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Brain Mechanisms Involved in Learning Also Drive Social Conformity

In a new study, scientists have reported that some of the same brain systems known to play a role in learning from trial and error also are engaged when people conform to social norms. Researchers concluded in a study that behavior is shaped indirectly by observing the actions of our peers, which oftentimes trigger drives to conform and imitate their behavior. Furthermore, electroencephalograms studying electoral activity demonstrated that the drive to conform was linked to the same EEG patterns as changing one’s behavior following acceptances or rejections in the study.
Overall, scientists have learned that the same brain system guides both pathways to behavior change which indicates that people learn from social information similarly to how they learn on their own from trial and error.

This article relates to the social psychology unit because it includes studies of how the brain navigates social situations and references concepts of conformity, attitude formation, and persuasion.

https://neurosciencenews.com/social-conformity-learning-19827/

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Summary: A brain network implicated in learning by trial and error also becomes engaged when people adapt to social norms, a new study reports. Findings suggest people learn from social information similarly to learning by trial and error.

Source: University of Illinois

Some of the same brain systems known to play a role in learning from trial and error also are engaged when people conform to social norms, scientists report in a new study.

The findings are important, the researchers said, because changing one’s behavior to align with one’s peers can contribute to community-building or – depending on the goals and values of the group – societal breakdown.

The study is reported in the journal Psychophysiology.

“Our results show that other people’s behaviors have profound impacts on our brains, which will use these examples as evidence about what is good or bad,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate student Paul Bogdan, who led the research with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. “We see that our drive to conform is a pivotal piece of our psychology, with close links to the important brain systems that support learning.”

The researchers set out to better understand how the brain navigates social situations. To do so, they had participants play a modified version of the “ultimatum game,” in which one player proposes how to split $10 with another. The other player, a responder, can either accept or reject the proposer’s offer. If a responder rejects the proposed split, neither party gets any money.

“The goal of the game is to maximize one’s own profits, so accepting any offer would be the logical way to proceed,” Florin Dolcos said. “But people don’t generally behave that way. If they feel an offer is unfair, they’re more likely to reject it, to punish unfair partners even though this comes at their own expense.”

The participants alternated between serving as proposers and responders. Throughout the experiment, participants interacted with a computer but thought they were dealing with other people.

“This design simulates repeated interactions within a community and sheds light on how cooperative relationships are formed and maintained,” Florin Dolcos said.

The researchers wanted to find the links between how people reacted when their partners accepted or rejected their offers and how their behavior changed after observing the offers as responders.

“Our behavior is … shaped indirectly by observing the actions of our peers, which oftentimes trigger drives to conform and imitate their behavior,” the authors wrote. “A key question is how the neurocognitive systems associated with processing other people’s actions overlap with the machinery dedicated to directly learning from rewards and losses.”

The team used electroencephalograms to track electrical activity in participants’ brains as they played the game. EEGs capture brain responses within hundreds of milliseconds after a stimulus. They also point to brain regions involved in those responses.

“We evaluated how participants responded to acceptances or rejections of their offers, then looked for patterns of brain activity that coincided with their decisions to mimic their partners’ decisions,” Sanda Dolcos said.

The team saw that participants were influenced by how their negotiation partners behaved. Image is in the public domain

The team saw that participants were influenced by how their negotiation partners behaved.

“They became more generous after receiving generous offers and more selfish after receiving selfish offers,” Bogdan said. “And we found that the drive to conform was linked to the same EEG patterns as changing one’s behavior following acceptances or rejections.

“These results demonstrate that the same brain system guides both pathways to behavior change,” Bogdan said. “This indicates that people learn from social information similarly to how they learn on their own from trial and error.”

The study suggests that understanding how someone sees the world “requires considering the people they associate with,” Bogdan said. “More often than not, these will be their guides to right versus wrong.”

See also

About this social neuroscience research news

Author: Diana Yates
Source: University of Illinois
Contact: Diana Yates – University of Illinois
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.
“Direct feedback and social conformity promote behavioral change via mechanisms indexed by centroparietal positivity: Electrophysiological evidence from a role-swapping ultimatum game” by Paul Bogdan et al. Psychophysiology

Abstract

Direct feedback and social conformity promote behavioral change via mechanisms indexed by centroparietal positivity: Electrophysiological evidence from a role-swapping ultimatum game

Our behavior is shaped by multiple factors, including direct feedback (seeing the outcomes of our past actions) and social observation (in part, via a drive to conform to other peoples’ behaviors). However, it remains unclear how these two processes are linked in the context of behavioral change.

This is important to investigate, as behavioral change is associated with distinct neural correlates that reflect specific aspects of processing, such as information integration and rule updating.

To clarify whether these processes characterize both direct learning and conformity, we elicited the two within the same task, using a role-swapping version of the Ultimatum Game—a fairness paradigm where subjects decide how to share a pot of money with other players—while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. Behavioral results showed that subjects decided how to divide the pot based on both direct feedback (seeing whether their past proposals were accepted or rejected) and social observation (copying the splits that others just proposed). Converging EEG evidence revealed that increased centroparietal positivity (P2, P3b, and late positivity) indexed behavioral changes motivated by direct feedback and those motivated by drives to conform.

However, exploratory analyses also suggest that these two motivating factors may also be dissociable, and that frontal midline theta oscillations may predict behavioral changes linked to direct feedback but not conformity. Overall, this study provides novel electrophysiological evidence regarding the different forms of behavioral change.

These findings are also relevant for understanding the mechanisms of social information processing that underlie successful cooperation.

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Brain Mechanisms Involved in Learning Also Drive Social Conformity - Neuroscience News

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A brain network implicated in learning by trial and error also becomes engaged when people adapt to social norms, a new study reports. Findings suggest people learn from social information similarly to learning by trial and error.

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Spanking children may impair their brain development

A study by Harvard researchers analyzed whether children who had been spanked affected their neurobiological brain development. In the study, researchers focused on the areas of the brain that respond to environmental threats including multiple regions in the prefrontal cortex. They studied a group of children ages 3 to 11, with 147 of them being children that had been spanked and captured each child's brain activity in response to actors making either "fearful" or "neutral" faces using an MRI machine. What they found was that although fearful faces elicited a greater activation than neutral faces in all children, children who were spanked demonstrated greater activation in multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex than other children. Despite the fact that many parents don't consider spanking to be a form of abuse, the findings demonstrate that the response in the brain elicited in similar to that of abuse and can be detrimental for the development of children.

This article corresponds to the developmental psychology unit by incorporating topics including parenting styles, childhood development stages, and characteristics of psychological studies.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/spanking-children-may-impair-their-brain-development/

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Spanking may affect a child's brain development in ways similar to more severe forms of violence, according to a new study led by Harvard researchers.

The research builds on existing studies that show heightened activity in certain regions of the brains of children who experience abuse in response to threat cues.

The group found that children who had been spanked had a greater neural response in multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including in regions that are part of the salience network. These areas of the brain respond to cues in the environment that tend to be consequential, such as a threat, and may affect decision-making and processing of situations.

"We know that children whose families use corporal punishment are more likely to develop anxiety, depression, behavior problems, and other mental health problems, but many people don't think about spanking as a form of violence," said Katie A. McLaughlin, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, director of the Stress & Development Lab in the Department of Psychology, and the senior researcher on the study, which was published Friday in the journal Child Development. "In this study, we wanted to examine whether there was an impact of spanking at a neurobiological level, in terms of how the brain is developing."

According to the study's authors, corporal punishment has been linked to the development of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and substance use disorders. And recent studies show that approximately half of parents in U.S. studies reported spanking their children in the past year and one-third in the past week. However, the relationship between spanking and brain activity had not previously been studied.

McLaughlin and her colleagues - including Jorge Cuartas, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in education at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and David Weissman, a postdoctoral fellow in the Stress & Development Lab - analyzed data from a large study of children between the ages of 3 and 11. They focused on 147 children around ages 10 and 11 who had been spanked, excluding children who had also experienced more severe forms of violence.

"... many people don't think about spanking as a form of violence."

- Katie A. McLaughlin, director of the Stress & Development Lab

Each child lay in an MRI machine and watched a computer screen on which were displayed different images of actors making "fearful" and "neutral" faces. A scanner captured the child's brain activity in response to each kind of face, and those images were analyzed to determine whether the faces sparked different patterns of brain activity in children who were spanked compared to those who were not.

"On average, across the entire sample, fearful faces elicited greater activation than neutral faces in many regions throughout the brain ... and children who were spanked demonstrated greater activation in multiple regions of PFC to fearful relative to neutral faces than children who were never spanked," the researchers wrote.

By contrast, "There were no regions of the brain where activation to fearful relative to neutral faces differed between children who were abused and children who were spanked."

The findings are in line with similar research conducted on children who had experienced severe violence, suggesting that "while we might not conceptualize corporal punishment to be a form of violence, in terms of how a child's brain responds, it's not all that different than abuse," said McLaughlin. "It's more a difference of degree than of type."

Researchers said the study is a first step toward further interdisciplinary analysis of spanking's potential effects on children's brain development and lived experiences.

"These findings aligned with the predictions from other perspectives on the potential consequences of corporal punishment," studied in fields such as developmental psychology and social work, said Cuartas. "By identifying certain neural pathways that explain the consequences of corporal punishment in the brain, we can further suggest that this kind of punishment might be detrimental to children and we have more avenues to explore it."

However, they noted that their findings are not applicable to the individual life of each child.

"It's important to consider that corporal punishment does not impact every child the same way, and children can be resilient if exposed to potential adversities," said Cuartas. "But the important message is that corporal punishment is a risk that can increase potential problems for children's development, and following a precautionary principle, parents and policymakers should work toward trying to reduce its prevalence."

Ultimately, added McLaughlin, "We're hopeful that this finding may encourage families not to use this strategy, and that it may open people's eyes to the potential negative consequences of corporal punishment in ways they haven't thought of before."
This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health

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Spanking children may impair their brain development

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Spanking may affect a child's brain development in ways similar to more severe forms of violence, according to a new study led by Harvard researchers. The research builds on existing studies that show heightened activity in certain regions of the brains of children who experience abuse in response to threat cues.

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Psychopaths Remain Just as Bad, or Worse, as They Age

The article studies how the behaviors of individuals with ASPD or psychopathy often get worse as they age. Although many believe that offenders burn out and change their antisocial ways over time, new studies shows that those with psychopathic traits remain the same past age 50, and can even become worse as they get older with respect to manipulation, deceit, and abuse. The article also references personal accounts of various victims of individuals with ASPD or psychopathy such as one woman who wrote about her ex-husband that “The older he got, the more abusive he became. He lied, cheated, used, and stole. As he aged, he seemed to care less about hiding his behavior, and he seemed to openly enjoy being cruel.”Overall, experts have concluded that people with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy never stop their manipulative and deceptive behavior.

This article relates to the unit of clinical psychology because it references psychological disorders such as anti social personality disorder and the way it represents itself in individuals. It also provides detailed accounts of the tactics these individuals can use to manipulate others as a result of their disorder.

https://neurosciencenews.com/psychopaths-behavior-aging-20599/

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While most people mellow with age, this does not appear to be the case for those with ASPD or psychopathy. Researchers report maladaptive behaviors associated with ASPD often get worse as people with the personality disorder age. Anyone waiting for a sociopath to grow up or calm down should give up; they will not change, a new study has revealed.
The research, published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, surveyed more than 1,200 partners, family members and friends of psychopaths-93% reported they were just as bad, or worse, as they got older.

Co-author Professor Martin Sellbom, of the University of Otago's Department of Psychology, says the research focused on people with antisocial personality disorder/psychopathy who were aged over 50.

"There is a general idea that offenders burn out and change their antisocial ways. But this study shows that those with psychopathic traits very much remain the same past age 50, and some even become worse as they get older with respect to manipulation, deceit, and abuse," he says.

The study took a unique victim-centered approach.

"This research gives a voice to the victims of psychopathy, providing a general indication of the degree to which victims are affected. Most of the time we focus on the individuals with such traits, and their biased perspectives."

According to those surveyed, 935 individuals showed levels of disordered traits considered indicative of ASPD/psychopathy. Respondents said 99% were manipulative, 94% engaged in antisocial behavior, 93% were emotionally abusive, 89% were psychologically abusive, 58% were financially abusive, and 47% were violent.

Many respondents provided narrative descriptions of what they witnessed and experienced. One woman wrote about her ex-husband: "The older he got, the more abusive he became. He lied, cheated, used, and stole. As he aged, he seemed to care less about hiding his behavior, and he seemed to openly enjoy being cruel."

Another respondent wrote about her mother: "Nothing ever changed. She exploits, lies, throws tantrums, rages, abandons, pouts, defames, threatens, and would still be physically violent if she had the physical strength."

"There are many ways people can be victimized and many are unaware of the warning signs of psychopathy before it is too late. These individuals can be very charming and say all the right things to hook someone, but then the manipulation begins," Professor Sellbom says.

Research shows people with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy never stop their manipulative and deceptive behavior. Image is in the public domain

Survey respondents reported significant harm caused by these over-50 individuals: 68% lost money, 45% incurred debt, 26% were physically abused or injured, and 27% had their lives threatened.

Psychological harm was even more widespread: 88% of survey respondents said they became anxious or depressed, 76% said the stress of the involvement made them ill, 70% said they suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and 31% considered or attempted suicide.

Lead author Donna Andersen, founder of non-profit Lovefraud Education and Recovery, says the research shows people with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy never stop their manipulative and deceptive behavior.

"Anyone who is waiting for a senior sociopath to grow up or calm down-whether this person is a romantic partner, family member, work colleague or friend-should stop wasting their life and escape. He or she will not change."

About this personality disorder and behavior research news

Author: Press Office
Source: University of Otago
Contact: Press Office - University of Otago
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.
" Surviving Senior Psychopathy: Informant Reports of Deceit and Antisocial Behavior in Multiple Types of Relationships" by Donna M. Andersen et al. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
Abstract

Surviving Senior Psychopathy: Informant Reports of Deceit and Antisocial Behavior in Multiple Types of Relationships
A prevailing view among researchers and mental health clinicians is that symptoms of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD)/psychopathy decrease as affected individuals reach middle age.

In the current investigation, informants were surveyed about the behavior of individuals who they believed showed traits of ASPD/psychopathy and were over the age of 50.

A final sample of 1,215 respondents rated the index individuals according to the ASPD/psychopathy traits derived from the pre-publication first draft of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition, revealing high endorsement of traits associated with ASPD.

Survey respondents reported their observations that individuals who met a threshold for putative ASPD/psychopathy continued to engage in antisocial behavior after age 50, and as a result the respondents endured significant harm, including material losses, financial losses, and various self-reported mental health problems.

Those who knew the index individuals both before and after the age of 50 were specifically asked whether there was a change in the individual's engagement in manipulation, deceit, and antisocial behavior; 93% of respondents reported that the behavior was just as bad or worse after age 50.

Other researchers have suggested that the DSM diagnostic criteria do not accurately describe ASPD/psychopathy symptoms and behavior in older adults, and that the disorder remains stable, but its manifestation changes with age. This study supports those conclusions.

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Psychopaths Remain Just as Bad, or Worse, as They Age - Neuroscience News

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While most people mellow with age, this does not appear to be the case for those with ASPD or psychopathy. Researchers report maladaptive behaviors associated with ASPD often get worse as people with the personality disorder age. Anyone waiting for a sociopath to grow up or calm down should give up; they will not change, a new study has revealed.

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What can politicians learn from tracking your psychology? Pretty much everything

The article explains the new ways in which psychology is used for political manipulation including through personality tests which can predict people's political opinions. Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of over 50 million Facebook users without their permission to find out information about voter's personalities so that they could understand how to influence their voting opinions. They used psychographics to ask odd, probing questions about what motivated people, what their life was about, and what was important to them. This information was then used to create demographic profiles defining people based on their lifestyles and values so researchers could then learn how to better sell information to them. Overall, this demonstrates the growing power of social media to reveal extensive information about people, including the inner workings of their mind, and how that information can be manipulated.

This article relates to the unit of Motivation, emotion, and personality because it references various topics learned in class such as psychometric tests like the Big Five personality test, Abraham Maslow's theories of self actualization, and personality theories.

https://qz.com/1232873/what-can-politicians-learn-from-tracking-your-psychology-pretty-much-everything/

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Psychology has always been used as a tool for political manipulation. At its most crude, politicians historically used terror to control the public, and propaganda to mislead them. Certain contemporary methods, though, are far subtler.

Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company behind Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, reportedly used some of the most sophisticated-and nefarious-psychological tactics to help secure political victory. Last week, the New York Times and the Observer (the British newspaper, published on Sundays and sister to The Guardiannewspaper) reported that the company worked with a University of Cambridge psychologist to harvest the data of 50 million Facebook users without their permission.

Cambridge Analytica wanted this information not because it cares about who has the pithiest status update or what comment got the most likes, but because online activity accumulates into a huge amount of data. And these data, it turns out, can be used to reveal the nuances of personality types and voting tendencies. Such sophisticated voter profiles in turn give political operatives fairly detailed insight into type of messaging will be most effective to influence Facebook users' opinions.

This method relies on "psychographics," which is more or less an online application of decades-old principles of psychology.

Pollsters typically rely on demographic data to predict election outcomes. Demographic research tends to classify people according to clear-cut characteristics, such as age, sex, race, class, education, and employment. Private companies also study traits like the age and gender of who buys their products so as to sell more effectively.

Psychographics works the same way-except it uses personality type, rather than age and sex, to predict behavior. It's not a brand-new concept; in the documentary Century of the Self, filmmaker Adam Curtis shows how researchers from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) used psychology to understand both personality types and so predict political behavior of the US public during the 1980s. The SRI sent out a huge survey to build an understanding of personal motivations.

Questions included "I'd say I'm rebelling against the way I was brought up," and "In general, it's more important to understand my inner self than to be famous, powerful, or wealthy." Members of the public weren't used to being asked such probing questions and responded enthusiastically: SRI's survey had a massive 86% response rate. "We were asking people to think about things that they'd never thought about before and they liked thinking about them," Amina Marie Spengler, director of psychological values at the research program from 1978 to 1986, said in Century of the Self. "Like what they felt inside, what motivated them, what was their life about, what was important to them."

Based on the results of this survey, SRI created a set of profiles that mapped onto psychologist Abraham Maslow's theories of self-actualization. These defined people according to their lifestyle and values: "Inner directeds" considered personal satisfaction more important than status or money, for example, while "I-am-me's" defied tradition to invent their own standards, and "experientials" constantly sought new and active experiences.

"We were trying to look into people's underlying values so we could predict what is their lifestyle, what kind of house do they live in, what kind of car do they drive. The corporations were then able to sell things to them by understanding them," said Spengler.

The same underlying values could be used to predict a person's politics: "Inner directeds," for example, consistently said they'd vote for Ronald Reagan for US president and Margaret Thatcher for UK prime minister. Psychology questionnaires effectively predicted voter behavior. "That was completely new," Christine MacNulty, program manager at SRI's values and lifestyles team from 1978 to 1981, said in Century of the Self.

Psychologists today no longer have to rely on questionnaires thanks to the huge trove of information they can glean from social media use. Psychologists at the University of Cambridge created myPersonality Facebook application, which asked Facebook users to take psychometric tests, including the Big Five personality test (which grades people on levels of neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience), and stored the resulting data. Tens of thousands of people who took the test also gave permission for the academics access their Facebook posts and behavior. This has allowed academics to create models of what sort of social-media behavior correlates with particular personality types. Now, social-media use can be decoded to reveal levels of the big five personality types.

It doesn't end there. Psychologists have used social-media behavior to measure depression, ADHD, race, physical health, political orientation, and sexual orientation, among other characteristics. Such findings tend to be accurate in aggregate, meaning it can effectively and accurately the level of depression, for example, within a given population, though the ability to predict characteristics based on social media use isn't necessarily perfectly accurate on an individual level.

Cambridge Analytica reportedly went a step beyond current industry-standard practices, though, by harvesting social-media data without users' permission. Though you might be less concerned about a third party accessing your Facebook posts than, say, your bank details, the implications are huge. Lyle Ungar, a University of Pennsylvania professor who researches the psychology of social media use, says he's been approached by (and turned down) health-insurance companies who want him to help them trawl social media behavior to learn more about potential customers. Facebook posts may not seem like a window into your soul but, taken together, your social media activity likely reveals a huge amount about how you live: The hours you're awake, how sociable you are, and, yes, even who you're likely to vote for.

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What can politicians learn from tracking your psychology? Pretty much everything

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Psychology has always been used as a tool for political manipulation. At its most crude, politicians historically used terror to control the public, and propaganda to mislead them. Certain contemporary methods, though, are far subtler. Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company behind Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, reportedly used some of the most sophisticated-and nefarious-psychological tactics to help secure political victory.

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Possible articles:
https://time.com/6171190/new-science-of-forgetting/
https://time.com/5267710/social-media-hurts-memory/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/health/memory-forgetting-psychology.html
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/12/daniel-kahneman-on-how-to-influence-others/

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We often experience forgetting as a frustration, or a glitch in the memory system. But new research shows it has real value.

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The Psychological Concept That Can Make You A More Effective Marketer

The article addresses the role of classical conditioning in business and how brands use it to influence consumer behavior. This connection is especially prevalent in non profits such as the Humane Society, which uses images of animals in its advertisements, along with something about how the audience can improve the animal's life. By repeatedly appealing to certain values in their specific audience, they further reinforce the connection. There are many ways brands can focus on classical conditioning in order to improve their brand, such as by pairing your brand with something that produces a reward, such as a free product or coupon. This will cause the consumer to learn to associate your brand with a good deal. Marketing ads that elicit feelings of happiness or joy, such as Christmas themes ads, can also be effective in causing consumers to create positive associations. Classical conditioning combines the studies of marketing and psychology to help brands.

This article relates to the unit of learning because of its explanation of the origins of classical conditioning and reference of figures such as Ivan Pavlov. It explains the process of eliciting a response in classical conditioning by using value-adding promotions or desire-quenching images.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2020/02/19/the-psychological-concept-that-can-make-you-a-more-effective-marketer/?sh=55b3190321a4

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Why do humans purchase the things that they do? Why do they choose certain brands over others? One of the most powerful things that influences consumer behavior is a basic psychological concept called classical conditioning. This type of learning can explain why we buy the same things over and over again. We have been conditioned to respond to and be attracted to certain brands, goods and products. Interestingly, we are often not even aware that this has taken place. The most successful brands know this and use the principles of classical conditioning to get us to buy their products. Here's how.
The Role Of Classical Conditioning
If you've ever taken an introductory psychology class, you've probably heard of classical conditioning. The term was coined by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, who came up with the idea that animals - and humans - could be conditioned to respond to a neutral stimulus.

Let me explain. Pavlov studied digestion in dogs. While conducting research studies on digestion, the physiologist noted that the dogs drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the researchers who fed them. The animals didn't need to see or taste the food to react. Just seeing a white lab coat was enough to make them drool.

Pavlov decided to study this phenomenon in the laboratory. Pavlov started by feeding the dogs meat powder. When given the meat powder, the dogs would salivate. This is a response that occurred automatically. The next part of the research involved ringing a bell. Pavlov initially didn't get a response when he rang the bell. However, he eventually paired the ringing of the bell with food. Every time he rang a bell, he would give the dogs the food. Eventually, the dogs made such a connection between the bell ringing and the meat powder that they began to salivate at the sound of a bell even if there wasn't any food in sight! He was able to get the dogs to react to something that normally wouldn't produce an effect. Advertisers use this principle in marketing campaigns all the time to get people to react to their products.

Real-world example: In nonprofits, a strong connection often exists between classical conditioning and the company's marketing efforts. For example, the Humane Society is a tremendously successful charity that always includes images of animals in its print and video marketing, along with something about how the audience can improve the animal's life. By repeatedly appealing to certain values in their specific audience, they further reinforce the connection, making this a salient example of classical conditioning.
How To Make Classical Conditioning Work For Your Brand
So, how can you use the principles of classical conditioning to make people have positive associations with your brand or product?

Try pairing your brand with something that produces a reward. For instance, offer a bonus deal or incentive that gives customers free products once they purchase a certain number of products. This activates a reward response. The customer learns to associate your brand with a good deal. That lasting impression can actually cause people to assume that they're getting a good value even when you don't have a promotion running.

Another popular technique is to market your product in a way that forms an association with feelings of happiness, satisfaction and success. Many successful brands do this. When you think of Christmas, how do you feel? For most people, the Christmas season elicits feelings of joy and happiness. Coca-Cola knows this, and so the beverage company has been associating its ads with Christmas since the 1920s. (Full disclosure: I have worked with several of Coke's C-suite executives.) Perhaps try images that feature groups of friends having fun or a person taking control of their morning routine. These types of images can make your product look like a gateway to positive experiences.
The Bottom Line
The focus really needs to be on "training" customers to think of and turn to your product or brand on a Pavlovian basis. You can do this by creating a response to stimuli using value-adding promotions or desire-quenching imagery. Of course, it is always important to use marketing techniques that are ethical and responsible when tapping into the power of classical conditioning. The implementation of classical conditioning done correctly marries the worlds of marketing and psychology in a way that helps brands to enter mainstream consciousness.

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Council Post: The Psychological Concept That Can Make You A More Effective Marketer

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Why do humans purchase the things that they do? Why do they choose certain brands over others? One of the most powerful things that influences consumer behavior is a basic psychological concept called classical conditioning. This type of learning can explain why we buy the same things over and over again.

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Feeling Sensations, Including Ones Connected to Sadness, May Be Key to Depression Recovery

New research has found that keeping sensation alive in the face of stress is critical for well-being, particularly for those who have recovered from depression. Findings also demonstrated that there was a link between past depression and a greater tendency to shut down sensory processing when faced with an emotional stressor. Furthermore, blocking out sensation is related to a greater risk of depressive relapse. This is due to the fact that when our brains shut out sensory information during a negative mood, we are left with only our thoughts to make sense of what is happening and these thoughts often fail to provide a wider view of what is going on. As a result, this blocking out bodily sensations locks people into an “echo chamber” of their negative views. Overall, if a person suppresses their bodily sensations, their thoughts will compound into more and more depressive reactions.

This article relates to the unit of sensation and perception because it references bodily sensations and how they play a role in depression.

https://neurosciencenews.com/sensation-depression-20431/

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Suppressing or blocking out physical sensations related to emotions such as sadness can hinder recovery from depression symptoms and may cause a relapse into depression. The physical sensations that accompany sadness can feel as undesirable as they are intense-a constriction of the chest, watery eyes and a raw throat, to name a few.
But Norman Farb, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Zindel Segal, a distinguished professor of psychology in mood disorders at U of T Scarborough, have discovered that keeping sensation alive in the face of stress is critical for well-being, particularly for those who have recovered from depression.

In the largest neuroimaging study to date of psychotherapy for preventing relapse and recurrence in depression, the researchers linked past depression with a greater tendency to shut down sensory processing when faced with an emotional stressor.

They also found that blocking out sensation is related to a greater risk of depressive relapse.

"We don't like feeling bad things, (but) we don't really think about the implications of balancing our short-term relief with our long-term health," says Farb.

"Our research explains why working to keep feeling is so important. It lays the groundwork for seeing that emotional stress actually robs us of sensation-and to undo stress, one must counter this inhibitory effect."

The study, published recently in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical, was co-authored by Farb and Segal, along with Ph.D. student Philip Desormeau, in the psychological clinical science graduate department at U of T Scarborough, and Cornell University Professor Adam Anderson.

The study included 166 participants who had recovered from depression but were vulnerable to a future episode. They were divided into two groups. Over an eight-week period, one group underwent cognitive therapy with a well-being focus, while the other group underwent mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

Between cognitive therapy sessions, 85 participants also had their brain activity measured through a fMRI scan while watching four consecutive clips from TV shows that wouldn't normally produce an emotional trigger as a baseline-for example, a lifestyle-related show on HGTV-as well as clips from an emotionally charged movie such as 1983's Terms of Endearment.

For the following two years, researchers followed up with participants every two months.

Farb says he and colleagues discovered something fascinating while studying the brain scans of those who relapsed: they had more of a tendency to "shut down."

When exposed to the emotionally charged video clips, the parts of their brain that control sensations shut down more often than those who had not relapsed. Researchers also found that those who reported higher feelings of sadness during the movie clips weren't necessarily more likely to suffer a relapse.

They also found that blocking out sensation is related to a greater risk of depressive relapse. Image is in the public domain

"What actually determined their depression levels was how much that sadness was accompanied by a sensory shutdown," Farb says.

He adds that when our brains shut out sensory information during a negative mood, we are left with only our thoughts to make sense of what is happening. Often, these thoughts fail to provide a wider view of what is going on-and blocking out bodily sensations locks people into an "echo chamber" of their negative views.

"Our thoughts are there to nail things down so you can hold onto them over time, and that's fine as long as they keep getting updated-but the thing that updates it is new sensations," Farb explains.

The researchers say their findings help explain why negative everyday life situations-such as getting criticized at a work meeting or butting heads with your spouse-could cause a relapse in somebody who has recovered from depression.

Segal says such seemingly minor events can trigger deeper feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness in those with a history of depression.

"This negative mood gets tied up with thoughts about themselves and can be easily perpetuated over time, and the person can feel worse," Segal says, adding that such thoughts often produce bodily sensations.

"If the person suppresses these bodily sensations, their thoughts will compound into more and more depressive reactions."

Farb adds that the study could help clinical researchers create new assessments around sensory inhibition as a risk marker for depression. It could also contribute to developing targeted therapies that help people recovering from depression become better at noticing their sensations throughout the day, which, in turn, could help them counter negative moods that can shut down sensation and "lock in" depressive thinking.

"We don't have to wait until the person starts to really spiral, where it takes a lot of resources and time and effort to pull them out," Farb says.

"You can start to notice if the person is starting to fit the profile of someone who's getting really sensory-avoidant. We can address it then, before the person stops showing up to work or taking care of their kids."

About this depression research news

Author: Kristy Strauss
Source: University of Toronto
Contact: Kristy Strauss - University of Toronto
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
" Static and treatment-responsive brain biomarkers of depression relapse vulnerability following prophylactic psychotherapy: Evidence from a randomized control trial" by Norman A.S. Farb et al. NeuroImage: Clinical
Abstract Static and treatment-responsive brain biomarkers of depression relapse vulnerability following prophylactic psychotherapy: Evidence from a randomized control trial
Background

Neural reactivity to dysphoric mood induction indexes the tendency for distress to promote cognitive reactivity and sensory avoidance. Linking these responses to illness prognosis following recovery from Major Depressive Disorder informs our understanding of depression vulnerability and provides engagement targets for prophylactic interventions.

Methods

A prospective fMRI neuroimaging design investigated the relationship between dysphoric reactivity and relapse following prophylactic intervention. Remitted depressed outpatients (N = 85) were randomized to 8 weeks of Cognitive Therapy with a Well-Being focus or Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. Participants were assessed before and after therapy and followed for 2 years to assess relapse status. Neural reactivity common to both assessment points identified static biomarkers of relapse, whereas reactivity change identified dynamic biomarkers.

Results

Dysphoric mood induction evoked prefrontal activation and sensory deactivation. Controlling for past episodes, concurrent symptoms and medication status, somatosensory deactivation was associated with depression recurrence in a static pattern that was unaffected by prophylactic treatment, HR 0.04, 95% CI [0.01, 0.14], p < .001. Treatment-related prophylaxis was linked to reduced activation of the left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), HR 3.73, 95% CI [1.33, 10.46], p  = .013. Contralaterally, the right LPFC showed dysphoria-evoked inhibitory connectivity with the right somatosensory biomarker

Conclusions

These findings support a two-factor model of depression relapse vulnerability, in which: enduring patterns of dysphoria-evoked sensory deactivation contribute to episode return, but vulnerability may be mitigated by targeting prefrontal regions responsive to clinical intervention. Emotion regulation during illness remission may be enhanced by reducing prefrontal cognitive processes in favor of sensory representation and integration.

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Feeling Sensations, Including Ones Connected to Sadness, May Be Key to Depression Recovery - Neuroscience News

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Suppressing or blocking out physical sensations related to emotions such as sadness can hinder recovery from depression symptoms and may cause a relapse into depression. The physical sensations that accompany sadness can feel as undesirable as they are intense-a constriction of the chest, watery eyes and a raw throat, to name a few.

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How Sleep Helps to Process Emotions

Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. Researchers first used mice to study neuron activity following presentations of the emotions of either safety or danger. What they found was that the brain favors the discrimination of safety versus danger in the dendrites, but blocks the over-reaction to emotion, in particular danger. Researchers are using these findings to develop a better understanding of the processing of emotions during sleep in humans and open new perspectives for therapeutic targets to treat maladaptive processing of traumatic memories, such as post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) and their early sleep-dependent consolidation.

This article relates to the biological bases of behavior unit of psychology because it explains important facts about sleep and references terminology such as REM sleep, prefrontal cortex, cell body, axons, and dendrites. It also references various mental disorders such as anxiety or PTSD and how they can effect sleep.

https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-emotion-processing-
20578/

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Study sheds light on how the brain processes emotions during dream sleep by consolidating positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative emotions. The findings could pave the way for new treatments for PTSD and other disorders associated with negative emotional processing. Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones.
The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health and offers the way to new therapeutic strategies.

Rapid eye movement (REM or paradoxical) sleep is a unique and mysterious sleep state during which most dreams occur together with intense emotional contents.

How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. The prefrontal cortex integrates many of these emotions during wakefulness but appears paradoxically quiescent during REM sleep.

"Our goal was to understand the underlying mechanism and the functions of such a surprising phenomenon," says Prof. Antoine Adamantidis from the Department of Biomedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern.

Processing emotions, particularly distinguishing between danger and safety, is critical for the survival of animals.

In humans, excessively negative emotions, such as fear reactions and states of anxiety, lead to pathological states like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Europe, roughly 15% of the population is affected by persistent anxiety and severe mental illness.

The research group headed by Antoine Adamantidis is now providing insights into how the brain helps to reinforce positive emotions and weaken strongly negative or traumatic emotions during REM sleep.

This study was published in the journal Science.
A dual mechanism
The researchers first conditioned mice to recognize auditory stimuli associated with safety and others associated with danger (aversive stimuli). The activity of neurons in the brain of mice was then recorded during sleep-wake cycles.

In this way, the researchers were able to map different areas of a cell and determine how emotional memories are transformed during REM sleep.

Neurons are composed of a cell body (soma) that integrates information coming from the dendrites (inputs) and sends signals to other neurons via their axons (outputs). The results obtained showed that cell somas are kept silent while their dendrites are activated.

"This means a decoupling of the two cellular compartments, in other words soma wide asleep and dendrites wide awake," explains Adamantidis.

This decoupling is important because the strong activity of the dendrites allows the encoding of both danger and safety emotions, while the inhibitions of the soma completely block the output of the circuit during REM sleep. In other words, the brain favors the discrimination of safety versus danger in the dendrites, but blocks the over-reaction to emotion, in particular danger.
A survival advantage
According to the researchers, the coexistence of both mechanisms is beneficial to the stability and survival of the organisms:

"This bi-directional mechanism is essential to optimize the discrimination between dangerous and safe signals," says Mattia Aime from the DBMR, first author of the study. If this discrimination is missing in humans and excessive fear reactions are generated, this can lead to anxiety disorders.

How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. Image is in the public domain

The findings are particularly relevant to pathological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorders, in which trauma is over-consolidated in the prefrontal cortex, day after day during sleep.
Breakthrough for sleep medicine
These findings pave the way to a better understanding of the processing of emotions during sleep in humans and open new perspectives for therapeutic targets to treat maladaptive processing of traumatic memories, such as post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) and their early sleep-dependent consolidation.

Additional acute or chronic mental health issues that may implicate this somatodendritic decoupling during sleep include acute and chronic stress, anxiety, depression, panic, or even anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure.

Sleep research and sleep medicine have long been a research focus of the University of Bern and the Inselspital, Bern University Hospital.

"We hope that our findings will not only be of interest to the patients, but also to the broad public," says Adamantidis.

About this sleep and emotional processing research news

Author: Press Office
Source: University of Bern
Contact: Press Office - University of Bern
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.
" Paradoxical somatodendritic decoupling supports cortical plasticity during REM sleep" by Mattia Aime et al. Science
Abstract Paradoxical somatodendritic decoupling supports cortical plasticity during REM sleep
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is associated with the consolidation of emotional memories. Yet, the underlying neocortical circuits and synaptic mechanisms remain unclear.

We found that REM sleep is associated with a somatodendritic decoupling in pyramidal neurons of the prefrontal cortex.

This decoupling reflects a shift of inhibitory balance between parvalbumin neuron-mediated somatic inhibition and vasoactive intestinal peptide-mediated dendritic disinhibition, mostly driven by neurons from the central medial thalamus.

REM-specific optogenetic suppression of dendritic activity led to a loss of danger-versus-safety discrimination during associative learning and a lack of synaptic plasticity, whereas optogenetic release of somatic inhibition resulted in enhanced discrimination and synaptic potentiation.

Somatodendritic decoupling during REM sleep promotes opposite synaptic plasticity mechanisms that optimize emotional responses to future behavioral stressors.

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How Sleep Helps to Process Emotions - Neuroscience News

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Study sheds light on how the brain processes emotions during dream sleep by consolidating positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative emotions. The findings could pave the way for new treatments for PTSD and other disorders associated with negative emotional processing.

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What’s in a Name? Glimmers of Evolution in Naming Babies

University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Mitchell Newberry has found that the more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. This fact is supported by an understanding of ecological and evolutionary change because the names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. If people tend to copy the most common variant or name that is references in some popular movie, then everyone ends up doing roughly the same thing. However, if people become less willing to copy a variant as it becomes more popular, it leads to a greater diversity of variants. This same data also supports trends of dog breed preferences. Studies demonstrated that rare dog breeds at 1 in 10,000 tend to increase in popularity faster than dogs already at 1 in 10. Overall, evolutionary psychology plays a greater role in the naming of babies and choosing of dog breeds than one might think.

This article relates to the unit of scientific foundations because it examines the evolutionary school of thought and implements terms consistent with the school such as frequency-dependent selection, which is a type of natural selection, as well as genetic diversity, immune escape, host-pathogen dynamics. Furthermore, the article also addresses how conformity or nonconformity play a role in evolution. For example, anti conformity is necessary because if we all had the same immune system, we would all be susceptible to exactly the same diseases.

https://neurosciencenews.com/baby-naming-evolution-20699/

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The more popular a baby's name becomes, the less likely the next generation of parents will use it. The same goes for dog breeds and the decline in popularity of specific breeds from one generation of owners to the next. Maverick was first used as a baby name after a television show called "Maverick" aired in the 1950s, but its popularity rose meteorically in 1986 with the release of the movie "Top Gun." Today, it is even used for baby girls.
The name Emma peaked in popularity in the late 1800s, declined precipitously through the first half of the 1900s, then shot back up to be one of the most popular names of the early 2000s. Linda peaked somewhere in the late 1940s and Daniel in the mid-1980s. But each rise in popularity was followed by an equally steep decline.

So, what's in a name-or, at least, what's in a baby name trend? University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Mitchell Newberry has found that the more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit.

Same goes for popular dog breeds: Dalmatians today are a tenth as popular as they were in the 1990s.

Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners.

His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Newberry looks at frequency-dependent selection, a kind of natural selection in which the tendency to copy a certain variant depends on that variant's current frequency or popularity, regardless of its content.

If people tend to copy the most common variant, then everyone ends up doing roughly the same thing. But if people become less willing to copy a variant the more popular it becomes, it leads to a greater diversity of variants.

"Think of how we use millions of different names to refer to people but we almost always use the same word to refer to baseball," Newberry said. "For words, there's pressure to conform, but my work shows that the diversity of names results from pressures against conformity."

These trends are common in biology, but difficult to quantify. What researchers do have is a complete database of the names of babies over the last 87 years.

Newberry used the Social Security Administration baby name database, itself born in 1935, to examine frequency dependence in first names in the United States. He found that when a name is most rare-1 in 10,000 births-it tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most common-more than 1 in 100 births-its popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

"This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity," Newberry said.

"If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then it's going to create a lot of new things. Every time a new thing is created, it's promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population."

Using the same techniques they applied to baby names, Newberry and colleagues examined dog breed preferences using a database of purebred dog registrations from the American Kennel Club. They found boom-bust cycles in the popularity of dog breeds similar to the boom-bust cycles in baby names.

The researchers found a Greyhound boom in the 1940s and a Rottweiler boom in the 1990s. This shows what researchers call a negative frequency dependent selection, or anti-conformity, meaning that as frequency increases, selection becomes more negative. That means that rare dog breeds at 1 in 10,000 tend to increase in popularity faster than dogs already at 1 in 10.

"Biologists basically think these frequency-dependent pressures are fundamental in determining so many things," Newberry said. "The long list includes genetic diversity, immune escape, host-pathogen dynamics, the fact that there's basically a one-to-one ratio of males and females-and even what different populations think is sexy.

University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Mitchell Newberry has found that the more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. Image is in the public domain

"Why do birds like long tails? Why do bamboos take so long to flower? Why do populations split into different species? All of these relate at a fundamental level to either pressures of conformity or anticonformity within populations."

Conformity is necessary within species, Newberry says. For example, scientists can alter the order of genes on a fly's chromosomes, and it does not affect the fly at all. But that doesn't happen in the wild, because when that fly mates, its genes won't pair with its mate's, and their offspring will not survive.

However, we also need anticonformity, he says. If we all had the same immune system, we would all be susceptible to exactly the same diseases. Or, Newberry says, if the same species of animal all visited the same patch of land for food, they would quickly eat themselves out of existence.

"Life is this dance of when do we have to cohere, and when do we have to separate?" he said. "Natural selection is incredibly hard to measure. You're asking, for an entire population, who lived, who died and why. And that's just a crazy thing to try to ask. By contrast, in names, we literally know every single name for the entire country for a hundred years."

About this evolutionary psychology research news

Author: Morgan Sherburne
Source: University of Michigan
Contact: Morgan Sherburne - University of Michigan
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.
" Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture" by Mitchell Newberry et al. Nature Human Behavior
Abstract Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture
The frequency of a cultural trait can influence its tendency to be copied.

We develop a maximum-likelihood method to measure such frequency-dependent selection from time series data, and we apply it to baby names and purebred dog preferences over the past century.

The form of negative frequency dependence we infer among names explains their diversity patterns, and it replicates across the United States, France, Norway and the Netherlands.

We find different growth rates for male versus female names, attributable to different rates of innovation, whereas biblical names enjoy a genuine selective advantage at all frequencies, which explains their predominance among top names.

We show how frequency dependence emerges from a host of underlying selective mechanisms, including a preference for novelty that recapitulates boom-bust fads among dog owners.

Our analysis of cultural evolution through frequency-dependent selection provides a quantitative account of social pressures to conform or to be different.

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What's in a Name? Glimmers of Evolution in Naming Babies - Neuroscience News

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The more popular a baby's name becomes, the less likely the next generation of parents will use it. The same goes for dog breeds and the decline in popularity of specific breeds from one generation of owners to the next.