NASA Releases Big Book of Psychology of Human Spaceflight

NASA's History Program Office is releasing a new book that examines the different psychological factors that affect astronauts during space travel, especially long-duration missions.

The book, "Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective," is a collection of essays from leading space psychologists. They place their recent research in historical context by looking at changes in space missions and psychosocial science over the past 50 years.

What makes up the "right stuff" for astronauts has changed as the early space race gave way to international cooperation.

Different coping skills and sensibilities are now necessary to communicate across cultural boundaries and deal with interpersonal conflicts.

"The essays give a comprehensive overview of this complex subject, providing novel insights for behavioral researchers and historians alike," NASA's Chief Historian Bill Barry said.

"The data is important as we work to send astronauts to Mars, which will mean longer missions without real-time communication with family and friends leading to increased potential psychosocial stresses."

The book's editor, Douglas A. Vakoch, is a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He also is a manager at the SETI Institute.

The book is available for purchase through the Government Printing Office here.

Canine connection: Study explores how dogs think and learn about human behaviour

Dog owners often attest to their canine companion's seeming ability to read their minds.

How do dogs they learn to beg for food or behave badly primarily when we're not looking? 

According to Monique Udell and her team, from the University of Florida in the US, the way that dogs come to respond to the level of people's attentiveness tells us something about the ways dogs think and learn about human behaviour.

Their research, published online in Springer's journal Learning & Behaviour, suggests it is down to a combination of specific cues, context and previous experience.

Recent work has identified a remarkable range of human-like social behaviours in the domestic dog, including their ability to respond to human body language, verbal commands, and to attentional states.

The question is, how do they do it? Do dogs infer humans' mental states by observing their appearance and behaviour under various circumstances and then respond accordingly? Or do they learn from experience by responding to environmental cues, the presence or absence of certain stimuli, or even human behavioural cues? Udell and colleagues' work sheds some light on these questions.

Udell and team carried out two experiments comparing the performance of pet domestic dogs, shelter dogs and wolves given the opportunity to beg for food, from either an attentive person or from a person unable to see the animal.

They wanted to know whether the rearing and living environment of the animal (shelter or human home), or the species itself (dog or wolf), had the greater impact on the animal's performance.

They showed, for the first time that wolves, like domestic dogs, are capable of begging successfully for food by approaching the attentive human.

This demonstrates that both species, domesticated and non-domesticated, have the capacity to behave in accordance with a human's attentional state.

In addition, both wolves and pet dogs were able to rapidly improve their performance with practice.

Read more: Canine connection: Study explores how dogs think and learn about human behavior

The Delusion and Flawed psychology of climate change denial

A poll published in Britain on November 14, found that only 41 percent of respondents accepted as 'an established fact' that human activity was largely responsible for current global warming.

The majority said the link was 'not proven', that green propaganda was to blame or the world was not heating up at all.

Hacked email disclosure
Last week, a private exchange of emails among climate scientists stoked a firestorm of skepticism after it was hacked and posted on the Web.

The memos expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming, and discussed ways to counter the campaigns of climate naysayers.

Experts see several explanations for the eagerness with which so many dismiss climate change as overblown or a hoax.

Clinging to Comfortable Lifestyles
"There is the individual reluctance to give up our comfortable lifestyles -- to travel less, consume less," said Anthony Grayling, a philosophy professor at the University of London and a best-selling author in Britain.

While deeply anchored in the West, this resistance also extends to emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil where a burgeoning middle class is only today tasting the fruits of a lifestyle they have waited so long and worked so hard to obtain.

Identity Crisis
For Tim Kasser, a professor of psychology at Knox University in Galesburg, Illinois, the reality of climate change impinges on core aspects of our identity.

"We are told a thousand times a day, notably through advertising, that the way to a happy, successful and meaningful life is through consumption," he said.

"But now scientists and environmentalists come along and say part of the problem is that we are consuming too much or in the wrong way."

Humanity's Delusions
Yet there may also be a darker explanation. It is the human instinct to shut out or modify a terrifying truth: that the world as we know it is heading for a smash.

"It's a paradox: when it comes to disasters, people do not allow themselves to believe what they know," explained Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a professor of social philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

"Because everybody is in denial -- or would like to be in denial -- and would prefer to not shoulder too much of the responsibility for dealing with the problem, you have a kind of disconnect here," Grayling said.

Even scientists are having trouble coping. They are reluctantly puting aside their growing sense of alarm, while at the same time, launching public appeals for action, .

The Vanishing Head Illusion

Blind spots are a quirk of the structure of the eye – use yours to "decapitate" psychologist Richard Wiseman

Herding the followers

HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

Wiltermuth's team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt. Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by research into mirror neurons

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an "error signal". This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it's how we learn to follow the crowd