Volume of Cursing on Persuasion: F@#k yeah or f@#ck no?

The act of swearing or cursing seems to hold a lot of mysteries. Firstly, it is hypothesized that our human brain is actually hard-wired to do it (Pinker, 2007). Woah! Pinker further says that cursing is akin to the startled meow of cats whenever you step on their tails. What’s even more amazing is that there have been seen benefits of cursing, ranging from individual ones such as relieving emotional and physical pain (Stephens, Atkin, & Kingston, 2009) and large-scale benefits such as increased speaker persuasiveness and intensity (Scherer & Sagarin, 2006), among others. Such benefit has been exploited by advertisers and below are some cool examples of how cursing was used to drive up sales in a creative way:

Isn’t that amazing? Who would have known there would be many benefits to saying foul words?

Now researcher students from the University of the Philippines- Diliman Acoba, Lastimoza, Sayo and Velasco (2012) turned their attention on this strange phenomenon of cursing = increased persuasion. Since it was for a Perception class, they were especially curious on the effect of loud volume of cursing and its effect on persuasiveness. You see, it was found that increased volume of a message could translate to effectivity in persuading someone to agree with you (Packwood, 1974; Hall, Coats & LeBeau 2005; Van Iersel 2012). The researchers hypothesized that if we combine both qualities of a communicator (cursing and increased volume), it would also equate to increased persuasiveness. Pretty interesting, huh?! But how did the study turn out? We’ll find out soon.

Their study had 3 conditions: (1) control condition, where participants did not hear any curse word; (2) normal condition, where the volume of the curse word was the same as the volume of the rest of the words in the argument and (3) loud condition, where the volume of the curse word was significantly louder than the rest of the words in the argument. There were 98 participants randomly distributed among the 3 conditions. They then made them listen to a certain speech reflecting the 3 conditions as stated above, with the curse word inserted near the end of the whole speech. After that, they were asked to answer a 10 item Likert type scale measuring induced persuasiveness on behavioral, cognitive and affective dimensions. Using a one-way ANOVA, the results proved to be insignificant, with an F of 1.391. The researchers had to reject their hypothesis that the condition with loud cursing would induce a much higher persuasive effect than the other conditions.

The research was very interesting and it poses many implications in the applied setting. For one, we now know that a loud curse might not be as effective as we think it is, so we should avoid doing that, be it on a personal (like on speeches, pitches, etc) or large-scale (advertising, campaigns, etc) level. In fact, it might also be detrimental to a person or institution’s credibility, as hypothesized by the researchers (Acoba, et al, 2012).

This research teaches us that we should be careful next time we spout a curse word (a loud one at that!) as it might hurt both others’ personal perception of you and the idea or product you are selling. Moreover  we could learnt that two things which elicit similar effects, if combined, might not be as effective as we would think it would be. How about that for a take-home point?

References

Acoba, J. B., Lastimoza, R., Sayo, L. E., Velasco, E. M., (2012). Effects of Cursing Volume in Persuasion. Unpublished manuscript.

Hall, J., Coats, E., & LeBeau, L. (2005). Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 898-924.

Packwood, W. (1974). Loudness as a variable in persuasion. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 21(1),1-2.

Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature. New York: Viking.

Scherer, C., & Sagarin, B. (2006). Indecent influence: The positive effects of obscenity on persuasion. Social Influence, 1(2), 138-146.

Stephens, R., Atkins, J. & Kingston, A. (2009). Swearing as a response to pain. NeuroReport, 20, 1056-1060.

Van Iersel, B., (2012). Powerful agents: enhancing an artificial social agent’s persuasiveness by increasing its perceived social power. Eindhoven University of Technology, 1, 1-12.

 

BOTO BOTO sa Langit: An Explanation

In our previous post, we made a poster that aims to increase the rate of voter registration in the upcoming 2013 elections. Since we’re taking our perception class this semester, we attempted to incorporate certain concepts we’ve learned from class that could aid in promoting this relevant issue. And these are the following:

ATTENTIONAL CAPTURE. Let’s admit it, many people find campaign materials boring. So, even though you have stated the most brilliant idea in your poster, it is quite sad to think that some people would not even want to spend a minute or two analyzing it. Because of that, we have decided to apply attentional capture. If you have clicked our poster, you would have seen the movement of the pictures. Since we have learned that movement captures attention, we hope that by doing so, more people will be encouraged to read and understand the message that our poster is trying to convey.

APPARENT MOTION. As we have mentioned earlier, clicking our poster would allow you to see it moving. However, this type of motion is just an illusion called apparent motion. The black and white pictures did not really transform to colored pictures. Instead, these were just two stationary pictures that were flashing on and off. This was done in order to apply the concept of attentional capture which was discussed earlier.

FAMILIARITY. The first thing that you’d notice in our poster is the block of pictures right in the middle. We chose these images since, the familiarity of the pictures, such as the faces of Gloria Arroyo and Jessie Robredo and the depiction of different scenes and situations in the Philippines, can increase the attention that people will pay to the poster. We did this because we know that since people have a previous representation about what these images portray, it becomes likely for them to take a look at the pictures more since they have associated it with some sort of meaning as compared to showing an unknown image or stimulus. The emotions or meaning that they’ve associated with these images tend to make them remember the image more in their heads.

COLOR. As you may have noticed, we chose to use achromatic colors on the pictures that depict the current issues in our country. This was done in order to emphasize that our current situation is problematic and dull. On the contrary, we have used chromatic colors on the positive events because we wanted to give emphasis to the positive changes that can be done if we exercise our right to vote.

As we have seen, persuading people does not end with a catchy statement. The poster itself should reel in the audience through its elements and physical appeal. Making our poster through the knowledge of sensation and perception, we hope to service the Filipino people and give back our knowledge in an applied setting. Let’s all vote on 2013 and make that difference! 😀

References
Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
Myers, D. G. (2010). Social psychology (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

BOTO BOTO sa Langit: Magrehistro Ngayong 2013 Elections!

Nalalapit na naman ang halalan sa Pilipinas. Nakapagrehistro ka na ba? Kung hindi pa, magparehistro na! Nasasayo ang kapalaran ng bayan. Your vote counts, ika nga. Kaya naman ang tanong: ngayong 2013, makikialam, makikilahok, at boboto ka ba?

Iklik ang poster para makita itong gumalaw!

Less Sweet when Stressed

On one hand, though reward may be much sweeter when earnest effort has been made in its pursuit (well, at least according to a certain Michael J. Powell), on the other hand, however, the resulting stress from exerting too much effort won’t make food taste any sweeter.

Source

This has been the finding made by Al’absi, Nakajima, Hooker, Wittmers, & Cragin (2012) when they examined the effects of stress on taste perception. In their experiment, participants had to undergo two laboratory sessions: one stress and one control rest session. The stressors included public speaking (4-minute speech preparation and 4-minute delivery), 8-minute mental arithmetic task, and 90-second cold pressor test (immersion of nondominant hand in ice water).

Cardiovascular, hormonal, and mood measures were collected during the experiment; and, by the end of each session, participants had to rate the intensity and pleasantness of sweet, salty, sour, and savory solutions at suprathreshold concentrations.

Results have shown that the reported intensity of the sweet solution was significantly lower for the stress session than for the rest session. Participants also exhibited expected changes in cardiovascular, hormonal, and mood measures in response to stress. Furthermore, cortisol levels poststress have shown to be a possible predictor of the reduced perceived intensity of salty and sour tastes, thereby suggesting that stress-related changes in the adrenocortical activity were related to reduced taste intensity.

The attenuation of the taste perception during stressful situations may help explain why some resort to stress eating, one being that their thresholds are not fully met, especially with the chemical changes in the body brought about by the stressful situation. More generally, the research could contribute to the continuously growing body of knowledge concerning the relationship of stress and appetite, as such influence of stress on taste perception has the great capability to change the way we eat and perceive food.

Reference

Al’absi, M., Nakajima, M., Hooker, S., Wittmers, L., & Cragin, T. (2012). Exposure to acute stress is associated with attenuated sweet taste. Psychophysiology, 49(1), 96-103.

Blind as a Bat, Deaf as a Post

Would individuals with poor eyesight agree with me when I say that without our visual correction devices (e.g., eyeglasses, contact lenses), not only are we almost blind but, to a certain extent, deaf as well?

If only I looked this fierce with my glasses on, I would probably never forget to wear them anymore… Source

As it turns out, the link between vision and hearing in the field of speech perception is not as blurred as my eyesight. Through their research, Sweeny, Guzman-Martinez, Ortega, Grabowecky, & Suzuki (2012) were able to demonstrate that while perceiving speech, people see mouth shapes that are systematically associated with sounds.

Usually, experiments would test how looking at a mouth would influence hearing of speech. In the experiment of Sweeny et al. (2012), however, they tested if hearing speech sounds would have an influence on how shapes are seen.

Sweeny et al. (2012)

Working on the knowledge that a horizontally elongated mouth would typically produce a /wee/ sound, and that a vertically elongated mouth would typically produce a /woo/ sound, the experimenters made use of horizontally elongated (flat) and vertically elongated (tall) ellipses in place of mouths so that the participants would not be aware of the relationship between the sounds and the aspect ratios.

There were three conditions: consistent-sound (flat ellipse was presented with a /wee/ sound; tall ellipse was presented with a /woo/ sound); inconsistent-sound (flat ellipse with /woo/ sound; tall ellipse with /wee/ sound); and, environmental-sound (ellipse presented with an environmental sound of no relation to speech or mouth shape; i.e., door shutting and ice cracking).

Results have shown that in the consistent-sound condition, perceived elongation was larger relative to both the inconsistent sounds and the environmental sounds. Simply put, hearing a /woo/ sound increases the apparent vertical elongation of a shape, and a /wee/ sound increases the apparent horizontal elongation. Since none of the participants reported awareness of the sound-shape associations or knowledge that the shapes could have been interpreted as mouths, the results also suggest that the crossmodal shape exaggeration occurs implicitly.

The findings of this study would be helpful in communicating effectively with others. Knowing that what we see can influence what we hear and vice versa, clearly articulating what we say would be beneficial in relating with others. Such findings are also helpful in educating those with learning disabilities, as clear speech has the capacity to make them better understand what they are told. It is also useful in communicating with elders who may have difficulty hearing or seeing, thus using the appropriate technique in talking to them would help make conversations with them less troublesome and confusing.

Reference

Sweeny, T.D., Guzman-Martinez, E., Ortega, L., Grabowecky, M., & Suzuki, S. (2012). Sounds exaggerate visual shape. Cognition, 124(2), 194-200.

Roles of Novelty, Violation of Expectation, and Stimulus Change in Auditory Distraction

Students! Have you ever wondered why a loud thud could easily sidetrack us from listening to the professor? Or how the subtle but sudden beep of our phones could quickly distract us from studying?

Source

Well, aside from the fact that these activities could get mind-numbing when done for a prolonged period of time, numerous studies have demonstrated that unexpected novel sounds could involuntarily take our attention off of the task at hand (e.g., Jankowiak & Berti, 2007; Parmentier, Elsley, & Ljungberg, 2010; Bell, Dentale, Buchner & Mayr, 2010).

Source

However, Parmentier, Elsley, Andrés, & Barceló (2011) begged to differ and said that novel sounds do not capture attention because of their novelty per se. To this, they proposed three hypotheses:

1. Low base-rate probability. Novel sounds capture attention because they are rare, thereby triggering the detection of change.
2. The expectation hypothesis. Novel sounds capture attention because they violate the cognitive system’s expectation about upcoming events.
3. The local perceptual change hypothesis. Novel sounds capture attention because they differ perceptually from the preceding stimulus.

In order to test the hypotheses, the researchers made use of a cross-modal oddball task in which participants categorized the parity of visually presented digits. An auditory stimulus was presented before each digit, but the participants were instructed to ignore it. The standard sound (S; a sine-wave tone) was used in 75% of the trials, while the novel sound (N; burst of white noise) was used in the remaining 25%. The novel trials were organized in such a way that 8 out of 9 novels would form pairs of consecutive trials among otherwise randomly dispersed standard trials. This manipulation resulted to six types of trials: S following another S; first N in a pair; second N in a pair; isolated N; S following isolated N; and, S following a pair of N.

Fourteen females and six males, with mean age of 24.2 (SD=6.4) participated in this experiment. Their hit rates and mean response times for correct responses were analyzed using one-way ANOVA for repeated measures with the sound condition as the independent factor. Overall, hit rates were high and did not vary across conditions. Their response times, however, significantly differed across conditions, where “first N in a pair,” “isolated N,” and “S following isolated N” recorded the longest response times; intermediate in “S following a pair of N”; and, shortest in the “S following another S” and “second N in a pair” conditions.

Interpreting these results, the low base-rate probability was rejected because performance following a predictable novel (second N in a pair) was comparable to that in the S condition, while the unexpected “S following isolated N” yielded as much distraction as “first N in a pair” and “isolated N.” Meanwhile, taking the “first N in a pair,” “isolated N,” and “S following isolated N” as points of comparison, the relatively shorter response times yielded in the “S following a pair of N” condition is in line with the expectation hypothesis but clashing with the perceptual change hypothesis. But if we were to take the conditions in which the sound was predictable (S, and second N in a pair), the relatively longer response time in “S following a pair of N” is in line with the perceptual change hypothesis but is incongruous with the expectation hypothesis.

Thus, the researchers have come to accept the hypotheses that, in circumstances promoting distraction, novel sounds do not capture attention just because they are rare. Rather, it is because they violate the cognitive system’s expectation and clash with the perceptual trace from the previous auditory stimulus.

This research adds to previous knowledge on behavior novelty distraction by demonstrating the ways in which a novel stimulus may affect attention. This finding has the potential for practical application, as it provides valuable insights which may be used in fostering an environment conducive for studying. More specifically, this would help both parents and teachers in designing a space where external auditory distractions may be minimized.

References:

Bell, R., Dentale, S., Buchner, A., & Mayr, S. (2010). ERP correlates of the irrelevant sound effect. Psychophysiology, 47(6), 1182-1191. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01029.x

Jankowiak, S., & Berti, S. (2007). Behavioral and event-related potential distraction effects with regularly occurring auditory deviants. Psychophysiology, 44(1), 79-85. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2006.00479.x

Parmentier, F. R., Elsley, J. V., Andrés, P., & Barceló, F. (2011). Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change. Cognition, 119(3), 374-380. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.001

Parmentier, F. R., Elsley, J. V., & Ljungberg, J. K. (2010). Behavioral distraction by auditory novelty is not only about novelty: The role of the distracter’s informational value. Cognition, 115(3), 504-511.

Oxytocin in Motion

 

Source

Oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” is known for its role in facilitating social interactions; it fosters mother-child bonding (West, 2007), improves social cognition (Association for Psychological Science [APS], 2010a), and stimulates trust (APS, 2010b), among others.

To further examine the function of oxytocin in human social cognitive and emotional processes, Kéri & Benedek (2009) investigated on the effect of externally administered oxytocin on the visual perception of social and nonsocial stimuli. The researchers devised a 2 x 2 x 2 within-subjects experimental design (stimulus type [biological/nonbiological] vs. difficulty [number of mask dots] vs. test condition [oxytocin/placebo]) to test the hypothesis that oxytocin improves the perception of biological motion but has no effect on the detection of structured nonbiological motion.

Kéri & Benedek (2009) adapted the stimuli used by Hiris (2007). A treadmill walking pattern was used to represent the biological motion, while a structured rotation target was used for the nonbiological motion. Each stimulus was consisted of eleven white dots on a black background. These were embedded among clouds of either 176 or 352 dynamic mask dots randomly placed on the stimulus area.

Figure 1. Illustration of the stimuli used for the assessment of biological and nonbiological motion perception. The walking character performed a treadmill-like motion, whereas the square was rotating (see also the online movies available at http://journalofvision.org/7/12/4/images/
Movie1.mov and http://journalofvision.org/7/12/4/
images/Movie3.mov [Hiris, 2007]). The signal dots are marked by arrows (Keri & Benedek, 2009).

The twenty participants had to determine whether the target stimulus was present within the mask dots or not. They had to go through 100 trials for each condition, adding up to a total of 400 trials. Forty-five minutes before the beginning of the experiment, the participants were intranasally given a single dose of 24 IU oxytocin spray or placebo. Each of them underwent the oxytocin and the placebo conditions with a one-week interval.

Figure 2. Sensitivity (d’) values for biological and nonbiological motion after intranasal administration of oxytocin and placebo. Data are means. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. *p < .05, Scheffé’s tests (Keri & Benedek, 2009).

Results have shown that oxytocin enhances the perception of biological motion by increasing sensitivity for stimuli that represent living objects, but does not change the sensitivity for nonbiological stimuli. What the researchers have accomplished is to provide further support to the claim that oxytocin is, indeed, involved in the facilitation of social processes. Through their experiment, however, they have achieved to do so on a more basic level, and that is to show the involvement of oxytocin in motion perception of biologically and socially relevant actors.

References:

Association for Psychological Science. (2010a). Hormone oxytocin improves social cognition but only in less socially proficient individuals. Retrieved from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/hormone-oxytocin-improves-social-cognition-but-only-in-less-socially-proficient-individuals.html

Association for Psychological Science.(2010b). Study suggests oxytocin makes people trusting, but not gullible. Retrieved from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/study-suggests-oxytocin-makes-people-trusting-but-not-gullible.html

Hiris, E. (2007). Detection of biological and nonbiological motion. Journal of Vision, 7(12), 1-16.

Kéri, S., & Benedek, G. (2009). Oxytocin enhances the perception of biological motion in humans. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 9(3), 237-241. doi:10.3758/CABN.9.3.237

West, C. (2007). Level of oxytocin in pregnant women predicts mother-child bond. Observer, 20(10). Retrieved from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2007/november-07/level-of-oxytocin-in-pregnant-women-predicts-mother-child-bond-2.html

It’s Not Distracting After All

With all these technological advancements available around us, it is definitely harder to focus our attention to specific things these days. Imagine whenever we need to study and read a textbook, most likely, we would be doing it in front of our televisions or computers while watching our favorite show or playing our newly downloaded songs. We even call it multitasking when in fact these things might just be distractions. But have we ever thought how these sounds really affect our performances?

In a study by Wetzel, Widmann and Schröger (2011), they investigated how the informational content of a sound affects our visual performance. Basically, the participants were shown series of pictures and all they had to do was identify them as fast as possible. While doing that, the experimenters presented two types of sound distractions—a burst of white noise (deviant) and environmental sounds (novel). Surprisingly, they found that these sounds do not really cause behavioral distractions when they are uninformative with respect to the occurrence of the visual target. However, they informational content of these irrelevant sounds speeds reaction times. They also found that novel sounds shows bias toward facilitation.

Now that we know that, I guess it will be easier for us to control our attention. Whenever we need to accomplish a visual task faster, maybe we can play sounds that are meaningless to us and irrelevant to our task instead of playing our own choice of songs. In that way, we do not only try to avoid shifting our attention to some interesting yet distracting things but we might also help ourselves to finish our tasks on time. Just make sure that by doing this, we really get the desired effects because sometimes listening to meaningless sounds can feel irritating and uncomfortable. After all, you won’t really accomplish anything if you’re in a bad mood. 🙂

Reference:

Wetzel, N., Widmann, A., & Schröger, E. (2011). Distraction and facilitation—two faces of the same coin?. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, doi:10.1037/a0025856

Image Sources:

http://goo.gl/acBP1

http://goo.gl/0LQFv

http://goo.gl/fDTPi

Hearing through the Noise (when older): Irrelevant Stimuli and Word Recognition among the Old

 “Forever young, I want to be forever young. Do you really want to live forever, forever forever”

Do you share the same sentiment/s with this famous song by Alphaville? I too, at an early age of 20, want to be forever young. Why? Because being young involves lesser responsibilities and workload as compared to that of an adult. And biologically speaking, being younger means being more physically fit and having more accurate perceptual processes. For instance, babies have a relatively sharper sensory system as compared to adults (Santrock, 2011). However, getting old is inevitable. It is for this reason that as we grow older, we should learn how to adapt to how our body functions at every age.

A forever young Peter Pan

A common difficulty in the functioning of older people is in their sense of hearing. According to the Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics and Biomechanics (1988; as cited in Li, Daneman, Qi & Schneider, 2004), older adults often report that they have difficulty understanding speech in everyday conversational settings, especially when the environment is noisy and when there is more than one person speaking at a time. This is difficult because everyday life is composed, more or less, of situations that are heavily bombarded with conversation and speech. Older people frequently find themselves in instances like this (e.g., family gatherings, mall conversations). Thus, they are prone to frustration and anxiety, and they may avoid or be excluded altogether from social interactions. Moreover, studies has shown that older adults with normal or near-normal hearing may have no difficulty  perceiving speech in quiet listening conditions, but they do have considerable difficulty when there are interfering stimuli or when they are tested in reverberant environments (Stuart & Phillips, 1996; Tun & Wingfield, 1999; Schneider, Daneman, & Pichora-Fuller, 2002; Li et al, 2004).

Age-related difficulties in understanding speech could arise from several different sources: 1. deterioration of auditory resources 2. slowing of brain functioning and cognitive processing and 3. difficulty in inhibiting the processing of irrelevant stimuli. In this post, I will focus on the last source which is filtering out of irrelevant stimuli.

It has been proposed that normal aging is associated with reduced inhibitory mechanisms for suppressing the activation of goal-irrelevant information (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999; Li et al, 2004), allowing interfering signals to intrude into working memory. Thus, older adults may find hearing in noisy backgrounds to be difficult not only because of auditory declines but also because they cannot inhibit the processing of irrelevant speech efficiently.

In the study conducted by Li, Daneman, Qi & Schneider (2004), they tested the hypothesis that older adults should have more difficulty inhibiting the irrelevant masker, particularly when the masker and target are both speech. They did this by comparing the performance of older adults with younger adults. To determine whether older adults find it difficult to inhibit the processing of irrelevant speech, they asked both the younger and older adults to listen to and repeat meaningless sentences (e.g., “A rose could paint a fish”) when the perceived location of the masker (speech or noise) but not the target was manipulated. Separating the perceived location (but not the physical location) of the masker from the target speech produced a much larger improvement in performance when the masker was informational (2 people talking) than when the masker was noise.  However, contrary to the expected result, the size of this effect was the same for younger and older adults, suggesting that the interference from an irrelevant source at the cognitive-level was no worse for older adults than it was for younger adults.

 

            So now, based from the results, we can conclude that the difficulties in sound localization among older adults are not caused by any age-related factor. However, it is helpful to note that the study used a simple word recognition task. The results may be different had they used a more meaningful sentence. In conclusion, what we can learn from this study is that we should be wary of attributing every cognitive difficulty to age because for all we know, there may be an underlying factor present in all ages that caused the problem.

References:

Li, L., Daneman, M., Qi, J. G. & Schneider, B. A. (2004). Does the information content of an irrelevant source differentially affect spoken word recognition in younger and older adults? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30 (6), 1077-1091.

Santrock, J. (2011). Life-span development, 13^th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Zen & Pain

Have you ever watched the movie Johnny English Reborn where Agent English (played by Rowan Atkinson or more popularly known as Mr. Bean) trained in a Tibetan monk monastery? There he learned the technique Balls of Steel. Quite simply, it turns your balls into steel! That is, hitting him in the balls won’t affect him as much. He did this by attaching a rock to his balls and dragged it  with him (ouch!) He also trained to become a fire walker!

But in reality, is there really balls of steel? What is it about meditators that makes them withstand much pain? Researchers from the University of Montreal had similar questions in mind. Grant, Courtmanche, Duerden, Duncan, and Rainville (2010) investigated structural MRI scans of non zen meditators (control) and zen meditators. The structural MRI scans were performed and the temperature required to produce moderate pain was assessed in 17 meditators and 18 controls and found out that indeed, zen meditation is significantly associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. They specifically observed that there is thicker cortices among zen meditators related to pain such as the  anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral parahippocampal gyrus and anterior insula. They found out, too, that thickening depends on the year of training of zen, and that the longer they train, the thicker these brain regions become. Moreover, hours of experience predicted more gray matter bilaterally in the lower leg area of the primary somatosensory cortex as well as the hand area in the right hemisphere.

Brain regions associated with pain

          Such findings reveal that there is a connection between cortical thickness and pain sensitivity, something we know little about today. It also highlights experience-related plasticity of the brain.  Training such as zen meditation apparently affects brain morphometry and will thus have various impacts in the way we perceive the world. A take home point here I guess is that we are never too old to learn something new and that will change our brain. Our brain is truly a wonderful structure holds many mysteries just waiting for us psychologists and neuroscientists to unlock 🙂

References:

Grant, J., Courtmanche, J., Duerden, E., Duncan, G., & Rainville, P. (2010). Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators. Emotion, 10(1), 43-53.