Your daily dose of science: Live-blogging an academic talk

4:04pm: I missed the beginning because I was running an experiment that went until 4. When I arrive, the speaker is in the middle of a description of the procedure, which is designed to elicit feelings of gratitude (I think, but I dunno---I missed the beginnning..)

Anyway, today's colloqium speaker is Dr. David DeSteno.

wooohoooo!

4:06pm: He's now talking about how gratitude mediates helping behavior. ("gratitude as a facilitator of costly reciprocity").

4:07pm: Study #2---> The goal is to show that gratitude, and not reciprocity concerns, drove helping behavior. In other words, if gratitude mediates helping, it should do so for a stranger as well.

Talking about effect of gratitude on helping behavior. Read the paper here (Desteno & Bartlett, 2006)

4:11pm: Cooperation vs Competition What happens when one's money is on the line? Will people help against their own financial interests?

Gratitude predicts how much money you'll give to the other person.

4:16pm: Maybe it's because I missed the beginning, but I feel like I can't keep up with the talk.

4:17pm: Speaker is talking about a current experiment that focuses on demonstrating that pride will increase perseverence on a task.

4:18pm: I like how all of his emotional manipulations are situation-based. For example, experimenter induces pride by telling the participant that they are in the 94th percentile on the task and the experimener presumably gives positive (and nonverbal) feedback indicating that it's good...

4:20pm: People who feel pride, perservere longer on a difficult task.

4:24pm: Acclaim feedback on a task increases perserverence. Question from the audience: to what extent does positive feedback during that condition increase motivation for the subsequent task. i.e. if we give a rat positive reinforcement after a behavior, we increase that behavior. in this instance behavior = persistence on task. I dunno. Something to think about.

4:25pm: Q from audience: What is the connection between the first task and the second task? answer-> both load on a visual factor.

4:26pm: Speaker's argument is that pride is adaptive. -> builds skills, makes one valuable to a group.

4:32pm: pride => dominance behaviors.

4:39pm: a slide demonstrating a mediational analysis, I understand it to mean that compassion motivates helping behavior.....

4:43pm: people moving in synchrony increases helping & liking. What does this tapping-in-rhythm task generalize to?

4:44pm: Conclusions---Humans possess discrete emotional responses that are sentiive, or tuned, to short-term vs. long-term payoffs.... these emotional repsonses lead to increasing social capital, etc...

4:45pm: Question & Answer time! yeah!

4:49pm: Speaker indicates that, for him, emotions are cognitive states, that increase response tendencies. May be conscious or unconscious.

4:41pm: Talking about Dalai Lama & Mother Theresa... Everyone is the same, it's a benefit to the self to help others?

4:57pm: Why do people feel pride for things that they aren't good at in comparison to other people? Lots of cross-talk about evolutionary adaptiveness of emotional states. I'm a fan of post-hoc evolutionary arguments.

This talk was really fun, and I'm glad that I was here for it.

Until next time!