Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the last week:

1. How too much empathy can actually lead us to do the wrong thing - thought-provoking essay by Paul Bloom. (related research covered on the Digest).

2. Thanks to books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and, most recently, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are discovering the manifold biases that muddle human judgment. So how come there hasn't been a revolution in good sense and shrewd decision making? Samuel McNerney may have the answer.

3. The Digest nearly won an award this week (hold the applause), reaching finalist position for psychology/neuroscience in the inaugural Science Seeker blogging awards. Many congratulations to all the winners, especially to Aatish Bhatia winner of the psych/neuro category; to psychologist Pete Etchells who won "best post about peer-reviewed research"; and to Virginia Hughes, who won "post of the year" for her superb story about hypersomnolence.

4. The build up to the release of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code (DSM-5) continued this week as the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology published a statement calling for a "paradigm shift" in psychiatric diagnosis "away from an outdated disease model" towards "an approach which pays far more attention to the complex range of life experiences of people experiencing mental distress."

5. The story broke at the Observer on Sunday with an unfortunate spin that implied psychology was at war with psychiatry. Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, a psychiatrist, showed there is in fact a great deal of consensus ("Mindless psychiatry is as unhelpful as brainless psychiatry, and the psychiatrist who ignores the social environment is, well, not a psychiatrist").

6. How to spot a murderer's brain (or not).

7. Ed Yong reported on an ambitious and controversial new study of super-brainy participants that's looking to pin down the genetic influences on intelligence.

8. Do nice guys really finish last?

9. If only there were somewhere you could get an expert, no-nonsense discussion of psychology research that's been splashed all over the media ... hang on, psychologist and writer Tom Stafford has started a new column for The Conversation that does just that - first off, can a poster of staring eyes really deter bike thieves?

10. The 2013 illusion of the year has been chosen - check out the winner and runners up.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Experienced job interviewers are no better than novices at spotting lying candidates

For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Marc-André Reinhard report that experienced job interviewers are in fact no better than novice interviewers at spotting when a candidate is lying.

The researchers filmed 14 volunteers telling the truth about a job they'd really had in the past and then spinning a yarn about time in a job they'd never really had. The volunteers were offered a small monetary reward to boost their motivation. These clips were then played online to 46 highly experienced interviewers (they'd conducted between 21 and 1000 real-life job interviews), 92 interviewers with some experience (they'd interviewed at least once), and 214 students who'd never before acted as a job interviewer. The participants' task was to identify the clips in which the interviewee was speaking truthfully about their work experience, and the clips in which the interviewee was fabricating.

Overall the participants achieved an accuracy rate of 52 per cent - barely above chance performance, which is consistent with a huge literature showing how poor most of us are at spotting deception. But the headline finding is that the more experienced interviewers were no better than the novice interviewers at spotting lying job candidates - the first time that this topic has been researched. Greater work seniority, having more work experience and having more subordinates at work were also unrelated to the ability to spot lying job candidates.

There was a glimmer of hope that interview lie-detection skills could be taught. Participants who reported more correct beliefs about non-verbal cues to lying (e.g. liars don't in fact fidget more) were slightly more successful at recognising which job candidates were lying (each correct belief about a non-verbal cue added 1.2 per cent more accuracy on average). Experienced and novice interviewers in the current study didn't differ in their knowledge about lying cues, which helps explain why the veterans were no better at the task. The more experienced interviewers were however more skeptical overall, tending to rate more of the clips as featuring lying.

"Our results provide the first evidence that employment interviewers may not be better at detecting deception in job interviews than lay persons," the researchers said, "although it is a judgmental context that they are very experienced with."

Although the main gist of the results is consistent with related research in other contexts - for example, studies have found police detectives are no better at spotting lies, despite their interrogation experience - this study has some serious limitations, which undermine the applicability of the findings to the real world. Above all, the study did not involve real interviews, which meant the participants were unable to interact with the interviewees in a dynamic manner.

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Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., and Müller, P. (2013). It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (3), 467-479 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence

Do fluent presenters make
learning feel too easy?

Eloquent and engaging scientific communicators in the mould of physicist Brian Cox make learning seem fun and easy. So much so that a new study says they risk breeding overconfidence. When a presenter is seen to handle complicated information effortlessly, students sense wrongly that they too have acquired a firm grasp of the material.

Shana Carpenter and her colleagues showed 42 undergrad students a one-minute video of a science lecture about calico cats. Half of them saw a version in which the female lecturer was confident, eloquent, made eye-contact and gestured with her hands. The other students saw a version in which the same lecturer communicated the same facts, but did so in a fumbling style, frequently checking her notes, making little eye contact and few gestures.

After watching the video, the students rated how well they thought they'd do on a test of its content ten minutes later. The students who'd seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. In the case of the students in the fluent lecturer condition, this wasn't as good as they'd predicted. Their greater confidence was misplaced.

A second study was similar - 70 students watched either a fluent or fumbling lecturer, but this time the students had a chance afterwards to spend as long as they wanted reviewing the script. On average, both groups of students devoted the same amount of time (perhaps out of habit). But only among the students who'd watched the fumbling lecturer was there a link between time spent on the script and subsequent performance on the test. This suggests only they used the time with the script to fill in blanks in their knowledge.

"Learning from someone else - whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent - may create a kind of 'social metacognition'," the researchers said, "in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, 'can I explain it clearly?'".

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren't picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class.

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Carpenter, S., Wilford, M., Kornell, N., and Mullaney, K. (2013). Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0442-z

--Further reading--
Co-author on this study, Nate Kornell, wrote a guest Digest post in 2008 with study tips for students. 
How fluency affects judgement, choice and processing style

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Paul Clarke Wikipedia Commons. 

Occupational hazard - links between professions and suicide risk have changed over time

Suicide rates have fallen among farmers

Among the various risk factors for suicide, psychologists have recognised for some time that a person's occupation plays an important part. Suicide rates have tended to be unusually high in professions that provide ready access to guns, drugs, or open water, such as in farming, medicine, dentistry and maritime careers.

A new analysis has examined whether this still holds true. Stephen Roberts and his colleagues accessed the UK suicide rates for dozens of occupations in 1979 to 1983 and compared these with similar data recorded between 2001 and 2005.

Consistent with the ready access theory, vets, pharmacists, dentists, doctors, and farmers were all among the top 15 occupations with the highest suicide rates back in the late 70s, early 80s. But this had all changed when looking at the more recent data. In the early noughties, none of these professions were in the top 30 occupations in terms of suicide rates. Instead, the occupations with the highest rates of suicide were largely manual, including coal miners, builders, window cleaners, plasterers and refuse collectors.

Stated differently, of 55 high-risk occupations, 14 had shown reductions in suicide rate in the noughties compared with the late seventies, and these were almost exclusively highly educated professional roles like doctors, radiographers and judges, as well as farmers, actors and authors. In contrast, five of the 55 high-risk professions showed an increased rate of suicide in the later data, and these were exclusively manual professions - coal miners, labourers, plasterers, fork-lift drivers and carpenters.

The new findings are published at a time when arguments are raging over the relative prominence that should be given to biological or social explanations of mental illness.

According to this new analysis, socio-economic forces appear to have become an increasingly major factor in occupational suicide risk. The percentage of variation in suicide rates explained by an occupation's socioeconomic grouping (e.g. managerial, trade, admin etc) almost doubled from 11.4 per cent in the early data to 20.7 per cent in the early noughties. Bear in mind these figures were from before the recession, so if anything it seems likely this trend will have intensified in more recent years.

The data also showed that suicide rates were much higher among men than women, and that among men, the most at-risk occupations tended to be manual, whereas in women they were more often (non-manual) professional.

If the pattern of these results are replicated in other European and Western countries, the researchers said this "could help in developing new suicide prevention interventions that can be targeted at specific occupational groups."

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Roberts, S., Jaremin, B., and Lloyd, K. (2013). High-risk occupations for suicide Psychological Medicine, 43 (06), 1231-1240 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712002024

--Further reading--
More Digest reports on suicide.
Men, suicide and society - why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide (Samaritans report).

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. Love this - "Neuroscience may be sexier than psychology right now, and it certainly has a lot more money and celebrity. But they really cannot get along without each other." Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal on How The Brain Really Works.

2. New Scientist has started a new column written by people with "mysterious neurological conditions". The first is by Heather Sellers who has a severe form of prosopagnosia (AKA face blindness).

3. There's been lots of coverage this last week about NIMH director Thomas R. Insel's announcement that his organisation - the world's largest funder of mental health research - will be moving away from US psychiatry's DSM categories, just as the profession is about to publish the latest version of its diagnostic manual. My favourite round-up of the affair was by Christopher Lane for Psychology Today. Other bloggers pointed out that the big news isn't really that surprising at all. (also, check out this measured response from the chair of DSM5).

4. "Probably the most boring book in the world" - that's how Prof Sir Simon Wesseley described the DSM on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind as he told presenter Claudia Hammond that the diagnostic code really isn't that relevant here in the UK. The programme also covered recent research that looked at rates of crying by therapists in therapy (check out my coverage of the research earlier this year).

5. The Guardian covered the psychological tricks that restaurant menu-compilers use to influence your dinner order.

6. Newly posted TED talk by positive psychology researcher Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit.

7. A new play on tour in the UK "Mess" sets out to demystify anorexia and it's getting rave reviews. It's written by and stars Caroline Horton, who has first-hand experience of the condition. (There's also a new book out soon about anorexia: Ministry of Thin, How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out of Control).

8. I enjoyed this charming account of the decades-long research relationship between Suzanne Corkin and amnesiac Henry Molaison. (Corkin's new book about Molaison is out now in hardback and Kindle).

9. Nathan Azrin, the psychologist who pioneered the use of "token economies" on psychiatric wards has died aged 82. "It would be difficult to name a population that wasn’t affected by his work," said Alan Kazdin in this NYT obituary.

10. Bad news for "Tiger" parenting enthusiasts - "Children of parents ... classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or "easygoing.”

--
Looking ahead to the weekend and beyond. There's a workshop this Saturday and Sunday in London on Havening Therapy, which promises to cure trauma in minutes. Here's why I won't be going. Later in the week in Oxford, there are still tickets available for three Pint of Science brain-related events.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Children aren't scared by nasty dentist visits, but by what they think of them

The Greek Stoic Epictetus wrote that "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them." A new study involving 185 children and teenagers, 88 fathers and 97 mothers shows how this same principle applies to children's fear of the dentist. This is an important topic because many children avoid the dentist out of fear, and around half of dentally anxious adults trace their fears to childhood.

Antonio Crego and his colleagues assessed the children's fear of the dentist, any bad experiences they'd had, their personality, their relatives' fear and, most importantly for this study, their "cognitive vulnerability". This last measure looked at how much the children had feelings of uncontrollability (e.g. feeling trapped), unpredictability (not knowing what will happen), dangerousness (expecting pain) and disgustingness (expecting it to turn their stomach) about a visit to the dentist. The mothers and fathers answered the same questionnaires.

As you'd expect, all the non-cognitive factors were associated with the children's dental fear. So having a bad experience, having a more fearful temperament and having fearful parents were all associated with being more scared of the dentist. But none of these were as strongly related to the children's fear as their cognitive vulnerability, which explained an additional 20 per cent of variation in fear levels.

Particularly striking was the finding that a bad experience was no longer associated with children's dental fear once cognitive vulnerability was taken into account. The implication is that a bad experience only leads children to fear the dentist if it increases their feelings of uncontrollability, dangerousness and so forth. Of the various components of children's cognitive vulnerability, it was perceived disgustingness that was most strongly related to their fear of the dentist.

Another finding was an association between children's cognitive vulnerability and their parents' cognitive vulnerability. Although there's no proof here that the parents are passing their thinking style onto their children, the researchers said this could reflect a kind of "cognitive transfer" among family members. This suggests that interventions aimed at reassuring children may need to target parents too.

Some further curiosities - the dental fear of children younger than 13 was more closely associated with their father's fear; for teenagers over 13, their fear was tied more with their mother's fear. Overall, cognitive vulnerability was more strongly associated with dental fear in teenagers, perhaps because of their increasingly mature thought processes.

Crego and his colleagues said their "cognitive approach may help explain why some children develop dental fear problems after suffering a negative dental experience and how dental anxiety is passed from parents to children."

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Crego, A., Carrillo-Diaz, M., Armfield, J., and Romero, M. (2013). Applying the Cognitive Vulnerability Model to the analysis of cognitive and family influences on children's dental fear. European Journal of Oral Sciences DOI: 10.1111/eos.12041

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

"It's about accepting that you're mortal" - Extreme sports enthusiasts on overcoming fear

In a safety-obsessed culture, why do some people throw caution to the wind and pursue sports where a wrong move often means instant death? Clues come from a series of interviews conducted with a group of 15 extreme sport participants (aged 30 to 70; 10 men) about their relationship with fear, including BASE jumpers (who launch themselves off high buildings), big wave surfers and waterfall kayakers.

Eric Brymer and Robert Schweitzer transcribed the interviews and looked for emerging themes. Contrary to traditional accounts of extreme sports enthusiasts as thrill seekers with a death wish, the interviewees described fear as an aversive, bodily sensation that the rest of us can recognise. A "gut-wrenching, terrible experience" was how one BASE jumper put it. "If you want a true slogan for these sports," he added, "it is Oh please don't let me die!". However, the interviewees also described how they face their fears and "push past" them.

Also contrary to some of the "devil may care" stereotypes that have dominated scientific and media portrayals of this group, the interviewees spoke of the importance of fear as a "healthy emotion" that "keeps you alive". Indeed, another of the themes related to "managing fear", with several participants describing their "fascination" with controlling their fear so as to avoid panic. "Fear is both a primal emotion and an experience to be savoured, confronted or broken through" the researchers said, "rather than as a stimulus for retreat."

The last theme on "self-transformation" was the most intriguing. The participants described how experiencing, controlling and pushing past intense fear left them positively changed and better equipped to deal with the tribulations of everyday life. A mountain climber described dealing with fear as "empowering" and "feeling very at peace" afterwards. A BASE jumper described the pursuit as "the ultimate metaphor for jumping into life rather than standing on the edge quivering". She also captured poetically the sense many of the interviewees had of becoming one with nature at the moment of most intense danger, as if "just a leaf in the wind: you're totally vulnerable and totally part of the environment at the same time. It's about accepting that you're mortal ... very vulnerable ... like a piece of dust ... in the wind." Another participant talked about a transformational "aura" that stayed with him "for as long as you care to remember."

According to Brymer and Schweitzer, these accounts "provide a critique of fear" as it is usually understood in conventional psychology, as always associated with dread. For the extreme sports enthusiast, fear is a useful emotion that aids survival but which ultimately can be transcended leading to personal growth and change. "By facing our greatest 'true' fears," said Brymer and Schweitzer "whether they be death, uncertainty or something else and taking action despite these fears, we transcend our own limitations and invite new possibilities into our lives."

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Brymer, E., and Schweitzer, R. (2013). Extreme sports are good for your health: A phenomenological understanding of fear and anxiety in extreme sport. Journal of Health Psychology, 18 (4), 477-487 DOI: 10.1177/1359105312446770

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Why your friends on Twitter are (probably) more interesting than you, and what to do about it

Statistical logic means that your lover has probably had more sexual partners than you. Similarly, at the gym, most of the other users train more frequently than you. And your friends have more friends than you do - this last observation was labelled the "friendship paradox" by sociologist Scott Feld. It's a fact because popular people get counted in more people's tallies of how many friends their friends have (here's more explanation).

Now thanks to a new paper by Nathan Hodas and his colleagues, we can add to this humbling stats lesson the fact that for most users of Twitter, our followers and followees (the people we choose to follow), are better connected, more active, and more interesting than we are.

Hodas' team analysed Twitter data from the second half of 2009 featuring 476 million tweets and 5.8 million users, with 193.3 million links between them. First off, they found that for most of us, the people we choose to follow are better connected - that is, they typically follow ten times as many people as we do. Our followers too are better connected, typically by a factor of twenty.

Seeing as we choose how many other people we want to follow, this first observation isn't such a blow to the ego. However, the researchers found a similar result for popularity. That is, the people who follow us are typically ten times more popular than we are (in terms of their own follower count). Less surprising, the people we choose to follow are also more popular than we are. Here there are two distinct groupings - in one, the people we follow are typically ten times as popular as us; in the other, they are typically 10,000 times as popular (this is thanks to celebrity accounts and such like).

Not only are our followers and the people we follow better connected and more popular than we are, the people we follow are also usually more active. Eighty-eight per cent of users were found to be less active than a typical person they followed; this rose to 99 per cent when omitting accounts that ceased activity during the period covered by the data. This is probably because we're more likely to follow accounts that are more visible by virtue of being more active.

A related observation was the link between activity and popularity - that is, more active users tended to be more popular, a correlation the researchers described as "especially strong". This suggests being more active on Twitter could be a simple way to gain more popularity, although we need to be cautious because there's no proof here for a causal link. "The detailed mechanism for this explanation is not yet clear," the researchers admitted.

To connectivity, popularity and activity, we can add interestingness. The researchers looked at the "virality" of links shared on Twitter - literally how many times they were re-tweeted. Here they found that 79 per cent of Twitter users posted less viral content than the people they follow.

Another issue the researchers looked at was what they called "information overload". Here they found that as the number of people we follow increases, the information that we're subjected to increases "super-linearly" - each new user that we follow typically equals hundreds of new items of information in our Twitter stream. In part this is because, as we heard, the people we follow are usually highly active (or at least more active than we are). The risk is that we end up subscribing to more information than we can possibly manage to consume.

This last point about overload is relevant to readers hoping to boost their popularity and interestingness on Twitter.  Comparing overloaded Twitter users (the third receiving the most amounts of info), and the underloaded (the bottom third), Hodas and his colleagues found that the overloaded tended to receive information that had gone massively viral, but tended to overlook "mini-cascades" - information that had viral potential. "It appears that overloaded users are only good detectors for information of mid-range interestingness," the researchers said. "Most likely the information that their friends already know." This suggests that if you want to be the kind of user who helps to break the next big story on Twitter, you need to be careful not to follow too many accounts in the pursuit of this aim. Pick and choose who you follow with care.

"If you have ever felt like your friends are more interesting or more active than you are," the researchers concluded, "it seems the statistics confirm this to be true for the vast majority of us."

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Nathan O. Hodas, Farshad Kooti, and Kristina Lerman (2013). Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You. arXiv arXiv: 1304.3480v1

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1.  Ferris Jabr for Scientific American on a fascinating study conducted on the streets of New York into people's private conversations with themselves - their internal stream of consciousness. (see also).

2.  The New York Times published an in-depth back story and interview with social psychology fraudster Diederik Stapel. Includes the revelation that Stapel wore suits as a grad student - a warning sign if I ever I heard one! (What do you think of the author Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's suggestion that Stapel's fraud is on a continuum with questionable research practices in psychology? Psychologist Dave Nussbaum took to his blog to disagree strongly. Update: Pete Etchells has also blogged about this today).

3. Nature News reported on a new row that's erupted in the field of social priming research, this one concerning the purported idea that exposure to the "professor" concept boosts people's intellectual performance (check out the discussion in the comments beneath the report).

4. The last two items may give the impression that social psychology is in crisis. Gary Marcus wrote a welcome counterpoint in the New Yorker: "The crisis in social psychology that isn't". And if psychology needs more cheering up - two psychologists were voted as among the top ten thinkers in the world - wahoo!

5. A brand new series of BBC Radio 4's flagship psychology programme All in the Mind began this week. I was lucky enough to appear as a guest to discuss new psychology research. Also on the programme - what happens when doomsday prophets find their predictions are wrong?

6. For the Guardian, novelist and psychologist Charles Fernyhough asked: How much and in what way is neuroscience permeating literary fiction?  (see also).

7. Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin. An in-depth, moving article that highlights the cost of not helping those with serious mental illness.

8. Neurobonkers interviews the authors of the recent paper exposing the serious power failure in neuroscience. (Here's the Digest report on the original paper).

9. A study published in open-access journal Plos One that claimed fist clenching affects memory has come under severe attack, sparking questions about the quality of open access journals and the virtues of post-publication peer review. (see this too from Neurocritic).

10. It's all been a bit serious this week - to round-off on a lighter note, here's a sardonic look at the 10 worst examples of management speak.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress

We each vary in how much we use first-person singular pronouns (I, Me, Myself) in our speech and writing, and how much we use first-person plural pronouns (We, Us, Ourselves). Researchers say it's a kind of habit and not something we usually have much control over. Now a study conducted in Germany claims that people who are more prolific users of "I" and "Me" tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression. "Using first-person singular pronouns highlights the self as a distinct entity," say the researchers led by Johannes Zimmermann, "whereas using first-person plural pronouns emphasises its embeddedness into social relationships."

Zimmermann and his colleagues counted pronoun use in transcripts recorded from 118 people who'd completed a 60 to 90-minute psychotherapeutic interview taking in topics including their past, their relationships and self-perception. This was an exploratory study and, knowing that these kind of interviews increase first-person singular pronoun use, the researchers thought this would be a good place to start.

The sample was made up of 99 patients at a psychotherapy clinic and 19 "healthy" controls (across both there were 103 women). The patients had problems ranging from anxiety to eating disorder. All the participants also filled out in-depth questionnaires that asked them about depression and their interpersonal behaviour.

Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns went hand in hand with higher depression scores and with interpersonal distress characterised by what the researchers called an "intrusive style", including inappropriate self-disclosure, attention seeking, and an inability to spend time alone. "First-person singular pronoun use may be part of a ... strategy that pulls for friendly-submissive attention from others," the researchers said. A "tendency to seek attention from others rather than self-focused attention."

In contrast, greater use of first-person plural pronouns was associated with lower depression scores and lower interpersonal distress. To the researchers' surprise, this was characterised by a "cold" interpersonal style. However, they think this is a "functional" kind of coldness - the ability to help others with their needs while also remaining appropriately detached for self-protection.

These are interesting findings that build on an established evidence base relating to pronoun use - for instance, past research has linked greater use of first-person singular pronouns with more marital dissatisfaction and social anxiety. However, the study has some obvious limitations, most notably its clinical sample, which limits the ability to say if the same findings would apply to the general population, and its reliance on participants' own descriptions of their interpersonal style. It's also important to note that there's no evidence here of a causal link - Zimmermann's team aren't saying that greater use of "I" and "Me" causes interpersonal problems. More likely, this way of speaking probably reflects how people see themselves and habitually relate to others.

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Zimmermann, J., Wolf, M., Bock, A., Peham, D., and Benecke, C. (2013). The way we refer to ourselves reflects how we relate to others: Associations between first-person pronoun use and interpersonal problems. Journal of Research in Personality, 47 (3), 218-225 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2013.01.008

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.