No Country For Neurotic Men


The genre of horror films is alive and well and the special effects guys can give us a clear glimpse into Armageddon several times an hour. Films are also good at manipulating our feelings of sadness and, with some documentaries, strong feelings of disgust.

We all fit on a scale of a range of personality traits, so do we all react in pretty much the same way when we go to a screening as we all know that we are just watching an image and we are warm and cozy in our seats.

Reynaud et al in yesterday’s PLoS one asked this question of people with neurotic personalities (1). They took 18 high neurotic and 15 low neurotic personalities and made them watch short film clips of harrowing scenes aimed to elicit fear, disgust or sadness.

Being good psychologists, they didn’t rely on word of mouth, but measured the skin conductivity of the participants and also had their frowning muscles monitored, although they were asked how worked up they were.

In terms of sadness there wasn’t much difference between those that were classified as highly neurotic and those just a little bit. There was a little bit more frowning when it came to fear and disgust, but the highly neurotic really broke a sweat with the fear factor as measured by skin conductance.

It’s not quite clear where this leads. Could this lead to greater suspicion of a polygraph test as a neurotic person could easily be scared into breaking a sweat? Maybe we’ll be tested at job interviews with a short horror film clip to see if we are the right material for stressful management. Of course if the special effects get much more realistic, we may have to be plugged in and shown a trailer before we get our tickets.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032413



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Kind Words And Warm Fuzzies


Incentives are familiar to us in most work situations and this usually takes the form of pay, bonuses or titles. Many of us try the same strategy with our kids, although often unsuccessfully. When it comes to non-profit organizations, we expect the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile to be reward enough.

We should ideally put democratic governments into that category, but I guess utopia was never an option. However, the wiki phenomenon, specifically Wikipedia is perhaps one of the most beautiful examples of people working behind the scenes for the general good without reward.

Most of us these days turn to Wikipedia frequently as a reliable part of our search for information and to most of us the contributors are anonymous as we dive in, suck up some juicy tidbit before flitting on to next source like an intellectual butterfly.

In an interesting short report in this weeks PLoS one, Restivo and Rijt of State U of NY, have made a study of how peer awarded accolades motivates Wikipedia’s contributors (1). The accolades are ‘barnstars’ which appeared in 2003 and now there is a huge array of barnstars awarded to contributing editors by their peers who appreciate a really fine piece of editing (2).

We all like to receive warm fuzzies from time to time, but now Restivo and Rijt have done the management guru/HR thing and asked how does the award effect performance?

 They carried out their study over a 30-day window and looked at a random selection of 200 contributors who hadn’t previously been awarded a barnstar. Half the group was the control and was doomed to going barnstarless for another 90 days, while the other 100 were awarded their barnstars and also studied for 90 days.

The results were spectacular. Getting their first barnstar made them increase their productivity by 60% no less and, as a huge bonus, made them six times more likely to get more barnstars from other contributors.

Maybe the rest of us donkeys would do much better if our drivers dropped their carrots and sticks and just said nice kind words of appreciation to give us frequent warm fuzzies.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034358
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars




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Persuasive Robot


Robots are slowly becoming more and more designed to interact with us as opposed to simply being used in an assembly line situation. They will clearly need to respond to our requests, but they will also have to persuade us to do things. How we respond will depend on how they ask us.

When we interact with others and want them to do something, we use a range of techniques to persuade. Perhaps one very effective method is to very confidentially ask someone to do us a favor. How does a robot do that?

That’s a challenge that Nakagawa et al took on and have reported on in the current issue of the International Journal of Social Robotics (1). They chose a little robot with large appealing eyes and just 17 inches tall, but with moving arms, called Robovie-mR2 to persuade a couple of dozen undergraduates to do something boring.

The first task that Robovie need to get done was to get the participants write down their multiplication tables as equations all the way from 1x to 9x. Now Robovie tried just speaking softly and asking, but then getting confidential by putting it hands up to its mouth and asking to whisper the request to the participants.

When asked to listen to the whispered request confidentially, the participants worked more diligently and got through writing down more equations in the time allotted than when just asked quietly.

With this success under their belts, Robovie was given the job of advertising a particular shop in a mall to potential shoppers. It was place on a table in the middle of the entrance and it tried simply suggesting as well as asking people to listen confidentially as it held its hands to its mouth. They were offered the chance to print a coupon for the store.

Almost 80% of the people, who heard the confidential suggestion, printed themselves a coupon while only 40% did when Robovie just invited them too without getting confidential about the recommendation.

It seems that just responding to a request to listen to a confidential suggestion already has us meeting the requester halfway, even when it’s a cute little robot that we know is pushing our buttons and can’t have any personal motives to do us a favor. However, a confidential approach makes it a very persuasive robot

  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/rv4722n559080314/fulltext.pdf



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Dolphin Gangs


While we flock to watch dolphins do tricks in large aquariums, we recognize that they are intelligent mammals that are used to wandering freely around the oceans. They travel long distances and don’t stake out small territories.

Connor et al have been studying bottlenose dolphins around Shark Bay for quite some time now and will have their latest report in Proc. Roy. Soc. B and Gill has given us a pre-publication summary in BBC Nature (1).

The dolphin groups wander about the ocean in a well-organized society. Males form alliances of different types to organize their females. At the ‘local’ level two or three males get together to herd their females, but they form larger gangs with up to a dozen or fourteen gang members to go raiding other dolphin troupes to steal their females.

All this is good fun if you are a young male dolphin, but of course they can sometimes meet stiff opposition and then the dolphin gangs forget about looking after what they’ve got. They band together into a little army to take on the opposition.

Apparently though, when they meet another group they don’t always want to fight, as would be the case if it were territory that they were defending. As it’s their females that they are worried about, if there is no obvious threat, they play nice.

In some cases, playing nice can mean groups joining up or having some small groups of males going off with the new group. So it appears that they have a complex social network with a variety of alliances. Only humans come close to having such hierarchical alliances according to the authors of the study, although the herding and stealing of females from other gangs makes me worry a bit about the comparison.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17522450


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Eating Chocolate and Looking Good


For some little while now we have heard that eating chocolate has some longevity benefits. That is devouring it in small quantities and not throwing discretion to the winds and downing candy bars with a little chocolate covering. But now there is additional good news.

Eating small amounts of chocolate correlated nicely with lower than average body mass indices of almost one thousand residents of San Diego, CA. The study was carried out by Golomb et al and reported in yesterday’s issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine (2) and outlined by Smith (1).

The age range of the chocolate munchers was from 20 to 85 and we are talking dark chocolate too, so it’s the good stuff. The stats were that on average for two days a week they indulged there craving, but also they were checked out for mood and regular exercise attainment on 3.6 days each week the got their heart pounding for at least 20 minutes.

The result of the study after careful scrutiny was that for each day per week of regular indulgence, the participant was 0.2 BMI points lower than the chocolate eschwers. Thus for the average person of 5’ 10’’ they would be about seven or so pounds lighter if they munched away Monday through Friday.

However, before we all rush out to the high quality chocolate shops, it may be worth noting that the study was a serendipity spin-off from a study of the effects of taking statins and looking for non-cardiac effects.

What this means, of course, is though a nice correlation was found, the study couldn’t determine a causal link, so I think that I will have to try it out and see if a little dark chocolate per day drops my weight. Now I will have to stress over what is the right little amount.

  1. http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/DietNutrition/31848
  2. http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/172/6/519


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Slow Learning Rates


Learning is something that we do all the time. This isn’t the focused effort that we might put into a course, but rather the everyday problems of the environment that we’re working in. This often involves us in learning complex systems and what response we need to make to them. We do this without realizing that we’re acquiring knowledge. This is termed implicit learning.

In some instances, this type of learning could be a matter of survival. For example if we are learning to fly a plane, responding to turbulent air requires a correct prediction of movement. Of course, there are many other examples that might have less dire consequences of slower learning.

Thoughts about the learning process bring some questions to mind. One of these is what affects our learning rate? Dienes et al set themselves to have a look at this and studied things like mood. Their paper is in Friday’s edition of the Public Library of Science (1).

Being psychologists, they went to the computer screen and pressing buttons for the answers. Basically they had colored squares appearing on the screen and the human lab rats had to press buttons indicating their prediction of which side of the screen the image would appear.

They put in variations and controls in an attempt to isolate the good data. The basic premise was that if the lab rat thought that they could see a pattern, they would be using a series of the previous images to make their decision. This corresponded to a slow learning rate in that the correlation with earlier occurrences would fade slowly with number of tests.

Now a fast learning rate meant that there would be some weight on the previous occurrence but little or none on events prior to that, so the correlation would fall off rapidly with number of trials. The decrease was taken to be exponential with a steeper decay (faster learning rate) for those candidates who only let the previous test affect their choice and not the third and fourth test back in time.

The results of the controls compared to an amnesia patient showed that the person suffering from amnesia had a faster learning rate, that is, he took less notice of previous result on his choice. Perhaps he couldn't remember?

The experimenters introduced another twist in that to some participants they displayed a happy face prior to their choice and to others they displayed a sad face. This influenced the mood of the participants who were being tested. The results showed that the happy people had a longer correlation decay, that is, the learned more slowly.

The big message that I take away here is that should I go gambling on something random like a coin toss, I’d better make sure that I’m unhappy or suffering from amnesia to avoid getting caught up in trying to see patterns in random events and fall foul of the gambler’s fallacy.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033400


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