Apr 5, 2017
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Pursue Meaning Instead of Happiness - When people say their lives are meaningful, it’s because they feel their lives have purpose, coherence, and worth. ....our lives matter and are contributing to the world in some way. http://tinyurl.com/MeaningfulnessVsHappiness @nymag @scienceofus ~Let me know what you think in the comments~ #nymag #scienceofus #meaningfulness #hapiness #newyear2017 #EmilyEsfahaniSmith #JenniferAaker #ThePowerofMeaningCraftingaLifeThatMatters
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(via Can a Silly Cat Video Help Curb Youth Smoking? -- Science of Us) “Fact: Cats are twice as likely to get cancer if their owner smokes. Smoking = no cats = no cat videos. That sucks.”
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Many straight men don’t stay through a partner’s transition. But for the ones who do, it can spark an identity crisis.
Internet Searching Might Make People Feel Smarter Than They Actually Are
Google makes it easy to pull up just about any information that's available, but some psychological researchers think it comes with a cost. The "Google effect," as one team dubbed it, is our tendency to forget information that can be easily looked up. Now a new study adds a new layer to the question of what effects our endless Google-searching might have on us: There's a chance it's making us overconfident about stuff we don't know as well.
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Over at BPS Research Digest, Simon Oxenham summarizes a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in which a team led by Matthew Fisher of Yale University tasked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers with finding the answers to a bunch of questions on the internet, while a separate group was tasked with answering the questions without the internet's assistance. Afterward, "the participants were ... asked how confident they were that, without using the internet, they could answer unrelated questions in six domains: weather, science, American history, food, health treatments, and the human body [emphasis his]."
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Overall, "the participants who had used the internet to search for answers were more likely to overestimate their own internal knowledge in unrelated areas." In other words, Google made them inflate their ability to figure stuff out on their won. It should be said that this wasn't a real-world situation: How often are you asked to figure something out without the assistance of Google and in a situation where your confidence level doesn't have any real-world consequences, which it doesn't for a Turk worker? Still, it's an interesting new nugget of information about the ways our constant Googling might be affecting us — given how ubiquitous Googling has become, it would be a miracle if it wasn't.
By Jesse Singal
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Can Neuroscience Explain Why People Are Sexist?
(Photo: AMC)
Neuroscientists, for obvious reasons, are really interested in finding out what’s different about the brains of people with unpleasant personalities, such as narcissists, or unsavory habits, like porn addiction. Their hope is that by studying these people’s brains we might learn more about the causes of bad character, and ways to helpfully intervene. Now to the list of character flaws that've received the brain-scanner treatment we can apparently add sexism — a new Japanese study published in Scientific Reports claims to have found its neurological imprint.
The researchers wanted to know whether there is something different about certain individuals’ brains that potentially predisposes them to sexist beliefs and attitudes (of course, as with so much neuroscience research like this, it’s very hard to disentangle whether any observed brain differences are the cause or consequence of the trait or behavior that’s being studied, a point I’ll come back to). More specifically, they were looking to see if people who publicly endorse gender inequality have brains that are anatomically different from people who believe in gender equality.
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In short, it seems the answer is yes. Neuroscientist Hikaru Takeuchi at Tohoku University and his colleagues have identified two brain areas where people who hold sexist attitudes have different levels of gray-matter density (basically, a measure of how many brain cells are packed into a given area), as compared with people who profess a belief in gender equality (their study doesn’t speak to any subconsciously held sexist beliefs). What’s more, these neural differences were correlated with psychological characteristics that could help explain some people’s sexist beliefs.
The researchers scanned the brains of 681 students — the average age was 21, and 306 of the participants were women — and also asked them to complete a measure of their belief in “Sex Role Egalitarianism” (SRE). The scale is basically a series of statements that participants rate their agreement with — two examples are “Domestic chores should be shared between husband and wife” (agreement would be a sign of high SRE) and “Bringing up children is the most important job for a woman” (agreeing with this would suggest low SRE). People who score highly on this trait believe that “the sex of an individual should not influence the perception of his or her rights, abilities, obligations, and opportunities,” as the authors of the new study put it. The participants also completed a host of other psych measures, including IQ and personality tests and a questionnaire about aggressive tendencies.
Takeuchi’s team found that lower scores on the SRE scale (that is, holding more sexist or gender-discriminating beliefs) tended to correlate, in men and women, with having more dense gray matter in the posterior cingulate cortex, an area in the brain associated with processing things like anger, fear, and pain; and with reduced gray-matter density in the right amygdala, another brain area that’s very important to emotions, especially fear. In terms of their broader psychological profile, people who espoused sexist beliefs tended to score higher in their anger, depression-proneness, and competitiveness, which fits previously published research into the personality correlates of sexism.
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These new brain-scan results suggest there’s something different about the brain structure of people with sexist beliefs, but what to make of these differences? It’s very difficult to interpret simple anatomical differences because less volume in certain brain areas can sometimes be a good thing — for example, as a mark of chess expertise — while other times it can be suggestive of lost function, such as when the brain shrinks in Alzheimer’s disease.
In the current context, we can at least look for clues in the other psychological scores the researchers collected. For example, they found that having more gray matter in the posterior cingulate didn’t just correlate with sexist beliefs but also (albeit weakly) with being more prone to anger and hostility, and with being competitive. Meanwhile, having less gray matter in the right amygdala correlated weakly with higher scores on neuroticism (among women) and being more depressive. There’s also some relevant prior research that’s shown that reduced amygdala volume is associated with stress, anxiety, and depression (though note that other research has linked an enlarged amygdala with emotional problems — unfortunately, neuroscience is rarely straightforward!).
The new findings paint a picture of people (men and women) who hold sexist beliefs as psychologically vulnerable folk who are fearful and competitive. We need to be aware that this study hasn’t proved that having a certain brain anatomy causes people to be sexist (it’s just as plausible that holding sexist beliefs changes the brain, or that other factors, such as one’s upbringing or social circumstances, shape one’s beliefs and brain structure). But it’s probably fair to speculate that some people may have a brain anatomy that predisposes them to be afraid of competition and cultural changes that could imperil their own interests, thus laying the foundation for their endorsement of gender inequality.
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However, the researchers don’t stop there. They go so far as to suggest their findings could hint at ways of intervening to combat sexist attitudes. For example, they say there’s evidence that when people successfully reduce their negative emotions, this results in increases to the gray matter in the right amygdala. “Therefore,” the researchers write, “improving negative mood may prevent stereotype on sex role [i.e. reduce gender discrimination] and may mitigate a wide range of problems associated with lower Sex Role Egalitarianism.”
Their message seems to be this: If you want to do your little bit to help achieve gender equality, try hugging a sexist. Or at least listen to their problems. You’ll cheer them up, calm them down, their amygdala might grow a bit, and — who knows? — maybe women might start to get equal pay with men a little bit sooner. Just one problem: I checked out that study they cited for showing that the amgydala grows as people manage to reduce their stress levels, and actually it found the very opposite, that “the more participants’ stress levels decreased, the greater the decrease of gray matter density in the right amygdala [emphasis added].” So maybe hold off on hugging your favorite sexist for now.
By Christian Jarrett
Dr. Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer), a Science of Us contributing writer, is editor of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog. His latest book is Great Myths of the Brain.
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The Two Types of People Who Come to Work Even Though They’re Sick
(Photo: Jamie Grill/Tetra Images/Corbis)
During a given day at the office, some people are their normal work-selves, typing away productively (well, arguably), while other people are home sick. Then there's the third, murky category researchers called "presenteeism" — coming to work even though you're sick and therefore not likely to be particularly productive. Researchers are curious about which pressures lead people to do this, since there are obvious ramifications both for public health (especially during periods like flu season) and for firms getting the most out of their workers.
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To better understand presenteeism, doctors Mariella Miraglia of the University of East Anglia and Gary Johns of Concordia University just published a paper in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (that's a link to a press release since there isn't yet a working link to the paper itself up). The duo conducted a meta-analysis of past studies about presenteeism constituting a total sample of 175,965, and then applied various bits of statistical trickery to try to figure out what's going on. They discovered that the variables correlated with presenteeism "included general ill health, constraints on absenteeism (e.g., strict absence policies, job insecurity), elevated job demands and felt stress, lack of job and personal resources (e.g., low support and low optimism), negative relational experiences (e.g., perceived discrimination), and positive attitudes (satisfaction, engagement, commitment)" [emphasis mine].
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That last one is interesting, since it's different from and more positive than all of the others, and it suggests two very different types of people are likely to drag themselves into work despite being under the weather: people who feel vulnerable as a result of financial stress, chronic illness, or other factors, and those who actually like and are really engaged by their job, making it hard for them to stay away. The former group probably would stay home if they felt like they could; you couldn't drag the latter away from the office if you tried. There could be some overlap here, of course — you can have a positive attitude toward your job but also experience "elevated job demands and felt stress." But a key, obvious takeaway from all this is that if you want workers to do the right thing and stay home when they're sick, it would be best to downplay the possibility that they'll be somehow punished for doing so.
By Jesse Singal
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