Dreaming the munchies

This is just a crazy theory that I have been thinking about one morning after waking up from a suffered dream in which I was hungry and trying to feed myself. Nicely enough when you're hungry in dreams you also find yourself next to the best options you could have in real life, like 5stars hotel buffet or all you can eat places, restaurants and so on.. all happy and satisfied because you're going to suppress the hunger feeling that you are perceiving in the dream. Often after waking up from those dreams, you still feel hungry and in need of food. This makes me hypothesize that we can dream what we feel, if the feeling is strong enough. I have been looking for research papers on dreams, however I didn’t find anything yet where particular emotions / perceptions are discussed in relation to what subject remember to have dreamed. I may understand that the research data could be discussed as non-valid because subject could be biased by the nature of the research and could add personal touch and feelings to what they really remember of their dreams --> asking someone to recall a dream focusing on the emotions, body sensations, could bias what the subjects recall from their dreams. One option could be to wake up the subjects during REM activity and ask them to write down what they recall without thinking too much about it as brief awareness = unconscious mind response.
I am really interested in emotions like fear, despair and such negative emotions as I always believed that the representation of those in dreams are just the representation of feeling we are bearing inside (overt or covert) and we suppress with our conscious mind. Unconscious mind wakes at night when the conscious mind is less responsive and fires the same info to the brain.
Studies on the content of dreams are very difficult because they rely on what the subject recalls, I will still look around for research papers to add to this post. This is merely a little hypothesis, based on the fact that hunger is present as a sensation and feeling in dreams that many people recall to have. Another way to approach the subject could be asking: is the hunger we dream of real hunger?
It's a couple of days that I have been thinking about emotions and feelings represented in dreams and how these could be scientifically studied, however I could not find anything scientific to back this up or relate this to (yet). - TO BE CONTINUED -

Essay on Altruism

Every action is a selfish one and thus true altruism does not exist. Discuss in relation to research on pro-social behaviour.

Helping another in need or having the feeling of wanting to help someone in need is something that usually happens in everyone’s life. It is a common thought that animals help each others reciprocally expecting to gain something in return. However in some cases, helping is not linked to immediate returning benefits or these are inexistent. This type of prosocial behavior has caught the attention of psychologists interested in understanding the processes and motives behind it. Can this be considered real altruism? Psychologists have been investigating this issue proposing different hypothesis to explain altruistic behavior. This essay will discuss altruism and some of the more dominant thoughts over the debate whether altruistic behavior generates from real altruistic motivations (helping with the goal of benefiting others, without any self benefit) or selfish motives (helping the other with the ultimate goal of self benefit).

The discussion over the real essence of altruistic behavior is not a new subject and has been present in literature for long time, from Aristotele to Freud (Batson and Shaw, 1991).

The common view of psychologists, philosophers and biologists was, until some time ago, that egoistic motivations are a common denominator for most human behaviors. Prosocial behavior is considered and studied differently than other human behavior, because it is the only one that is apparently independent from reinforcement (benefit or punishment). Altruism is considered part of prosocial behavior (Hogg and Vaughan, 2008). Auguste Comte coined the word altruism when writing about the two different motives (egoism versus altruism) which are simultaneously present in an individual and that shape the individual’s behavioral responses. Altruism refers to those social acts that are “an expression of an unselfish desire to live for others” (Comte, as cited in Batson and Shaw, 1991, p108). Despite the promising prosocial definition, most psychologists through all times have held the idea that real altruism cannot exist because all behaviors are originated by selfish or evolutionary motives.

Evolutionary psychologists like Rushton (1991) argue how altruism is part of evolution that originates from genetic purposes. Many studies show how people would rather help a relative, or a person they can mirror with, than someone they are not related or don’t feel a connection with.

It is understandable how helping a relative or someone we are attached to could be a normal response and bring benefit to the helper in some ways, but it is difficult to explain when people and non-humans show compassionate feelings for complete strangers. This apparently altruistic behavior suggests that real altruism could indeed exist.

To further investigate this option some tried to analyze the emotions and cognitive processes happening to an individual prior to manifesting the helping behavior.

Piliavin et al. (1981, as cited in Vaughan en Hogg 2008) suggested that the act of not helping someone in need could result in costs for the bystander. These could be of either emphatic or personal nature. That is, the helper may feel remorse if choosing not to help. In this case, the effort of minimizing the costs does result in helping behavior that is anyway considered selfish. They put down a model outlining three cognitive stages a bystander goes through before formulating what outcome will be the most effective. First the bystander suffers from physiological arousal, which means to feel distressful or uncomfortable feelings from perceiving the other person’s trouble. Secondly, the bystander needs to label this state of arousal. As explained by Vaughan and Hogg, arousal alone does not produce an emotion. Individual cognitive processes play a significant role in determining which emotion needs to be allocated to the arousal state. (Hogg and Vaughan, 2008). The last stage is evaluating the consequences, losses and benefits; hence the person will make the choice of helping or not helping.

During the second stage of this model one can start focusing on the emotions that generate either the altruistic or egoistic motives behind the resulting action. It could be argued that the bystander, who feels empathy, namely to have compassionate feelings for the other person and being able to feel and entering into another’s feelings, aims the helping behavior at alleviating the person in need and thus altruism is generated by altruistic motives . Empathy, therefore, is the emotion that could generate real altruistic behaviors (Batson and Shaw, 1991). Batson and Shaw proposed in 1991 the empathy-altruism model, suggesting that in order to understand which motive drives the action, it is needed to ascertain someone’s ultimate goal because if the ultimate goal is to relieve the other’s suffering, unintended benefit could be a consequence of the helping action but not the goal itself and thus the motives can be considered altruistic. But when the ultimate goal is to receive self benefit from helping another, the behavior can be considered selfish. They designed experiments appositely to try ascertaining the real motive behind an action and to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis against all opposite theories. Their results suggested that the empathy-altruism hypothesis was a valid and researchable one. But their study was as promising for the altruism versus egoism debate, as questionable. Cialdini and his colleagues (1987) contested their hypothesis saying that empathy can generate sadness in the helper, therefore the action of helping another could be motivated by the willingness of the helper to relieve his/her sadness (as cited in Breckler, Olson, Wiggins, 2006) even if they agreed to the new pluralistic approach proposed (Cialdini, 1991).  Other critiques were instead against the methodology of the experiments, complaining that the results could lack of natural validity because of the way the experiments were designed (Wallach and Wallach, 1991; Dovidio, 1991). Wallach and Wallach also suggested that it is empirically impossible to test whether the motives behind helping someone else are truly altruistic (aiming only at relieving the other’s pain) or egoistic (aimed at relieving self discomfort) because “one goal is the necessary consequence of the other” (1991, p.154). They claimed that trying to prove this would be like trying to solve the null hypothesis and that altruism does not seem to be demonstrated by psychological experimentation (Wallach and Wallach, 1991).

This could sound pessimistic for scientific research, but the studies by Batson and Shaw gave rise to a new era of thought about altruism, suggesting that a pluralistic view, including both egoistic and altruistic motives, should be used when interpreting and researching prosocial behavior, pushing away the monistic view of human egoism. In the last years, evolutionary psychologists such as De Waal, have included the empathy-altruism hypothesis as part of their researches on altruism, empathy and evolutionary approach. De Waal suggestes that empathy is the proximate behavior that on the long term gives birth to the ultimate prosocial behaviors, such as altruism. This is an evolutionary point of view. In comparative studies it is shown how other animals also engage in prosocial acts (e.g. chimpanzees). De Waal believes that empathy can be the only answer to why animals and humans are able to dispense assistance according to need (De Waal, 2008, p.289).  Supported by clinical research (2002a), he introduced the Perception Action Mechanism (PAM) model according to which humans have a mechanism from which empathic capacity generates. PAM provides a person to perceive the subjective state of another through neural and physiological representations (De Waal, 2008).

Supporting PAM, MRI studies on human subjects have demonstrated an activation of the ventral insula both when we feel disgusted or we see someone who is disgusted (Wicker, 2003 as cited in de Waal). According to De Waal, the PAM is at the core of the helping behavior, whilst cognitive processes are on its outer layer. De Waal argues that cognitive processes are too long to be part of every pro-social action, as they may include very quick reactions, as for example in emergency situations.

His research, which includes also clinical experimentations and comparative studies, provides a better understanding of why people and other animals feel the need of helping others. It also proposes prosocial behavior to be a more spontaneous impulse instead of a mechanic and controlled cognitive process and it highlights the mediating role that emotions have on behaviors.

Other studies show that infants already show compassion at a very young age (1 to 2 years old), when complex cognitive processes are not developed yet. This is an empirical critique to the Pilivian cognitive view of altruism, as demonstrated by Warneken and Tomasello (2006), babies who understand when their help is needed will try to help the person in need (an unknown person) even before help has been requested.

All these results suggest that altruism exists independent by evolutionary theories and can be independent from direct or indirect reinforcement, leading us to the idea that true altruism can exist free from egoistic motives.

Why some altruistic behaviors exist in the animal world has not been discovered yet, but the debate on the true core of altruism is challenging and still goes on. It is intriguing how it has involved so many disciplines, from philosophy to biology and still continues to receive interest and be researched. Today it is fair to accept the coexistence of both altruism and egoism behind different pro-social behaviors and, as suggested by Wallach and Wallach (1991) as well, the fact that it is very difficult to demonstrate which motive prevails on the other doesn’t preclude us from accepting the existence of altruism, as it is, for the fact that is part of our natural human being.

References:

Batson C.D. & Shaw L.L. (1991) Evidence for altruism: toward a pluralism of prosocial motives.    Psychological Inquiry, 2(2), 107 – 122

Breckler S.J, Olson J.M. and Wiggings E.C. (2006) Social Psychology Alive. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth

Cialdini R.B. (1991) Altruism or egoism? That is (still) the question. Psychological Inquiry, 2(2), 124 – 125

De Waal, F.B.M. (2008) Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008(59), 279 – 300. Retrieved from http://www.annualreviews.org/ by EMORY UNIVERSITY on 01/23/08.

Dovidio J.F. (1991) The empathy-altruism hypothesis: paradigm and promises. Psychological Inquiry, 2(2), 126 – 128

Hogg M.A. & Vaughan G.M. (2008) Social Psychology (5^th Edition) Essex: Pearson Education Limited

Rushton J.P. (1991) Is altruism innate? Psychological Inquiry, 2(2), 141 - 143

Wallach L. & Wallach M.A. (1991) Why altruism, even though it exists, cannot be demonstrated by Social Psychology experiments. Psychological Inquiry, 2(2),153 – 155

Warkeneken F. & Tomasello M. (2006) Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. ScienceMag, 311. Retrieved from http://wwwsciencemag.org

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- Analysis of how language affects cognition and viceversa -

Valeria Scimia - Student # 100156703 {University of Derby}

Essay Cognitive Psychology

Analyse and evaluate the view that language affects cognition. Refer to relevant empirical evidence in your answer.

Language is considered to be a human gift. It allows people to communicate their thoughts to one another and it is essential for living a normal social life. It is a cognitive capacity that has always interested psychologists of all times. There are many languages spoken in the world, people from different countries speak different languages, each of them differs from another. In the recent years psychologists and linguistics have been interested in understanding whether those differences may represent also differences in the way people perceive the world. It has always been a common thought that it is our cognition to shape the way we speak but recently studies are showing results that encourage the hypothesis that language plays a more important role in shaping the way people think and perceive reality. This essay will focus on reviewing the history behind this idea and some empirical researches that were carried out to understand whether language can affect cognition, an hypothesis often considered empirically untestable therefore scientifically incorrect (Boroditsky, 2009).

The study of how we come to speak and learn language has populated psychological literature of all times. The fact that children speak their thoughts aloud led behaviorists, observing this particular behaviour, to believe that language and thought could be the same thing. Studies have shown that thought is often accompanied by covert speech (Harley, 1995), but the relationship between the two has been debated amongst philosophers and linguistics. Some, like Chomsky, believed that language and thought are independent from one another, others like Piaget argued that cognitive development accompanies language development (Harley, 1995). Eve Clark (2004) reported observations made upon the developing of space concepts by children. She concluded that the cognitive experience is acquired by the children before verbalization. They adapt their acquired cognitive representation to the reference language only later in their years. Humans therefore retain the full cognitive experience about space, while language represents just few of its aspects. The use of language can provide a diversity of perspectives used to describe an event or object, but it is the full cognitive representation of the event or object that is used when verbalization is not needed (e.g. when thinking about something). But verbalizing cognitive concepts is important for the perception other people may have of one another.

To first raise the question that words could indeed change the way people perceived reality was a fire insurance engineer, Whorf (1956, as cited in Harley). During his employment he noticed of how big importance were the words used, and how an incorrect use of terminology could actually cause errors in judgment and therefore accidents (Harley, 1995). Together with linguistic Sapir, they generated the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stating that language determines the way we think and perceive the world, therefore it is the language we speak that determines our cognitive processes. This was a strong hypothesis, and a weaker version was later proposed by Miller and McNeil (1969), stating that language does affect perception. This latter version was the only one to be empirically testable (as cited in Harley, 1995).

To test this hypothesis many studies were conduced on different areas of human perceptions, like the perception of time, space or colors.

One interesting study about the perception of time and space was made on English native speakers and native Mandarin speakers. Because Mandarin language arranges the concept of time in a vertical way, the research was performed to understand if language did indeed influence the way Mandarin speakers differed from English speakers on the perception of time. Laboratory tests showed that English speaker were unable to perceive time vertically, as English language has a horizontal representation of time, but Mandarin speakers had no trouble with the vertical representation of it (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, McCormick, 2010). Other studies have been made on gender loaded and non gender loaded languages to better understand if grammatical gender could influence the sex categorization in speakers. Gender loaded languages are those like Italian, Spanish and Russian, where all parts of the sentence need to reflect the gender of the object or noun, so the determines, verb and adjectives will all be presented in a gender form (masculine or feminine) depending on the noun. Other languages, like English, are not gender loaded and the sentence does not need all elements to reflect the gender of the noun. There are also languages that have two grammatical genders for the referent (like Italian and French) and others that have more than two genders, like German that has also a neutral grammar category (Elieff, Burch, Forbes, Rodriguez, Dubois, 2002). Many studies have tried to understand if grammatical gender can also influence the way people semantically think about the world. A more recent study has confirmed that for those language with only two genders and that are gender loaded (such as French or Italian), grammatical gender influences the categorization of semantic representations, but the same result could not be found for languages that had multiple gender categories or none (Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, Dworzynski, 2005). This result suggests that grammatical gender does affect “thinking for speaking”, that is it is crucial when forming a sentence because all parts need to reflect the referent’s gender. It could be that a native Italian speaker needs to categorize the object or person into grammatical gender in order to obtain proper syntax in the sentence (Vigliocco et al., pag.513). Studies like the latter suggest indeed that language does have an effect on the semantic of the people speaking it. More studies on second language acquisition should be carried on to understand whether people that learn a different language will also start perceiving the world according to the new language (Boroditsky, July 2010).

But if the case is indeed that language does affect the way people perceive the outside world, what about the use of violent language or misleading words? In nowadays society it can be noticed a large use of language aimed at obtaining a certain purpose, thinking for example about advertisement where wrong information may be given out in such a way that the viewer starts believing it as real.  One may think about the war on drugs, made by the US government against marijuana. The use of improper terminology and its association with heavier and more dangerous drugs was so heavy, that in some States it was wrongly classified as narcotic, a medical term used to classify opiates (Pinel, 2007, pag.379).  It was already medically known that marijuana was not to be considered a narcotic, but the use of the word next to it made the population scared and confused to the point that still to this day people are not aware of the real chemical differences between marijuana and narcotics. This example suggests how the wrong use of labels and categorization may lead people to act in a certain way. There have been studies focused on the way people use words to categorize and label others.  Hoffman, Baer and Mischel (1984) researched how the use of language was connected to trait categorization. They carried out a research aiming to see whether people tended to categorize more when they were expecting to engage in a conversation regarding a subject than when they expected not to. The result was that people who expected to engage in a conversation about someone tended to list more trait categories about the subject than those who expected not. This suggests that the idea of talking about someone or something reinforces the way people use trait categories and labels about it. So, it can be imagined in a school environment, for example, how this may influence the way peers talk and use word categories against each others.

Poteat and DiGiovanni (2010) studied the relationship between sexualized (or homophobic) talk and bullying, and the relationship of this biased talk with personal prejudice. Teenagers tend to use sexualized talk against their peers or against objects, inducing fear into sexual minorities. The results of this research showed how the use of biased talk was linked to high sexual prejudice amongst teenagers, especially boys.

They suggest in their paper how crucial it is to include teaching of the proper use of language and to tackle biased language when working with children in rehabilitation programs in order to minimize verbal bullying.

A last example of how the improper use of language could cause people to act and shape their cognitive perception of the world could be the terrorism debate. Politicians, mass-media and newspapers some years ago have begun an anti-terrorism campaign often referring wrongly to certain religious and cultural groups. A study that took place at Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust discussed the way UK ministers were using misleading language regarding terrorism, as it included nuances that could be interpreted as supporting the terrorists as soldiers instead of criminals. It was also mentioned how certain remarks about religious and cultural groups could lead the population to treat and perceive those groups in a racist and discriminating way (Politics.co.uk, 2006). 

All these examples, supporting the weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language does affect perception, lead to new questions and evoke new ways the hypothesis should be tested.  A pioneer in this field, Lera Borodistky, suggests that new studies should be directed at the manipulation of language and its effects on cognition, as it is not clear at this point whether the correlation between different languages and the difference in its semantic are due to cognitive capacity depending on the language or simply to the culture that speaks the language. MIT studies have shown that when people are taken off the ability to use spoken language during nonlinguistic tasks, like counting and doing arithmetic tasks, their performance drops severely. This shows how much humans need language to support a number of activities besides speaking. It could be crucial to the understanding of human behaviour if the structures that are present on our language determine so profoundly the way we perceive reality and the way we are perceived by other human beings in the world. (Boroditsky, 2010).

The differences in languages could point to much deeper differences amongst cultures and the people that speak certain languages, thus the importance of understanding this relationship is strong, as it could help people live a better life based on better communication patterns. If language can really shape the way we perceive the world and we are constantly submitted to many inputs, it is each one’s responsibility to pay attention to the appropriate language to use and to be open to always double check the sources before making up the mind about something, as the improper use of words and labels could bias the perception of reality for us and for the people around us.

Language is a gift but it is also a communication tool that should not be underestimated and should always be nurtured from childhood. These new researches could help develop education programs aimed at children and teenagers to improve and appreciate their use of language.

Reference:

Boroditsky L. (2009) How does our language shape the way we think? In Brockman Max (Ed.) What’s Next? Dispatches on the future of science. Retrieved from the WordWideWeb 18 December, 2010: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html

Boroditsky L. (2010) Lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from the WorldWideWeb 18 December, 2010: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/

Boroditsky L., Fuhrman O. & McCormick K. (2010) Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently? Cognition, 118(1), 123-9

Clark E.V. (2004) How language acquisition builds on cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sceinces, 8(10), 472 - 477

Harley T. (1995) Language, thought, and the precursors of language. In T. Harley (Ed.) The psychology of language: From data to theory (pp. 311-350) West Sussex: Hove Books

Hoffman C., Mischel W. & Baer J.S. (1984) Language and person cognition: Effects of communicative set on trait attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(5), 1029 – 1043

Pinel. J.P.J (2006) Biopsychology (6th Edition), USA: Pearson Education

Politics.co.uk (2006) Terror talk “exploiting politics of fear”. Retrieved from the WorldWideWeb 30 December, 2010: http://www.politics.co.uk/News/domestic-policy/crime/terrorism/terror-talk-exploiting-politics-fear-$457526.htm

Poteat P.V. & DiGiovanni C.D. (2010) When biased language use is associated with bullying and dominance behavior: The moderating effect of prejudice. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39, 1123 – 1133

Sera M.D., Elieff C., Forbes J., Burch M.C., Rodríguez W. & Dubois D.P. (2002) When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 131(3), 377 – 397

Vigliocco G., Vinson D.P., Paganelli F. & Dworzynski K. (2005) Grammatical gender effects on cognition: Implications for language learning and language use. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 134(4), 501 – 520