How fear skews our spatial perception

"Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us," says psychologist Stella Lourenco.

By Carol Clark

That snake heading towards you may be further away than it appears. Fear can skew our perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, finds a study published in Current Biology.

“Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind,” says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, co-author of the study. “Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us. This has clear implications for understanding clinical phobias.”

Lourenco conducted the research with Matthew Longo, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.

People generally have a well-developed sense for when objects heading towards them will make contact, including a split-second cushion for dodging or blocking the object, if necessary. The researchers set up an experiment to test the effect of fear on the accuracy of that skill.

The more fearful someone reported feeling of spiders, the more they underestimated time-to-collision of a looming spider.

Study participants made time-to-collision judgments of images on a computer screen. The images expanded in size over one second before disappearing, to simulate “looming,” an optical pattern used instinctively to judge collision time. The study participants were instructed to gauge when each of the visual stimuli on the computer screen would have collided with them by pressing a button.

The participants tended to underestimate the collision time for images of threatening objects, such as a snake or spider, as compared to non-threatening images, such as a rabbit or butterfly.

The results challenge the traditional view of looming, as a purely optical cue to object approach. “We’re showing that what the object is affects how we perceive looming. If we’re afraid of something, we perceive it as making contact sooner,” Longo says.

“Even more striking,” Lourenco adds, “it is possible to predict how much a participant will underestimate the collision time of an object by assessing the amount of fear they have for that object. The more fearful someone reported feeling of spiders, for example, the more they underestimated time-to-collision for a looming spider. That makes adaptive sense: If an object is dangerous, it’s better to swerve a half-second too soon than a half-second too late.”

The researchers note that it’s unclear whether fear of an object makes the object appear to travel faster, or whether that fear makes the viewer expand their sense of personal space, which is generally about an arm’s length away.

“We’d like to distinguish between these two possibilities in future research. Doing so will allow us to shed insight on the mechanics of basic aspects of spatial perception and the mechanisms underlying particular phobias,” Lourenco says.

Related:
Psychologists closing in on claustrophobia
How babies perceive numbers, space and time

Images: iStockphoto.com

Religion and science make case for monogamy

Couples only: Animals pair up with a mate and enter Noah's Ark two-by-two, to ensure survival in the face of disaster.

John Witte Jr, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory, wrote about monogamy for the Washington Post blog “Guest Voices.” Below is an excerpt:

“Creationists and evolutionists don’t agree on much, but they both believe that monogamy is the most ‘natural’ form of reproduction for the human species. This seems counterintuitive. Yes, the Bible recounts the story of creation, but it also describes the rampant polygamy of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon and other titans of the faith. Yes, nesting birds, voles, and a few other animals are monogamous, but most mammals reproduce with one dominant male controlling a large harem of females. Polygamy seems ‘natural,’ monogamy ‘supernatural.’

“Yet, for the past millennium, Christians and post-Christian liberals alike – Aquinas, Calvin, Locke, Hume, and Jefferson -- all agreed that God created humans to reproduce by becoming ‘two in one flesh,’ not three or four. And modern evolutionary scientists, from Claude Lèvi-Strauss to Bernard Chapais, have concluded the same: that pair-bonding is part of the ‘deep structure’ of human reproduction that humans have evolved as their best strategy for survival and success. …

“The Western tradition reminds us that the biblical polygamists did not fare well. Think of the endless family discord of Abraham with Sarah and Hagar, or Jacob with Rachel and Leah. Think of King David who murdered Uriah the Hittite to add the shapely Bathsheba to his already ample harem. Or King Solomon with his thousand wives, whose children ended up raping, abducting, and killing each other. Anthropologists point to similar problems in modern polygamous households. They show further that young girls are often tricked or coerced into marrying older wealthy men and that women and children of modern polygamy are often poorly educated, impoverished, and chronically dependent on welfare.”

Read the whole article on the Washington Post site.

Related:
The eternal tensions of religion and science
Marriage: A powerful heart drug in short supply
The science of love and attraction

Image: iStockphoto.com.

Studying statistics pays off for poker player

Jonathan Schoder took up poker as a hobby when he was 13. “I’m pretty good with numbers,” he says, explaining why he was drawn to the game.

When he was accepted into Emory, at age 18, Schoder didn’t want to take out student loans. So he decided to defer entering school for a year to earn his tuition through poker.

“It was all online,” he says of his year-long poker quest. “I had three screens set up at home and I was playing 24 games at a time.”

Schoder, now a junior at Emory majoring in finance and economics, made enough to cover his college tuition during that year, and he continues playing poker in his spare time. He says that his academic focus on statistics has made him an even better poker player.

This past summer, he decided to test those skills by entering the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Friends pitched in for the $10,000 stake needed to enter the tournament. “I found backers by posting it on Facebook. It took me about four hours,” Schoder says.

The bet paid off, for Schoder and his friends: He placed 36th and won nearly a quarter-million dollars at the tournament.

“I have a deep understanding of statistics,” Schoder says of his poker success. “There’s a lot of statistical models that I had to run to figure out how my opponents were playing and then play a different style against every single person. It’s a lot of looking at different percentages and then knowing how to figure out those percentages. I would say that school helped me out with poker more than poker helped me out with school.”

After he graduates, Schoder plans to become a venture capitalist. “It’s something meaningful that I can be happy about doing at the end of the day,” he says. “While poker is a lot of fun, venture capitalism has both aspects of happiness and fun."

Related:
Math's in your cards, so deal with it
Lottery study zeroes in on risk

Integration: A dream that's dying

A 1950s' stamp honoring desegragation.

Decades after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation, U.S. schools lack true integration, note sociologists Amanda Lewis, at Emory University, and John Diamond, at Harvard. They co-wrote an opinion piece on the topic for the Huffington Post. Following is an excerpt:

“Recent reports by the U.S. Department of Education and UCLA's Civil Rights Project describe alarming segregation levels for both Latino and black students nationally, with most attending schools that are majority non-white and almost 40 percent of both groups attending schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. Most experience ‘double segregation’ -- attending schools that are segregated by race and class. While most white children, even poor white children, don't attend high-poverty schools, most black and brown children, even middle-class ones, do. And high-poverty schools almost always lag behind in measures of resources and success -- they have less experienced and qualified teachers, more decrepit buildings, less access to technology and advanced curricula, and few or outdated textbooks.

“Beyond this lies a more obscured truth: Even ‘desegregated,’ schools are typically not truly integrated. Manifesting what social scientists call ‘second-generation segregation,’ these schools are re-segregated internally through ability grouping or tracking. In the post-Brown v. Board of Ed era, tracking has become what UNC sociologist Karolyn Tyson describes in her book Integration Interrupted as a ‘legally permissible way to separate students by race.’ And tracking matters.

“Decades of research has found vast differences in the quality of education in high and low tracks and shows that poor and minority students are placed disproportionately in the bottom groups or lower tracks.”

Read the whole article in the Huffington Post.

Related:
Analysis finds benefits to racial quotas in Brazilian higher education
Racial segregation fuels achievement gap in U.S. schools

Image: iStockphoto.com.

Compassion meditation may boost neural basis of empathy

The idea behind the compassion-based meditation is that "the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways," says Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who developed the protocol.

By Carol Clark

A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.

“It’s an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy,” says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at Emory University. “Previous research has shown that both children and adults who are better at reading the emotional expressions of others have better relationships.”

The meditation protocol, known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Although derived from ancient Tibetan Buddhist practices, the CBCT program is secular in content and presentation.

The research team also included senior author Charles Raison, formerly a psychiatrist at Emory’s School of Medicine and currently at the University of Arizona, and Emory anthropologist James Rilling.

Research shows that people better at reading the emotions of others have better relationships.

When most people think of meditation, they think of a style known as “mindfulness,” in which practitioners seek to improve their ability to concentrate and to be non-judgmentally aware of their thoughts and feelings. While CBCT includes these mindfulness elements, the practice focuses more specifically on training people to analyze and reinterpret their relationships with others.

“The idea is that the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways,” Negi explains. “CBCT aims to condition one’s mind to recognize how we are all inter-dependent, and that everybody desires to be happy and free from suffering at a deep level.”

Study participants were healthy adults without prior meditation experience. Thirteen participants randomized to CBCT meditation completed regular weekly training sessions and at-home practice for eight weeks. Eight randomized control subjects did not meditate, but instead completed health discussion classes that covered mind-body subjects like the effects of exercise and stress on well-being.

To test empathic accuracy before and following CBCT, all participants received fMRI brain scans while completing a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The RMET consists of black-and-white photographs that show just the eye region of people making various expressions. Those being tested must judge what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling. 

Eight out of the 13 participants in the CBCT meditation group improved their RMET scores by an average of 4.6 percent, while the control participants showed no increase, and in the majority of cases, a decrease in correct answers for the RMET.

The meditators, in comparison to those in the control group, also had significant increases in neural activity in areas of the brain important for empathy, including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These changes in brain activity accounted for changes in the empathic accuracy scores of the participants.

“These findings raise the intriguing possibility that CBCT may have enhanced empathic abilities by increasing activity in parts of the brain that are of central importance for our ability to recognize the emotional states of others,” Raison says. “An important next step will be to evaluate the effects of CBCT on diverse populations that may particularly benefit from enhanced empathic accuracy, such as those suffering from high-functioning autism or severe depression.”

Findings from the current study add to a growing database indicating that the CBCT style of meditation may have physical and emotional effects relevant to health and well-being. For example, previous research at Emory found that practicing CBCT reduced emotional distress and enhanced physical resilience in response to stress in both healthy young adults and in high-risk adolescents in foster care.

Related:
Are hugs the new drugs?
Elementary thoughts on love and kindness
Compassion meditation benefits foster children