The usefulness
of voodoo dolls in studying blood sugar and aggession
By Marc Abrahams in Improbable Research
The Associated Press tells of the new study by Ig Nobel Prize (for the study “‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are
drunk also think they are attractive“) winner Brad Bushman and colleagues:
The researchers
studied 107 married couples for three weeks. Each night, they measured their
levels of the blood sugar glucose and asked each participant to stick pins in a voodoo doll representing
his or her spouse. That indicated levels of aggression.
The study procedure
also raised [an unusual] problem. Bushman had to handle a call from his credit
card company, which wanted to make sure it was really he who had spent $5,000
to buy more than 200 voodoo dolls.
The study is:
“Low glucose relates to greater aggression in married couples,”
by Brad J. Bushman, C. Nathan DeWall, Richard S. Pond, Jr., and Michael Hanus, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, epub April 2014. (Thanks to Davide Castelvecci for
bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain:
“Intimate partner
violence affects millions of people globally. One possible contributing factor
is poor self-control. Self-control requires energy, part of which is provided
by glucose. For 21 days, glucose levels were measured in 107 married couples.
To measure aggressive impulses, each evening participants stuck between 0 and
51 pins into a voodoo doll that represented their spouse, depending how angry
they were with their spouse.
To measure aggression, participants competed
against their spouse on a 25- trial task in which the winner blasted the loser
with loud noise through headphones. As expected, the lower the level of glucose
in the blood, the greater number of pins participants stuck into the voodoo
doll, and the higher intensity and longer duration of noise participants set
for their spouse.”
BONUS (April 15, 2014):
ABC News (Australia) has a report about it. The other ABC News (US) interviewed Brad Bushman, too.
- See more at:
http://www.improbable.com/#sthash.Zo9TzNJm.dpuf
