Cuteness And Self-Compassion: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web Like humans, octopuses have both an active and quiet stage of sleep, reports Rodrigo Pérez Ortega at Science. Researchers found that for 30-40 minutes of sleep the creatures are fairly still with pale skin, but for about 40 seconds their skin turns darker and they move their eyes and body. In humans, dreaming happens in the active, REM stage, but scientists still don’t know whether the octopuses also dream during their active sleep. During the pandemic we haven’t only missed out on socialising — we’ve also been deprived of ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 26, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs

Students Who Want To Cut Down On Their Drinking Often Feel Forced To Compromise For Social Connection
By Emily Reynolds Drinking culture is a huge part of university, with Freshers’ Week events often revolving near-exclusively around getting drunk. A 2018 survey from the National Union of Students found that 76% of respondents feel an expectation for students to “drink to get drunk”; 79% agreed that “drinking and getting drunk” is a key part of university culture. This isn’t for everyone, however: a quick search of student forums will show many young people, pre-university, anxious about a drinking culture they don’t want to participate in. Now a new study in the British Journal of ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 25, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Alcohol Educational Social Source Type: blogs

Here ’s What We Listen For When Deciding Whether A Speaker Is Lying Or Uncertain
By Emma Young How do you know whether to trust what someone is telling you? There’s ongoing debate about which cues are reliable, and how good we are at recognising deception. But now a new paper in Nature Communications reveals that we reliably take a particular pattern of speech pitch, loudness and duration as indicating either that the person lying or that they’re unsure of what they’re saying — and that we do it without even being aware of what we’re tuning into. In an initial study, Louise Goupil at Sorbonne University, France, and her team manipulated the pitch, loudness and duration of a series ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 24, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Language Lying Perception Source Type: blogs

Taking Lecture Notes On A Laptop Might Not Be That Bad After All
By Emma Young “The pen is mightier than the keyboard”… in other words, it’s better to take lecture notes with a pen and paper rather than a laptop. That was the hugely influential conclusion of a paper published in 2014, by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer. The work was picked up by media around the world, and has received extensive academic attention; it’s been cited more than 1,100 times and, the authors of a new paper, also in Psychological Science, point out, it often features in discussions among educators about whether or not to ban laptops from classrooms. However, when Heather Urry at Tufts Universi...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 23, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Educational Memory Replications Source Type: blogs

The Experience Of Being “Tolerated”, Rather Than Accepted, Leads To Lower Wellbeing Among Ethnic Minority Groups
By Emily Reynolds Tolerance is often touted as a progressive value, a way of ensuring that society offers equal opportunities to all. But it can also imply “putting up with” something or someone you fundamentally disagree with or dislike — being tolerated isn’t the same as being genuinely valued or respected, for example. As one writer puts it, tolerance has echoes “of at best grudging acceptance, and at worst ill-disguised hostility”. Now a new study in the British Journal of Psychology has found that the experience of being tolerated takes its toll on the wellbeing of ethic monitories in the Un...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 22, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Mental health Social Source Type: blogs

Astronauts And Ambivalence: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web Researchers have used virtual reality to explore how art and nature elicit feelings of the sublime. The team compared people’s emotional responses when they saw a 360° VR version of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night to when they saw a realistic portrayal of the actual area depicted in the painting. They found that both VR videos induced sublime feelings — but participants’ responses were more intense for the naturalistic video, reports Sarah Wells at Inverse. We’re often expected to fall firmly on one side or the other of an is...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 19, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs

Autistic Children May Experience Less Variation In Their Bodily Emotional Responses
By guest blogger Dan Carney Research into emotion processing in autistic people has mainly focused on how they understand others’ emotions. A more limited body of work into how autistic people process their own emotions has, however, suggested difficulties identifying and describing emotional experiences, and distinguishing between emotional states. The latter is potentially important, as it is associated with negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and self-injurious behavior, all of which have been suggested to occur more frequently in autism than in the general population.    So far, studie...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 18, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Autism Emotion guest blogger The self Source Type: blogs

These Two Factors Are Linked To The Experience Of Otherworldly Phenomena Across Cultures And Religions
By Emily Reynolds Hearing voices is often associated with mental illness. But this belief doesn’t always reflect reality, with much research suggesting that many people who hear voices experience no distress and have never had contact with psychiatric services. Religious hearing of voices also has a tradition outside of what we might consider “pathological”: St. Augustine’s recognition of the voice of God, to use one very famous example. Why do some of us hear otherworldly voices, while others don’t? According to Stanford University’s Tanya Marie Luhrmann and team, it could be related to two fact...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 17, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Cross-cultural Personality Religion Source Type: blogs

How To Cope With Failure, According To Psychology
By Emma Young We all have times when we feel that we’ve failed — but it’s how we respond to it that really matters. Here are five findings that could help you cope with failure: 1. Be kind to yourself It’s an old one, but a good one: practise some self-compassion. Being self-compassionate entails being kind and non-judgemental towards yourself in the face of difficulty — including failure. Perhaps the best-known proponent of self-compassion is Kristin Neff at the University of Texas, Austin (you can take her self-compassion test here). Back in 2005, Neff published work finding that students who ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 16, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Educational The self Source Type: blogs

Do Liberals And Conservatives Really Have Different Moral Foundations? Differences May Be Less Clear Cut Than Often Claimed
In conclusion, the results of this meta-analysis both confirm and expand the relations of moral foundations and political orientation,” the team writes. However, they “also raise some notable considerations for future studies regarding the methodology and theory”. – Moral foundations and political orientation: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest (Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST)
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 15, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Morality Political Source Type: blogs

Children As Young As Eight Show A Gender Gap In Negotiation
By Emma Young Though the gender pay gap is narrowing in the UK, it still remains. It’s vital, then, to fully understand what causes it — and so what can be done to ensure that women are paid the same as men for doing the same work. Research does show that women are less likely than men to initiate salary negotiations, and also ask for less. Now a new study in Psychological Science reveals that a gender gap in negotiation emerges surprisingly early, becoming apparent among children aged just eight to nine. This implies that efforts to close the gender pay gap should start long before anyone even enters the workf...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 11, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Developmental Gender Source Type: blogs

People Who Believe In Pure Evil Support Harsher Punishments For Perpetrators Of Violence
By Emily Reynolds Whether you believe in such a thing as “pure evil” — that there are individuals inherently predisposed to intentionally harming others — can fundamentally change how you see the world. Strong belief in pure evil, for example, has been linked to increased support for the death penalty, torture, and racial prejudice. Now a new study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, has looked at the link between belief in pure evil and the attributes we ascribe to perpetrators of violence. Focusing on mass shootings in the US, the team once again finds a relationship between belief in p...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 10, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Forensic Terrorism Source Type: blogs

If We Don ’t Feel Socially Accepted, We Get More Defensive When We’ve Done Something Wrong
By Emily Reynolds When you’ve done something wrong, big or small, it can be hard to own up to — particularly if you feel you’ve transgressed a moral or social code. Instead, you might avoid confronting the issue and become defensive. Yet defensiveness often has negative consequences anyway: it can hurt someone else’s feelings, cloud your ability to make a good decision in the moment, or prevent you from changing harmful behaviours. But why do we get defensive, and what can we do to minimise those negative consequences? A new study from Michael Wenzel and colleagues at Flinders University, published in the Br...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 9, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Morality Social Source Type: blogs

Longer Interview Shortlists Could Help Women Advance In Male-Dominated Industries
By Emily Reynolds Despite many efforts to make workplaces more equitable, women are still frequently discriminated against at work. Companies run by women are judged more harshly on ethical failings, for instance, and women are more likely to be lied to in performance reviews. This discrimination doesn’t just happen in the workplace: it can happen before someone is even employed. A study from last year, for example, found that Black women with natural hair are seen as less competent and professional than their White counterparts when interviewing for jobs. Now a new study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, has ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 8, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Gender Occupational Source Type: blogs

It Turns Out You Can Bullshit A Bullshitter After All
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter. Well, that’s the saying — but is it true? Shane Littrell and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada, set out to investigate. And in a new paper in the British Journal of Social Psychology they report that, in fact, people who bullshit more often in a bid to impress or persuade others are also more susceptible to bullshit themselves. The reason for this — also uncovered by the team — is truly fascinating. Some earlier work has suggested that better liars are also better at detecting lies. But as the team notes, bullshit isn’t quite the same, as it falls just sho...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 5, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Language Lying Social Source Type: blogs