Psychologists Use Social Networking Behavior to Predict Personality Type

The ability to automatically determine personality type could change the way social networks target services to users

KFC 

One of the foundations of modern psychology is that human personality can be described in terms of five different forms of behavior. These are:

1. Agreeableness--being helpful, cooperative and sympathetic towards others
2. Conscientiousness--being disciplined, organized and achievement-oriented
3. Extraversion--having a higher degree of sociability, assertiveness and talkativeness
4. Neuroticism--the degree of emotional stability, impulse control and anxiety
5. Openness--having a strong intellectual curiosity and a preference for novelty and variety

Psychologists have spent much time and many years developing tests that can classify people according to these criteria. 

Today, Shuotian Bai at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a couple of buddies say they have developed an online version of the test that can determine an individual's personality traits from their behavior on a social network such as Facebook or Renren, an increasingly popular Chinese competitor.

Their method is relatively simple. These guys asked just over 200 Chinese students with Renren accounts to complete online, a standard personality test called the Big Five Inventory, which was developed at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1990s.

At the same time, these guys analyzed the Renren pages of each student, recording their age and sex and various aspects of their online behavior such as the frequency of their blog posts as well as the emotional content of the posts such as whether angry, funny or surprised  and so on. 

Finally, they used various number crunching techniques to reveal correlations between the results of the personality tests and the online behavior. 

It turns out, they say, that various online behaviors are a good indicator of personality type. For example, conscientious people are more likely to post asking for help such as a location or e-mail address; a sign of extroversion is an increased use of emoticons; the frequency of status updates correlates with openness; and a measure of neuroticism is the rate at which blog posts attract angry comments.

Based on these correlations, these guys say they can automatically predict personality type simply by looking at an individual's social network statistics. 

That could be extremely useful for social networks. Shuotian and comapny point out that a network might use this to recommend specific services. They give the rather naive example of an outgoing user who may prefer international news and like to make friends with others. 

Other scenarios are at least as likely. For example, such an approach might help to improve recommender systems in general. Perhaps people who share similar personality characteristics are more likely to share similar tastes in books, films or each other. 

There is also the obvious prospect that social networks would use this data for commercial gain; to target specific adverts to users for example. And finally there is the worry that such a technique could be used to identify vulnerable individuals who might be most susceptible to nefarious persuasion.

Ethics aside, there are also certain questions marks over the result. One important caveat is how people's response to psychology studies online differs from those done at other times. That could clearly introduce some bias. Then there are the more general questions of how online and offline behaviours differs and how these tests vary across cultures. These are things that Shuotian and Co. want to study in the future.

In the meantime, it is becoming increasingly clear that the data associated with our online behavior is a rich and valuable source of information about our innermost natures. 

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1204.4809: Big-Five Personality Prediction Based on User Behaviors at Social Network Sites

Just a Few Cell Clones Can Make Heart Muscle

The growth of the zebrafish heart from embryo to adult is tracked using colored cardiac muscle clones, each containing many cellular progeny of a single cardiac muscle cell. Here, a large clone of green cardiac muscle cells (top) expands over the surface of many smaller clones in a growing heart. (Credit: Vikas Gupta, Duke University Medical Center)                                 Science Daily— Just a handful of cells in the embryo are all that's needed to form the outer layer of pumping heart muscle in an adult zebrafish.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center used zebrafish embryos and careful employment of a new technique that allows for up to 90 color labels on different cells to track individual cells and cell lines as the heart formed.

The scientists were surprised by how few cells went into making a critical organ structure and they suspect that other organs may form in a similar fashion, said Kenneth Poss, PhD, professor in the Duke Department of Cell Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The study appears online in Natureon April 25.

"The most surprising aspect of this work is that a very small number of cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) in the growing animal can give rise to the thousands of cardiomyocytes that form the wall of the cardiac ventricle," said Vikas Gupta, lead author, who is in the Duke Medical Scientist Training Program for MD and PhD degrees.

Gupta found that about eight single cells contributed to forming the major type of heart muscle in the wall of the zebrafish heart -- and just one or two cells could create anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the entire ventricular surface.

"Clonal dominance like this is a property of some types of stem cells, and it's a new concept in how to form an organ during development," Poss said.

Another surprise was the way the patches of cloned cells formed muscle.

"It was completely unexpected," Gupta said. "I thought the wall would simply thicken in place, but instead there was a network of cells that enveloped the ventricle in a wave. It was as if a cell at your shoulder grew a thin layer of new cells down your arm surface."

Gupta said this opens an area for investigation to see whether or not a process like this repeats in the hearts of mammals, and perhaps in other internal organs.

Poss said the cell clones appear to have the ability to cover as much of the ventricular surface as possible before other cells start appearing and growing at the surface.

"Our suspicion is that the muscle cells that initiate large clones are not much different from other muscle cells -- they just get to the surface of the heart first," Poss said.

They used the analogy of a sperm getting to the egg first, among all the millions of possible sperm cells.

Poss said the manner in which these muscle cells envelope the heart could lead to new therapies.

"Researchers may be able to channel this developmental process to help damaged hearts or failing hearts to grow muscle that will reinforce the ventricular walls," he said. "Someone who's had a heart attack would want this ability to generate new muscle to cover a scar naturally, and it's attractive to think that the help might come from a small number of muscle cells within a population."

The color-label technique was originally developed by other biologists and was critical to allow the researchers to track heart cell populations.

"You can label individual cells very early in an embryo with a permanent color and those cells and their progeny will keep that color," Poss said. "You can learn what an individual cardiomyocyte did, and its neighbor, and that cell's neighbor and so on, until you've covered much of the whole ventricle of the developing zebrafish."

Poss said it makes sense that this growth process works by a gradual layering process, especially for the heart.

"It's speculative, but for the heart to maintain circulation in a relatively slowly growing animal, a process like this to build the heart might be a way of gradually increasing its circulatory strength to keep up."

Funding for the study came from a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Medical Scientist Training Program supplement. Dr. Poss is an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This work also was supported by grants from the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute and the American Heart Association.

Your Brain Knows Which Ads Are Winners, Better Than You Do: Study On Smokers' Brains May Mark Dawn of New Age in Advertising

The brain, with the medial prefrontal cortex highlighted in green. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)                                                                                Science Daily  — Advertisers and public health officials may be able to access hidden wisdom in the brain to more effectively sell their products and promote health and safety, UCLA neuroscientists report in the first study to use brain data to predict how large populations will respond to advertisements.

The UCLA researchers also consulted experts who work in the anti-smoking field and who have been involved in creating anti-smoking advertisements. These experts agreed that campaigns "A" and "B" were the best and "C" was the worst.Thirty smokers who were trying to quit watched television commercials from three advertising campaigns, which all ended by showing the phone number of the National Cancer Institute's smoking-cessation hotline. They were asked which commercials they thought would be most effective; they responded that advertising campaigns "A" and "B" would be the best and "C" would be the worst.

While the smokers watched the advertisements, they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans at UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, and the neuroscientists focused on part of the medial prefrontal cortex -- located in the front of the brain, between the eyebrows -- a region that they have found to be especially important in previous persuasion studies.

The researchers found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex increased much more during advertising campaign "C" than it did during campaign "A," and somewhat more than it did during campaign "B."

"The medial prefrontal cortex predicted 'C' would be the best, 'B' would be second best and 'A' would be the worst -- essentially the opposite of what the experts and the participants told us they thought would happen," said the study's senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.

"We didn't expect how radically different people's predictions would be from the predictions we made based on their brain activity," said Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience. "We had people telling us one thing and this brain region telling us something diametrically opposed."

Initially, Lieberman and first author Emily Falk, an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, were concerned when they saw the results from the medial prefrontal cortex.

"We were hoping the brain data would add something to the self-reports of our participants," Lieberman said. "Given how different they were from one another, we were afraid our brain data might not end up predicting the real-world outcomes at all."

A few months later, after the advertisements had been broadcast, the authors received the call-volume data from the National Cancer Institute's 1-800-QUIT-NOW hotline. They compared the number of people who called the hotline the month before and the month after each of the advertising campaigns was run. All three advertising campaigns were successful in increasing the number of phone calls to the hotline. Campaign "A" more than doubled the number of calls, "B" increased the number of calls more than ten-fold and "C" boosted the number of calls a remarkable thirty-fold. (The advertisements were shown in Michigan, Massachusetts and Louisiana.)

Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex predicted which ads persuaded more people to call the hotline significantly better than the smokers' own thoughts about how successful the ads would be.

The research is published this month in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science.

What are the implications for the advertising industry, which often relies, at least partly, on unscientific focus groups?

"If people are making decisions based on what focus groups tell them, here's an important brain region saying, 'No, spend your money a different way,'" Lieberman said. "If I were deciding on an advertising campaign, I would want to know which ads are activating this region the most -- that is where I would want to spend my money."

This new research represents "the first thing you could call aneural focus group," Lieberman said.

One reason focus groups can be misleading, he said, is that people often do not know what motivates their own behavior.

"Our brain is built to generate reasons for our actions," Lieberman said, "and we think the reasons we come up with must be true. We believe our own reasons with an intensity that is out of proportion to their accuracy. In this study, we are bypassing people's self-reports and getting at a form of hidden wisdom in the brain.

"We wanted to determine what kind of brain activity serves as the catalyst between people seeing a message and whether they actually change their behavior," he said. "This is the region we identified. We have tested it multiple times, and each time, it has been successful."

John Wanamaker, a 19th-century U.S. department store pioneer, famously said he wasted half the money he spent on advertising, but "the trouble is I don't know which half." Many people since Wanamaker have hoped to predict which advertising campaigns will succeed or fail before committing their advertising dollars.

"We're too late for Wanamaker, but now we have a method for figuring out which ads will succeed," Lieberman said.

The 30 smokers in the study were between the ages of 28 and 69; half were female.

Brain regions associated with thinking analytically have not been consistently associated with whether people change their behavior in these studies, Lieberman said. The medial prefrontal cortex is associated not with analytical thinking but with self-reflection -- thinking about our own identity as well as what we like and do not like.

"Persuasive advertising seems to be about getting to people's hearts and their identity," Lieberman said. "We are just at the beginning of this line of research. There are many more questions than answers, but the initial results have been promising."

In research Lieberman and Falk published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2010, greater activity in the same medial prefrontal region was predictive of who would increase their sunscreen usage after seeing persuasive messages about daily sunscreen use.

"We knew from prior studies that this brain region predicted people's behavior change in response to a persuasive message," Lieberman said.

With the new study, Lieberman and his colleagues wanted to know whether they could predict not only people's own behavior but use these brain responses to predict how effective advertisements would be throughout the country.

PhD Student Position in Wireless Sensor Networks at University of Trento, Italy

PhD Student Position in Wireless Sensor Networks

at University of Trento, Italy

=================================================================



Applications are invited from those interested in pursuing a PhD

in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) at the University of Trento,

Italy, in the D3S group. D3S (http://d3s.disi.unitn.it) is a

crossâ€institution research group focusing on dynamic, decentralâ€

ized, distributed systems.



In the context of WSNs, the D3S group has been particularly sucâ€

cessful in bringing research results into realâ€world, longâ€term,

operational deployments. Examples are the structural health monâ€

itoring of a medieval tower, and the closedâ€loop control of

lighting in a road tunnel. The scientific results of these

projects received the Best Paper Award at IPSN (both in 2009 and

2011) and the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at PerCom 2012.



Other ongoing projects include: i) a pervasive computing environâ€

ment equipped with audio, video, and other types of sensors to

provide support for elders and people with disabilities; ii) a

mobile WSN for monitoring wildlife; iii) a platform for integratâ€

ing WSNs into business process, through a modelâ€driven approach.



Although we emphasize realâ€world applications as a motivation and

a concrete opportunity for the validation of our research, the

latter is not limited to the immediate needs of WSN deployments.

We perform a mix of curiosityâ€driven and applicationâ€driven reâ€

search. The research challenges tackled by D3S span a broad set

of topics, ranging from lowâ€layer issues concerned with the charâ€

acterization and design of communication protocols to higherâ€layâ€

er issues related with programming platforms and software archiâ€

tectures for WSNs.



New PhD students are invited to participate in ongoing projects

to gain experience and insight into real systems, and to identify

novel, challenging problems whose solutions break new grounds.

The D3S group, and Trento at large, provide a fertile environment

for highâ€quality research: two of our PhD students received the

Best Ph.D. Thesis Award at the European Conference on Wireless

Sensor Networks (EWSN) in 2009 and 2012.



The language of the research group is English.



The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science is

a leading and fastâ€growing research institution, characterized by

a young and international faculty and by a large, international

student population. Indicators for scientific production place

the department among the top in Europe. The department and the

PhD school closely collaborate with †and operate in †a fertile

and rapidly growing research and innovation environment characâ€

terized by top class research centers and an increasing number of

industrial research labs. The successful candidate will therefore

have the opportunity to work in a dynamic and exciting environâ€

ment.



Trento is a vibrant city with a beautifully preserved historic

center, consistently ranked among the best cities for quality of

life in Italy. It offers a variety of cultural and sports opporâ€

tunities all year around, as well as excellent food and wine.



Applications must be filed online before May 15 2012 (at 13:00,

Italy time) at the link below.



IMPORTANT:

In the "Areas of preference" section of the application, the apâ€

plicant must indicate a preference BOTH for "Systems and Netâ€

works" (under "Computer Science") AND "Remote and Distributed

Sensing" (under "Telecommunications"). Failure to do so may reâ€

sult in ineligibility for this position.



It is strongly advised to get in contact with Prof. Gian Pietro

Picco (gianpietro.picco@unitn.it) before submitting the applicaâ€

tion, by providing a curriculum vitae including three references.



Links:



Online PhD Application: http://ict.unitn.it/applicaâ€

tion/ict_doctoral_school

Prof. Gian Pietro Picco: http://disi.unitn.it/~picco

D3S Group and Projects: http://d3s.disi.unitn.it

DISI web site: http://disi.unitn.it

Research at DISI: http://disi.unitn.it/research

PhD School: http://ict.unitn.it/

Subconsciously, we echo the speech of superiors

(Phys.org) -- Want to know who holds the power? Just listen carefully, preferably with a little help from a computer. Research at Cornell shows that people speaking to someone of perceived superior status often unconsciously echo the linguistic style of that person. The effect is usually not noticed by humans but shows up in a computer analysis of large amounts of text. The linguistic clues were found in discussions in which the outcome matters to the speaker.

The rule seems to apply across many domains of life. The researchers found it in Internet discussion and in arguments before the Supreme Court. In the latter case, language analysis also offers clues to which justices may favor one side or the other in a case.

Graduate student and lead author Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil presented the research at the World Wide Web Conference April 16-20 in Lyon, France. Co-authors are Jon Kleinberg '93, the Tisch University Professor of computer science; Lillian Lee '93, professor of computer science; and Yahoo! researcher Bo Pang, Ph.D. '06.

While sociologists commonly study people in small groups, the computer scientists were able to find subtle effects because they worked with very large collections of text -- 240,000 conversations among Wikipedia editors and 50,389 verbal exchanges from 204 cases argued before the Supreme Court.

In conversation with someone more powerful, the analysis shows, a speaker tends to coordinate with the other person's use of "function words": articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, frequently used adverbs ("very," "just," "often"), pronouns, prepositions and quantifiers ("all," "some," "many"). This means that the effects are independent of the topic and would show up even in text that has been censored to hide or disguise the subject matter, the researchers say.

As a further test, the researchers trained a computer to measure language coordination on Wikipedia and then fed it text from Supreme Court arguments and vice versa. They got the same results either way, confirming that the effect is independent of the situation.

On Wikipedia talk pages, where writers and editors discuss their articles, status is clearly defined, with some editors identified as "admins," who have more authority over what goes into an article. The researchers found that when editors were promoted to an admin position, others coordinated language to them more after the promotion. In turn, the newly promoted administrators coordinated their language less with the rank and file, but usually only after about two months of adjustment to their new status.

In the Supreme Court, as expected, lawyers coordinate their speech to justices. But, say the researchers, there is another factor besides formal status that confers power: dependence. Speakers coordinate their speech with those who can do something for them. Lawyers generally go before the Supreme Court with an idea of which justices will be opposed to their cause, and the analysis showed that lawyers coordinated their speech more with justices who opposed them (as confirmed by the final vote). At the same time, opposing justices coordinated less with those lawyers.

As a sidelight, the analysis showed that female lawyers coordinated their speech with justices more than male lawyers, and justices coordinated less with female lawyers. The researchers caution that this result may be influenced by other gender differences in communication style.

The researchers see applications of this type of analysis in studying the sociology of online groups, which previously has focused on structural features such as who talks to whom. "It is exciting to contemplate extending the range of social properties that can be analyzed via text," they concluded.

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Google and Yahoo!

Provided by Cornell University

"Subconsciously, we echo the speech of superiors." April 24th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-subconsciously-echo-speech-superiors.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Lack of sleep may produce unethical behavior, management research shows

(Medical Xpress) -- Can lack of sleep make you behave unethically? Researchers think so.

Many studies have looked at the impact of sleep deprivation on workers’ health, safety, and morale, says Pamplin College of Business management assistant professor Christopher Barnes, but few have considered its implications for unethical behavior. “Sleep deprivation may also contribute to unethical conduct in the workplace, which is costly to organizations,” says Barnes, who co-authored a recent study on the subject.

Barnes and three other scholars conducted four studies in different settings and situations to examine the influence of low levels of sleep in decision-making situations involving ethical considerations. “We consistently found that people were more likely to behave unethically when they were short on sleep,” he says.

An important practical implication of their research, he says, is that managers and organizations may play a larger role than previously thought in promoting unethical behavior — through excessive work demands, extended work hours, and shifts that result in night work, each of which, other studies show, has diminished employee sleep.

“We are not arguing that managers can or should completely control the sleep and unethical behavior of their subordinates,” Barnes says, “but that managers should recognize that many of their actions may have second-order effects on sleep and thus unethical behavior. Managers who push their employees to work long hours, work late into the night, or work sporadic and unpredictable schedules may be creating situations that foster unethical behavior.”

Barnes is the lead author of “Lack of sleep and unethical conduct,” co-authored with John Schaubroeck and Megan Huth of Michigan State University and Sonia Ghumman of the University of Hawaii and published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115 (2011), 169–180.

More information: Read more about their study in “When you don't snooze, your ethics lose,” in the spring 2012 Pamplin magazine.

Provided by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

"Lack of sleep may produce unethical behavior, management research shows." April 24th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-lack-unethical-behavior.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Even positive stereotypes can hinder performance, researchers find

A new study indicates that exposure to broad generalisations about the likely success of a social group - boys or girls, for example - undermines both boys’ and girls’ performance on a challenging task. Credit: Jallinson01

Does hearing that you are a member of an elite group – of chess players, say, or scholars – enhance your performance on tasks related to your alleged area of expertise? Not necessarily, say researchers who tested how sweeping pronouncements about social group skills or likely success can influence children's performance.

The researchers found that broad generalizations about the likely success of a social group—of boys or girls, for example—actually undermined both boys' and girls' performance on a challenging activity.

The new study appears in the journal Psychological Science.

"Some children believe that their ability to perform a task is dictated by the amount of natural talent they possess for that task," said University of Illinois psychology professor Andrei Cimpian, who led the study. "Previous studies have demonstrated that this belief can undermine their performance. It is important, therefore, to understand what leads children to adopt this belief."

The researchers hypothesised that exposure to broad generalisations about the abilities of social groups induces children to believe that success depends on "natural talent." If the hypothesis were correct, then hearing messages such as "girls are very good at this task" should impair children's performance by leading them to believe that success depends primarily on innate talent and has little to do with factors under their control, such as effort.

In line with this hypothesis, two experiments with 4- to 7-year-olds demonstrated that the children performed more poorly after being exposed to information that associated success on a given task with membership in a certain social group, regardless of whether the children belonged to that group.

"These findings suggest we should be cautious in making pronouncements about the abilities of social groups such as boys and girls," Cimpian said. "Not only is the truth of such statements questionable, but they also send the wrong message about what it takes to succeed, thereby undermining achievement – even when they are meant as encouragement."

More information: "Who is Good at This Game? Linking an Activity to a Social Category Undermines Children's Achievement," Psychological Science.

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Even positive stereotypes can hinder performance, researchers find." April 24th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-positive-stereotypes-hinder.html

Posted by

Robert Karl Stonjek

Summer Drink Orange Juice !

Meet the Ferrari of trains

Italy launched Europe's first private high-speed train service this week.The dark-red bullet-shaped "Italo" trains are run by NTV, a company headed by Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo who wants to take a quarter of the market from state rail network Trenitalia.

ROME, ITALY - APRIL 20: Italo, the new high speed train from the railway company New Passenger Transport SpA, known as NTV, ahead of its inaugural trip to Naples, at Stazione Tiburtina on April 20, 2012 in Rome, Italy. The new NTV railway company will run its maiden public high speed train journey on April 28, from Rome to Naples. (Photo by Giorgio Cosulich/Getty Images)

"Italo", a new high-speed train for the NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), is seen on a platform at the Tiburtina train station in Rome April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

New "Italo" high-speed trains for the NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori) are seen on a platform at the Naples central station April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

"Italo", a new high-speed train for the NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), is seen on a platform at the Tiburtina train station in Rome April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

ROME, ITALY - APRIL 20: The staff of the railway company New Passenger Transport SpA, known as NTV, welcome travellers before the Italo high speed train's inaugural trip to Naples, at Stazione Tiburtina on April 20, 2012 in Rome, Italy. The new NTV railway company will run its maiden public high speed train journey on April 28, from Rome to Naples. (Photo by Giorgio Cosulich/Getty Images)

Train crew of NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), pose in a railcar of the new high-speed train "Italo" during the inaugural trip from Rome to Naples April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo (L), president of NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), talks with reporters during the inaugural trip of the new high-speed train "Italo" from Rome to Naples April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, president of the NTV (Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori), is seen inside the new high-speed train "Italo" at the Tiburtina train station in Rome April 20, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, president for NTV

--