"Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing"

One of my papers was published in final form today. Here are some details about it.

Title: Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing

Authors: Elisa C. Baek, Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson

Abstract: It has been proposed that information sharing, which is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior, plays a critical role in cultivating and maintaining a sense of shared reality. Across three studies, we test this theory by investigating whether or not people are especially likely to share information that they believe will be interpreted similarly by others in their social circles. Using neuroimaging data collected while people who live in the same residential community viewed brief film clips, we find that more similar neural responses across participants is associated with a greater likelihood to share content. We then test this relationship using two behavioral studies and find (1) that people are particularly likely to share content that they believe others in their social circles will interpret similarly and (2) that perceived similarity with others leads to increased sharing likelihood. In concert, our findings support the idea that people are driven to share information to create and reinforce shared understanding, which is critical to social connection.

"Social Network Analysis for Social Neuroscientists"

A paper of mine that was posted in advanced access more than a year ago has now finally been posted in final form. It is a survey and perspective article on social network analysis for social neuroscientists. Here are some details.

Title: Social Network Analysis for Social Neuroscientists

Authors: Elisa C. Baek, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson

Abstract: Although social neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the brain interacts with its social environment, prevailing research in the field has primarily considered the human brain in isolation, deprived of its rich social context. Emerging work in social neuroscience that leverages tools from network analysis has begun to advance knowledge of how the human brain influences and is influenced by the structures of its social environment. In this paper, we provide an overview of key theory and methods in network analysis (especially for social systems) as an introduction for social neuroscientists who are interested in relating individual cognition to the structures of an individual’s social environments. We also highlight some exciting new work as examples of how to productively use these tools to investigate questions of relevance to social neuroscientists. We include tutorials to help with practical implementations of the concepts that we discuss. We conclude by highlighting a broad range of exciting research opportunities for social neuroscientists who are interested in using network analysis to study social systems.

New Journal Paper: "The Value of Thoughts and Prayers"

A new study, which was just published in PNAS, is called "The Value of Thoughts and Prayers". It considers the monetary value of thoughts and prayers, as quantified in psychology experiments.

This paper seems very worthy of an Ig Nobel Prize, though just seeing the title of it mostly makes me feel sad, despite its amusing (and 'improbable') nature.

(Tip of the cap to Bruno Gonçalves.)

Surpise!

I am highly amused by this classification. :)

I Am Vindicated!

I am vindicated!

My dark sense of humor has been a positive sign from the beginning! ;)

The Surprising Population Counts of Cities: Reality Versus Psychology

The headline and tagline of this 538.com article are misleading, but the rankings are interesting. (Surprisingly, the article doesn't bring up metro and urban areas, as opposed to a city proper, which makes a big difference for an example like Miami, though this does not satisfactorily explain many of the examples.)

Would you have guessed that the city of Fresno has a higher population than New Orleans? (In this case, the order does get reversed if you measure metro area, but they are still very similar, so it's not like the whopping case of Miami.)

I remember being surprised a few years ago to find out that Boston is not in the US top 20 if you consider the city proper (based on the 2010 census). I remember querying this in a particular data set (here is the associated readme file, by the way) with street-map networks of the center of the top 20 most populous US cities (and similarly for other continents).

Note (partly so I remember this later): metro population and urban population are two different things.

"Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus"

Sanjay Srivastava (University of Oregon) put together a summary of the field of psychology called "Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus".

My favorite quote from his blog entry is the following one: "The format of this seminar is as follows: Each week we will read and discuss 1-2 papers that raise the question of whether something is fucked." Amidst the topics of all of the other weeks, I am highly amused by the title of week 7: "Interlude: Everything is fine, calm the fuck down".

Of course, there is also the serious side to this about the enormous amount of messiness in basically every step in fields like psychology (and of course there are significant complications in scientific practice more generally).

I know I would be interested in taking this course! Would you?

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)

Limit-Cycle-Oscillator Models of Bipolar Disorder: Revisited

Years ago, Steve Wirkus and I coauthored (with several undergraduate students) a paper that first introduced the idea of using limit-cycle oscillators to model bipolar patients. Our model was a toy model, but years later several of my colleagues at Oxford have been doing amazing things from a more data-centric perspective. Their latest paper is especially exciting for me. It does what we dreamed about and speculated about 12 years ago in our paper: taking the basic idea of a limit-cycle oscillator and combining it with clinical data in a realistic way. (The authors of this work understandably also incorporate noise into their model.)

Quoting the last few lines of our conclusions: "In this respect, we view our work as a first step in developing mathematical models of the mood swings of bipolar individuals. Our intent is to provide a mathematical framework that ultimately leads to the development of more detailed models of bipolar disorder that incorporate clinical data. With this work, we hope to motivate the collection of time-series data from clinical trials that will lead to refinements of our model that incorporate such data. In our view, dynamical systems theory and mathematical modeling in general can lead to important advancements in the understanding of bipolar disorder."

(Tip of the cap to Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, who shared a popular account of the work on Facebook.)

Controlling Our Bladders Makes Us Better Liars

As I describe in my most recent blurb for the Improbable Research blog, a new study suggests that people are better at lying when they are controlling their bladders.

(Tip of the cap to Karen Kustedjo.)

"Zigzag Hochschild Complex": Mathematical Object or Psychological Disorder?

The Zigzag Hochschild Complex certainly sounds like it could be a psychological disorder, but it is actually a mathematical object.

Apology Cards Sorted by Discipline

Today's SMBC, which shows some apology cards sorted by discipline, is a big win! The psychology apology is the best one.

Sketchy Futon

Fun Fact: The Stanford psychology department has a very sketchy futon in front of its ground-floor bathrooms.

I assume that it gets used for 'experiments'.

"Plane" Thinking

Here is an interesting article on a couple of psychological studies on analytical versus intuitive thinking/cues and how one subsequently answers questions related to faith.

I do take one issue with the article, though: the idea that the word 'plane' has nothing to do with thinking is absolute nonsense. To give just one example, whether or not a graph is embedded in a plane or not has a profound influence on it's structure. :) [I know, I know: I've had it with this motherfuckin' graph in this motherfuckin' plane!]

Consequences of Ambidexterity?

An interesting new study suggests that ambidextrous people are easier to manipulate than right-handers. That's really neat!

(Tip of the hat to Louis Wang.)

Nuns and Dementia

This NPR article about the 'Nun Study' of dementia and Alzheimer's disease is extremely cool. The part that's especially fascinating is the discovery of the biographies that the "nuns" (technically not nuns, as stated in the article... not that I would know) wrote when they first entered the order at 18 and the use of the 'complexity' of the text in those articles to see if it correlated with development of the signs of dementia (as measured in their brains after they died). A very strong correlation was observed between increasingly complex writing---see the article for a rough statement of how this was measured (it was basically how densely ideas were packed, on average, into 10-word segments)---and the onset of features in the brain associated with Alzheimer's Disease and dementia.

By the way, I love the 'causation versus correlation' comment at the end of the article. :)

Now I'm very curious to see my writing analyzed in this way... Of course, one can train oneself to write in different ways---e.g., I strongly prefer simple, clear sentences for scientific exposition (clarity >> elegance). We'll see how much dementia I develop... ;)

Agatha Christie was also mentioned extensively in the article, but the Nun Study is cooler.

(Tip of the cap to Rachel Gray.)

Update (6/10/10): I checked: The idea density of my writing is actually pretty damned high. (Also, I took a look at the .ppt presentations of one of these people to get a better idea of how it's calculated, and short nuanced ideas---sub-sentences but not necessarily full sentences---are the type that score the highest, and in fact my writing style goes very strongly and specifically in that direction.) I put in 4 writing samples from recent stuff that I have done (2 examiner reports, one document containing 3 articles I just wrote for a newsletter---in a format reminiscent of my blogging style, and one research statement), and I ranged from 5.03 - 5.48. (The word numbers in the documents ranged roughly from 500 - 2000.) Unsurprisingly, the newsletter articles---the least technical of the four documents by leaps and bounds---scored the lowest. A really neat thing to do---though indubitably this has been done before---would be to take a cohort of children and examine how their writing density changes as they age.

The Misinformation Effect

Here is a neat blog post, from a blog called You Are Not So Smart, about The Misinformation Effect. Neat stuff!

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Thatcher Effect

Wow, the so-called "Thatcher effect" is pretty bizarre.

Author Name of the Day

This demotivational poster compelled me to find a famous psychologist by the name of Edwin Boring.

Caption of the Day

Today's caption occurred in this CNN article on some results that aren't particularly surprising.

The caption reads as follows: Images of women in bikinis prompted brain responses in men associated with using tools.

Also, here is the article's money sentence: New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.


I suppose I would be less amused if the term 'handling tools' weren't the one that was chosen by the author of the article, but I also suppose that that particular pun was too hard to keep inside.