AU Blogspot

               Thanks to Angel Schatz for permission to use this Photo.

Answer the following questions, and don’t look at the next until you answer the previous: 

Does depression in kids raise their risk of violence? 

If a kid is violent, is it more or less likely they are depressed? 

If someone is depressed and violent, is it likely they are a kid? 

Can you define any of the nouns in the preceding questions? 

In a study called Perceived Dangerousness of Children With Mental Health Problems and Support for Coerced Treatment the perceptions of 1100 members of the public were evaluated, finding: 

“Children… with major depression were perceived (by 81% of the sample) as somewhat likely or very likely to be dangerous to themselves or others, compared with children with asthma (15%) or those with “daily troubles” (13%).”
and, later: 

“…compared with the child with “daily troubles,” the vignette child with depression was more than twice as likely to be assessed as dangerous toward others and ten times as likely to be assessed as dangerous toward himself or herself.”

Now, you lose no money assuming the public at large merely guess at probabilities.  So what they think may be right, wrong, both– who knows.  But whatever they think, it’s probably important to quote them correctly:

“The issue that was highlighted by this study that was really concerning to us was that Americans have linked depression in youth and violence, particularly violence towards others,” said Dr. Pescosolido [”distinguished professor of sociology, Indiana University.”] [emphasis mine, but, face it, really theirs.]

Well, no, that’s not what the public thinks, at least according to your study.  They think that depression leads to violence against themselves, and maybe towards others.  Only 9% thought violence towards others was very likely.  The majority thought violence towards others was not likely.  Right? (more…)

 
               Thanks to Chris Gladis for permission to use this Photo.

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what’s going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn’t involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what’s really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Shopping

For this study researchers set themselves up in a mall pretending to carry out a consumer survey on nightgowns and nylon stockings. Passersby were asked to evaluate what they were told were four different nightgowns and four different pairs of stockings. In fact, all four items were identical.

Quite by accident they discovered a positional effect for the identical goods: people seemed to prefer the item that was on the far right. In fact this effect was really obvious for the stockings. The right-most pair, although identical to the left-most was preferred by a factor of four to one.

When asked why they had chosen a particular item, no one mentioned its position. Even when experimenters suggested to people that the position might have an effect, most participants looked at best very confused and at worst utterly dismissive.

Result: these people didn’t have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another.

Reading

In this study participants read a passage from the novel ‘Rabbit, Run’ by John Updike. The extract from the book involves an emotionally charged scene in which an alcoholic mother, while washing her baby in the bath, accidentally drowns and kills her.

Click here to read the rest of this entry… 

         Thanks to vieilles_annonces’ for permission to use this Photo.

On September 15, 1985, a seemingly innocent package was delivered to the home of Dr. James V. McConnell, then-professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.  His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened the package as Dr. McConnell looked on.  The resulting explosion resulted in Suino sustaining injuries to his arms and abdomen.  Dr. McConnell was more fortunate although he suffered a hearing loss as a result of the blast.  It remains unclear exactly why Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) targeted Dr. McConnell as he had others in the scientific communit, but Dr. McConnell’s colorful career may provide a clue. 

Considered a maverick in his time, James V. McConnell’s career was marked by his unconventional research and outspokenness.  In his most famous research project, he classically conditioned Planaria (flatworms) to react to bright lights using electric shocks.  He then cut up his research subjects and fed them to other Planaria and he found that the cannibal Planaria learned to respond to the bright light more rapidly than control Planaria did.  In his classic paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, he suggested that memory was chemically based and that the memory transfer had been accomplished through what he termed memory RNA.  While it was an intriguing finding at the time, other researchers have not been able to replicate his results and the concept of memory transfer fell by the wayside. (more…)

The photo on the left is real circa 1989: Tiananmen Square.  On the right, a doctored photo.  300 people were shown either a real or altered photo of two different protests, and then asked to recall what happened back then.  The point of this study was to show that altering a photograph will change how the events are actually remembered (in this case, as bigger and more violent.)  It’s important to emphasize that the subjects already had a memory of the events (from TV, etc)– so this photo actually changed their pre-existing memories, and they weren’t aware of it.

But, here’s the thing: these subjects weren’t actually at the original protests.  Their original memories also came from images– hopefully not altered images, but certainly selected images.  Right?  The TV newspeople didn’t pick the boring pictures, did they?  I get that doctored photos are bad.  But how much of our memories and knowledge of the past are largely determined not by “reality” but what, or how, we were shown it in the first place.  Obviously, a lot.  Therein lies the question: is it worse to see a doctored photo, or doctored reality?

Here’s an example: search your mind for recollections about the Tiananmen “episode” in 1989.  Can you remember anything– anything at all– other than that guy standing in front of the tanks?  Do you remember who was protesting? Why?  The question isn’t why you don’t remember anything, hell, it was 20 years ago and a solar system away; the question is why you do remember that guy.  Are you better off for knowing this?  Are you smarter?  Or do you carry the false impression that you know something about which you really know nothing?  That’s the Matrix– not only do you have false memories, but you get to feel good about being a knowledgeable, aware, citizen of the world. (more…)

             Thanks to global green for permission to use this Photo.

The ‘How to Be Happy’ article has become a staple of newspapers, magazines, books and, increasingly, of websites. We should ‘accept reality’, or ‘take a break’, or ‘be honest with ourselves’, or ’surround ourselves with happy people’.

These things are unlikely to do us any harm but that doesn’t stop them reading like a list of platitudes - the kind that people are always doling out but never follow themselves.

We can all create our own lists of happiness enhancing activities and argue endlessly about which is better and for whom. While that’s fun for a bit, I always want to ask: which activities have evidence to back up their claims for increasing happiness?

Psychologists have only started investigating this question relatively recently, so there’s not a very long list and it is obviously far from exhaustive, but at least there’s some research to back them up. The activities psychologists have investigated are gratitude, helping others, and firstly, visualizing your best possible self.

1. Visualizing your best possible self

Visualizing your best possible self may sound like an exercise in fantasy but, crucially, it does have to be realistic. Carrying out this exercise typically involves imagining your life in the future, but a future where everything that could go well, has gone well. You have reached those realistic goals that you have set for yourself.

Then, to help cement your visualization, you commit your best possible self to paper. This exercise helps draw on the proven benefits of expressive writing.

Click here to read the rest of this entry… 

               Thanks to Breidholt for permission to use this Photo.

In yesterday’s session of Behavior Disorders in Childhood, we were discussing Simon Baron-Cohen (not to be mistaken for his cousin Sasha) and his theory of Assortive Mating . Briefly, what Baron-Cohen is suggesting is that two systemizers who marry are more likely to produce a child with autism. Given the entrance of women to the workforce, the theory suggests that it is now easier for systemizers to find one another, particularly in tech fields, leading to an increase in children with autism.

Baron-Cohen is British, and his theories do not seem to trod on British sensibilities of gender differences as much as they cross American sensitivities. Baron-Cohen’s contention that women are “hard-wired” to be empathic and men to be systematic makes Harvard’s Larry Summers seem quite tame. Whether you buy into his theory or not, it is an interesting concept to explore. (more…)

                  Thanks to Kara for permission to use this Photo. 

Which of the following statements is true of childhood (vs adult) mania?

A.  Irritability tends to be more prominent
 
B.  The decrease in sleep is more pronounced
 
C.  Changes in appetite are less noticeable
 
D.  Racing thoughts are less common
 
If you got the right answer, you’ve wasted your life.  If you got the answer wrong, but then learned the correct answer, you are wasting other people’s lives. (more…)