Tag: psychology

Toddlers Want to Help and We Should Let Them

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We, in the United States and many other Western nations, more often think of children as sources of extra work than as sources of help. We often think that trying to get our children to help us at home or elsewhere would be more effort than it would be worth. We also tend to think that the only way to get children to help is to pressure them, through punishment or bribery, which, for good reasons, we may be loath to do. We ourselves generally think of work as something that people naturally don’t want to do, and we pass that view on to our children, who then pass it on to their children.

But researchers have found strong evidence that very young children innately want to help, and if allowed to do so will continue helping, voluntarily, through the rest of childhood and into adulthood. Here is some of that evidence.

Evidence of Toddlers’ Instinct to Help

In a classic research study, conducted more than 35 years ago, Harriet Rheingold (1982) observed children ages 18, 24, and 30 months interacting with their parent (mother in some cases, father in others) as the parent went about doing routine housework, such as folding laundry, dusting, sweeping the floor, clearing dishes off the table, and putting away items scattered on the floor. For the sake of the study, each parent was asked to work relatively slowly and allow their child to help if the child wanted, but not to ask the child to help or direct the child’s help through verbal instructions. The result was that all of these young children—80 in all—voluntarily helped do the work. Most of them helped with more than half of the tasks that the parent undertook, and some even began tasks before the parent got to them. Moreover, in Rheingold’s words, “The children carried out their efforts with quick and energetic movement, excited vocal intonations, animated facial expressions, and with delight in the finished task.”

Many other studies have confirmed this apparently universal desire of toddlers to help. A common procedure is to bring the little child into the laboratory, allow him or her to play with toys in one part of the room, and then create a condition in which the experimenter needs help in another part of the room. For example, the experimenter might “accidentally” drop something onto the floor, over a barrier and try but fail to reach it. The child, who is on the other side of the barrier from the experimenter, can help by picking the object up and handing it over the barrier to the experimenter. The key question is: Does the child come over and help without being asked? The answer is yes, in almost every case. All the experimenter has to do is draw attention to the fact, through a grunt and attempts to reach, that she is trying to get the object. Even infants as young as 14 months have been found regularly to help in these situations (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). They see what the experimenter is trying to do, infer what she needs, and then, on their own initiative, satisfy that need.

This helping behavior is not done for some expected reward. In fact, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello (2008) found that giving a reward for helping reduces subsequent helping. In one experiment, they allowed 20-month-old children to help an experimenter in a variety of ways and either rewarded the child (with an opportunity to play with an attractive toy) or not. Then they tested the children with more opportunities to help, where no reward was offered. The result was that those who had been previously rewarded for helping were now much less likely to help than were those who had not been rewarded. Only 53% of the children in the previously rewarded condition helped, in this test, compared with 89% in the unrewarded condition.

This finding is evidence that children are intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated to help—that is, they help because they want to be helpful, not because they expect to get something for it. Much other research has shown that rewards tend to undermine intrinsic motivation. For example, in one classic study, children who were rewarded for drawing a picture subsequently engaged in much less drawing than children who had not been rewarded for drawing (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). Rewards apparently change people’s attitudes about a previously enjoyed activity, from something that one does for its own sake to something that one does primarily to get a reward. This occurs for adults as well as for children (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999).

We parents, in our culture, tend to make two mistakes regarding our little children’s desires to help. First, we brush their offers to help aside, because we are in a rush to get things done and we believe (often correctly) that the toddler’s “help” will slow us down or the toddler won’t do it right and we’ll have to do it over again. Second, if we do actually want help from the child, we offer some sort of deal, some reward, for doing it. In the first case, we present the message to the child that he or she is not capable of helping; and in the second case, we present the message that helping is something a person will do only if they get something in return.

Cross-Cultural Evidence that Toddlers Who Are Allowed to Help Become Truly Helpful Later in Childhood

Researchers studying various Indigenous communities and Indigenous-heritage communities (communities not far removed from Indigenous ways) have found that parents in those communities respond positively to the desires of their toddlers to help, even when the “help” slows them down, because they believe that this pleases the child and helps the child learn to become a truly valuable helper. The research also shows that, by the time they are about 5 or 6 years old, children in those communities are very effective, willing helpers. Actually, “helper” is not even the right word here. A better word is “partner,” because they act as if the family’s work is as much their responsibility as it is their parents’.

Illustrations of this can be found, for example, in a study in which researchers interviewed mothers of 6- to 8-year-olds in Guadalajara, Mexico (Alcala, Rogoff, Mejia-Arauz, Coppens, & Dexter, 2014). Nineteen of the mothers were from an Indigenous-heritage community, still rather closely linked to their Native American roots, and the other 14 were from a more cosmopolitan, Westernized urban community. All of the children attended school, but the parents in the Indigenous-heritage community had much less schooling than did those in the cosmopolitan community. The research revealed great differences in ways that the two sets of parents described their children’s contributions to household tasks. According to the parents’ reports, 74% of the children in the Indigenous-heritage community regularly took initiative in family household work, without being asked, compared with none of the children in the cosmopolitan community. For illustration, here are quotes from two of the Indigenous-heritage mothers describing their children’s activities:

“There are days when she comes home and says: ‘Mom, I’m going to help you do everything.’ Then she picks up the entire house, voluntarily. Or sometimes, when I’m not done cleaning the house, she tells me, ‘Mom you’ve come home really tired, let’s start cleaning the house.’ And then she turns the radio on and tells me, ‘You do one thing, and I’ll do something else,’ and I clean the kitchen and she picks up the rooms.”
“Everybody knows what they need to do, and without having to ask her, she tells me, ‘Mommy I just got home from school, I’m going to visit my grandma, but before I go, I’m going to finish my work,’ and she finishes and then she goes.”
In contrast, the cosmopolitan mothers reported very little voluntary helping from their children and seemed to denigrate what little help a child did offer. Here, for example, is a quotation from one of these mothers: “I’ll walk into the bathroom and everything is all soapy, and she says to me ‘I’m just cleaning.’ I tell her, ‘You know what? It’s better that you don’t clean anything for me because I’m going to slip and fall in here.’”

All in all, the Indigenous-heritage mothers described their children as capable, autonomous, self-initiating, willing partners while the cosmopolitan mothers described their children as subordinates who generally helped only begrudgingly and needed to be told what to do. In the researchers’ words, “Most mothers in the Indigenous-heritage community (87%) reported that their children planned and chose their ‘free-time’ activities (work, unstructured play, homework, religious classes, and visiting relatives and friends), compared with only two mothers (16%) in the cosmopolitan community.” Indeed, other studies, involving first-hand observations of the children in their homes, confirm these parents’ reports. To many people in our culture, it may seem counterintuitive that children who were most free to choose their own activities, least directed by their parents, were the children who contributed most to the family’s welfare.

In some other essays in this blog (e.g.: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200808/children-educate-themselves-iii-wisdom-hunter-gatherers) I’ve described children’s natural drive to learn by observing others around them and then trying out for themselves the activities they observe. Cross-cultural researcher Barbara Rogoff has described this mode of self-directed education as Learning by Observing and Pitching In, or LOPI (Rogoff, Mejia-Arauz, & Correa Chavez, 2015). Helping with housework is just one example of LOPI.

A How-To Summary

In sum, the research I’ve described here suggests that, if you want your child to be a partner with you in taking responsibility for the family work, you should do the following:

Assume it is the family work, and not just your work, which means not only that you are not the only person responsible to get it done but also that you must relinquish some of the control over how it is done. If you want it done exactly your way, you will either have to do it yourself or hire someone to do it.

Assume that your toddler’s attempts to help are genuine and that, if you take the time to let the toddler help, with perhaps just a bit of cheerful guidance, he or she will eventually become good at it.

Avoid demanding help, or bargaining for it, or rewarding it, or micromanaging it, as all of that undermines the child’s intrinsic motivation to help. A smile of pleasure and a pleasant “thank you” is good. That’s what your child wants, just as you want that from your child. Your child is helping in part to reinforce his or her bond with you.

Realize that your child is growing in very positive ways by helping. The helping is good not just for you, but also for your child. He or she acquires valued skills and feelings of personal empowerment, self-worth, and belonging by contributing to the family welfare. At the same time, when allowed to help, the child’s inborn altruism is nourished, not quashed.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201809/toddlers-want-help-and-we-should-let-them

If you drive an expensive car you’re probably a jerk, scientists say

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By Rob Picheta

The science is looking pretty unanimous on this one: Drivers of expensive cars are the worst.

A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road — with the likelihood they’ll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth.

Researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas speculated that the expensive car owners “felt a sense of superiority over other road users” and were less able to empathize with lowly sidewalk-dwellers.

They came to this conclusion after asking volunteers to cross a sidewalk hundreds of times, filming and analyzing the responses by car drivers.

Researchers used one white and one black man, and one white and one black woman — also finding that cars were more likely to yield for the white and female participants. Vehicles stopped 31% of the time for both women and white participants, compared with 24% of the time for men and 25% of the time for black volunteers.

But the best predictor of whether a car would stop was its cost, researchers discovered. “Disengagement and a lower ability to interpret thoughts and feelings of others along with feelings of entitlement and narcissism may lead to a lack of empathy for pedestrians” among costly car owners, they theorized in the study.

And the discovery of a car-value-to-jerkish-behavior correlation isn’t new; the research, published in the Journal of Transport and Health, backed up a Finnish study published last month that found that men who own flashy vehicles are more likely to be “argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic.”

According to that survey of 1,892 drivers by the University of Helsinki, those deemed to have more disagreeable character traits were “more drawn to high-status cars.”

But it also found that conscientious people often favor higher-priced vehicles, too. If you’re reading this while stuck in traffic in your brand new BMW: yes, you’re definitely in that category.

“I had noticed that the ones most likely to run a red light, not give way to pedestrians and generally drive recklessly and too fast were often the ones driving fast German cars,” Helsinki University’s Jan-Erik Lönnqvist said in a press release.

He set out to discover what kind of person is more likely to buy an expensive car, creating a personality test of Finnish car owners.

“The answers were unambiguous: self-centred men who are argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes,” the press release states.

“These personality traits explain the desire to own high-status products, and the same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others,” Lönnqvist added.

His study cited previous research that indicated drivers behind the wheel of a costly vehicle are more likely to flout traffic regulations or drive recklessly.

But he also found people with “conscientious” characters seek out pricey models, too.

“People with this type of personality are, as a rule, respectable, ambitious, reliable and well-organised,” the statement said. “They take care of themselves and their health and often perform well at work.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/world/expensive-car-drivers-study-scli-scn-intl/index.html

The Unexpected Joy of Repeat Experiences

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By Leah Fessler

Scrolling through Instagram can quickly convince you that everyone’s life is more interesting than yours. During a particularly adventurous week on Instagram Stories recently, I saw water skiing in Maui, hiking in Yosemite and swimming with wild pigs in Bermuda. Wild pigs!

Impulsively, I started Googling flights to new places. Then I ordered pho from the same Vietnamese place I eat at every week and … felt bad about not trying somewhere new.

This fear of missing out is rooted in a common psychological tic: Evolutionarily, we’re disposed to find novel experiences more exciting and attention-grabbing than repeat experiences, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. It’s basically fight or flight psychology — our brains can’t process all the stimuli around us, so we evolved to pay attention to new, flashy and potentially dangerous things more intently than familiar things, which we’ve seen enough to know they’re not dangerous. What’s more, words like “repetition” and “repetitiveness” — unlike “novelty” — tend to be associated with more negative emotions, said Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School.

“Classic research shows that when we think about upcoming experiences, we think about variety,” said Mr. Norton, who specializes in consumer behavior. “If I ask you right now to select a yogurt for each day next week, you’ll pick your favorite flavor — say, blueberry — a few times, but you’ll mix in some strawberry and peach. Because who wants to eat that much blueberry yogurt? Over the longer term, though, as the original experience fades in time and memory, repetition can become more pleasurable.”

He added: “We’re simply more boring than we’d like to admit.”

Our obsession with novelty is also enhanced by the influencer and experience economies, which confer social status based on how many new things you can do, see and buy, as Leah Prinzivalli unpacks in a recent article documenting the rise of Instagram to-do lists. This can be emotionally and financially draining: Few of us have the time or money to regularly indulge new experiences, which can lead us to feel bad about our lives’ monotony. However, recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about repeat and novel experiences suggests we ought to reconsider how we digest those feelings of monotony.

This research centers on hedonic adaptation — when an identical stimulus provides less pleasure the more it’s consumed.

Some previous research has painted a negative picture of repeat experiences, citing that doing the same thing twice can feel inherently less valuable. But Ed O’Brien, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, wondered whether behavioral science misconstrued hedonic adaptation, and people actually underestimate how positively they react to repeat experiences. Many of us happily listen to our favorite song on repeat, he noted, or rewatch favorite movies and TV shows. This repetition was the whole point of purchasing music or film before the age of Spotify and Netflix. This conflict is why Mr. O’Brien launched a series of studies on the topic.

“There’s a general belief that if you want to seem like an interesting, cultured person, the best thing you can do is to showcase that you’re open to new experiences,” he said. “That may be true, but I think we take for granted the other value of really digging deep into one domain.”

To test this hypothesis, Mr. O’Brien and his team exposed all participants to the same stimulus once in full (various stimuli were tested, including museum visits, movies and video games). Next, some participants were asked to imagine repeating the experience, while others actually did repeat the experience.

Counter to previous research, Mr. O’Brien found that across the board, repeat experiences were far more enjoyable than participants predicted.

“Doing something once may engender an inflated sense that one has now seen ‘it,’ leaving people naïve to the missed nuances remaining to enjoy,” he wrote in the study.

In other words: You’re far more likely to enjoy something the second time around than you think.

Given that participants experienced the exact situation they imagined repeating, their predictions should’ve been relatively accurate, Mr. O’Brien explains. In reality, participants who repeated experiences found the second time around just as enjoyable as the first.

“Novel experiences are definitely great for enjoyment, and our studies don’t go against this idea,” he said. “In many cases, the novel option is better. But what our studies emphasize is that repeat options also might have high hedonic value and might also come with less costs to acquire than a purely novel option, and people might sometimes overlook this.”

There is joy in repetition partly because every human mind wanders. Consequently, we miss a substantial part of every experience.

“As I’m enjoying a museum or a beer, my mind is also thinking about emails I need to send, phone calls I need to return and the name of my third grade teacher,” Mr. Norton said. “So repeating things can really be seen as another opportunity to actually experience something fully.”

This is especially true when the experience is complex, leaving ample room for continued discovery.

“When an experience has many layers of information to unveil, it’s probably a good bet to repeat it,” Mr. O’Brien said. “The rub is that it’s hard to tell which experiences will be like this, and our studies show that people are too quick to assume that they’ve ‘seen all the layers’ even in those cases where they haven’t.”

In fact, it’s safe to assume there are more explorable layers in any experience, according to Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the so-called “Mother of Mindfulness.” That’s because the process of looking for new insights in any repeat experience is fulfilling in and of itself. It’s the essence of mindfulness.

“When you’re noticing new things in any experience, neurons are firing, and that’s the way to become engaged,” Ms. Langer said. “Many people look to be engaged, because they’re bored with life and they don’t know what to do. All you need to do is approach whatever task is at hand by searching for the things that you didn’t see in the first time around.”

If you’re unsure how to be more mindful in repeat experiences, Ms. Langer offers three tips.

“First, recognize that everything is always changing, so the second experience is never exactly the same as the first experience,” she said. “Second, if you’re looking for novelty, that’s itself engaging, and that engagement feels good.” And third, you must realize that events are neither positive nor negative. “It’s the way we understand events that makes them positive or negative,” she said. “So that if we look for ways the experience is rewarding, exciting, interesting, we’re going to find evidence for that. Seek and ye shall find.”

Beyond helping us feel excited at the prospect of staying home and strolling around your neighborhood this winter rather than jet-setting to a tropical beach, Mr. O’Brien’s research suggests we should think twice about our cultural obsession with doing and accomplishing as much as humanly possible.

“Coffee will never taste as good as it does if you quit it for a month. So it’s true that novelty is fun, but given enough of a break in between, repeat experiences regain that initial buzz,” Mr. Norton said. “This is why people do seemingly crazy things, like creating time capsules. If you looked at your third-grade report card every day, you’d get sick of it — but if you bury it in a time capsule and unearth it 20 years later, that’s fascinating.”

How Behavioral Science Solved Chicago’s Plastic Bag Problem: the fee works better than the ban

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Like a lot of cities seeking to reduce the unrecyclable plastic waste that has burdened their landfills and fouled their waterways, Chicago officials had two basic policy remedies to pick from: a ban or a fee. And like a lot of cities, they made that choice based largely on gut instinct and voter preference. They picked a ban but soon after it went into effect in August 2015, officials discovered it was having some unintended and unwelcome consequences.

“It was only a matter of months,” said Paul Sajovec, chief of staff to Alderman Scott Waguespack, “because people pretty quickly realized that it wasted more plastic.”

The ban applied to only thin, single-use plastic bags, prompting stores to find alternatives like paper bags, which are less likely to wind up in local waterways but cost more energy to manufacture than plastic. One independent grocer gave out 9,500 fewer plastic bags a week after the ban, according to the Illinois Retail Merchant Association, but those bags were twice the thickness—negating the benefit of the ban. In all, it was a real-time confirmation of a 2017 study by the University of Sydney: plastic bag bans tend to increase purchases of both plastic trash bags and paper bag use.

There was some anecdotal evidence consumers were changing their behavior by bringing their own reusable bags but the law was generally earning mixed reviews. Politicians and environmentalists wanted more impact. Retailers were frustrated at the increased cost of bagging supplies.

“The silver lining in that bad policy was it brought retailers to the table,” said Jordan Parker, founder and director of Bring Your Own Bag Chicago, an environmental advocacy group that helped shape the new legislation.

In November 2016, the city repealed the ban, replacing it with a 7-cent fee on paper and plastic bags. In a short period of time, Chicago had effectively become a municipal laboratory to study which of the two basic policy remedies works best. What researchers found when they examined the data was that consumers are less motivated by emotional appeals to save the environment and more by the impact on their pocketbook—even when it’s just a few cents. Over the course of the first year, Chicagoans reduced their disposable bag usage from 2.3 bags per trip to 1.8 bags per trip—a nearly 28 percent difference, according to a 2018 study by the University of Chicago, New York University and the non-profit ideas42.

Tatiana Homonoff, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at New York University, and her research team surveyed shoppers inside Chicago and its neighboring suburbs, which were not subject to a bag fee, before and after the city’s tax went into effect. When she asked why they brought a reusable bag, shoppers would tick off environmentalist talking points such as the pile of garbage twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. But when Homonoff asked customers when they started bringing their own bag they answered, “After the tax was passed.”

“Sometimes these informational campaigns can work,” she said. “Telling people about the environmental ills of plastic isn’t going to work.” At least not on its own.


Washington, D.C. resident Takia Holmes carries a jumble of groceries to her car without using a plastic bag, which would have cost her an extra nickel.

To understand the bag tax’s success, Homonoff points to a phenomenon in behavioral economics known as loss aversion. The painful experience of loss is more effective at changing habits than a positive gain. During her surveys, customers often said they wouldn’t bring a reusable bag if they could save a nickel but would bring a bag if it meant avoiding a 5-cent charge.

“You do see this asymmetry when we’re talking about a bonus versus a tax,” she said.

Interestingly, that small but painful fee proved effective on customers across all demographics and income levels, she added.

“It’s not to say that it only works when it’s a big financial burden, then you would expect the drop in low-income neighborhoods but not high-income neighborhoods,” she said. “This tells me that it’s not just about the financial burden of this, that maybe there’s something behavioral.”

Knowing that the modest fee can work at different income levels could also help policymakers understand how to calculate the most palatable tax for consumers. In Seattle, the plastic bag industry goaded voters to reject a 20-cent plastic bag fee. The city ultimately replaced the fee with a hybrid solution that banned plastic bags and charged 5 cents for larger paper bags. In the four years after the policy went into effect, the city of Seattle reported a 50 percent reduction of plastic bags going to city dumps. However, the same report noted that about half of convenience stores and grocery stores were out of compliance.

The takeaway, Homonoff says, is that while you might get a bigger change if you have a large tax, you can change consumer habits with a small tax as well.

Parker agreed that even a modest tax can force people to think twice about the environment.

“These tiny slaps on the wrist are effective at making people care,” she said. “The data points to money. If they feel like they’re losing money, the loss aversion is so much more powerful when changing human behavior.”

The city had initially projected the fee would garner $9.2 million in revenue. Instead, the tax collected just $5.6 million in the first year. (Unlike some municipalities that dedicate revenue from the bag fee to environmental cleanups, Chicago retailers collect 2 cents while the city retains the other 5 for its general operating budget.)

While revenue climbed to $6.4 million in 2018, the city’s fiscal year 2020 budget overview projects that number will decline to $5.9 million in 2019 and will stabilize the following year. That drop doesn’t bother the city’s budget experts, who argue the tax wasn’t really about the revenue in the first place.

“It really was trying to encourage people to bring reusable bags when shopping,” said Susie Park, the city’s budget director. “The decline in revenue is potentially a good thing, because it shows a change in behavior. So we’re hoping that continues.”

Evidence of the fee’s success is anecdotal in other cities, such as Washington, D.C., that have implemented one. In Washington, the Anacostia River has served as the poster child for the city’s 5-cent fee. The waterway is the intended recipient of the tax’s revenue and despite evidence that some of the funds earmarked for cleaning the river have floated down other revenue streams, local politicians say there is less plastic clogging the river.

Even as Chicago acknowledges its bag tax hasn’t beefed up the city’s coffers, its performance hasn’t dissuaded the state government from eyeing a similar fee as a potential revenue source. In February, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker proposed a 5-cent tax on plastic checkout bags across the state, a fee his administration expects would garner between $19 million and $23 million. State Rep. Ann Williams, a Democrat whose district encompasses parts of northern Chicago neighborhoods, introduced a bag tax bill in the Illinois House of Representatives earlier this year. Williams noticed a dramatic change in behavior in her home district after the tax, but can’t say the same for the state capital, where there’s no disposable bag policy. Her new habits, she said, travel with her.

“I’m throwing stuff in my purse,” she said. “… I absolutely try and there’s that guilt factor.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/21/plastic-bag-environment-policy-067879

The smartphone app that can tell you’re depressed before you know it yourself

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by Rachel Metz

There are about 45 million people in the US alone with a mental illness, and those illnesses and their courses of treatment can vary tremendously. But there is something most of those people have in common: a smartphone.

A startup founded in Palo Alto, California, by a trio of doctors, including the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, is trying to prove that our obsession with the technology in our pockets can help treat some of today’s most intractable medical problems: depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.

Mindstrong Health is using a smartphone app to collect measures of people’s cognition and emotional health as indicated by how they use their phones. Once a patient installs Mindstrong’s app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other apps. This data is encrypted and analyzed remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s medical provider.

The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression. With details gleaned from the app, Mindstrong says, a patient’s doctor or other care manager gets an alert when something may be amiss and can then check in with the patient by sending a message through the app (patients, too, can use it to message their care provider).

For years now, countless companies have offered everything from app-based therapy to games that help with mood and anxiety to efforts to track smartphone activities or voice and speech for signs of depression. But Mindstrong is different, because it’s considering how users’ physical interactions with the phones—not what they do, but how they do it—can point to signs of mental illness. That may lead to far more accurate ways to track these problems over time. If Mindstrong’s method works, it could be the first that manages to turn the technology in your pocket into the key to helping patients with a wide range of chronic brain disorders—and may even lead to ways to diagnose them before they start.

Digital fingerprints
Before starting Mindstrong, Paul Dagum, its founder and CEO, paid for two Bay Area–based studies to figure out whether there might be a systemic measure of cognitive ability—or disability—hidden in how we use our phones. One hundred and fifty research subjects came into a clinic and underwent a standardized neurocognitive assessment that tested things like episodic memory (how you remember events) and executive function (mental skills that include the ability to control impulses, manage time, and focus on a task)—the kinds of high-order brain functions that are weakened in people with mental illnesses.

The assessment included neuropsychological tests that have been used for decades, like a so-called timed trail-­tracing test, where you have to connect scattered letters and numbers in the proper order—a way to measure how well people can shift between tasks. People who have a brain disorder that weakens their attention may have a harder time with this.

Subjects went home with an app that measured the ways they touched their phone’s display (swipes, taps, and keyboard typing), which Dagum hoped would be an unobtrusive way to log these same kinds of behavior on a smartphone. For the next year, it ran in the background, gathering data and sending it to a remote server. Then the subjects came back for another round of neurocognitive tests.

As it turns out, the behaviors the researchers measured can tell you a lot. “There were signals in there that were measuring, correlating—predicting, in fact, not just correlating with—the neurocognitive function measures that the neuropsychologist had taken,” Dagum says.

For instance, memory problems, which are common hallmarks of brain disorders, can be spotted by looking at things including how rapidly you type and what errors you make (such as how frequently you delete characters), as well as by how fast you scroll down a list of contacts. (Mindstrong can first determine your baseline by looking at how you use your handset and combining those characteristics with general measures.) Even when you’re just using the smartphone’s keyboard, Dagum says, you’re switching your attention from one task to another all the time—for example, when you’re inserting punctuation into a sentence.

He became convinced the connections presented a new way to investigate human cognition and behavior over time, in a way that simply isn’t possible with typical treatment like regularly visiting a therapist or getting a new medication, taking it for a month, and then checking back in with a doctor. Brain-disorder treatment has stalled in part because doctors simply don’t know that someone’s having trouble until it’s well advanced; Dagum believes Mindstrong can figure it out much sooner and keep an eye on it 24 hours a day.

In 2016, Dagum visited Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences company, where he pitched his work to a group including Tom Insel, a psychiatrist who had spent 13 years as director of the National Institute of Mental Health before he joined Verily in 2015.

Verily was trying to figure out how to use phones to learn about depression or other mental health conditions. But Insel says that at first, what Dagum presented—more a concept than a show of actual data—didn’t seem like a big deal. “The bells didn’t go off about what he had done,” he says.

Over several meetings, however, Insel realized that Dagum could do something he believed nobody in the field of mental health had yet been able to accomplish. He had figured out smartphone signals that correlated strongly with a person’s cognitive performance—the kind of thing usually possible only through those lengthy lab tests. What’s more, he was collecting these signals for days, weeks, and months on end, making it possible, in essence, to look at a person’s brain function continuously and objectively. “It’s like having a continuous glucose monitor in the world of diabetes,” Insel says.

Why should anyone believe that what Mindstrong is doing can actually work? Dagum says that thousands of people are using the app, and the company now has five years of clinical study data to confirm its science and technology. It is continuing to perform numerous studies, and this past March it began working with patients and doctors in clinics.

In its current form, the Mindstrong app that patients see is fairly sparse. There’s a graph that updates daily with five different signals collected from your smartphone swipes and taps. Four of these signals are measures of cognition that are tightly tied to mood disorders (such as the ability to make goal-based decisions), and the other measures emotions. There’s also an option to chat with a clinician.

For now, Insel says, the company is working mainly with seriously ill people who are at risk of relapse for problems like depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse. “This is meant for the most severely disabled people, who are really needing some innovation,” he says. “There are people who are high utilizers of health care and they’re not getting the benefits, so we’ve got to figure out some way to get them something that works better.” Actually predicting that a patient is headed toward a downward spiral is a harder task, but Dagum believes that having more people using the app over time will help cement patterns in the data.

There are thorny issues to consider, of course. Privacy, for one: while Mindstrong says it protects users’ data, collecting such data at all could be a scary prospect for many of the people it aims to help. Companies may be interested in, say, including it as part of an employee wellness plan, but most of us wouldn’t want our employers anywhere near our mental health data, no matter how well protected it may be.

Spotting problems before they start
A study in the works at the University of Michigan is looking at whether Mindstrong may be beneficial for people who do not have a mental illness but do have a high risk for depression and suicide. Led by Srijan Sen, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, the study tracks the moods of first-year doctors across the country—a group that is known to experience intense stress, frequent sleep deprivation, and very high rates of depression.

Participants log their mood each day and wear a Fitbit activity tracker to log sleep, activity, and heart-rate data. About 1,500 of the 2,000 participants also let a Mindstrong keyboard app run on their smartphones to collect data about the ways they type and figure out how their cognition changes throughout the year.

Sen hypothesizes that people’s memory patterns and thinking speed change in subtle ways before they realize they’re depressed. But he says he doesn’t know how long that lag will be, or what cognitive patterns will be predictive of depression.

Insel also believes Mindstrong may lead to more precise diagnoses than today’s often broadly defined mental health disorders. Right now, for instance, two people with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder might share just one of numerous symptoms: they could both feel depressed, but one might feel like sleeping all the time, while the other is hardly sleeping at all. We don’t know how many different illnesses are in the category of depression, Insel says. But over time Mindstrong may be able to use patient data to find out. The company is exploring how learning more about these distinctions might make it possible to tailor drug prescriptions for more effective treatment.

Insel says it’s not yet known if there are specific digital markers of, say, auditory hallucinations that someone with schizophrenia might experience, and the company is still working on how to predict future problems like post-traumatic stress disorder. But he is confident that the phone will be the key to figuring it out discreetly. “We want to be able to do this in a way that just fits into somebody’s regular life,” he says.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612266/the-smartphone-app-that-can-tell-youre-depressed-before-you-know-it-yourself/

Scientists Determine Four Personality Types Based on New Data

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Researchers led by Northwestern Engineering’s Luis Amaral sifted through data from more than 1.5 million questionnaire respondents to find at least four distinct clusters of personality types exist — average, reserved, self-centered, and role model — challenging existing paradigms in psychology.

“People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates’s time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense,”said co-author William Revelle, professor of psychology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

“Now, these data show there are higher densities of certain personality types,” said Revelle, who specializes in personality measurement, theory, and research.

The new study appears in Nature Human Behaviour. The findings potentially could be of interest to hiring managers and mental healthcare providers.

Initially, Revelle was skeptical of the study’s premise. The concept of personality types remains controversial in psychology, with hard scientific proof difficult to find. Previous attempts based on small research groups created results that often were not replicable.

“Personality types only existed in self-help literature and did not have a place in scientific journals,” said Amaral, Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. “Now, we think this will change because of this study.”

The new research combined an alternative computational approach with data from four questionnaires, attracting more than 1.5 million respondents from around the world. The questionnaires, developed by the research community over the decades, have between 44 and 300 questions. People voluntarily take the online quizzes, attracted by the opportunity to receive feedback about their own personality.

These data are now being made available to other researchers for independent analyses.

“A study with a dataset this large would not have been possible before the web,” Amaral said. “Previously, researchers would recruit undergrads on campus and maybe get a few hundred people. Now, we have all these online resources available, and data is being shared.”

Average

Average people are high in neuroticism and extraversion, while low in openness. “I would expect that the typical person would be in this cluster,” said Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab and the paper’s first author. Females are more likely than males to fall into the Average type.

Reserved

The Reserved type is emotionally stable, but not open or neurotic. They are not particularly extraverted but are somewhat agreeable and conscientious.

Role Models

Role Models score low in neuroticism and high in all the other traits. The likelihood that someone is a role model increases dramatically with age. “These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas,” Amaral said. “These are good people to be in charge of things. In fact, life is easier if you have more dealings with role models.” More women than men are likely to be role models.

Self-Centered

Self-Centered people score very high in extraversion and below average in openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. “These are people you don’t want to hang out with,” Revelle said. There is a very dramatic decrease in the number of self-centered types as people age, both with women and men.

The group’s first attempt to sort the data used traditional clustering algorithms, but that yielded inaccurate results, Amaral said.

“At first, they came to me with 16 personality types, and there’s enough literature that I’m aware of that says that’s ridiculous,” Revelle said. “I believed there were no types at all.”

He challenged Amaral and Gerlach to refine their data.

“Machine learning and data science are promising but can be seen as a little bit of a religion,” Amaral said. “You still need to test your results. We developed a new method to guide people to solve the clustering problem to test the findings.”

Their algorithm first searched for many clusters using traditional clustering methods, but then winnowed them down by imposing additional constraints. This procedure revealed the four groups they reported.

“The data came back, and they kept coming up with the same four clusters of higher density and at higher densities than you’d expect by chance, and you can show by replication that this is statistically unlikely,” Revelle said.

“I like data, and I believe these results,” he added. “The methodology is the main part of the paper’s contribution to science.”

To be sure the new clusters of types were accurate, the researchers used a notoriously self-centered group—teenaged boys—to validate their information.

“We know teen boys behave in self-centered ways,” Amaral said. “If the data were correct and sifted for demographics, they would they turn out to be the biggest cluster of people.”

Indeed, young males are overrepresented in the Self-Centered group, while females over 15 years old are vastly underrepresented.

Along with serving as a tool that can help mental health service providers assess for personality types with extreme traits, Amaral said the study’s results could be helpful for hiring managers looking to insure a potential candidate is a good fit or for people who are dating and looking for an appropriate partner.

And good news for parents of teenagers everywhere: As people mature, their personality types often shift. For instance, older people tend to be less neurotic yet more conscientious and agreeable than those under 20 years old.

“When we look at large groups of people, it’s clear there are trends, that some people may be changing some of these characteristics over time,” Amaral said. “This could be a subject of future research.”

This article has been republished from materials provided by Northwestern University. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference:

Martin Gerlach, Beatrice Farb, William Revelle, Luís A. Nunes Amaral. A robust data-driven approach identifies four personality types across four large data sets. Nature Human Behaviour, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0419-z

Lonely people stand farther from loved ones, study finds

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A new study from the University of Chicago found that people who report feeling lonely also say they sit or stand physically farther away from close friends and family. Their “personal space” for intimate partners is larger than those who report less loneliness, even when adjusted for marital status and other factors such as gender, anxiety and depression.

In two experiments, published Sept. 6 in PLOS ONE, the researchers surveyed nearly 600 U.S.-based men and women on how far they preferred to sit or stand near different groups of people, including friends and family, romantic partners and acquaintances. On average, loneliness doubles the odds of someone staying farther away from those in their closest circle of intimacy. (It had no effect on how far they preferred to stand from acquaintances or strangers).

“To our knowledge, this is the first direct evidence for a link between interpersonal distance preferences and loneliness,” said Elliot Layden, a UChicago graduate student and first author on the paper. “This finding may be important to consider in the context of loneliness interventions—such as client-therapist interactions and community programs seeking to combat loneliness.”

The effect persists even when scientists adjusted for how much social interaction the person experiences; for example, those who felt lonely despite high levels of social interaction still kept their distances.

“You can feel alone even in a crowd or in a marriage—loneliness is really a discrepancy between what you want and what you have,” said Stephanie Cacioppo, director of the Brain Dynamics Laboratory, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and senior author on the paper.

The authors say this fits with the evolutionary model of loneliness, pioneered by Stephanie Cacioppo and her late husband, John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and a co-author on the paper, who passed away earlier this year. The Cacioppos’ transformative work in this field connected feelings of loneliness to physical health outcomes, including sleep disturbances, inflammation and earlier death.

The evolutionary model suggests that even though loneliness might be expected to prompt people to move closer to others, it also increases an individual’s short-term self-preservation instincts, triggering an instinct to stay farther away. Previous Cacioppo studies using neuroimaging techniques have found evidence that lonelier individuals also exhibit heightened vigilance for social threats—such as social rejection or interpersonal hostility.

“This ‘survival mode’ means that even though a lonely person wants more social interaction, they may still unconsciously keep their distance,” Stephanie Cacioppo said. “The hope is that by bringing this to conscious attention, we can reduce the incidence of divorce as a byproduct of loneliness and increase meaningful connections among people.”

Cacioppo and her team are working to incorporate the finding into a program to reduce loneliness with the National Institutes of Health, she said. In further studies, she wants to explore gender differences in personal space; men are consistently found to prefer larger personal spaces than women.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-lonely-people.html

Walter Mischel, psychologist who created ‘marshmallow test,’ dies at 88

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Walter Mischel in 2004. “If we have the skills to allow us to make discriminations about when we do or don’t do something,” Dr. Mischel said, “we are no longer victims of our desires.” (David Dini/Columbia University)

By Emily Langer

The experiment was “simplicity itself,” its creator, psychologist Walter Mischel, would later recall. The principal ingredient was a cookie or a pretzel stick or — most intriguingly to the popular imagination — a marshmallow.

In what became known as “the marshmallow test,” a child was placed in a room with a treat and presented with a choice. She could eat the treat right away. Or she could wait unaccompanied in the room, for up to 20 minutes, and then receive two treats in reward for her forbearance.

Conducting their work at a nursery school on the campus of Stanford University in the 1960s, Dr. Mischel and his colleagues observed responses that were as enlightening as they are enduringly adorable. Some children distracted themselves by putting their fingers in their ears or nose. At least one child caressed the marshmallow as he hungered for it. Only about 30 percent of the children managed to wait for the double reward.

Dr. Mischel, who continued his career at Columbia University and died Sept. 12 at 88, followed a cohort of the children for decades and presented his findings to mainstream readers in his 2014 book “The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success.”

His observations, widely noted and hotly debated, were striking: Children who had found ways to delay gratification, he found, had greater success in school, made more money and were less prone to obesity and drug addiction.

“What emerged from those studies is a different view of self-control, one that sees it as a matter of skill” and not a matter of “gritting your teeth,” said Yuichi Shoda, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who worked with Dr. Mischel as a graduate student.

As worried parents conducted marshmallow tests at home, policymakers, educators and motivational speakers found a compelling catchphrase: “Don’t eat the marshmallow!” Even the ravenous Cookie Monster, a mainstay of the children’s TV show “Sesame Street,” was coaxed to resist a cookie.

Meanwhile, some psychologists challenged Dr. Mischel’s findings, arguing that a study group drawn from the privileged environs of Stanford could hardly yield reliable results. Skeptics noted that while affluent families might teach their children to delay gratification, in an effort to encourage financial and other forms of responsibility, children from disadvantaged homes learn that waiting to eat might mean not eating at all.

Dr. Mischel defended his research, emphasizing that in no way did he wish to suggest a laboratory performance — particularly by a preschooler — was destiny. The question, he said, is “how can you regulate yourself and control yourself in ways that make your life better?”

Walter Mischel was born Feb. 22, 1930, to a Jewish family in Vienna. His home was not far from that of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. “Even as a young child I was aware of his presence,” Dr. Mischel once told the British Psychological Society, “and I suspect at some level I became quite interested in what makes people tick.”

Dr. Mischel’s family enjoyed a comfortable life until the rise of Nazism. His father, a businessman who had suffered from polio, was made to limp through the streets without his cane. Dr. Mischel recalled being humiliated by members of the Hitler Youth who tread on his new shoes. The experience, he told the Guardian, planted in him a desire to understand “the enabling conditions that allow people to go from being victims to being victors.”

After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the family fled the country and settled eventually in New York City, where they ran a five-and-dime store. Dr. Mischel, who became a U.S. citizen in the 1950s, helped support the family by working in an umbrella factory and as an elevator operator.

He was a 1951 psychology graduate of New York University and received a master’s degree from the City College of New York in 1953 and a PhD from Ohio State University in 1956, both in clinical psychology. He taught at Harvard University before settling at Stanford.

He said he became fascinated by the development of self-control in children by watching his daughters emerge from infancy into toddler-hood and girlhood.

“I began with a truly burning question,” he told the Guardian. “I wanted to know how my three young daughters developed, in a remarkably short period of time, from being howling, screaming, often impossible kids to people who were actually able to sit and do something that required them to concentrate. I wanted to understand this miraculous transformation.”

The subjects of the Stanford nursery-school tests were his daughters’ classmates. As the children grew up and he noticed correlations between their childhood self-control and future success, he decided to pursue the question more rigorously, through longitudinal study.

He conceded the limitations of his study group at Stanford. “It was an unbelievably elitist subset of the human race, which was one of the concerns that motivated me to study children in the South Bronx — kids in high-stress, poverty conditions,” he told the Atlantic in 2014, “and yet we saw many of the same phenomena as the marshmallow studies were revealing.”

Dr. Mischel proposed strategies for delaying gratification, such as putting the object at physical distance, by removing it from view, or at symbolic distance by imagining it to be something else. A marshmallow is not a sugary treat, for example, but rather a cotton ball.

In his own life, he reported success at resisting chocolate mousse by imagining the dessert to be covered in roaches. A self-described “three-packs-a-day smoker, supplemented by a pipe . . . supplemented by a cigar,” he said he conquered his addiction by recalling the image of a lung-cancer patient he had seen at Stanford, branded with X’s where he would be treated by radiation.

In addition to “The Marshmallow Test,” Dr. Mischel wrote and co-authored numerous texts on personality, child development and other fields of psychological research. He retired last year after more than three decades at Columbia.

His marriages to Frances Henry and Harriet Nerlove ended in divorce. Survivors include his partner of nearly two decades, Michele Myers of New York; three daughters from his second marriage, Judy Mischel of Chicago, Rebecca Mischel of Portland, Ore., and Linda Mischel Eisner of New York City; and six grandchildren.

Linda Mischel Eisner confirmed the death and said her father died at his home of pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Mischel professed to have found hope in his life’s work. “If we have the skills to allow us to make discriminations about when we do or don’t do something,” he told the New Yorker magazine, “we are no longer victims of our desires.”

“It’s not,” he said, “just about marshmallows.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/walter-mischel-psychologist-who-created-marshmallow-test-dies-at-88/2018/09/14/dcf24008-b782-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.bc74b74cf416

Scientists Say They’ve Found The Driver of False Beliefs, And It’s Not a Lack of Intelligence

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by DAVID NIELD

Why is it sometimes so hard to convince someone that the world is indeed a globe, or that climate change is actually caused by human activity, despite the overwhelming evidence?

Scientists think they might have the answer, and it’s less to do with lack of understanding, and more to do with the feedback they’re getting.

Getting positive or negative reactions to something you do or say is a greater influence on your thinking than logic and reasoning, the new research suggests – so if you’re in a group of like-minded people, that’s going to reinforce your thinking.

Receiving good feedback also encourages us to think we know more than we actually do.

In other words, the more sure we become that our current position is right, the less likely we are to take into account other opinions or even cold, hard scientific data.

“If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don’t, you’re less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know,” says one of the team members behind the new study, Louis Marti from the University of California, Berkeley.

For the research, more than 500 participants were recruited and shown a series of colored shapes. As each shape appeared, the participants got asked if it was a “Daxxy” – a word made up for these experiments.

The test takers had no clues as to what a Daxxy was or wasn’t, but they did get feedback after guessing one way or the other – the system would tell them if the shape they were looking at qualified as a Daxxy or not. At the same time they were also asked how sure they were about what a Daxxy actually was.

In this way the researchers were able to measure certainty in relation to feedback. Results showed the confidence of the participants was largely based on the results of their last four or five guesses, not their performance overall.

You can see the researchers explain the experiment in the video below:

The team behind the tests says this plays into something we already know about learning – that for it to happen, learners need to recognise that there is a gap between what they currently know and what they could know. If they don’t think that gap is there, they won’t take on board new information.

“What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident,” says Marti. “It’s not that they weren’t paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren’t using most of what they learned to inform their certainty.”

This recent feedback is having more of an effect than hard evidence, the experiments showed, and that might apply in a broader sense too. It could apply to learning something new or trying to differentiate between right and wrong.

And while in this case the study participants were trying to identify a made-up shape, the same cognitive processes could be at work when it comes to echo chambers on social media or on news channels – where views are constantly reinforced.

“If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information,” says one of the team, psychologist Celeste Kidd from UC Berkeley.

So if you think vaccinations are harmful, for example, the new study suggests you might be basing that on the most recent feedback you’ve had on your views, rather than the overall evidence one way or the other.

Ideally, the researchers say, learning should be based on more considered observations over time – even if that’s not quite how the brain works sometimes.

“If your goal is to arrive at the truth, the strategy of using your most recent feedback, rather than all of the data you’ve accumulated, is not a great tactic,” says Marti.

The research has been published in Open Mind.

https://www.sciencealert.com/feedback-study-explains-why-false-beliefs-stick

2018 Ig Nobel Prizes

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cientific studies on the cleaning power of spit, a lone fruit fly’s ability to spoil wine, and cannibals’ caloric intake garnered top honors at the 28th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The seriously silly citations, which “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then think,” were awarded on Sept. 13 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Entertaining emcee Marc Abrahams and the savvy satirists of the Annals of Improbable Research produced the ceremony.

The coveted Chemistry Prize went to Portuguese researchers who quantified the cleaning power of human saliva. Nearly 30 years ago, conservators Paula Romão and Adília Alarcão teamed up with late University of Lisbon chemist César Viana to find out why conservators preferred their own saliva to any other solvent for cleaning certain objects—with the goal of finding a more hygienic substitute. Compared with popular solvents, saliva was the superior cleaning agent, particularly for gilded surfaces. The researchers attributed the polishing power to the enzyme α-amylase and suggested solutions of this hydrolase might achieve a spit shine similar to spit (Stud. Conserv. 1990, DOI: 10.1179/sic.1990.35.3.153).

A fruit fly in a glass of wine is always an unwelcome guest. But it turns out that as little as 1 ng of Drosophila melanogaster’s pheromone (Z)-4-undecenal can spoil a glass of pinot blanc. That discovery, from researchers led by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ Peter Witzgall, received the Ig Nobel’s Biology Prize. Only female fruit flies carry the pheromone, so males can swim in spirits without delivering the offending flavor, but the Newscripts gang still prefers to drink wine without flies (J. Chem. Ecol. 2018, DOI: 10.1007/s10886-018-0950-4).

Putting the paleo diet in a new perspective, University of Brighton archaeologist James Cole took home the Nutrition Prize for calculating that Paleolithic people consumed fewer calories from a human-cannibalism diet than from a traditional meat diet. Thus, Cole concludes, Paleolithic cannibals may have dined on their companions for reasons unrelated to their nutritional needs (Sci. Rep. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/srep44707).

A team led by Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist Lindie H. Liang won the Economics Prize “for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.” Push in some pins: The findings indicate voodoo doll retaliations make employees feel better (Leadership Q. 2018, DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.01.004).

The Newscripts gang previously reported about this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel for medicine, physicians Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, who found that riding roller coasters can help people pass kidney stones (J. Am. Osteopath. Assoc.2016, DOI: 10.7556/jaoa.2016.128).

The Reproductive Medicine Prize went to urologists John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau, who, in 1980, used postage stamps t
o test nocturnal erections, described in their study “Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring with Stamps” (Urol. 1980, DOI: 10.1016/0090-4295(80)90414-8).

The Ig Nobel committee also gave out a Medical Education Prize this year, to gastroenterologist Akira Horiuchi for the report “Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned from Self-Colonoscopy” (Gastrointest. Endoscopy 2006, DOI: 10.1016/j.gie.2005.10.014).

Lund University cognitive scientists Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc and coworkers claimed the Anthropology Prize “for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees” (Primates 2017, DOI: 10.1007/s10329-017-0624-9).

For a landmark paper documenting that most people don’t read the instruction manual when using complicated products, a Queensland University of Technology team led by Alethea L. Blackler garnered the Literature Prize (Interact. Comp. 2014, DOI: 10.1093/iwc/iwu023).

And finally, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a team from the University of Valencia’s University Research Institute on Traffic & Road Safety “for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile” (J. Sociol. Anthropol. 2016, DOI: 10.12691/jsa-1-1-1).

The Ig Nobel ceremony can be viewed in its entirety at youtube.com/improbableresearch, and National Public Radio’s “Science Friday” will air an edited recording of the ceremony on the day after U.S. Thanksgiving.

https://cen.acs.org/people/awards/2018-Ig-Nobel-Prizes/96/i37