Saturday 19 September 2015

Diurnal gloom

I have never bothered to record the daily variation in my moods, for fear that the effort would damage the frailty of my good humour and cast me into even deeper despair. At a gut level, or perhaps that should be a gut-wrenching level, we all seem to have good days and bad days. Some days proceed from defeat to defeat like ink spreading across a damask table cloth. Others (less frequent) soar above earthly concerns to deliver joyous triumphs and accolades. Raise high the roof-beams, carpenters!

Does any of this emotional tittle tattle and swooning effluvia have any effect on serious things like intellectual performance? It seems so. You may remember Sophie von Stumm, who showed that the Dunning-Kruger effect affects people’s self-assessments of their own intellectual abilities:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/so-you-think-youre-intelligent.html

 

Here is what she has found when she subjects volunteers to up to 5 days of intellectual testing.

 

DAY-TO-DAY VARIABILITY IN IQ AND MOOD Sophie von Stumm

Goldsmiths University of London,

s.vonstumm@gold.ac.uk.

Intelligence, also known as IQ, has been shown to be subject to systematic developmental changes in childhood and in late life and to be relatively stable from adolescence through most of adulthood. However, little is known about the stability – or in fact variability – of cognitive functioning and intelligence test performance across days. Here, the day-to-day variability across 6 IQ tests was studied and its associations with a) day-to-day variability in mood and b) personality traits.

Overall 98 participants (age range 18 to 75, mean 23 years) were assessed 5 times on 5 consecutive days in the lab, where they completed each day different versions/ items of 6 cognitive ability tests (short-term memory, logical reasoning, image rotation, pattern comparison, working memory, processing speed) and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). On day 1, they also completed the NEO-FFI to assess the Big Five.

All participants completed at least 2 study days, and 77 participants contributed on all 5 study days. Day-to-day variance in mood and cognitive ability tests were adjusted for trial-to-trial variance (i.e. within-test variance/ internal consistency). Day-to-day variability in cognitive ability tests ranged in IQ points (mean 100, SD = 15) from 0 to 20 with an average of approximately 6 IQ points across tests (SD = 3), demonstrating a) considerable day-to-day variability in cognitive function and b) individual differences in day-to-day variability. Associations between individual differences in the extent of day to-day variability in cognitive function and mood were weaker than their respective correlations with personality traits.

This study demonstrates the extent of day-to-day variability in IQ and mood, thereby highlighting the importance of the individual differences dimension of variability per se. In addition, the findings help understanding the relative importance of more (i.e. mood) and less (i.e. personality) fluctuating factors for variability in cognitive ability test performance.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/stumm/

7 comments:

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  2. Are there any studies of circadian variations in IQ? I'm a night owl and a chess player, so I created 2 accounts on a chess website and played on separate accounts in the mornings and in the evenings. I ended up with my evening IQ 1SD higher. So I'm curious if there is similar research.

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    1. A great deal of work on task performance and shift patterns, much of it conducted on nuclear submarines. For a look at how another research dept operates http://www.ndcn.ox.ac.uk/research/cognition

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  3. Talking of mood, I remember one feature of undergraduate examinations. Towards the end of a long diet of exams I would become rather light-headed and provide the examiner with jolly jests mixed into my answers. The culmination of this was in the last paper of my Finals when I wrote a satirical essay that apparently was sufficiently well-liked by the examiner that it was passed around his colleagues for amusement. Do IQ tests have that effect: that the thought that they are going to stop (or alternatively, the consequence of having taken a series of them) alters mood?

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  4. IQ test take about an hour, exams about 3 days or more. For highs, try exams, or Gregorian chant

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    1. Or other kinds of chant, the Tibetan bass chants seem especially effective. Applying continuous low-mid frequency audio tones to the skull can have a similar near-instantaneous effect, and it is much stronger than electrical stimulation at alpha frequencies. Different parts of the brain have specific audio resonances (and different resonances in different linear directions and planes of rotation) which when stimulated can interact with neural function. Some of the higher resonances with small neural structures have been used for ultrasonic neural stimulation (U. of Arizona, I forget the researcher's name), proposed to have anti-depressant effects.

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  5. "were assessed 5 times on 5 consecutive days in the lab" is getting towards the scale of a diet of examinations, though obviously not to be compared with the old two three-hour exams a day Monday-Friday, plus one of Saturday morning.

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