Barking up the wrong tree

The lyrical content of Billboard No. 1 songs for each year from 1955 to 2003 was investigated across changes in U.S. social and economic conditions. Consistent with the environmental security hypothesis, popular song lyrics were predicted to have more meaningful themes and content when social and economic conditions were threatening. Trends for more meaningful, comforting, and romantic lyric ratings were observed in more threatening social and economic times. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, songs with more words per sentence, a focus on the future, and greater mention of social processes and intergroup themes were popular during threatening social and economic conditions. Limitations and possible implications are discussed.

Source: "The Language of Lyrics: An Analysis of Popular Billboard Songs Across Conditions of Social and Economic Threat" from Journal of Language and Social Psychology

One of my favorite movies about music is here.

Related posts:

1 in 5 country music songs refers to alcohol, 1 in 3 to tears, 1 in 7 to mama

Does rock music promote suicide?

Are opera fans more accepting of suicide?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

By listening to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" series, "Ghosts of the Osfront."

I think history is a phenomenal subject but it's usually conveyed by bad storytellers, rendering it dry and uninteresting. This is a wonderful exception.

You can grab the whole series on iTunes, or get them from his site on MP3: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

And yeah, it's free.

If you're looking for an interesting way to cover a few more things you were supposed to learn in school, I recommend this book.

Related posts:

If you're reading this...then you are the worst man in history

What makes a great teacher?

Does Hollywood alter history in the eyes of schoolchildren?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

Music lessons:

In Study 1 (N = 147), duration of music lessons was correlated positively with IQ and with academic ability among 6- to 11-year-olds, even when potential confounding variables (i.e., family income, parents' education, involvement in nonmusical activities) were held constant. In Study 2 (N = 150), similar but weaker associations between playing music in childhood and intellectual functioning were evident among undergraduates. In both studies, there was no evidence that musical involvement had stronger associations with some aspects of cognitive ability (e.g., mathematical, spatial-temporal, verbal) than with others. These results indicate that formal exposure to music in childhood is associated positively with IQ and with academic performance and that such associations are small but general and long lasting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

Source: "Long-Term Positive Associations Between Music Lessons and IQ" from "Journal of Educational Psychology"

If you want a good book on the mind I recommend A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.

Related posts:

Does Talking Back May Lead to Smarter Kids?

Does absurdist literature make you smarter?

Why do we sometimes feel smarter than everybody else and sometimes dumber?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

Normally I don't post stuff that's just odd and doesn't provide some level of insight. I'm making an exception here because of just how absurd this is. Who decided this was needed?

Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, including 62 males and 41 females, aged 18–66 (M = 34.2, SD = 13.3), were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) either: (1) prior to entry, or (2) after having held a 1-m saltwater-crocodile. Gambling behavior; including bet-size, speed of betting, final payouts and trials played on the EGM; was investigated with respect to participants’ assigned arousal condition, problem-gambling status, and affective state. At-risk gamblers with few self-reported negative emotions placed higher average bets at the EGM after having held the crocodile when compared to the control. In contrast, at-risk gamblers with many self-reported negative emotions placed lower average bets at the EGM after having held the crocodile. The results suggest that high arousal can intensify gambling in at-risk players, but only if this feeling state is not perceived as a negative emotion.

Source: "Never Smile at a Crocodile: Betting on Electronic Gaming Machines is Intensified by Reptile-Induced Arousal" from "Journal of Gambling Studies

I get the whole priming thing and understand the results but... crocodiles?

Then again, I've never been to an Australian casino... and apparently I may really be missing something.

For more on gambling stories, I recommend this book.

Related posts:

How science can improve your "March Madness" bracket and win you some money

Is it a good idea to ban smoking in casinos?

If you give away a lottery ticket, is it more likely to win?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

If the "truth" resonates with the listener, yes:

This study tests the folk psychological belief that we find things funny because we think they are true. Specifically, it addresses the relationship between implicit preferences and laughter. Fifty-nine undergraduate Rutgers University students (33 females and 26 males) from ethnically diverse backgrounds were videotaped while watching a white stand-up comedian for 30 min. Positive emotional expression associated with laughter was later scored using the facial action coding system (FACS). Computer-timed Implicit Association Tests (IATs) were used to measure a subject's implicit preferences for traditional gender roles and racial preferences (blacks vs. whites). Results show that participants laughed more in response to jokes that matched their implicit preferences (e.g., those with stronger implicit preferences for whites laughed more at racially charged material). Implications for the evolution of humor, and laughter as a hard-to-fake signal of preferences, are discussed.

Source: "It's funny because we think it's true: laughter is augmented by implicit preferences" from "Evolution and Human Behavior"

For some very funny writing (to my implicit preferences, at least) I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Is Laughter the Best Remedy?

Jerry Stahl's hilarious attempt to quit heroin by switching to crack (Audio)

Malcolm Gladwell amusing story about about the "Perverse and Often Baffling" (Audio):

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

Stop predicting so many upsets:

Every year, billions of dollars are spent gambling on the outcomes of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. This study examines how individuals make predictions for tournament pools, one of the most popular forms of betting, in which individuals must correctly predict as many games in the tournament as possible. We demonstrate that individuals predict more upsets (i.e., wins by a higher seeded team) than would be considered rational by a normative choice model, and that individuals are no better than chance at doing so. These predictions fit a pattern of probability matching, in which individuals predict upsets at a rate equal to past frequency. This pattern emerges because individuals believe the outcomes of the games are nonrandom and, therefore, predictable.

The author of the paper explains:

"Picking the lower seed is a good strategy, but people think, 'I can't win by doing that because everyone else is doing this,'" said Ed Hirt, professor in IU Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "The upsets people pick are no better than chance. People have this idea that they know how many upsets will occur, but can they predict the ones that will occur? They pick upsets but not the right ones and end up sabotaging their efforts."

Another tip: Don't trust the so-called "experts":

Other studies have shown that making NCAA bracket predictions based on rankings from other experts, such as sportswriter polls or gambling bookies, are no more successful than choosing the lower seeds.

Source

By the way, if you're watching a game and get frustrated because it seems one of the players doesn't know what he's doing, you're 100% correct. Athletes don't know what they're doing. That's okay though; if they knew what they were doing, they probably wouldn't be that good:

Skilled athletes often maintain that overthinking disrupts performance of their motor skills. Here, we examined whether these experiences have a basis in verbal overshadowing, a phenomenon in which describing memories for ineffable perceptual experiences disrupts later retention. After learning a unique golf-putting task, golfers of low and intermediate skill either described their actions in detail or performed an irrelevant verbal task. They then performed the putting task again. Strikingly, describing their putting experience significantly impaired higher skill golfers' ability to reachieve the putting criterion, compared with higher skill golfers who performed the irrelevant verbal activity. Verbalization had no such effect, however, for lower skill golfers. These findings establish that the effects of overthinking extend beyond dual-task interference and may sometimes reflect impacts on long-term memory. We propose that these effects are mediated by competition between procedural and declarative memory, as suggested by recent work in cognitive neuroscience.

Source: "Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can't do" from Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

For more on gambling stories, I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Here are a number of things you didn't know about sports.

Are men better gamblers when accompanied by a woman?

The Gambler Who Blew $127 Million

If you give away a lottery ticket, is it more likely to win?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

There are ways to make a narcissist easier to deal with. Emphasize representation of community:

Three studies tested the hypotheses that the activation of communal mental representations promotes relationship commitment (communal activation hypothesis) and that this effect is stronger among narcissists than among nonnarcissists (Communal Activation x Narcissism hypothesis). Across experimental, longitudinal, and interaction-based research methods, and in participant samples ranging from college students to married couples, results supported the communal activation hypothesis in two of three studies and the Communal Activation x Narcissism hypothesis in all three studies. Moreover, a meta-analytic summary of the results across the three studies revealed that the association of communal activation with commitment was significant overall and that it was stronger among narcissists than among nonnarcissists. Narcissists tended to be less committed than nonnarcissists at low levels of communal activation, but this effect diminished and sometimes even reversed at high levels. This work is the first to identify a mechanism by which narcissists can become more committed relationship partners.

Source: "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus: Communal Activation Promotes Relationship Commitment Among Narcissists" from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

When they do something wrong, use disappointment as a weapon to keep them in line:

The authors examined whether individual differences in social value orientation moderate responses to other's expressions of disappointment in negotiation. The literature suggested competing hypotheses: First, prosocials are more responsive to other's disappointment because they have a greater concern for other; second, proselfs are more responsive because they see other's disappointment as a threat to their own outcomes. Results of a computer-mediated negotiation in which a simulated opponent expressed disappointment, no emotion, or anger supported the second prediction: Proselfs conceded more to a disappointed opponent than to a neutral or angry one, whereas prosocials were unaffected by the other's emotion. This effect was mediated by participants' motivation to satisfy the other's needs, which disappointment triggered more strongly in proselfs than in prosocials. Implications for theorizing on emotion, social value orientation, and negotiation are discussed.

Source: "What Other's Disappointment May Do to Selfish People: Emotion and Social Value Orientation in a Negotiation Context" from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Maybe you think you don't deal with too many narcissists. There's research that shows the leader of a group is more likely to be on the narcissistic end of the spectrum:

These studies investigate whether individuals with high narcissism scores would be more likely to emerge as leaders during leaderless group discussions. The authors hypothesized that narcissists would emerge as group leaders. In three studies, participants completed personality questionnaires and engaged in four-person leaderless group discussions. Results from all three studies reveal a link between narcissism and leader emergence. Studies 1 and 2 further reveal that the power dimension of narcissism predicted reported leader emergence while controlling for sex, self-esteem, and the Big Five personality traits. Study 3 demonstrates an association between narcissism and expert ratings of leader emergence in a group of executives. The implications of the propensity of narcissists to emerge as leaders are discussed.

Source: "Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader" from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

If you're looking for some fiction that goes well past narcissism into some much darker and more twisted territory I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?

Why do we blame the victim?

Can economics students be trusted?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

Yes. Though circular, socially anxious people make their interactions with others notably less smooth because of their anxious behavior. So, yes, if you're acting socially anxious you have a reason to be socially anxious because you really are screwing things up:

The behavioral manifestations of social anxiety may have implications for social outcomes. Unfortunately, little is known about how anxiety shapes social interaction. The present study examined social interactions in dyads consisting of either 2 nonsocially anxious (NSA) individuals or 1 socially anxious (SA) and 1 NSA individual. Behavior, self-reported affect, and perceptions were examined. In comparison with the interactions of NSA pairs, high levels of fidgeting, poor reciprocity of smiling behavior, more self-talk, and more frequent reassurance seeking and giving characterized interactions between SA and NSA participants. Both SA participants and their NSA partners rated their interactions as being less smooth and coordinated than did participants in NSA-NSA dyads. In addition, SA participants' reassurance seeking and self-talk correlated negatively with partner positive affect and perceptions of interaction quality. The authors discuss self-focused attention and the interpersonal consequences of social anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Source: "Interpersonal Consequences of Social Anxiety" from Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Looks like the symptom perpetuates the disease in this case. Relax and you'll actually have fewer reasons to be anxious.

If you're dealing with some anxiety (and don't require serious medical attention) I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Is a little anxiety good for you?

Is there a way to easily counteract loneliness -- by yourself?

How to stress out less and reduce worrying

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

How attractive she thinks she is, how masculine she is and how much she drinks:

Women vary with respect to monogamous/polyandrous inclinations, as indexed by the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI). Possible sources of SOI variation include variation in perceptions relating to the utility of different mating tactics and variation in one’s degree of masculinity/femininity, among other things. In three studies with undergraduate participants SOI, an index of self-perceived attractiveness and two measures of masculinization, namely scores on the Vandenberg Mental Rotation test (V-MRT) and 2D:4D digit ratios, were measured. Self-perceived attractiveness predicted SOI in the first study, but not in the second study. Right 2D:4D did predict SOI in the second study. In the third study, both self-perceived attractiveness and right 2D:4D predicted SOI, and so did V-MRT scores. However, the strongest single predictor of SOI in Study 3 was the reported amount spent on alcohol during the average month.

Source: "Self-perceived attractiveness and masculinization predict women’s sociosexuality" from "Evolution and Human Behavior"

If you want to read more about sex and human nature I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Here are a lot of things you didn't know about sex

Does pornography hurt a relationship?

What you should look for in a marriage partner

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet

They should have titled this paper, "The Borat Effect":

This research examined the effect of language fluency on the evaluation of culturally inappropriate behavior. A series of video vignettes were created in which a nonnative speaker either followed or broke social rules while displaying varying degrees of fluency in English. Results demonstrated a shielding effect of poor language fluency, such that when the nonnative individual acted in a culturally inappropriate manner, poor fluency in English shielded the individual from negative evaluation.

Source: "Training Wheels for Cultural Learning: Poor Language Fluency and Its Shielding Effect on the Evaluation of Culturally Inappropriate Behavior" from "Journal of Language and Social Psychology"

I'm going to speak in broken English all the time and just GET AWAY WITH MURDER.

If you want more Borat he's here and here.

Related posts:

What does English sound like to foreigners?

What is the hardest language?

Do complex societies have simple languages?

Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

If you enjoyed this post you should follow me on Twitter here. I tweet content there you won't find on the site. You should also subscribe to this blog's feed.

Loading mentions Retweet