Psychology Department, University of Michigan, In The News http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/news/department/ News and Information en-us I'll Have That Typeface on the Menu http://news/?id=248 Jeremy Caplan, Time 2008-06-17 It's no secret that the cost of a restaurant dish tends to mirror its complexity. That's why a menu item that says "medley of berry conserves and pureedpindas " is likely to cost five times what it would if it were just called peanut butter and jelly. But it turns out that obscure menu terminology may be just half the game. A new study suggests that typography also plays a role in influencing diners. In a paper that will appear in the October issue of Psychological Science, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz suggest that small changes in menu fonts can significantly alter people's perceptions of dishes' complexity and value. "People infer that if something on a menu is difficult to understand or hard to read that it takes great skill and effort to prepare," says Song, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan. "When I go to an expensive French restaurant, I can hardly pronounce the words on the menu, so I take for granted that it's expensive because it's not comprehensible." Similarly, Song says, using an offbeat typeface to obscure a dish's description may signal hidden value to an unsuspecting diner on unfamiliar ground. That may explain the implicit logic employed by restaurants offering exorbitant entrees described with elaborately scripted fonts in microscopic print. To read the entire article, see the Time website at http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1813950,00.html. en-us Study by University of Michigan researcher shows font to be a really big deal http://news/?id=247 Tina Reed, The Ann Arbor News 2008-06-16 http://www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/06/study_by_university_of_michiga.html Before you get frustrated with that next furniture assembly project, take a look at the typeface on those instructions. According to a recent University of Michigan study, the ease of reading the font on directions has a big impact on how easy, or difficult, consumers believe a project will be. The study is planned to run in October's issue of Psychological Science, but could have big implications for business marketing, said Hyunjin Song, a U-M doctoral psychology student who conducted the study with marketing professor Norbert Schwarz at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. To read the entire article, see the Ann Arbor News website at http://www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/06/study_by_university_of_michiga.html. en-us Brain-training to improve memory boosts fluid intelligence http://news/?id=246 Joe Serwach, U-M News Service 2008-05-21 http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6518 Visiting Scholars Susanne Jäggi and Martin Buschkuehl in the news From the news release: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Brain-training efforts designed to improve working memory can also boost scores in general problem-solving ability and improve fluid intelligence, according to new University of Michigan research. "Considering the fundamental importance of fluid intelligence in everyday life and its predictive power for a large variety of intellectual tasks and professional success, we believe that our findings may be highly relevant to applications in education," U-M psychology researchers Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl concluded. The research is detailed in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).... This research has been picked up by media outlets around the globe. To read the entire article, see the News Service website at http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6518. en-us Officials’ Memory an Issue When Time Stands Still http://news/?id=244 Joshua Robinson, New York Times 2008-05-12 From the article: We know that in the course of even a single minute, when you’re getting distracted by all the noise in the crowd, the emotion, the discussion of what the rulebook says to do, most of the short-term memory gets emptied out, said David Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. It’s sort of like what happens at a crime scene where we know that eyewitness accounts of what happened are greatly altered by emotion.
To read the entire article, see the New York Times website at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/sports/basketball/07clock.html?_r=3&ref=sports&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. en-us Study: Estrogen fuels female need for power and control http://news/?id=245 Joseph Serwach, U-M News Service 2008-05-12 From the article: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—New University of Michigan psychology research suggests that the sex hormone estrogen may be for women what testosterone is for men: The fuel of power. Until recently, some researchers doubted whether women had a biologically anchored need for dominance. "Women have long been overlooked in biological research on dominance," said psychology researcher Steven Stanton. "Using a male model, the small body of existing research has struggled to link testosterone to dominance motivation and behavior in women. "However, estrogen is very behaviorally potent and is actually a close hormonal relative to testosterone. In female mammals, estrogen has been tied to dominance, but there has been scant research examining the behavioral roles of estrogen in women." The study by Oliver Shultheiss, a psychology professor who directs the Human Motivation & Affective Neuroscience Lab, and Stanton, who is completing doctoral work at the lab, is detailed this month in the journal Hormones and Behavior. Schultheiss and Stanton measured women's power needs and then assessed salivary estrogen levels both before and after they entered a one-on-one dominance contest. The researchers found that even before women got involved in the contest, higher power motivation was associated with higher levels of estrogen....
To read the entire news release, see the U-M News Service website at http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6524. en-us You Can Blame the Bugs http://news/?id=242 Sharon Begley, Newsweek 2008-04-09 Professor Richard Nisbett's research in Newsweek From the article: There is no better way to shatter someone's "we are all the same" illusion than to show pictures of a monkey, a panda and a banana to someone from Japan and someone from Britain. Ask them which two images go together. Chances are, the Japanese will pick the monkey and the banana, because they have a functional relationship: the former eats the latter. The Brit will select the panda and the monkey, because they are both mammals. As Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan described in his 2003 book, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why," Westerners typically see classifications where Asians see relationships. He means "see" literally. When students in one study looked at tanks holding a large fish, a bunch of small fry and the usual aquarium plants and rocks, the Japanese later said they'd seen lots of background elements; the Americans saw the big fish. The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued. East Asian societies exalt the larger society: behavior is constrained by social roles, conformity is prized, outsiders shunned. "The individualist-collectivist split is one of the most powerful differences among cultures," says Nisbett. But the reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes. Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation....
Read the entire article on the Newsweek website. en-us Stress levels can make brain flip from desire to fear http://news/?id=241 Joseph Serwach, U-M News Service 2008-03-24 Kent Berridge's Research in the University Record, and Nature Neuroscience From the University Record article: A single brain circuit mediates desire and dread, and entering a noisy, new environment instantly can flip an emotion switch, researchers say of a study that included exposing rats to punk rock music by Iggy Pop. "We experience desire and fear as psychological opposites. But from the brain's point of view they seem to share a common kernel that can be flexibly used for either one," says Kent Berridge, a psychology professor who oversees the Affective Neuroscience & Biopsychology Lab. "This brain limbic circuit can retune its emotional functions from moment to moment, according to situation." The study is featured in the April issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience....
Read the entire article on the University Record website at http://www.ur.umich.edu/0708/Mar24_08/16.php. Read the News Service press release at http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6419. en-us Unusual brand logos and images work well http://news/?id=238 Bernie DeGroat, U-M News Service 2008-03-11 The world of branding is full of iconic characters, images and logos that help hawk a company's wares, but those that seem to have little in common with its product may be the most effective, a U-M researcher says. "Among marketers, there has been a trend to employ unusual visual identifiers that have little, if anything, to do with the product," says Norbert Schwarz.... In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Schwarz and colleagues Aparna Labroo of the University of Chicago and Ravi Dhar of Yale University conduct three studies that show consumers prefer a product with a visual identifier on its label or logo over those without one, provided the identifier is easy to process.... "Consider the case of a consumer with a young son who loves Kermit the Frog," says Schwarz, who also is a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research. "She is buying a wine online and encounters a wine bottle that features a label with the image of a frog. "Neither Kermit nor other frogs have much to do with wine, but the increased exposure to Kermit may facilitate the visual processing of a label that features a frog and increase its aesthetic appeal. This increased appeal of the label, in turn, may increase the consumer's preference for the 'frog wine' over a wine that features a different label."...
You can read the entire article on the University Record website at http://www.ur.umich.edu/0708/Mar10_08/20.php. en-us Edward Chang on Voices in the Family http://news/?id=237 Esther Eppele, Department of Psychology 2008-03-03 Associate Professor Edward Chang was interviewed by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb for the NPR-affiliate radio show Voices in the Family. Listen to the podcast at http://www.whyy.org/podcast/voices20080225.mp3. en-us Edward Chang Interviewed on Martha Stewart Show http://news/?id=234 Esther Eppele 2008-02-25 Three of Chang's undergraduate honors students (Nicole Hermann, Kavita Srivastava, & Marguerite Bodem) and he have been working on a "fun" project in dealing with the ongoing scientific debate regarding whether or not perfectionism is best viewed as adaptive or maldadptive. For the "fun" study, they asked students and their parents to identify popular living perfectionists. The details are interesting, but need replication, more representative samples, etc. Chang was briefly interviewed on the telephone by Martha Stewart to talk about the results and about perfectionism. Read more on her website at http://www.marthastewart.com/portal/site/mslo/menuitem.79cd0d4bac77d1611e3bf410b5900aa0/?vgnextoid=945b270b3efb7110VgnVCM1000003d370a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=38f9cf380e1dd010VgnVCM1000005b09a00aRCRD&rsc=showmain_tv_the-martha-stewart-show&lnc=38f9cf380e1dd010VgnVCM1000005b09a00aRCRD. en-us Making Memories: A glowing protein provides insight into how learning strengthens the ties between neurons. http://news/?id=236 Jocelyn Rice, Technology Review 2008-02-22 Steve Maren quoted in Technology Review February 22, 2008 From the article: A new strain of genetically engineered mice has allowed researchers to pinpoint, for the first time, the precise cellular connections that form as a memory is created... "It's a first step in visualizing the synapses that encode memories," says Stephen Maren, director of the neuroscience graduate program at the University of Michigan, who was not involved with the research. "We really haven't had a tool like this to see memory encoding at a synaptic level. It's an exciting paper." "We are developing techniques that allow us to focus on the actual physical sites that are changing in the brain with learning, at finer and finer resolution," says the study's lead investigator, Mark Mayford, associate professor of cell biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Neuroscientists believe that in order for a memory to form, individual synaptic connections must be strengthened in response to a memory-generating stimulus. This strengthening is likely the result of a specific set of proteins migrating to synapses in a precisely choreographed pattern, but it remains a mystery which proteins are involved and how they are targeted to their destinations. The new study, which appears in today's issue of Science, is the first to trace a particular protein as it makes its way to particular synapses. ...The receptor's "preference" for mushroom-type synapses suggests that, at least in the process of forming a fear-related memory, there is a specialized trafficking system to direct synaptic proteins to their targets. "But what sort of molecular flag gets waved to say, 'Come up here and make your home at my type of synapse,' is not really clear," says Maren...
To read the entire article, visit the Technology Review website at http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20320/. en-us Political Animals (Yes, Animals) http://news/?id=232 Natalie Angier, New York Times 2008-01-24 Professor Barbara Smuts in the New York Times January 22, 2008 From the article: As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power. You can go tough and steely in an orange hunter’s jacket, or touchy-feely with a Kleenex packet. You can ally yourself with an alpha male like Chuck Norris, befriend an alpha female like Oprah Winfrey or split the difference and campaign with your mother. You can seek the measured endorsement of the town elders or the restless energy of the young, showily handle strange infants or furtively slam your opponents. Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung social networks.... Not all male primates pursue power by appealing to the gents. Among olive baboons, for example, a young male adult who has left his natal home and seeks to be elected into a new baboon group begins by making friendly overtures toward a resident female who is not in estrous at the moment and hence not being contested by other males of the troop. “If the male is successful in forming a friendship with a female, that gives him an opening with her relatives and allows him to work his way into the whole female network,” said Barbara Smuts, a biologist at the University of Michigan. “In olive baboons, friendships with females can be much more important than political alliances with other males.” Because males are often the so-called dispersing sex, while females stay behind in the support network of their female kin, females form the political backbone among many social mammals; the longer-lived the species, the denser and more richly articulated that backbone is likely to be....
Read the entire article on the New York Times website. en-us Twin Study Indicates Genetic Basis For Processing Faces, Places http://news/?id=230 Sara Harris, Journal of Neuroscience; Medical News Today Press Release 2008-01-07 A new study of twins indicates that the genetic foundation for the brain's ability to recognize faces and places is much stronger than for other objects, such as words. The results, which appear in the December 19 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, are some of the first evidence demonstrating the role of genetics in assigning these functions to specific regions of the brain.... Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, Thad Polk, PhD, Joonkoo Park, and Mason Smith of the University of Michigan, along with Denise Park, PhD, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, measured activity in the visual cortex of 24 sets of fraternal and identical twins. The twins watched several series of images: sets of people's faces, houses, letters strung together, and chairs, as well as scrambled images that served as a baseline measurement.... Polk's analysis of brain activity patterns from the twins suggests how the organization of these independent regions is shaped. By showing greater similarity in the brain activity of identical twins than their fraternal counterparts when processing faces and places, the results indicate a genetic basis for these functions. Activity in response to words, Polk suggests, may be shaped to a greater degree by one's experiences and environment. "Face and place recognition are older than reading on an evolutionary scale, they are shared with other species, and they provide a clearer adaptive advantage," says Polk. "It is therefore plausible that genetics would shape the cortical response to faces and places, but not orthographic stimuli."
To read the remainder of the press release, please visit the Medical News Today website at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/92256.php. Nicole Casal Moore of U-M News Service also reported on this study in the January 7, 2008 University Record. Read the article at http://www.ur.umich.edu/0708/Jan07_08/09.shtml. Visit the Journal of Neuroscience website to read the journal article Nature versus Nurture in Ventral Visual Cortex: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Twins by Thad A. Polk, Joonkoo Park, Mason R. Smith, and Denise C. Park. The article appeard in the December 2007 issue of the journal. en-us Brilliant Pet Tricks? http://news/?id=229 Dave Gershman, Ann Arbor News 2008-01-03 From the article: Barbara Smuts thought this dog owner must be a crackpot. The woman from Maryland kept insisting her dog was going into the backyard and arranging his many plush toys into geometric shapes of circles, parallel lines and triangles. Come on, you must be helping him, responded Smuts, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies canine social behavior. And if you're not, the neighbors must be playing a trick on you, she said. The woman steadfastly ruled out Smuts's reservations, and the professor eventually flew to Maryland to visit the woman and her dog, Donnie. Smuts now believes Donnie is, in fact, creating the displays. Cable TV viewers will be able to make up their minds about Donnie on Sunday, when he and Smuts will be featured on a National Geographic Channel documentary called "Dog Genius.'' The show airs at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. [More on the documentary below.] Donnie, a male Doberman, was at first reluctant to perform for Smuts, probably because he was more excited about having a new person in the house. So she suggested the woman install a few security cameras, which recorded Donnie in the act, moving his more than 80 plush toys into geometric shapes and creating social vignettes with them. "She actually got some significant footage of him,'' Smuts said. "Not as much as I would like, but enough to show that he's doing it, and it's not something he has been trained to do, and it's completely spontaneous.'' ...
To read the entire article, visit the Ann Arbor News website at: http://www.mlive.com/annarbor/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-25/1198309257106770.xml&coll=2.
Dog Genius documentary on National Geographic Channel See Professor Barbara Smuts' canine research, as well as other dog experts on a National Geographic documentary about canine cognition. The show will appear on the National Geographic channel several times. It is currently scheduled to appear: Sunday December 23rd @ 8pm and 11pm Sunday, December 30th @ 1pm Friday, February 1st @ 4pm, 7pm and 11pm Saturday, February 2nd @ 2am See the National Geographic channel website to schedule an email or cellphone reminder, and to stay up to date with any changes in the show schedule. From National Geographic's website: We share the planet with 400 million dogs : toy dogs, working dogs, champion dogs and artistic dogs; dogs who know what to do in an emergency; and dogs who know their way around a couch. For over 12,000 years, they've been our essential survival aids and our constant companions. But how smart are dogs? Most dog owners would say they're geniuses and point to their pup as living proof. National Geographic joins scientists and dog trainers to explore the dog smarts in surprising new ways, unlocking the truth about man's best friend. en-us Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness http://news/?id=227 Marina Krakovsky, New York Times Magazine 2007-12-18 Adjunct Professor Peter Ubel in the New York Times Magazine's Year In Ideas From the article: People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people don’t always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope--the belief that your current hardship is temporary.... It might seem strange that patients who are better off objectively were less satisfied with their lives, yet the finding makes sense: “If your condition is temporary,” Ubel explains, “you’re thinking, I can’t wait until I get rid of this.” Ubel says thoughts like these keep you from moving on with your life and focusing on the many good things that remain.
To read the entire article, visit the New York Times website at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09_23_hope.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. en-us