Friday, April 15, 2011

To pee or not to pee - that is the question

And the answer would be not…especially if you have a decision to make.

On a somewhat related note, don't try doing any of the above X'ed out actions in Japan either, which is where this picture was taken.

Here's a recent amusing study that examined whether “urination urgency” (yep, you read that right – in other words, how badly you needed to pee) spilled over to “inhibitory control” in other domains. The authors did a set of four studies where they asked subjects to drink a lot of water and checked out how this affected their performance on a Stroop task and on what they called intertemporal patience (also known as “delay discounting” – i.e., choice between small reward now vs. large reward later).

In the first study, which involved the Stroop task, subjects were asked to indicate the meaning (dominant response) or color (non-dominant; requires “inhibiting” the tendency to read) of the word on screen. Interestingly, subjects who had to go were able to name the color of the word quicker, while urination urgency had no impact on time taken to indicate meaning of the word.

In study 2, they had participants drink different amounts of water (700 ml vs 50 ml – high vs. low bladder pressure conditions) and then after about a 45 minute delay to ensure adequate levels of pressure and urgency, they had participants do a delay discounting task with different levels of money (e.g., 16 euros the next day or 30 euros in 35 days). Again, interestingly, participants who drank more water actually chose the delayed reward more often. I would have totally predicted the opposite effect!

Anyway, Study 3 did the same manipulation, but tried to relate the choices to a personality measure – the Behavioral Inhibition Scales (BIS). The authors note that “the BIS is sensitive to signals of punishment and is involved in the inhibition of ongoing behavior in the face of a threat”. As expected, they found high BIS scorers were more likely to choose the delayed reward in the high bladder pressure condition. Just as a pedantic aside, the literature on the BIS/BAS scales doesn't provide the strongest support for the theory, and this study doesn't fit in well with the entertaining tone of the rest of the article, but I figured I would add a paragraph on it for the sake of scientific integrity.

But never fear, dear reader. This does not mean that you have to drink a gallon of water the next time you are trying to decide between two competing choices. Wisely, in study 4, the authors decided to see if merely viewing words associated with peeing (e.g., “urination,” “toilet,” “bladder” vs. words such as “table,” “watching,” “hammer”) could lead to similar effects. And sure enough, it did! According to the authors, such "exogenous cues" were potent enough to evoke similar effects in their participants.

So there you go – now you hold to key to making wise, patient, choices in life! Just visualize your toilet the next time.....


ResearchBlogging.org

Tuk MA, Trampe D, & Warlop L (2011). Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 21467548

No comments:

Post a Comment