Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

Worth Psychology recently tweeted this link to a New York Magazine story, "5 of Humanity's Best Ideas of What Dreams Actually Are." Believe it or not, I learned a thing or two in the article:

The earliest recorded dream is from the Sumerian king Dumuzi of Uruk, who ruled just before Gilgamesh, sometime around 2500 BC. “An eagle seizes a lamb from the sheepfold,” a translation reads. “A falcon catches a sparrow on the reed fence … The cup lies on its side; Dumuzi lives no more. The sheepfold is given to the winds.” The king was freaked out about his dream, and occasioned the first recorded dream interpretation, care of his sister, who was evidently a professional at these things. Sister’s advice: Some bad shit is about to go down, so you’d do well to hide.

The article then goes through the 5 theories, offering some background and explanation for each. Unfortunately, they give a lot of attention to the Freudian/psychoanalytic perspective, that dreams are your brain trying to tell you something.

• Dreams are pragmatic prophecies - This is not to say dreams are actual prophecies, but rather, that because we know our situation well and because human survival comes from our ability to think about and prepare for the future, we could have dreams about things that we expect to happen. Dreams in this theory are about preparation, so that we are ready to deal with situations in our wakeful life.
• Dreams tell you what to do - Unfortunately, for this item on the list, they really just followed along with the previous item, even delving into actual prophetic elements (such as mentioning that Lincoln dreamed of a White House funeral days before his assassination). However, one story they share, about Descartes, gets at a different aspect of dreams - that of consolidating and synthesizing information, and using that to solve problems:

"In the 17th century, René Descartes, the great doubter, had his life course shifted by a series of dreams he had one November evening. In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, historian-psychiatrist George Makari reports that Descartes had a series of sleeping visions that prompted him to realize that 'spatial problems could become algebraic, which crystallized a vision of a natural world underwritten by mathematical laws,' thereby changing his life and eventually the popular, scientific conception of reality."

This realization was likely not a sudden insight, but an issue Descartes had spent a great deal of time thinking about. Because of the memory consolidation aspect of sleep, combined with dreaming about something that had been on his mind, Descartes was able to solve his mental puzzle.

• Dreams are communications from the unconscious mind - The good old "Your dreams are trying to tell you something" hypothesis. I've blogged before about my thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and why social psychological findings are a much better explanation for some of the things Freud and his ilk observed. And of course, I would argue that this "theory" differs very little from the first and second items on this list. (I would also argue that none of these first three items meet the definition of theory, hence the quote marks.)
• Dreams are data - This one is not actually a theory at all, but rather a thinly veiled reason to share the Sleep and Dream Database, a crowdsourcing site that has catalogued 20,000 dreams (which, to be fair, is a cool idea, and a site I'll be visiting myself). Using these data, researchers have been able to examine psychological themes, and the results suggest that, because we are rarely alone in dreams and we tend to dream about people we are close to, we use dreams to explore the quality of our relationships with others. Honestly, that would have been a better bullet point for this list.
• Dreams are your memories in action - And finally, the author mentions the memory consolidation and learning aspects of dreams. Of all these "theories," this is the only one for which they offer research support over anecdotes. The author hints at the neural network aspect of memory, and also shares findings from a study on learning that allowed some participants to nap afterward, resulting in enhanced learning. (In fact, many such studies have been performed.) But they also discuss a study on male zebra finches that also provides support for this theory. Birds aren't born knowing how to sing certain patterns, but instead learn them. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that male zebra finches showed the same patterns of neuron firing while sleeping as they were when they were singing, suggesting they may be practicing the songs in their dreams.

Personally, I ascribe to the last (and really only) theory on the list. But that's not to say that aspects of the other items on the list can't be true. In fact, as is the case with the Descartes anecdote, they can be easily combined with this theory. The human brain is an incredibly complex machine. Even with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have not even begun to truly imitate the human brain's incredible pattern recognition ability or attention to context. This is arguably an evolved trait, because the best way to learn (something humans excel at compared to most other species) is to connect it to something already learned. This strengthens neural connections, and not only enhances our ability to learn the new thing, it changes our understanding of what we've learned previously. This can, of course, have some pesky effects when it comes to memory of events. But all in all, this ability is a good thing.

While we're awake, we think through things and examine patterns, but we also have to devote a lot of energy to being awake and interacting with the world, making decisions that takes up space in our limited working memory. Sleep is a time of rejuvenation, when our body replenishes, heals, and repairs. Our cognitive resources are free to work through problems, and our brain is consolidating memories, getting us closer to a synthesized solution. And because our problems range from intellectual (like Descartes's) to social and psychological, the content of our dreams can also range from thought problems to interpersonal issues.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured

When people find out I'm a psychologist, there are a few very predictable reactions, as predictable as the response I get when I tell people I'm originally from Kansas:

I'm of course asked if I'm analyzing them right now. I have many go-to responses for that one:

"I'm a social psychologist. I don't help people."

"I do research, so actually I'm analyzing your behavior."

"You think any self-respecting psychoanalyst would do that for free?"

But the next most common question is about dreams. I've had many people ask me if I can help them figure out the meaning of a strange dream they had. Even people who have known me for years sometimes ask me about dreams.

Dreams are pretty fascinating. It's like your own TV channel, except the shows all involve you walking around with no pants. (Or in my case, shoes - I definitely have the naked dream but probably more common is realizing I went all the way to work/school/somewhere random with no shoes.) There are certain dreams we all have. The naked dream is one example. But another common one was a recent subject of an article for the Washington Post:

We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments.

The author, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, did some digging to find out what psychologists had to say about the dream. I give her credit that the first place she looked was at the peer-reviewed literature. She was dismayed when she found nothing and expressed surprise that no psychologists had studied such a common dream. I'll be honest, I sat down and tried to figure out how I would study such a dream, and unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of objective ways to study any dream. You'd need to find people right after (or right before) they had the dream and try to measure various aspects of their lives to find any connections or explanations. But the problem with recruiting people right before is that 1) you don't know when or even if they'll have the dream and 2) you risk influencing their dreams by the simple act of studying them, perhaps causing people to have the school dream. In fact, just writing down your dreams have been shown to influence how you dream - I'm told that's the best way to get into lucid dreaming, where you are able to control the direction of a dream during the actual dream.

So with no peer reviewed literature to guide her, she asked various psychologists to offer their thoughts on the dream. Though many of the explanations crossed into the realm of psychoanalysis (see this blog post to find out what I really think about Freud and his ilk, a post that was also about dreams in which I briefly referenced the "going back to school" dream), there did seem to be a thread linking these explanations together that probably gets at the truth:

"I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students," says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. "These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve."

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, "is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer's task in 'awake life' is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure."

But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?

"Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked," Willis wrote in an email. "Since each new stress in the current day is 'new,' there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar 'achievement' stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the 'go-to' memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the 'now.'"

So the dream is really about fear of not measuring up, or of being measured and found wanting. We're concerned about failure. Though in the article, the psychoanalyst goes on to talk about manifest/latent content and how your brain is trying to shield yourself from the real truth, the neurologist's explanation is probably more accurate and certainly more supported. It's kind of the "neural-connectedness" theory of dreams. Information stored in your brain is connected through a neural network. Some connections - such the connection between dog and leash - are stronger than others - such as the connection between dog and duck-billed platypus.

The internet, however, laughs in the face of your strong-weak connection dichotomy and says, "You want to see a dog dressed as a duck-billed platypus? Boom!"

When you sleep, your brain is consolidating memories, and building up the neural network. So if a stressful time in your current life reminds you of a stressful time in school, your resting brain will forge or strengthen that connection. I think, and I think Dr. Willis would agree, that dreams are just your brain making and testing connections, causing you to see elements of these memories and bits of information while you sleep. We see common themes and threads not because your subconscious brain is sending you coded messages, but because that's how neural connectedness works.

If you have had this dream, unfortunately you're probably going to continue having this dream, especially in times of stress. Dreams can be disconcerting but they're really just your brain testing out the wiring - and that's a good thing.

L is for Kurt Lewin

Wilhelm Wundt may have been the first to use the term "social psychology" and Floyd Allport may have been the first to identify it as the study of groups, but Kurt Lewin is widely recognized as the father of modern social psychology. His ideas continue to influence the field, and even other fields, and they manage to be both revolutionary and easy-to-understand. In short, Kurt Lewin is awesome.


And there is nothing so practical, when teaching about theory, as a great quote about the importance of theory.

Born in Prussia and educated in Germany, Lewin came to the United States in 1933 (where he changed the pronunciation of his name from Leh-veen to Lou-win), fleeing Jewish persecution. During his career, he worked at Cornell University, the University of Iowa, MIT, and Duke, and he founded the National Training Laboratories, at Bethel, Maine. Among his contributions are the concepts of "action research" (which he defined as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action"), applied research (that is, research that examines real-world issues, rather than theoretical research), "genidentity" (the multiple phases, or identities, of an object across time - a concept used in theories of space-time), and sensitivity training (an intervention to combat religious and racial prejudice).

But perhaps his strongest contribution has to do with what is known as the nature versus nurture debate. From its beginnings, psychology was the study of what makes a person the way they are, that is, understanding their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Some psychologists, such as the psychoanalysts, believed that the person was a product of his/her experiences - that is, to understand the current person, you had to know something about his/her past. Others, such as the behaviorists, believed people were shaped entirely by their experiences - specifically, reinforcements and punishments that shape behavior.

Then Lewin published his formula:

B = f(P, E)

Specifically, behavior is a function of person and environment, or person in the environment. This simple formula speaks volumes about human behavior. First of all, it slices through the nature-nurture debate by establishing the person-environment interaction, essentially saying "it's a bit of nature and a bit of nurture." But most importantly, it was revolutionary in its assertion that human behavior could be determined entirely by the situation. The situation exerts a powerful influence on us, sometimes even making us behave in ways that are completely contrary from how we usually behave. Taken to its extreme, some psychologists completely deny the existence of personality, instead highlighting that we behave in very unique ways depending on the situation and the specific social role we play in that situation.

Lewin's equation also sets the stage for a concept called multifinality - that is, how people in similar situations could arrive at different outcomes. This is because of the interaction with person; because of this interaction, no environment is the same for any two people. Reality is determined by the person perceiving it, a concept known as psychological reality.

He extended this work when he developed the force-field model, in which the person is at the center of the life space, with forces (often social) exerting influence on the person as either helping forces or hindering forces.

Lewin's ideas continue to influence the field, and his focus on the importance of applied psychological research definitely shaped my education. I usually tell people my PhD is in social psychology; this isn't a lie, but technically, my degree is in applied social psychology. In addition to learning about theory, methods, and statistics, we took courses in applied topics (such as the law, politics, and so on) and were encouraged to seek out internships and research opportunities that tackled real-world issues. I would like to think the existence of such a program is an extension of Lewin's legacy.

Freud and Dogs

My husband shared this story with me last night, which he read in his Dog-A-Day calendar:

Sigmund Freud had an awareness of the role dogs could play in therapy long before the words “therapy dog” were coined. The celebrated psychiatrist often allowed his Chow to sit in on sessions with his patients. If the dog kept his distance from a patient, the doctor knew that patient was tense or troubled. Freud also realized that petting his dog had a therapeutic effect on many patients.

He said, "So Freud wasn't all bad." To which I replied, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

The thing I will give Freud is that he was good at observing, which is part of the scientific method, but not all of it. The "research" Freud contributed to the field of psychology was not really scientific - more like anecdotes. Some have followed up on his observations using scientific methods, allowing some of his conclusions to be confirmed, and others refuted. The problem I have with Freud is that his contributions gave people a skewed view about psychology, and what psychologists do - even research psychologists, like myself. I suppose that's not really his fault, rather the fault of people who encountered Freud's work.

It would be interesting to find out if others also noticed the calming effect of dogs, and see where research into therapy dogs as we know them today began. There are certainly days at work that I'd love to have a dog in my office.

Edit: Thanks to my friend, David, at The Daily Parker, here's a little history of animal-human bond research, including a funny story from 1908 about Colonel Deems and his dog Riley, as well as a summary of research on the positive effects of animals on our well-being.

Therapeutically yours,
~Sara

 

Inspiration, Dreams, and Why Social Psychology is Awesome

After finishing up my time on a non-profit board, my plan was to fill that extra time with things I enjoyed - including writing. Unfortunately, as is often the case with "extra" time, it quickly gets filled with tasks. So I resolve, once again, to try to spend more time writing, including writing on this blog.

Many writers have clashed on the issue of inspiration - whether one should write only when "inspired" to do so, or whether one should write regularly as a practice, whether you feel like doing so or not. Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors, had a lot of advice for aspiring writers, much of which involved writing often, regardless of "inspiration." Isaac Asimov also wrote every day, and was very prolific as a result.

I know I should apply this logic to myself and basically make myself write regularly. But as I was pondering this issue of inspiration, I started thinking about when and where I get some of my best ideas. For me - and this is especially true of fiction ideas - I tend to be most creative at night, especially after I've woken up from a strange and inspiring dream. I'd say dreams are the source of some of my best ideas. (P.S., I've blogged before about head songs that I think come from dreams, in part.)

I started doing a little research into this and found a whole literature on dreams and creativity. For instance, dreams inspired Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Because of sleep's role in memory consolidation, it makes sense that sleep can have a positive impact on certain aspects of creativity, such as insight.

REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this kind of linking (neural networking) naturally, and it's a great way to learn new things - by connecting new knowledge you need to memorize to something you already know. Just as you can connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, you can connect any concept in your brain to another. Some connections are more direct than others.

Apparently one thing your brain does during REM sleep is play six degrees of "showing up to work without your pants." Or some such.

Of course, Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists would state that these strange juxtapositions are simply your subconscious trying to work out any conflicts you're having in your life. In fact, pretty much everything goes back to this idea of the subconscious, at least for psychoanalysts.

According to these theories, within your mind are three forces vying for control: the id, which operates on the pleasure principle (i.e., that feels good, keep doing it; that feels bad, stop doing it); the superego, which operates on morality (i.e., that feels good, stop doing it; that feels bad, keep doing it); and the ego, the conscious self who is just trying to pick the right feel goods to keep doing or stop doing and the right feel bads to keep doing or stop doing.

In case you would prefer a visual representation of the id, ego, and superego (respectively); Homer's id is clearly winning

When you dream, according to these theories, there are two types of content: manifest content, which is the literal subject of the dream (e.g., showing up to work without your pants), and latent content, which is the underlying meaning of the dream (e.g., you have issues with your mother, or maybe you like exhibitionism - I don't know, I'm a social psychologist!).

Of course, the interesting thing about all this theory is that social psychologists have come up with a variety of hypotheses and theories that explain many aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Putting some kind of idea in your head below your awareness that influences behavior? Priming. Attitudes that you swear you do not hold but that guide decisions, such as whether to trust someone of a certain group? Implicit attitudes. And of course, underlying meaning in your life and nonconscious sources of influence based on past experiences, temperament, and so on? Self and identity.

See also media effects, mob mentality, and ingroup/outgroup effects, just to name a few forces that influence you without you even realizing it. (Note: social psychologists prefer the term 'nonconscious,' rather than the psychoanalyst-laden term 'subconscious.')

Why do we need these little snippets of theory and hypothesis if Freud's and other psychoanalysts' theories can sum much of this up, in a neat, Oedipus-complex-themed package? After all, parsimony is an important aspect of science - the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, in the absence of evidence to support one over the other.

But that's the thing - the various social psychological theories outlined above have just that: evidence. Specifically empirical evidence, which is pretty important for science, something I've also blogged about before. In fact, psychoanalytic theories lack the basic ingredients that make them at all scientific: the ability to test these concepts (we call this 'testability') and, if they are false, demonstrate that (we call this 'falsifiability'). If there really are subconscious forces operating in your brain, trying to give you glimpses of what's really bothering you (latent content) but hiding behind symbolism (manifest content), how would we even begin to test this? After all, they're subconscious. But for social psychological theories, such as priming, we may know what evidence we would observe if priming happened and what we would observe if it isn't happening.

One of the key differences is whether the hypothesis/theory is nomothetic (describes a general pattern) or idiographic (describes a specific pattern, usually within a particular person). There are ways to test idiographic hypotheses, but it is more difficult than if you can generate a hypothesis that should apply to a group of people receiving the same intervention. You would just test to see if the group of people responded the way you expected.

These various social psychological theories lack a couple of things - 1) there isn't a unified theory that sums all this up in a neat little package and 2) other than the various findings outlined above in regard to sleep/dreams, there isn't really a good hypothesis/theory for the purpose of dreams. What you read above is descriptive with regard to sleep and dreams, but not predictive; that is, we haven't identified some key cause that would allow us to understand why we dream what we do and perhaps predict what people will dream, based on knowledge of the important variables. We don't even know what those variables are.

As I mentioned in my previous post linked above, scientific findings are tentative, pending better evidence and methodology. We may not completely understand dreams now, but perhaps will be able to in the future, as we expand on technology for studying the living, working brain.

For the time being, though, I'll be happy to take whatever inspiration my dreaming brain sends my way. But please, no more going back to high school dreams.

Dreamily yours,
~Sara

In the Quiet Calm of the Mind

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm painfully self-aware - either from my background in theatre, or my current career in psychology & research, who knows? - and tend to think about and analyze my thoughts, actions, and feelings. This could be a blessing or a curse, and which of the two often depends on what I do with the information.

But occasionally, I stumble across something that makes me think, "Hmm, that's an interesting psychological phenomenon. How can I study that?" I don't always come up with a good study idea right away, but it's something I tuck into my back pocket for later.

Recently, I was nearly in a car accident. There was probably nothing special about this near-miss, but something very interesting hit me - figuratively, of course. I was driving to pick something up at the store, going east, and a car coming from the west hung a left in front of me without looking. I slammed on my breaks, thinking, "Gotta stop, gotta stop." I hit a patch of ice and began to skid. In that moment, I felt a sudden sense of peace, as I very calmly thought, "I'm going to hit him. There's nothing I can do about it. My passenger front will hit his passenger back. This is going to happen."

It wasn't freaking out, it wasn't, "Oh God, my cheap, old car is going to be totaled." Or "I hope this guy has insurance." It was a peaceful acceptance that, "This is going to happen."

I wonder if that happens in other situations. After you've fought like hell to stop whatever from happening, when you realize that your actions are probably not going to make a difference, you quietly accept that "This is how it is." I realized after that this feeling happened to me in another car accident, when a man in front of me braked suddenly and I rear-ended him. I think that's one reason the thud of a car accident sounds so deafening - because it follows that quiet calm. Thankfully, there was no damage to either car - it was a pretty slow rear-ending - and we both thanked the Lord we were okay and went about our business. He even gave me a hug. Nice guy.

Sorry, getting off the subject. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the accident didn't happen. The other car began to slow down - which is bad, because it means he would have stopped right in front of me - but thankfully, sped up and got through the intersection. We missed by mere inches. Perhaps it's because this was a near-miss that I noticed this sensation. If we had collided, the calm would have been followed by, "Thud" and "Well, better call the cops".

It was of course, after the accident didn't happen that my heart began to pound, as I thought, "Crap, that was really close!" That's when the freak-out occurred. But it was short-lived, given nothing really happened.

So what is driving this sensation? (Man, I am full of unintentional puns this evening.) Is it the "death instinct" Freud insists we all have, that at some point, when faced with our unavoidable demise or something like it, we accept or perhaps even welcome it? Is it an evolutionary holdover from our hunter-gatherer days where struggling with the predator/whatever was more likely to get us killed? What could it be?

Pensively yours,
~Sara

And Now for Something Completely Different: The Psychology of Parody

I was a little late onto the Adele bandwagon. She had already released her album 19 and “Rolling in the Deep” was already a single when I finally gave her a shot - okay, I’ll be honest, it took a few listens to 21 before I decided to buy, and I still have some serious qualms about her singing technique; I mean, at only 23 years old, she’s already shredded her voice to the point that she needed surgery to save it. But then, I can’t help but sing along - loudly - anytime her music comes on the radio, and I definitely enjoyed the video for “Rolling in the Deep”, which - though it had some symbols I didn’t completely understand - was much more sensical than other videos I watched around that time.

So you might be surprised to hear that when Key of Awesome, a group who creates parody versions of music videos, made a parody of “Rolling in the Deep”, I loved it. In fact, I enjoy most of Key of Awesome’s videos, even (and perhaps especially) when they make fun of a song I enjoy.

This seems counterintuitive. Why would I enjoy seeing music I love being made fun of? But it’s something I’ve long been aware of about myself and others, and have wondered about occasionally. Today, I finally sat down and began to explore what it is about parody we find so funny.

You may not be surprised to know that humor is very important to human beings. Being able to see the humor in situations has mood-enhancing effects (Strick, Holland, van Baaren, & van Knippenberg, 2009) and is beneficial to our long-term well-being: Martin and colleagues (see Martin’s book for more information on this research) created a questionnaire to assess individuals’ humor styles: Self-Enhancing (being able to comfort oneself with humor), Affiliative (using humor to build relationships with others), Aggressive (sarcasm or teasing others), and Self-Defeating (using humor at one’s own expense); these styles are related to many measures of psychological well-being, such as satisfaction with life, self-esteem, optimism, and mood. Having high scores for Self-Enhancing and/or Affiliative humor is associated with greater well-being, and having high scores for Aggressive and/or Self-Defeating humor is associated with lower well-being.

Further, Galloway (2010) examined humor styles scores and found that there are four distinct groups: people high on all four styles of humor, people low on all four styles of humor, people high on self-enhancing and affiliative humor and low on aggressive and self-defeating humor, and people high on aggressive and self-defeating humor and low on self-enhancing and affiliative humor. Other researchers have attempted to take the field a step farther, examining what it is about certain situations or stimuli that make them funny. And it seems what it comes down to is setting things up so that perceivers expect a certain outcome… and then giving them something completely different. Strick and colleagues (2009) explain:

“A typical joke contains a set up that causes perceivers to make a prediction about the likely outcome. The punch line violates these expectations, and perceivers look for a cognitive rule that makes the punch line follow from the set up. When this cognitive rule is found, the incongruity is resolved and the joke is perceived as funny.” (p. 575).

In fact, research has shown that when we are unable to make sense of a joke - find a cognitive rule that “makes the punch line follow from the set up” - we find the joke to be less humorous. Which can be seen in practice by anyone who ever told a joke, only to be greeted by silence followed by “I don’t get it”.

Sigmund Freud called this incongruity experiencing the “uncanny” - encountering the unfamiliar in familiar situations. Absurdism is considered to be one form of uncanny-inducing stimuli. Freud argued that uncanniness was a thrilling state of arousal, though others have argued that it can be quite unpleasant - regardless of whether this state of arousal is enjoyable or not, we deal with it as we deal with most states of arousal: engaging in behaviors to make the state of arousal go away or end.

One way we can end or get rid of uncanniness is by perceiving the stimuli to be a joke and responding to it as we do to jokes (e.g., laughter if we find it funny, eye rolls if it’s not funny, etc.). If we don’t realize something is a joke (i.e., we don’t get it), we have to find other ways of dealing with uncanniness, such as by reaffirming our worldview (in fact, reaffirming our worldview is a common way we deal with unpleasant states of arousal - see Terror Management Theory as another example).

Proulx, Heine, and Voh (2010) performed a study on uncanniness with absurdist art, including Monty Python (seriously, sign me up for the line of research using Monty Python as the stimulus). In study 2 of their article, 2 groups of participants read a summary of Monty Python’s Biggles: Pioneer Air Fighter, which was presented as either a joke or an adventure story; a 3rd group read a standard joke. Afterward, they read an unrelated court case and set bail; this was their opportunity to affirm their worldview. Participants set significantly higher bail in the “adventure story” condition than the other two conditions. The authors also found that among participants reading Biggles presented as an adventure story, those who found the story funnier (that is, figured out it was a joke even though it wasn’t presented as such) set lower bond; this effect was not observed in the other two groups. The effect was also not explained by mood, so even though reading something humorous makes people happy (if they get it), it’s not their happiness that explains the bail amount selected.

But the secret to understanding why some people appreciate parody while others do not probably lies in the part of the body that deals with arousal on a fairly regular basis.

Of course. Why? What did you think I was going to say?

Neuroscientists have explored what regions of the brain are activated when we encounter humor. In research on adults, they’ve found that humor results in activation in the part of the brain where the temporal (side), occipital (back), and parietal (top) lobes meet, known as the TOP junction. This part of the brain is used to resolve incongruencies - such as instances where unfamiliar elements are juxtaposed with the familiar (doesn’t this definition bear an uncanny resemblance to, well, the definition of uncanniness?). They also see activation in the mesolimbic system, responsible for processing of rewards (see previous blog post on reward pathways and addiction). That’s right - humor is rewarding, too.

So laugh it up, fuzzball.

~Thoughtfully yours,
Sara

For more laughs, also see Bad Lip Reading and Nice Peter.

Galloway, G. (2010). Individual differences in personal humor styles: Identification of prominent patterns and their associates. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 563-567.
Proulx, T., Heine, S.J., & Vohs, K.D. (2010). When is the unfamiliar the uncanny? Meaning affirmation after exposure to absurdist literature, humor, and art. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 817-829.
Strick, M., Holland, R.W., van Baaren, R.B., & van Knippenberg, A. (2009). Finding comfort in a joke: Consolatory effects of humor through cognitive distraction. Emotion, 9, 574-578.

The Need to Personalize: Why Consumer Data is More Important Now than Ever Before

As a long-time researcher, my answer to many questions is, "What do the data say?" I consider myself to be a very empirical person, so having data to support views or my approach to life is very important to me. Even in parts of my life where no data are available, I continue asking questions. And, like most people, I constantly observe other people and draw inferences from their behavior. So when I read about some of the cutting edge work the Obama campaign is doing with supporter data, I wondered, "Why aren't more politicians doing this?" and more importantly, "Why aren't more people doing this?"

I'll be the first to say that too much personalization is not necessarily a good thing. For one, I'm really not a fan of design-your-own-major programs and would be happy to go into the "whys" of that sometime. But when it comes to marketing or informing people about causes they can join, personalization is an excellent idea. In fact, it's the logical continuation of what market researchers have been doing for years.

When a company creates a new product, designs a new ad campaign, etc., they want to get consumer perspectives. They do this through things like focus groups, where a group of similar people are brought in to try out a new product or view a new ad and discuss their thoughts as a group (I also frequently use focus groups in my research - you can get a lot of really useful information and they're fun to do!), and survey research, where people may (as an example) hear a new product slogan and rate it on a scale.

Market researchers also often collect demographic information from their participants, things like age, gender, race & ethnicity, and education, to see how these factors relate to responses to the product. This gives some basic information on who is likely to buy your product, and what approaches those groups respond to. A company who wants to appeal to many demographic groups may develop more than one ad campaign and put certain ads in places likely to be seen by certain groups. If you want to see some basic personalized marketing in action, grab a couple of magazines, say a fashion magazine and a sports magazine. Take a look at the ads in each - the ads in the fashion magazine may be for different products than the ads in the sports magazine. Not only that, you may notice that even ads for a product found in both of the magazines are different in terms of color scheme, layout, and writeup. You'll probably even notice different people featured in the ads.

The same is true for advertising during certain shows. Market researchers know what kinds of things their target demographic likes to watch on television and will buy ad space during that time.

Of course, I call this "basic" because it's not really personalized to one specific person; it's aimed at a specific group who have some feature or features in common. But advances in technology have made it even easier to gather information about a specific person, and in some cases, deliver that personalized advertising directly to that one individual. Google has been doing this for years. Facebook is also doing more and more of this targeted marketing. Using data from people's search terms or status updates, specific ads are selected from a database and displayed to that person.

Why is this personalization such a good idea? People respond to (e.g., process) things that are personally relevant more quickly. Research shows that people, for instance, show stronger preferences for the letters in their own names, probably because these letters are more familiar and therefore more fluent (easier to process - discussed in a previous blog post). When we're feeling especially miserly with our cognitive resources and are operating on auto-pilot, such highly personalized information can still "get in" and be noticed and processed by the brain.

Personally relevant information also appeals to our sense-of-self, our identity (also discussed in a previous blog post). We view the world through the lens of our personal experiences and details; some people may be better at considering another person's viewpoint than others, but we can never be separate from the self, so our view of the world is always going to be self-centered (and I use that term in a descriptive, rather than judgmental, sense).

Even in theories developed in fields like psychology, we recognize that the perspective of the theorist receives a lot of weight (this is why following the scientific method to develop testable and falsifiable hypotheses and gather empirical data, is so important; it's also one reason why theories are developed by many studies on a subject, hopefully performed by more than one individual, and no single study is the end-all, be-all on the topic).

I remember reading a quote in college by a great psychologist about Freud, and after much searching, could not uncover the quote or the source, but the person (I want to say Gordon Allport, who met Freud briefly when he was 22 and became disillusioned with psychoanalysis as a result) essentially asked of Freud's theory, "What kind of little boy would want to be so possessive of his mother?" - that is, he suggested that Freud's theory, specifically its emphasis on the Oedipus complex, was more about Freud himself than normal human development.

These days, individuals are doing things with computers that were once only reserved for the nerdiest of super-nerds sitting in front of a computer the size of a small house.

And if we leave it running all night, we could have our checkbook balanced by tomorrow morning! Who has the punch cards?

The people who are embracing today's technology to personalize content are the ones who will be sticking around as the market becomes more and more saturated. That's why I would argue that this kind of personalization is so important - there are almost 6.8 billion people on this planet, nearly all of whom will make their livelihood off of selling something (whether that something is concrete, like a product, or abstract, like a skill). As the population continues to grow, getting even a minuscule percentage of that total to see what you have to offer and show an interest in buying it, is going to take some serious data-crunching ability.

If you sell a product, any kind of product, you should be collecting data on your customers and using their information to make important decisions. And if you've got any kind of computational and statistical know-how, work those skills, because you are going to be sorely needed as the market continues moving in this direction.

True, some people are just born to sell things - they can convince you that you need this product, that your very life depends on having this thing. We can't all be Steve Jobs, walking into a room and presenting the product with such flair and resonance that we all suddenly wonder how our life was ever complete before iPod. (Years from now, when people look at the products Jobs was responsible for and think, "Oh, a personal music player, how quaint", they're still going to be watching and dissecting his presentations to find that magic formula.  If only it were that easy.)

And perhaps part of Jobs's genius was that he could do some of this data-crunching in his head, examining how people are responding to his presentation in real-time and making subtle shifts to bring the message home and get people on board. Few people possess that ability.  But for the rest of us, we can perhaps get by with a little help from our data.