Generally Thinking

Month: July 2010

  • The 28 best psychology blogs on the internet, organised by topic


    Here are the best blogs in each of the following respective areas, according to me.

    There are some sub-fields I know nothing about (clinical topics mainly), so this list is not comprehensive in that regard.

    I’ll update this as time goes by. Feel free to repost this on your own website to spread the word about these excellent resources.

    General Psychology Blogs

    PsyBlog – Jeremy Dean at the top of the list, as it should be.

    Research Digest – The BPS Research Digest is a superb resource, for students, researchers and people with a general interest in psychology. Christian Jarrett has done a great job with this.

    GenerallyThinking.com – A great psychology blog written by a handsome, accomplished, and modest psychology student (i.e., me).

    PsychFutures Blog – By psych students, for psych students. You can sign up and make a contribution yourself!

    Social Psychology

    Social Psychology Eye – Blog of the Social & Personality Psychology Compass; some brilliant articles in here.

    Situationist – How “the situation” influences our behaviour.

    What Makes Them Click by Susan Weinschenk – A blog about understanding people. The ‘100 things you should know about people’ series is fantastic, I wish I’d thought of it first!

    Exercise Psychology

    Physical Exercise and Psychology Blog – Not that well known, and has been quiet for a while, but Sean Webster has some good posts and links on here about the cross-over between psych and physical exercise.

    Neuroscience / Cognitive Science

    Neurocritic – A pleasingly critical look at Neuroscience and related fields

    Neuronarrative – No list of psych blogs is complete without David DiSalvo’s Neuronarrative.

    Neurophilosophy – Good stuff here on all aspects of neuroscience.

    Neuroconscience – Brain plasticity particularly in relation to media and technology use.

    The Mouse Trap – Great stuff from Sandy, you’ll find some general posts on psychology with a preference towards neuroscience, and a recent interest in positive psychology too!

    Mind Hacks – Big, popular, successful, long-lasting, accessible – it’s Mind Hacks!

    Cognitive Daily – Sadly, Cognitive couple Greta and Dave closed shop in Jan 2010, but the archives are still up and valuable.

    Psychiatry

    Frontier psychiatrist – Mental illness for the masses!

    Psychotherapy Brown Bag – Absolutely fantastic blog, even if psychotherapy isn’t your bag. Lot’s in here on the right way to think as a scientific psychologist, critical thinking etc. Well worth reading if you’re a psych student.

    Positive Psychology

    Positive Psychology News Daily – The best positive psychology site on the web, written mostly by current and former MAPP students.

    Curious – Todd Kashdan’s interesting blog. Check it out if you’re curious.

    The Good Life – The Psychology Today blog of Christopher Peterson, sports fan and VIA strengths co-founder.

    The Meaning in Life – Michael Steger’s blog, more focus on meaning, as you might have guessed.

    Persuasion

    Influence PEOPLE – Brian Ahern’s excellent ethical persuasion blog. Also his podcasts are here.

    Persuasion Theory – Matt Fox’s blog focuses the science of persuasion into various applications, mainly marketing. Lot’s of practical tips here.

    Sex

    Jena Pincott – Author Jena Pincott’s interesting and sometimes cheeky blog.

    Dr Petra – More focus on sex education and policy issues here. Thoughtful stuff.

    Critical Thinking

    Bad Science – Ben Goldacre’s site. Not a psychology site actually, but if you’re a psychology student you should immediately subscribe to Ben’s blog and let his critical attitude rub off on you through the power of web-osmosis.

     

  • Between participants and within participants designs explained

    If you’re doing a study using two or more groups, you’ve got two options: You can use different people in each group (between participants design), or you can use the same participants in each group (within participants design). There are pros and cons to each.

    Say I’m an office manager and I want to measure the effect of distraction on workplace performance. My workers always have that damned radio playing all those cheesy love songs, and I think it’s distracting them and costing me valuable profit. So I hire a researcher to find out for sure.

    He might use a between participants design. On one floor of my office he bans the radio. On another floor, he let’s them carry on as usual. At the end of the week, we work out which floor got the most work done. Pretty simple.

    Or, he might use a within participants design. He only looks at one floor. For a week he measures their workrate while the radio is there, then the week after he takes it away and measures workrate again.

    What’s the best way?

    There’s no right or wrong answer. If he used a between participants design, he’s got different people on each floor. Maybe one floor is populated by people who are better workers than the other floor. To truly test the effect of the radio, and nothing else, the conditions – and the people – in the test would have to be exactly the same. Normally in psychology, researchers try to get large numbers of people in each group, and assign people randomly to each one. That way it’s expected that, since most human traits fall on a normal distribution, the groups will be pretty similar to each other on average.

    But to get them exactly the same, you’d have to use the same people! That’s a within participants design. This brings it’s own problems with it. In this particular example, there might be temporal effects – differences in the environment week by week. For instance, maybe there were an unusually high number of birthdays in the office on the second week, and they went out celebrating a few times, leaving them tired at work. Or maybe on the first week, they were a bit nervous about having a researcher watching over them, but by the second one they had gotten over it.

    Temporal effects aren’t limited to within participants designs of course – in a between participants design you might test the groups at different times; although you should not do this unless you have no other choice, to avoid these temporal effects.

    Within participants designs are also vulnerable to something called practice effects. If I’m measuring the effect of caffeine on some cognitive ability, such as working memory, I might test people when they first step into the lab, then give them a triple espresso, and test them again.

    Is this a between or within participants design? It’s within participants – testing the same people twice. But, the second time they do the test they know what to expect; they have had a little practice. So they might improve on the second test purely through this practice effect, rather than the caffeine.

    Alternatively, maybe the results were influenced in the opposite direction – maybe they got bored of doing the test twice and didn’t put as much effort in the second time around.

    There’s a way of getting around this – counterbalancing. You split the sample in two, and half of them would get the espresso before the first test, while the other half would get it before the second test. In this case you’d have to leave a few hours between tests so that the caffeine wears off, but both conditions – with caffeine and without caffeine – would be equally susceptible to practice effects, so we can be more certain that any difference is due to the effect of the caffeine.

    Once more, just to clarify

    In a between participants design, a given participant is allocated to one group or the other, but not both.

    In a within subjects design, a given participant is allocated to both groups.

    Advantages of between participants design:

    Help to avoid practice effects and other ‘carry-over’ problems that result from taking the same test twice.

    Is possible to test both groups at the same time.

    Disadvantages of between participants design:

    Individual differences may vary between the groups

    Vulnerable to group assignment bias (though you would use random assignment wherever possible to compensate)

    Advantages of within participants design:

    Half the number of participants need to be recruited

    They offer closer matching of the individual differences of the participants.

    Disadvantages of within participants design:

    Practice and other ‘carry-over’ effects may contaminate the results (though you would use counterbalancing where possible to compensate)

    Visualising this in SPSS

    When you’re putting data into SPSS, a row always indicates a single participant. Data from two different participants will never appear on the same row. Therefore, in a within participants design, our coffee experiment would have two columns for our data – one for with caffeine, one for without.

    But, if we had used a between participants design, we would have ONE column for the data, plus another column saying which group that participant was in.

    Alternative names

    Between participants is also known as independent measures design, or between subjects design.

    Within participants is also known as repeated measures design, or within subjects design.

    Further info…

    Are you finding the stats section of your course a little difficult? It’s hard to understand at first, but I’ve explained the bulk of what you need to know in plain English, in the study guide. Have a look.

  • Four ways to boost your creativity when writing

    Whether you’re writing a novel, a blog, or an essay, the biggest problem has to be writer’s block. It’s so annoying when you’ve actually gotten past the initial procrastination hurdle (not an easy task in itself), you’re sat at your desk and you WANT to write – but it’s just not coming out. Or, what is coming out isn’t to your liking.

    Trust me, I know how that feels; I started this blog post in 2005.

    Here are a few tips you can try to give your creativity a little boost.

    1) Get the right emotions for the job

    3342877736_374c327e7a_m
    Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

    Our emotions serve evolutionarily adapted purposes. We have different emotions because they each solve different evolutionary problems. Anger helps to stop people transgressing against us, love helps us keep a mate, fear keeps us out of danger, and so on. Because they are specialised, emotions have different effects on our perceptual system, and the ways we think. ‘Negative’ emotions tend to narrow our though-action repertoire, while ‘positive’ emotions tend to broaden them (Fredrickson, 2001 – PDF).

    In other words, when you’re in a lower mood, you’re more likely to look at the little details, when your mood is high, you’re see the bigger picture and be more creative.

    So whenever you’re brainstorming or coming up with new ideas, boost your mood with something uplifting, heart warming, or side-splitting.

    Whenever you’re editing or proof-reading, put some downbeat music on, and get to work.

    (We might also suppose that continuing a long argument with your spouse is a bad idea – you’re both focusing too much on the things that put you into that negative state. Sleep on it and discuss in the morning.)

    2) Take breaks

    Whenever you’re doing work that requires focused, mental effort, you’re draining your mental willpower reserves. Once these are depleted, performance suffers and you suddenly can’t be bothered to work. Take regular breaks and do something that requires no effort to attend to – spending time in nature has proven to be a useful exercise to this end (See the extensive work of the Kaplans). Also, make sure you don’t go hungry while working – the fuel that willpower runs on is glucose (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007) – empty stomach equals poorer mental performance.

    3) Use novelty to your advantage

    Short answer: If you want a novel idea, expose your brain to novelty.

    Long answer: The area of the brain associated with novelty is thought to be the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA). The VTA is part of the dopamine system, in other words, the reward system. When we perceive novelty, our brain signals us to explore, because it is always looking for rewards. The brain likes novelty.

    What’s more, these brain areas are connected to the hippocampus, which is involved in learning. You can see where I’m going with this; enhanced learning might occur in the context of novelty. On top of that, a novel environment exposes you to a different set of priming, which themselves trigger different areas in your brain.

    There’s the science, here’s the simple advice – go somewhere new to write. Try a park, a library, a coffee shop you’ve never been to. Try a car park, a zoo, a big wheel, try wearing different clothes, talking to different people. Use novelty to your advantage and see if your brain doesn’t come up with some new ideas.

    4) Try the SCAMPER method

    Luciano Passuello of LiteMind discusses the SCAMPER method of creative problem solving. This is going to be more effective when you have a specific writing problem you are ‘stuck’ on. It is essentially a list of questions which help you to look at the problem from 7 different angles, each represented by the SCAMPER acronym. Not all of these angles will be appropriate to your specific writing problem, but I’ve found it really useful at various times. I’m interested to hear how you get on with this method, so let me know if you use it – leave a comment with your experiences!

    Get to it

    I’m certain that by using one or more or these techniques (all four if necessary) you’ll be able to make at least SOME headway on your writing. Let me know how you get on!

  • The incredible reason why you should be exercising regularly

    I think everyone is sold on the idea that exercise is good for the body, assuming no contraindications. Everyone who can, should do it – it makes you physically healthier, stronger, etc.

    Fewer people are aware of it’s effect on mood though, which I have discussed before. Physical exercise makes you happier, and more likely to overcome stressful setbacks that you encounter through your life. I believe it was Tal Ben-Shahar who said “Not exercising is like taking depressants.”

    Fewer people still are aware of another benefit to exercise. It’s even good for the brain. Is there nothing it can’t do?

    Take dementia for instance. Laurin et al (2001) looked at a huge sample of randomly selected Canadian men and women. 6,434 of these were ‘cognitively normal’ at baseline; that is, no dementia. Five years later, 4,615 people completed a follow up test which asked them about their exercise habits, as well as other tests, such as for cognitive impairment.

    High levels of activity were associated with reduced risks of cognitive impairment, dementia (of any type), and Alzheimer disease. The odds of someone having Alzheimer’s in the group who exercise were half as low as those who did no exercise at all!

    So it seems that regular physical activity might be a preventative factor in age related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s. This is pretty big.

    But the benefits of exercise do not seem to stop at prevention – they may actually have an augmenting effect on cognitive function in healthy adults; and the evidence for this is getting stronger.

    Take Winters et al (2007) for instance. They took a group of people, got them to run around a bit, and then tested their learning performance, both immediately afterwards and long term. They found that vocabulary learning was 20% faster after intense exercise, as well as increases in a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, and sustained BDNF was linked to greater learning success. BDNF is sort of the holy grail of cognitive enhancement, helping to support the survival of existing neurons as well encourage the growth of new neurons and synapses. This protein may explain both the preventative and enhancement effects of exercise on cognitive function.

    So when you’re wondering whether to get off your ass and get to the gym today, keep this in mind – you’re not only keeping your body healthy, you’re improving your mental function and preventing cognitive decline.

    This might also play a role in the timing of your exercise sessions. Try working out immediately prior to any time you need to learn. It should improve your performance.

  • Obesity, junk food, and the brain – tugging the human instinct in an unhealthy direction

    Ever wonder about the effect modern life has on us? Unbridled freedom, choice and… fat? Yep. According to the BBC back in ’06, we were on course for 20% child obesity in 2010. I haven’t checked that fact, nor the actual 2010 figure, but I doubt anything has been done to solve this problem. It doesn’t appear that way on a walk down an average street, anyway.

    Circumstances do kind of conspire against us though. Massive corporations spend millions learning how to alter the behaviour of consumers. Marketing departments and salesmen, in their own field, know as much about human psychology as scientists do. It’s almost empirical, you advertise here, and in this way, at this time, and watch the results. Companies know exactly what buttons to press to have us spending money on junk food.

    Not only that, but junk food may be a bit of a ‘hack’ in itself. As the theory goes, changes in our diet have occurred at a much faster rate than our genome is able to adapt to. Our bodies don’t ‘know’ food is abundant; as far as they are concerned, we’re hunger-gatherers in the pleistocene and food is scarce indeed. Our most successful ancestors were the ones with the strongest taste for nutrient- and calorie-dense food (fat, sugar), they were more motivated to seek and eat food, and hence more likely to pass their sugar-loving genes into subsequent generations.

    At the same time as food has been systematically refined into that which we can resist the least, our environment has been undergoing a similar shift. We can’t resist conserving our energy, resting. Wasting energy could be fatal 40,000 years ago, so if we have food and shelter nearby, we tend not to move (except perhaps for sex). Combine MacDonalds with La-z-boy, throw in a TV for entertainment, and you can see the results.

    fitness_escalator
    You just want to slap some people, don’t you?

    I’m not saying there isn’t a degree of personal responsibility here; there is. My point is that the health and fitness deck is not exactly stacked in our favour. Our natural inclinations are being pulled in an unhealthy direction.

    Do I see a similar thing going on with the brain?

    If I can’t remember the name of that song, Google is at my fingertips to relieve me of the burden of recall. If I had an iWhatever, I could do this wherever I was. Is this another example of circumstances moving us away from optimal functioning?

    It makes intuitive sense, and strong arguments have been put forward both for and against, but I’m not sure the evidence either way is deep enough to form a solid opinion yet. Some studies have been showing cognitive gains related to media usage.

    On the other hand, there’s the multi-tasking study that many bloggers have picked up – where people who were classed as heavy multi-taskers were not so good on a test of task switching ability. But how this relates to general internet usage (for instance) isn’t all that clear.

    But even assuming there is a detrimental effect going on (which as I say, I think is a big assumption at the moment), there might be a common solution, which I’ll talk about next time…