Developing Self-Control


As the universities settle into their routines of lecture, tutorials and maybe labs for some students, the frequency of wild parties has decreased and normality is returning to university towns. The muttering from the older population about the lack of self-control of the young has also faded to its normal background level.

Self-control has been an active area of psychological and cognition studies for some time. The frontal lobes of your brain are where the struggle goes on. The more you have to struggle, the greater the degree of tiredness – just like your leg muscles as you climb up stairs – or so the received wisdom goes.

The technospeak is that you experience self-regulation depletion after experiencing a bout of self-regulation demanding activity. Universities are, of course, great places to study this. They have adequate supplies of eager lab rats to try things on among the continuously renewed supply of undergrads shipped in each year.

Dahm et al have recognized a problem with this source of lab rats, though, and have just published a study which illustrates it (1). They point out that our pre-frontal lobes are not fully developed until we are 25 or so, and thus the 20-year olds rushing into the labs to be experimental subjects are not well-armed for the self-control battle. It’s not just that they may be lacking in practice but their ‘self-control muscle’ is still in the building stage.

The experimental program for their paper used a cohort of  40-60 year olds as well as undergrads and exercised their self-control muscles using a Stroop test. That’s the one where subjects have to read the words for a series of colors that are printed in inks of a different color to the one that the word describes. They were then subjected to an autobiographical memory test in which accuracy was measured. Of course control groups made sure that they wouldn’t draw false conclusions.

The undergrads showed much greater self-regulatory depletion than the ‘oldies’ who didn’t show very much, confirming our prejudice that we oldies have more self-control than those noisy youngsters. The authors warn their colleagues about the possible bias lurking in a large number of cognitive studies because their subject’s brains were not fully matured.

So next time you lie awake at 2 A.M. listening to the student bacchanalia next door, just remember that they are still in the process of strengthening their resistance to self-regulatory depletion by beefing up their frontal lobes. Dousing them with alcohol makes the exercise more challenging, just like increasing the weights on the exercise machine in the gym.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026351#pone-0026351-g001

Going In Style – Top Toilet, USA


Sooner or later when we are away from home we will need to search out and make use of the local plumbing. But how big a part does your plumbing experience play in your enjoyment of your trip, whether it is a visit to a mall or holiday in a fancy resort?

For the past decade we have had an opportunity to acknowledge elevating experiences of the restroom variety by entering the restroom for a national award if you should feel so moved. Cintas sponsor the annual ‘America’s Best Restroom’ contest and the 10th King of the Throne is now crowned.

This year’s winner is to be found in the windy city at the Field Museum (1,2). The women’s room is particularly luxurious and spacious, although, to my eyes, rather clinical. (From the photos, of course, I wouldn't dare trespass.)

Much more exciting to me is the gem hidden away in Crystal City, Virginia. The photos make me want to organize a vacation to the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel (3). Nothing coldly clinical here. They have the ultimate in techno-geek faucets with hot or cold water indicated by the color of the lights illuminating the stream. So hot water looks red and cold looks blue, wow!

Another of the nominees for this year’s top spot was, appropriately, The Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. Enough said.

  1. http://www.bestrestroom.com/us/hall_of_fame/2011/default.asp
  2. http://news.discovery.com/human/top-toilets-united-states-111021.html
  3. http://www.bestrestroom.com/_images/us/nominee-2011/fullsize/Renaissance-Arlington.jpg

Drinking Our Way Into Retirement


We hear a great deal about healthy living and how those of us living in the pampered, developed world are living longer, more active lives. One of the results of this appears to be that our politicians are determined to raise the retirement age to help keep “the 1%” comfortable. Of course, that doesn’t mean that pre-retirement planning should be delayed.

There are lots of things to worry about as retirement looms and the years around retirement can be stressful, and being under stress can have an effect on alcohol consumption. So, an international team has pored through the data of a large French study of the drinking habits of more than 12,000 good citizens covering the 5-year periods either side of their retirement (1). They were particularly interested in the prevalence of heavy drinking.

The most striking result was that the prevalence of heavy drinking trended slowly down until a year before retirement. At that point it started to climb steadily until a year after retirement. It then started to trend slowly down again. So in all cases, there was a two-year binge. Clearly, the stress associated with retiring is a significant problem. Or maybe, just maybe, it is just a sign of a 2-year celebration.

The authors of the study suggest that older people should be targeted with information on the dangers of the overuse of alcohol as they may misinterpret the information that is published on the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption. I hope that this doesn’t mean more pamphlets through the mail to add to the pile on funeral insurance and cheap cremations that grows steadily. Perhaps, if they do get something out, they could add instructions as to the best way to suck an egg?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026531

Networks


That the structure of social networks is important to all species of social animals is a given. Also all social networks have rules which define the structure. Rule breakers threaten the status quo and are not usually encouraged and the effect of breaking the rules may result in the rule breaker complying with the majority. But if the number of rule breakers hits a particular threshold, what happens? Does the network change or does it disintegrate?

Hock and Fefferman of the State U of NJ have fired up their computer and carried out some simulations (1). Their virtual people were in groups of 50 and had to make friends. They could choose friends and then change two at each step in the simulation using one of two criteria. Their success in the group, i.e. becoming “popular,” was measured by their connectivity after 200 steps in the simulation.

The friend selection criteria, or The Rules, were either that the people were looking to be directly connected to the most popular individuals for one set of simulations, or that they were selecting friends who had the best connectivity for the other simulations, thereby becoming popular by having the most effective network.

Rule breakers ignored the criteria and dropped and befriended at random. The questions asked are firstly, how do the rule breakers affect their social (popularity) position? Secondly, how does the rule breaking effect the popularity structure of the network?

The answers are somewhat different depending on the type of network. If the network was based on everyone wanting a direct connection to the most popular, nothing much happened to anyone unless there was a large number of rule breakers and then the structure changed. So if the network relied on an alpha male that had to be worshipped, then the system would fall apart if enough network members said “To hell with that!”

For the networks where success depended on the best connectivity, breaking the rules by failing to try to connect with highly connected individuals didn’t hold those rule breakers back. By cutting across the normal routes, they could disrupt the success of others while improving their position if their numbers grew. But checks and balances (rewards/punishments) would be easier to build into the system to maintain the network structure.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026652


Catching A Win


Sitting in our armchairs, we are wise critics as we watch world-class athletes performing in their sports and shout our advice at the TV screen. But what if their sport is also our sport? Can we see so clearly why our performance isn’t anywhere near as good? Well, we don’t have as much time to practice and then we don’t have the optimal equipment, do we?

There is some evidence that that we may be able to raise our performance if we can borrow the big guy’s stuff. This is known in the business as positive contagion, but in the cold light of dawn, do we really believe it occurs? It’s time it was put to the test. Lee et al have done just that and published their findings in the current issue of the Public Library of Science (1).

They picked golf as their chosen sport and selected a group of undergrads who were about 19-years old. 38 were guys and 3 were women, all who claimed to be members of the golfing fraternity. They were asked to try putting on a training mat, but half of them were offered the identical putter to a successful PGA player (Ben Curtis) and were informed that it was actually his putter. The rest just had to accept the putter as a tool of the trade.

The results were amazing. The putters who thought that they were using the top professional’s putter sank more putts. Their average was 53%. The control group who thought that they were putting with a plain putter, puttered along with a mere 38%. It gets even better, though, when they were asked to estimate the size of the hole that they were aiming at. The lucky-putter group estimated that the hole was larger by about 10% than the control group.

So apparently positive contagion works. Even the task seems easier. That the big man is thought to have used the equipment produces a significant improvement. Sadly, there is one experiment missing. They should have also sneaked the actual master’s putter in and checked if there was real magic in addition to the perceived advantage that was only in their minds.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026016