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Media Interviews on Voting Poll Addiction and Withdrawal – Part 2 of 2.

November 29, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

  The 2008  presidential election is certainly one for the books. But it is not one where when it was over it was over. It wasn’t one where, at the end, win or lose, people went home, celebrated (or mourned) a little or a lot and then went on with their lives. Even if they wanted to do just that, there was too much militating against an either "Martha, hand me the cyanide," or the alternative, "job well done, see ya" trajectory. People are writing about poll fatigue or election fatigue or Obama or Clinton fatigues. But it’s premature. The possiblity for withdrawal and "what the hell do I do now?" remonstrations simply have to wait. The beat goes on. Here are some reasons why:  1. Unresolved house and senatorial elections demanded and continue to demand more volunteer work and more cash contributions to help in the recounts in Minnesota and a run-off election in Georgia, all with the hoped for outcome by Democrats for Obama to have a filabuster-proof majority of 60 Democrats in the Senate. The House is already a safe haven for Obama, even if you factor in the conservative or Blue Dog Democrats. 2. The recently resolved Sen. Ted Stevens vs. Mark Begich race in Alaska which, resolved in Begich’s favor, makes the 60-vote majority even more tantilizingly reachable and worthy of further support of time and money. 3. The commitment to keep the activist, volunteerist, contributonal strategies running to help President-Elect Obama work on and push through his promises and policies once in office, including programs akin to Kennedy’s Peace Corps or the later Volunteers in Servie to America (VISTA) programs. And, with the current economic meltdown, the possibility of Obama instituting FDR-type WPA programs to get Americans back to work on infrastructural problems. Obama and his people knew that it was no mean feat to get the young people again enthusiastically involved in national politics and causes and that the lamp of activism must be kept lit. 4. Those who actively worked on the Obama campaign were queried, filled out questionnaires about their "intentions" for the future and their ideas about how the campaign worked, what they would do differently and the extent to which they want to continue working for Obama to advance progressive "change" programs he touted during the campaign. In other words, Obama is offering a never-ending campaign, if not a New Deal than at least a Change Deal. 5. This was an historical election for all the obvious and well-analyzed reasons having to do with race, gender, war, economics and some social, wedge issues concerning gays and marriage. But it was an historical election pre-eminently because there is something felt historical about the election. There was and is the belief that Obama can indeed change the direction of this country, recoup its "special" image in the world, a nation, a people, a set of leaders one can look toward rather than turn away from. This has been a long time in coming and many people don’t want to let that "feeling" go so quickly just because the election is completed. And Obama has asked them to stay in touch and hold him to his promises. 6. The power of Obama has been enhanced by the retiring reticence, lame-duckness of George Bush and company. On a surprise yet most welcome note, the Bush administration has provided Obama with a transitional power, visibility and pulpitude practically unprecedented for a President-Elect in American politics. With this bully pulpit and perception of real rather than potential power, foreign dignitaries know the sitting president has psychologically and emotionally left the building. Most substantive foreign and domestic attention and speculation has turned to Obama. In many ways, Obama is President-Elect in name only, as George Bush is now President in name only. 7. The TV pundits and the op ed pages of the major national newspapers are filled with commentary about who will be pulling levers of power in an Obama D.C. Who will Obama appoint to cabinet positions, to transition team positions, and to various administratively sensitive positions such as Press Secretary, White House Counsel and Chief of Staff? Coverage of these Administration change-of-power goings-on fill up the 24 hour cable news shows and keep Obama in the public eye while his cool, confidant demeanor and words are contributing to the emerging legend of Barack Obama in his own time. 8. Polls are still chugging along, only this time about dimensions of The Obama Effect: How confident do you feel about his solving the current and expanding economic crisis? The military problems? Unemployment? National Security? Cabinet appointments? Obama’s ability to walk on water?So, if you yearn for polls, if you yearn for excitement and speculation and punditry, like the media offered for two years; if you yearned for another episode in the never-ending Clinton Travelling "enigma in a conundrum show," one that’s keeping the election spirit alive, along with, of course, the miasmic rats nest, Wall Street-Detroit, it’s all here. And hey, MSNBC still calls itself "the station for politics. That must mean something, right? Yes, events intervene and momentarily drive American politics off the front page. The marathon crisis and tragedy that is Mumbai has consumed media news attention. And certainly Sarah Palin still shows the power to pull the camera away from both presidents when she opens her mouth to save a turkey but somehow misses the point and reveals her astounding insensitivity to the suffering of all things animal. But she still has a constituency; she is still is someone to watch. And comedians adore her. The political beat goes on. The Obama train, hated, hopeful, or adored, is still racing across the multi-media landscape, taking up all the political oxygen in cyberspace. Even the columns and photos of Bush-in-Decline add to the Obama, post-election after-show. So, to paraphrase the legendary Yogi Berra-Dan Cook phrase as it might apply to this election season: it ain’t over and the fat lady hasn’t sung. Election fatigue and withdrawal? Poll fatigue and withdrawal? Nowhere that I can see. Final note : For the true political addicts, the ones who jump from one issue to another, one candidate to another, one juice machine to another, they’re another story. By this writing, they will have already found another issue to shoot up, another cause in which to immerse themselves, to find the meaning and the tang that "civilian" life simply can’t deliver. They’re like the unnamed war photographers who scour the world for action. Idealistic and noble causes are not their life blood. For them, it’s the fight that counts, not who is fighting.  It’s the process, not the outcome. For them and for political junkies, Obama is already yesterday. For the rest of us, Obama is today and tomorrow.       © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Media Interviews on Voting Poll Addiction and Withdrawal – Part 2 of 2.

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The Seven Questions Project: Introduction

November 26, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

Let’s see what happens when I present the same seven questions to big names in the world of psychotherapy. This project was inspired by the Gloria videos  Three Approaches to Psychotherapy I recently re-discovered on Youtube . For those who weren’t psych nerds in college, this 1965 cinematic gem follows a 30 year-old woman through sessions with three master therapists: Carl Rogers , Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis . Psych majors watch the Gloria tapes to help clarify the differences between therapeutic modalities and see theory put into practice. The videos are classic – they’re like Mad Men meets In Treatment meets reality TV. Everyone chain smokes and Fritz tells Gloria to go cry in the corner. Beyond the rich entertainment value, the Gloria film is an interesting study: one subject, three different treatments. With Gloria as the constant, the only difference between sessions must be due to the clinician – or more accurately, the interaction between Gloria and the clinician. It’s really an excellent teaching tool. I want to teach something similar with this blog. I’d like readers to discover the diversity of therapeutic styles and variety of personalities in this field. The terms therapist and psychotherapy represent a huge spectrum of people and ideas. I’d update the Gloria film, but I’m no filmmaker and have no budget, so that’s out. I chose instead to make the most of the Internet and ask some busy professionals for a few moments of their time. I contacted several influential psychotherapists, from living legends to high-ranking officials to best-selling pop-psych authors. I sent each an email with seven questions regarding their approach to psychotherapy. To my delight, I’ve had a 50% response rate so far, a respectable number in this field. I kept the questions brief, simple and open-ended to allow them to write as much or as little as they wanted: How would you respond to a new client who asks: "What should I talk about?" What do clients find most difficult about the therapeutic process? What mistakes do therapists make that hinder the therapeutic process? In your opinion, what is the ultimate goal of therapy? What is the toughest part of being a therapist? What is the most enjoyable or rewarding part of being a therapist? What is one pearl of wisdom you would offer clients about therapy? These seven rather generic questions pulled something distinct from each therapist based on his or her experience, therapeutic style and personality. Examine and compare the answers in the coming weeks. Some are brief, some verbose. Some provide personal information, others keep it clinical. Some answers are practical, others theoretical. I even think some were irritated by a question or two. Compare the answers and you’ll get a taste of the diversity within the field of psychotherapy. I hope you enjoy the Seven Questions project. For me, this endeavor has been a blast – it’s even provided one of the greatest thrills of my professional career. To build dramatic tension, I’ll reveal that thrill later. In fact, I’ll keep all my guests a secret. Some you’ll recognize, others you won’t, but each have an informed, experienced, unique voice. I’m honored they were willing to participate. I’ll post every Wednesday until I run out. Stay tuned…   © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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The Seven Questions Project: Introduction

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Mental illness in children: medical issue or fig leaf?

November 25, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

Dana’s online mind and brain magazine Cerebrum has a critical and thought-provoking article arguing that mental illnesses like ADHD and child bipolar disorder are too often being used as fig leaves for social problems that we prefer to think of as blame-free genetic disorders that can be treated with simple-solution medications. The piece is by distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan , considered one of the founders of developmental psychology, who discusses the various social changes that have encouraged differences and misbehaviour to be medically diagnosed and treated – particularly during the last two decades. The article is timely, owing to it coinciding with recent revelations from an ongoing trial where parents are suing drug makers over the use of antipsychotic medication in children. The documents show that pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson aimed to carry out research on child bipolar disorder with a specific intention of boosting sales of their medication, as well as countering unfavourable coverage from the media and spinning ‘no result’ studies on the drug. We usually think of ‘social factors’ as increasing risk for mental illness in the individual, but we also need to remember that there are strong social factors that affect how we think about disorders in terms of their causes, effects and treatments. One of the strongest social factors is financial pressure, and, as covered by Wired , drug companies are notorious for ‘cooking the books’ in an attempt to bury negative data and spin positive findings in the best possible light. This has just been reported in yet another damning study on drug company data handling published in the most recent edition of PLoS Medicine . Link to Dana article ‘The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality’. Link to PLoS Medicine study on bias in drug trials submitted to the FDA.

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To know me is to like me III: Subliminal advertising

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

When you travel for work, you end up on a lot of airplanes. Often, that means some polite conversation with the person sitting next to you. As a psychologist, that conversation is a dangerous one, because eventually I get asked what I do. When I say that I’m a psychologist, people’s initial reaction is that I have somehow been analyzing all of their deepest problems, or perhaps that I have been looking into their soul. They are relieved (and perhaps a little disappointed) when I tell them that I study the way people think. But quickly, they find other questions about thinking that have always puzzled them. One of the most common questions centers on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising. Something about subliminal advertising captures our imagination. The prospect that a flash on a screen could drive us to do something without knowing why seems to scare us. So, it is worth talking a bit about subliminal advertising in the context of the topic of the last post on accessibility. (If you haven’t read the previous post yet, go back and read it first. I’ll wait…) Ok. First of all, subliminal advertising shouldn’t frighten you. There are all sorts of things in the world that affect your decisions, even though you are not aware of them. However, these things that affect your behavior without awareness all do it by changing the accessibility of concepts in your environment. And that is basically how subliminal advertising can affect you. Subliminal means "below the threshold." Basically, subliminal things are items that you sense (with your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, or skin), but you are not aware of. The main influence that subliminally perceived items can have on you is to increase the accessibility of concepts relating to those items. So, think about the classic example of subliminal perception. You are sitting in a dark movie theater, and suddenly a single frame of the movie shows an ice-cold Coca Cola. Movies flash by at 24 frames per second. That is too fast for you to identify anything you have seen in a single frame. What can that ice cold Coke do to you? Well, imagine first that you have never heard of Coca Cola or seen a Coke ad. In that case, the flashed Coke will do nothing to you. You don’t have a concept to activate. If you have heard of Coke (and sadly, most of us have), then it will make the concept of Coke easier to think about. For most of us, most of the time, that will have little effect on our behavior. We often see Coke ads on TV, in magazines and at sporting events. Often, we’re not even that aware of the ads, because we try not to pay attention to them. That means that the situation created by subliminal advertising in a movie actually happens to us all the time. And most of the time, we do not slavishly go out and buy a Coke. When can subliminal advertising affect your behavior? A few things have to happen. First, you must be in a situation where you need to drink already. The flashed ice-cold Coke may then raise the idea of drinking a soda to the level that you notice you need a drink. At that point, you may decide to get a drink. That won’t be driven by the subliminal ad so much as whether you feel like getting up and drinking. If you do, then you’ll order a drink. You might be somewhat more likely to order a soda than usual having decided to get a drink. However, there are so many things in your environment between the subliminal ad and the point where you can get a drink that you probably won’t be much more likely to buy a Coke than you normally are when you decide to get a drink at the theater. So, really, subliminal advertising isn’t so interesting. What is potentially more interesting (at least to me) is why people believe that subliminal advertising could work. But that is a subject for the next post.   © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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To know me is to like me III: Subliminal advertising

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A Dog Whose Memory Was Too Good

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

Just as there is a long standing controversy about whether dogs have a consciousness that is similar to that of people, there is a lot of argument and speculation about the nature, quality and duration of a dog’s memory. Ultimately the issue will be solved by psychologists collecting systematic data in a laboratory, however let me give a bit of anecdotal evidence that seems to bear on the matter. I was giving some lectures in Belgium, in the city of Ghent, and I had been speaking about how dogs think. After my presentation, when the audience was having coffee and pastries, a woman came over to speak to me. "I thought that you might be interested in a story my grandfather, Jacob Lasker, used to tell about his dog. It says a lot about how dogs think and remember. The dog was some kind of curly coated cross breed, probably a Poodle or Terrier mix, but it was very clever. Grandpa called him Kraus, which means ‘fuzzy’. "Jacob was living in Vienna at the time and was a pipe smoker. So for fun, as well as convenience, he trained Kraus to walk down the street with a coin in his mouth and to go into the tobacco shop where he would exchange it for a small package of tobacco. Kraus was sent on this errand several times a week and he became a familiar sight in the neighborhood. "Eventually Jacob moved to Prague and found a nice little residence not far from a street with a many little shops. One of these was a tobacco store that Grandpa began to use. Then Jacob thought that it might be nice to have Kraus perform his little trick again. So he introduced the dog to the tobacconist and explained to shop owner what he used to do in Vienna. The man was amused and said that he would watch for the dog and exchange the coin he would be carrying for a package of tobacco. The shop keeper gave Kraus a little pat on his head and the dog seemed to understand. "So the very next day, Jacob put a coin in the dog’s mouth and opened the door to let him out. Kraus seemed to know what was expected, and he trotted off in the right direction with his tail wagging. A few hours later, however, the dog had not returned, so Grandpa put on his coat and walked the route that he usually took to the tobacco shop. Unfortunately he was told that Kraus never arrived at the shop and no one remembered seeing him along the street. "Jacob was worried and concerned. He hoped that Kraus had just become lost in his new neighborhood and would eventually return. He checked with the dog pound to see if he had been picked up, and left a description of Kraus and his address should he turn up, and even if an injured or dead dog that might be him might be found. As the days passed he began to despair of ever seeing his clever dog again. "According to the story he told, it was on the fourth day after Kraus had gone missing that he heard a familiar scratching at his door. He opened it and there was his dog. He was dusty and the pads on one of his paws had dried blood from an injury. The dog was also a bit shaky and weak, apparently from not eating. Jacob felt a wave of relief and bent down to caress his dog, but when he extended his hand, Kraus dropped a package of tobacco in his hand. Much to my Grandpa’s amazement, when he looked at it he saw the familiar label of his tobacconist in Vienna–nearly 120 miles away from Prague! The dog had remembered his task exactly, and had performed it as he had been asked." It is hard to doubt the quality of the memory or the resourcefulness of dogs when one is told stories such as this. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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A Dog Whose Memory Was Too Good

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by Vaughan

The enchanting Encephalon 59

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

The 59th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared online on the wonderfully named Ionian Enchantment and has all the latest in the last fortnight’s mind and brain writing. A couple of my favourites include an interesting piece on the development of dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease from the new Dana Press Blog and a great piece on recent research looking at the cognitive neuroscience of poverty from The Mouse Trap . I’ve not discovered the Dana Press blog before but it looks really promising with some great posts and offers to review new mind and brain books before they’re released. Anyway, more of the new and interesting in this month’s Encephalon . Link to Encephalon 59.

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The enchanting Encephalon 59

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Grounding the helicopter parents

November 24, 2008 in Blogs, Mind Hacks by Vaughan

The New Yorker has an extended review and discussion of various new books critical of the increasing trend for parents to be overinvolved in their children’s lives owing to the trend for ‘intelligence boosting’ products and activities. It’s a nicely balanced article that highlights some of the worst trends in ‘overparenting’ while also pointing out some of the flaws with the recent wave of criticism. To get some perspective, look at “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood” (2004), by Steven Mintz, a professor of history at Columbia. Mintz’s story begins with the beginning of the United States, and therefore he describes children with troubles greater than overparenting: boys dispatched to coal mines, and girls to textile mills, at age nine or ten. As for the current outbreak of worry over the young, Mintz reminds us that America has seen such panics before—for example, in the nineteen-fifties, with the outcry over hot rods, teen sex, and rock and roll. The fifties even had its own campaign against overparenting, or overmothering—Momism, as it was called. This was thought to turn boys into homosexuals. For the past three decades, Mintz writes, discussions of child-rearing in the United States have been dominated by a “discourse of crisis,” and yet America’s youth are now, on average, “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.” There have been some losses. Middle-class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are far better off. Mintz thinks that we worry too much, or about the wrong things. Despite general prosperity—at least until recently—the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than it was thirty years ago. One in six children lives below the poverty line. If you want an emergency, Mintz says, there’s one Over-involvement is certainly a risk, however, and this can be seen even in the very beginning of infancy. One of the key skills psychologists talk about in early life is the ability to self-soothe – in other words, learning to independently manage discomfort and strong emotions. This begins when babies are getting into sleep routines in the months after being born. There is a temptation to attend to the baby and soothe it as soon as it cries but this can have the opposite effect and the child actually sleeps worse because they don’t have the opportunity to learn to settle themselves. A recent large study helped to confirm this and found that parents that encouraged independence and self-soothing by not attending to their baby at every cry reported that their child had extended and more consolidated sleep. Link to New Yorker ‘The Child Trap’ article.

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Aut lupus, aut deus [Evolving Thoughts]

November 12, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

So wrote the renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Man is to man either a god or a wolf. Here , courtesy of Leiter , is an article in The Telegraph , in which philosopher Mark Rowlands describes his life with a wolf, and how he ended up learning, as he puts it, how to be a human from the wolf. Few animals are as similar in their social behaviour to humans as wolves. The domesticated dog is subordinated to human breeding goals, but the wild wolf is itself – a pack animal with dominance psychology, capable of identifying intentions in other agents, of exploring, teaching and playing. And by evolutionary convergence, it is like humans in many respects. Not identical, of course; we have a lot of cognitive and psychological faculties wolves and their kin do not, but the similarity is what enabled us to domesticate them in the first place, and arguably they domesticated us back. For a canine in human care, the human social unit, whether a family, a police squad, or a farm, is its pack. Like Lorenz’s ducklings that imprinted on him at birth, we take cubs as soon as we can and imprint them on us. And they behave in ways we find agreeable in our social context… mostly. I once knew a family in which one of two spoiled wirehaired terriers killed a six month baby. The story was tragic and old – the dog, seeing the deference the baby was receiving from the rest of the family, challenged it the way a wolf would – by biting. Being a baby, the child was killed. [The idiot media and the moron who headed the local RSPCA blamed the parents and accused them of hiding their murder by making it look like the dog did it. I have hated the media ever since I spent six months trying to counsel two teenage half-sibs of that baby in my youth group from committing suicide. The parents belatedly won a lawsuit and a half-arsed apology on page 45.] Evolutionarily, canines are some distance from us. Inferences of their behaviour based on our motivations are misleading. They are similar but not the same , and we must always remember that. We have more direct insight into a chimp’s behaviour than into a dog’s, and even less into a cat’s. We might be more familiar with them, but that is a matter of happenstance. Their similarity is based on a limited convergence of social structure, nothing more. Read the comments on this post…

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Aut lupus, aut deus [Evolving Thoughts]

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Parrots and Mirrors [The Frontal Cortex]

November 12, 2008 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

I’ve been really enjoying Alex and Me , the new book by Irene Pepperberg, and not only because I’ve got an African Grey of my own. It’s full of wonderful anecdotes like this: The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, “What’s that?” “That’s you,” Kathy answered. “You’re a parrot.” Alex looked some more and then said, “What color?” Kathy said, “Gray. You’re a gray parrot, Alex.” The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that’s how Alex learned the color gray. Obviously, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that we know what it’s like to be a parrot, anymore than we know what it’s like to be a bat , but still…There’s something tantalizingly familiar about the way in which Alex thinks, which is almost certainly a by-product of the complex social worlds of African Greys in the wild. As I’ve noted before , we can learn a lot about the evolution of intelligence by studying the avian cortex. Read the comments on this post…

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Does Mozart make you smarter?

November 12, 2008 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (KV 448) is one of the most used compositions in music psychology research. Since the publication of the study Music and Spatial Task Performance in Nature in 1993, numerous researchers have tried to replicate the so-called "Mozart effect" using this composition. And often with little success. The idea is of course compelling: to become smarter by simply listening to Mozart’s music. It could be a helpful fact in the much needed support for a more prominent place of music in the curricula. However, the effect has been shown to appear not only with the music of Mozart, but also that of Beethoven, Sibelius, and even a ‘Blur effect’ was shown (based on a study by Glenn Schellenberg from the University of Toronto using 8,000 teenagers). Currently, the most likely interpretation of the effect is that music listening can have a positive effect on our cognitive abilities when the music is enjoyed by the listener. Apparently (and in a way unfortunately), it is not so much the structure of the music that causes the effect, but a change in the mood of the listener. While this indirectness might be disappointing for admirers of Mozart’s music, it is important to note that, at the same time, it leaves uncovered an important aspect of music appreciation. What makes certain music so effective in changing or intensifying our mood? It seems that while we are all experienced and active users of music as a kind of mood regulator (widely ranging from energizer to consoler of grief), music research has only just begun to explore the how and why of the relation between music and emotion.  

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