8/24/16

 Of our last 15 presidents, these seven guys all have something in common. Do you know what it is?

If you guessed that they were all left-handed, you’re right!  Or, more accurately, non-right handed. That’s astonishing, as lefties account for only about 12.5% of the population (a little more for men, a little less for women) but 47% of our most recent presidents.

And it’s not just cherry picking recent presidents.  It’s quite possible that previous presidents, all the way back to George Washington, included lefties, but we’ll never know as left-handedness was strongly discouraged until quite recently. Left-handedness was previously thought to be tied to criminality, insanity and feeble-mindedness.  Sinister! 

Anyway, how did that presidents’ thing happen? Does America somehow prefer lefties? What makes people non-right handed? Are they more likely to die earlier?  And what about cultures where the use of the left hand is socially forbidden?

Let’s start with defining that whole handedness thing.  Actually, let’s not, as it turns out to be much more complicated than I thought.  Some people are pure lefties. Some are mixed lefties, like my dear husband, the Mac Geezer, who proposed this presidential question to me last week. He eats and writes with his left hand but plays sports with his right hand and uses a right-handed mouse for his Mac.  Some lefties are also left-eyed and left-footed but some not.  And some, like my 19 month-old granddaughter, are currently ambidextrous.  Notice the spoons in both hands.

What causes hand preference? 

The theory I like best suggests that there’s a dominant Right-Shift gene or allele.  Twenty-five percent of the population would have two of these R-S alleles.  They would be right handed. 50% of the population would have one but not both alleles.  They would still be right handed because it's dominant.  And the remaining 25% of the population wouldn’t have a Right-Shift gene. Pure chance would mean that half of those remaining 25% would be right handed and half would be left handed.  That would bring the non-right handed population to 12½ %, which is almost exactly where it lies. I like that! Doesn’t explain why men and gay people of both genders are more likely to be non-right handed. More work to do.

Are left-handed people more likely to die earlier than right-handed people.

 NO!  That result was bogus, based first on faulty conclusions by people who should have known better and then later on faulty research.  Don’t even get me going. You lefties are just as likely to live as long as the righties.

Does culture make a difference?

Some cultures frown heavily (understatement) on using the left hand to eat.  And not surprisingly, kids from those cultures are less likely to be non-right handed than other kids. That cultural preference even slopped over into a suppression of left-eyedness!

What else?  Bits and pieces:

 Deaf people are more than twice as likely to be left-handed as hearing people. That may be tied to delayed language acquisition during early childhood.

There’s a relationship between schizophrenia (delusions and hallucinations, not multiple personality) and atypical handedness. Atypical means hand preference shifts during the same task. Their relatives, too.

Forcing a child to switch from left hand to right hand does not cause stuttering.

Handedness is tied to eyedness but not footedness or earedness.

Now about those presidents:

I couldn’t find anything that looked really solid on why we keep electing left handed presidents. There were some suggestions that lefties have to be more flexible and inventive to survive in a right-handed world. I saw a suggestion that our society perceives lefties as more creative, so who knows.  What I do know is that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are right handed. Rand Paul and Lindsay Graham are lefties. The rest of the primary candidates are all right handed, as is Ben Carson (lefties are discouraged from becoming surgeons).  Anyone know about Gary Johnson or Jill Stein?

Is political leaning tied to handedness?

No. But. People on the left and right coasts are more likely to be non-righthanded than those in the South and Midwest.  Make of that what you will.

And then there’s this:

“During the 2008 US presidential campaign, Barack Obama was faulted by Sarah Pain for signing bills with his left hand. Palin’s comments prompted conservative news reporters to urge Obama to learn to use his right hand to be like everyone else.” Personally, I think Palin was kidding, but you never know.

  

I based a lot of this on Clare Porch's 2015 book, Laterality: Exploring the Enigma of Left-Handedness. 

8/19/16

I’ve grown accustomed to your face…

Here’s a confession: All my life I’ve been bad at faces.  I could have a lovely conversation with you today and walk right past you tomorrow.  I'm not trying to be rude - I just don't recognize you.

www.crystalinks.com

This created special burdens when I was teaching. Even at the end of a 15-week semester, I would still have students I couldn’t recognize if I saw them outside of class. In class, I would ask them to sit in the same seats each week because I could attach names to places better than faces.  I was always grateful to have students with distinguishing features, like bright red hair or a big smile because they were easier to recognize.  There was one unfortunate statistics class full of attractive young women (i.e. regular features), with long brown hair.  They all looked the same to me.

For my close friends, there’s a specific “person-ness” to their faces that I can eventually rely on, but for many people I come across, that’s lacking.  If I see someone who gives me that micro-expression of recognition (the eyebrow flash), I always assume I’ve met them and respond accordingly.  Heaven forbid I have to introduce them to anyone else, though.

Here's the eyebrow flash:

Anyway, this is what it’s like to have a mild case of prosopagnosia or face blindness. I’m comparatively lucky. There are some people who are completely face blind.As one victim says: “It doesn’t matter if I know the person: I’ve walked right past my husband, my own mother, my daughter, my son, without being able to recognize them.” Some don't even recognize their own faces!

wikipedia

Your facial recognition software lies tucked up under the bottom of the temporal lobe of the brain, more on the right side than the left.  It helps you remember and recognize the faces of those you’ve met before. 

For some people, face blindness is the result of an injury, but there’s growing evidence that it can also be lifelong, like it is for me. What’s much more interesting is that the ability to recognize faces is actually on a continuum. Just as there are people who are really bad at it, there are people who are really good at it.  Really, really good.  And Scotland Yard has assembled them into a special team called super-recognizers.

London is covered by CCTV (closed circuit TV), more than almost anywhere else.  So it’s often that the Metropolitan Police have a face of a culprit but not a name.  That’s where the super-recognizers come in.  They can check a database of faces or the parts of town where the bad guy hangs out and look for a face they recognize.  And they’ve been amazingly successful.  Sometimes when all they see are the person's eyes! There’s a great story about them in the New Yorker. You can find it HERE. 

And here’s the test that researchers and Scotland Yard use to find super-recognizers.  Give it a try. Average is about 80%. The super-recognizers score near 100%.  I'm not talking about my score. Nope.

Cambridge Face Memory Test

NOTE:  It's a well recognized phenomenon that we are best at recognizing faces from our own ethnic or racial groups.  Scotland Yard's super recognizers are supplemented when needed with other officers from different ethnicities.

NOTE #2: If about 2% of the population have severe face blindness, that suggests that 2% of the TSA folks have the same problem because they don't screen for this.  TSA has 47,000 employees, so almost 1,000 can't recognize faces. At all. Some can't even tell if the face on the passport is the face they're looking at.  Think about that for awhile.

8/10/16

The moral foundations of conservatives and liberals.

Some years ago, my hubby (whom I affectionately refer to as The Mac Geezer) and I went to see the Jim Carrey film, Liar, Liar.  I was bored beyond belief.  TMG was rolling in the aisles and laughing till the tears poured out his eyes, something he NEVER does.  It was like we were sitting next to each other but seeing two different movies.  The plot involves a man who finds himself, to his horror, suddenly incapable of lying.  Here’s a clip.

It went on like this for. two.hours. Rolls eyes. 

The difference between the Geezer and me is kinda like how liberals and conservatives can look at the same event and see it in totally different ways.  Take gay marriage, for example. Liberals tend to see this as a given and describe it as marriage equality.  Some deeply religious conservatives see it as evil and describe gay sex as an abomination.  That’s some split, considering they’re both looking at the same thing.

There are lots of reasons why this happens: differences in personalities, differences in deeply felt beliefs about how families are structured, and differences in moral foundations.  Today I’m going to touch on the issue of moral foundations.

Based on lots and lots of research (I’ll put a few links at the bottom), societies tend to share a few common moral foundations. 

· CARE/HARM. Because of this, we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need in others.  “…it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.”  

· FAIRNESS. It makes us altruistic. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters. But primarily for liberals, it makes us want to be sure that all people are treated equally and fairly.

· LOYALTY.  This foundation makes us sensitive to how well others are team players.  It makes us especially fierce in dealing with those who violate our trust or sell us out to the enemy. It’s the force behind conformity, especially in the face of adversity.

· AUTHORITY. We recognize those who have higher or lower rank than us and respond accordingly. It makes us respectful of authority and of the rules of relationships, like reciprocity.

· SANCTITY. This makes us value purity and sanctity, like adherence to Biblical laws that evolved thousands of years ago. A good example are the Jewish dietary laws that designate various foods and mixtures of foods as unclean. It also makes us wary of symbolic objects and threats.

If you want to see how these things are measured, I've set up a little questionnaire based on some of the research questions.  If you like, give it a shot. It'll take about 10 minutes. LINK.

I’ll wait or you can just continue to read. 

Are you done?  Great!  Here’s what researchers found when they gave this test to liberals and conservatives:  

You don't have to be a statistician to see that strongly liberal people (that's the folks on the left of the political identity line) score much higher on statements about issues of harm and fairness and not so much about the other three foundations.  Strongly conservative people (the folks on the far right of the line) score much higher on things like respect for authority and purity/sanctity. 

In general, and over many types of studies, what the research shows is that liberals care most about equality and caring for others.  Strongly conservative people tend, overall, to feel about the same about all five foundations.  So when it comes to something like gay marriage, liberals see it as a fairness issue. Conservatives see it as a purity/sanctity issue. As a result, their opinions can be very different.  However, conservatives also care about fairness (just not as much as liberals), so if you describe it as marriage equality instead of gay marriage, it’s easier for them to get on board. Just don’t show them two guys kissing.

Anyway, the next time you see a very liberal or very conservative pundit saying something that sounds just crazy to you, see if you can figure out what moral foundation they’re drawing from to make that judgment. It’ll help understand where they’re coming from. Doesn’t mean you have to agree.  And in fact, some pundits are actually pulling stuff out of their behinds, but still, give it a shot.

Much of this is drawn from these two papers and from Richard Haidt's The Righteous Mind

http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/GHN2009.pdf

http://righteousmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ch07.RighteousMind.final_.pdf

8/7/16

Famous Faces

So which of these famous people do you think published an article on psychology?

I'll give you a minute ...

Yes, you're right!  All of them!  I was surprised, too, when this very long list showed up in my inbox this morning from the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. I am excited to share my favorites with you. And I think at least a third of them touch on the topic of politics and influence as well as psychology.

Some of these are obvious, right?  Carl Sagan was a scientist, but mostly he published about astrophysics and planetary science.  However, in the mid 1980s he wrote a lovely and entertaining article called  “Night walkers and mystery mongers: Sense and nonsense at the edge of science” for the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. It wasn't really a journal, hardly a magazine, but the Sagan article is just as relevant today as it was then.  The beginning description of the second century con man Alexander of Abonutichus could have been written about people today.  Anti-vaxers and climate change skeptics take note. You can find the article HERE. It's a fun read.


Albert Einstein was a scientist, too, but he was also acquainted with Sigmund Freud.  They published a series of letters in which they discussed the causes of war and possible ways of preventing it. Freud invokes his idea of "Thanatos" or a death instinct, which is not generally considered to be valid today.  Nevertheless, the letters are compelling.  You can find them HERE. 



So much for the obvious.  But how about the rest of these folks?



Mayim Bialik plays the brainy girlfriend of fellow nerd Sheldon on Big Bang Theory.   I had no idea she had a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA. She published what was probably her dissertation research on brain imaging during affective and linguistic prosody conditions. No, I don’t know what that means, either, but I’m impressed!




(Totally off topic, but did you know that Brian May, of Queen, has a doctorate in astrophysics? He started on it before Queen became famous and finally went back and finished his dissertation in 2007. There's an asteroid named after him!!!)

The Dalai Lama teamed up with one of my heroes, social psychologist Paul Ekman,  in a series of conversations looking at the linkages between Buddhism and the science of emotion. Ekman delayed his retirement to supervise some serious research on the relationship between meditation and emotional responses, which the Dalai Lama sponsored. The authors feel that mindfulness-based meditation can help enhance compassion, which is a touchstone for the Dalai Lama. I’ve read their book. It’s fascinating and has increased my appreciation for both men. Amazon has it HERE. 

Colin Firth, yes that Colin Firth, Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice fame, commissioned a study on the relationship between various parts of the brain and political leanings. He and his coauthors found a tie between conservatism and greater amygdala size (related to sensitivity to threat) while liberalism was related to greater size in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is in turn related to increased ability to manage conflict. This sounds, and is, really technical, but if you want to have a go at it, you can find the article HERE.I hope to have a more user friendly blog on brains and politics later.   

I read this several years ago. Their research was part of a growing realization that brain structure was related to political leanings.  And then you have to wonder, if politics is biology, then can your political philosophy be inherited?  Political leanings run in families, after all...

Benjamin Franklin.  If Colin Firth is my current swoon, Franklin is my historical swoon. You can keep your Hamilton. If I had a time machine, I'd be headed straight towards 18th century Philadelphia.  

Back in the 1700s, the King of France, Louis XVI, asked then-ambassador Franklin, along with chemist Lavoisier and physician Guillotin (the man who popularized the device that would execute Lavoisier a few years later; the French Revolution was full of irony...), to investigate the claims of Frans Anton Mesmer regarding what he called “animal magnetism”. Mesmer said that he could use this magnetism to cure diseases and well as other infirmities.   They concluded that Mesmer’s claims, “…were not legitimate and instead were attributable to the effects of imagination, belief, and suggestion.” On the other hand, hypnosis, as mesmerism is known today, has more widespread acceptance.  You can find the text of Franklin's report, in English, HERE. 

American poet and writer Gertrude Stein studied under William James (the Father of Psychology!) at Harvard.  She was looking at how the unconscious, slight hand movements of the players can send the planchette skittering across the Ouija board. Who knew? Stein's paper is HERE.  






Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, collaborated with The Amazing Randi and others on an article “on how knowledge of magic can inform the psychological study of perception, attention, and memory.” Magicians are really good at misdirection, and their knowledge can help psychologists better understand things like inattentional blindness and change blindness.

Here’s an example.  Can you figure out WhoDunnIt?

That's change blindness.  Here's another example. Pay attention to the rules and follow the directions in the video.

That's inattentional blindness.  You get so focused on one thing that really obvious stuff just slips by.

I hope you enjoyed this brief journey through psychology geekdom.  The original article on famous people and psychology is this one:
Lilienfeld, Scott O. and Lynn, Steven J. (2016) You'll never guess who wrote that: 78 surprising authors of psychological publications. Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 11 no. 4, 419-441.

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