Dr. Virginia Kwan of Princeton University, with the latest in our ongoing series of guest features for students.

One of the most direct ways in which psychologists learn about how people think about themselves is by simply asking people about themselves (e.g. “How smart do you think you are?”). There are many advantages to self-reports in studying self-perception. They are simple, inexpensive – there are no fancy machines or complicated experimental setups – and revealing; after all, who knows you better than you?

Nevertheless, self-reports have their flaws. One problem is that self-reports are subject to social desirability concerns, making them vulnerable to misreporting. When people know that someone else is going to hear their response to a question, they may change their answer, even unknowingly. Another issue concerning self-reports is whether people are consciously aware of their self-perception and whether they are able to report it accurately.

No single measure is perfect, which is why psychologists often use both self-reports and implicit measures. Implicit measures are designed to be free of social desirability concern by tapping into unconscious aspects of self-perception. For example, during the Rorschach inkblot test, people are presented with ambiguous inkblot images and are asked to interpret them. The interpretation of ambiguous stimuli is thought to reflect personality characteristics and emotional states (see also prior Digest item on implicit test of attitudes).

Why should we care about self-perception? Psychologists have studied self-perception extensively because many believe it is essential for human functioning. One question that has endured, however, is whether we are better off seeing ourselves accurately or through a rose-coloured glass (see Block & Colvin, 1994; Sedikides et al pdf; Taylor & Brown, 1988 pdf). Recent research suggests that overly positive self-perception, known as self-enhancement, may be a mixed blessing for mental health (Bonanno et al; Kwan et al pdf; Paulhus, 1998 pdf).

But overly positive compared to what? Self-perception is an inherently social phenomenon. The way we see ourselves and the ways we are seen by others are closely intertwined. To examine self-enhancement, my colleagues and I (pdf) asked study participants to rate themselves and each other on personality attributes following a group interaction. Comparing all of these ratings allowed us to study the effects of self-enhancement by taking into account the ways people perceive others as well as how they are perceived by them. Our findings suggest that seeing oneself in an overly positive light compared to the social reality leads to maladjustment, but on the other hand, seeing oneself more positively than we see others leads to higher self-esteem and other intrapsychic benefits.

Dr. Nate Kornell of UCLA, with the fifth article in our ongoing series of guest features.

Although as students we have all spent countless hours studying, we receive little guidance in how to study effectively. There are no shortcuts to effective studying, but in general, being actively involved in learning makes studying effective. Some specific points are obvious: pay attention in class, do the reading, don’t procrastinate, while others should be obvious but aren’t: study in a quiet place without distractions, don’t send text messages during class, ask questions if you are confused.

Here are three unintuitive but very effective ways of studying based on findings from psychological research:

Space your study. We humans, and other animals as well, learn more by spacing study sessions out in time (pdf) than we do by massing them together (e.g. by cramming). For example, read a chapter at one time, and review it at another time; if you are studying a set of flashcards, study it every day, instead of intensely all at once. My own research has shown the benefits of spacing in learning about artists’ styles, learning vocabulary words using flashcards, and learning physics concepts, among other topics. If you don’t think spacing will work for you, think again—spacing is virtually always effective, even when it feels counterproductive.

Ask yourself questions. Testing oneself while studying has two advantages: First, it requires retrieving knowledge from memory. Doing so creates powerful memories (pdf) that are not easily forgotten. Second, self-testing allows you to diagnose your learning. If you test yourself before your exams, you can identify and rectify your weaknesses beforehand, instead of regretting them afterwards. A warning though: Self-testing when the information is still fresh in your memory, immediately after studying, doesn’t work. It does not create lasting memories, and it creates overconfidence.

Summarize and integrate. After going to class or reading a chapter, try to summarize the main points, and think about how they relate to the topic at large and to your own experience. This process, known as knowledge integration, creates lasting memories, and has the added benefit of requiring you to recall the information. One way to do so is to “learn by teaching”—that is, tell others about what you have learned, including fellow students or, if you don’t mind being boring, friends and family. Explaining requires integration and summarization, and it is an excellent way to expose the gaps in your own knowledge.

The steps above might seem burdensome, but the long-term benefits far outweigh the costs. A student looking to minimize effort would do well to follow them.
___________________________________

Link to more information.
Link to Nate Kornell's website.
Link to article from this month's Psychologist magazine on how to think like a psychologist (open access).

Nick Yee of Stanford University, with the fourth article in our series of guest features.

Virtual worlds (such as World of Warcraft and Second Life) have received a great deal of media and academic attention recently. While these virtual communities provide us with a new and fascinating area of study, it is also important to understand how these virtual environments provide us with new research tools.

Several lines of research in this area have emphasized the methodological possibilities of this emerging technology. One research paradigm known as Transformed Social Interaction purposefully breaks and alters the rules of social interaction in order to gain insight into communication and interaction processes. In the physical world, two people interacting in the same space necessarily share the same reality. On the other hand, in a virtual environment where users view the shared environment from their own computer terminals or virtual reality goggles, their realities need not be congruent. Thus, for example, I may perceive my avatar (a digital representation of myself) to be short while you perceive my avatar to be tall. These non-congruent reality scenarios open up a range of research questions in stereotype threat, behavioral confirmation, and self-perception theory among other psychological theories.

Virtual environments also allow us to endlessly recreate and customize how we appear. While it is difficult to alter a participant’s height (let alone race or gender) in a lab experiment, virtual environments make it easy to explore what it means to be in a different body. For example, a line of research known as the Proteus Effect has shown that users conform to stereotypes based on their avatar’s appearance. Thus, participants given attractive avatars provided more information about themselves to a confederate stranger than participants given unattractive avatars. In addition to putting participants in someone else’s body, virtual environments also allow participants to watch their avatar (i.e. themselves) do something they never did. The fluidity of our virtual bodies allows us to ask provocative questions related to identity, false memories, and cognitive dissonance.

And finally, virtual environments keep track of a great deal of behavioral data. Everything a user does in an online game can potentially be tracked and accumulated over time with a precision not possible in the physical world. While a great deal of psychology research focuses on individual, dyadic, or small group effects, virtual environments provide the opportunity to study social interaction and communication processes at a community level. For example, could altruism be engineered into a virtual community via non-congruent realities? Furthermore, these virtual environments could also allow experimental manipulations on a scale not previously possible in traditional lab settings.

--

Further Reading:

Bailenson, J.N., Beall, A.C., Loomis, J., Blascovich, J. & Turk, M. (2004). Transformed Social Interaction: Decoupling Representation from Behavior and Form in Collaborative Virtual Environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 13(4), 428-441.

Yee, N. & Bailenson, J.N. (2007, in press). The Proteus Effect: Self Transformations in Virtual Reality. Human Communication Research.

Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E. & Moore, R.J. (2006). "Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Games." In conference proceedings on human factors in computing systems CHI 2006, pp.407-416. April 22-27, Montreal, PQ, Canada.

The Digest needs you. If you'd like to write about your area of psychology research, please get in touch on: christian at psychologywriter.org.uk

In the third of our ongoing series of guest features for students, Dr. Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield introduces psychophysics.

How far away can you see a candle at night? Why can't you see it at the same distance during the day? How much do I have to turn up the volume before something seems twice as loud?

All these questions are about measuring the relation between physical qualities and the psychological impressions they cause. Psychophysics is the part of psychology which involves the systematic and precise investigation of these relationships.

Founded in the laboratory of German Gustav Fechner, psychophysics is one of the parents of modern experimental psychology. It demonstrated that mathematical analysis could be applied to subjective reports, and that principled relationships could be discovered between physical quantities and subjective impressions.

Let's take a close look at a famous example: Weber's Law, named after Ernst Weber, a colleague of Fechner's. This formula describes how changes in the subjective perception of stimulus intensity (e.g. how heavy a weight feels) are related to the actual change in stimulus magnitude (how much something actually weighs). You can look up the mathematics of this if you're interested, but a plain-language interpretation is that to increase the perceived intensity of a stimulus you need to increase its physical magnitude by a constant proportion, not a constant absolute amount.

Imagine: you can make an empty bag feel heavier by putting in a book, but a single book won't make a bag full of bricks feel heavier, even though in both cases you are adding the same amount of weight. Weber's Law gives you a mathematical way to calculate how much you would need to increase or decrease the physical weight to produce a subjective impression of a change in heaviness. It also allows you to compare sensitivity between the senses – showing, for example that we are more sensitive to brightness than loudness, because the proportional change needed to create a noticeable difference for lights is smaller than that needed for sounds.

As well as discovering many of the few laws that exist in psychology, psychophysics has generated methods and theories which are applied across all of experimental psychology, not just in the investigation of sensation and perception. In applying scientific measurement to subjective experience, the early psychophysicists were demonstrating a faith in empiricism, but they were also throwing themselves upon a dilemma - the attempt to relate the world of the measurable and objective to the subjective inner world of sensation. That dilemma is still just as relevant and profound today in all areas of psychology, and psychophysics is still vital as a toolkit for addressing it.
__________________________________

Read an excerpt of Fechner, G. (1860). Elements of psychophysics (HE Adler, Trans.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Link to the psychophysics introduction by Webvision.
Check out the other articles in this ongoing series, including "Why psychologists study twins", "A lyrical guide to using the web" and "Podcasts - a clickable list". Forthcoming in the series: "Systematic reviews" and "Virtual reality and online games" - stay tuned!

Updated 7 Nov 07, please use comments to send me news of new podcasts or dead links etc.

Royal College of Psychiatrists

Mind Podcast

The American Journal of Psychiatry

My Three Shrinks

Shrink Rap Radio

All in the Mind (ABC Radio)

Neuropod (from the journal Nature in association with the Dana Foundation)

Cognitive Daily

University of Nebraska

Autism podcast

The Dana Foundation

The Institute of Psychiatry

The University of California Berkeley - 1, 2, 3

Psychology Press

University of Connecticut

The PsychFiles

The National Institutes of Health

This Week in the History of Psychology

Coach radio (work psychology)

Psychjourney podcasts

Brain science podcast with Dr Ginger Campbell

General science podcasts (they often feature psychology) :

The New York Academy of Sciences

Scientific American

Seed Magazine

New Scientist

Nature

BBC Focus

Science Times (link opens in iTunes), from the New York Times

--
If you know of a psychology-related podcast that I've omitted, please let me know via comments and I'll add it to the main list.

This list wouldn't have been possible without Mind Hacks' Vaughan Bell.

In the second of our on-going series of guest features for psychology students, Dr. Angelica Ronald of London's Institute of Psychiatry describes the use of twin studies in psychology.

Psychologists are often trying to control one thing to look at its effect on something else. This results in the plethora of artificial experiments and carefully-matched control groups in psychological studies. The beauty of twin studies is that they provide psychologists with a natural experimental design – there’s no need for any additional control groups.

This natural design comes about because there are two types of twins: those who share all their genes (because they were formed from the same egg which split early on in development), called identical or monozygotic twins, and those who, just like non-twin siblings, share on average half their genes (they are formed from two separate eggs), called fraternal or dizygotic twins.

Twin designs address the nature-nurture question. Behaviour geneticists compare how alike one twin is with the other twin on whatever variable they are interested in; in my case this is autistic behaviours. If genes influence variation in autistic behaviours, identical twin pairs who share all their genes will be highly similar in their degree of autistic behaviours whereas fraternal twins will be much less similar. This is what we have found.

It’s the same for a diagnosis of autism: when one identical twin has autism, in 60 per cent of cases their co-twin also has autism. With fraternal twins there is a different pattern: most of the time when one twin has autism, the other does not have a diagnosis.

Just as much as twin studies have told us about genetics, they have been paramount in revealing the importance of the environment. For example, it is true that about 60 per cent of identical twins have the same autism diagnosis i.e. if one is autistic, the other is too. But in the other 40 per cent or so of identical twins, if one has autism, the other does not. This is sound proof that autism is not completely genetically determined – because if it were, both identical twins in a pair would always show the same degree of autistic problems. Genes play a role in risk but there must be some influence of the environment on the child’s outcome as well.

This example represents just the tip of the iceberg of how twin studies can contribute to psychology and our understanding of the causes of human behaviour. Of course no study design is perfect: like most research designs, the twin design has a number of assumptions, and even though it’s a natural experiment and we don’t have to control any variables, behavioural geneticists have to collect huge samples of twins (usually in the 1000’s) to be able to be certain about their findings.
___________________________________

Further reading:

Plomin, R., DeFries, J.C., McClearn, G.E. & McGuffin P. (2001). Behavioral Genetics (4th edn). New York: Worth Publishers.

Ronald, A., Happé, F., & Plomin, R. (2005). The genetic relationship between individual differences in social and nonsocial behaviours characteristic of autism. Developmental Science, 8, 444-458.

Ronald, A., Happé, F., Bolton, P., Butcher, L. M., Price, T. S., Wheelwright, S., Baron-Cohen, S., & Plomin, R. (2006). Genetic Heterogeneity Between the Three Components of the Autism Spectrum: A Twin Study. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 45, 691-99.

--
If you'd like to write a mini-feature about your area of research, please get in touch.

The Digest invited psychologist and PsychSplash founder Dr. Gareth Furber to produce a guide to internet resources for psychology students. Here's his advice in the form of a poem:

THINK LINKS

Students unite, for the time is nigh
To take your web-based research to the sky
Poems are lame, yes its true
But this one will make a researcher out of you!!

Searching is easy, but I think it is frugal
To adopt a more scholarly google
Or if you want a more ajax-based treat (a)
Try MSN’s Academic Live Beta.

But what if journals give you the willies?
Their evidence-based nonsense endlessly silly
Why not search for the voice of the masses
Keyword “psychology”, technorati, skip classes.

Is it links you want, organized neatly?
All you needed to do was ask sweetly
Try here and here and here and here
And then chill out with a beer (sorry that was a lame rhyme).

I must admit, I have a thing for librarians
Mostly the younger ones, not the octogenarians
My fascination however I assure you is pure
It’s their mental health resources that are the lure.

Perhaps this is old hat, and you’re more into excesses (not safe for work)
In which my collection of extensive RSS ‘ss
Should keep you quiet for many hours
Right down to the article about psychology and flowers.

Now “blogs” is a strange little word
Reminding one of a small round t %^ d
But these gems of intellectual might
Are a sure-fire gateway to massive insights.

I warn thee however, there are many to choose
Pick the wrong one, and you could lose
The BPS digest is a great place to start
Christian’s got blogging down to an art.

Searching for blogs is a bit of a chore
But tools exist to reduce the bore….
..dom of finding something that tickles your fancy
from clinical psych to necromancy (link not included for safety reasons).

What about those who love to write?
Staying up late into the dead of night
Starting out can be a little tricky
Unless of course you opt for a wiki!

Wikipedia is standard, their psychology portal
Giving some academics a reason to chortle
But theirs is not the only choice
Competition gives many a voice.

Now I’ve heard social support
Can improve your immunity
So why not share your thoughts
With a thriving community?

Professional or casual
It is up to you
But whatever you choose
Try at least one or two.

Now before you leave, you should be aware
Of a couple of pioneers of internet psychology care
Grohol is not just a man of nirvana
And counselling resource is a virtual charmer.

Now, no post is complete without shameless promotion
Of one’s own display of professional devotion.
So feel free to visit my home on the web
Any support you give me will reduce the ebb.