August 2018
An experiment conducted at Reading and Leeds Festival to understand psychological and physiological components of musical chills or goosebumps
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April 2018Dyedra Morrissey was selected as one of two graduate students to present her DPhil research into Time Perception and The Planning Fallacy as part of the Pembroke College Annual Fund Series in front of 70 Donors of the college.
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April 2018Robin Murphy delivered keynote address to surgeons and medical health experts at 3rd World Congress. People enact agency and control of their body using surgery. The talk presented research on mental health screen tools for female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS). Title "Predicting and managing psychological well being: Screening for Aesthetic and Affective genital surgery".
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March 2018Dyedra Morrissey presents new causal learning data to the International Associative Learning Conference in Wales. Our data raises questions for how we think about the cognitive computation of causal relations.
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October 2017Action and Control are expressed in our behaviour. Here we are thinking about mental health support for prospective patients of Female Genital Surgery
Stelios Kiosses discusses the collaboration with Robin Murphy Interview starts at 10:47 minutes - click here to watch. |
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October 2017Social Brain and Behaviour Club
8th October 2017 4-5pm, Corpus Christi College (Rainolds Room), University of Oxford https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/events/social-brain-and-behaviour-club 
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Please join us for our next Social Brain and Behaviour Club meeting at 4pm on Wednesday 8th November in the Rainolds Room, Corpus Christi College. Our speakers will be Prof. Robin Murphy and Dr. Alex Sel. The format will be two short 20 minute presentations on topics related to social neuroscience and social psychology with some time for discussion.
Dr. Robin Murphy: Trump and the Brexit Brain: Learning and the social contact hypothesis Stereoptypical attitudes are responsible for some of our more hurtful decisions and behaviours. In terms of rationality, it seems difficult to understand from where some biases emerge. The Illusory Correlation effect (Hamilton & Gifford, 1972; JESP) is an experimental demonstration of such a bias emerging in the absence of supporting evidence. I will discuss Model free or Model Based theories of learning and how they can be used to explore the development of negative attitudes (Murphy et al., 2011; QJEP). I will also present research involving the experimental study of these acquisition processes and the utility (and disutility) of evidence gathered from neural processes (Spiers et al., 2017, J. CogNeuro). Hosted by patricia.lockwood@psy.ox.ac.uk |
October 2017The Guidelines Challenge: A CauseHealth Event
Oxford Spires Hotel 3rd-4th October 2017 https://causehealthblog.wordpress.com/the-guidelines-challenge-a-causehealth-event/ |
CauseHealth takes on the challenges related to causal complexity, individual variations and external validity in health sciences. Guidelines, for various reasons, are often used more rigidly in clinical settings than the developers intended. But one size does not fit all. Evidence from the patient context can be more causally relevant in deciding treatment than what has been shown to work at the group level.
This conference brings together practitioners, guidelines networks and philosophers of science to address the general problem of how to put the tools of philosophy to use in improving the development and implementation of healthcare guidelines. In particular, how do we reconcile the purpose of guidelines with the needs of the clinic? There is a growing movement towards the particular (e.g. person centred approaches, individualised treatments, incorporating patient narratives and clinical judgement), while guidelines must be general (e.g. providing evidence-based advice and methods for clinical decision-making). Brian Broom Nancy Cartwright Trish Greenhalgh Mike Kelly Further relevant questions are:
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July 2017Prof. Robin A Murphy talking at the Global Aspiring Medic Conference in Hong Kong
University of Hong Kong www.gamchk.com/speakers www.psychology.hku.hk/~main/?page_id=24 |
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July 2017To neglect or integrate contingency information from outside the task frame, that is the question! Effects of depressed mood
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691816303511 New research published in Acta Psychologica |
Evidence shows that there are individual differences in the extent to which people attend to and integrate information into their decisions about the predictive contingencies between events and outcomes. In particular, information about the absence of events or outcomes, presented outside the current task frame, is often neglected. This trend is particularly evident in depression, as well as other psychopathologies, though reasons for information neglect remain unclear. We investigated this phenomenon across two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 157; Experiment 2: N = 150) in which participants, scoring low and high in the Beck Depression Inventory, were asked to learn a simple predictive relationship between a visual cue and an auditory outcome. We manipulated whether or not participants had prior experience of the visual cue outside of the task frame, whether such experience took place in the same or different context to the learning task, and the nature of the action required to signal occurrence of the auditory outcome. We found that all participants were capable of including extra-task experience into their assessment of the predictive cue-outcome relationship in whatever context it occurred. However, for mildly depressed participants, adjacent behaviours and similarity between the extra-task experience and the main task, influenced information integration, with patterns of ‘over-integration’ evident, rather than neglect as we had expected. Findings are suggestive of over-generalised experience on the part of mildly depressed participants.
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June 2017Elisa Militaru joins the group on an Experimental Psychology Society Studentship
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The current research we employed a fear conditioning paradigm to study anxiety. By pairing a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) to an aversive stimulus (unconditioned stimuli, US) such as a scream, an organism exhibits a conditioned response towards the originally neutral stimuli. In such fear conditioning studies, anxious individuals show elevated fear responses to both the CS and the context in which the CS has been presented in (Duits et al., 2015). Interestingly, when the CS-US contingency is not learnt, individuals show higher levels of fear towards the aversive context than towards the CS (Baas et al., 2008). Furthermore, unpredictable shocks in humans have been shown to be associated with greater context conditioning compared to predictable shocks (Grillon, 2015). Baas et al. did not use an unpredictable CS, but diminished the reinforcement ratio (reinforcing one out of 4 CSs) and made the CS ambiguous and hard to identify.
In the present study, we hypothesised that responses to the safe and aversive cues and contexts will depend upon how predictive of the outcome CSs are, which in turn will depend upon the CS-US contingency. Thus, two reinforcement ratios were used: 1/4 and 3/4. The second aim was to identify whether fear responses modify as a function of cue distinctiveness. Two types of cues were used to answer this question: a distinctive CS (a light turning on, changing the luminance of a discrete area in the on-screen room) versus an integral CS (a light turning on, changing the luminance of the entire on-screen room). Manipulating these two factors, a between-subjects design yielded four groups which were compared to identify group differences. A further aim of the experiment was to assess whether attentional focus changes depending upon the strength of the CS-US association. Eye-tracking was employed to reach this aim and to complement the comparison between cue and context learning. This was attained by comparing the fixation durations upon the CS in a distinctive condition compared to an integral condition. |
March 2017Pint of Science, Oxford
https://pintofscience.co.uk/event/texit-keep-calm-and-science-on Causation is complex, especially where it involves ‘the person’. Advances in science are made in the face of weak comprehension of causal frameworks. One problem is that the Scientific Method is weak in contrast to the model of understanding to which we aspire. Psychology highlights a further constraint; animals have evolved mechanisms that solve natural causation in a similar manner. There are implications for patient and practitioner as well as their interaction. The world is more complex than we acknowledge and we have evolved to think more simply than we might wish. |
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February 2017Dyedra Just, at the Cognitive and Brain Science Seminar Series, SUNY Binghamton University, USA
www.binghamton.edu/psychology/ Time flows, but for each of us the flow is different and changes with our psychological state. Time can seem to speed up or slow down depending upon what we are doing and how we feel. Two variables closely related to time perception are causality and agency. Hume posited that causality is what we perceive when events happen close together in time. Conversely, being an agent and causing an outcome to happen, results in the action and outcome seeming to occur closer together in time, the intentional binding effect (Haggard, 2002). This effect is observed on very short time scales, however agency and control may also explain distortions in time prediction at longer time durations up to days and years. This may explain The Planning Fallacy (Kahnemann & Tversky 1977), the phenomenon that tasks temporal completion are often underestimated. Furthermore, personality variables related to control seem to also be related to this effect and may also be related to mood and mental health. I will present experiments designed to explore the role causal agency in time perception and posit an account of this interaction. |
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November 2016New research published on learning stereotypes
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_01056 Despite advances in understanding the brain structures involved in the expression of stereotypes and prejudice, little is known about the brain structures involved in their acquisition. Here, we combined fMRI, a task involving learning the valence of different social groups, and modeling of the learning process involved in the development of biases in thinking about social groups that support prejudice. Participants read descriptions of valenced behaviors performed by members of novel social groups, with majority groups being more frequently encountered during learning than minority groups. A model-based fMRI analysis revealed that the anterior temporal lobe tracked the trial-by-trial changes in the valence associated with each group encountered in the task. Descriptions of behavior by group members that deviated from the group average (i.e., prediction errors) were associated with activity in the left lateral PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and lateral anterior temporal cortex. Minority social groups were associated with slower acquisition rates and more activity in the ventral striatum and ACC/dorsomedial PFC compared with majority groups. These findings provide new insights into the brain regions that (a) support the acquisition of prejudice and (b) detect situations in which an individual's behavior deviates from the prejudicial attitude held toward their group. |
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September 2016Anti-depressant drugs enhance feelings of control in depression
www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/anti-depressant-drugs-enhance-feelings-control-depression |
New research undertaken by members of the Computational Psychopathology Research Group based at the Universities of Limerick and Oxford and collaborators at Harvard Medical School, provides evidence showing that anti-depressants can help people take control over their lives, reducing feelings of helplessness and depression symptoms.
Researchers Dr Rachel Msetfi, University of Limerick, Dr Poornima Kumar, Harvard Medical School, USA, and Professors Catherine Harmer and Robin Murphy, University of Oxford, UK, carried out a study in which they administered a commonly prescribed dosage of an anti-depressant drug, escitalopram, for 7-days to people who were depressed or not depressed. The drug increases levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the central nervous system. Lead researcher, psychologist Dr Rachel Msetfi said, “Although people may be concerned about taking anti-depressants, we are now starting to understand how anti-depressant drugs have a positive effect on psychological experience and symptoms. Our new research adds to the understanding suggesting that anti-depressants affect our everyday behaviours and our learning about simple day-to-day activities, resulting over time in feelings of being more in control, less 'ruled' by the environment, and perhaps ultimately alleviating depression." After 7-days of either taking the drug or a placebo, volunteers took part in a computer-based game designed to test learning ability. They were required to learn about how their actions could control events occurring in the game. Volunteers tested the effectiveness of their actions on numerous occasions (using keyboard presses) to check if they could control sound turning on. The researchers had ensured that, in all cases, the volunteers had no control over these events in the game. In these situations, healthy people who are not experiencing depression tend to perceive that they are 'in control', whereas people with depression report little control or so-called helplessness. In this recent study, published in the 'Neurobiology of Learning and Memory', Dr Msetfi and her colleagues discovered that the anti-depressant drug affected how people behaved in the game, and importantly how they learned about their own control over events in relation to events randomly occurring in the environment. People with depression who were taking the placebo (no drug) tended to interact less with the game, produce fewer actions and feel that the environment was more in control of events than themselves. After taking the drug for 7-days, depressed volunteers interacted more with the game, tested whether their actions controlled the situation on more occasions, and the environment was judged as less controlling than for participants on the placebo. The paper is published open access in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. This study was funded by the P1vital CNS Experimental Medicine Consortium and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK). |
September 2016Symposium for Person-Centered Care of Medically Unexplained Symptoms, St George’s, University of London
http://pchealthcare.org.uk/sites/pchealthcare.org.uk/files/conference/download/espch_causehealth_st_georges_university_of_london_person-centered_care_of_mus_delegate_brochure.pdf Understanding causation is complex, especially where it involves ‘the person’. Advances in physiological, psycho/social understanding, and associated interventions have been made in the face of this complexity but often in spite of weak comprehension of the causal framework of any particular disorder. One of the problems highlighted by CauseHealth and ESPCH is that our tools (e.g., the Scientific Method, Evidence Based Medicine, Random Control Trials) are relatively weak in comparison with the model of understanding to which we aspire. Research from experimental psychology highlights a further constraint to our understanding; Animals have evolved neural mechanisms that solve causal problems in a manner that mirrors the scientific method. Our natural behaviour and thinking suffers from the same weaknesses as our methods. I will discuss experiments designed to understand how our perceptions, their mental representations and associated cognitions guide our thinking. Highlighting some of the biases that constrain our thinking about cause, we discuss 1) single cause bias 2) surface similarity between cause and effect and 3) representational complexity. These experiments have implications for both patient and practitioner as well as how they interact. Not only is the world more complex than we generally tend to acknowledge but we are evolved to think more simply than we might wish. |
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