Ohio State professor Kimberly Rios Morrison polled Stanford University students about what they thought about students drinking alcohol. What she discovered was that the students with the most extreme pro-alcohol stance expressed their opinions most readily, in general because they believed that they were voicing the majority opinion. But polls showed that the majority of students had a moderate to anti-alcohol stance. When pro-alcohol students were shown evidence that most people didn't support their views, they were far more reluctant to express their extreme opinions.

Said Morrison:

It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue.

Sounds like this study explains internet trolling and flame wars too. People with extreme views who are extremely loud about them manage to delude themselves into thinking everybody agrees. Morrison added:

You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.

No word yet on how to break the cycle, especially with trolls, who may not care whether the majority agree with them or not. But we can only hope further research will lead to a simple way to cure extremists of their belief that everybody shares their opinions and wants them to keep talking.

via Ohio State

A team of researchers at University College London showed volunteers a series of words with positive, negative, and neutral connotations. Each word was shown too quickly for the viewer to consciously perceive it, but the researchers asked the viewers to identify whether the word had an emotional value. Viewers correctly identified negative words as having an emotional value 77 percent of the time, while they correctly identified positive words as having an emotional value just 59 percent of the time.

The researchers believe that this superior subliminal perception of negative words is tied to a primal tendency to be more alert to threats than to non-threats. Thus, words that create a sense of fear or anxiety are more acutely perceived by the human brain and are more likely to trigger an emotional response. That suggests that, if advertisers are looking to utilize subliminal messages, it's less effective to tout your product's virtues than it is to bash the competition.

Power of the hidden message revealed [The Independent]

According to Science Blog:

Straus found that children in the United States who were spanked had lower IQs four years later than those who were not spanked.

Straus and Mallie Paschall, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, studied nationally representative samples of 806 children ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9. Both groups were retested four years later.

IQs of children ages 2 to 4 who were not spanked were 5 points higher four years later than the IQs of those who were spanked. The IQs of children ages 5 to 9 years old who were not spanked were 2.8 points higher four years later than the IQs of children the same age who were spanked.

"How often parents spanked made a difference. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the child's mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference," Straus says.

via Science Blog

Psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia have been studying the effects of reading on cognitive functions. They had one group of subject read Franz Kafka's short story "The Country Doctor," a strange and surreal tale, and had a second group read the same story, but structured in a way that made more traditionally logical sense to readers. After reading the story, the subjects were then given a grammar learning test in which they were asked to identify patterns within strings of letters.

Subjects who read the original Kafka story identified more letter strings than those who read the more logically structured version, and were actually more accurate in their identifications, suggesting that they had better learned the patterns. The researchers believe that, in reading a story without a readily identifiable logic or structure, the subjects' brains began actively looking for patterns:

"You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," [study co-author Travis] Proulx said. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviours, but either way, they want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

The rub, though, is that the surreal experience must be unexpected to get the desired cognitive boost. Going in knowing you are going to read a strange and surreal story might not have the same effect.

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study [Guardian]

Charles Snowdon, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and David Teie, a musician at the University of Maryland, have been testing the responses of cotton-top tamarins to different kinds of music. In the past, psychologists trying to examine the evolutionary roots of music have played music for primates, but with little response from our hairy cousins.

The problem, Snowdon and Teie claim, is that human music is designed for human enjoyment; different species interpret rising and falling pitches, and the duration and volume of sounds differently, so what's melodious to human ears may sound like random noise to a monkey or an ape. They tried instead to compose music based on tamarin calls, and, sure enough, when monkeys heard music based on the "fear" sounds, they became agitated and nervous, but when they heard music based on the "friendly, happy" sounds, they became visibly calm and relaxed. They hope their study will open a new door in animal communications research, one in which behaviorists not only communicate information to animals, but also use sounds to change their long-term behavior.

Like earlier psychologists, Snowden and Teie played human music for the tamarins, to no effect — with one exception. They reported that the monkeys did, in fact, respond to Metallica, though it's not clear whether they saw it as "fear" music or "friendly" music.

You can hear samples of David Teie's monkey music compositions at PhysOrg.

Monkeys get a groove on, but only to monkey music (w/ Audio) [PhysOrg]

Troop is a health psychologist and lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. Much of his work is focused on eating disorders and trauma, but he is also investigating how word usage can affect one's mood and health. As a sideline to his research, Troop decided to analyze the lyrics of all of David Bowie's songs using text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Troop also looked at the relative success of Bowie songs, and based on his findings, penned lyrics to what he believes to be the "ideal" Bowie song. He explains his process in detail below, and sings his alleged hit-in-the-making, "Team, Meet Girls" at 4:24:

Team, Meet Girls; Girls, Meet Team (© Nick Troop, 2009)

Buddy loves good loving : Calm and proud while peace wins
Warmth and conversation : Heaven's energy and an elegant charm
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Sweet faith : Secure in the affection of a better boy
Feeling admiration : A cheerful kiss, kiss the phone
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
They met and were loving : Perfectly amazed, comfort and cared for
A loyal companion : Share, relax, creating humans XXX
Dear charm, playing nice give paradise smiles
Truth wins – an adult love to win awards
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Special persons with casual ease enjoy the band
Lucky and rich, a special guest hero
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Team, meet girls; girls, meet team
Girls, meet team; team, meet girls

Scientist writes 'ideal' David Bowie Song [news:lite via William Gibson]

According to the New York Times, there was a debate on Wikipedia over whether one of the ten traditional inkblot images should remain on the site. So Moose Jaw emergency room doctor James Heilman decided to take matters into his own hands:

I just wanted to raise the bar - whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up. The debate has exploded from there.

Heilman didn't just post all ten images — he also added research data on the most typical responses to them. So if you're taking a Rorschach test and want to appear normal at all costs, you can read up beforehand. And apparently, the inkblots were created 90 years ago, so they're no longer in copyright in the United States.

And now, according to a second New York Times article, Heilman is facing some complaints, and maybe even disciplinary action:

Andrea Kowaz of the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, complained that by including the inkblots on Wikipedia, Dr. Heilman was violating the test's secrecy and that if he were a psychologist his behavior would be "viewed as serious misconduct."

The other letter, from Laurene J. Wilson, a psychologist at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, echoed the concern about the test's security but added that Dr. Heilman "shows disrespect to his professional colleagues in psychology and disparages them in the eyes of the public."

Dr. Wilson said she had read interviews with Dr. Heilman in which he "refers to psychologists as undertaking practices akin to a magic show with smoke and mirrors."

In light of those complaints, an official from the Saskatchewan organization wrote, there was "a responsibility to investigate the matter."

I'm actually somewhat surprised to learn that there are only ten Rorschach tests and they're standard all over the place. Somehow, I'd pictured psychologists getting up in the morning, carefully smearing ink on a page, and making the day's fresh inkblots for another batch of patients. It's fascinating how the mysteroius science of one era is colliding with the fanatically open technological bent of another. In a way, the controversy is like a moth-shaped blur, that you can look into and see something that reveals your inner nature.

A team of psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted a study to determine the relationship between a pain susceptibility gene OPRM1 and emotional pain. They polled 122 participants about their emotional and physical reactions to social situations, especially social exclusion. They also created a virtual social exclusion scenario in which 31 of the participants were excluded during a ball-tossing computer game while researchers monitored their brain activity.

They found that the same variation of the OPRM1 pain gene that has been linked with high susceptibility to physical pain also correlates to high susceptibility to emotional pain. When participants with this rare variation were excluded from the computer game, there was greater activity in the pain-related regions of their brains than in the brains of people with more common variations of the gene.

This suggests that the gene may be responsible for a neurological mechanism that triggers pain receptors when an individual feels social rejection. And study co-author Naomi Eisenberger suggests that such a mechanism may have driven some humans to form evolutionarily beneficial social groups:

Because social connection is so important, feeling literally hurt by not having social connections may be an adaptive way to make sure we keep them. Over the course of evolution, the social attachment system, which ensures social connection, may have actually borrowed some of the mechanisms of the pain system to maintain social connections.

Still no word, though, on whether a person can, in fact, die of a broken heart.

Why a broken heart really does hurt [Telegraph via Reddit]

In a new article from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Jaye Derrick and Shira Gabriel of the University of Buffalo and Kurt Hugenberg of Miami University examine the "Social Surrogacy Hypothesis," which posits that humans are using their TV sets as a substitute for human interaction. What they found was that people become more emotionally invested in watching television when they felt a need to belong to a social group:

The authors theorized that loneliness motivates individuals to seek out relationships, even if those relationships are not real. In a series of experiments, the authors demonstrated that participants were more likely to report watching a favorite TV show when they were feeling lonely and reported being less likely to feel lonely while watching. This preliminary evidence suggests that people spontaneously seek out social surrogates when real interactions are unavailable. The authors also found that participants who recalled a fight with a close person in their lives wrote for significantly longer about their favorite TV show than a non-favored TV show. It appears that experiencing a lack of belonging actually caused people to revel in their favorite TV shows, as though the parasocial relationships with TV characters replaced the flawed relationships that had been recalled.

The results suggest that humans are inclined to form one-sided, parasocial relationships with people and characters on television, and that being able to spend time with those characters without the possibility of rejection fulfills a primal need to socially connect to others, even if that connection isn't interactive.

So what effect, I wonder, does canceling shows have on the human psyche? Do we unconsciously feel that a trusted friend has been ripped from us, and does not being able to spend time with them make us more lonely?

[Scientific American]

A recent study by San Francisco State psychologist David Matsumoto published today in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers evidence that facial expressions are innate rather than learned. He examined over 4,000 photographs of blind and sighted athletes who had just lost important competitions. Though the blind athletes could not have learned their facial expressions from seeing other people's, they nevertheless produced very similar unhappy expressions when they first heard the news that they'd lost. Later, they moved almost the same facial muscles to produce social smiles during award ceremonies.

Matsumoto explained that a genuine Duchenne smile causes the cheek muscles to move, and also makes the eyes narrow (some describe this as "twinkling eyes"). A social smile affects only the mouth muscles, and usually the lips remain closed in a social smile.

Said Matsumoto:

The statistical correlation between the facial expressions of sighted and blind individuals was almost perfect. This suggests something genetically resident within us is the source of facial expressions of emotion. Losers pushed their lower lip up as if to control the emotion on their face and many produced social smiles. Individuals blind from birth could not have learned to control their emotions in this way through visual learning so there must be another mechanism. It could be that our emotions, and the systems to regulate them, are vestiges of our evolutionary ancestry. It's possible that in response to negative emotions, humans have developed a system that closes the mouth so that they are prevented from yelling, biting or throwing insults.

So we're smiling instead of biting each other? Evolution works!

SOURCE: San Francisco State University

Photos by Bob Willingham.

Most of the data for this extremely long-term study came from the Framingham Heart Study, a study in Massachusetts that's been ongoing since 1948. The researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, chose to pick their subjects from this study because it included detailed histories of everyone, such as information about spouses, friends, and family. This information provided a sense of participants' social networks.

Each participant's happiness was measured with a standard test for depression, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index, that rates a person's sense of well-being.

One of the first things the Christakis and Fowler found was that the effect of one person's happiness on a social network can spread to strangers and its effects could last up to a year. In addition, geographical location had a lot to do with this. The happy mood of a friend who lives around the corner will have a much greater effect on you than a friend who lives across the country. And despite the fact that misery is supposed to love company, the researchers found that sadness appears not to spread as virally as happiness.

According to a release about the study:

They also found that, contrary to what your parents taught you, popularity does lead to happiness. People in the center of their network clusters are the most likely people to become happy, odds that increase to the extent that the people surrounding them also have lots of friends. However, becoming happy does not help migrate a person from the network fringe to the center. Happiness spreads through the network without altering its structure.

"Imagine an aerial view of a backyard party," Fowler explains. "You'll see people in clusters at the center, and others on the outskirts. The happiest people tend to be the ones in the center. But someone on the fringe who suddenly becomes happy, say through a particular exchange, doesn't suddenly move into the center of the group. He simply stays where he is—only now he has a far more satisfying sense of well-being. Happiness works not by changing where you're located in the network; it simply spreads through the network."

So next time you're feeling cheerful, remember that feeling may be coming from a friend of a friend of a friend. I feel like there's a lesson about cat videos on YouTube in here somewhere.

Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network [via British Medical Journal]

Sometimes the objects are metal pins or paper clips, which makes them easy to pick up on X-rays, say a group of researchers from Chicago who studied the phenomenon in 10 teen girls. The problem is that a lot of people suffering from self-embedding cut themselves and then put objects like wood, stone, or crayons in the wounds. It's estimated that as many as a quarter of all teens engage in some form of self-injury at least once.

Apparently, if you think a patient might be self-embedding, the best thing you can do is examine them using ultrasound. Here you can see staples that a teen has lodged inside her hand. According to the Radiological Society of North America:

Using ultrasound and/or fluoroscopic guidance, interventional pediatric radiologists removed 52 embedded foreign objects from nine of the patients. The embedded objects included metal needles, metal staples, metal paperclips, glass, wood, plastic, graphite (pencil lead), crayon and stone. The objects were embedded during injuries to the arms, ankles, feet, hands and neck. One patient had self-embedded 11 objects, including an unfolded metal paperclip more than six inches in length.

Ultrasound guidance allowed the researchers to detect the presence and location of wood, crayons and plastic objects, not detectable on x-ray examinations. Removal was performed through small incisions in the skin that left little or no scarring and was successful in all cases, without fragmentation or complications.

The radiologists, who are presenting their research today at a meeting of the Radiological Society, say that dealing with self-embedding has helped them come up with techniques that aid in removing any kind of small object in the body without fragmenting the object - a very dangerous problem - and without leaving scars.

Radiologists Diagnose and Treat Self-Embedding Disorder in Teens [via RSNA]

In the last few years, psychiatrists began documenting cases of patients who reported a belief that they were being filmed for television entertainment. The patients differed in their experiences, but all believed that their lives had somehow been selected to participate in a show without their consent:

One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything - the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed - was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie "The Truman Show."

Although the syndrome, which some psychiatrists have unofficially named after the film, is related to classic paranoid and grandiose delusions, the pervasiveness of reality television in our culture may reinforce the delusion in many patients. Mental health professionals note that, when patients see shows featuring hidden cameras and invasive footage, it seems plausible that they could be on television themselves:

That's not to say reality shows make healthy people delusional, "but, at the very least, it seems possible to me that people who would become ill are becoming ill quicker or in a different way," Ian Gold [a philosophy and psychology professor at McGill University] said.

While many sufferers are intensely disturbed by their delusions (one physician reported a patient who threatened to kill himself if he couldn’t drop out of his imagined reality show), some find the idea of being on television appealing. The imagined total invasion of their privacy may be distressing, but a few actually take pride their supposed celebrity status.

[via Associated Press]

Indian medical researchers CP Thakur and Dilip Sharma published an article in the British Medical Journal in 1984 where they demonstrated that incidents of crime were far higher on full moon days - that's their chart, above. They based their work on four years of police reports from three towns: One rural, one urban, and one industrial. Apparently poisonings were particularly popular on full moon days, but crimes of all types rose by a significant amount. Several years later, they published another article in the same journal about the rise in animal attacks during the full moon.

Thakur and Sharma blame "human tidal waves" for the rise in crime. They believe that the full moon exerts more gravity on the water in human bodies, disturbing our biological processes. That rationale may sound a bit like poppycock, but their statistics remain intriguing. And other researchers take the correlation between moon cycles and crime seriously too.

Brighton, UK Police determined last year that they would beef up numbers of patrolling officers on nights of the full moon because their research showed a strong connection between that and violent crime (payday also caused a rise in crime). According to the BBC:

In 1998, a three-month psychological study of 1,200 inmates at Armley jail in Leeds discovered a rise in violent incidents during the days either side of a full moon.

And insurance companies have also done studies that suggest there's a correlation between accidents and the full moon. Back in 2003, Bloomberg reported:

Car accidents occur 14 percent more often on average during a full moon than a new moon, according to a study of 3 million car policies by the U.K.'s Churchill Insurance Group Plc.

But psychologist Ivan Kelly, a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, says the whole idea is bunk. He's reviewed nearly 50 scientific studies of the relationship between a full moon and changes in human behavior, and has found nothing but shoddy research as well as a tendency to confuse correlation and causation. He told National Geographic:

The studies are not consistent. For every positive study, there is a negative study. Journalists pay too much attention to finding sensational news or news that will support interesting results. Hence [they] ignore the findings of studies and tend to prefer stories or anecdotes from policemen or nurses.

Celeb psychiatrist Glenn Wilson suggested people's behavior might change at the full moon, but not due to any sort of "human tidal wave" shenanigans:

There is good reason to believe that people's personalities do change around the time of the full moon, not because of any astronomical force, but because it creates the optimum lighting conditions for feeling carefree and mischievous.

So if you're feeling a little mischievous tonight, it might be the full moon. Or it might just be the fact that you read some sensationalistic articles about how the full moon affects people's behavior.

Moon image via NASA.

Psychology professor Jean Decety and his team analyzed the brains of bullies — teens who had showed unusual aggression, starting fights, using weapons, and mugging people. He put the bullies in a functional MRI scanner, looking to see how their brains reacted to pictures of a person deliberately stepping on someone else's foot. Said Decety:

Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain.

Earlier this year, Decety demonstrated that most children respond to these images of pain with sympathy, imaginatively feeling the pain themselves. And that's what the control group in his most recent study did. But the bullies clearly liked seeing pain.

Decety thinks his discovery will help psychologists and psychiatrists treat violent adolescents. He believes that when teens enjoy other people's pain it means they've suffered a disruption in their brains' natural empathetic reactions.

In other words, someday we might have a "cure" for aggression that restores bullies' ability to feel sympathy for other people's pain. Of course, tinkering with this brain signaling mechanism might also reveal a way to disrupt people's empathy too — turning pacifists into sadists.

Source: "Atypical Empathetic Responses in Adolescents with Aggressive Conduct Disorder: A functional MRI Investigation" [via Biological Psychology]

In the 1960s, Milgram conducted an infamous set of experiments where he said he was running pain tests. He asked Yale locals to come to his lab to participate in an experiment, and when they arrived they were told they'd "assist" him by using a machine (a prop) to shock his "test subjects" (the actors) until they screamed and in some cases pretended to die. Of course the real test subjects were the people running the fake shock machine, and he was really studying authoritarianism.

Milgram wanted to find out how easy it would be for a regular person to torture somebody else if ordered to do it by an authority figure. What he discovered horrified him — and his unwitting test subjects. Nearly every single person who came into Milgram's lab was willing to torture or kill a person when ordered to do it by Milgram. Only a very few people refused. Many of them protested, but did it when Milgram insisted he was a doctor and knew what he was doing.

Many of his test subjects claimed they'd been traumatized, while for others it became a life-changing experience that inspired them to go into human rights work. Milgram's research is partly what inspired U.S. universities to create committees devoted to oversight of research done on human subjects. Now BoingBoing points us to a new radio documentary where ABC Radio International's Gina Perry tracked down some of Milgram's research subjects/victims and talked to them about their experiences. It's free online!

Stanley Milgram Radio Documentary [via BoingBoing]

Medgadget has the news:

All of the studies being presented used the Medtronic DBS system to stimulate a target within the brain called the ventral anterior limb of the internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS), which is a central node in the neural circuits that regulate mood and anxiety.

"The data we are presenting on 43 patients is the result of more than 10 years of work across multiple institutions worldwide. These data represent the largest number and the longest evaluation of patients with psychiatric disorders who have undergone DBS implants, including some with long-term follow up," said [Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon] Dr. Ali Rezai, who represented an international working group of physicians studying DBS therapy for treatment resistant OCD and depression. "While OCD and depression treatment with DBS require additional clinical evaluation research, our early open-label experience to date is encouraging and indicates that DBS may help severely disabled and suffering patients who have exhausted other treatment options."

Deep Brain Stimulation Useful for Severe Depression and OCD [Medgadget]

Last year, Ricard told The Independent that he hasn't had sex since he was 30, but that he still loves football. And the only time he's really gotten mad in the past few decades was when somebody threw flour on his laptop as a joke.

Meanwhile, the researchers at the University of Wisconsin say they can measure anyone's happiness levels by registering the amount of electrical activity in their right frontal cortex. Happy serenity is associated with activity in that region, while depression is associated with activity in the left frontal cortex. Apparently, according to The Independent:

Out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers' results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him - a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis.

Is it really possible that measuring happiness is as simple as monitoring electrical activity in a general region of your brain?

Sources: The Independent, and University of Wisconsin's Lab for Affective Neuroscience

It's worth quoting rather extensively from a release about this study, which makes a somewhat subtle point. First, the researchers explored three different types of mental illness, ranging from mild to severe. They also point out that people in Lebanon on average don't have a higher rate of mental illness than people in other countries. When Lebanese civilians have been directly exposed to war, however, the likelihood that they will develop mental illness increases 3- to 13-fold. (Also, note that the researchers carefully define what "exposure to war" means.)

From a release about the study:

Elie Karam and colleagues . . . used a World Health Organization (WHO) interview tool to diagnose mental health disorders in a sample of 3,000 adults in Lebanon representative of the population. They investigated the question of lifetime prevalence (the proportion of Lebanese who have a mental disorder at some point in their lives) and the age of onset of mental disorders, as well as the delay they experienced in receiving treatment . . . They also asked each participant in the study about their experience of traumatic events relating to war, including whether they had been a refugee (38 % of people in the study), a civilian in a war zone (55%), or witnessed death or injury (18%). Although the relationship between war and the mental health of people serving in the military has been described before, this is the first time that a nationally representative study has assessed the effect of war on the first onset of mental disorders in a civilian population.

The authors describe that one in four Lebanese in this study had a mental health disorder during their lifetime, according to the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria that the WHO tool uses, with major depression being the most common disorder. This is similar to prevalence of mental illness in the United Kingdom and lies within the range observed in the WHO's World Mental Health Surveys in other countries. The researchers also estimated that one in three Lebanese would have one or more mental disorders by the age of 75, which is also similar to survey results in other countries. Only half the surveyed people with a mental disorder had ever received professional help; of those who did have a mental disorder, the delay in treatment ranged from 6 years for mood disorders to 28 years for anxiety disorders. Finally, exposure to war-related events increased the risk of developing an anxiety, mood, or impulse -control disorder by 6-fold, 3-fold and 13-fold respectively.

Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Lebanon [PLoS Medicine]

If you're like most people (and if you like the original Star Wars and Joss Whedon's writing), you probably thought you wouldn't enjoy this blog post all that much. You've fallen prey to what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls a "common affective forecasting mistake" by overestimating how much pain you'll receive from this post. Normally, however, this type of mistake is measured in potato chips.

Gilbert did a series of studies on undergraduates at Harvard that involved two potato chip scenarios. Subjects in group A were presented with a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar, both of which they were going to eat. Subjects in group B were presented with a bag of potato chips and a tin of sardines. Asked to rate how yummy the potato chips would be, subjects in group A said "so so." Subjects in group B said, "wow totally yummy." (I'm paraphrasing.)

But when they ate the chips, all the subjects reported enjoying them as much as they always enjoy chips. These Harvard students had made an affective forecasting mistake. They'd overestimated how yummy the chips would be when in the presence of sardines and underestimated how yummy they would be when in the presence of chocolate. Neither prediction accurately described how they felt when ultimately eating the chips.

Gilbert suggests that this kind of mistake happens because humans imagining a future experience have more attention energy to burn. They cast their attention around, compare their future experience (chips) to other potential future experiences (chocolate), and then decide that because chocolate is so awesome that chips can't possibly be that great.

But if you're actually experiencing something (like eating a chip), your attention energy is focused on the crispy, oily, salty experience itself. Your mind doesn't wander as much into elaborate comparisons with other potential experiences. And therefore the experience of the chip isn't diminished by comparison with the chocolate. The chip is the chip in itself.

What this means is that when you predict how good or bad you're going to feel about a future situation, more often than not you'll probably be wrong. In fact, I'll bet you can think of at least one example off the top of your head where you severely overestimated how happy or sad something would make you.

So now that you're reading this post, by the way, you're probably enjoying it as much as you normally enjoy posts on io9. That's because you started reading, and stopped comparing it with the COOLEST BLOG POST EVAR, involving nanotech brain surgery and a better Star Wars. Sorry, kids, but you're never going to learn to predict the future correctly if you keep thinking about that.

(With apologies to Daniel Gilbert of Harvard, whose presentation at the AAAS annual meeting yesterday demonstrated that he does this experiment in a much more rigorously scientific way.)