Broad Or Narrow, Which Choice Tonight?


Psychologists these days are heavily into measuring ratios of bits and pieces of our bodies. The digit ratios of our fingers are taken as a surefire guide to our success in life’s struggle to be the best. The latest ratio to come back to the surface is face ratios.

Never heard of it? It is the distance between your ears divided by the distance between your mouth and your eyes. Unlike your digit ratio, this is not being used as a surrogate for the testosterone level that you had to deal with while in utero. Your face ratio is a measure of how other people view your character.

A high face ratio and you will be seen as masculine. Low and it will be feminine. Geniole et al in this weeks Public Library of Science have asked a 100 people to glance at people pictures and rate them in terms of masculinity, femininity, aggressiveness, and nurturing nature (1).

Broad faces were (as previously) rated as more masculine and also as more potentially aggressive. This was true if the faces were male or female. Although the viewers were a mix of men and women, the more feminine the faces (low ratio), the higher they were rated on an attractiveness scale, regardless of whether they were of males or females.

Low ratio faces had the exclusive for a nurturing look. That is males with low face ratios have a higher paternal investment potential.

Can we soon expect to find a tape measure in every women’s bag when she is on a night out so she can quickly confirm whether he is the macho-man that will love her and leave her or if the impression that he has a high paternal investment potential isn’t clouded by alcohol?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030366


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How Will You Stack Up When The Chips Are Down?


When we are pushing ourselves hard, our oxygen demand gets high, we get out of breath and we (most of us) stop to catch our breath before returning to the competition, battle or whatever the devilish physiologists are throwing at us this time.

Top class athletes, apart from being better at their sport than the rest of us, will push themselves harder. It is the old saw about when the going gets tough, the tough get going, supposedly. So what is it about their brain activity that gives them that edge?

Paulus et al have made a start at sorting this out in a recent experimental study (1). Their lab rats consisted of 10 world class adventure racers who combine orienteering with severe cross country running at the elite level. Both men and women were selected and their average age was 37.5. A similar size, mixed gender control group were selected from healthy individuals with an average age of 36.6.

The participants lay with their head in the big magnet for fMRI studies while their breathing was restricted. They had to breath through a hose with sintered bronze filters. This would put a similar mental load as extreme exercise, without the pain in the legs, of course. However, to challenge the brain/body coordination, the participants had to play a computer game of pressing a button in repose to things happening on a screen.

The result of all the hard work is that the right insula of the elite athletes activity was less than with the control subjects. The significance is that effects of emotions like fear and awareness of risk were lower, or suppressed with the elite athletes.

We use this side of the brain for approximate estimations and working on novel situations. It appears that attenuation of the activity might mean less imagination, and thus not imagining the bad results of pushing oneself to the limits. My imagination encourages me to stop for a cup of tea and sympathy when things get too hard and, I suspect, I'm in the majority.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029394



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Are You As Old As You Feel?


How susceptible are you to suggestion? Not very?  Well maybe, but would you know? There has been an idea floating around the Social Psychology field for the past fifteen years that we can be quite unconsciously influenced  by noticing the right words.

The original experiment that purported to show this was organized so that a group of people were given a word game where they were spotting the odd word out. With some of these, the out of place word could be associated with being elderly. The control group had neutral words. After the experiment the participants walking speed was measured. The elderly primed group walked more slowly as though they were thinking “I’m old.”

Now, Doyen et al have repeated the experiment in a rather more controlled fashion with a group of 120 students from Bruxelles (1). Their walking speed was measured using infrared beams and a computer and, lo and behold, the students walked along at their normal pace, quite oblivious of any association with the elderly words that they’d been exposed to.

Well, of course, other experiments followed. The next experiment with a fresh batch of students had half the experimenters who were monitoring the human lab rats told that the expected result was that the walk would be speeded up and the other half that it would be slower. They were given stopwatches and were told the electronic kit was unreliable so they needed to measure the speeds themselves.

The experimenter’s prejudices were confirmed with the stopwatch results. But now comes the fly in the ointment. When the speeds measured by the electronics were checked, the rate was indeed slower for the data involving the experimenters that expected it to be slow, but not so with the speedy group – they had not speeded up.

So we seem to be left with a complex interaction from any priming from the actual task and the expectations of the guys running the experiment. Seems the unbiased observer is hard to find and we seem to be able to communicate what we expect without saying a word, and that can be effective if something else catches your attention.

I’m left wondering whose doing my thinking for me.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029081;jsessionid=06FAE6EEF0847DBAD0771BDBD4C1BCCA



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Not Birds Of A Feather, Unfortunately!


Now we are well into the flu season, things still seem quiet. The rumored bird flu comeback doesn’t appear to have appeared. Colds, of course, abound and we are often poor at wrapping up warm in case (like our Mom’s told us.) But then the weather seems to be so unpredictable. One of the problems that we keep hearing about is the Southern Oscillation in the Pacific.

These weather fluctuations, cold for La Niña and warm for El Niño, pop up every few years and douse our expectation. Now it seems that things might be more worrying than we thought.

The suggestion by Shaman and Lipsitch from Columbia and Harvard U's respectively, is that the change in weather patterns can change bird migratory patterns (1,2). Before you say that only the birds would worry about that, the suggestion is that the changes cause mixing of species and that in turn can be a driving factor in nasty flu pandemics.

Shock horror and we have to ask show us the evidence. Well, the bad flu years were 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009 and all correspond to El Niño years, although some strong and some weak oscillation years. The subtlety we have to note though is not that we may have a flu epidemic, bad though that may be, But that the bird mixing may be a vector for the viral reassortment which gives us a variety which we have less resistance to and then a pandemic rages.

If it is a particularly virulent viral type, we could have a 1918. None of us want that, of course. We’d better watch where those birds are heading as the weather changes.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16577612
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/11/1107485109.full.pdf+html?sid=5da526b5-5753-4b96-9ee4-16c0e43a5fce




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Following The Leader


Choosing the right direction depends on who you are with. If you have a guide, you follow, no question – you are probably paying for the service so why would you take off on your own. If travelling with your partner, things may be different and arguments may be vivid. But these are special situations, What happens when in an informal group?

Many social species wander around following somebody, but does that someone know where they are going? Among the dreamy spires of Oxford, Flack et al decided to see if homing pigeons were too bird-brained to take good advice and follow a more experienced bird.

They decided that the birds should work in pairs and that the experience of the two in each pair should be different. After loading them up with GPS tracking equipment, they tossed the pairs out at locations far from home.

What they found was that the bird who had more navigational time under its feathers chose the route. This was most marked when the difference in navigational time served was the greatest.

Clearly the best decisions were made, but it still isn’t clear how the issues were decided as they climbed into the sky and made a quick circuit before flapping off home for tea. But decided they were, and no one had to stop and ask directions, or fly around while the other consulted a map.

It is interesting that here experience and not social dominance decided the issue. Maybe we have a lot to learn from homing pigeons.

  1. A. Flack,B. Pettit, R. freeman, T. Guilford and D. Biro, J. Animal Behaviour, DOI.org/10.1016.janbehav.2011.12.018


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Petting The Ultimate Pet


It is interesting that when we are young we cling to our cuddly toys for comfort, more so than humanoid toys. As we grow up, we are expected to leave those behind and many of us substitute cuddly pets such as cats or dogs to cover their role. “Get a dog” is the advice sometimes given to the able elderly with the explanation that it will prolong their life.

Cuddly robots have been around for some while now with the robotic baby harp seal Paro being the cuddliest. MIT’s Huggable, in its teddy bear guise, looks a close second, although it has a broader function in terms of chatting and verbal encouragement. The challenge with these robots is to make them responsive to you just like your cat or dog manages to be.

The trick is for the robot to sense your emotional state via the way you handle it, say hug, stroke, tickle its ears or idly play with its fur. You see it still has to have fur – seems to be deep in our DNA and points back to our evolutionary origins.

To investigate this aspect of the human-robot interaction, Yohanan and MacLean of UBC, Vancouver, have built their Haptic Creature (HC), round, furry with big ears and a tail (rather like a koala-sized mouse).

Covered in a wondrous array of touch sensors, it knows when it is being hugged, stroked, massaged, tickled or having its fur idly pulled. It breathes and purrs and has an accelerometer so it will know if it gets kicked, but has no teeth.

Thirty volunteers between the ages of 18 and 41 were locked away in a soundproof room for an hour or so each with HC. Video cameras were rolling of course. They were then encouraged to feel a range of emotional states such as pleased, depressed, happy, and miserable in random order and their response to HC recorded.

After analyzing the hours of video footage and the inevitable questionnaires, HC had been hugged, stroked, tickled and tossed up in the air with the participants wanting it to show sympathetic responses rather than mirroring their emotions.

It appears that HC’s back and sides were the most touched. It didn’t get its tummy tickled very much, not like our cats and dogs. Seems nobody had the courage to tickle the tummy of a giant mouse. Also, I’m sure that breathing and purring was preferable to being given good advice as you might get from MIT’s Huggable.

  1. S. Yohanan and K.E. MacLean, Int. J. Soc. Robot. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-011-0126-7
  2. http://www.springerlink.com/content/543287662w312676/fulltext.pdf


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Positively Positive!


Texting and tweeting have reduced our phraseology to the bare bones to communicate, but we still require a deal of sophistication if we can get it. But what about the English language in general? Is it a cold stiff upper-lippy language, or is it a happy go lucky cheerful language? The French, of course, claim French for romance, but that leaves plenty of space for English.

Kloumann and her colleagues from the U of Vermont have been worrying during those long Vermont winters about where does English stand on the emotional spectrum; does it impart a neutral, negative or positive flavor to our communications? (1)

To find out, they gleaned a set of the most commonly used words from Twitter, The New York Times, Music Lyrics and The Google Book project so that they had covered all levels of erudicity. Then they obtained 50 independent judgments on the happiness rating of each word.

This latter labor of Hercules was carried out via Amazon’s Turk. For those that had missed some of the advances of the 21st Century, Amazon’s Turk is a service run by Amazon for people who would like to take on some human intelligence task on their computer at home (for money, of course) and report the results to harassed academics or others who are too busy or grand for scut work.

The results? Well, “laughter” was rated 8.5/10 for happy, while “terrorist” was rated 1.3/10 on the happy scale. So after half a million human word evaluations, they found that English was positively biased towards happy. The mean was around 60% happy.

Of course, the words are grabbed from a big population that doesn’t cover a fixed time. One wonders what the happiness rating would be if the same study was done with the words selected from those used during this American election year. Just at the moment there doesn’t seem to be much positivity going around.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029484


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