Imagine a photograph showing your friend’s face. Although you might think that every single detail in his face matters to recognize him, previous experiments have shown that the brain prefers a rather coarse resolution instead.

This is tantamount to that a small rectangular photograph of about 30 to 40 pixels in width (showing only the face from left ear to right ear) is optimal.

But why?

A hint comes from an analysis of many face images. It turns out that the eyes and the mouth are responsible for setting the resolution level.

Looking at eyes and mouth at a coarse resolution gives the most reliable signals for recognition, and the brain adapted to this property.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
www.publishing.royalsociety.org/proceedingsb

The human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate, UCLA scientists report. Being treated fairly turns on the brain’s reward circuitry.

“We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward,” said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.

“Receiving a fair offer activates the same brain circuitry as when we eat craved food, win money or see a beautiful face,” said Golnaz Tabibnia, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and lead author of the study, which appears in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The activated brain regions include the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Humans share the ventral striatum with rats, mice and monkeys, Tabibnia said.

“Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats,” she said. This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need, she added.

In the study, subjects were asked whether they would accept or decline another person’s offer to divide money in a particular way. If they declined, neither they nor the person making the offer would receive anything. Some of the offers were fair, such as receiving $5 out of $10 or $12, while others were unfair, such as receiving $5 out of $23.

“In both cases, they were being offered the same amount of money, but in one case it’s fair and in the other case it’s not,” Tabibnia said.

Almost half the time, people agreed to accept offers of just 20 to 30 percent of the total money, but when they accepted these unfair offers, most of the brain’s reward circuitry was not activated; those brain regions were activated only for the fair offers. Less than 2 percent accepted offers of 10 percent of the total money.

The study group consisted of 12 UCLA students, nine of them female, with an average age of 21. They had their brains scanned at UCLA’s Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. The subjects saw photographs of various people who were said to be making the offers.

“The brain’s reward regions were more active when people were given a $5 offer out of $10 than when they received a $5 offer out of $23,” Lieberman said. “We call this finding the ’sunny side of fairness’ because it shows the rewarding experience of being treated fairly.”

A region of the brain called the insula, associated with disgust, is more active when people are given insulting offers, Lieberman said.

When people accepted the insulting offers, they tended to turn on a region of the prefrontal cortex that is associated with emotion regulation, while the insula was less active.

“We’re showing what happens in the brain when people swallow their pride,” Tabibnia said. “The region of the brain most associated with self-control gets activated and the disgust-related region shows less of a response.”

“If we can regulate our sense of insult, we can say yes to the insulting offer and accept the cash,” Lieberman said. UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 37,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 300 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Whether you are running for president or looking for a clerical job, you cannot afford to get angry if you are a woman, Yale University psychologist Victoria Brescoll has found.

Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann at Northwestern University recently completed three separate studies to explore a phenomenon that may be all-too-familiar to women like New York Senator Hillary Clinton: People accept and even reward men who get angry but view women who lose their temper as less competent

The studies, published in the March issue of Psychological Science, provide women with recommendations for navigating emotional hazards of the workplace. Brescoll says it pays to stay emotionally neutral and, if you can’t, at least explain what ticked you off in the first place.

Clinton’s presidential campaign has put a spotlight on the question of whether anger hurts a female candidate. The answer, according to the studies, appears to be an unequivocal yes – unless the anger deals with treatment of a family member.

“An angry woman loses status, no matter what her position,” said Brescoll, who worked in Clinton’s office as a Congressional Fellow in 2004 while she was preparing her doctoral thesis on gender bias. She noticed over the years that women pay a clear price for showing anger and men don’t.

In all studies, both men and women were shown videos of actors portraying men and women who were ostensibly applying for a job. The participants in the studies were then asked to rate applicants on how much responsibility they should be given, their perceived competence, whether they should be hired, and how much they should get paid.

Both men and women in the reached the same conclusions: Angry men deserved more status, a higher salary, and were expected to be better at the job than angry women.

When those actor/applicants expressed sadness, however, the bias was less evident, and women applicants were ranked equally to men in status and competence, but not in salary.

Brescoll and her colleague then compared angry job applicants to ones who did not display any emotion. And this time the researchers showed study participants videos of both men and women applying for lower-status jobs. The findings were duplicated: Angry men were valued more highly than angry women no matter what level position they were applying for. However, the disparities disappeared when men and women who were emotionally neutral were ranked.

A final study showed another way bias against female anger could be mitigated. When women actors explained why they were angry, observers tended to cut them more slack. However, Brescoll noted a final gender difference: Men could actually be hurt when they explained why they were angry.

Here’s a maxim from the “duh” department: People typically prefer to feel emotions that are pleasant, like excitement, and avoid those that are unpleasant, like anger.

But a new study appearing in the April issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says this may not always be the case. Psychologists Maya Tamir and Christopher Mitchell of Boston College, and James Gross of Stanford University tested whether people prefer to experience emotions that are potentially useful, even when they are unpleasant to experience.

The authors wanted to examine whether individuals are motivated to increase their level of anger when they expect to complete a confrontational task, where anger might enhance performance. They told the study participants that they will either play a computer game that is confrontational (Soldier of fortune – a first person shooter game where killing enemies is your primary goal) or one that is not confrontational (”Diner Dash” – a game in which players guide a waitress serving customers). They were then asked to rate the extent to which they would like to engage in different activities before playing the game.

The researchers found that participants preferred activities that were likely to make them angry (e.g., listening to anger-inducing music, recalling past events in which they were angry) when they expected to perform the confrontational task. In contrast, participants preferred more pleasant activities when they expected to perform a non-confrontational task.

With this preference established, the researchers wanted to examine whether these inclinations to increase anger improved performance. They randomly assigned participants to either the angry or excited emotion induction (or a neutral condition) and then had them play the confrontational and a non-confrontational computer games.

As expected, angry participants performed better than others in the confrontational game by successfully killing more enemies. However, angry participants did not perform better than others in the non-confrontational game, which involved serving customers.

So it seems that individuals are not always striving to feel pleasure and may even be willing to endure some nasty emotions if necessary. “Such findings,” write the authors “demonstrate that what people prefer to feel at any given moment may depend, in part, on what they might get out of it.”

A new study in the Journal of Personality reveals the extent to which children’s personality types can predict the timing of key transitional moments between childhood and adulthood.

The study set out to examine whether childhood personality would predict the timing of important transitional events moving into adulthood, including leaving the parents’ home, establishing a romantic relationship, and entering the world of part-time work.

Participants consisted of 230 children who were studied every year from their first or second year in preschool until age 12. After age 12, the sample was reassessed twice, at ages 17 and 23. Researchers led by Jaap Denissen of Humboldt-University Berlin assessed degrees of shyness and aggressiveness through parental scales and teacher reports.

Denissen tested the hypotheses on the predictive validity of three major preschool personality types. Resilient personality is characterized by above average emotional stability, IQ, and academic achievement. Overcontrol is characterized by low scores on extraversion, emotional stability, and self-esteem. Undercontrol is characterized by low scores on emotional stability and agreeableness and high scores on aggressive behavior.

The 19-year longitudinal study illustrated that childhood personality types were meaningfully associated with the timing of the transitions. Resilient males were found to leave their parents’ house approximately one year earlier than overcontrolled or undercontrolled children. Overcontrolled boys took more than a year longer than others in finding a romantic partner. Resilient boys and girls were faster in getting a part-time job than their overcontrolled and undercontrolled peers.

“Studies of so-called natural experiments will continue to be useful in elucidating the effects of life experiences on personality development,” the authors conclude.

This study is published in the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Personality.

Whether you are a habitual list maker, or you prefer to keep your tasks in your head, everyone pursues their goals in this ever changing, chaotic environment. We are often aware of our conscious decisions that bring us closer to reaching our goals, however to what extent can we count on our unconscious processes to pilot us toward our destined future?

People can learn rather complex structures of the environment and do so implicitly, or without intention. Could this unconscious learning be better if we really wanted it to?

Hebrew University psychologists, Baruch Eitam, Ran Hassin and Yaacov Schul, examined the benefit of non-conscious goal pursuit (moving toward a desired goal without being aware of doing so) in new environments. Existing theory suggests that non-conscious goal pursuit only reproduces formerly learned actions, therefore ineffective in mastering a new skill. Eitam and colleagues argue the opposite: that non-conscious goal pursuit can help people achieve their goals, even in a new environment, in which they have no prior experience.

In the first of two experiments, Eitam and colleagues had participants complete a word search task. One half of the participants’ puzzles included words associated with achievement (e.g. strive, succeed, first, and win), while the other half performed a motivationally neutral puzzle including words such as, carpet, diamond and hat. Then participants performed a computerized simulation of running a sugar factory. Their goal in the simulation was to produce a specific amount of sugar. They were only told that they could change the number of employees in the factory. Although participants were not told about the complex relationship that existed between the number of employees and past production levels (and could not verbalize it after the experiment had ended); they gradually grew better in controlling the factory. As predicted, the non-consciously motivated participants (the group that had previously found words associated with achievement) learned to control the factory better than the control group.

In a second experiment the researchers replicated the findings by having participants perform a simple task of responding to a circle that repeatedly appeared in one of four locations. They were not told that the circle (sometimes) appeared in a fixed sequence of locations. Non-consciously motivated participants had again (nonconsciously) learned the sequence better than control participants.

“Taken together, both studies suggest that the powerful, unintentional, mechanism of implicit learning is related to our non-conscious wanting and works towards attaining our non-conscious goals,” the researchers write. These results, which appear in the March issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal an unconscious process that has both an advantage over conscious processing and an ability to serve a person’s current goals. Such unconscious processes may be responsible for far more of human ability than is yet recognized.

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information.
Article “Nonconscious Goal Pursuit in Novel Environments: The Case of Implicit Learning”

08 Mar 2008

A team of researchers from Canada and Japan have uncovered some remarkable results on how eastern and western cultures assess situations very differently.

Across two studies, participants viewed images, each of which consisted of one centre model and four background models in each image. The researchers manipulated the facial emotion (happy, angry, sad) in the centre or background models and asked the participants to determine the dominant emotion of the centre figure.

The majority of Japanese participants (72%) reported that their judgments of the centre person’s emotions were influenced by the emotions of the background figures, while most North Americans (also 72%) reported they were not influenced by the background figures at all.

“What we found is quite interesting,” says Takahiko Masuda, a Psychology professor from the University of Alberta. “Our results demonstrate that when North Americans are trying to figure out how a person is feeling, they selectively focus on that particular person’s facial expression, whereas Japanese consider the emotions of the other people in the situation.”

This may be because Japanese attention is not concentrated on the individual, but includes everyone in the group, says Masuda.

For the second part of the study, researchers monitored the eye movements of the participants and again the results indicated that the Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than the westerners when judging the situation.

While both the Japanese and westerners looked to the central figure during the first second of viewing the photo, the Japanese looked to the background figures at the very next second, while westerners continued to focus on the central figure. Medical News Today News Article

A new study published in the journal Human Communication Research reveals that viewers can be influenced by exposure to racial bias in the media, even without realizing it.

Led by Dana Mastro of the University of Arizona, the study exposed participants to television clips where Latinos were portrayed in both flattering and unflattering ways.

First, using a simulated television script, Latinos were presented in a variety of roles which differed in terms of the degree of intelligence and educational attainment associated with the main character. Next, additional participants were exposed to actual television programming, providing a more valid television viewing experience. Although the simulated scripts offered greater control, viewing actual programming more closely reproduced an authentic television encounter.

Exposure to stereotypes produced unfavorable effects on the viewers. When the target character was white, no association was made between racial identification and evaluations of the character. However, with relative consistency, when the target character was Latino, as viewer racial identification increased, perceptions of the character’s education and qualifications decreased.

The research indicates that stereotype-based processing may occur based on media exposure, even when at a conscious level people try to dismiss what they are seeing as harmless. Indeed, TV images not only affected what the viewers thought about minorities, but also led to an us-versus-them mentality.

The study also suggests that when white’s own racial group membership is an important part of how they define themselves, then these unfavorable television characteristics may be used to boost their own esteem and elevate the status of their group.

This study was published in the January 2008 issue of Human Communication Research. Medical News Today News Article

There are several human characteristics considered to be genetically predetermined and evolutionarily innate, such as immune system strength, physical adaptations and even sex differences. These qualities drive the nature versus nurture debate and ask of our species, who is more successful and why?

Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden asked an even more complicated question of human predisposition: Does one’s sex influence his or her ability to remember everyday events? Their surprising findings did in fact determine significant sex differences in episodic memory, a type of long-term memory based on personal experiences, favoring women.

Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example, the results indicate a man would be more likely to remember his way out of the woods.

However, there are also sex differences favoring women on tasks such as remembering the location of car keys, which requires both verbal and visuospatial processing.

“In addition, women are better than men at remembering faces, especially of females,” described Herlitz and Rehnman, “and the reason seems to be that women allocate more attention to female than to male faces.”

To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings, which appear in the February 2008 edition of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male.

In additional studies, psychologists also discovered that women perform better than men in tasks requiring little to no verbal processing, such as recognition of familiar odors, and that the female episodic memory advantage increases when women utilize verbal abilities and decreases when visuospatial abilities are required. Environmental factors, such as education, seem to influence the magnitude of these sex differences, as well.

While the probability of genetically-based differences between the quality of male and female memory remains unknown, the results suggest that females currently hold the advantage in episodic memory.