perception

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The physical rewards of exercise derive not just from muscular exertion but, to a surprising extent, from a person's mind-set about exercise, a new report suggests। http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com

Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer, psychologists at Harvard University, made this provocative discovery when they studied 84 women who clean rooms at seven Boston-area hotels. It's a physically taxing job. Each woman scours a hotel room for 20 to 30 minutes, cleaning an average of 15 rooms daily.

For at least a month, women who had heard a brief presentation that explained how their work qualifies as good exercise displayed more weight loss, larger blood pressure declines, and other health advantages compared with peers given no such information, Crum and Langer say.

This finding suggests that exercise enhances physical health, at least in part, via the placebo effect—that is, as a consequence of an individual's beliefs and expectations. "If our mind-sets control our psychological and physical reactions and we can control our mind-sets, then we can have direct control over our health," Langer says.

The new study appears in the February Psychological Science.

Crum and Langer recruited the women, officially known as room attendants, at franchise, condominium-type, and luxury hotels. All room attendants in any hotel either did or didn't receive the work-exercise presentation.

Participants ranged in age from 18 to 55, and most were Hispanic.

A total of 44 women attended a presentation, in Spanish and English, in which Crum and Langer showed that many of the activities that the attendants engaged in while cleaning hotel rooms satisfy the surgeon general's recommendations for an active lifestyle.

Handouts and posters in the attendants' lounge areas offered daily reminders of how much exercise participants were getting.

Four weeks after the presentation, women in both groups reported no change in how much they exercised outside of work. Hotel managers confirmed that room attendants' workloads remained constant.

However, the exercise-informed women perceived themselves to be getting markedly more exercise than they had indicated before the presentation. Members of that group lost an average of 2 pounds, lowered their blood pressure by almost 10 percent, and displayed drops in body-fat percentage, body mass index, and waist-to-hip ratio. Given the study's short length, the researchers call the observed changes "small but meaningful."

Participants who weren't offered the presentation didn't show such changes in perception of their activity or in health measures.

"These data are compelling and surprising," remarks psychologist Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull in England। Kirsch has studied placebo effects of substances such as antidepressant drugs and caffeine। http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com

Presentations to room attendants may have increased their optimism or raised expectations about the benefits of their work activities, but it's unclear how such mental adjustments would lead to health changes, Kirsch says.

To test whether women behave differently after the presentation, Crum is planning a longer investigation that will monitor physical activity using accelerometers and daily logs.

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Oh what a tangled web we weave, when trying to determine who deceives। Virtually everyone, even those experienced at dealing with deceivers, detect others’ lies no better than would be expected by chance। http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Those sobering conclusions come from the first large-scale analysis of individual differences in deception detection। It takes two to tangle in deceptive encounters, note Charles Bond Jr। of http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The two psychologists say their analysis of the findings to date suggest some people are relatively easy to read, while others shroud their intentions in mystery.

A person’s perceived credibility, as reported by volunteers on questionnaires, rather than honesty, plays a major role in whether that person gets branded as a liar, Bond and DePaulo report in the July Psychological Bulletin. Certain people appear either honest or dishonest from the get-go, whether or not they’re telling the truth, the psychologists assert. Earlier research has found that baby-faced people seem credible whereas people who look nervous or avert their gaze typically get labeled untrustworthy.

The new analysis shows that participants more often believe liars perceived as high in credibility than truth-tellers regarded as low in credibility.

“When all the evidence is statistically analyzed, deception judgments depend more on the liar than the judge,” Bond says.

The new investigation challenges a view, championed by psychologists Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco and Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco, that a small number of individuals with considerable experience in unraveling certain kinds of lies do so with great accuracy. O’Sullivan and Ekman have found that a minority of psychotherapists quickly discerns lies about what a person says he or she is feeling, whereas insightful police officers readily discern a suspect’s crime-related deceits.

“There are significant differences among individuals in lie detection accuracy if you pick your subjects appropriately,” O’Sullivan says.

Bond and DePaulo disagree। They devised a new statistical method for estimating the range in the percentage of lies and truths that groups of volunteers would accurately identify if a lie-detection test was infinitely long। The technique corrects for measurement errors that occur on standard lie-detection tests, especially those requiring only a few true-or-false judgments. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

The researchers applied this statistical tool to data from 142 earlier laboratory studies of lie detection. In these investigations, 19,801 judges assessed the veracity of 2,945 people conveying either true or false information. Many studies involved only college students as either judges or potential liars, but a substantial minority consisted of people with real-world lie-detection experience who were making deception judgments relevant to their professions.

Overall, participants accurately detected lies an average of 54 percent of the time, when an overall average of 50 percent would be expected by chance. This figure aligns with what researchers already knew.

But Bond and DePaulo focused on an individual’s performance, not a group average. They found that the highest detection rate achieved by an individual in these studies, which peaked at about 75 percent, did not exceed the maximum rate that guessing would have yielded, the researchers say. Individual differences in lie-detection accuracy were small, with scores clustering near the overall average of 54 percent correct.

Experienced judges displayed no lie-detection advantage over inexperienced ones. Neither did judges show greater accuracy in evaluating highly motivated liars, such as crime suspects, compared with less-motivated liars, such as college students pretending to have stolen money.

The researchers also found that the tendency to label someone as a liar also depended on whether a judge regarded other people as generally truthful or not.

Bond and DePaulo call for experiments that examine the complexity of real-world lie detection. Outside the laboratory, people infer deception from many lines of information, not just a person’s immediate behavior and speech, they say. In these situations, lies get identified over days, weeks or longer, rather than at the time a lie is told.

O’Sullivan also sees a need for research that addresses such issues. But she maintains that some people, due to their professional experiences, can quickly detect certain types of lies. In a new study submitted for publication, she and her colleagues find that experienced police officers rapidly identify high-stakes lies told by actual crime suspects far more often than they identify low-stakes lies told by students.

little

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Sun all day, but a little hazy; perhaps a battle.

There was quite a battle yesterday on the south side. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.comThe accounts in the morning’s paper fall short of the whole of our success. The enemy, it is said to-day, did not regain the works from which they were driven, but are now cooped up at Bermuda Hundred. Nothing is feared from Butler.

Nothing from Lee, but troops are constantly going to him.

I saw some 10,000 rusty rifles, brought down yesterday from Lee’s battle-field. Many bore marks of balls, deeply indenting or perforating the barrels. The ordnance officer says in his report that he has collected many thousands more than were dropped by our killed and wounded. This does not look like a Federal victory!