Does picturing yourself eating fruit increase your fruit intake?

Health experts say we aren't eating enough fruit. Perhaps psychology can help. Try this. Picture yourself eating a portion of fruit tomorrow - an apple, say, or a couple of plums. Take your time. Focus on the colours, the consistency, the flavour. Visualise where you are at the time, and what you are doing.

Do you think this simple imagery task will have increased the likelihood you will eat fruit tomorrow? A new study led by Catherine Adams attempted to find out. Over two hundred volunteers were split into three groups. One performed the fruit imagery task, another group did the same thing but for a biscuit bar of their choice (examples they were given included flapjacks, Kellogg's Elevenses and Jaffa Cake bars), and a final group did not perform an imagery task.

Straight after, the participants answered questions about their food preferences, future consumption intentions, and they were offered a reward from a basket of fruits and biscuit bars. Two days later they were also asked by email whether they had any eaten fruit or a biscuit bar the day before (35 per cent of them answered this).

Once the researchers controlled for background factors (such as the possibility there were more fruit lovers in one condition or the other), they found that the fruit imagery task made no difference to participants' intentions to eat fruit, no difference to their choice of fruit as a reward, nor their consumption of fruit the next day, as compared with the control group who didn't perform the imagery. For the biscuit bar group, the imagery task increased their intentions to eat biscuit bars in the future, but didn't actually alter their consumption (as compared against the no-imagery control group).

"These effects suggest different effects for different visualised behaviours," the researchers said. "Further investigation is needed before recommending visualisation for increasing fruit consumption."

As the researchers' acknowledged, there are some issues with the study that mean caution is needed in interpreting the results. For instance, just one brief imagery session may well be inadequate. Also, other research suggests imagery works best when combined with other strategies, such as "if-then" implementation plans (e.g. If I am hungry, then I will snack on some fruit). The response rate to the follow-up email was also disappointing, and bear in mind that participants may have felt the food they chose immediately after the imagery was a form of reward, and therefore this behaviour may not reflect their usual eating choices. These issues show how difficult health behaviour research can be.

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Adams C, Rennie L, Uskul AK, and Appleton KM (2013). Visualising future behaviour: Effects for snacking on biscuit bars, but no effects for snacking on fruit. Journal of health psychology PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24217063

Further reading. The Digest guide to willpower: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-digest-guide-to-willpower.html

The mindbus technique for resisting chocolate - should we climb aboard?http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-mindbus-technique-for-resisting.html

The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads

Studying the ways people talk to themselves in their own minds is incredibly tricky because as soon as you ask them about it, you're likely interfering with the process you want to investigate. As William James said, some forms of introspective analysis are like "… trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."

For many years Russell Hurlbert and his colleagues have used a technique that they believe offers the best way to study what they call "pristine" inner speaking, unaltered by outside interference. They provide participants with a beeper that goes off randomly several times a day, and ask them to record in precise terms their mental activity that was happening just before the beeps. Early in the process, this "descriptive experience sampling" (DES) approach also involves cooperative interviews between the participants and a trained researcher, so that the participant can learn to identify true instances of inner speaking from other mental phenomena.

Now Hurlbert's team has documented some of what they've learned so far about the ways that we talk to ourselves in our own minds. Our inner voices usually sound to us like our external spoken voice - instances of inner speaking occurring in another person's voice are very rare. Just like our spoken voice, the voice of inner speaking can also express degrees of volume and emotion.

Inner speaking is perceived as wilful - something done, rather than experienced passively. There is huge variation in the frequency with which people speak to themselves in their mind. In one study with 30 participants that involved ten beeps a day for three days, some reported no instances of inner speaking at all, while others reported inner speaking for 75 per cent of the beeps. On average inner speaking was reported at 23 per cent of beeps, although note that doesn't mean people are speaking to themselves 23 per cent of the entire time.

Another curious variation in inner speaking is where people report its location. Some people describe it as occurring in a particular location in their head; others say in their head but are no more specific; still others say their inner speaking occurs in their chest.

Also notable is some people's descriptions of inner speaking occurring while they are speaking aloud - with the two voices saying different things. There are also reports of inner speaking that has no meaning, and inner speaking that is at a much faster rate than would be physically possible for aloud speaking.

Hurlbert's team say it is also important to outline what inner speaking is not. They say it is different from "inner hearing," which is when an inner voice is experienced passively, even if it is one's own voice. This can give rise to a situation where a person has an inner discussion between their inner speaking voice and their heard voice. The researchers give this example from their records, of a man eating dinner in a restaurant, who then notices a woman:

Innerly speaking voice: Why are you bringing this woman to my attention?

Innerly heard voice: She's pretty (spoken in a matter of fact tone).

Innerly speaking voice: Uh huh ("in a that's-bullsh*t tone of voice") [Beeper goes off]

Inner speaking is also different from "unsymbolised thinking" according to the researchers. Unsymbolised thinking is a "thoughty experience" about a distinct concept or issue but does not involve words, pictures or symbols. Inner speaking also is not "sensory awareness" - when we're focused on a specific sensory aspect of the outside world or our bodies.

Hurlbert's group believe their approach has advantages over the questionnaire methods used by other researchers, which obviously rely on people remembering their past mental lives, and are often vague in what they mean by inner speaking. And Hurlbert's group think their method is more trustworthy than simple armchair introspection, because if you sit back and deliberately attempt to analyse your own inner speaking you will immediately interfere with the natural course of your mental activities.

They conclude by outlining many puzzles that remain to be investigated, including why some people appear to experience so much more inner speaking than others (some people report that they experience inner speaking 100 per cent of the time, yet others report none). Also, are there cross-cultural differences in inner speaking? And when and how does inner speaking first appear in life?

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Hurlburt RT, Heavey CL, and Kelsey JM (2013). Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking. Consciousness and cognition, 22 (4), 1477-94 PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24184987

Author weblink: http://faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt/

Further reading. 'Don't do it!' - how your inner voice really does aid self-control: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/dont-do-it-how-your-inner-voice-really.html

The same voices heard differently: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/same-voices-heard-differently.html

There are 636,120 ways to have post traumatic stress disorder

The latest version of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) controversial diagnostic code - "the DSM-5" - continues the check-list approach used in previous editions. To receive a specific diagnosis, a patient must exhibit a minimum number of symptoms in different categories. One problem - this implies someone either has a mental illness or they don't.

To avoid missing people who ought to be diagnosed, over time the criteria for many conditions have expanded, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Indeed, in their new analysis of the latest expanded diagnostic criteria for PTSD, Isaac Galatzer-Levy and Richard Bryant calculate that there are now 636,120 ways to be diagnosed with PTSD based on all the possible combinations of symptoms that would fulfil a diagnosis for this condition.

First defined as a distinct disorder in 1980, for many years PTSD was diagnosed based on a patient exhibiting a sufficient number of various symptoms in three categories: reexperiencing symptoms (e.g. flashbacks); avoidance and numbing symptoms (e.g. diminished interest in activities); and arousal symptoms (e.g. insomnia). For the latest version of the DSM, a new symptom category was introduced: alterations in mood and cognition (e.g. increased shame). This means a diagnosis of PTSD is now met according to the patient having a minimum of 8 of 19 possible symptoms across four categories (or criteria), so long as these appear after they witnessed or experienced an event involving actual or threatened harm.

Putting these various diagnostic permutations into the statistical grinder, Galatzer-Levy and Bryant arrive at their figure of 636,120 ways to be diagnosed with PTSD. This compares to 79,794 ways based on DSM-IV - the previous version of the APA's diagnostic code. The net has not widened in this fashion for all conditions - for example the criteria for panic disorder have tightened (there were 54,698 "ways" to be diagnosed with panic disorder in DSM-IV, compared with 23,442 ways in DSM-5).

Galatzer-Levy and Bryant believe the PTSD scenario exemplifies the problem with using a set of pre-defined criteria to identify whether a person has a mental health problem or not. In the pursuit of increasing diagnostic reliability, the code loses its meaning in a fog of heterogeneity. The authors fear that despite the increasing diagnostic complexity, people who need help are still missed, while others continue to be misdiagnosed. They believe this could be the reason why the research into risk factors for PTSD, and into the effectiveness of interventions for the condition, tends to produce such highly varied results.

The ideal situation, according to Galatzer-Levy and Bryant, is for our understanding and description of mental health problems to be based on empirical data - in this case about how people respond to stress and trauma. They say a useful approach is to use statistical techniques that reveal the varieties of ways that people are affected over time - a complexity that is missed by simple symptom check-lists. For instance, Galatzer-Levy and Bryant say there are at least three patterns in the way people respond to stressful events - some cope well and show only short-lived symptoms; others struggle at first but recover with time; while a third group continue struggling with chronic symptoms.

"Such an empirical approach for identifying behavioural patterns both in clinical and nonclinical contexts is nascent," the authors conclude. "A great deal of work is necessary to identify and understand common outcomes of disparate, potentially traumatic, and common stressful life events."

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SOURCE

RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Isaac R. Galatzer-Levy and Richard A. Bryant (2013). 636,120 Ways to Have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Perspectives on Psychological Science.http://pps.sagepub.com/content/8/6/651.abstract

Author weblink: http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=irg2101

Do children learn more from self-explanation than extra practice?

Explaining a rule or concept to yourself forces you to think deeply about it. Plenty of studies have shown this has benefits, both in terms of improving the understanding of relevant concepts and aiding the skill or process in question. Unfortunately, as Katherine McEldoon and her colleagues argue in their new paper, most of these studies are flawed because they failed to control for the extra time spent on self-explanation. So a typical study has compared, say, 30 minutes practice against 30 minutes practice plus time spent on self-explanation. This means any apparent benefit of self-explanation could just be due to extra time spent on studying.

McEldoon's team attempted to avoid this shortcoming. Sixty-nine children, average age 8.8 years, were split into three groups. All had previously struggled with the focus of the study - mathematical equivalence. One baseline group received 50 minutes instruction and practice on solving mathematical equivalence problems (e.g. 6 + 3 + 4 = 6 + _). Another group received the 50 minutes instruction and practice, but they were also prompted to explain why answers to the questions were right or wrong. A final "additional practice" group acted as controls - they received the 50 minutes instruction and practice, and they spent extra time on solving more equations to control for the time taken by the second group on self-explanation. Right after this, and again two weeks later, all the children completed a test of their conceptual understanding and skill at mathematical equivalence problems.

The children in the self-explanation condition showed superior conceptual knowledge compared with the other children, in terms of their knowledge of equation structures (tested with questions like "“Is 8=3+5 true or false?”) but not their understanding of the equals symbol. Their advantage over the additional practice group didn't actually reach statistical significance, though power calculations suggested this could be due to the small sample sizes.

In terms of actual problem solving skill on mathematical equivalence items, the self-explanation group did not differ significantly from the other two conditions. The highest scores were actually achieved by the additional practice group.

Lastly the researchers looked at what's known as "procedural transfer" - the ability of the children to apply themselves to new versions of the mathematical equivalence problems that involved subtraction and the blank being in different position. Here the researchers said the self-explanation group "performed somewhat better" than the other two groups. That is, their scores were higher, but the difference did not reach statistical significance - again possibly due to the samples being too small.

Unfortunately, these results just aren't clear cut enough to provide any solid take-out messages for teachers or parents. More research with larger samples is needed. McEldoon and her colleagues concluded that their findings suggest "self-explanation prompts have some small unique learning benefits, but that greater attention needs to be paid to how much self-explanation offers advantages over other uses of time." 

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SOURCE:

RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

McEldoon KL, Durkin KL, and Rittle-Johnson B (2013). Is self-explanation worth the time? A comparison to additional practice. The British journal of educational psychology, 83 (4), 615-32 PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24175685

Author weblink:http://www.vanderbilt.edu/psychological_sciences/bio/katherine-mceldoon