Obsessive driving fanatics are prone to drive aggressively

Here's one for the boys at Top Gear to think about - apparently having an obsessive passion for driving can predispose people towards aggression behind the wheel. The idea is that for these people, driving has become an overpowering compulsion, such that an obstacle - for example, a slow driver in front - provokes great frustration, which leads to anger, which explains why they sometimes drive right up your bumper and flash their headlights.

Frederick Philippe and his colleagues make their claims based on three studies. The first was a survey of 133 undergrad drivers. Those who scored highly on obsessive passion for driving (e.g. agreeing with statements like 'I have difficulty controlling my urge to drive') also tended to score highly on driving aggression (e.g. 'I speed up to frustrate another driver'). By contrast, 'harmonious passion', as indicated by agreement with statements like 'driving is in harmony with other activities in my life' was not linked with increased driving aggression.

A second study replicated these findings but with a sample of 458 middle-aged drivers, and with the addition of a question about a recent driving incident. Obsessive passion was again linked with aggression.

Most convincing is the third study involving a driving stimulator. Forty-four male car fanatics were tricked into thinking they were completing the task with another participant in another car. In reality the behaviour of the other driver was fixed such that he got in the participant's way on more than one occasion. Honking from the car behind helped crank up the pressure. Independent judges scored the participants' driving for aggressiveness. Once again, participants who rated highly on obsessive, but not harmonious, passion for driving tended to drive more aggressively. Participants also completed a questionnaire about their anger during the simulated drive. Results from this suggested that obsessive driving passion led to aggressive behaviour purely because obsessive participants got more angry.

'When obsessively passionate, the person wants to pursue activity engagement because of an internal compulsion that comes to control him or her,' the researchers explained. 'Within such a state, being prevented from engaging in the activity by an external agent is conducive to anger toward this agent.'
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FL Philippe, RJ Vallerand, I Richer, E Vallieres, & J Bergeron (2009). Passion for Driving and Aggressive Driving Behavior: A Look at Their Relationship. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39, 3020-3043

Bruery inspired Art!

Well this is a first for us. A super awesome artist who sampled our Melange no Sechs during San Francisco beer week was inspired to use the beer as the latest installment in her weekly art blog where she makes witty paintings and other art pieces that dissect different foods (mainly meats, but today, BEER!)

Be sure to take look at her site, she does great work.

http://meatsections.blogspot.com

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

What works in investigative psychology? (Legal and Criminological Psychology). Topics covered include interviewing child witnesses; confessions and interrogations; suspect line-ups; deception detection; offender profiling; and jury decision making.

Group processes and aggression (Aggression and Violent Behaviour).

National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence Guidelines for the Treatment of Antisocial Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder (Personality and Mental Health).

The sense of body (Neuropsychologia).

Developmental disorders of language and literacy (British Journal of Developmental Psychology).

Contemporary perspectives on sex offending, its assessment, and treatment (Psychology, Crime and Law).

Repression debunked

Psychologists in Denmark have hammered another nail into the coffin containing 'repression' - the idea, made popular by psychoanalysis, that negative, emotional memories are particularly prone to be being locked up out of conscious reach.

Simon Nørby and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen presented dozens of undergrad participants with word pairs, each made up of a cue word and an unrelated target word. Past research has suggested that people are able to deliberately forget some target words while remembering others. But this has been over very short time periods. Nørby's team wanted to test the effects of deliberate forgetting over a longer time period - a week - and they also wanted to revisit the question of whether emotional words can be deliberately forgotten as easily, or more easily, than neutral words. Past research has suggested they can, but these studies have tended to block emotional word pairs altogether in series of themed trials, thus raising the possibility that their impact may have been diminished by habituation. Nørby's team avoided this problem by jumbling up neutral and emotional words altogether.

The participants spent time learning 70 word pairs, then they were informed which target words were to be deliberately forgotten and which to be retained. An ensuing training process helped them with this. Participants repeatedly gave the target words when presented with cues for to-be-remembered pairs (if they couldn't remember it, they were told the target word), whereas they repeatedly withheld and attempted to suppress target words when presented with the cues for to-be-forgotten pairs. After all this, the participants were tested once again on all the word pairs, with their task to recall even those they had deliberately forgotten.

The results of this immediate test suggested that the participants had succeeded, to some extent, in deliberately forgetting those neutral words that they were supposed to forget. Recall for to-be-forgotten neutral words dropped from a baseline of about 80 per cent to about 70 per cent, whereas accurate recall for to-be-remembered words had increased to 95 per cent (unsurprisingly, the final training phase had acted as memory aid for these words). By contrast, suppressed, to-be-forgotten negative emotional words like 'massacre' and 'incest' remained unforgotten and were recalled just as accurately as to-be-remembered emotional words.

On retesting a week later, to-be-forgotten emotional and neutral words were recalled just as often as to-be-remembered words. In fact, over the course of a week, there was evidence that memory for to-be-forgotten words had deteriorated less than memory for to-be-remembered words. This could be another manifestation of the ironic 'suppression rebound effect' which is the finding that deliberately suppressing certain thoughts can make them come back stronger.

Taken altogether, the results suggest that neutral material can be deliberately suppressed over short time periods, but not for as long as a week. Negatively emotional material, by contrast, appears to be stubbornly resistant to deliberate suppression. This flies in the face of the psychoanalytic idea of repression, but is consistent with trauma research suggesting that emotionally salient memories are more persistent than normal, not less.
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Nørby S, Lange M, & Larsen A (2010). Forgetting to forget: on the duration of voluntary suppression of neutral and emotional memories. Acta psychologica, 133 (1), 73-80 PMID: 19906363

Image credit: fancy

Previously on the Digest:

Can we deliberately forget specific parts of what we've read?
How remembering can lead to forgetting.

Sneek Peak

A sneek peak into what we have been busy with the last couple of weeks.

More to come, stay tuned!

Just call me Martha: Valentine-inspired rainbow plate

I know. I know. But it was so exciting for my children and their playdate: peanut butter & jelly sandwich, blueberries, apple "bows and arrows", dried cranberries, (drum roll) those my friends are red peppers cut into hearts, and the ShaSha cookies I told you about in the last post. Trust me, this rainbow plate was a major lunchtime hit. Well worth busting out the cookie cutters.

Look what's local!!

Look what’s local! In addition to being thrilled to see (my now beloved) Rico M. Panada’s carried at Walter Stewart’s Market right here in New Canaan, I stumbled upon these wonderful heart shaped gingersnaps (perfect for this Valentine’s weekend!) when I went in to stock up on (those fabulous) Sonoma Tortillas in anticipation of some fish tacos and black bean breakfast burritos this weekend.

The ShaSha gingersnaps were a big hit with my two little ones and their friend who’d come over to play. According to the package, they contain “no refined sugar, trans fat or dairy”. I’m a fan of everything in moderation, but still it’s nice to find a store-bought cookie that’s on the healthy side. (If you’re there looking for them, I found them in the end aisle display by the Valentine’s candies…which is good because I wasn’t trolling the cookie aisle. Oh, and they’re on sale today too—probably in recognition of their timely heart shape.)

As for the empanadas, race over to pick some up before they sell out! Stewart’s is carrying: the Beef, Chicken Pot Pie, Black Bean & Beet, Sweet Corn and Cheese, and Red Beans & Rice varieties. My children’s favorites are the Sweet Corn and Cheese and the Chicken Pot Pie ones. My husband and I are partial to the Beef and Black Bean & Beet ones. The only reason we're not fans of the Red Bean & Rice one is because we haven't tried them yet! I stocked up because they’re such a perfect healthy dinner, paired with a salad or some fruit, on a busy night.