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Archive for the ‘We're Only Human’ Category

Male homosexuality doesn’t make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. It appears that the trait is heritable, but since homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring than heterosexual men, shouldn’t the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago? What value could this sexual orientation have, that it has persisted for eons even without any discernible reproductive advantage?

One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the “kin selection hypothesis.” What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives. Specifically, the theory holds that homosexual men might enhance their own prospects by being “helpers in the nest.” By acting altruistically toward nieces and nephews, homosexual men—bachelor uncles in effect—would perpetuate the family genes, including their own.

Two evolutionary psychologists have been testing this idea for the past several years on the Pacific island of Samoa. Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan of Lethbridge University, Canada, chose Samoa because male homosexuals there—called fa’afafine—are widely recognized and accepted as a distinct gender category, neither man nor woman. The fa’afafine tend to be effeminate, and to be exclusively homosexual. This clear demarcation makes it easier to identify a sample for study.

The researchers have shown in past research that the fa’afafine behave much more altruistically toward their nieces and nephews than do either Samoan women or heterosexual men. They babysit a lot, tutor the kids in art and music, and help out financially—paying for medical care and education and so forth. That’s interesting in itself, but it’s unclear just why they behave this way. What’s going on cognitively that supports such avuncular acts. In their most recent study, the scientists set out to unravel the psychology of the fa’afafine, to see if their altruism is targeted specifically at kin rather than kids in general.

They recruited a large sample of fa’afafine, and comparable samples of women and heterosexual men. They gave them all a series of questionnaires, measuring their willingness to help their nieces and nephews in various ways—caretaking, gifts, teaching—and also their willingness to do these things for other, unrelated kids. The findings, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, lend strong support to the kin selection idea. Compared to Samoan women and heterosexual men, the fa’afafine showed a much weaker link between their avuncular behavior and their altruism toward kids generally. This cognitive disconnect, the scientists argue, allows the fa’afafine to allocate their resources more efficiently and precisely to their kin—and thus enhance their own evolutionary prospects.

But these aren’t your garden variety uncles. From an evolutionary perspective, you can’t make up for not having any offspring just by giving a toy to your nephew, or tossing a football with your niece once in a while. Indeed, to compensate for being childless, each fa’afafine would have to somehow support the survival of two additional nieces or nephews who would otherwise not have existed. In short, the fa’afafine must be “super uncles” to earn their evolutionary keep.

Do these findings have any meaning outside of Samoa? Yes and no. Samoan culture is very different from most Western cultures. Samoan culture is very localized, and centered on tight-knit extended families, whereas Western societies tend to be highly individualistic and homophobic. Families are also much more geographically dispersed in Western cultures, diminishing the role that bachelor uncles can play in the extended family, even if they choose to. But in this sense, the researchers say, Samoa’s communitarian culture may be more—not less—representative of the environment in which male homosexuality evolved eons ago. In that sense, it’s not the bachelor uncle who is poorly adapted to the world, but rather the modern Western world that has evolved into an unwelcoming place.

For more insights into human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Say you are traveling in a foreign country, trying to find your way through the bustling capital city. Not Paris or London, some place a bit edgier. Bangkok. You don’t speak the language, and you’re a little frazzled. You walk into a café for some respite, and to your surprise to see a fellow you know from back home sitting at a corner table, sipping coffee. He’s hardly a friend, but you know him to say hello. How do you feel? Well, after the initial surprise, you probably feel a warm glow as you walk up and greet him. You’re genuinely happy to see his familiar face in this strange place. He’s like an old friend.

Now, simply switch cities. You’re back at home and the same basic scenario takes place: You walk into a café, and there’s the same acquaintance, sitting at a corner table sipping coffee. How do you feel today? Well, if you’re like most people, you don’t feel much of anything. You recognize him, but no smile comes to your face. You might nod hello, but you’re really more focused on getting your morning coffee.

Same face, similar scenario. So what’s going on here? Are you a couple of hypocrites? Well, don’t feel bad. First of all, he’s probably not feeling all that warmly toward you either. And what’s more, your own mixed feelings are probably beyond your control. That warm glow of recognition may be hard-wired into your neurons, but it’s also tightly entwined with other emotions, notably fears about personal peril and a yearning for safety.

At least that’s a theory, which a team of cognitive psychologists have recently been testing in the laboratory. According to Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, people naturally feel good when they see something recognizable and familiar. That’s because things that are familiar are—generally speaking—less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It’s worked in the past, so it’s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow.

But it may not be quite that straightforward. De Vries and her colleagues wondered: Wouldn’t the power of familiarity depend somewhat on the context? Specifically, isn’t it possible that mood might modify and shape the mind’s response to familiar and unfamiliar things? Is that what’s occurring when you feel a warm glow in Bangkok and a big yawn back home? They decided to explore this idea experimentally.

Instead of using people’s faces, the scientists used abstract patterns of dots. Basically what they did is familiarize volunteers with some patterns and not others; then they measured their responses when they saw the familiar patterns later. But they didn’t simply ask them which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t; in addition to doing that, they attached electrodes to their faces to detect subtle physiological signs of smiling. In other words, they measured the body’s visceral response to familiarity and novelty.

But before doing this, they manipulated each volunteer’s mood. They asked some to think of sad events in their lives, and others joyous events; and then they played mood-appropriate music to maintain the gloom or happiness. The idea was that mood “tunes” the mind toward safety concerns. That is, if our mood is good, we assume we must be in a safe place; if we’re feeling edgy or down, that must be because we’re threatened in some way. The researchers predicted that feeling blue (and therefore unsafe) would make familiarity an especially potent cue; feeling happy (and therefore safe) would make that cue much less significant.

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers who were melancholy smiled much more at the familiar patterns than did those who were upbeat. Think about that: Familiarity wasn’t all that important to people who were already feeling secure; they already had the safety of their local coffee shop. But people who were feeling uneasy and threatened experienced familiarity as very comforting—even when the familiar stimuli were nothing more than meaningless abstract patterns of dots. No wonder the face of an “old friend” can seem so welcoming in a Bangkok café.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

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Imagine this hypothetical scenario: You’re at a cocktail party and the host introduces you to a stranger, whose name is Jeremy. It’s a crowded party, and as you chat with Jeremy, you’re also picking up snippets of another conversation nearby. Something about a big football game on Sunday. It doesn’t concern you, so you try to tune it out. You have a short but pleasant conversation with Jeremy, then go on to mingle with other guests.

What do you remember when you run into Jeremy the next day? Well, if you’re young, you will probably recognize Jeremy’s face and associate his face with his name. That’s normal social memory. But if you’re older, you may have a very different kind of association: You may inexplicably link Jeremy with the upcoming football game. That overheard chatter about football is an irrelevant piece of information—you don’t even like football much. But your mind has been distracted by it, and it has connected that unimportant tidbit with your newly forged memory of Jeremy.

This is just a theory, which scientists call “hyper-binding.” That’s really just a jargony way of saying that the elderly remember a lot of useless information by attaching it to important new learning. But according to new research from the University of Toronto, such seemingly haphazard learning might be a blessing in disguise for the elderly. Psychological scientists Karen Campbell, Lynn Hasher and Ruthann Thomas recently ran a laboratory version of the cocktail party conversation to see if the phenomenon is indeed unique to the elderly—and to explore its possible benefits.

The experiments were fairly technical, but here’s the gist: The researchers recruited two groups of volunteers, the first about 19 years old and the second in the mid-60s. They showed all of them a string of pictures that were superimposed with irrelevant words. That’s like meeting Jeremy and hearing sports chatter at the same time. The volunteers were told to ignore the irrelevant words, and later on they were given a memory test for pictures and words in different combinations. They wanted to compare the older and younger minds at work.

The results were dramatic. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the older volunteers were clearly unable to ignore the distracting information even when they were instructed to. They stored away the irrelevant words by linking them tightly with their corresponding pictures in memory. What this suggests is that the elderly have weaker mental regulation and a broader “bandwidth,” taking in important and unimportant information indiscriminately. They store this new knowledge for later use and what’s more, they do this without even being aware of it.

Wouldn’t such distractibility be a terrible hindrance? Wouldn’t it just clutter up the mind with a lot of junk information? Not so, say the Toronto scientists. In fact, it may well be an advantage for the elderly. Aging often brings with it some mild cognitive declines—and indeed the elderly were slower and less accurate in some parts of these memory experiments. But awareness of how events connect in everyday life—even seemingly irrelevant events—may play a critical role in certain kinds of reasoning and judgment. In this way, distractibility may surreptitiously bolster everyday problem-solving.

The fact is, we never really know for sure what information in our world is important or useless—not when we’re first encountering it. The elderly mind may not be as fleet as it once was, but by being unfiltered, it perhaps is making connections that aren’t literal or obvious, and can be insightful. It might even be the foundation of a novel kind of intuition that comes with aging, or perhaps even what we call wisdom.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought, will be published by Crown in September.

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Everyone who is in any kind of serious relationship—with a partner, a child, a close friend—has been guilty of transgression as one time or another. That’s because we’re not perfect. We all commit hurtful acts, violate trust, and hope for forgiveness.

That’s simply a fact, and here’s another one: Nine out of 10 Americans say that they pray—at least on occasion. Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert put these two facts together and came up with an idea: Why not take all that prayer and direct it at the people who have wronged us? Is it possible that directed prayer might spark forgiveness in those doing the praying—and in the process preserve relationships?

This is obviously not a new idea. Indeed it’s ancient, but Lambert and his colleagues decided to test it scientifically in two simple experiments. In the first, they had a group of men and women pray for their romantic partner. It was just a single prayer for their partner’s well-being, spoken privately in a quiet room. Others—the experimental controls—also went into a quiet room, where they simply described their partner, speaking into a tape recorder.

Then they meaured forgiveness. When someone hurts you, it’s human nature to want to strike back, retaliate—or to withdraw from the relationship. The scientists defined forgiveness as the diminishing of these initial negative feelings, and when they analyzed all the data, the results were clear: Those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on.

This is remarkable, when you think that a single prayer made the difference. The researchers decided to run another test to double-check the findings. In this study, they had a group of men and women pray for a close friend every day for four weeks. Others simply reflected on the relationship, thinking positive thoughts but not praying for their friend’s well-being. They also added another dimension. They used a scale to measure selfless concern for others—not any particular person but other people generally. They speculated that prayer would increase selfless concern, which in turn would boost forgiveness.

And that’s just what they found. But why? How does this common spiritual practice exert its healing effects? The psychologists have an idea, which they described recently in the journal Psychological Science: Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals like retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was caught red-handed returning from a tryst with his Argentine mistress last June, he told the Associated Press that he had met his “soul mate.” His choice of words seemed to suggest that having a deep emotional and spiritual connection with Maria Belen Chapur somehow made his sexual infidelity to his wife Jenny Sanford less tawdry.

Jenny Sanford wasn’t buying it, and neither would most women. What the two-timing governor didn’t understand is that most women view emotional infidelity as worse, not better, than sexual betrayal. Publicly acknowledging a soul connection was probably the most insulting and hurtful thing he could have said to his wife of 20 years.

The clueless governor is not alone. Research has documented that most men become much more jealous about sexual infidelity than they do about emotional infidelity. Women are the opposite, and this is true all over the world. Just why this is the case is not fully understood, although the prevailing theory is that the difference has evolutionary origins: Men learned over eons to be hyper-vigilant about sex because they can never be absolutely certain they are the father of a child, while women are much more concerned about having a partner who is committed to raising a family.

New research now suggests an alternative explanation. The new studies do not question the fundamental gender difference regarding jealousy—indeed they add additional support for that difference. But the new science suggests that the difference may be rooted more in personality—specifically in traits like self-reliance and insecurity.

Pennsylvania State University scientists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly doubted the evolutionary explanation because there is a conspicuous subset of men who are more like women. That is, they find emotional betrayal more distressing than sexual infidelity. Why would this be? The researchers suspected that it might have to do with trust and emotional attachment. Some people—men and women alike—are by nature more secure in their attachments to others, while others are more invested in their own autonomy and seemingly less in need of intimacy. Psychologists see this compulsive self-reliance as a defensive strategy—protection against deep-seated feelings of vulnerability. People high on this trait tend to be preoccupied with the sexual aspects of relationships rather than emotional intimacy.

Levy and Kelly decided to explore a possible link between attachment style and jealousy style, and they did this by running a group of volunteers through some standard psychological tests. One questionnaire measured whether the volunteers were secure in their romantic relationships, or whether they instead were avoidant and noncommittal. A second questionnaire asked which they would find more distressing—knowing their partner was off having passionate sexual intercourse with someone else, or knowing that same partner had formed a deep emotional attachment with someone else.

They sorted the data, and the conclusions were indisputable. As the scientists reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, avoidant types—those who prize their autonomy in relationships over commitment—were much more upset about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. And conversely, emotionally secure volunteers—including secure men—were much more likely to find emotional betrayal more upsetting.

But here’s the interesting twist. Just like all the earlier studies, Levy and Kelly found clear evidence of a gender difference in jealousy style.
In other words, men are indeed preoccupied with sexual betrayal, and women the reverse, but not for the reasons we thought. Men fret about sexual betrayal because they are overly invested in the sexual side of their own relationships—and that superficiality is linked to their thin personal attachments. Not to put too fine a point on it, male jealousy is shaped by deep emotional insecurities. Jenny Sanford probably knew that already, and the governor’s soul mate is no doubt having her suspicions by now.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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In the darkly funny film classic Harold and Maude, Harold is a 19-year-old who is obsessed with death and dying. He repeatedly fakes his own suicide, drives around in a hearse, and attends strangers’ funerals as a pastime. At one of these funerals he meets Maude, a 79-year-old with the same morbid hobby, and in one of the most unlikely romances on film, the melancholy young man and the vivacious concentration camp survivor fall in love. Maude’s life ends with her suicide on her 80th birthday, but it’s not a depressing death. Indeed, the final scene shows Harold putting aside his morbid ways and embracing life anew.

Harold and Maude is one of the cleverest films to wrestle with existential themes, but the interplay of morbidity and zest for life is a recurring theme in art and literature. And in real lives as well: People who have close brushes with death often report a sharpened appetite even for the ordinary stuff of daily life. Facing one’s mortality appears to give new meaning to being alive.

But why would this be? It’s not obvious. One can imagine becoming negative and fearful when faced with life’s fragility, or reckless, but that doesn’t seem to happen. What cognitive crunching transforms morbidity into hope, mourning into joy? In other words, what was taking place in young Harold’s neurons when his soul mate’s death lifted his spirits out of the doldrums?

Some new science offers one possible explanation for this cognitive phenomenon. A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, headed by Laura King, decided to look at the death-and-zest interplay in terms of mental heuristics. Heuristic is just scientific jargon for the ancient, deep-wired rules that shape many of our thoughts and actions, and the Missouri scientists were especially interested in two of these rules. The so-called scarcity heuristic states: If something is rare, it must be valuable. This explains, for example, why we prize gold, even though steel is much more useful. The flip side of the scarcity heuristic, often called the value heuristic, states: If we desire something very much, it must be scarce.

Neither of these cognitive rules is necessarily correct or useful all the time, but they are both powerful—powerful enough to explain the common intertwining of morbidity and zest. Because scarcity and value are so tightly linked in the human mind, King and her colleagues reasoned, the mind might interpret death as a scarcity of life, which according to the theory should enhance its perceived value. They decided to test this idea in their laboratory.

The experiments were fairly straightforward. In one, for example, the researchers had a large group of volunteers complete word-find puzzles—those grids of letters with words embedded in them. For some of the volunteers, the embedded words were death-related, like tombstone and coffin, while for others—the controls—they were pain-related, like headache. Then all the volunteers completed three widely used measures of life’s meaning and purpose. The findings were simple and unambiguous: Those with death on their mind found life more meaningful and, well, simply better. They valued life more when primed by funerals and hearses.

So that’s the scarcity principle at work. But the scientists wanted to test their idea the other way around. That is, if it is indeed the heuristic mind finding meaning in death, then loving and embracing life should also enhance awareness of death’s constant presence. They tested this idea in an ingenious way. They approached strangers on the streets of Columbia, Missouri, and asked them to read a brief prose passage. Some read about how valuable the human body was if the organs were traded on the market—in the neighborhood of $45 million, the equivalent of “400 Porsches, 265 houses, or 45 luxury yachts.” The idea was to spark thoughts about life’s monetary worth. Others read about how the body was made up of common chemicals with a total value of about $4.50—the equivalent of “a Big Mac Value Meal at McDonald’s.”

Then they had all the volunteers do a different word test, this one requiring word completions like coff__ and de__. These words could be completed with either death-related words like coffin and dead, or with neutral words like coffee and deal. The idea was to see how much the two different groups of volunteers were thinking about death and dying. And the findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were again clear: As the value heuristic would predict, those who were imagining themselves as the $45 million bionic man were also focused on the inevitability of dying—much more than those primed to devalue life. Valuing life made it seem scarcer and thus more fragile.

So the reality of death does not render life meaningless. Indeed, the opposite. And what’s more, when we embrace life, death is not pushed out of awareness; it lurks just outside of consciousness, easily accessible. That’s a psychological reality that Maude knew well from experience, and 19-year-old Harold was just beginning to sense.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book on the heuristic mind will be published by Crown in fall of 2010.

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I take part in a spinning class a couple times a week, and I always position my bike so I can’t see the wall clock. Spinning is really hard, and I know from experience that the session will seem much longer and much more arduous if I have one eye on the clock. It still drags some days, but other days I really forget about the clock. Time flies.

I know, it’s a cliché, but who hasn’t experienced a deep connection between the clock and the subjective experience of pleasure or pain? It’s what psychological scientists call “naïve physics.” We all know that time doesn’t really ever speed up or slow down; it always ticks at its own pace. But our perceptions of time vary dramatically, depending on our state of mind.

The universality of this naïve theory got scientist Aaron Sackett wondering if the opposite might also be true: If indeed time seems to tick away faster when we’re having fun, could a distorted sense of time make an experience more or less enjoyable? And why? Sackett, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, ran several experiments to look at this common perception in a variety of ways. All of them involved tinkering with the passage of time in creative ways.

In one experiment, for example, Sackett and his colleagues put a group of men and women in two rooms, each without any clocks or watches or cell phones. They had them do a timed test, in which they had to read a text and underline certain words—so not particularly fun-filled, but not particularly aversive either. The scientists told the volunteers the test would take exactly ten minutes, and made a big show of starting a stopwatch as they left the room.

But the test didn’t take exactly ten minutes. For some, the scientists reentered after just five minutes, but acted as if the full ten minutes had passed; they even left the stopwatch conspicuously in view. For others, they didn’t reenter the room until 20 minutes had passed, but again they left the volunteers with the idea that ten minutes had passed. In other words, for some ten minutes seemed surprisingly long, while for others it seemed short—the lab equivalent of making time fly.

Then all the volunteers rated the experience for enjoyment, challenge, fun, engagement, and so forth. And the results were clear: If the ten minutes passed surprisingly quickly, volunteers found the word search task more pleasurable than if time seemed to drag. This doesn’t mean they found it exhilarating, or that the others found it crushingly boring—but their subjective experiences were definitely different on the pleasure scale.

But what if the task were actually aversive—more akin to the muscle ache of a spinning class? In a second study, the scientists forced the volunteers to listen to a tape recording of a dot matrix printer for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but apparently this was a really irritating noise. While they listened, they watched the elapsed time tick off on a screen– except that, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the elapsing time was either too slow or too fast. So again, for some time flew, while for others time dragged.

And again, time perceptions shaped emotions. When time flew, the tedious listening experience seemed less tedious, more bearable. When it dragged, it was worse; these listeners said they would rather listen to an electric drill if given the option. They also ran the experiment with a pleasant audiotape—of a favorite song—and once again time distortions determined the pleasure of the listening experience. That is, a pleasant experience became more pleasant.

So what does all of this mean? As the researchers explain on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, humans are sense-making creatures. If we perceive something in the world as surprising, we automatically look for an explanation for the aberration. So if time sees distorted, we want to know why—and out intuitive physics clicks in: If time flies when we’re having fun, then flying time must signal that something fun is taking place.

In real life, we can’t slow or speed up time, of course. But we can shorten our estimates of time, and one way is not to look at clocks or other time cues. There may be other ways to make time fly as well, which suggests the possibility of making the inevitable tedium of everyday life—waiting in line, for example, or even a spinning class—just a bit more fun.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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My kids cut their video gaming teeth on Super Mario Brothers in the late 80s, and I confess I had some qualms about buying our first Nintendo. Would these seemingly pointless games be intellectually numbing, a waste of time and money? Would my kids lose interest in books? The usual parental fretting, I guess. But Mario and Luigi’s adventures with Princess Toadstool seemed benign enough, so we took the plunge. I limited their gaming time, and censored their games choices, and they seem to have emerged as undamaged adults.

I had it easy, really. The video gaming culture has become much more pervasive over the past two decades, and as we enter the holiday gift-giving season, many parents are in a deep quandary. Today’s games—especially those for teenagers and young adults—have become much more frenetic. Many reward adrenaline-pumping vigilance, rapid reactions, sharpshooting and other skills of personal combat. So parents are still left to wonder: Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these contests?

Well, the latest psychological science provides at least a partial answer, and one that might surprise a lot of Luddites, Grinches and well-meaning moms and dads. Indeed, parents might consider putting an action video game under the tree not only for their kids, but for their aging parents as well. The weight of evidence, summarized by University of Rochester scientists in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests that regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors and—more important—that this skill carries over far beyond fragging bots in Unreal Tournament.

Anecdotal evidence has long hinted that players who spend a lot of hours on a game get faster—at least faster at that game. That’s not surprising, but cognitive scientists Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier wanted to look beyond the obvious. They gathered together all the existing studies of video gaming that they could find, and crunched them together in what’s called a “meta-analysis”—to see what general conclusions they could extract. They found some surprising insights in the mounds of data.

For example, they found that avid players got faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated laboratory tests of reaction time: finding a particular letter in a field of letters, that kind of thing. They also found evidence that gamers don’t lose accuracy as they get faster. This is important, because skeptics have claimed that avid gamers are simply “trigger happy”—that is, fast but impulsive, and prone to errors. It appears they’re fast and accurate—just as accurate as cautious players. Perhaps most important, they found that all avid players’ share a common underlying cognitive change that explains their generalized quickness and sharpness.

That’s the most important finding. When they examined the gamers’ speed-plus-accuracy boost more closely, they found that the common underlying ingredient is improved visual cognition. Playing video games enhances performance on things like mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention. What’s more, it’s not just that kids with these skills are drawn to video games. Scientists have trained novices with no particular interest in gaming, and with enough hours, they too become both faster and more visually sharp.

These enhanced visual skills are beginning to sound like talents that might be helpful to an airline pilot, not just a Call to Duty2 champion. But there’s more to recommend these games, the Rochester scientists conclude: Studies have already indicated that training might reduce gender differences in visual and spatial processing, and there is good reason to believe such training might stem the cognitive declines that come with aging as well. Indeed, one theory is that all the decrements that come with aging are related to a generalized slowing of the ability to process information—the exact opposite of the generalized cognitive gain that comes from gaming.

But hold up. There are obviously many other considerations before parents run out and buy the latest first-person assassin game for the whole family. Many of the action-oriented video games are unsuitable for children, and granddad might lack the manual dexterity and eyesight to play these games anyway. But perhaps in a Christmas future, there will be an intergenerational face-off on an educational toy for all ages.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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The coming holiday season looms as a nightmare of temptation for many, whether the lure is fruitcake or martinis. Most dieters and abstainers think of willpower as the key to success. Bite the bullet; just say no. Yet paradoxically, the cornerstone of most addiction recovery programs is the exact opposite of willpower: It’s admitting powerlessness over drugs or sweets or booze.

This is a difficult concept for many, especially for those who have grown up in a culture that celebrates self-reliance. How can weakness be the way to success? Whatever happened to personal responsibility and self-discipline? It’s not entirely clear why or how this principle works, but some new research may help illuminate the dynamic.

Northwestern University psychologist Loren Nordgren and colleagues wanted to explore how our beliefs about our own powers of restraint might shape our behavior in the face of temptation. They suspected that people who believe they are powerless would be less likely to put themselves in risky situations—holiday parties, for example—and would therefore be less likely to give into temptation. Similarly, people who believe in their own powers of restraint would be less vigilant about temptation—and thus at heightened risk for a slip. They were especially interested in one puzzling question about addiction and recovery: Why do so many people relapse even after the physical symptoms of addiction subside?

They decided to study smokers. They contacted about 50 smokers who were trying to quit through a smoking cessation program. All had gone without a smoke for at least three weeks, which means that their physical withdrawal cravings were past. The researchers began by giving the smokers a questionnaire to gauge their beliefs about their ability to control their impulses and withstand temptation. Then they asked them a series of questions about the steps they took to avoid being around cigarettes: Do you avoid people who smoke? Ask people not to smoke? Sneak an occasional drag? And so forth.

Four months later, they contacted the recovering smokers again to see how they were doing with their effort to quit. They expected that their beliefs would shape their risky behavior, which would in turn influence success or failure. And that’s precisely what they found. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, quitters who were confident in their powers of self-restraint were more apt to hang around smokers and keep cigarettes around—and were also more likely to relapse. Those who felt weak and vulnerable had a higher rate of success.

But what makes one person believe in willpower, while another sees himself as powerless? According to the researchers, beliefs are not fixed. They fluctuate depending on our circumstances and psychological state. People in a “hot” state are feeling the full force of their visceral impulses—hunger and craving—and therefore “believe” in the potency of addiction and in their vulnerability. But people in a “cold” state—who aren’t having cravings at the moment—have a great deal of trouble remembering what those impulses feel like, and as a result tend to believe more in their personal willpower. This disconnect is what the psychologists call the “empathy gap.”

The problem is that we spend most of our time in a cold state, so we tend to overestimate our powers of control and restraint. When we overestimate these powers, we are more likely to act recklessly. This would help explain why people relapse long after their physical compulsions are gone: They feel confident in their abstinence, and let their guard down, only to find themselves in a hot state—and at a holiday party. It would also explain another cornerstone of recovery programs: Going to meetings. Spending time around other recovering addicts, listening to stories of temptation and struggle and relapse is a way to prevent a hot state from going cold.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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