Do you have one arm longer than the other?

If you’re right-handed, you may think so. Research by an American team has shown that right-handed people think their right arm is longer than their left, despite them both being the same size!

Image credit: Hypothesis Now

The differences in perception correlate with the level of activity in the ‘arm’ regions of our brains: right-handed people show much more neural activity over a larger area in the region associated with their right arm than with their left. In contrast, left-handed people show no difference between their two arms: the area of brain activity for both tends to be equal in size.

These results are the first time anyone has shown that our perception of our body can be influenced by the body ‘maps’ our brains create.

Using a limb more often can cause the brain area related to it to increase in size. Left-handers often use both arms equally, whereas right-handers tend to favour their right arm for the vast majority of tasks. The researchers wanted to see if the uneven brain activity in right-handers matched how people actually perceive their body shape, regardless of how long their arms actually were!

To do so, they asked volunteers to estimate how long their arms were and how far they could reach to pick up an object. Volunteers were asked to hold one arm out-stretched in front of them. The researchers then held up a tape measure, with the numbers hidden, and asked the volunteers to tell them when the tape measure was the same length as their arm. They then asked volunteers to tell them when they thought a small object was within their reach as the researcher slowly slid it across a table towards them.

Left-handers thought their arms were of equal lengths, and that they could reach just as far with both hands. Right-handers, however, had a significant difference between the perceived lengths of their arms, consistently thinking their left arms were much shorter than their right and couldn’t reach as far.

The researchers are careful to point out that the unevenly-sized areas of neural activity might not actually cause the perceptual differences: someone needs to do a bit more research to establish exactly what causes this bizarre phenomenon!

Paper reference: doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02447.x

Don’t sack the manager

Faith in a manager can lead to victory. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Jameboy

When sports teams do badly, the finger of blame is often pointed at the manager, who is quickly sacked.

New research suggests this may be a bad idea. Researchers from several UK universities have shown that the best-performing football teams (or soccer teams, if you prefer) in the UK Premier League are those with the longest-serving managers.

Teams such as Manchester United, Arsenal, and Everton have had long-serving managers, and have reaped the rewards. In contrast, Newcastle United had several different managers last season, which may have contributed to their relegation from the top division.

Several defeats and the associated fear of relegation often lead to the sacking of a football manager. Relegation from the Premier League can cost a team tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue so they make short-term changes to try and stop it happening. The latest research shows this may not be the best strategy. Instead, a team’s results are more likely to improve in the long-run if they give the current manager time to make a difference. Lead author of the study Mat Hughes, from the University of Nottingham, said

“We don’t dispute that change is often needed — but it should not be a rash response to performance declines.”

Experienced football managers build up a store of knowledge about the team, which helps them perform well. When they leave, their experience is lost; as is that of the coaching staff they take with them. Although teams often see one or two better results when a new manager starts, this is probably due to a boost in confidence, rather than an actual improvement in performance.

“Clubs who chop and change their managers — often with no opportunity for the manager to implement real change — tend to experience a long-term downturn in results, even if they have initially experienced success following the appointment of a new manager.”

said Paul Hughes, from Loughborough University.He added,

“Our findings suggest that sacking a manager often deflects from the real underlying issues at clubs, which need to be addressed before continuity and success will be achieved.”

The research suggests new managers need at least a year to make any significant changes to how a team plays. With the average football manager in place for just 1.38 years, many teams are actually harming their own chances of victory.

Are we happy?

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” – Aristotle.

Happiness is something we all aspire to. But how happy are we, really? Psychologists have struggled to answer this question for many years, but a team of American scientists might have found one way to do so reliably.

By analysing the words bloggers use, the scientists have come up with a way to monitor the happiness of the entire blogging population of the United States. As so many blog posts are published, the scientists could track the daily changes in the mood of the country.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 9/11 is an unhappy day for the blogosphere, with an increase in words such as “lost”, “anger” or “tragedy” and a decrease in positive words such as “happy”. In contrast, the day on which the current US President was elected was much happier; dominated as it was by words such as “proud”, “hope” and “win”.

Using the personal details provided by many bloggers, the scientists also found that young people are least happy, and happiness increases with age, up to a point. Beyond the age of 60, happiness seems to decrease.

Finally, there is a subtle change in happiness over the course of an average week. Sunday is the happiest day, with happiness dipping mid-week. Personally, I’m not surprised!

Measuring happiness is a tricky business. People tend to misreport (intentionally or otherwise) their own happiness, and researchers cannot gain a reliable measure of someone’s happiness from observation alone. To overcome these difficulties, the new technique uses a list of words scored for their happiness: for example, on a scale of 1 – 9, “love” scores 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, and “suicide” 1.25. By averaging the score of the words used, the scientists could determine the happiness of the blog post. The individual results could then be combined to monitor the happiness of the whole blogosphere.

So is this study a useful tool for checking our mental health, or a sinister Orwellian mind-reading device?

Happily, the study is open access, so you can make up your own mind here.

“We’re all individuals!”

Who sets the latest trends – the advertisers and media organisations, or your friends? According to American researchers, both have an influence on the trends we follow.

By looking at how people interact and share things in the on-line world Second Life, the researchers were able to show that around half of the virtual goods people acquired (indicating which trends they followed) came directly from friends. The rest came from virtual shops.

Second Life's trend-setters? Really? Image credit: Linden Lab

They also showed that the chances of an individual following a trend increased dramatically as more of their friends did so. However, those people with lots of friends were less easily influenced by any one of their friends, as the effect of each friend was lost in the crowd. Trends also spread very quickly through groups of friends, possibly because they had similar interests, but they reached far fewer people this way. This suggests viral marketing campaigns can be powerful tools to spread the word about products aimed at small, specialist groups, but will be less effective when trying to reach large audiences.

One advantage of carrying out the study inside Second Life is that interactions in the virtual world leave a record of when and how they occur. This allowed the researchers to establish exactly when someone acquired something new, and from whom. The researchers could never hope to record such detailed information in real life.

Real life is complicated, and reliable data can be hard to collect. By using virtual worlds, scientists can access much more specific information about how people interact. My favourite example of this was the escape of a virtual plague in the on-line game World of Warcraft. The spread of the plague through the world’s population allowed researchers to examine how real people’s interactions can help or hinder the spread of real-life diseases.

Testing hypotheses about how diseases are transmitted, how people interact socially, or even how economies function can be difficult, and quickly encounter ethical and moral barriers. Virtual worlds circumvent such problems, and I suspect they have a long future as testing grounds for answering all manner of otherwise unanswerable questions.

Be a better person – play computer games

Behavioural adjustment free with every console?

Do violent computer games turn players into violent people? Perhaps. On the other hand, do games which encourage players to think about the needs of others make us better people? Recent studies suggest they do.

Researchers from the USA, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia combined the results of three very different studies to suggest people who play positive, or “prosocial”, games are more helpful to others afterwards. The three studies each investigated the effects of games on the behaviour of children or students in different contexts and over different timescales.

The researchers’ conclusion is that playing computer games does not, in itself, lead to anti-social behaviour, but that specific game content can encourage those who play to adopt similar behaviour themselves.

Using what they call the “General Learning Model” the researchers suggest that any stimulus can lead to behavioural changes. Computer games prime players to behave in certain ways – whether positive or negative – and, importantly, reward or punish players according to how well they perform these behaviours. The reward or punishment reinforces the chosen behaviour, encouraging players to carry it over into real life.

So if playing violent kill-fests such as PS3 shooter Killzone 2 makes us less pleasant individuals, imagine the good that comes from playing positive games such as popular on-line strategy game Food Force, or even the beautiful Ico – arguably one of the most prosocial games ever created!

Ultimately, understanding the effects computer games have on ourselves will allow us to make better-informed decisions about the games we play, and those we buy for our children. With the UK’s adoption of the PEGI content classification system, as announced in this week’s Digital Britain report, this has become even easier.

The long-term effects of computer gaming will, however, undoubtedly continue to be the subject of much debate.