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January 28 2012
January’s In the Journals… by Amy Cooper
The most recent edition of Medical Anthropology features work by Somatosphere contributor Stephanie Lloyd and Nicolas Moreau that explores the meanings of symptom reduction and ‘normalcy’ for people treated for anxiety disorders. They situate patients’ frustrated expectations for an ‘ideal self’ within a broader cultural context in which the desire to achieve an ever-elusive ‘ideal self’ is widespread. Bianca Brijnath provides a fascinating analysis of the relationship between food, care, and pleasure for caregivers and people with dementia in Delhi, which parses out the different ways in which food and feeding are experienced as practices of care and love. This edition also features research on the experiences of HIV-negative partners in relationships with HIV-positive people, and on the relationship between metastatic cancer and mothering.
Among the articles in Sociology of Health and Illness is an ethnographic account that complicates biomedical narratives of obesity and obesity surgery. Also, Howard Waitzkin et al. report on interviews with corporate executives and government officials, showing how these groups describe their decisions regarding public sector managed care. An article by Simon Williams et al. analyzes the connections between two emergent cultural discourses: ‘neuroculture’ and ‘active aging/the Third Age.’ In doing so, the authors seek to explain how new understandings of and expectations for an ‘ageing brain’ are coming into being. Also in this issue is a study of how future imaginaries are constructed in the context of assisted reproductive technologies and stem cell research.
Those of you interested in neuroscience, take note: the journal Psychosomatic Medicine just launched a special series called “Neuroscience in Health and Disease.” In the first article of the series, Tristen Inagaki and Naomi Eisenberger expand our understanding of the mental and physical benefits of social support. Focusing on those who provide social support to others, they show that such actions are linked to neural correlates suggesting benefits for the givers as well as the receivers of social support. Also in this month’s issue is an research on how high-stress jobs (like urban bus driver) affect our physical health, and an article that attempts to parse out the ability of somatic and cognitive-affective symptoms of depression to predict cardiac events in patients with coronary heart disease.
Health includes an analysis of how the stigma of mental illness plays out among physicians and forecloses on their own help-seeking; the author offers suggestions for ways to reduce stigma and increase access to mental health care for doctors. Also of note are two qualitative meta-analyses (or ‘meta-syntheses’). The first one looks at the effects of complementary therapies for cancer patients (finding, among other things, that patients benefit more from complementary therapies when they are seen to be integrated with, rather than polarized from, biomedical care). The second meta-synthesis by Jonathan Lamb et al. examines experiences of receiving mental health care for ‘hard to reach groups,’ including homeless people and the long-term unemployed.
One of the articles in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry is a sort of ‘Durkheim Revisited’: Yur’yev et al. find that across Europe, unemployment status is related to suicide mortality.
There’s also an article on ethnic differences in involuntary psychiatric treatment for women in the UK. The authors found that black women were significantly more likely to be involuntarily admitted as psychiatric inpatients compared to white women.
In the always-fascinating world of medical history, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences presents a special issue this month on the intellectual history of medicine: “Each [article] shows, in its own way, how a particular disorder became conceptualized or how a particular set of difficulties was made into a topic of debate.” Articles explore:
- the conceptualization of female same-sex desires across competing medical fields in late nineteenth-century Europe
- understandings of the ‘culture-bound syndrome’ koro from the 1890s to present
- a reassessment of shell shock as a wartime illness experience and its role in the development of psychiatric knowledge and practice
- nineteenth century debates over the possibilities for Europeans to ‘acclimatize’ to tropical climates. The authors explain how, “the influence of climate and the possibility of acclimatization became recurring themes in debates about colonial governance in both the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands.”
The open-access journal Philosophy, Ethnics, and Humanities in Medicine features some timely articles on the construction of the DSM-V. Kawa and Giordano provide a historical account of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and discuss contemporary concerns in psychiatric classification, the shifting boundaries of what gets counted as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ and the difficulty of delineating between “treatment, enablement, and enhancement” in the context of mental health research and practice.
Also, in the first of a series of reports in this journal, Phillips et al. examine “the six most essential questions in psychiatric diagnosis.” They identify these as: 1) the nature of a mental disorder; 2) the definition of mental disorder; 3) whether DSM-5 should assume a cautious, conservative posture or an assertive, transformative posture; 4) the role of pragmatic considerations in the construction of DSM-5; 5) the issue of utility of the DSM (is it more for clinicians or researchers?) and 6) the possibility and advisability of designing a different diagnostic system.
Articles that came out in Social Science and Medicine this January include an analysis of how American participants in randomized controlled trials view placebos. Among the authors’ findings they note: “Some participants maintained a negative view of placebo effects (e.g. as illusions) that was apparently inconsistent with their other beliefs (e.g. in mind-body healing mechanisms). This may indicate a dominance of negative discourses around placebos at a socio-cultural level. Negative views of placebos are inconsistent with evidence that placebo treatments can have positive effects on symptoms.”
Also, Wilches-Gutiérrez et al. conducted a mixed-methods study of the relationship between death, holidays, and cultural conceptions of mortality in Mexico. After finding that people in Morelos, Mexico have higher mortality rates on holidays like Christmas and All Saints’ Day, researchers conducted interviews with relatives of those who had died on holidays. They report, “Our results suggest that, in the studied region, death can be interpreted as a “beautiful process,” and they explore the ways in which interviewees characterize dying on a holiday as a positively-valenced and special phenomenon. Also in the journal this month is a theoretical appraisal of medical tourism in terms of therapeutic landscapes and postcolonial theory.
Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong
Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.
Here's what he said.
First, think about how you attack a pile of study material. “People tend to try to learn in blocks,” says Bjork, “mastering one thing before moving on to the next.” But instead he recommends interleaving, a strategy in which, for example,instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork. “This creates a sense of difficulty,” says Bjork, “and people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”
Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with yourserving ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn.
Bjork explains that successful interleaving allows you to “seat” each skill among the others: “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful,” he says.
There’s one caveat: Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you’re trying to learn tennis, you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork—not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.
Similarly, studying in only one location is great as long as you’ll only be required to recall the information in the same location. If you want information to be accessible outside your dorm room, or office, or nook on the second floor of the library, Bjork recommends varying your study location.
And again, these tips generalize. Interleaving and varying your study location will help whether you’re mastering math skills, learning French, or trying to become a better ballroom dancer.
So too will a somewhat related phenomenon, the spacing effect, first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. “If you study and then you wait, tests show that the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten,” says Bjork. That’s obvious—over time, you forget. But here’s thecool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session.
Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”
Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds”: You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.
Along these lines, Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during—forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information ismore effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. “Get out of court stenographer mode,” says Bjork. You have to work for it.
The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become.
“Forget about forgetting,” says Robert Bjork. “People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true.” See, once you learn something, you never actually forget it. Do you remember your childhood best friend’s phone number? No? Well, Dr. Bjork showed that if you were reminded, you would retain it much more quickly and strongly than if you were asked to memorize a fresh seven-digit number. So this oldphone number is not forgotten—it lives somewhere in you—only, recall can be a bit tricky.
And while we count forgetting as the sworn enemy of learning, in some ways that’s wrong, too. Bjork showed that the two live in a kind of symbiosis in which forgetting actually aids recall. “Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork. “Imagine you remembered all the phone numbers of all the houses you had ever lived in. When someone asks you your current phone number, you would have to sort it from this long list.” Instead, we forget the old phone numbers, or at least bury them far beneath theease of recall we gift to our current number. What you thought were sworn enemies are more like distant collaborators.
* Excerpted from Brain Trust: 93 Top Scientists Dish the Lab-Tested Secrets of Surfing, Dating, Dieting, Gambling, Growing Man-Eating Plants and More (Three Rivers Press, March 2012)
Twitter: @garthsundem
How I Create: Creativity Coach and Author Gail McMeekin
Want to know how others get creative? What inspires them to pursue their craft? I always find it fascinating to see how other people cultivate their creativity and accomplish amazing things.
As such, here’s the second installment in our series on all things creativity. Each month we talk with a different person about their creative process and get their tips for letting our own creativity flourish.
Below, we had the pleasure of chatting with Gail McMeekin, LICSW, a Boston-based national executive, career and creativity coach, a licensed psychotherapist and award-winning author. She’s the President of Creative Success, which helps creative professionals and entrepreneurs leverage their best ideas into heartfelt, prosperous businesses and fulfilling lives.
McMeekin also is the author of many books, including The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women: A Portable Mentor and The 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women: A Portable Life Coach for Creative Women.
You can learn more about McMeekin at her website. Also, check out her free e-book, The Path to Creative Success, which is loaded with exercises to help you to get creative.
1. Do you incorporate creativity-boosting activities into your daily routine? If so, what activities do you do?
I journal regularly and take a daily walk to clear my head and get ideas. Plus I consult my own Creativity Courage Cards that I created with my photographer husband to get a courage prompt for the day, and I always draw a Viking Rune to remind me that everything comes in cycles and to surrender as needed.
2. What are your inspirations for your work?
I am greatly inspired by my work with coaching clients and their challenges and I design solutions for their creative success. I also love to create products like my “Positive Choices: From Stress to Serenity” workshop, journals, charts, cards, etc.
I am using a new technique now called Life Purpose Scientific Hand Analysis, which is not palmistry but a scientific analysis of your fingerprints and your palms to help you to find out your Life Purpose, your Life Lesson, your Life School, which is your spiritual path, and your Special Gifts. People are just blown away by the results and their accuracy and how useful this information becomes in changing their lives.
I also love watercolors and paint myself, and I surround myself with beautiful art and decorating. Also, going out on travel photo shoots with my husband inspires me.
3. There are many culprits that can crush creativity, such as distractions, self-doubt and fear of failure. What tends to stand in the way of your creativity?
I can be very focused on my creative projects and complete them on deadline. But my greatest gift of ideaphoria is also my greatest liability.
I have a continual flow of ideas and I have to make choices daily to put some of them aside. So I record the ideas that pop up to review them later and stay focused on my agenda for the month.
4. How do you overcome these obstacles?
I have learned the art of focus, which is why I teach focus groups [and] help people get their creative projects and businesses launched and … resolve the emotional barriers that get in their way.
These groups have been very powerful and I keep creating new strategies and materials for all the ingredients of focusing, which keeps me on track as well. One woman went from not doing her mosaic work at all to winning first prize in the best international contest in the world, all in a few months.
5. What are some of your favorite resources on creativity?
One of my favorite resources was a magazine called Artist Sketchbook, which I wrote several articles for and read every page of. But it folded, although I still have all my copies and refer to them. Books and art inspire me as well as lovely places.
The show “Create” on PBS is great as well as all of the wonderful programming that they share with us each week. I have always gotten lots of ideas from magazines and I continue to read women’s magazines and travel magazines and get ideas.
6. What is your favorite way to get your creative juices flowing?
I have a photo of my office on my website and I have a treasure map on my desk that reminds me of what I am longing to create next. Listening to music, I usually listen to the same piece over and over doing one project, and keeping a special journal for each project helps me stay excited and alive when I am creating.
I also crave large blocks of time in which to work. In the summer, I will drive the SUV out onto our private beach on Cape Cod and write and paint and hang out with the sand pipers and the seals.
7. What’s your advice for readers on cultivating creativity?
Follow your fascinations and immerse yourself in them. Just begin working on something that you love and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Trust your process and your intuition.
8. Anything else you’d like readers to know about creativity?
Creativity simply means making new connections and making or inventing something new and useful. You have it in you, but you need to commit to it and work with a mentor or a coach to help you to defeat all your negative inner critics that seduce you away from success. We all need support to get our creative work done and out into the world.
–
Thanks so much to Gail McMeekin for a great interview!
Caffeine Linked to Estrogen Changes
Moderate caffeine consumption is associated with higher levels of estrogen in Asian women, but lower levels in white women, according to a study of reproductive-age women conducted by the National Institutes of Health and other institutions.
Over 250 women, ages 18 to 44 years old, participated in the study between 2005 and 2007. On average, they consumed 90 milligrams of caffeine a day, equivalent to approximately one cup of caffeinated coffee.
Asian women who took in an average of 200 milligrams or more of caffeine a day — the equivalent of approximately two cups of coffee — had higher estrogen levels than women who consumed less caffeine.
In contrast, white women who consumed 200 milligrams or more of caffeine a day had slightly lower estrogen levels than women who consumed less.
Black women who consumed 200 milligrams or more of caffeine a day were found to have elevated estrogen levels; however, the result was not statistically significant.
Total caffeine intake was calculated from any of the following sources: coffee, black tea, green tea, and caffeinated soda.
Findings differed slightly when the source of caffeine was considered singly. Drinking 200 milligrams or more of caffeine from coffee was consistent with the findings for overall caffeine consumption—with Asians having higher estrogen levels, whites having lower estrogen levels, and the results for blacks not statistically significant. However, drinking more than one cup each day of caffeinated soda or green tea was linked to higher estrogen level in Asians, whites, and blacks.
The changes in estrogen levels among the participants did not seem to affect ovulation. Animal studies had suggested that caffeine could possibly interfere with ovulation.
“The results indicate that caffeine consumption among women of child-bearing age influences estrogen levels,” said Enrique Schisterman, Ph.D., of the Division of Epidemiology, Statistics and Prevention Research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute where some of the research was conducted.
“Short term, these variations in estrogen levels among different groups do not appear to have any pronounced effects. We know that variations in estrogen level are associated with such disorders as endometriosis, osteoporosis, and endometrial, breast, and ovarian cancers. Because long-term caffeine consumption has the potential to influence estrogen levels over a long period of time, it makes sense to take caffeine consumption into account when designing studies to understand these disorders.”
Most of the study participants reported to the study clinic one to three times a week for two menstrual cycles. Their visits were scheduled to correspond with specific stages of the menstrual cycle.
During each visit, the participants reported what they had eaten in the last 24 hours and answered questions about their exercise, sleep, smoking and other lifestyle factors. Reproductive hormone levels were also measured.
Researchers added that receiving these details during multiple stages across two menstrual cycles produced more precise information concerning the link between caffeine and hormones than was possible in previous studies. The researchers also noted that the study volunteers were more racially diverse than those from earlier studies.
The study was published online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Source: National Institutes of Health
Family History of Psychiatric Disorders Shapes Intellectual Interests
Results of a survey published by Princeton University researchers suggest that a family history of psychiatric conditions, such as autism and depression, could influence the subjects a person finds engaging.
The Princeton researchers surveyed nearly 1,100 students from the university’s Class of 2014 early in their freshman year to learn which major they would choose based on their intellectual interests. The students were then asked to indicate the incidence of mood disorders, substance abuse or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their family, including parents, siblings and grandparents.
Students interested in pursuing a major in the humanities or social sciences were twice as likely to report that a family member had a mood disorder or a problem with substance abuse.
Students with an interest in science and technical majors, on the other hand, were three times more likely to report a sibling with an ASD, a range of developmental disorders that includes autism and Asperger syndrome.
Senior researcher Sam Wang, an associate professor in Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, said that the survey — though not exhaustive nor based on direct clinical diagnoses — presents the idea that certain psychiatric conditions are more closely linked to a person’s intellectual interests than is currently supposed.
During the past several decades, Wang said, researchers have found that mood or behavior disorders are associated with a higher-than-average representation in careers related to writing and the humanities, while conditions related to autism exhibit a similar correlation with scientific and technical careers.
By focusing on poets, writers and scientists, however, those studies only include people who have advanced far in “artistic” or “scientific” pursuits and professions, potentially excluding a large group of people who have those interests but no particular aptitude or related career, Wang said.
He and lead author Benjamin Campbell selected incoming freshmen because the students are old enough to have defined interests, but are not yet on a set career path. (Princeton students do not declare a major until the end of sophomore year.)
“Until our work, evidence of a connection between neuropsychiatric disorders and artistic aptitude, for example, was based on surveying creative people, where creativity is usually defined in terms of occupation or proficiency in an artistic field,” Wang said.
“But what if there is a broader category of people associated with bipolar or depression, namely people who think that the arts are interesting? The students we surveyed are not all F. Scott Fitzgerald, but many more of them might like to read F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
As in past studies, Wang and Campbell suggest a genetic basis for their results. The correlation with interests and psychiatric conditions they observed implies that a common genetic path could lead relatives in similar directions, but with some people developing psychiatric disorders while their kin only possess certain traits of those conditions.
Those traits can manifest as preferences for and talents in certain areas, Wang said.
“Altogether, results of our study and those like it suggest that scientists should start thinking about the genetic roots of normal function as much as we discuss the genetic causes of abnormal function. This survey helps show that there might be common cause between the two,” Wang said.
“Everyone has specific individual interests that result from experiences in life, but these interests arise from a genetic starting point,” he continued. “This doesn’t mean that our genes determine our fate. It just means that our genes launch us down a path in life, leading most people to pursue specific interests and, in extreme cases, leading others toward psychiatric disorders.”
The study was published January 26 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Source: Princeton University
High Tech Treatment for Tourette Syndrome
Deep Brain Stimulation in Tourette Syndrome: A Description of 3 Patients With Excellent Outcome
A neurologist describes a new paper published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Three of his patients suffering from severe, treatment refractory Tourette syndrome received deep brain stimulation implants, and the procedures were successful. Dr. Savica talks about which areas of the brain were targeted by DBS, and the need for more research to determine the best target. For more details, read the free article here. DOI: 10.4016/38287.01.
January 27 2012
The Dark Side of Altruism
The true-crime book Wiseguy [1], on which the movie Goodfellas is based, vividly portrays the Brooklyn Mafia's social world in the 1950s-70s. A main player in this world, Jimmy "the Gent" Burke, was renowned for his spectacular generosity:
"(Jimmy would) walk in the door (of the makeshift casino) and everybody... would go wild. He'd give the doorman a hundred just for opening the door. He shoved hundreds in the pockets of the guys who ran the games. The bartender got a hundred just for keeping the ice cubes cold. I mean, the guy was a sport..." (p. 28).
Sounds like a great guy, right? Except that besides being extremely generous, Jimmy was also more than just a little psychopathic, known for his joyful indulgence in murder and larceny:
"He seemed to possess a bizarre combination of generosity and enthusiasm for homicide (p. 116)... Jimmy could plant you just as fast as shake your hand. It didn't matter to him. At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world but then he could blow you away for desert. He was very scary and he scared some very scary fellows (p. 130)... He loved to steal. He ate and breathed it. I think if you ever offered Jimmy a billion dollars not to steal, he'd turn you down and then try to figure out how to steal it from you" (pp. 119-120).
Jimmy, unusual in both generosity and viciousness, is not a typical human. But he nicely exemplifies how seemingly altruistic behaviour can be motivated by brutally selfish concerns. People can boost their own social status through their abilities to benefit and/or harm others, and Jimmy used both generosity and violence to get ahead. In giving money so freely to everyone around him, he bought their respect and dependence on him; he implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) bribed them to stay on his side and never double-cross him. And if he couldn't buy their loyalty with these positive incentives, he was always happy to coerce it instead, via his terrifying personality and enthusiasm for killing.
So generosity doesn't have to be selfless, and can in fact be as used for the same basic purpose—status striving—as clearly ungenerous acts like murder and theft. Even if generosity can often be selfish, however, it doesn't have to be as brazenly selfish as buying people off. Evolutionarily, there were much subtler ways in which generous acts could have enabled ancestral individuals to increase their social status and popularity (and thereby increase their reproductive fitness). Such an act could have signaled, for example, one's own access to resources or empathy, and thus one's attractiveness as a mate, ally, friend or cooperative partner.
Just as humans often use generosity in self-serving ways, they also scrutinize the generous acts of others for underlying selfish motives. When a corporation donates to charity, for instance, we may wonder whether it's just an effort to generate governmental or public goodwill, in order to avoid regulation or to drum up business. To assess a generous act in this way, however, is not necessarily to disparage the act's moral value. Even if the act benefits the giver substantially, it may still be highly commendable and beneficial for the recipient; there's nothing wrong with win-win situations. Still, people reserve a special place in their heart for acts that seem to be true cases of self-sacrificial altruism: the less we can discern self-serving motives for a generous act, the more we extol the act.
Why do we praise generous acts more when they seem more selfless? It may seem slightly ironic, but we probably do so out of self-interest: as beneficiaries of such acts, we aren't expected to provide anything in return, so we gain bigger net benefits than we would from acts that obligated us to reciprocate. Here's an illustration: in a study I conducted among members of a work team in an indigenous Amazonian society [2], I asked respondents to make moral judgments about members of another (fictional) work team who were portrayed as varying in the extent to which they (a) contributed to a group project and (b) benefited from this project. Respondents overwhelmingly favored a member who worked hard for low benefit—an altruist—over one who worked hard for high benefit. (They also overwhelmingly disfavored one who worked little for high benefit—a free rider—compared to one who worked little for low benefit). In other words, indigenous team members preferred the actor who would produce higher net benefits for them, were they on the same team; as in our own culture, selfless generosity was praised more than selfish generosity. But as praiseworthy as many acts of self-sacrificial generosity may be, we should remember that praising others for these acts is itself probably selfish.
(A version of this article will appear as the author's "Natural Law" column in the banking magazine Global Custodian).
References
1. Pileggi, N. (1985). Wiseguy. New York: Pocket Books.
2. Price, M. E. (2006). Judgments about cooperators and freeriders on a Shuar work team: An evolutionary psychological perspective. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 101: 20-35.
Copyright Michael E. Price 2012. All rights reserved.
Want To Feel Happier? Enjoying Childish Pleasures
My children make me happy for many reasons, of course. But it strikes me that one reason that they make me happy is that they encourage me to engage more deeply with the physical world.
Left to my own instincts, I’d drift absent-mindedly through the apartment, reading, writing, and eating cereal for dinner every night.
Through my daughters, I become much more alive to ordinary pleasures — the comfort of our weirdly soft fleece blanket, the vanishing sweetness of cotton candy, the textures and colors of the Play-Doh, scented markers, and velvety pipe cleaners left scattered around the kitchen.
I’m trying to push myself to enter more deeply into childish pleasures. I love blowing bubbles, but I haven’t blown bubbles in a long time. I delight in looking at new boxes of Crayons and magic markers, but I almost never do any coloring myself. I’ve never used our cunning set of animal stamps.
I do make good use of food dye and sprinkles, however. I use any excuse to pull out our food dye! We have a giant box of sprinkles, colored markers that work on food, sugar crystals, rainbow nonpareils, and the like.
I get so much pleasure from turning vanilla yoghurt into a rainbow confection that I’m trying to be more aware of other opportunities to enjoy childish pleasures.
How about you? What childish pleasures do you enjoy, or wish you took the time to enjoy? Skate-boarding, jump-roping, shooting hoops, playing jacks? A forty-something friend told me that whenever she and her three sisters get together, they play Four-Square. It made me so happy just to hear that.
I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in—no need to catch up, just jump in right now.
A thoughtful reader sent me the link to this one-minute YouTube video for Google’s “Search plus Your World.” If you watch like a hawk, you can see the URL for The Happiness Project make a cameo in the search results displayed. Note: you will have to watch very closely.
Buying New Experiences, Not Things, Tied to Happiness
A new study suggests that those who spend money to do things are happier than those who spend their money on possessions.
In the study, investigators determined extraverts and people who are open to new experiences are more apt to spend more of their disposable income on experiences, such as concert tickets or a weekend away, rather than hitting the mall for material items.
Investigators, led by San Francisco State University Professor, Ryan Howell, discovered the habitual “experiential shoppers” reported greater life satisfaction.
To further investigate how purchasing decisions impact well-being, Howell and colleagues have launched a website where members of the public can take free surveys to find out what kind of shopper they are and how their spending choices affect them.
Data collected through the “Beyond the Purchase” website will be used by Howell and other social psychologists.
The site is designed to study the link between spending motivations and well-being, and how money management influences our financial and purchasing choices.
In the current study, Howell and colleagues surveyed nearly 10,000 participants, who completed online questionnaires about their shopping habits, personality traits, values and life satisfaction.
“We know that being an ‘experience shopper’ is linked to greater well-being,” said Howell, whose previous research on purchasing experiences challenged the adage that money can’t buy happiness.
“But we wanted to find out why some people gravitate toward buying experiences.”
Investigators determined an individual’s personality via a model that classifies how extraverted, neurotic, open, conscientious and agreeable a person is.
People who spent most of their disposable income on experiences scored highly on the “extravert” and “openness to new experience” scales.
“This personality profile makes sense since life experiences are inherently more social, and they also contain an element of risk,” Howell said. “If you try a new experience that you don’t like, you can’t return it to the store for a refund.”
Researchers believe it may be helpful if people would realize that life satisfaction and happiness can be influenced by their spending habits.
“Even for people who naturally find themselves drawn to material purchases, our results suggest that getting more of a balance between traditional purchases and those that provide you with an experience could lead to greater life satisfaction and well-being,” he said.
The research findings are published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Source: San Francisco State University
Best Friends Provide Buffers in Bad Times
The presence of a best friend directly affects children going through negative experiences, according to new research from Concordia University.
“Having a best friend present during an unpleasant event has an immediate impact on a child’s body and mind,” said co-author William M. Bukowski, Ph.D., a psychology professor and director of the Concordia Centre for Research in Human Development.
“If a child is alone when he or she gets in trouble with a teacher or has an argument with a classmate, we see a measurable increase in cortisol levels and decrease in feelings of self-worth.”
In the study, 55 boys and 48 girls in fifth and sixth grades in Montreal schools kept journals on their feelings and experiences over the course of four days and submitted to regular saliva tests that monitored cortisol levels.
Although previous studies have shown that friendships can protect against later adjustment difficulties, this study is the first to demonstrate that the presence of a friend results in an immediate benefit for the child undergoing a negative experience, the researchers said.
These results have far-reaching implications, Bukowski said.
“Our physiological and psychological reactions to negative experiences as children impact us later in life,” he said. “Excessive secretion of cortisol can lead to significant physiological changes, including immune suppression and decreased bone formation. Increased stress can really slow down a child’s development.”
“What we learn about ourselves as children is how we form our adult identities,” Bukowski said. “If we build up feelings of low self-worth during childhood, this will translate directly into how we see ourselves as adults.”
The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology.
Source: Concordia University
Belief in Conspiracies Can Lead to Contradictions
Distrust and paranoia about government has a long history in the U.S and can lead to suspicion about claims made by authorities and belief in conspiracies.
Now, a new study suggests that the attraction to conspiracy theories can lead some to endorse entirely contradictory beliefs.
Researchers discovered people who endorse conspiracy theories see authorities as fundamentally deceptive. This belief that the “official story” is untrue can lead people to believe several alternative theories – despite contradictions among them.
“Any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conspiracist worldview,” according to Drs. Michael Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton of the University of Kent’s psychology department.
To see if conspiracy views were strong enough to lead to inconsistencies, the researchers asked 137 college students about the death of Princess Diana.
The more people thought there “was an official campaign by the intelligence service to assassinate Diana,” the more they also believed that “Diana faked her own death to retreat into isolation.”
By the way, Diana cannot be simultaneously dead and alive.
The researchers wanted to know if the contradictory beliefs were due to suspicion of authorities, so they asked 102 college students about the death of Osama bin Laden.
People who believed that “when the raid took place, Osama bin Laden was already dead,” were significantly more likely to also believe that “Osama bin Laden is still alive.”
Researchers found this contradiction was associated with the belief that “actions of the Obama administration indicate that they are hiding some important or damaging piece of information about the raid.”
Thus, belief in a conspiracy is so strong that it blinds individuals who can then believe completely inconsistent ideas.
“For conspiracy theorists, those in power are seen as deceptive – even malevolent – and so any official explanation is at a disadvantage, and any alternative explanation is more credible from the start,” said the authors.
It is no surprise that fear, mistrust, and even paranoia can lead to muddled thinking; when distrust is engaged, careful reasoning can fall by the wayside.
“Believing Osama is still alive,” they write, ‘is no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years.”
The research is found in the current issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Source: Sage
Adult Depression Influenced by Parents’ Education
Emerging research suggests depression in adulthood may be tied to a parent’s level of education.
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Ph.D., a medical sociologist from McGill University, and co-researcher Miles Taylor reviewed 29 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.
In their analysis, they reviewed associations between a parent’s education level and their children’s education level, household income and depressive symptoms. They discovered that higher levels of parental education meant fewer mental health issues for their adult children.
“However, we also found much of that association may be due to the fact that parents with more education tend to have children with more education and better paying jobs themselves,” said Quesnel-Vallée.
“What this means is that the whole process of climbing up the social ladder that is rooted in a parent’s education is a crucial pathway for the mental health of adult children.”
Researchers believe these findings imply that improving educational opportunities for everyone, but especially the underprivileged, could stop the vicious cycle between low social economic status and poor mental health.
“Children don’t get to choose where they come from. I think we have a responsibility to address health inequalities borne out of the conditions of early childhood,” said Quesnel-Vallée.
The paper was recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Source: McGill University
Men May Have Higher Risk of Memory Loss
A new study suggests men may be at higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) than women. MCI is the stage of mild memory loss that occurs between normal aging and dementia.
Experts were surprised ag the finding as women generally have higher rates of dementia than men.
Mayo Clinic researchers, led by study author Dr. Rosebud Roberts, followed a group of 1,450 people from Olmsted County, Minn. Study participants were between the ages of 70 and 89 and free of dementia at enrollment. Individuals underwent memory testing every 15 months for an average of three years and were also interviewed about their memory by medical professionals.
By the end of the study period, 296 people had developed mild cognitive impairment.
“The risk of MCI in men and women combined was high in this age group of elderly persons. This is disturbing given that people are living longer, and MCI may have a large impact on health care costs if increased efforts at prevention are not used to reduce the risk,” said Roberts.
Researchers discovered the number of new cases of mild cognitive impairment per year was higher in men, at 72 per 1,000 people compared to 57 per 1,000 people in women and 64 per 1,000 people in men and women combined.
MCI with memory loss present was more common at 38 per 1,000 people than MCI where memory loss was not present, which affected 15 per 1,000 people. Those who had less education or were not married also had higher rates of MCI.
“Our study suggests that risk factors for mild cognitive impairment should be studied separately in men and women,” said Roberts.
But the study also found that cognitive impairment can be transitory: 12 percent of people who were newly diagnosed with MCI were later diagnosed with no MCI, or reverted back to what was considered “cognitively normal.”
Roberts said the majority of people with mild cognitive impairment continue to have MCI or progress to dementia, such as Alzheimer’s.
The study is published in the online issue of the medical journal Neurology.
Source: American Academy of Neurology
Best of Our Blogs: January 27, 2012
It’s very easy to fall down what I like to call the, “Woe is me rabbit hole.” It can start innocently enough.
Maybe you’re having a particularly difficult day or you’re feeling tired, fed-up or emotionally exhausted. It’s during these times that the question you’ve been ruminating on such as, “Why this?” can easily be turned into, “Why me?” Negative thoughts like these can be seductive. Spend enough time focusing on them and they can grow into self-pity. And even worse? When you start asking yourself, “Why even try?” you’re on your way to self-sabotaging behavior.
When I’m in a downward spiral, distraction helps. What helps even more than that is reading about how others are not just surviving despite challenges, but doing inspiring, amazing things because of it. You’ll find it this week in reading about how mindfulness is helping kids deal with stress, how you can take back control of your happiness and your career, and find new ways to heal and motivate yourself.
Bookmark these posts for a rainy day when you need a boost or help transforming your thoughts from, “Why me?” to “Why not me?”
Mindfulness, Children and Parenting: An Interview with Amy Saltzman, MD
(Mindfulness & Psychotherapy) – We may not be aware of it, but children experience stress too. And parents contribute significantly to it. In this post, Dr. Goldstein interviews Amy Saltzman, MD a holistic physician in Northern California on an innovative way parents, caregivers and teachers can help kids manage their stress.
How Is Your Personality Impacting Your Happiness?
(Adventures in Positive Psychology) – Who you are has a surprising impact on your potential for happiness. How? This post looks at the Big Five Theory of Personality and its connection to psychological well-being.
How Do You Know If You Still Need Meds?
(My Meds, My Self) – Taking medication for mental illness is a necessity for most individuals. But because of the baggage that comes with prescriptions (a.k.a. side effects), it’s not always easy to keep taking them. Here, Kaitlin addresses the heart of medication non-adherence.
More On Nutrition, Body Peace & Yoga: Part 2 With Julie Norman
(Weightless) – In part 2 of her post, Margarita talks to Julie Norman, a registered dietician, yoga instructor and Health At Every Size Supporter about the dangerous myths of nutrition and how mindful eating and yoga can heal your negative body image.
Marketing Yourself And Your Creative Work: Don’t You Deserve a Wider Audience?
(The Creative Mind) – If you’re having trouble making a career out of your creative pursuits, take heart. It is possible, even in this economy, to make a living from your art. The key is to do away with the phrase “starving artist” and start learning how to market your art instead.
Embracing Darwin in an Uncertain World
February 12th is Darwin Day, the anniversary of Darwin's birth and an excuse for scientists, educators, and Darwin enthusiasts worldwide to celebrate the theory of natural selection and its central role throughout the biological and social sciences.
While scientists overwhelmingly accept natural selection as a well-established scientific theory, it's rejected by a sizable minority of Americans, especially as an explanation for human origins.
What makes natural selection so unpalatable to so many people? And what makes alternatives, such as Intelligent Design and creationism, so attractive?
The answers to these questions are no doubt complex, and every individual has his or her own reasons for belief. Nonetheless, a growing body of research spanning the cognitive sciences suggests that powerful psychological mechanisms shape the explanations that people tend to find satisfying and ultimately accept.
This post is the first in a series inspired by Darwin Day that explores why people find evolution difficult to understand and to accept, and why Intelligent Design and creationism might be more compelling.
In this post I'll consider a provocative paper published in 2010 by Bastiaan Rutjens, Joop van der Pligt, and Frenk van Harreveld from the University of Amsterdam. They examined how a reminder that one can't always control life's outcomes influenced people's preferred explanations for life on earth. Specifically, they wondered whether feeling a lack of control would lead people to reject explanations that involve random chance (namely natural selection) in favor of explanations that suggest a more orderly and predictable world.
The experimenters first assigned their undergraduate participants to one of two groups. In the first group (call them the powerless group), participants were encouraged to think of themselves as powerless in the face of an unpredictable universe. They first recalled an unpleasant situation in which they lacked control and were then asked to provide three reasons to believe that the future is uncontrollable. In the second group (call them the powerful group), participants were encouraged to think of themselves as powerful agents in an orderly universe: They were asked to recall an unpleasant situation in which they did have some control and to provide three reasons to believe that the future can in fact be controlled.
Participants were then presented with descriptions of evolution and Intelligent Design and asked to choose the theory that "provides the best framework to explain the origin of life on this planet." The description of evolution emphasized the role of random processes and chance:
"...Natural selection, the basis of this theory, is generally an unstructured and random process in which unpredictable features of the natural environment determine how life evolves."
In contrast, the description of Intelligent Design focused on the role of an overseeing and controlling designer:
"...Contrary to evolutionary theory, which explains life on our planet as the results of random processes, ID theory posits that, given the complexity of our planet, its design requires an external agent."
Overall, participants tended to choose natural selection over Intelligent Design.* However – and this is the key – they were much less likely to do so when their sense of control was threatened. Participants in the powerful group chose Intelligent Design less than 5% of the time, but those in the powerless group chose it over 20% of the time! In other words, feeling a lack of control sent participants in search of a designer.
But is God or some other external agent the only remedy for the existential malaise induced by confronting one's powerlessness in an uncontrollable world?
Not necessarily. The researchers cleverly considered a third possible explanatory framework: a version of natural selection inspired by Conway-Morris that characterized evolution as a predictable and orderly process. The description explained that "life on our planet is not the result of random processes: if evolution would be replayed, results would inevitably be similar to the present state of affairs."
Given the choice between "random" natural selection and this predictable form of evolution, participants tended to prefer the familiar random option. But they were much less likely to choose the random option if they were in the powerless group. Only about 5% of participants in the powerful group opted for the Conway-Morris version of evolution. But when participants' sense of control was challenged in the powerless group, over 30% did so! As before, feeling a lack of control pushed participants towards the more orderly universe, but in this case it was one that did not invoke a designer.
The researchers also pitted one orderly universe against the other: Intelligent Design versus the Conway-Morris version of evolution. When these were the options, manipulating participants' sense of control no longer had a measurable effect. Confronted with two options that promised order and predictability, feeling powerless no longer gave Intelligent Design an edge relative to evolution.
Some lessons are clear: Feeling a lack of control can push people towards explanations that suggest a predictable and orderly world, but embracing an ultimate designer isn't the only option.
Other lessons are less clear. Does this explain why any given individual does or does not accept evolution? Probably not. And do findings of this kind tell us anything about what ACTUALLY explains the biological world as opposed to what people BELIEVE explains it? That turns out to be a complicated and controversial question, which I'll return to in a Darwin Day post next month. Stay tuned!
* Remember that participants were university students, presumably in Amsterdam. While approximately 70% of people polled in the Netherlands agreed with the statement that "Human being, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals," only about 40% of Americans did so (Miller, Scott, & Okamoto, 2006).
January 26 2012
Faking ADHD for Special Treatment
You might ask, “Why would anyone want to fake attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?”
Many years ago, when ADHD was first proposed as a diagnosis, you would’ve been right — few people would’ve bothered faking the diagnosis because it brought you little reward to do so.
But as ADHD diagnoses bloomed over the past two decades, so did special accommodations in the school systems for children and teenagers diagnosed with the disorder. And one of the primary treatments for attention deficit disorder is stimulant medication, something that can be used for less-than-legitimate reasons.
Could teens today really be faking ADHD to get into college?
Welcome to the world of unintended secondary gains and rewards.
Secondary gains are when you get something unintended or secondary to the primary objective. For instance, let’s say you need to get good grades in school in order to get to the next grade or keep your GPA up. But when you bring home a report card with mostly As on it, your parents are so excited they treat you to a special dinner out or a gift certificate. You didn’t get good grades just to get the dinner or gift certificate — those are secondary to the real reason.
Psychologists have long understood the power of secondary gains as rewarding to people, sometimes in very unintended ways. So when some well-meaning people give those disabled by a mental illness such as ADHD special treatment (such as unlimited time to take a test or the SATs), others see the benefits and take advantage of the situation.
Heidi Mitchell has the story over at The Daily Beast about an anonymous student named “Steven” who decided to fake ADHD in order to get into a college in upstate New York (not Harvard, as the article’s headline mistakenly claims).
Steven decided to dupe his doctor when he returned from his elite boarding school exhausted by the intense competition there. He needed an edge to help him, he felt. So through written evaluations from teachers and his parents, and by deliberately failing tests, he succeeded in getting himself diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and was given both his in-school tests and his SATs untimed. Eventually Steven, which is not his real name, was accepted to a top college in upstate New York, although he no longer takes medication, nor does he consider himself ADHD. The ADHD diagnosis, and the benefits that came with it, he acknowledges, helped him beat the competition. [...]
Faking the test that diagnoses ADHD is easy, shows a recent study by Prof. David Berry at the University of Kentucky. His group of fakers was assessed on the ADHA Rating Scale (ARS) developed by Barkley and Murphy and on the Conners Adult ADHD Rating Scale. The test givers could not distinguish between the fakers, who had spent five minutes on Google learning what signs to display in order to trick assessors, and the real ADHD group.
Nobody knows the exact numbers of students who are doing this, but it appears to be enough of a problem that researchers are finally trying to better detect malingering, the technical term for faking.
I’d argue that rating and screening scales for ADHD, like those for most mental disorders, aren’t there to make a definitive diagnosis — that’s the mental health professional’s job. They are there to act as a rough screening measure to give a person or a professional an idea of the likelihood of ADHD.
The problem is that most symptom criteria for nearly all mental disorders are subjective behavioral symptoms arrived at, most usually, be self-report by the patient. It’s really hard to tell a person is lying when they say all the right things that a person with actual ADHD might say.
Luckily, researchers are on it. A study published in The Clinical Neuropsychologist in December 2011 by Lindsey Jasinski and colleagues suggests that the administration of a battery of neuropsychological tests can pick up on ADHD malingering:
Similar to Sollman et al. (2010) and other recent research on feigned ADHD, several symptom validity tests, including the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM), Letter Memory Test (LMT), Digit Memory Test (DMT), Nonverbal Medical Symptom Validity Test (NV-MSVT), and the b Test were reasonably successful at discriminating feigned and genuine ADHD.
I’d also suggest that if someone wants special academic accommodations for their mental illness, it’s required they see a specialist in that area who is most qualified to render an accurate and objective diagnosis. A neuropsychologist, for instance, is the most qualified professional to render an accurate ADHD diagnosis, since they are the only professionals trained and qualified to administer neuropsychological testing.
Unfortunately, such consultations don’t come cheaply. But it’s one solution to this potentially burgeoning problem.
Read the full article: Faking ADHD Gets You Into Harvard
Can a Candidate Be Too Religious?
When Rick Santorum did surprisingly well in the Iowa caucuses on January 3, many Americans started taking a serious look at his views. One revelation that quickly came to light was that the former Pennsylvania senator, a devout Catholic, takes his religion very seriously. In fact, via news accounts appearing immediately after the Iowa caucuses, many Americans learned that Santorum, like his church, is highly critical of birth control and believes that nonprocreative sex is wrong.
This makes Santorum more Catholic than the typical American Catholic. Although the Vatican considers contraception not just a sin, but a mortal sin, most American Catholics, preferring to cherry-pick from the moral standards of their church, simply don't accept such religious dictates. They may identify as Catholic, but they'll use condoms and/or the pill, and they'll even get a vasectomy or tubal ligation once they've decided they've had enough kids.
Interestingly, since Santorum's views have come to light, he has lagged in the polls. This raises a point that is rarely acknowledged in American politics: despite what we hear in the media about America being a deeply religious country, Americans don't really want their candidates to be too religious. The common exaltation of religion in the public dialogue is a gross overstatement, as the average American is more likely to prefer a candidate who accepts modern standards, not biblical standards, of morality and sexuality.
Nevertheless, despite holding views that are essentially secular and modernistic, many Americans are still reluctant to vote for a candidate who is openly secular, who publicly identifies as atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist. They prefer a candidate who accepts traditional religion publicly, but they don't want that person to take that religion too seriously.
The failed candidacies of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are further evidence of this. While poor debate performances and other missteps no doubt contributed to the doom of their campaigns, the fact that they each dwell on the fundamentalist fringe of religion certainly scared some voters away. Future constituents get a bit uneasy when a would-be leader of the free world rejects evolution and hangs out with young-earth creationists, many of whom optimistically await Armageddon.
This unease about religiosity is not new. John F. Kennedy's famous religion speech in 1960 can be paraphrased as follows: "My fellow Americans: Don't worry, I'm not that religious!" In the speech, Kennedy assured America that, despite his Catholicism, he would not take orders from Rome and that he believed in "absolute" separation of church and state. This speech has been criticized recently by some on the Religious Right, and in fact some religious conservatives today like to deny that the concept of church-state separation is valid, but mainstream Americans appreciate the basic point JFK was making. They may want their leaders to go to church, but they really don't want them to be too religious.
This should be seen as reason for optimism. Since Americans really do want leaders who embrace forward-looking, secular values that enable ordinary citizens to live in health and prosperity based on our modern understanding of the world, those who are personally secular should be able to succeed in the public realm. The only real obstacle is the incorrect perception that a candidate who is personally secular is unfit for office. As secular identity becomes more common, especially among younger people, this obstacle should be overcome.
Pre-order Dave's new book, Nonbeliever Nation, here.
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