The wisdom of crowds has become a modern motif, a “cultural mantra” adopted with zeal across party and discipline lines, Jonathan V. Last observes for In Character. Conservatives clicked with its endorsement of the free market; liberals connected with its egalitarian appeal. “And nearly everyone associated with the Internet glommed on because they understood that it was, in large part, an exaltation of the new medium that placed the World Wide Web near the center of an entire world view,” he writes.

However many good things have come from crowd-sourcing, though, Last cautions that we devalue the wisdom of individuals at our own peril. Sometimes, for example, crowds are fooled: Enron’s stock was valued at over $40/share just months before the company declared bankruptcy, he notes, proffering the parallel tale of six Cornell business school students who, studying Enron for a research project in 1998, “concluded that the company was a house of cards.”

What appears to be crowd consensus can also be skewed by a handful of vociferous or aggressive members. Those rating systems on sites like Amazon.com? “New research confirms what some may already suspect: Those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users,” Kristina Grifantini reports for Technology Review.

For Last, the real loss is creativity: “Even if crowds can reach wise decisions, they don’t create,” he writes. “Genius and inspiration are the province of individuals.”

Sources: In Character, Technology Review

People who “can’t take a joke” are often pegged as spoilsports—but recent research suggests that there might be more going on. According to Science News, gelotophobia is the fear of being laughed at, characterized by difficulty distinguishing mean-spirited teasing from the friendly variety.

Gelotophobes flew under the radar until the mid 1990s, when psychologist Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich identified the personality trait and began researching it. “That shame is a predominant emotion in gelotophobia explains, in part, why the affliction received little scrutiny from scientists for so long,” the biweekly magazine reports. “Burning shame can create more feelings of shame and is rarely acknowledged to others.”

Ruch and his colleages have now developed questionnaires and assessment tools to help identify the trait. They’ve surveyed 23,000 people in 73 countries, finding gelotophobia present in all countries, from 2 to 30 percent of each population. In the United States that figure is 11 percent.

So on the one hand, we’ve got a new name for a trait that’s been under our noses all along. On the other, perhaps this emerging understanding of the spectrum of ways people perceive laughter could help us all get along a little better. Just one question remains: Can you take a joke?

Source: Science News

Psychologists are experimenting with mindfulness exercises to fight eating disorders, according to the Psychotherapy Networker. A treatment program known as the Enhancing Mindfulness for the Prevention of Weight Regain (empower) uses breathing and visualization exercises to help people better understand their thoughts, emotions, and associations with food.

“People who struggle with their emotions and thoughts often externalize their psychological battles,” according to the article, “by denying themselves nourishment to starve unwelcome feelings or overeating to smother them.” The exercises are designed to help people better understand those emotions and empower them to change their diets for the better.

Source: Psychotherapy Networker 

Thinking about love makes people better at creative problem solving, while sex is more shortsighted. That's according to research highlighted by Miller-McCune. The idea is that love “is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by  JLStricklin , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Married men with Asperger’s Syndrome, a socially alienating form of autism, often make extremely loyal and hardworking spouses, writes Richard Howlin for Psychotherapy Networker. “Their single-minded focus appears to filter out the distracting social world and they often show immense dedication to their families,” he adds.

But in some cases, Howlin, a clinical developmental psychologist, has found women want their husbands with Asperger's to become more relational, which leads to confusion and avoidance when interpersonal conflicts arise. He writes about one of his clients:

I've always been taken by the idea that there are conventional and unconventional ways of expressing love in any given situation. As relational beings, we have to be clear about what kind of expression we need or desire. Like most high-functioning men with AS, Mark understood the core of love to be loyalty, dependability, and hard work. Cathy will need to come to terms with the possibility that this may not be enough for her. The decision about whether Mark ultimately offers her the kind of affection and growth she's looking for in a relationship can only be made by her.

Source: Psychotherapy Networker 

Image by Joe in DC, licensed under Creative Commons.

Science and spirituality don’t always get along. A few scientists are trying to change that through a new, peer-reviewed journal called “Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.” The journal’s editor, Dr. Ralph Piedmont, sat down with Interfaith Voices to talk about how scientists can explore big issues, including the meaning of life, while retaining scientific integrity.

Source: Interfaith Voices

How we think about memory is about to change. Psychologist Alain Brunet, who works at McGill University and the Douglas Institute in Montreal, is conducting clinical trials in which participants take propranolol, a blood-pressure drug, after writing about a traumatic experience, reports Technology Review. This exercise seems to “weaken” the emotional strength of the memory, without disturbing any details. Six months after participating in a trial, one Canadian soldier suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) no longer qualified for the diagnosis.

Brunet’s research has to do with unlocking the secrets of how memories are stored, specifically proving the concept of memory reconsolidation. If Brunet is correct, when we recall a memory, it has to be packed away into the brain anew—and during that process the memory is malleable. If this is true, it opens up a bevy of possibilities for the treatment of PTSD, as well as other anxiety disorders and addiction.

There are some concerns that Brunet could be opening the proverbial Pandora’s box, but the psychologist isn’t fazed. “Brunet points out that he is trying to bring PTSD patients’ memories into a normal emotional range, not blunt their power altogether,” Technology Review senior editor Emily Singer writes. “He doesn’t think that using propranolol to render these memories bearable would create any unique potential for abuse as a way to dull the regrets, fears, and embarrassments of everyday life; people already use alcohol and drugs for such purposes.”

Source: Technology Review 

Writing for the online magazine Greater Good, Dacher Keltner explores the evolutionary roots of embarrassment and explains how our pink cheeks can actually help us. Keltner, a psychologist who studies positive emotions, writes: “We may feel alienated, flawed, alone, and exposed when embarrassed, but our display of this complex emotion is a wellspring of forgiveness and reconciliation.”

The simple elements of the embarrassment display I have documented and traced back to other species' appeasement and reconciliation processes—the gaze aversion, downward head movements, awkward smiles, and face touches—are a language of cooperation, they are the unspoken ethic of modesty. With these fleeting displays of deference, we navigate conflict-laden situations—watch how regularly people display embarrassment when in close physical spaces, when negotiating the turn-taking of everyday conversations, or when sharing food. We express gratitude and appreciation. And, with deflections of attention or face-saving parodies of the mishap, we quickly extricate embarrassed souls from their momentary predicaments.

Studying embarrassment does seem sort of fun—at least, for the researchers who are charged with inducing said embarrassment. “In perhaps the most mortifying experiment,” Keltner writes, “participants had to sing Barry Manilow's song ‘Feelings’ using dramatic hand gestures—and then had to watch a video of their performance surrounded by other students.”

(Congrats to Greater Good on their 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nomination for social/cultural coverage!)

Source: Greater Good 

Image by Symic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Modern society actively bombards the human consciousness, allowing the most primitive and consumption-oriented parts of the brain to take over, John Naish writes for the Ecologist. People are tricked on a base level into “feeling beset by famine and poverty, despite the abundant sufficiencies around us.” These feelings of need push people into buying, eating, and using resources, often without thinking rationally. 

Beyond foods and cars, the human brain is wired for conceptual consumption, too. The quest for more experiences can lead people into choosing more unique or interesting experiences over more pleasurable ones, according to PsyBlog. When faced with a choice between a consistently pleasurable ice cream flavor (say, chocolate) or a more interesting but clearly less tasty one (say, bacon), many people will choose the bacon-flavored ice cream, knowing it won’t be as good. A similar theory is employed to explain why people prefer horror movies over a good comedy.

The problem is that marketers and advertisers know how to stimulate the primitive parts of the human brain to prod people into more consumption. That drive is having a devastating effect on the environment, according to Naish, as people irresponsibly consume natural resources in a Sisyphean effort to quiet the irrational parts of the brain.

There are, however, plenty of exercises that people can use to stimulate the higher-functioning, more rational  parts of the brain. Naish suggests that society tap into the psychological need for social belonging to nudge people toward more responsible consumption. Some solutions are far more simple than that, too. Naish cites research showing that “pausing between deciding to buy something and taking it to the check-out dramatically increases the chance of a no-sale.” Simply taking a breath or walking around the block before making a purchase can help bypass the more irrational part of the brain and encourage more responsible and conscious consumption.

Image by  Simon Shek , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Ecologist, PsyBlog 

The recent issue of The Sun features an interview with psychologist Barbara Fredrickson (article not available online), a pioneer in the field of positive psychology, director of the University of North Carolina’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab and author of the upcoming book Positivity.

While humans pay more attention to negative experiences—an evolutionary result of having to constantly scan for threats—positive moments are far more abundant. Fredrickson says a focus on day-to-day feelings of satisfaction can lead to a happier life, and that an awareness of the present moment, paying attention to human kindness, and enjoying nice weather can increase positivity.

Positive emotions can also affect how we perceive people of other races. Scientists had found that when looking at people of a different race, we often look at individual facial features. People “use the same process they use to recognize objects, which suggests there’s some dehumanization going on,” Fredrickson says. “But what we’re finding is that, under the influence of positive emotions, people use the same holistic process for cross-race faces that they use for faces of their own race. It’s as if people, when they’re feeling good, are better able to see the full humanity of people of a different race.”

Still, denying negative emotions is unrealistic. Fredrickson instead advocates taking stock of the positive moments. “Negativity doesn’t always feel like a choice; it feels like it just lands on you, and you have to deal with it. Positive emotions, I think, are more of a choice.”

Sources: The Sun

Image by Christine Szeto, licensed under Creative Commons

Psychologists have found that people who are too cautious or deliberate can be perceived as racist, according to the We’re Only Human blog of the Association for Psychological Sciences. For the experiment, researchers from Tufts University tried to sap white volunteers of the cognitive abilities needed for self-discipline through a series of mental exercises. Then, the participants sat down to talk about race with black men who served as judges. According to the blog:

Those who were mentally depleted—that is, those lacking discipline and self-control—found talking about race with a black man much more enjoyable than did those with their self-control intact. That’s presumably because they weren’t working so hard at monitoring and curbing what they said. What’s more, independent black observers found that the powerless volunteers were much more direct and authentic in conversation. And perhaps most striking, blacks saw the less inhibited whites as less prejudiced against blacks. In other words, relinquishing power over oneself appears to thwart over-thinking and “liberate” people for more authentic relationships.

It must have been quite a party:

“What did you do on New Year's Eve?"

"Um, I watched my friends eat dog food.”

Yikes. It sounds like these friends were on the losing end of a bet. Apparently, though, they did it in the name of science—helping Science Magazine’s John Bohannon test some theories on the psychology behind luxury food purchases. He wondered what feeds the demand for pricey foods. Do people really enjoy them, or do they just feel like they should? Some research has suggested that price influences our perception of quality. A study on wine preferences, for instance, found that most people can’t pick out expensive wine by taste, and, on the whole, tend to favor cheaper versions if they're not aware of the cost.

In his taste test, Bohannon placed the dog food alongside pâté, liverwurst, and Spam. His subjects weren't fooled: They consistently rated dog food as the least appetizing option.  

Image courtesy of star5112, licensed under Creative Commons.

(Thanks, In the Pipeline.)

Sources: In the Pipeline, Science Magazine

Barack Obama’s election is hailed as a step forward in American race relations. Now, researchers are trying to quantify the “Obama Effect” to figure out how it’s changing American culture. One study, reported by the New York Times, found that a test-taking achievement gap between black people and white people disappeared after Obama’s election. In other words, before Obama’s election, white people tended to do better on this test than black people. Now, that gap has disappeared, at least for this test.

The reason why that gap existed in the first place, Jonah Lehrer writes for the Frontal Cortex blog, may be due to a “stereotype threat.” Stereotypes can creep into the minds of test takers, making them perform worse on tests because of the threat, rather than any difference in intelligence.

An inspiring politician isn’t needed to erase that achievement gap, according to the WNYC show Radio Lab. All that’s needed is a simple change in language: When a test is referred to as an “intelligence test,” the gap remains. But if researchers refer to the exact same test as a “puzzle,” or some other word that is less loaded than “test,” the difference goes away.

“The real subtle power of a stereotype isn’t that it prevents you from the thing you want to do,” Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad says, “it distracts you for just a beat from the thing you want to do. And that may be all the difference.”

Obama’s election could be lowering racism coming from white people, too. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller McCune that biases against black people registered significantly lower after Obama’s election in certain research. Researchers from Florida State University used Implicit Association Tests and found that the participants, 80 percent of which were white, showed no biases against black people, while previous studies showed a preference for white people. The researchers described this as a “fundamental change” in American race relations.  

The post-election test results aren’t all positive, however. Other studies have shown that white people who expressed a preference for Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, also expressed a preference for hiring white people over black people. That same preference didn’t come up when the participants expressed a preference for John Kerry.

“The researchers conclude that endorsing Obama helps people establish their ‘moral credentials’ as non-prejudiced people,” Jacobs writes, “and thus makes them more comfortable expressing opinions that could be regarded by some as racist.”

Sources: Miller McCune, Radio Lab, Frontal Cotex, New York Times

Image by hyperscholar, licensed under Creative Commons.

People can do their own taxes, control their spending, contribute to retirement funds, and psychologists will still think they’re irrational about money. And more than likely, they're are right.

In many situations, people think more about the size of numbers than what they represent, according to an article in Science Daily. Using studies on risk aversion, psychologists at Ohio State University showed that people think of 300 cents as greater than $3, even though they hold the same value.

People also think of money “in terms of percentages, not in terms of absolute numbers,” behavioral economist Dan Ariely told Marketplace. He gave an example: If a person found out that they could save $7 on a $15 pen by walking five blocks, many people would do it. If they were told they could save  $7 on a suit that cost $1,015, most people wouldn’t bother.

Both examples show how people can be entirely irrational, even when working with small numbers. When it comes to $700 billion bail out plans, I shudder to think.

Unlike many Americans, Russians don't put on their happy face for the benefit of strangers. In fact, Russians seldom crack smiles in public, but that doesn't mean they've come down with "a nationwide case of the blues," reports Marina Krakovsky for Psychology Today.

While the sharp difference in the number of smiling citizens you'll encounter in public places in the United States and Russia can’t be explained by a wide gap in general happiness, it could be attributed to differences in the ways we separate our public and private lives. Krakovsky points to a psychological study that found that in group-oriented cultures, like Russia, people tend to express less emotion in public because “tamping down emotional displays reinforces the borders between friends and strangers, which in collectivist societies are hard to cross.” In the States, where “relationships come and go more easily,” people tend to be more expressive, even with strangers.

Krakovsky notes that Russians’ straight-faced public demeanor could also have grown out of a number of other aspects of Russian life—their rough history or severe climate, for instance. However it became ingrained in the national psyche, it’s a custom guided by an unwritten code of conduct, Russian linguist Iosif Sternin told Psychology Today. That code says showing off one’s dimples isn’t a way “to lift another’s spirits,” and that it's only done “for good reason.”
 

Bottled-up aggression sometimes needs an outlet. Sarah Lavely tries to provide a healthy one in her Smash Shack located in downtown San Diego. According to Psychology Today (article not available online), the company rents out concrete rooms, where clients can smash plates, glasses, or once-cherished mementos from relationships they want to forget. People can also buy plates and borrow Sharpie pens, to write out names or personal messages before they smash them. Some say that unleashed anger simply leads to more aggression, but Lavely points out that “Research has also shown that it’s absolutely critical to express emotions and anger, as opposed to shoving it down.”

Image by  BitBoy , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Neuroimaging grabs headlines, but a recent study, highlighted in the New Scientist, questions the reliability of brain scan research, particularly when it’s used to make claims about human emotions and behavior.

Hal Pashler and his colleagues looked at more than 50 studies that used fMRI scans to link activity in specific brain regions to feelings. They argue that many of the studies—nearly 30—have inflated these correlations or created one where none exists. The problem has to do with methodology. Pashler’s team contends that for any given brain image, researchers should cross-reference two sets of scans in order to accurately judge the strength of a correlation. The studies they criticized relied on only one.

Not surprisingly, the scrutinized groups have already begun to defend themselves, but there’s more than scientific integrity on the line. Studies like the ones in question are already being treated outside scientific circles as fact. As both the New York Times and Justice Talking (pdf) reported, the scans been used as evidence in legal cases for years.

Image by Mikey G. Ottawa, licensed under Creative Commons.

In its January 2009 issue, Shambhala Sun is “Celebrating 30 Years of Buddhism in America” along with its anniversary (1978-2008). Among the thoughtful offerings: Senior editor Barry Boyce chronicles the dramatic changes Western Buddhism has undergone since it was introduced to the United States.

Marcia Z. Nelson reviews some of the most significant Buddhist books from the past 30 years, such as The Art of Happiness (1998), a Eastern-philosophy-meets-Western-psychology bestseller coauthored by the Dalai Lama and psychiatrist Howard Cutler. Nelson also singles out Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994) and Full Catastrophe Living (1991) as two books that brought mind-body meditation into the mainstream. 

Another article—"What's Next?"—assembles thoughtful predictions from an array of Buddhist thinkers (excerpt only). “Just like pouring water from one container into another, this formless wisdom may be transmitted from one country, culture, and language to another by way of the cultural forms and conventions that contain it,” writes scholar and meditation master Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche.

Image by alicepopkorn, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hollywood’s romantic comedies aren’t just innocuous cinematic tripe. They’re actually warping children’s minds (pdf), according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The films, including Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail are skewed portrayals of relationships with “both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities,” the researchers write, where romantic problems or transgressions “have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning.” The films tend to focus on the early stages of relationships, but the characters displayed emotions that generally develop over time, including deep feelings of love and emotional support. Adolescents sometimes use these films as models for their own relationships, which could lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. 

In the book and film High Fidelity, the main character  asks, “What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?” For romantic comedy films, researchers may now have an answer. 

(Thanks, Miller-McCune.)

Image from the film Notting Hill.

Groups are thought to be strong: United we stand, divided we fall. E pluribus unum. In reality, though, just one negative person can ruin an entire group, according to research by Will Felps highlighted on This American Life. Felps identified three personality types that can ruin a group: jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists. One person who fits any of those personality types can make an otherwise productive group 30 to 40 percent worse. “What was sort of eerily surprising,” Felps said of his research, “was how these team members would start to sort of take on” the characteristic of the bad apple. Groups with a jerk in them started being mean to each other. Groups with a depressive pessimist often acted more depressed.

Group dynamics can also give way to group think. Too often, Jake Mohan writes for the Jan-Feb issue of Utne Reader, “Fruitful dissent evaporates, self-defeating tendencies surge, and corrosive emotions destroy the potential of group work.” 

There are strategies to overcome the problems in group dynamics. Mohan writes that “Team leaders can encourage constructive dissent by playing devil’s advocate and disagreeing with a unanimous decision, prompting a timid voice to pipe up.” In Felps’ research, there was one group that didn’t do worse, even with a bad apple. In that group, according to Felps, “There was just one guy who was a particularly good leader. And what he would do was he would ask questions and he would engage all the team members and diffuse conflicts.” The question that Felps is currently researching is whether a good leader can overcome the obstacles provided by all the jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists just by asking questions. His previous research would suggest that it’s possible.

Image by  Lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Some half a million people in the United States experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Symptoms of the condition, also known as winter-onset depression, include anxiety, fatigue, and irritability, and the problems may keep coming back every winter.

The disorder is thought to be caused by the lack of sunlight that some people experience during the winter. It also may be an evolutionary remnant of human hibernation, according to columnist Carol Venolia in Utne Reader’s sister publication, Natural Home magazine. As recently as the early 20^th century, Venolia writes that peasants in both Russia and France would shut themselves in for the cold months, huddling around the stove and barely moving until the spring thaw.

Venolia advocates giving into our hibernation tendencies, at least a little bit. If we did, “We’d sleep more and demand less from ourselves.  We’d be more inward and reflective.”

Image courtesy of OakleyOriginals, licensed under Creative Commons.

Meditation and psychology are intertwining as experts in the fields realize the benefits of a symbiotic relationship. Joelle Hann reports for Whole Life Times that many psychologists have begun to incorporate yoga and mindfulness into their therapies, and some yoga instructors are studying up on psychology to create “yoga psychotherapy” for their clients.

“Integrating yoga-based methods into psychotherapeutic work presents inherent challenges,” Hann writes. Part of the problem lies in a strict taboo against physical contact in traditional psychotherapy, a standard born out of concern about abuse from therapists. There are, however, many yoga-based therapies that don’t involve any touching. For example, some psychologists have found that controlled breathing and meditative exercises can go a long way toward psychological healing.

Many of these mindfulness-based therapies have hard science to back them up. “Mindfulness reduces stress, boosts immune functioning, reduces chronic pain, lowers blood pressure, and helps patients cope with cancer,” Jay Dixit writes for Psychology Today.  The article offers six tips on how people can incorporate mindfulness into daily lives.

The mindfulness exercises have also been used to help children in war-torn countries. In the September-October issue of Utne Reader, Aaron Huey wrote about a yoga class in the Allahoddin Orphanage in Kabul, Afghanistan. Huey writes that yoga helps the children “move away from painful thoughts to ones that give them strength. In a place so full of suffering, the comfort this simple routine provides is immeasurable.”

Image by  RaminusFalcon , licensed under Creative Commons.

People don’t need alcohol to get drunk. The organizers of the “Expectancy Challenge” can prove it using groups of college students, a bar, and both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, Psychotherapy Networker reports. The key is that participants in the don’t know whether they’re being served the alcoholic or the non-alcoholic drinks. A few of the students inevitably end up drinking the non-alcoholic stuff, and still end up feeling drunk. Once they realize that they’ve been duped by their own brains, the program is able to teach them that you don’t need alcohol to have a good time.

John McCain and Barack Obama “represent distinct cognitive styles” and have “starkly different approaches to decision-making,” Jonah Lehrer writes for the Boston Globe. According to Lehrer, the contrast between the two candidates makes the 2008 election not just an assessment of who's right on the issues, but "a referendum on the best mode of thinking.” Lehrer cites psychological research on how good decisions are made to evaluate the strengths of McCain and Obama’s cognitive styles. Some studies imply that gut instincts, which McCain often relies on, are a great asset in complicated decision making. Others contend that good judgment is more likely to spring from active introspection, which is more Obama’s style.

Either approach, according to Lehrer, “is inherently flawed” as an absolute methodology. It’s important for decision makers to “constantly reflect on their own thought process” and to enlist advisers that will challenge their decisions. Psychologist Philip Tetlock tells Lehrer, “We should see self-awareness and even self-doubt as a sign of strength, not as a sign of weakness.” That may be true, but in a presidential campaign, self-doubt is often attacked as unpresidential.

“The ideal president,” Lehrer writes, “won't conform to the current cliches of presidential decision-making. He'll exude confidence in public, but behind the scenes he'll accept his fallibility and seek out those who disagree with him. He won't fixate on rational deliberation - or worship the power of his intuition. The brain is not a hammer, and not every problem is a nail.”

Though National Singles Week (September 21-27) has come to a close, Bella DePaulo assures singletons that not being in a committed relationship does not necessarily equate to loneliness or solitude. DePaulo, a psychology professor and author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Systematically Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, gives the lie to academic studies and conventional wisdom suggesting that married people are happier, and that a single life is an incomplete life.

DePaulo also targets discriminatory practices that favor married people, such as “the 1,136 federal benefits, protections, and privileges that are available only to people who are legally married” and the Family and Medical Leave Act. The 100 million unmarried American voters remain an untapped political demographic, DePaulo writes. And the media portrayal of marriage and couples’ culture is not doing people any favors.

“You are no more likely to live happily ever after if you get married than you were when you were single,” DePaulo writes. The statement could be reassuring or unsettling, demanding on your point of view.

Image by desdetasmania.blogspot.com, licensed by Creative Commons.

Many gardeners feel that digging in the dirt and planting seeds helps them relax. Now researchers have found that gardening can have real physical and psychological health benefits. According to an article in Psychology Today (article not available online), gardening exposes people to soil-borne microbes called Mycobacterium vaccae that can stimulate their immune systems. The same microbes also boost the levels serotonin in mice, much like prozac and other antidepressants. Some researchers think that depriving children from playing in the dirt may have led to the recent rise in immune disorders, including asthma. Daniel Marano writes for Psychology Today that “the components of the soil itself might be as critical to human heath as the finest fruits and veggies grown in it.”

The U.S. Army Research Office has awarded $4 million to scientists from three universities to study “the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.” Put simply, the military wants to read minds. According to an offical press release, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland will collaborate to construct a “brain-computer interface,” where soldiers’ thoughts will be recorded by an EEG and transcribed by a computer-based speech recognition program for others to read. The project’s supporters say that synthetic telepathy would help both wounded soldiers and civilians as well (for example, those sustaining brain damage from trauma or stroke). Critics worry that the technology could be used for interrogation, even though the lead researcher, UC-Irvine's Michael D’Zmura, told the Associated Press that the program "will never be used in a way without somebody's real, active cooperation.”

This is by no means the first time the military has poured money into researching psychic activities like mind-reading or “remote viewing.” Writing for Maisonneuve (article not available online), Alex Roslin details the long history in the US of military psychic research, which stretches all the way back to 1953. The idea reached its peak in the 1970s and ‘80s with Stargate, the CIA’s cinematically titled program for developing remote viewing and precognition techniques.

(Thanks, Democracy Now!)

Image by The She-Creature, licensed under Creative Commons.

Psychologists have figured out why Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin looked so frustrated last night after she won a silver medal. Her reaction was typical of silver medalists, who are often more disappointed than the athletes who win bronze medals. According to the Boston Globe, “close-call counterfactuals” explain the disappointment of second place: Silver medal winners, like Liukin, focused on how close they came to the gold, while bronze winners focused on how close they came to not winning a medal. Studies have also found that media expectations and performance in qualifying rounds, were determining factors in the athletes’ emotions.

From health care plans and investments options to the small choices of what to have for lunch, Cass Sunstein wants to help people make better decisions. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the coauthor, along with economist Richard Thaler, of Nudge about the subtle ways that government can push (or nudge) people into making better decisions.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, I sat down with Cass Sunstein to talk about the benefits and dangers of using nudges in government and business. And since Sunstein is also an informal advisor to presidential candidate Barack Obama, I asked him about the ways in which both candidates are nudging voters. 

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

Listen Now:

 Interview with Cass Sunstein: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Clichés are often the refuge of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. This is patently clear when people cherry-pick words from psychology. PsyBlog has compiled 30 of the most hated psychobabble phrases, including the following:

1. “He’s totally projecting.”
2. “I’m stuck in denial.”
3. Calling someone “bipolar”
4. And my favorite, “I get really OCD about cleaning my kitchen”

The problem with most of these phrases is how often they’re misused. Being moody isn’t the same as being bipolar. And keeping a clean kitchen doesn’t mean a person has obsessive compulsive disorder.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)

Sitting in front of a television, thousands of miles away from the action, a true sports fan will be emotionally, physically, and psychologically invested in the game. Hearts racing, palms sweating, fans yell at their TVs, pleading for a win. In my mind, this has an immeasurable effect on the game. In reality, Jonah Lehrer on the Seed blogs attributes the actions to mirror neurons. 

These recently discovered brain cells “collapse the distinction between seeing and doing,” Lehrer writes, allowing humans to internalize the actions of others. Mirror neurons fire when humans perform actions, and also when humans see other people taking actions. So when Paul Pierce was beaming on the sidelines in the final minutes of the Lakers-Celtics series this week, the mirror neurons of every Boston fan were firing wildly.

The cells also have a role to play in empathy, according to Bruce Grierson writing for the journal In Character. Empathy is “the very denominator of what it means to be human,” according to Grierson, and is triggered in some way by mirror neurons. Those neurons, however, are greatly affected by context. Grierson writes, “it’s the context that will determine to what degree the cognitive apparatus suppresses the limbic response.” In other words, if you see your team score a basket, it will call up a very different physiological response than when you see the opposing team score one. After all, we’re only human.

Image by  Todd Huffman , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Expensive pills are more effective than cheap ones, even when they’re both identical placebos, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and reported on the website Science a Go Go. Participants in the study were given light electric shocks and were asked to report on pain levels before and after taking the placebos. Half of the participants were told they received pills that cost $2.50 and half were told the pills cost 10 cents. Of the patients given the “cheap” pills, 60 percent reported a reduction in pain, while an overwhelming 85 percent reported less pain after taking the “expensive” pills.

—Bennett Gordon

People make mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, but eventually we can all get there. “We are meant to be happy,” says psychologist Daniel Gilbert in an interview with Shambhala Sun. In his new book, Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert tries to help people understand how to find a joyful life. He advises people to “distrust your brain, and trust your eyes a little bit more.” Don’t myopically pursue selfish and materialistic goals that you think will make you feel good. Rather, take a more scientific view, testing what makes you happy, and making natural mistakes on your way there.

This quest for bliss, however, may be entirely misguided, Eric G. Wilson writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Americans’ over-pursuit of happiness, and rejection of sadness, amounts to “a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life.” Melancholic feelings give inspiration to music, art, and literature, yet Americans try to destroy sadness through positive psychology and prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical therapies can help seriously depressed people, Wilson acknowledges, but too many people try to numb their pain instead of embracing it. This is a horrible and dangerous mistake.

—Bennett Gordon