This is Your Brain on Gum--Or is it?

Click on the banner below to read an article reporting evidence of the relationship between gum chewing and cognition. (Note the website on which these results are being reported) I do not know if giving you gum to chew during a test is improving your cognitive skills or not. It turns out, according to Christopher Green, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, that "Beech-Nut and Wrigley have a long history of commissioning research to
"demonstrate" that gum chewing has various fashionably healthful consequences. Beech-Nut commissioned the well-known Columbia
psychologist Harry Hollingworth to write a whole book on the topic --
/The Psycho-Dynamics of Gum Chewing/ (1939). Phil Wrigley (legendarily
awful owner of the Chicago Cubs) used this and other research to
persuade the US military to include his chewing gum in the K-rations of
every single US soldier sent to Europe during WWII. He made (more of) a
fortune (see my "Psychology Strikes Out: Coleman R. Griffith and the
Chicago Cubs" /History of Psychology, 6/, 267-283. footnote 5).

Gum companies aren't the only ones to use "scientific" research as part
of their marketing campaigns. Coca Cola hired Hollingworth back in 1911
to show that the caffeine they added to their product did not have have
detrimental effects, and then to testify on their behalf in a court case
(see Benjamin, L. T., Rogers, A. M., & Rosenbaum, A. (1991). Coca-Cola,
caffeine, and mental deficiency: Harry Hollingworth and the Chattanooga
trial of 1911. /Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 27/,
42-55)."

So what do  you think?  Does chewing gum improve you ability to concentrate or not?

Here is a video of the famous "Bobo Doll Experiment" by Albert Bandura. We discussed it in class as an example of observational learning.

Bandura and his associates came to the conclusion that children observing adult behavior are influenced to think that this type of behavior is acceptable thus weakening the child's aggressive inhibitions. Do you agree with Bandura? Do you think that these reduced inhibitions will lead children to respond to future situations in a more aggressive manner?

Also important in this experiment is the result that males are drastically more inclined to physically aggressive behaviors than females. Bandura explains that in our society, aggression is considered to be a distinct male trait.Girls, however, almost matched the boys in Bandura's experiments in terms of verbal aggression. What do you theorize could explain this result?

The 1963 experiment found that observing aggressive behavior via video playback is less influential on a subject than is observing the same aggressive act in person. Again, any theories to explain this result?

In a follow-up study, Bandura (1965) found that when children viewed aggressive behaviour and then viewed that behaviour being either rewarded or punished that children were less likely to emit aggressive behaviours when they had viewed an adult model being punished for aggressive behavior. Children who saw the model rewarded did not differ in aggressive behaviors from those that saw a model receive no reward.