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Issue 196 (08.09.11):
1. At what age do girls prefer pink? 2. Children with autism demonstrate superior change detection skills 3. Animal-sensitive cells discovered in the human brain 4. Prolific gossipers are disliked and seen as weak 5. Investigating the personality of companies 6. The woman misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's

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At what age do girls prefer pink?
Crudely speaking, the psychological field of gender development is split between those who see gender differences as learned via socially constructed ideas about gender, and those who believe many gender differences are actually sex differences, innate and biologically driven. In Western cultures, girls consistently prefer pink, boys prefer blue. Which academic camp lays claim to this difference? Past research has made a case, in terms of the evolutionary advantage of finding fruit, for why females might be biologically predisposed to prefer pink and other bright colours. But a new study purports to show that girls only acquire their preference for pink, and boys their aversion to it, at around the age of two to three, just as theyre beginning to talk about and become aware of gender. Vannessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache say their finding undermines the notion of innate sex differences in colour preference. If females have a biological predisposition to favour colours such as pink, this preference should be evident regardless of experience of the acquisition of gender concepts, they said. LoBue and DeLoache presented 192 boys and girls aged between seven months and five years with pairs of small objects (e.g. coasters and plastic clips) and invited them to reach for one. Each item in a pair was identical to the other except for its colour: one was always pink, the other either green, blue, yellow or orange. The key test was whether boys and girls would show a preference for choosing pink objects and at what age such a bias might arise. At the age of two, but not before, girls chose pink objects more often than boys did, and by age two and a half they demonstrated a clear preference for pink, picking the pink-coloured object more often than youd expect based on random choice. By the age of four, this was just under 80 per cent of the time however there was evidence of this bias falling away at age five. Boys showed the opposite pattern to girls. At the ages of two, four and five, they chose pink less often than youd expect based on random choices. In fact, their selection of the pink object became progressively more rare, reaching about 20 per cent at age five. Analysis from one trial to the next showed this wasn't simply due to boys growing bored of the pink choice - they avoided pink items from the beginning of their participation. A second experiment zoomed in on the age period of two to three years, to see how colour preferences changed during this crucial year. The same procedure as before was repeated with 64 boys and girls in this age group. Among the children aged under two and a half, both boys and girls chose pink objects around 50 per cent of the time, just as youd expect if they were choosing randomly and had no real colour preference. Among those aged between two and a half to three years, by contrast, the boys showed a bias against choosing pink and the girls showed a bias in favour of pink. This research lends important information to when children develop gender-stereotyped colour preferences the researchers said. Knowing exactly when children begin to demonstrate these tendencies can help lead to fuller understanding of the development of gender-stereotyped behaviour more generally and can be an important marker for future research in this domain. _________________________________ LoBue, V., and DeLoache, J. (2011). Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29 (3), 656-667 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044835X.2011.02027.x

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Children with autism demonstrate superior change detection skills
Developmental disorders are usually thought about in terms of their impairments. But a welcome trend in recent years is to document their advantages too. I'm not talking about dramatic savant skills like calendar calculating, but rather advantageous manifestations of basic cognitive differences. For example, investigators have shown that children with Tourette's syndrome - a condition involving involuntary tics - have superior cognitive control and timing, compared with children without Tourette's. Now Sue Fletcher-Watson and her team have added to this literature with a new study showing that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are quicker than neurotypical children and adults at detecting subtle changes to a visual scene. The task required that children with ASD and neurotypical children (aged 11 to 16; most were male), and non-ASD adults, look at pictures of non-social scenes (e.g. a furnished room) on a computer. Each scene appeared for just under half a second, the screen would go blank, then the scene would reappear with one subtle change. The changes could be located centrally in the scene or in the periphery, and they could be a change in colour of an object, a change in an object's presence or absence, or location. The participants' task was to spot the change as quickly as possible and say what it was. The headline result is that the 11 children with ASD were often significantly faster at detecting scene changes than the 29 neurotypical kids and the 20 adults. Specifically, they were faster than the neurotypical children at spotting central location changes and peripheral colour and location changes. They beat the adults at colour changes in the periphery. The difference in speed was often dramatic - for example, for a colour change in the periphery, the average response time of the ASD group was just over 5 seconds. For the typically developing children, it was just over 8 seconds, and for the non-ASD adults it was just over 7 seconds. The researchers said theirs was the first study to show "somewhat enhanced" performance in change detection among children with ASD, "providing further welcome evidence of strengths in this population". The cautious tone is due to a major caveat in the results. As well as being quicker at change detection, the ASD children were also less accurate being more likely to describe a change that hadn't actually happened. This points to a simple speed-accuracy trade-off as explaining the group differences in performance. But the researchers don't think this is the case. Supporting their claim, they demonstrated that the ASD kids were faster whether all responses were analysed or only accurate responses were analysed. However, they conceded that more research was needed to clarify this issue. Intriguingly, studies with adults with ASD have actually found that they are relatively impaired at detecting changes in complex scenes, compared with neurotypical participants. Fletcher-Watson and her colleagues wonder if this is because they've learned through education and therapeutic interventions to focus more on social information in scenes at the expense of their instinct for focusing on local details. "Since the attentional system can only give enhanced processing to about five items in a scene at once, a focus on social information would have the effect of removing attention from other, non-social features," the researchers said. _________________________________ Fletcher-Watson, S., Leekam, S., Connolly, B., Collis, J., Findlay, J., McConachie, H., and Rodgers, J. (2011). Attenuation of change blindness in children with autism spectrum disorders. British Journal of Developmental Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02054.x

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Animal-sensitive cells discovered in the human brain
A part of the human brain that's involved in emotion gets particularly excited at the sight of animals, a new study has shown. The brain structure in question is the amygdala: that almond-shaped, sub-cortical bundle of nuclei that used to be considered the brain's fear centre, but which is now known to be involved in many aspects of emotional learning. Florian Mormann and his colleagues didn't use a brain scanner for their main study. Instead they inserted electrodes directly into the brains of 41 patients with epilepsy, who were undergoing neurosurgery as part of their treatment. This allowed the researchers to present the patients with different pictures and to record the resulting activity of nearly 1,500 individual brain cells, located in the amygdala, hippocampus, and entorhinal cortex (all regions are found in the medial temporal lobe; the latter two are involved in memory). The dramatic result was that cells in the right-sided amygdala, but not the other regions, were far more likely to respond to pictures of animals, and to be aroused more powerfully by them, as compared with pictures of people (mostly celebrities), landmarks and objects (e.g. food and tools). By contrast, hippocampus cells responded similarly to the different picture categories, whilst the entorhinal cortex cells showed a reduced likelihood of response to pictures of people. Cells in the right-sided amygdala weren't only more likely to respond to the sight of animals than other pictures, and to do so more powerfully, they also did so extra fast, with a mean latency of 324ms. This wasn't true for the other brain regions. Although this suggests the sight of animals is processed with extra efficiency by the amygdala, the latency is not so short as to suggest bypassing of the cortex (the crumpled, outer layer of the brain associated with conscious processing). Because the amygdala is involved in fear learning, among other functions, it's tempting to interpret these findings alongside fossil evidence showing that early hominids were preyed on by carnivores, and alongside findings relating to "prepared learning" - this is our innate or early predisposition to have our attention grabbed by threats, such as snakes, faced by our ancestors rather than by contemporary threats like guns. Other research shows that animals are more likely to be detected, than vehicles or even buildings, in change blindness tasks, in which an object or animal appears in a scene that remains otherwise unchanged. However, Mormann's team noted that there was no relation between the likelihood or speed of response of amygdala cells and the nature of the animal pictures as either threatening or harmless. The researchers said the differential response to animals by amygdala cells is "truly categorical" and "argues in favour of a domain-specific mechanism for processing this biologically important class of stimuli. "A plausible evolutionary explanation," they continued, "is that the phylogenetic importance of animals, which could represent either predators or prey, has resulted in neural adaptations for the dedicated processing of these biologically salient stimuli." _________________________________ F. Mormann, J. Dubois and 10 others (2011). A category-specific response to animals in the right human amygdala. Nature Neuroscience, In Press. http://www.nature.com/neuro/index.html

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Prolific gossipers are disliked and seen as weak
Gossip might be the social glue that binds us, but prolific proponents of tittle-tattle should beware gossipers are perceived not just as unlikeable but also as lacking social influence. Sally Farley made her finding after asking 128 participants (mostly female students) to think of someone they knew, who either did or didn't gossip a lot, and to rate that person for likeability and social influence, plus there were 21 other distractor items. To further conceal the true aims of the study, the actual word "gossip" was never used. Instead, participants were told the research was about "informal communication" and the specific instruction was to think of someone who "spent a lot of time (or little time) talking about other people when they were not around". Among those participants asked to imagine a gossiper, a further detail was to imagine someone who either said negative things or positive things about people in their absence. Prolific gossipers were liked less than non-gossipers, and negative gossipers were liked least of all. On a 13-item liking scale, with each item scored between 1 and 9, the negative gossipers averaged 37 points, the non-gossipers averaged 47. Moreover, prolific gossipers were perceived as less socially powerful than non-gossipers, especially if they were negative gossipers. These findings actually contradict some prior research showing, for example, that it is girls with more friends who are more likely to gossip. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has even likened gossiping to the mutual grooming performed by non-human primates, with both activities serving to enhance social bonds. "Perhaps high gossipers are individuals who we welcome into our social networks for fear of losing the opportunity to learn information, but we tend to keep them at arms length," Farley said, attempting to reconcile her results with this earlier research. Another possibility is that the relationship between gossiping and social power is curvilinear, with low and high levels harming one's social status, but the act of moderate gossiping attracting more favourable judgements. Unfortunately, the current study only asked participants to imagine high and low gossipers. Another related line of research has documented a common-sense effect known as "the transfer of attitudes recursively", which simply put has found that people who say nice things about others in their absence are judged as more likeable, whereas those who slag people off behind their backs are judged more harshly. The current study effectively extends this to show that negative gossipers are not only disliked, but also seen as socially weak. "Despite the shortcomings of the present study, it represents one of a few empirical investigations into how gossipers are perceived by others," Farley concluded. "Future research should consider other important moderators of gossip such as inclusion in the gossip, topic of the gossip, and motivations for gossip (group-serving versus self-serving)." _________________________________ Farley, S. (2011). Is gossip power? The inverse relationships between gossip, power, and likability. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41 (5), 574-579 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.821

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Investigating the personality of companies
When we think about other people, we do so in terms that can be boiled down to five discrete personality dimensions: extraversion, introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness (known as the Big Five factors). A new study suggests that a similar process is at work in our perception of companies and corporations. Google and Apple have personalities too, it seems. Philipp Otto, Nick Chater and Henry Stott quizzed thousands of people about their perception of hundreds of companies and they've found that our view of companies is encapsulated by four fundamental dimensions: honesty, prestige, innovation and power. These perceived characteristics correlate with traditional economic measures of company performance, but they offer something more. "With the introduction of personality factors for companies, a new way of describing companies is provided," the trio said, "which directly reflects the public understanding of companies ... Tracking measures of corporate personality might add important dimensions to economic measures of company performance and could be used both in shaping marketing and brand strategy, and potentially also in evaluating and predicting company success." Otto's team kicked off its investigation by using George Kelly's Repertory Grid technique. Six participants named nine wellknown companies and then, taking three at a time, they identified an adjective on which two companies in that group differed from the third (a process known as "triadic elicitation"). The idea of this approach is to cultivate responses from participants without putting ideas into their heads. Named companies included Tesco, BT and Chanel, and popular themes were quality, price, general appearance and experiences with the companies. For a second study, the adjectives from the first were combined with adjectives taken from the existing literature on categorising objects, giving a total of 118. Twenty students then rated 20 companies on all these 118 adjectives. Any inconsistency or instability was weeded out. So, adjectives were retained if they distinguished between companies (an adjective is useless if all companies score the same on it), and if different participants tended to give the same company a similar rating on the same measure. This whittling led to a list of 31 adjectives. In turn, these 31 were analysed for clustering so that highly correlated adjectives like "luxurious" and "upper class" were part of the "prestige" dimension. Next, thousands of participants recruited via the I-points web-service rated sixty-four companies along four of the 31 adjectives, and 10 more social adjectives like "friendly" and "helpful". Again, the superordinate factors of honesty, prestige, innovation and power fitted the results well and were found to correlate with traditional economic factors: for example, prestige correlated with company size and profit; innovation correlated with company growth. The final phase of the study repeated this exercise precisely a year later (in 2006) with many of the same companies, to investigate the stability of the measures. There was a high correlation in the factor scores the companies achieved, although there were also some interesting changes in the relative rankings of the companies on these measures - for example, German car manufacturers showed gains in perceived innovativeness. "The proposed methodology not only has substantial commercial value in helping companies understand and track their public perception, but scales of this type can potentially guide and manage the decision-making of individuals or groups inside and outside rated organizations, thus influencing their organizational culture," the researchers said. _________________________________ Otto, P., Chater, N., and Stott, H. (2011). The psychological representation of corporate personality. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 605-614 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.1729

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The woman misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's
Psychologists in the Netherlands have documented the case of a 58-year-old woman who was misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. The would-be patient consulted a neurologist at a stressful time in her life, in the knowledge that her mother had had the illness. A brain scan indicated reduced activity at the front of her brain ("hypofrontality"), and the neurologist also estimated her performance on a test of cognitive impairment as poor (though no formal test was conducted). On this basis he diagnosed Alzheimer's*. The woman was devastated and thereafter her condition deteriorated significantly, to the point that she was permanently confused and, at one point, suicidal. Some months later, after receiving advice from an Alzheimer's helpline, the woman consulted a different neurologist for a second opinion. She completed comprehensive memory tests and undertook a further brain scan. All results were normal. This neurologist surmised that her earlier hypofrontality was associated with depression. He also went to great lengths to explain the good news about her results and the misinterpretation of her earlier scan, but it proved extremely difficult to assuage her concerns. Years later, Harald Merckelbach and his team have interviewed the woman and they report that she continues to experience intrusive thoughts about the misdiagnosis and to catastrophise her memory lapses. Merckelbach's group believe the effect of a misdiagnosis has parallels with the implantation of false memories. Just as false memories are difficult to reverse, so too are mistaken diagnoses. "Conferring a diagnostic label is far from a neutral act," they said. "Many diagnostic labels have strong stereotypical connotations and sometimes, these will automatically shape the experiences and behaviour of patients, a phenomenon called 'diagnoses threat'." To test these ideas further, Merckelbach, with colleagues Marko Jelicic and Maarten Pieters, gave 78 undergrads a psychological symptoms questionnaire to complete. Afterwards the students performed Suduko puzzles as a distraction. Next, the researchers went through some of the students' answers with them. During this review, the researchers inflated two of the answers they'd given to anxiety items. For example, imagine a student had originally indicated that she never had trouble concentrating. The researcher would inflate that answer by two points on the scale, as if she'd said that she sometimes had trouble concentrating, and they then asked the student to explain why she'd given that answer. Remarkably, 63 per cent of the participants failed to notice that their answers had been altered, and they proceeded to describe their experience of the symptoms (readers may notice parallels here with a phenomenon known as "choice blindness", in which people seem to have little insight into a recent choice they made). Ten minutes later, and again after one week, all the students re-took the psychological symptoms questionnaire. At both time points, students who'd earlier failed to notice that two of their answers had been altered, now gave higher ratings to those two items, as if they considered themselves to have those symptoms. Such an effect was not observed among the minority of students who'd earlier noticed that their answers had been altered. An analysis of all the students' original baseline answers uncovered higher

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average baseline symptoms among those who would fail to notice the inflation of their answers. "Apparently a non-zero symptom intensity level introduces ambiguity; thereby raising the probability that misinformation is accepted," the researchers said. However, it's not the case that the influenced participants were simply more keen to give answers that the researchers wanted - they scored just the same on a test of social desirability. The results from this study are consistent with past research showing how misinformation about physical symptoms can shape how people feel: for example, false feedback about asthmatic wheezing can trigger breathlessness in children with asthma. Harald Merckelbach and his colleagues said their findings had particular significance for the way medical professionals interact with patients with unexplained symptoms, including those labelled with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic pain. "... Expressing concern about the possibility of an underlying illness and, related to this, excessive investigation and attending patient support groups may all contribute to symptom escalation. What these interventions have in common is that they convey the message to the patient that his or her symptoms might be more intense and severe than he/she thinks they are. Our study suggests that blindness to unintended misinformation about the severity of the symptoms may underlie escalation of symptoms." The researchers recommend that medics avoid mentioning the whole spectrum of possible symptoms when interviewing patients with medically unexplained symptoms. They also pointed to interesting avenues for future research. For example, notwithstanding the ethical issues involved, could patients benefit from receiving misinformation that lowered their symptom ratings? Also, is the inflated selfreporting of symptoms observed here based purely on exaggerated report, or is it grounded in an altered experience of symptoms? _________________________________ Merckelbach, H., Jelicic, M., and Jonker, C. (2011). Planting a misdiagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in a person's mind. Acta Neuropsychiatrica DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1601-5215.2011.00586.x Harald Merckelbach, Marko Jelicic and Maarten Pieters (In Press). Misinformation increases symptom reporting a test retest experiment. J R Soc Med Sh Rep.

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