Students awarded Agnes Penner Prize

Congratulations to Nyssa Schlem, Sarah Segal and Paula Zatko who were awarded the Agnes Penner Prize!


The prize is awarded to the Applied Psychological Science project with the greatest potential to benefit society, as judged by a panel of community members. 


The winning project is an intervention program they designed to help children with Autism Spectrum Disorders better recognize facial expressions of emotion and improve both communication and social interactions. Their project is being piloted this summer.

Your relationship with that Middle Schooler Just Might Affect Their Grades and Behavior

Do you remember your first day of 6^th grade? Do you remember that feeling of being treated like a big kid, but being the youngest in the school? Do you remember those preteen years of 10-12years old? Well, if you do, then you should know this was one of the most critical years of your young little development: as a student and as a person. As students transition from elementary to middle school the influence of Mommy and Daddy changes as their new friends and peers influence increases. Little do we, as teachers, parents and friends that our relationships with middle schooler’s affects their grades and behaviors. The problem is, if we’re not aware of these influences, we may end up making this transition even harder.

            What about these relationships? How the student perceives support or thinks about the support from the people with whom they have close relationships is crucial. People like parents, teachers and peers. These relationships have an affect on the 5 school behaviors.  It is important to identify this affect as scientists are showing evidence surrounding supportive relationships associated with academic success and supportive relationships associated with student motivation.

1.    Social behavior: School isn’t just about intellectual development, although it is the real reason we send kids to school. School is also about the interactions students have with each other, which establishes social and moral development.

a. Peers: How your middle schooler thinks his or her peers support them is most associated with this type of development.

2.    Academic Interest: This is the child’s own interest and curiosity. How much they want to gain knowledge. The greater the interest the more improvement you see in class assessment and performance. Interest leads to setting goal.

a. Peers: This is usually influenced by peers as well, but is open to wide a range of influences outside of relationships including media, role models and experiences.

3.    Academic goal setting and pursuit: academic goals reflect students desire to pursue social responsibility as a student and child in the classroom.

a.     Teacher: The support from educators is associated most with academic interest, classroom functioning and pursuit of goals.

4.    Self-motivation: This refers to the desire and how much the child tries to  pursue a goal.

a.     Peers, Parents & Teachers: The perceived support of all the relationships around each child has an effect on self motivation.

5.     Academic success: This can be defined as excellence in all academic disciplines, in class as well as extracurricular activities

a.     Parents: Let us not, as parents and teachers, underestimate our influence on a child’s schooling. This was the only relationship where the child’s perceived support predicted academic success. 

Ok, So how do we make sure that these relationships have only the positive effects and influences to ensure a smooth transition into middle school during this critical year? Well, based on the above findings it is clear that home socialization and interaction has just as much of a powerful influence on student emotional well-being at school as school socialization. Therefore, Parents, siblings, grandparents and extended family should offer moral and academic support to students. Personally, I think this should be all the time, not just during 6^th grade. This can be a little difficult, especially when there are several students in a household and when parents have to work to feed a family. However, this is an effort that is worth making to encourage a healthy foundation for student’s academic success.

As for teachers, it is and always should have been the teacher’s job to provide ampe support to children who steps into their presence. Basically, teacher student relationships are critical for academic success since most of the academic growth is done in the presence of and in collaboration with the teacher.

As for peers, as older individuals, there isn’t much we can do to effect how peers influence middle schoolers. Perhaps we can encourage them to engage in and do more pro-social and morally positive activities. This is assuming the social influence is negative. On the other hand, peers can have positive influences on each other as they challenge one another to think critically and strive for academic success. This is sometimes a conscious influence and other times unconscious.

The moral of the story is, no what your relationship with a student, whether it be close or distant, we must all strive to provide positive support to the best of our ability.

Peace and Blessings!!

Victoria Ryland

Wentzel, K. R.
(2003). Motivating Students to behave in socially competent ways. Theory Into Practice, 42(4), 319-326.

Wentzel, K.R., (1998) Social relationships and motivation in middle school: the role of parents, teachers and peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(2), 202-209.

Plan Accordingly

    As an undergraduate senior, I am always reminded of how my time at college is quickly coming to an end. However, there is always a huge difference in effect when I hear the amount of days left as opposed to the date, March 14, 2011. And this got me thinking of how different forms of the same answer effect how we perceive time, and how this effect would alter our ability to plan for future events as well as looking back on past events. Everyone has had the feeling of a past event seeming like it was just a few days ago or a future event being so far away. How do we estimate time of future or past events, and how does the answering form affect that estimation?

    In my search to understand this, I found an article by Robyn LeBoeuf and Eldar Shafir, describing a tendency for individuals to generally underestimate the time of uncertain events by unit-based estimation, such as days or years, than by end-based estimations, such as a date. Through as series of experiments, they were able to show indirectly that a pattern of behavior was demonstrated, and this behavior stemmed from a process called anchoring and adjustment. When people generate the day estimate of uncertain dates, they “anchor” around the current time and adjust incrementally by the unit, in this case day. Due to insufficient adjusting, it tends to lead to a general underestimation.
    So what does that mean for the rest of us? This can be translated in to bad planning. When you think a task can be completed in a certain amount of time and falter, this could be one of the reasons why it happened. An example from the article demonstrates this; when asking undergraduates how long it would talk for them to complete a thesis, most said around 34 days, when in actuality it took around 56 days.
    So next time you plan on working on a difficult, long term task, try to give yourself more time than you initially think. And when you decide on a date, also have how many days left until then because that will have a drastic effect on how you work. I saw a similar effect when I was making a timeline for my collaborative project. The breaking down of dates seemed less intimidating then counting the number of weeks and days it would take to complete certain tasks. I only hope is that I did not underestimate the time necessary for those task.

Alexander Nalbandian

LeBoeuf, R. A., & Shafir, E. (2009). Anchoring on the "here" and "now" in time and distance judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 81-93.

Death By IQ Score

Many states in the United States have created laws banning the sentencing of the death penalty to people with mental retardation.  What do you think happens when the life or death of a person hinges on a few IQ points?  In some capital cases, this is the case.  A person is considered mentally retarded if his or her IQ is below 70, but what does the court do if a person with an IQ a few points above 70 is involved in a capital crime?  In their article, Looking to Science Rather Than Convention in Adjusting IQ Scores When Death Is at Issue, Mark Cunningham and Marc Tasse wrote about how important finding the best way to interpret the standardized IQ score of someone a few IQ points away from a diagnoses of mental retardation in capital cases is.  

Most of us probably think that IQ scores are reliable, but what we might not know of is the Flynn effect.  You might be asking yourself, ‘What is the Flynn effect and why is it so important when talking about IQ scores?’  Well, the Flynn effect is the rise of mean IQ scores since the introduction of standardized IQ tests in the 20^th century.  The year that a standardized IQ test is created, the test norms reflect the contemporaneous population and therefore, a person’s IQ is an accurate comparison of the population at that time.  Over the years, the test norms for that IQ test become obsolete, so the mean IQ score of the general public rises and a given IQ score is not an accurate comparison of the current population.  An IQ test is re-normed about every 15 to 20 years, but in the meantime, IQ scores will rise because the IQ test norms are becoming outdated.

You can probably see why the legal system should consider and discuss the Flynn effect in capital cases where mental retardation is an issue.  Now that we see the problem, how can we fix it?  Truth be told, there is no easy fix.  Some professionals still do not understand or even know of the Flynn effect and others do not even agree with it.  Until there is a general acceptance of adjusting IQ scores to compensate for the Flynn effect, the practice will not become a prevailing convention in the professional community.

Ideally, having constantly updated IQ tests would fix the problem of continually rising mean IQs due to outdated norms, but frequently updating the tests would be extremely costly and time consuming.  Also, updating the tests frequently would require those who give the tests to obtain new testing materials and adapt the scoring procedures every time the test changes.

Cunningham and Tasse finally suggest a procedure to follow in capital cases where life is dependant upon a person’s IQ score.  They think that, in capital mental retardation hearings, someone needs to report the defendant’s IQ score, describe the Flynn effect, and report the defendant’s corrected IQ score.  To correct an IQ score, one would have to find how many years had passed since the creation of that IQ test and then multiply the number of passed years and the annual inflation rate of that specific test.   This procedure will hopefully save the lives of those with mental retardation when they are involved in capital crimes.

~Paula Zatko

Cunningham, M. D., & Tassé, M. J. (2010). Looking to science rather than convention in adjusting IQ scores when death is at issue. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 41, 413-419.

Finding and Maintaining a Romantic Relationship: Should I Say "I Love You" ?

 One day my friends are telling their boyfriends/girlfriends “I love you”, and the next day, I am comforting them with a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints; the same guy/girl my friend said “I love you” to, broke up with them and is now a “loser”. Who ever thought that three simple words, I love you, would be so confusing? Expressing commitment is critical for establishing and maintaining a romantic relationship because there are physical and emotional benefits to being in a committed relationship (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004).

After skimming an article in this month’s issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (March 2011) , on why women say “I love you” in  romantic relationships, I started to think about how men and women communicate differently in romantic relationships. Do men or women say “I love you” first in romantic relationships? Although I lack experience in the romantic relationship department, based on my undergraduate career largely grounded in psychology, it is apparent that men and women communicate their emotions differently. Since women are more emotionally expressive than men (Pines, 1998), then I predict that women  say  “I love you” first in a romantic relationship.

A recent study conducted by Ackerman, Griskevicius, and Li (2011) examined how men and women communicate commitment in romantic relationships. The researchers performed six experiments to answer two questions, who initially says “I love you” in a romantic relationship, men or women (studies 1-3)? And, how do men and women react to confessions of love (studies 4-6)? Although women are stereotypically associated with having stronger feelings of love then men, the study revealed men confess their love first in romantic relationships. In fact, men reported thinking about confessing their love 6 weeks earlier than did women. It is apparent that people's stereotypical beliefs can influence inaccurate judgments about a blossoming romantic relationship.

What explains this irony between people’s expectations and reality? According to the evolutionary-economics perspective on romantic commitment, men are likely to confess love first in relationships because they have a stronger desire to motivate early sexual activity (Ackerman et al., 2011). Women are choosier at picking a mate because women biologically use more resources than men on pregnancy and raising offspring. The costs and benefits associated with sexual activity suggest that men will be more interested in seeking sexual access at the beginning of a relationship.

If you are thinking about taking the “next step” in your relationship or you are in a long-term relationship consider this, hearing and saying “I love you” has different meanings depending on who is saying it and when it is being said. Ackerman et al. (2011) explored men’s and women’s levels of happiness from being told “I love you” prior to sexual intercourse and after sexual intercourse. Surprisingly, when people were told “I love you” prior to sexual intercourse, men felt more positive than women did. After sexual intercourse, women felt as happy or slightly happier than men did. I expected women to react more positively than men to a post-sex confession of love because expressing commitment can be emotionally reassuring. However, since sexual activity is associated with high costs of female resources, then women are cautious of sexual relations (Ackerman & Kenrick, 2009). 

People have different reactions to hearing “I love you” depending on their  romantic goals. men who are interested in short-term romance should be happy about a pre-sex confession of love because they will perceive the expression as a signal of sexual opportunity. However if a man is interested in long-term commitment, then he should feel happy about a post-sex confession because there is the potential for long-term romantic relationship.  If a woman is interested in long-term commitment, then she should feel happy about a pre-sex confession because it signals the potential of a long-term romantic relationship (Ackerman et al., 2011).

What happens when romantic goals clash?  If a woman is interested in long-term commitment starts dating a man, who is interested in a short-term relationship, then saying “I love you” can send mixed messages. When the man says “I love you” he may be signaling sexual interest, but the woman may interpret his confession as a commitment to a long-term relationship. Conflict in romantic goals can lead to disappointment and an unsuccessful romantic relationship. Addressing the evolutionary-economics of romantic relationships will help people to better understand the meanings, intentions, and faults associated with communicating romantic (and non-romantic) commitment, and will improve the quality of others’ relationships.

In the future, research should explore the role religion has on communicating commitment in romantic relationships. The current study did not address religious beliefs. It would be fascinating to assess how people’s religious values influence their attitudes on love confessions and sexual activity. This study focused on gender and time as factors of communication and commitment. It would be interesting to investigate cross-cultural differences in communication and mating strategies.            

            Melissa Zimmerman 

Ackerman, J. M., Griskevicius, V., & Li, N.P. (2011). Let’s get serious: Communicating commitment in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advanced online publication. doi:10.1037/a0022412.

Gender Differences in Risk Taking

        Theories are often judged to be adequate to the extent that they can explain similarities or differences in performance among various groups (e.g., male vs. female participants, younger vs. older students, experimental vs. control groups). All things being equal, a theory that can explain gender differences is more adequate than a theory that cannot. Risk-taking literature reveals that researchers have not been particularly interested in explaining or uncovering gender differences using the most widely cited theoretical models of risk taking. Instead, they have tended to examine gender differences in a secondary manner that does not consult existing studies or frameworks. Nevertheless, it is useful to briefly consider the types of results that would be more or less consistent with particular types of theoretical approaches in order to avoid gender stereotypes in the domain of risk taking.

Byrnes, Miller, and Schafer (1999) examined 150 studies that looked at risk taking differences for men vs. women across a wide spectrum of situations. Byrnes et al operationally defined risk taking as any type of behavior that has more than one possible outcome and at least one of those outcomes is either undesirable or dangerous. Three general types of risk taking research currently exist: The first, is that there is research that suggests that risk taking is inherently greater for men because men have either a lower level of arousal or that the need to take risks is instilled in them, Secondly, there is research that investigates how different situations will promote more or less risk taking, and lastly, there is research that explains why only certain people take risks in certain situations.

The findings from this study revealed that men tended to take more risks than women across nearly every situation. However, several findings in this study seem to require further explanation and analysis. The first pertains to intriguing differences in the age trends for the four types of self-reported behaviors. Studies were coded with respect to type of task (e.g., self-reported behaviors vs. observed behaviors), task content (e.g., smoking vs. sex), and 5 age levels. Results showed that the average effects for 14 out of 16 types of risk taking were significantly larger than 0 (indicating greater risk taking in male participants) and that nearly half of the effects were greater than .20. However, certain topics (e.g., intellectual risk taking and physical skills) produced larger gender differences than others (e.g., smoking). In addition, the authors found that (a) there were significant shifts in the size of the gender gap between successive age levels, and (b) the gender gap seems to be growing smaller over time.

 The results of the study showed the shift between high school and college seems to promote a sharper increase in drinking and drug use in men than in women. At present, it is not clear whether this finding reflects the fact that men are confronted with risk-inducing contexts more often than women (e.g., they attend a greater number of parties) or whether women have a greater capacity to negotiate themselves through these risk-inducing situations than men. The latter would not appear to be the case because women seem to be significantly more likely to smoke during their college years than men and also seem to be more likely to drink, take drugs, or engage in risky sexual activities in their post-college years. Such findings could be interpreted in one of two ways. The first would be that contexts make different demands on men and women at different points in time. The second interpretation would be that men are somewhat “precocious” (i.e., men engage in these activities earlier than women but women eventually catch up and surpass men). Future research should determine which of these explanations seems to be more accurate.

To add greater clarity to the study of gender differences and risk taking, research needs to accelerate in three different domains: 1. Unambiguous measures of both appropriate and inappropriate forms of risk taking should be constructed, 2. Valid measures tapping the core constructs of several different theories of risk taking should be constructed in order to see which of the remaining viable theories is the most adequate, and 3. These measures should be given to multiple age groups (to further probe the meaning of age trends). The findings from such studies would make an important and much-needed contribution to the literature and would provide important insight into possible ways to improve the risk-taking skills of children, adolescents, and adults for both genders. The findings from such studies would make an important and much-needed contribution to the literature and would provide important insight into possible ways to improve the risk-taking skills of children, adolescents, and adults.

 Dipti Balwani 

Byrnes, J. P., Miller, D. C., Schafer, W. D. (1999). Gender differences in risk taking: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 367-383. 

Dance Dance Meditation

Isadora Duncan once said, “there are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desire emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.” Emotion plays a key role in promoting coherence between the psychological self and physical body in adjusting to one’s environment. Studies report higher awareness of bodily sensations leads to a greater sense of emotional experiences, and also suggests that individuals vary on how they focus on their bodies. Sze, Gyurak, Yuan, and Levenson (2010) questioned whether having a background in activities that promote body awareness aid in coherence of emotions.

Vipassana meditation intends to increase the mind’s focus as well as awareness of bodily sensations such as heartbeats and breathing. It focuses on maintaining continuous attention and introspection. 

Modern dance and ballet focus on muscles, balance, posture, and coordination in every leap and turn. Instead of maintaining continuous attention, dancers shift their attention between time, space, music, and body. These two groups, as well as a control group without training in either practice, participated in the present study.

Participants completed a series of tests, including heart-rate measurements and questionnaires on their awareness of their own bodies such as internal bodily sensations and body processes. In addition, the participants answered questions about their personality traits and current physical symptoms. Each participant then watched one of four films intended to change the emotional state from neutral to either positive or negative. The participants then reported on their emotional experience.

Results from this study support the notion that the more training one has in body related practices, the higher awareness and coherence of subjective and emotional experience. Those with Vipassana meditation training showed the largest coherence, followed by the dancers, and finally the control group. Training in different forms of meditation or yoga, or even modern and ballet dance serves an important role in one’s ability to gain a heightened awareness of personal emotional experiences. So, in light of Isadora Duncan, the next time you meditate or dance, try embodying the second type of dancer by focusing the mind and body into a state of a preferred emotion.

-Nyssa Schlem

Sze, J.A., Gyurak, A., Yuan, J.W., & Levenson, R. W. (2010). Coherence between emotional experience and physiology: Does body awareness training have an impact? Emotion. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/a0020146

Teaching Our Children Well

The greatest legacy we leave behind us is our children. Unfortunately, many of today’s children, especially in lower income areas, are being forgotten when it comes to sex education by their schools and parents. Because of this, girls are becoming mothers at younger ages and acquiring STIs without learning how to prevent or treat them. It is our jobs as members of society to help stop this problem and educate our children so they are able to go on to lead healthy lives with healthy families.

Donenberg, Emerson, and Mackesy-Amiti (2011) performed a study to see if having a strong relationship with a mother figure and good mental health skills made a difference in the type and amount of sexual behavior had by young girls. They focused their study on African American teenaged girls. Sadly, this population has an “HIV infection rate [that is] 11 times that among young White women, and compared to girls in other racial groups, African American girls 15-19 years of age have the highest rates of Chlamydia and gonorrhea” (Donenberg et al., 2011, p. 1). Because this population is the largest representation of teenage girls with STIs it is important that it be fixed as quickly and widely as possible.

One of the elements explored by the team was parenting styles. There were two different aspects of parenting styles discussed: Instrumental Factors and Affective Expressions. Instrumental factors include how involved a parent is directly in their child’s life. For example, how permissive they are in allowing their children to participate in activities and how well they monitor those activities. The other, affective expressions, is how the well the parent is able to express their emotions to the child. For instance if children are told often that they are loved and feel a connection with their mother.

Many of the girls in this study named their mothers as one of the most influential and important women in their lives. Could this strong influence over their daughters be used in a positive way to help teach their daughters proper sex education? Girls participating in the study filled out a survey discussing their relationship with their mother ranked on a scale from 1-4 based on how often they talked about sex related topics, the diversity of the conversations, and how open the discussions actually were. Mental health of the girls was also measured to see how they dealt with problems both internally and externally, that is if they utilized resources like their mother for problems or tried to deal with them on their own. The mother’s skills were also looked at in this survey to learn about their parenting styles. Questions were asked ranging from “how often do you check in with your parents before going out” to “Your parents let you go places without asking” (Donenberg et al., 2011, p. 2).

            It was found that girls who participated often in discussions about sex with a broad range of topics were significantly less likely than their peers to participate in sexual activity. As predicted, the more parents watched over their daughters also affected the rate at which they engaged in sexual acts. These findings were especially important to the population that they focused on. Since the girls participating in this study were from urban, lower-income areas, they were exposed to more violent environments. With the high amount of risky situations readily available for girls in this position, it is even more vital for mothers to be involved in their daughter’s lives. If the simple act of asking what your child is doing is enough to minimize her number of sex partners, it is possible to use this open dialogue to tackle other issues like drugs and gangs. If more parents are informed about their direct impact the possibilities are endless to teach our children well and help them be healthier, happier members of society. 
-Chrissy Mueller

It is Better to Give than to Receive- by Seymone Killins

Did you know that just by giving someone else emotional support you can better your own outlook on life and will most likely receive more emotional support in return? Or, that the way you formulate your goals can change the way you react if your goal is not achieved?

            While we all have goals of varying degrees at different times in our lives, one of the times that most people first realize their life goal may be out of reach is their freshman year of college. Who doesn’t know of a friend who went into freshman year wanting to be pre-med and then came out with an entirely different major? In their study on Interpersonal Goals and Change in Anxiety and Dysphoria in First Semester College Students, Crocker, Canevello, Breines and Flynn examined how goals can affect a first year student’s change in anxiety and depression. The researchers surveyed roommates of both sexes throughout their freshman year, monitoring their change in goals, their types of goals and their level of depression and anxiety. The study essentially found that the context in which you formulate your goals can affect the level of anxiety and depression you experience if that goal can no longer be achieved.

            The study looked at the impact different types of goals can have on an individual’s level of anxiety and depression when these goals are not realized. It found that students who had an ecosystem perspective, meaning that they give equal priority to their own needs and to the needs of others, are more likely to have compassionate goals.  People with compassionate goals want to be supportive of others and are less likely to experience depression and anxiety, and they are more likely to receive support from their peers in return. In the study, the students who reported having compassionate goals felt that they gave and received support from their roommates. We all know the impact of having a support system no matter what situation you are in, especially college when most students have moved away from their families and no longer have them as their primary support system.

            In contrast, students who had an egosystem view of society were more likely to prioritize their own needs above, and at the expense of others. From an egosystem perspective other individual’s are only important if they can thwart or assist the individual in obtaining their goals. People with an egosystem view tend to have self-image goals; they want people to view them in a certain way and therefore strongly rely on the opinions of others to feel successful. In the study students who reported having self-image goals were more likely to have feelings of depression and anxiety.

What also may contribute to the well being of those with compassionate goals versus those with self-image goals is that it is easier to make progress towards compassionate goals because supporting others is not dependent upon their response. While in the case of self-image goals getting others to view you in a positive light is dependent upon the responses of others.

            Overall the study found that students who reported having compassionate goals at the beginning of the semester were less likely to experience feelings of distress and anxiety, while students who reported having self-image goals were more likely to experience these feelings of distress.

            This study shows that not only when you go to college but in any aspect of your life, it is important to create goals that are not only attainable but that allow you to support other’s in the process. People who give support to others are more likely to receive support in return, and therefore have a more positive outlook on life. Specifically in the college sector where it can be difficult to be supportive of classmates who are attempting to obtain the same goals as yourself, especially in a highly competitive school like my own. But in the end it actually is better to give than to receive.

Take Time to Think Like a Kid

Everyone has seen the creative ideas that children come up with in their play and in everyday life.  One day we all thought that creatively, but as we get older and mature into adults, our thinking becomes more goal-directed and rigid, causing us to lose much of our playfulness and creativity.  It has been shown that as children go through the various stages of development their “creative productions” shift from being spontaneous to rule-bound and logical.  But creativity can be a useful skill for older children and adults, and it is important for us to understand what causes us to lose creativity with age and whether we can artificially regain it.  Zabelina and Robinson sought to do this in their 2010 study of creativity and a child-like mindset.  They recruited college students to participate in a study that they were told would involve a writing exercise and several other short activities.  When the participants arrived they were told to imagine that school was cancelled for the day and to write in as much detail as possible what they would do with their day.  In the experimental condition, the phrase “You are seven years old” was added to the instructions in order to put the participants in a child-like mindset.  Once the participants had written for seven minutes they were stopped and given a test of creativity called the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA), which measures both fluency of creativity (the total number of relevant responses) and originality (the number of responses that are unique).  After this, Goldberg’s broad-bandwidth trait scales were administered to measure the personality traits of openness to experience (a predictor of creative thought) and extraversion (higher levels are associated with playfulness and spontaneity).  Finally, mood was assessed using two seven-point scales ranging from positive to not positive and negative to not negative.      

       

The researchers hypothesized that the participants who thought of themselves as children would have increased creative originality due to the fact that younger children show more originality, but not increased creative fluency, because this is based on brain structures that change in adulthood.  They also thought that people who were less extraverted, and therefore less spontaneous, would show more creativity in the experimental condition (more extraverted people tend to be more creative to begin with, so the child-like mindset would not affect them as much).  However, they thought that openness to experience would be a predictor of creativity regardless of which condition the participant was in.  Also, they believed that the manipulation would have no effect on mood.  All of their hypotheses were supported by their results.  Additionally, writing prompt responses from students in the 7-year-old condition were more focused on desires and play while the responses from the adult condition were more focused on responsibilities and obligations.

There are three possible explanations for the reduction in creativity as people become adults.  First, the areas of the brain that control rule-based behavior develop slower than some other areas, so they don’t become fully influential until adulthood.  Second, many educational practices are focused on getting children to do well on standardized tests, which requires problem-focused thinking and allows for very little play, which can decrease creativity.  The third explanation is supported by the current study, and says that a child’s mindset sees tasks in terms of play, while an adult’s mindset is focused on problem-solving.  Previous studies have shown that mindsets are flexible, so manipulating a child-like mindset can increase creativity.  This study manipulated child-like mindset and it provides support that changes in creativity may be due to changes in task mindset rather than brain structure or education practices.

These results also provide support that creativity can be nurtured and improved because the move away from creativity is not permanent and unchangeable.  This cultivation of creative thought could be implemented in schools by allowing for more play and spontaneity, rather than a pure focus on problem-solving and concrete thinking for tests.  Creativity could also be enhanced in the workplace by utilizing guided imagery to enable a child-like mindset, games, and other interventions focused on desires rather than obligations.  All of these tactics may be able to improve innovation in businesses.  It is also possible that increasing playfulness and utilizing child-like mindsets could be beneficial because creativity is linked to improved psychological well-being.  Obviously there are a number of benefits to getting in touch with our “inner child” and it certainly couldn’t hurt for us all to think like our younger selves once in awhile, especially when we are having a creative block.

-Debra Gladwin

Darwin and Dating: Can Evolutionary Psychology Save Your Love Life?

The world of dating has changed. Just by turning on the television, viewers are constantly reminded of this facet through repeated advertisements of over-the-phone and online dating services, some even claiming that as many as one in five relationships now begin online. Additionally, many of the actors in these commercials seem to be addressing an older rather than younger demographic, thus suggesting the prevalence of secondary and tertiary marriages among target clients. With the divorce rate and partner dissatisfaction being higher than ever, researchers have begun to look for clues into why current relationships show little resemblance to those of the earlier half of the 20^th century. In their article, “The Future of an Applied Evolutionary Psychology for Human Partnerships,” Robert, Miner, & Shackelford (2010) note numerous factors that have potentially led to this phenomenon, primarily those regarding repeated exposure to mass media, the creation of new methods of meeting potential partners, and shifts within our culture.

First, the authors tackle the effects of mass media on self-assessments, partner-assessments, and relationship satisfaction. Recent studies have shown that exposure to highly attractive faces (such as those frequently shown on television) not only led men to rate average faces as more unattractive, but their own partners’ faces as more unattractive as well (Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980; Kenrick, Gutierres, & Goldberg, 1989). Other studies have shown that both men and women rated their relationships more poorly after being exposed to more “ideal” partners (Kenrick, Neuberg, Zierk, & Kromes, 1994). In addition, women were more likely to report an increased desire for thinness and decreased body satisfaction after reading high-fashion magazines (Salmon, Crawford, Dane, & Zuberbrier, 2008). All of these studies suggest exposure to mass media can have particularly negative effects on self-assessment, partner-assessments, mental health, and relationship behaviors, therefore leading to an overall decline in relationship satisfaction.

Next, the authors examine changes in the meeting behavior of potential-mates. With the advent of speed and online dating, individuals are more likely to place emphasis on objective statements (such as qualifications and personality traits) rather than subjective statements (such as perceived attractiveness), therefore creating the opportunity for manipulation and false advertising (i.e. lying) (Pawlowski & Koziel, 2002). Roberts et al. (2010) claim that these new methods of dating have shifted the focus away from emotional compatibility to an emphasis on physical (read: more shallow) attributes, thus furthering unhappiness within relationships.

Finally, the article mentions how oral contraceptives are affecting the way women choose potential mates. Specifically, women on “the pill” are more likely to select partners that are more genetically similar, which has been deemed as an advantageous adaptation in pregnant women. However, this preference can be potentially detrimental to women who are only feigning pregnancy through hormonal contraception (Roberts, Gosling, Carter, & Petrie, 2008). Additionally, the rise in cosmetic surgery, makeup, and even perfume/cologne have changed the way humans perceive the opposite sex, leading people to stray from biologically-adaptive discernment of attractiveness.

Although society shows no signs of slowing down in the direction it is currently moving, all hope for happy relationships is not lost. Roberts et al. (2010) suggest a remedy to ameliorate the negative effects of Westernization. The answer namely lies in the theory of evolution. The authors propose developing a field that shifts evolutionary psychology from the theoretical to the world of applied. By placing an emphasis on evolutionary psychology and applying it to dating, we may be able to direct humans to make better choices in mate selection and reduce the negative effects of modern society. Not only would this potentially improve the quality of relationships, but also it could create a new market of jobs for us psychologists in terms of employment through dating agencies. Who knew Darwin could be the ultimate love doctor?

Posted by Sarah Segal

Roberts, S. C., Miner, E. J., Schakel, T. K. (2010). The future of an applied evolutionary psychology for human partnerships. Review of General Psychology, 14, 318-329.

The Psychological Effects of Risk-Glorifying Media

          Throughout the past several years there has been a rise in the amount of glorified risk-taking behavior in the media. Some examples of this type of behavior are excessive drinking, participating in extreme sports, reckless driving and smoking.  We are exposed to these types of behaviors frequently on television, in movies, through advertisements, and in pop music song lyrics. Risk-glorified behavior is exemplified in shows such as the highly popular Jersey Shore, in which the characters’ daily lives revolves around binge drinking, smoking, and promiscuous behavior.  Other popular examples in the media are MTV’s The Real World, the film Jackass 3D, and the videogame Need for Speed.  These forms of media often portray high-risk behavior as fun, glamorous, and thrilling, and they are highly popular because they engage and entertain audiences, but we are unaware of the psychological impact they can have. 

A study by Fischer, Greitemeyer, Kastenmüller, Vogrincic, and Sauer posted on February 21^st in the Psychological Bulletin examined the psychological effects of risk-glorifying media. They conduced a meta-analysis (a combination of the results of many studies with a common hypothesis) made up of 88 studies with a total of 80,000 participants. The results of the study indicated a strong association between exposure to risk-glorifying media and high-risk behaviors. The results were based on a variety of types of studies including correlational, experimental, and longitudinal designs.  Fischer et al. examined different forms of media including video games, music, advertising, TV and movies. Most importantly, they concluded that a causal relationship exists between exposure to risk-glorifying media and risk taking tendencies in real life.  Their research demonstrated that risk-glorifying media was associated with risk-positive cognitions, attitudes, and emotions of participants.  Furthermore, the data indicated that the effect of risk glorifying media was stronger for active engagement with media (i.e. playing video games) than passive exposure to media incorporating dangerous behavior (i.e. watching a movie), and also determined that interaction with high-risk behavior in the media had both short-term and long-term effects.

It is clear that this popular form of media has many negative consequences for our society. Risk-taking behavior is a primary contributor to fatal injuries among children, adolescents, and young adults (Harvey, Towner, Peden, Soori, & Bartolomeos, 2009).  Traffic accidents are the leading cause of serious injuries to 10 to 24 year olds, yet these accidents are often due to risky behavior which is preventable (Harvey et al.).

The fact that the negative outcomes of exposure to this type of media are highly preventable is particularly striking to me, and this article prompted me to think about the potential political and societal implications of this issue. Is it necessary to restrict access to risk-glorifying media? Although the US and Europe have already outlawed most tobacco and alcohol advertisements, this study reveals that perhaps more intervention is necessary. This issue primarily targets young adults, as Fischer et al. found that effects were strongest for 16 year olds, and the 16 to 24 year old age group. Intervention could help to reduce the number of traffic fatalities, injuries, and other serious health problems related to risky behavior.

I found this article to be particularly relevant in today’s world, as the media plays an increasingly important role in everyone’s lives.  Fischer et al.’s study provides a psychological perspective that illustrates the impact of the media on our behavior, emotions, and cognition.  It is difficult not to be drawn to the engaging nature of this type of media, yet this study reveals the importance of being aware of its power to impact our behavior in harmful ways. 

Carly Helmetag

Fischer, P., Greitemeyer, T., Kastenmüller, A., Vogrincic, C., & Sauer, A. (2011, February 21).  The 

Effects of Risk-Glorifying Media Exposure on Risk-Positive Cognitions, Emotions, and      Behaviors: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0022267

Gaming to Make Friends?

            Have you ever had that satisfying feeling of finally beating the thirteenth level after weeks of dedication and effort, only to have a parent turn off the machine before the level could load? In most cases, your parents are right. Video games increase violence, increase antisocial behavior, and produce other harmful short and long-term behaviors. Keeping this in mind, it is sobering to read the statistics reporting that 87% of U.S. American children play video games daily. Video games have become more commonplace and popular than TV among the current generation of children. However, there is hope. Some researchers have found that not all video games are bad. 

            A study by Greitmeyer, Osswald, and Brauer in December of 2010 shows that prosocial video games can be linked with the opposite emotions of standard video games. Instead, these games increase prosocial affects such as empathy and decrease pleasure at others’ misfortunes, described as schadenfreude. In the study, experimenters had 56 students at a German University play either Tetris or Lemmings for ten minutes. Tetris is considered a neutral game: there is no violence or emotional interaction in the game. Players must simply place differently shaped blocks together to form continuous lines with no breaks, to clear the screen before the blocks reach the top. Tetris is essentially a cognitive challenge, a puzzle. In the game Lemmings, however, players must care for the Lemmings while guiding them through each level until they reach the end, at which point their lives are safe. Lemmings involves many nurturing and solicitous behaviors. To measure if these emotions outlasted the game, the researchers asked the group of Tetris players and the group of Lemmings players to read a brief description of Paris Hilton’s jail experience. After, they asked the college students questions regarding their feelings for Paris Hilton in terms of schadenfreude, relief, and happiness. Then they gave the students two essays to read. In the first, the students are led to believe that the author had broken up with his girlfriend, while in the second, the author had broken his leg. Looking at the average responses to all three situations from groups of students who played Tetris versus those who played Lemmings shows that the latter group had more empathy and less schadenfreude.

            Though their hypothesis was supported in their first experiment, the authors were concerned that using such a controversial celebrity as Paris Hilton may have altered the results. Pre-existing opinion may have influenced participants’ reactions to Paris Hilton (some people love her, while others are not so fond) irrespective of the effects of any video game. Also, it is possible that some of the students did not know Paris Hilton but may have thought she deserved to go to jail as a consequence of her actions (drinking and driving). To be certain that their results were demonstrative of the effects of the prosocial video game, Greitmeyer, Osswald, and Brauer repeated the study, replacing Paris Hilton in the description with Dieter Bohlen, a German music producer who was robbed in his house.

            For the second experiment the researchers also added a third video game for a new group 61 students to play called Lamers. Lamers, unlike Lemmings, is an antisocial game. In Lamers, the player must kill all of the lemmings before they are able to reach the exit and their safety. The results of this experiment matched those of the first. Also, as was suspected, the group that played Lamers reported more antisocial responses to the questions than any other group.

            Research on the topic of video games’ effects on behavior is still young. This study was one of the first. There should be many more studies of this type as the popularity of video games continues to increase and influence the youngest generation. Future research might also reveal that every form of entertainment may alter our moods and behavior. Perhaps movies, TV shows, songs, and newspaper articles involving empathy have the same effects. This finding would hold grave implications for current society as well as possibilities for change in the future. In the mean time, parents should supervise their children’s choice of video games. The right video games might make children better people.


Grace Johnston 

Why Learning Is So Hard (By Chelsea Weisbord)

Most college students get stressed out at times, some even get depressed. I am a student at Franklin & Marshall College and I for one can tell you that I am constantly stressed out. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to go to class, study for exams, write papers, while also trying to salvage your social life. One might assume that it would be the high-achieving college students who would show more distress than low-achieving college students, since they have higher GPAs and therefore must work harder and be under more stress. This argument makes sense, but according to the study “The problem is not learning: Facilitated acquisition of stimulus equivalence classes among low-achieving college students”, this is not exactly the case. Even though all students experience stress, low-achieving students admit to having more distress than their high-achieving counterparts, which in turn leads to avoidance behavior when it comes to academics.  This is demonstrated by the results of the study, which show that low-achieving college students are more likely to pair neutral or non-meaningful words or random shapes with emotionally evocative words about academic failure. Neutral words or shapes are even more likely to be associated with the academic failure words when there is a personal reason for the college student. The study compared how high-achieving students performed on the tasks versus how low-achieving college students performed with the prediction that low-achieving college students would perform better than high-achieving students on the academic failure tasks, which presented words about academic failure such as fail, flunk, stupid, or dumb, but worse on the other two non-meaningful tasks that included words about color and shape, such as blue or square.

                Imagine that you are a college student who is participating in this study. You are seated in a psychology computer lab and after agreeing to participate in the experiment, you are asked to fill out a series of questionnaires one of which asks for your age, race, and social class and another which asks for you GPA from you last semester. The third questionnaire measures your level of distress by asking questions about different symptoms of anxiety, depression, social roles, etc. and having you rate how often you feel that symptom with a scale from never to almost always. The last questionnaire asks about questions about you academic experience such. For example, one of the questions on the questionnaire was “Do you ever feel completely confused or lost in any of your classes?” The purpose of this questionnaire is to get people to think about academic stressors before they are asked to complete the actual task for the experiment. During computer task one box will appear at the top of a computer screen as well as three at the bottom of the screen and you must choose one of the boxes from the bottom of the screen that best matches the top box. For the first phase, random shapes referred to as category A, were the ones presented at the top of the screen and had to be matched with the correct set of words referred to as category B, at the bottom of the screen. The first random shape, or A1, was matched up with four academic failure words: flunk, fail, stupid, and dumb. A2, another random shape, was paired up with color words: blue, green, red, and yellow. The third random shape, or A3, was “shape” words: square, triangle, rectangle, and circle. In order to move onto the next phase you must pair up all of the random shapes and sets of words correctly. In the second phase, you have to do the same thing only instead of matching the shapes from the “A” category to sets of words you have to match them to other random shapes known as category “C”. Once again, you cannot move to the next phase until you match up the random shapes correctly.  The last phase was a mixture of the first two phases where both random pictures from category “C” and sets of words from category “B” are presented, but not the random picture from category “A”. After these three phases, you are tested to see if you form a relationship between the random from the “C” category and the sets of words even though you were never actually asked to pair them up during the phases.

                In the actual study 52 college students completed this experiment. The researchers were able to use the GPA’s that students gave in a questionnaire to separate high-achieving students from low-achieving students. The responses to the questionnaires revealed that students with a low-GPA showed a lot more distress than students with high-GPA students who showed less distress. The results also showed that low-achieving students with a low GPA gave more accurate responses to the questions that included academic failure words and were  emotionally evocative than high-achieving students with a high GPA, but low-achieving students did worse on the other tasks that included color and shape words. Low-achieving students also had a stronger pattern when responding to the task while high-achieving students’ behavior was less stable. Overall, the results of the study show that people can associate neutral, non-meaningful concepts and situations with those that are emotionally evocative. As a result, the avoidance and escape behavior that tends to go along with emotionally evocative situations can be transferred to the non-meaningful situations as well thus causing the same avoidance and escape behavior to also occur for the non-meaningful stimuli. This tendency for students, especially low-achieving students, to associate negative aspects of emotionally evocative situations to situations that were originally neutral can have dire effects on their psychological health, such as an increase in distress, anxiety or depression, all of which would have a negative effect on their academics.

                All students do this to some extent. For instance, although I excelled in English and History classes, match has always been my weakness. It all began with Algebra, no matter how hard I worked I could never receive an A as my final grade, I managed to receive B’s and B+’s, but I felt like I was working twice as hard as other students to achieve those grades. The following year I went into Pre-calculus and immediately had the same feelings of anxiety that Algebra used to give me despite the fact that I have never actually taken Pre-Caluculus before. By associating my negative feelings toward Algebra with other math classes math in general became a stressful subject for me even though initially it was only Algebra that was the problem. Had I known at the time about the results of this study I could have consciously tried to prevent myself from becoming anxious in all math classes just because Algebra gave me such a tough time.