Laura’s Psychology Blog

Over the 30 years plus that I’ve been teaching, I’ve seen a reflection of what’s happening in the elementary and secondary classrooms in California. There have been ups and downs. Among the “downs” were the cohorts of students who had no clue whatsoever about the differences between “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” and used them interchangeably. More recently, I have seen students incomprehensibly using “apostrophe s” in order to make plurals, as in “cat’s” instead of “cats.” I have no idea why anyone past the first grade would make such an error, but this is so common, it must have an origin somewhere in the collective experience of these young adults.

Some people might be tempted to blame writing errors on new technologies. A colleague in the English department attributed the “there–their–they’re” issue to our “auditory” culture in which young people do not read, but merely listen. That may have been true ten or fifteen years ago, but I see new technologies as boosting, not hindering, student reading and writing. One of my students indicated that he and his buddies “aced” their middle school vocabulary tests because many of the more obscure words had been used in the videogames they played. They all knew the word “flask,” and not because they were early alcoholics.

I also know my students are reading, not listening, because there are some simple words that they use correctly, but do not know how to pronounce. If they were only listening, these errors would not occur. The Internet, IM, blogs, and videogames all require intense reading and writing. We should be getting better, not worse.

So I was pleased to see that my local observations were confirmed by a paper by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis that showed that instant messaging represents “an expansive new linguistic renaissance.” Contrary to the fears of parents and teachers, IM messages were actually more formal than spoken language, and abbreviations such as LOL were used only 2.4 percent of the time. Their article is to appear in American Speech this Spring.

I think it’s safe to say that between Harry Potter and new technologies, we professors can look forward to working with an increasingly literate student population.

We all know that a combination of diet and exercise is important to good health and psychological well-being. If we only diet, we don’t get the cardiovascular and psychological benefits of exercise, and we run the risk of lowering our metabolic rate, making weight loss even harder. If we only exercise without watching our intake, the exercise is likely to make us hungry. We might not gain weight, but it’s unlikely we’ll lose any.

I’ve often felt a bit guilty about letting Jenny do most of the work for my weight loss and maintenance. I am a fairly sedentary person who spends quite a few hours in front of the computer. Other than walking around campus and pacing in the front of my classroom, the only exercise I get is my afternoon walks with Mr. F to our favorite coffee shop, the Nautical Bean. The round trip is about 2 miles. Ho hum. Better than nothing, but we walked it plenty of times without losing an ounce. We walk so regularly that some of our neighbors ask us for our “real names,” because they refer to us as “the Walkers.” Nonetheless, we walked the same amount when Mr. F was 100 lbs heavier and I was 80 lbs heavier, and none of that weight budged. We’re afraid that people who have seen us lose weight over the past 2 years will think that all we’re doing is walking. Okay, if it gets them moving, that’s great, but they’ll be disappointed with the results if that’s all they do.

Some of my guilt was reduced by a recent article by Derek M. Huffman and his colleagues [1]. These researchers compared the health and longevity of mice that exercised and mice with caloric restriction. Although exercise does a lot of good, by itself, it does not extend lifespan, at least for mice. In contrast, restricting calories produced a unique set of benefits that did not occur in the mice that exercised without caloric restriction. The caloric restriction used in this study was mild–only 9% and 18% in different groups. That’s equivalent to 225-450 calories for a person eating 2500 calories per day, like passing up dessert. In many rodent caloric restriction studies, the animals eat only about 65% of their normal food, or 875 fewer calories for a person normally eating 2500 calories. That’s probably okay when you’re trying to lose weight (Jenny put me on 1200 calories and I lost about 2 lbs per week), but you can’t keep it up indefinitely without becoming anorexic.

These are mice and we are people, but Huffman et al. do remind us that “fit and fat” is better than just fat, but “fit and thin” is probably a better goal. And yes, it is my goal to get out on the stairmaster more often.

1. Huffman, D.M., Moellering, D.R., Grizzle, W.E., Stockard, C.R., Johnson, M.S., & Nagy, T.R. (2008). Effect of exercise and calorie restriction on biomarkers of aging in mice. American Journal of Physiology–Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 294.

Just got a nice email from Blogged.com telling me that their editors had reviewed my blog and given it an 8.2 “great” rating in their Health category.

I feel a little bit like a student again, as my site was “graded” using the following criteria:

1. Frequency of updates (oops…that’s tough on the quarter system)
2. Relevance of content
3. Site design
4. Writing style (it would be pretty sad if a PhD couldn’t write)

I got a nice little widget (check it out in the lower left sidebar–couldn’t wait to add that in) in case you want to check out their other ratings. When I checked the site, I’m ranked #190, which isn’t too bad considering that there are 10,580 sites….but being the student I am (and not too short of achievement motivation), I will strive to do better!

Thanks again to Amy and the Blogged.com staff!

Mother’s Day may be the most commercial of American holidays. Wikipedia says that Americans will spend $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.5 billion on “pampering gifts” and $68 million on greeting cards for the occasion. Americans are more likely to eat dinner at a restaurant on Mother’s Day than any other holiday.

That being said, the sentiment is rather nice, in my view. Families are important to our well-being, and having an excuse to get together, even if that means a phone call over thousands of miles, is meaningful.

We had our celebration yesterday, actually, as our routine is to eat thoughtfully six days per week and indulge on a Saturday lunch. And wow, did we indulge. Mr. F concocted a chocolate version of our family’s New York style cheesecake recipe, complete with a raspberry sauce, and it was outstanding. I’m not too sure what this did to my leptin/ghrelin levels, but whatever happened was worth it!

Forgive us, Jenny!

All of us have had the experience of knowing that we’re not hungry, that we’re in fact full, but going ahead and eating anyway. In my experience, this usually happens when I have the opportunity to eat something unusually yummy. I typically don’t overeat my broccoli or salad. So this is what lunch looked like chez Freberg last Saturday….

Alain Dagher and his colleagues might have an answer for this [1]. They remind us that eating is both homeostatic (maintaining a constant supply of nutrients) and hedonic, or pleasureable. Homeostasis is likely driven by hormonal effects on the hypothalamus, whereas the hedonic effects are due to the activity of reward areas.

One of the hormones involved with appetite is ghrelin, manufactured in the lining of the stomach and in the pancreas. Dagher and his colleagues gave volunteers an intravenous dose of ghrelin while they underwent functional MRI. When the participants looked at pictures of tasty food, like pizza, those who had received ghrelin showed increased responses in areas associated with the anticipation of a payoff. In other words, when ghrelin is present, we view food as more rewarding, and the resulting brain activity is similar to the activity of the brain in addiction.

How can we apply this new knowledge? Pharmaceutical companies are definitely looking at manipulating ghrelin to reduce appetite, but the side effects could be dreadful. If ghrelin has a more general effect on reward and incentive in addition to boosting appetite, blocking that general effect could lead to depression. In addition, we need to figure out why obese people already have low levels of ghrelin and people with anorexia have high levels of ghrelin [2].

1.  Malik, S., McGlone, F., Bedrossian, D., & Dagher, A. (2008). Ghrelin modulates brain activity in areas that control appetitive behavior. Cell Metabolism, 7(5), 400-409.

2. Dostálová, I., & Haluzík, M(2008). The role of ghrelin in the regulation of food intake in patients with obesity and anorexia nervosa. Physiological Research [epub ahead of print.]

On Monday, our Sensation Perception class followed up the jello study by investigating supertasters. There are a number of resources online that help you identify what kind of taster you are. So we did 5 different assessments to see if they would give us the same answers.

One of my favorites is a little questionnaire on the BBC. We also used the mint lifesaver test, because people are supposed to react the same way to peppermint as they are to the more scientific taste of PROP.

Probably the most dramatic thing we did was to put reinforcers on our tongues, swab some blue food coloring in the middle of the ring, and count papillae. I brought one mirror to class, but most of the class went down the hall to the restroom with their blue tongues sticking out. I guess we looked a bit odd.

We also looked at the overall structure of the tongue, using these images as models of the different taster types. Finally, I adapted a little questionnaire asking students to rate how much they liked broccoli, coffee, grapefruit juice, and other tastes that usually distinguish between taster types.

According to the BBC, about 25% of the population are non-tasters (that would be me), 25% are supertasters (Mr. F), and the remaining 50% fall somewhere in between. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men, and people from Asia, South America, and Africa are more likely to be supertasters than people from other parts of the world.

Personally, I think knowing one’s taste status can be rather useful in planning diets and just understanding the eating patterns of others. One feature that characterizes the supertaster is a “passion” for food, and I think Mr. F and our daughters definitely have that. Our latest project is to adapt our cheesecake recipe to include chocolate. We have lots around here. Mr. F bought 50 pounds of chocolate–definitely a supertaster! This is only one of the 5 10-lb bars he has in our pantry.

Last week, our Sensation/Perception class had lemon jello day. If this sounds insidious, I assure you it’s just a bunch of fun. Here’s the deal. We whip up a batch of lemon jello, but color it with red food coloring. Then you have participants taste the jello either blindfolded or not, and then identify the flavor. As you might imagine, the red color really throws off the flavor identification of the non-blindfolded P’s. The point we’re trying to demonstrate is how human vision can influence taste.

My preparation did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. Normally, I’m not a procrastinator, but I returned home last weekend from an out-of-town conference convinced that I had lemon jello in my cupboard. Alas, when I finally looked on Sunday night, all I had was orange. Undaunted, I though it might be cool to try to make the orange jello green. Note to self–do not mess around with jello experiment at last minute. The resulting jello was actually a very weird green-brown. Mr. F was kind enough to zoom down to our local market and return with lemon jello. Still, all did not go smoothly. I had also been convinced that I had plenty of red food coloring, but after dumping in everything I had, the jello was more orange than red. Nonetheless, it looked a whole lot better than the brown, and I didn’t want Mr. F to make a second trip to the store, so I decided to go with it.

I did have some explaining to do with Becky and Susan in the grad studies office the next morning, as I told them that I needed to store some “experimental jello” in their refrigerator during my first two classes….That just didn’t sound like a terrific idea to them.

When the hour finally arrived, our Sensation/Perception students ventured out to the patio by the Campus Store, armed with jello, clipboards, and blindfolds. It was a lovely day, so all of us appreciated leaving our windowless (there should be a law against these) classroom.

The students managed to talk 61 people into tasting our jello, including a few professors enjoying a mid-morning break. Aside from the obvious sensation/perception aspects of the study, I think the most remarkable finding is that 27 people were willing to be blindfolded and let a psychology student put something they hadn’t seen into their mouths. This level of trust is astonishing. I’m not sure I would do that.

Coding the data is also an interesting process. What do you do when somebody says, “mango” or “passion fruit?” Is there even such a thing as passion fruit jello? We broke into groups to decide on a coding scheme and crunch the numbers. Meany that I am, I made the students do their Chi Squares by hand instead of using SPSS. Actually, there isn’t a whole lot of math in Chi Squares anyway, so this was easy, cell-phone-capable calculation. Depending on the coding the students used, about half the groups found significant results, while the other did not. I coded mine “orange/red color names,” “yellow/green color names,” and “other,” and found a highly significant (p less than .001) Chi Square stat. But the discrepancy among the groups raised a lot of interesting questions about what they’re actually reading in the scientific literature.

In all, it was a fun exercise. And yes, Mr. F and I actually ate the brown jello for lunch…we like jello….but I probably could have used a blindfold.

Evolutionary psychologists tell us that it is in the best interests of human females to disguise their fertility over their menstrual cycles. Not only does this help prevent unwanted attention from unacceptable males, but it keeps the male partner “guessing” about her fertility status and more likely to stay close at times when she is less fertile. Nonetheless, it appears that women do exhibit subtle signals of fertility.

In the most recent entry into the “fertility” signal discussion, Nathan Pipitone and Gordon Gallup demonstrate that both males and females judge women’s voices as more attractive when they are near ovulation [1]. Okay, we’re not talking about whispering sweet nothings here, because Pipitone and Gallup recorded the women counting from one to ten. Woo hoo. Recordings were taken at four different times during a woman’s menstrual cycle, then played for male and female participants. Women on oral contraceptives, of course, did not show any variations in vocal attractiveness across their cycles.

The fact that men can pick up on a subtle indicator of female fertility is not too surprising, but why would women themselves perceive these differences? The authors suggest that women might do this in order to keep tabs on the competition.

Voice is not the only variable that contains fertility information. Martie Haselton and her colleagues demonstrated that women dress “more attractively” at fertile points in their cycle [2]. In arguably one of the oddest experiments of this type (and one where it would be interesting to sit in on the IRB ethics discussion), lap-dancers were found to make the most tips at the fertile phase of their cycles [3]. Once again, women using oral contraception showed no cyclic patterns in tips.

1. Pipitone, R.N., & Gallup, G.G., Jr. (in press). Women’s voice attractiveness varies across the menstrual cycle. Evolution and Human Behavior.

2.  Haselton, M. G., Mortezaie, M., Pillsworth, E. G., Bleske-Recheck, A. E., & Frederick, D. A. (2007). Ovulation and human female ornamentation: Near ovulation, women dress to impress. Hormones and Behavior, 51, 40-45.

3. Miller, G., Tybur, J.M, & Jordan, B.D. (2007). Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: Economic evidence for human estrus? Evolution and Human Behavior, 28(6), 375-381.

As the proud mom of three terrific daughters, and a third daughter myself, I am always a little dismayed by people who have strong preferences for children according to sex–they usually want boys. So it was with some trepidation that I read a new article by Fiona Mathews, Paul Johnson, and Andrew Neil in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled “You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans.”

According to these researchers, women with “high resources” at conception were more likely to have sons, compared to women who produced daughters. Although the overall ratio of the participants’ male and female offspring was 50:50, 56% of women in the highest third of nutrient intake at conception, according to their food diaries, gave birth to boys, compared to only 45% in the lowest third. In particular, moms who had sons seemed to eat a lot of breakfast cereal. To rule out the possibility that carrying a child of a certain sex influenced your eating patterns, the researchers noted that there were no systematic patterns of eating during pregnancy.

The researchers have added a new possible explanation for the recent drop in birth rates of boys. Many others have attributed the drop to possible pollution effects and other environmental causes. These new data suggest that the drop in nutrient consumption among young women in industrialized nations might also account for the observed changes. In case you’re wondering how the researchers can say that we have a drop in nutrients during an obesity epidemic, they argue that most of the weight gain is due to less activity and the “alteration in the distribution of energy intakes.”

It seems a bit premature to start buying up Cheerios or skipping breakfast in order to select the sex of your offspring. I have always been a breakfast eater. I just can’t imagine skipping breakfast, and I don’t recall ever having done so, except when I’ve had the flu. Another curiosity is that I’ve only recently started eating cereal, because it actually has fewer calories than my previous breakfasts. For most of my adult life, breakfast has meant eggs and toast or pancakes. One would think that those breakfasts would have even more nutrients than cereal.

In the meantime, it seems to me to be common sense to eat nutritious foods that you like, and let nature do her thing.

Thanks to a very alert student, I was turned on to a terrific video source with the very plain sounding name of “TED.” According to the About TED website, TED stands for “technology, entertainment, and Design.” The group started in 1984 and began offering conferences where speakers were challenged to bring these disciplines together in the “talk of their lives”–in only 18 minutes. As a professor who has been trained to talk in 50 minute intervals, I know how hard it is for these people to do this.

In case you can’t find the $6000 it costs to attend (conferences only accommodate 1000, and there are waiting lists), you can see videos on the site of some of the speakers. One of my favorites is illusion master Al Seckel, who gives a terrific talk on visual illusions. Seckel used to host one of my favorite visual illusion sites “Illusionworks,” but had to take it down, I believe, because it took up too much of Cal Tech’s server resources. Fortunately, a German site has retained much of Al’s original material. The explanations are terrific for students, and include references that can be used for more in-depth exploration. You might also enjoy Al’s many books and calendars featuring illusions. Al recommends eyetricks for additional illusions.

Other great videos (you can spend a lot of time on this site) include Jane Goodall and Daniel Goleman (on emotional intelligence).

Enjoy! And many thanks to the TED people for making this content available.