Your Daily digest for PsyPost – Psychology News Daily Digest (Unofficial)

[Article Digests for Psychology & Social Work]

PsyPost – Psychology News Daily Digest (Unofficial)

 

(https://www.psypost.org/how-neurons-work-together-a-fractal-approach-to-brain-efficiency/) How neurons work together: A fractal approach to brain efficiency
Dec 13th 2024, 08:00

The brain is a marvel of efficiency, honed by thousands of years of evolution so it can adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Yet, despite decades of research, the mystery of how the brain achieves this has remained elusive.
Our (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.10.004) new research, published in the journal Cell, reveals how neurons – the cells responsible for your childhood memories, thoughts and emotions – coordinate their activity.
It’s a bit like being a worker in a high-performing business. Balancing individual skills with teamwork is key to success, but how do you achieve the balance?
As it turns out, the brain’s secret is surprisingly simple: devote no more than half (and no less than 40%) of each cell’s effort to individual tasks. Where does the rest of the effort go? Towards scalable teamwork.
And here’s the kicker: we found the exact same organisational structure across the brains of five species – from fruit flies and nematodes to zebrafish, mice and monkeys.
These species come from different branches of the tree of life that are separated by more than a (https://timetree.org/) billion years of evolution, suggesting we may have uncovered a fundamental principle for optimised information processing. It also offers powerful lessons for any complex system today.
The critical middle ground
Our discovery addresses a long-standing (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1888) debate about the brain: do neurons act like (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.287.5456.1273) star players (each highly specialised and efficient) or do they prioritise (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2019.02.002) teamwork (ensuring the whole system works even when some elements falter)?
Answering this question has been challenging. Until recently, neuroscience tools were limited to either recording the activity of a few cells, or of several million.
It would be like trying to understand a massive company by either interviewing a handful of employees or by only receiving high-level department summaries. The critical middle ground was missing.
However, with advances in (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.02.011) calcium imaging, we can now record signals from tens of thousands of cells simultaneously. Calcium imaging is a method that lets us watch neural activity in real time by using fluorescent sensors that light up according to calcium levels in the cell.
Applying insights from my physics training to analyse large-scale datasets, we found that brain activity unfolds according to a (https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-fractals-10865) fractal hierarchy. Cells work together to build larger, coordinated networks, creating an organisation with each scale mirroring those above and below.
This structure answered the debate: the brain actually does both. It balances individuality and teamwork, and does so in a clever way. Roughly half of the effort goes to “personal” performance as neurons collaborate within increasingly larger networks.
The brain can rapidly adapt to change
To test whether the brain’s structure had unique advantages, we ran computational simulations, revealing that this fractal hierarchy optimises information flow across the brain.
It allows the brain to do something crucial: adapt to change. It ensures the brain operates efficiently, accomplishing tasks with minimal resources while staying resilient by maintaining function even when neurons misfire.
Whether you are navigating unfamiliar terrain or reacting to a sudden threat, your brain processes and acts on new information rapidly. Neurons continuously adjust their coordination, keeping the brain stable enough for deep thought, yet agile enough to respond to new challenges.
The multiscale organisation we found allows different strategies – or “(https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/neural-coding) neural codes” – to function at different scales. For instance, we found that zebrafish movement relies on many neurons working in unison. This resilient design ensures swimming continues smoothly, even in fast-changing environments.
By contrast, mouse vision adapts at the cellular scale, permitting the precision required to extract fine details from a scene. Here, if a few neurons miss key pieces of information, the entire perception can shift – like when an optical illusion tricks your brain.
Our findings reveal that this fractal coordination of neuron activity occurs across a vast evolutionary span: from vertebrates, whose last common ancestor lived 450 million years ago, to invertebrates, dating back a billion years.
This suggests brains have evolved to balance efficiency with resilience, allowing for optimised information processing and adaptability to new behavioural demands. The evolutionary persistence hints that we’ve uncovered a fundamental design principle.
A fundamental principle?
These are exciting times, as physics and neuroscience continue interacting to uncover the universal laws of the brain, crafted over aeons of natural selection. Future work will be needed to see how these principles might play out in the human brain.
Our findings also hint at something bigger: this simple rule of individual focus and scalable teamwork might not just be a solution for the brain.
When elements are organised into tiered networks, resources can be shared efficiently, and the system becomes robust against disruptions.
The best businesses operate in the same way — when a new challenge arises, individuals can react without waiting for instructions from their manager, allowing them to solve the problem while remaining supported by the organisation rapidly.
It may be a universal principle to achieve resilience and efficiency in complex systems. It appears basketball legend (https://www.forbes.com/sites/grantfreeland/2018/06/01/talent-wins-games-teamwork-wins-championships/) Michael Jordan was right when he said: “talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships”.
 
This article is republished from (https://theconversation.com) The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the (https://theconversation.com/how-do-brains-coordinate-activity-from-fruit-flies-to-monkeys-we-discovered-this-universal-principle-242792) original article.

(https://www.psypost.org/reducing-screen-time-boosts-childrens-mental-health-and-prosocial-behaviors-study-finds/) Reducing screen time boosts children’s mental health and prosocial behaviors, study finds
Dec 13th 2024, 06:00

A new study published in (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2821176) JAMA Network Open offers experimental evidence supporting the idea that reducing leisure-time screen media use can improve the mental health of children and adolescents. The research, a secondary analysis of the SCREENS randomized clinical trial, found that reducing leisure-time screen media use led to notable improvements in psychological well-being. Participants showed a reduction in behavioral difficulties, particularly internalizing symptoms like emotional and peer-related issues, along with enhanced prosocial behaviors.
Concerns about the potential negative effects of digital screen use on young people’s mental health have grown in recent years. With children and adolescents increasingly reliant on devices for entertainment and communication, researchers sought to explore whether limiting leisure screen time could have tangible benefits. Previous studies have found small but significant associations between high screen time and poor mental health. However, these studies couldn’t establish causation due to their reliance on self-reported data and the lack of experimental control.
“We were interested in the link between screen media use and mental health because the observational studies conducted remained inconclusive. Some studies found links between screen media use and poorer mental health, while others found no associations,” said study author (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesper-schmidt-persson-82505b97/?originalSubdomain=dk) Jesper Schmidt-Persson, an assistant professor at the University College Copenhagen and guest researcher at the University of Southern Denmark.
The SCREENS trial was designed as a randomized clinical trial to evaluate the effects of reducing leisure-time screen media use on children’s and adolescents’ mental health. The study recruited families from Denmark through a survey of screen media habits, ultimately including 89 families with 181 children aged 6 to 17 years.
Participants were randomly assigned to either an intervention group or a control group. Families in the intervention group were required to hand over their smartphones and tablets for two weeks and limit other leisure screen media use to three hours per week. Necessary screen activities, such as schoolwork, were excluded from this limit. To support communication, participants received basic phones capable only of calls and text messaging. Small financial incentives were provided to families to encourage compliance.
Researchers measured mental health outcomes using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which assesses behavioral strengths and challenges across subscales such as emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer issues, and prosocial behaviors. Parents completed the questionnaire before and after the two-week intervention.
The results demonstrated improvements in mental health among children in the screen reduction group compared to the control group. On average, children in the intervention group experienced a reduction of 1.67 points on the total difficulties scale, corresponding to a moderate effect size. This effect was most pronounced for internalizing symptoms, including emotional challenges and difficulties with peer relationships.
“I found it particularly interesting that we were able to observe a significant moderate effect size after only two weeks,” Schmidt-Persson told PsyPost. “I am curious to study the effects of a larger break from screen media use on both physical and mental health.”
Additionally, the intervention improved prosocial behaviors, such as helping others and showing consideration for others’ feelings. The findings suggest that reduced screen time allowed for more face-to-face social interactions and meaningful family engagement, which likely contributed to these positive changes.
“Our results showed that reducing screen media together as a family can lead to improved mental health among both children and adolescents,” Schmidt-Persson said. In (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-022-00015-6) a previous study, the researchers found that similar improvements could also be observed among adults in the family.
Interestingly, subgroup analyses hinted that boys and children with higher baseline screen time or greater behavioral difficulties might benefit more from reduced screen use. However, these subgroup differences were not statistically significant.
The study provides evidence for the short-term benefits of reduced screen time. But as with all research, there are limitations. First, the open-label design meant that parents knew whether their family was in the intervention group, potentially biasing their responses on the questionnaire. Second, the study’s relatively small sample size and high compliance rates might limit generalizability, as participants may have been unusually motivated to reduce screen use.
“The study was open label because blinding was not possible. Thus, study participants were not blinded to the group allocation of their family. We can only speculate about whether it has had an influence on the results,” Schmidt-Persson noted.
The intervention focused on reducing overall screen media use without differentiating between types of activities, such as educational versus entertainment-based content. Future research could investigate how specific screen media activities impact mental health and whether the benefits of screen reduction persist over longer periods. Additionally, studies targeting high-risk populations with greater baseline behavioral difficulties could help clarify the intervention’s effects.
“Although screen media use was objectively measured, we are unfortunately not able to conclude anything on which types of screen media use are better or worse for children and adolescent mental health. I hope that we can answer these types of questions in future studies,” Schmidt-Persson said.
Kristin Hadfield, an assistant professor of psychology at Trinity College, who was not involved in the study, (https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-screen-media-use-and-mental-health-of-children-and-adolescents/) told the Science Media Centre: “There is a lot of concern about the impacts of ‘screen time’ on children and adolescents, but most of the studies are correlational and so can’t tell us whether more screen time causes worse child mental health. Screen time is a very vague concept, with major differences in effects depending on what someone is actually doing on their phone, computer, tablet, etc. This paper provides experimental evidence about the effects of a screen time intervention on children’s mental health, which is a major advancement.”
“This is a good step in understanding how screen time is related to child and adolescent mental health,” Hadfield added. “However, we should be careful about over-interpreting a relatively small study as considerably more experimental research would be needed to understand how, to what extent, and for whom screen time impacts mental health. People often think of screen time as bad, but it really depends what the child is doing on the screen. Very few people would view it as a negative if a child was video calling their grandparent, watching a documentary, or learning how to code, and we wouldn’t expect any of these things to negatively impact a child’s mental health. A greater focus in research and intervention on what children are doing on computers, phones, and tablets would be more valuable than just counting the time they spend on these.”
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.19881) Screen Media Use and Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial,” was authored by Jesper Schmidt-Persson, Martin Gillies Banke Rasmussen, Sarah Overgaard Sørensen, Sofie Rath Mortensen, Line Grønholt Olesen, Søren Brage, Peter Lund Kristensen, Niels Bilenberg, and Anders Grøntved.

(https://www.psypost.org/largest-ever-survey-on-ayahuasca-highlights-links-to-better-mental-health-and-wellbeing/) Largest-ever survey on ayahuasca highlights links to better mental health and wellbeing
Dec 12th 2024, 14:00

A new study published in the (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02791072.2024.2424288) Journal of Psychoactive Drugs has uncovered significant associations between naturalistic ayahuasca use and improved mental health. The research, based on a large international survey, found that frequent use of ayahuasca—a traditional Amazonian psychoactive brew—is linked to lower psychological distress and enhanced psychological wellbeing. However, the benefits appear to depend on factors like the intensity of mystical experiences, self-insights gained, and the strength of community connections during use.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew traditionally used in spiritual and healing practices by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. It is often made by combining the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with the leaves of the Psychotria viridis plant. The mixture contains powerful compounds: N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a hallucinogenic substance, and beta-carbolines, which allow the DMT to be active when consumed orally. Together, these ingredients create a potent psychedelic experience that often includes vivid visual imagery, intense emotional introspection, and a profound sense of spiritual connection.
Over the past few decades, the use of ayahuasca has spread beyond its traditional settings to more urban and international contexts. Its growing popularity has sparked interest among researchers due to anecdotal reports of its potential mental health benefits. These reports suggest that ayahuasca may alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, and addiction while fostering personal insight and emotional resilience.
“Ayahuasca has been used for centuries by Indigenous communities for healing and spiritual purposes, but despite its growing global popularity, its effects on mental health in contemporary settings are not well understood,” said study author Daniel Perkins, an adjunct associate professor at Swinburne University, senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, and CEO of Psychae Therapeutics.
“With more people around the world turning to ayahuasca (and related plant combinations containing these compounds) for personal growth, spirituality, and mental health support, we saw an opportunity to explore its potential benefits and risks in real-world settings.”
To address this, Perkins and his colleagues conducted the largest survey to date on ayahuasca’s relationship with mental health and wellbeing. The survey attracted over 10,800 participants from more than 50 countries, though the final analysis focused on 7,576 respondents who completed detailed mental health assessments. The survey was available in six languages, and participants were recruited through online communities and networks related to ayahuasca use.
The researchers found that participants who used ayahuasca more frequently reported better mental health, reflected in lower scores on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale and higher scores on the 12-Item Short Form Survey (indicating better general mental health). This trend was consistent across individuals with and without a history of mental health diagnoses. Additionally, greater frequency of use was associated with higher scores on the Psychological Wellbeing Growth questionnaire.
Mystical experiences and personal insights gained during ayahuasca ceremonies appeared to be significant contributors to these positive outcomes. Respondents who reported stronger mystical experiences or greater self-insights were more likely to report better mental health and greater psychological growth. These effects were particularly pronounced for those who had faced mental health challenges in the past, suggesting that the subjective experiences associated with ayahuasca may play a role in its therapeutic potential.
Community and social support also appeared to enhance the benefits of ayahuasca use. Participants who drank ayahuasca within a supportive group or community reported better mental health and greater personal growth than those who lacked such connections. This finding underscores the importance of the social context in which ayahuasca is consumed, as group settings may provide emotional safety, shared purpose, and opportunities for reflection.
“We were surprised by how consistent the positive associations were between repeated ayahuasca use and improved mental health, even after accounting for a range of other factors,” Perkins told PsyPost. “Notably, we found that mental health and wellbeing benefits were present even after controlling for the social and community aspects of ayahuasca use, which in themselves can enhance wellbeing. Previous studies have not been able to separate out these effects.”
However, the study also highlighted potential risks. A subset of participants reported experiencing extreme fear or panic during ayahuasca sessions, which was associated with poorer mental health outcomes. Similarly, individuals who struggled to integrate their experiences afterward reported lower scores on mental health and wellbeing measures. These challenges, while less common, emphasize the need for proper preparation, support, and integration following ayahuasca use.
“We found that most people who use ayahuasca in naturalistic settings report improvements in their mental health and wellbeing, and that greater use of ayahuasca appears to lead to greater mental health and wellbeing improvement,” Perkins explained. “This was the case both for individuals with and without a history of mental health conditions.”
“However, the context in which it is used is important—things like the strength of the mystical experience, personal insights gained, the support of a community, and how people process the experience afterward are key to these outcomes. At the same time, there are potential risks, including emotional distress and difficulty integrating the experience.”
But there are some limitations to consider. The study relied on self-reported data collected through an online survey. This method introduces the possibility of response bias, as participants who had particularly positive experiences with ayahuasca may have been more inclined to participate and complete the lengthy questionnaire. The data also cannot establish causation, meaning it is unclear whether ayahuasca directly improved mental health or if individuals with better mental health were more likely to engage in its use.
“An important limitation of our study is that it’s based on self-reported data from an online survey, which means we can’t prove cause and effect,” Perkins noted. “Additionally, it’s important to remember that ayahuasca does not provide benefit for everyone, and its effects can vary widely depending on the setting of use and a person’s psychological and emotional preparation.”
To build on these findings, future research could focus on longitudinal studies that track individuals before, during, and after their ayahuasca experiences. This approach would provide a clearer understanding of how ayahuasca influences mental health over time. Controlled clinical trials could also help establish causation by comparing participants who use ayahuasca in structured settings with those who do not. Additionally, future studies could investigate the specific factors that contribute to ayahuasca’s therapeutic effects.
“We want to learn more about how ayahuasca works—what aspects of the experience or environment make the biggest difference for improving mental health and wellbeing, and the extent to which therapies inspired by ayahuasca may be able to provide a benefit for people with treatment-resistant mental health conditions in Western countries,” Perkins said.
“While many people report benefits after consuming ayahuasca, it is not a panacea or quick fix,” he added.
The study, “(https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2024.2424288) Associations Between Ayahuasca Use in Naturalistic Settings and Mental Health and Wellbeing Outcomes: Analysis of a Large Global Dataset,” was authored by Daniel Perkins, Jerome Sarris, Tessa Cowley-Court, Helena Aicher, Luís Fernando Tófoli, Jose Carlos Bouso, Emerita Opaleye, Andreas Halman, Nicole Galvão-Coelho, and Violeta Schubert.

(https://www.psypost.org/expressive-suppression-can-effectively-reduce-negative-emotions-under-specific-conditions/) Expressive suppression can effectively reduce negative emotions under specific conditions
Dec 12th 2024, 12:00

Published in the (https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241290397) Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, a new study reveals that expressive suppression reduces negative emotions at both experiential and expressive levels, challenging long standing assumptions about its ineffectiveness.
Jessica L. Jones and colleagues investigated the experiential effects of expressive suppression, a strategy within the broader domain of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which individuals influence their emotional experiences and expressions. Two commonly studied strategies are cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.
Cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting a situation to change its emotional impact, typically before an emotional response fully develops. In contrast, expressive suppression occurs after an emotional response has been triggered and focuses on inhibiting the outward display of emotions, such as facial expressions or gestures.
While cognitive reappraisal is widely recognized as effective in reducing both the intensity of emotional experiences and their outward expressions, expressive suppression has often been considered less effective, impacting only external displays while leaving internal experiences unchanged. However, recent research has suggested that suppression may have subtle effects on emotional experiences, especially when studied within participants over time rather than between different groups. Motivated by this contradiction in the literature, Jones and colleagues designed their research to clarify whether suppression can indeed alter internal emotional experiences and under what conditions it might be effective.
In Study 1, the researchers reanalyzed data from a previous study by Livingstone and Isaacowitz ((https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000240) 2018), involving 163 participants aged 18 to 88. Participants were instructed to view emotionally negative images drawn from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) under three conditions: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, or general regulation, which served as a control condition. Each participant completed three separate blocks, each corresponding to one of these strategies.
During the tasks, participants used an analog slider to continuously rate their negative emotional responses while viewing images. These ratings allowed the researchers to measure changes in negative affect in real-time. The images were randomized and presented with standardized timing to control for stimulus-induced variability.
Study 2 expanded on this by implementing a randomized within-subject design, involving 234 undergraduate participants aged 18 to 33. Participants were presented with negative and neutral images of varying intensity. These images were displayed in randomized blocks, paired with three different regulatory instructions: expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, or no regulation. Participants rated their emotional negativity after each trial. To prevent habituation, neutral trials were interspersed among negative trials at regular intervals. Importantly, this study refined suppression instructions to avoid explicitly directing participants to alter their emotional experiences, ensuring that any changes in affect were genuinely attributable to suppression alone.
The findings of Study 1 indicated that expressive suppression significantly reduced participants’ negative emotions compared to the general regulation condition, albeit less effectively than cognitive reappraisal. Participants reported the lowest levels of negative affect when using reappraisal strategies, which involved reframing their emotional interpretation of the images. Interestingly, expressive suppression also reduced negative affect compared to general regulation, contradicting the long-held assumption that suppression merely suppresses outward expression without influencing internal experience.
Study 2 corroborated these results, showing that expressive suppression lowered negative affect compared to the no-regulation control condition. While suppression was again less effective than cognitive reappraisal, its impact on reducing negative emotions remained statistically significant. Notably, the researchers found that suppression’s effects were consistent across images of low, moderate, and high intensity, suggesting that the strategy’s efficacy is not contingent on the emotional intensity of the stimuli. Additionally, responses were not influenced by strategies used in preceding trials, ruling out carryover effects as an explanation for the findings.
Combined, the results from both studies provide evidence that suppression can be an effective tool for emotion regulation, particularly when other strategies may not be feasible.
The authors acknowledge the limited generalizability of findings to real-life contexts, as the studies relied on static images rather than dynamic social interactions.
The research, “(https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241290397) Conceal and Don’t Feel as Much? Experiential Effects of Expressive Suppression,” was authored by Jessica L. Jones, Derek M. Isaacowitz, and Özlem Ayduk.

(https://www.psypost.org/objectification-and-abuse-of-women-new-study-highlights-a-dangerous-connection/) Objectification and abuse of women: New study highlights a dangerous connection
Dec 12th 2024, 10:00

Intimate partner violence is a global scourge. (https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/types-of-violence/intimate-partner-violence) One in four Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner. The perpetrators are overwhelmingly heterosexual men.
Many factors contribute to this form of violence. Persistent gender inequality is a fundamental systemic cause, but researchers have identified additional risk factors. These include alcohol and drug use, past experience of family violence, financial stress and sexist attitudes.
One psychological factor that may be implicated in intimate partner violence is objectification. Feminist thinkers such as Cambridge scholar (https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/rae-langton/) Rae Langton and American philosopher (https://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum) Martha Nussbaum have proposed men who treat their partners as “object-like” are disposed to harm them because they fail to see them as fully human.
Objectification can involve men judging their partner’s value in her physical appearance, seeing her as a possession, or denying her agency and autonomy. The common thread is a subtle or not-so-subtle form of dehumanisation.
Recent psychological research has tried to test these ideas, with intriguing results.
Our new research
Past (https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033840) research found young men who sexually objectify women are especially likely to perpetrate sexual violence. It also showed that men who unconsciously associate women with objects have a relatively (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167212436401) high propensity for sexual harassment.
In our (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313016) recently published work, we moved from considering violence towards women in general to violence towards men’s intimate partners. You might expect men would be less likely to objectify those they claim to love. The appalling statistics on intimate partner violence suggest otherwise.
Our (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313016) new article presents findings from three studies on the role of objectification in intimate partner violence. Each study sampled American men aged 18 to 35 who were in a committed romantic relationship of at least one year’s duration.
In our first study, men completed a computer-based task – the (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/iatdetails.html) Implicit Association Test – commonly used to measure unconscious bias. We adapted the task to assess how much they automatically associated women with inanimate objects or animals.
The group also responded to questionnaires measuring how often they engaged in a range of abusive and sexually coercive behaviours towards their current partners. Although based on self-reporting, and therefore open to distortion, these measures are (https://doi.org/10.1891/vivi.19.5.541.63681) valid predictors of violent behaviour.
As expected, men with relatively strong tendencies to associate women with objects reported higher rates of violent and coercive behaviour. This effect did not occur because these men held more hostile sexist attitudes toward women.
Objectification and sexism were distinct predictors of intimate partner violence, suggesting that objectification independently contributes to this form of violence.
Voodoo dolls
Our second study extended the first in two ways. First, we adapted the association test to examine how much men automatically associated their partner with objects, rather than women in general.
Second, we added a more behavioural test of violence. The (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23878068/) Voodoo Doll Task allows participants to use “pins” to stab a doll, presented on a computer screen, that shares their partner’s name.
Each participant has an opportunity to use as many pins as he wishes after vividly imagining a provocative scenario. He is at a bar with his partner when she starts flirting with another man and expressing discontent with her current relationship.
Stabbing a virtual doll with digital pins is not the same as inflicting actual violence, of course. However, (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23878068/) people who use more pins are more prone to real-world violence. Their inhibitions against acting violently are likely weaker.
In our study, men who tended to associate their partners with inanimate objects reported higher rates of violence, as in the first study. They also stabbed the voodoo doll with more pins if they were highly upset by the provocative scenario.
The objectifying mindset
Our first two studies examined objectification as the tendency to associate a person with objects. Our third considered it as the tendency to focus on the person’s physical appearance.
In our experiment, men were randomly assigned to write several sentences about their partner’s appearance or about her personality. They then completed the Voodoo Doll Task and several short questionnaires.
As we predicted, young men induced to focus on their partner’s appearance stabbed the doll with more pins. They also rated their partner as having fewer personality traits associated with being emotional and capable of action (which contrasts the inertness of inanimate objects).
What this means in the real world
Our three studies indicate objectification plays a role in men’s intimate partner violence against women. Men who implicitly see their female partners as object-like are at greater risk of acting violently towards them.
Inducing an appearance mindset may also promote intimate partner violence, suggesting objectification may be implicated in violence even among men who are otherwise not prone to it.
These findings offer a new perspective on intimate partner violence and how to prevent it. Fundamentally, they imply this violence is partially rooted in a failure of empathy. Some men are unwilling or unable to appreciate their partners as complete humans.
Cultural changes that boost or encourage men’s appreciation of women’s experiences, and reduce their focus on their physical appearance, may help reduce the terrible toll of violence in heterosexual intimate relationships.
 
This article is republished from (https://theconversation.com) The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the (https://theconversation.com/young-men-who-see-women-as-objects-are-more-likely-to-be-violent-towards-their-partners-new-research-242578) original article.

Forwarded by:
Michael Reeder LCPC
Baltimore, MD

This information is taken from free public RSS feeds published by each organization for the purpose of public distribution. Readers are linked back to the article content on each organization's website. This email is an unaffiliated unofficial redistribution of this freely provided content from the publishers. 

 

(#) unsubscribe from this feed
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.clinicians-exchange.org/pipermail/article-digests-clinicians-exchange.org/attachments/20241213/6c0621a0/attachment.htm>