we were interested in learning more about the direct effects a short period of music learning can have on our cognitive abilities.

"Learning to play an instrument like the piano is a complex task: it requires a musician to read a score, generate movements and monitor the auditory and tactile feedback to adjust their further actions. In scientific terms, the process couples visual with auditory cues and results in a multisensory training for individuals.

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Psychology: What gazes reveal about us

A new study by the TU Dresden shows that eye movements during the processing of tasks provide information about what the respective person is currently occupied with and what goals are being pursued within the task. These findings could play a role in the organization of screen work in the future.

We constantly move our eyes to obtain important information from the environment. Measuring eye movements allows to understand how information is processed. Previous work has shown that new visual information leads to a certain pattern of eye movements In particular, two types of visual processing are distinguished. In the so-called ambient mode, the eyes move rapidly over large distances to initially gain rough impressions of potentially interesting targets. It is therefore used for general spatial orientation. Once this process is complete, specific information is viewed for longer periods of time and processed more deeply, depending on the target and the level of interest. This is the so-called focus mode. So far, these changes in gaze patterns have mainly been found in the context of changes in the environment, that is external stimuli.

In a recent study by the Chair of Engineering Psychology at Technische Universität Dresden, Sebastian Pannasch and his team have now investigated the extent to which such patterns also occur as a result of internal stimuli. For this purpose, the test subjects were asked to solve a task on a computer screen in which they had to assemble a Rubik's cube according to a model so that all sides corresponded exactly to the model specifications. The external stimulus, i.e., the setting on the screen and the task, remained the same. Evaluation of the measured eye movements showed that the environmental mode for reorientation always occurred when information was taken in during different subtasks of the puzzle, e.g., when a puzzle piece was selected or checked to see if it matched the specification.

For Sebastian Pannasch, professor of engineering psychology and applied cognitive research at Technische Universität Dresden, the new findings are promising: "Our results show that the eyes are not only a proverbial mirror of the soul, but actually and measurably provide information about what we are currently engaged in and what goals we are pursuing within a task. Eye movements could be an indicator of the state of attention during task processing. In further studies, we will therefore investigate whether these new findings can be used to organize screen work."

Read more at Science Daily

Social media experiment reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation

Short animations giving viewers a taste of the tactics behind misinformation can help to "inoculate" people against harmful content on social media when deployed in YouTube's advert slot, according to a major online experiment led by the University of Cambridge.

Working with Jigsaw (https://jigsaw.google.com/), a unit within Google dedicated to tackling threats to open societies, a team of psychologists from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol created 90-second clips designed to familiarise users with manipulation techniques such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence.

This "pre-bunking" strategy pre-emptively exposes people to tropes at the root of malicious propaganda, so they can better identify online falsehoods regardless of subject matter.

Researchers behind the Inoculation Science project (https://inoculation.science/) compare it to a vaccine: by giving people a "micro-dose" of misinformation in advance, it helps prevent them falling for it in future -- an idea based on what social psychologist's call "inoculation theory."

The findings, published in Science Advances, come from seven experiments involving a total of almost 30,000 participants -- including the first "real world field study" of inoculation theory on a social media platform -- and show a single viewing of a film clip increases awareness of misinformation.

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook," illustrated with relatable examples from film and TV such as Family Guy or, in the case of false dichotomies, Star Wars ("Only a Sith deals in absolutes").

"YouTube has well over 2 billion active users worldwide. Our videos could easily be embedded within the ad space on YouTube to prebunk misinformation," said study co-author Prof Sander van der Linden, Head of the Social Decision-Making Lab (SDML) at Cambridge, which led the work.

"Our research provides the necessary proof of concept that the principle of psychological inoculation can readily be scaled across hundreds of millions of users worldwide."

Lead author Dr Jon Roozenbeek from Cambridge's SDML describes the team's videos as "source agnostic," avoiding biases people have about where information is from, and how it chimes -- or not -- with what they already believe.

"Our interventions make no claims about what is true or a fact, which is often disputed. They are effective for anyone who does not appreciate being manipulated," he said.

"The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

Google -- YouTube's parent company -- is already harnessing the findings. At the end of August, Jigsaw will roll out a prebunking campaign across several platforms in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic to get ahead of emerging disinformation relating to Ukrainian refugees. The campaign is designed to build resilience to harmful anti-refugee narratives, in partnership with local NGOs, fact checkers, academics, and disinformation experts.

"Harmful misinformation takes many forms, but the manipulative tactics and narratives are often repeated and can therefore be predicted," said Beth Goldberg, co-author and Head of Research and Development for Google's Jigsaw unit.

"Teaching people about techniques like ad-hominem attacks that set out to manipulate them can help build resilience to believing and spreading misinformation in the future.

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

The team argue that pre-bunking may be more effective at fighting the misinformation deluge than fact-checking each untruth after it spreads -- the classic 'debunk' -- which is impossible to do at scale, and can entrench conspiracy theories by feeling like personal attacks to those who believe them.

"Propaganda, lies and misdirections are nearly always created from the same playbook," said co-author Prof Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol. "We developed the videos by analysing the rhetoric of demagogues, who deal in scapegoating and false dichotomies."

"Fact-checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online. We need to teach people to recognise the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled."

Six initial controlled experiments featured 6,464 participants, with the sixth experiment conducted a year after the first five to ensure earlier findings could be replicated.

Data collection for each participant was comprehensive, from basic information -- gender, age, education, political leanings -- to levels of numeracy, conspiratorial thinking, news and social media checking, "bullshit receptivity," and a personality inventory, among other "variables."

Factoring all this in, the team found that inoculation videos improved people's ability to spot misinformation, and boosted their confidence in being able to do so again. The clips also improve the quality of "sharing decisions": whether or not to spread damaging content.

Two of the animations were then tested "in the wild" as part of a vast experiment on YouTube, with clips positioned in the pre-video advert slot that provides an option to skip after five seconds.

Google Jigsaw exposed around 5.4 million US YouTubers to an inoculation video, with almost a million watching for at least 30 seconds. The platform then gave a random 30% of users that watched a voluntary test question within 24 hours of their initial viewing.

The clips aimed to inoculate against misinformation tactics of hyper-emotive language and use of false dichotomies, and the questions -- based on fictional posts -- tested for detection of these tropes. YouTube also gave a "control" group of users who had not viewed a video the same test question. In total, 22,632 users answered a question.

Despite the intense "noise" and distractions on YouTube, ability to recognise manipulation techniques at the heart of misinformation increased by 5% on average.

Google say the unprecedented nature of the experiment means there is no direct data comparison available. However, increases in brand awareness from advertising on YouTube -- known as "brand lift" -- are typically limited to 1% in surveys of under 45,000 users.

"Users participated in tests around 18 hours on average after watching the videos, so the inoculation appears to have stuck," said van der Linden.

Read more at Science Daily

Cooperation among strangers has increased since the 1950s

Despite common concerns that the social fabric is fraying, cooperation among strangers has gradually increased in the U.S. since the 1950s, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"We were surprised by our findings that Americans became more cooperative over the last six decades because many people believe U.S. society is becoming less socially connected, less trusting and less committed to the common good," said lead researcher Yu Kou, PhD, a professor of social psychology at Beijing Normal University. "Greater cooperation within and between societies may help us tackle global challenges, such as responses to pandemics, climate change and immigrant crises."

The researchers analyzed 511 studies conducted in the United States between 1956 and 2017 with a total of more than 63,000 participants. Those studies included lab experiments measuring cooperation among strangers. The research was published online in Psychological Bulletin.

The study found a small, gradual increase in cooperation across the 61-year period, which the researchers said may be linked to notable shifts in U.S. society. The increase in cooperation was associated with increases in urbanization, societal wealth, income inequality and the number of people living alone. The study cannot prove those factors caused an increase in cooperation, only that there is a correlation.

Increased cooperation has been linked with market competitiveness and economic growth in prior research. As more people live in cities and on their own, they may be forced to cooperate with strangers, said study co-author Paul Van Lange, PhD, a professor of social psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

"It's possible that people gradually learn to broaden their cooperation with friends and acquaintances to strangers, which is called for in more urban, anonymous societies," Van Lange said. "U.S. society may have become more individualistic, but people have not."

The studies that were analyzed occurred in lab settings primarily with college students as participants, so the findings may not be representative of real-life situations or of U.S. society as a whole. However, the researchers noted that prior studies have not found that levels of cooperation vary by gender or ethnicity in the U.S.

The study did not measure some other societal factors, such as levels of trust about strangers. Prior research has found a general decline in trust over several decades in the U.S.

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People less outraged by gender discrimination caused by algorithms

People are less morally outraged when gender discrimination occurs because of an algorithm rather than direct human involvement, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

In the study, researchers coined the phrase "algorithmic outrage deficit" to describe their findings from eight experiments conducted with a total of more than 3,900 participants from the United States, Canada and Norway.

When presented with various scenarios about gender discrimination in hiring decisions caused by algorithms and humans, participants were less morally outraged about those caused by algorithms. Participants also believed companies were less legally liable for discrimination when it was due to an algorithm.

"It's concerning that companies could use algorithms to shield themselves from blame and public scrutiny over discriminatory practices," said lead researcher Yochanan Bigman, PhD, a post-doctoral research fellow at Yale University and incoming assistant professor at Hebrew University. The findings could have broader implications and affect efforts to combat discrimination, Bigman said. The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

"People see humans who discriminate as motivated by prejudice, such as racism or sexism, but they see algorithms that discriminate as motivated by data, so they are less morally outraged," Bigman said. "Moral outrage is an important societal mechanism to motivate people to address injustices. If people are less morally outraged about discrimination, then they might be less motivated to do something about it."

Some of the experiments used a scenario based on a real-life example of alleged algorithm-based gender discrimination by Amazon that penalized female job applicants. While the research focused on gender discrimination, one of the eight experiments was replicated to examine racial and age discrimination and had similar findings.

Knowledge about artificial intelligence didn't appear to make a difference. In one experiment with more than 150 tech workers in Norway, participants who reported greater knowledge about artificial intelligence were still less outraged by gender discrimination caused by algorithms.

When people learn more about a specific algorithm it may affect their outlook, the researchers found. In another study, participants were more outraged when a hiring algorithm that caused gender discrimination was created by male programmers at a company known for sexist practices.

Read more at Science Daily

Are people more willing to empathize with animals or with other humans?

Stories about animals such as Harambe the gorilla and Cecil the lion often sweep the media as they pull at people's heartstrings. But are people more likely to feel empathy for animals than humans?

A new Penn State study led by Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research associate at Rock Ethics Institute, found that the answer is complicated. The findings could have implications for how messaging to the public about issues like new environmental policies is framed, among others.

The researchers found that when people were asked to choose between empathizing with a human stranger or an animal -- in this study, a koala bear -- the participants were more likely to choose empathizing with a fellow human.

However, in a second pair of studies, the researchers had participants take part in two separate tasks: one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with a person, and one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with an animal. This time, people were more likely to choose empathy when faced with an animal than when faced with a person.

Cameron said the findings -- recently published in a special issue on empathy in the Journal of Social Psychology -- suggest that when people are deciding whether to engage in empathy, context matters.

"It's possible that if people are seeing humans and animals in competition, it might lead to them preferring to empathize with other humans," Cameron said. "But if you don't see that competition, and the situation is just deciding whether to empathize with an animal one day and a human the other, it seems that people don't want to engage in human empathy but they're a little bit more interested in animals."

According to the researchers, empathy is the process of thinking about another living thing's suffering and experiences as if they were their own. For example, not just having compassion for someone who is sad after an argument with a friend, but actually imagining and sharing in what that person is feeling.

While there are plenty of examples of people feeling empathy and compassion for animals, Cameron said there is also a theory that it may be more difficult for people to feel true empathy for animals since their minds are different than those of humans.

In the first study, the researchers recruited 193 people to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to make a series of choices between empathizing with a human or an animal. If they chose a human, they were shown a photo of a college-aged adult and asked to mentally share their experience. If they chose an animal, they were shown a photo of a koala and asked to do the same. The experiment was based on a novel empathy selection task developed in Cameron's Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab.

Cameron said that when participants had to choose between empathizing with a person or an animal in the first study, it's possible the participants thought it might be easier to empathize with another human.

"Participants indicated that empathizing with animals felt more challenging, and that belief of empathy being more difficult drove them to choose animal empathy less," Cameron said. "It's possible that people felt empathizing with a mind that's unlike our own was more challenging than imagining the experience of another human."

In the second pair of studies, the researchers recruited an additional 192 and 197 participants, respectively, who completed a pair of choice tasks.

In the first task, the participants were given the choice between empathizing with a person or not engaging in empathy and simply describing the person. Then, in a separate task, the participants were given the same choice but with an animal.

"Once humans and animals were no longer in competition, the story changed," Cameron said. "When people had the chance to either empathize with or remain detached from a human stranger, people avoided empathy, which replicates the previous studies we've done. For animals, though, they didn't show that avoidance pattern. And actually, when we decoupled humans from animals, people actually were more likely to choose to empathize with an animal than a human."

While further studies will need to be done to see if these findings extend to other animals, Cameron said the results could have interesting implications. For example, if it's true that people empathize less with animals if animal interests are pitted against human interests, that could affect how people feel about environmental policies.

"If people perceive choices about empathy in a way that makes it seem like we need to choose between humans or animals with no compromise -- for example, choosing between using a parcel of land or conserving it for animals -- they may be more likely to side with humans," Cameron said. "But there may be ways in which those conversations could be tweaked to shape how people are thinking about managing their empathy."

Read more at Science Daily

Disbelief in human evolution linked to greater prejudice and racism

A disbelief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes and support of discriminatory behavior against Blacks, immigrants and the LGBTQ community in the U.S., according to University of Massachusetts Amherst research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Similarly, across the globe -- in 19 Eastern European countries, 25 Muslim countries and in Israel -- low belief in evolution was linked to higher biases within a person's group, prejudicial attitudes toward people in different groups and less support for conflict resolution.

The findings supported the hypothesis of lead author Stylianos Syropoulos, a Ph.D. candidate in the War and Peace Labof senior author Bernhard Leidner, associate professor of social psychology. They collaborated with co-first author Uri Lifshin at Reichman University in Israel and co-authors Jeff Greenberg and Dylan Horner at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The researchers theorized that belief in evolution would tend to increase people's identification with all humanity, due to the common ancestry, and would lead to less prejudicial attitudes.

"People who perceive themselves as more similar to animals are also people who tend to have more pro-social or positive attitudes toward outgroup members or people from stigmatized and marginalized backgrounds," Syropoulos explains. "In this investigation, we were interested in examining whether belief in evolution would also act in a similar way, because it would reinforce this belief that we are more similar to animals."

In eight studies involving different areas of the world, the researchers analyzed data from the American General Social Survey (GSS), the Pew Research Center and three online crowdsourced samples. In testing their hypothesis about the associations of different levels of belief in evolution, they accounted for education, political ideology, religiosity, cultural identity and scientific knowledge.

"We found the same results each time, which is basically that believing in evolution relates to less prejudice, regardless of the group you're in, and controlling for all of these alternative explanations," Syropoulos says.

For example, religious beliefs, like political ideology, were measured separately from a belief or disbelief in evolution, the researchers note. "Regardless of whether one considers religion an important part of their life, belief in evolution relates to less prejudice independently from belief, or lack thereof, in God or any particular religion," Syropoulos says.

Leidner adds, "This whole effect and pattern seems to be present in all major political systems. It's very much a human phenomenon, no matter where you are in the world."

The researchers note that Darwin's 19th century theory of evolution has been cited to perpetrate racism, prejudice and homophobia, in part through the phrase, "survival of the fittest," used to describe the process of natural selection.

"There have been theoretical accounts that predict the opposite of what we found, so it was exciting for us to show that this actually is not the case, that the opposite is true and that belief in evolution seems to have pretty positive effects," Leidner says.

The U.S.-based study involved data from 1993, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 -- the years the GSS surveyed Americans about their beliefs in evolution, as well as measures of attitudes toward immigrants, Blacks, affirmative action, LGBTQ people and other social matters.

The data analysis showed unfailingly "that the disbelief in human evolution is the driving factor and most consistent predictor of prejudice in comparison to other relevant constructs," the paper states.

In the Israel-based study, people with a higher belief in evolution were more likely to support peace among Palestinians, Arabs and Jews. In the study involving countries in the Islamic world, belief in evolution was associated with less prejudice toward Christians and Jews. And in the study based in Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christians are the majority, a belief in evolution was linked with less prejudice toward gypsies, Jews and Muslims.

Syropoulos posits that a belief in evolution may expand people's "moral circle," leading to a sense that "we have more in common than things that are different."

The findings also suggest that "teaching evolution seems to have side effects that might make for a better or more harmonious society," Leidner adds.

Read more at Science Daily