Before the mid-20th century, typologies of love were works of philosophy, ethics, introspection, and intuition. In the 1980s, Robert Sternberg produced a typology of love psychometrically, meaning he asked people about their experiences and used factor analysis to determine which experiences tended to co-occur. He came up with a three-factor model of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy is stuff like warmth, closeness, and bondedness. Passion is stuff like romance, physical attraction, and sex. Commitment is the decisions involved in maintaining love over time. By combining those factors, he came up with the following typology:
I heard a segment recently on NPR about gas prices and it reminded me of the link between driving speed and gas mileage. According to the story, driving over 60 miles per hour is equivalent to paying $.25 more per gallon for each five miles an hour faster. So if you paid$4.00 for a gallon of gas, but burn it at 65 miles an hour, it’s like having paid $4.25. Seventy miles an hour makes it $4.50, etc.
It seems funny that it’s very easy to imagine Americans complaining about the price of gas, but very difficult to imagine them driving the slightest bit slower in order to save that same money. In fact, I can easily imagine an American burning a 70-mile-per-hour gallon of gas to go out of their way to save $.25 cents per gallon at the pump. (It could be a good economic decision to do so, I suppose, depending on how many gallons of gas you need to buy, and how much your time is worth, but it still seems funny.)
If I remember my physics correctly, I think the loss of efficiency is actually not that linear, that a 75-mile-per-hour gallon probably costs significantly more than the $4.75 that NPR’s equation predicts. It has to do with the amount of force each particle of air hits the front of our car with–it’s the same principle we (if we are from the desert) use to remember to drive slowly or stop during a sandstorm, to save our windshields from getting sandblasted. Any physicists in the audience care to explain the mechanics of it?
In his excellent lecture “Climate Change Recalculated,” engineer Saul Griffith tells about how he gave an intern this incredibly boring job: Drive his wife’s Honda Insight in 100 mile stretches around a runway at constant speeds, twelve 5-mile-per-hour increments from 20 to 75 miles per hour. Seventy-five miles per hour was the worst, obviously, at about 40 miles per gallon, and the most efficient speed, at about 85 miles per gallon, was 30 miles per hour.
That’s pretty slow, but three times as fast as the average driving speed for large urban areas, he points out. I’ve been thinking about making my next trip to Portland at 30 miles an hour, to see how little gas I can use to get there. It’ll take 4 hours to get there, so I’d better bring some good company.
It’s funny to find myself giving a presentation about getting a date, as I’ve asked exactly one person for a date and was rejected. I agreed to help with a presentation in my Sex Therapy class about clients who are lonely and want to date. This is my rough (but roughly accurate) outline for my part of the presentation, about what the research says:
Things to Know About Loneliness
It’s common. 10-25% of people are significantly lonely. Adolescents and young adults are the loneliest groups.
There are two kinds: Social and emotional—a lack of a sense of social integration, and the absence of an attachment figure. Most research is about social loneliness, and the two can get confounded. Our clients may mistake one for the other.
It is bad for us. Both social integration and attachment figures are human needs. It significantly increases morbidity and mortality, probably mediated by stress and also possibly by metabolic syndrome. Predicts 25-30% of suicidal behavior. Loneliness is a key vulnerability in sexual offending.
Things to Know About Dating
Lots of people are single. Maybe close to half.
Rejection hurts. Physically. Seriously. It may actually help to take a Tylenol. Normalize the pain and the fear of pain.
There is a lot of research and it may be good to know, for psychoed purposes:
Awareness. To get a date, other people must be aware of you. Are your clients making others aware of them? The general rule here is to stand out from the crowd in some way that does not violate social norms. Standing out in a negative way will not help.
Attraction.
Physical attractiveness is a big deal. Sorry, it just is. If it is an issue, consider a conversation with clients about grooming. Beyond that, blame the media and move on to the points below.
Appropriateness. Again, violating social norms generally will turn people off. There is also a lot of research on stuff like age, social/economic status, and race/ethnicity acting as “appropriateness” filters for affiliation, but I’m not sure how helpful that will be for clients.
Familiarity. People will like you more just because they know you. As long as you didn’t make an initial negative impression, becoming a regular will help you.
Similarity. Opposites attract is wrong. People like people who are like them. This is a good plug for meeting people at special-interest events. (Bars are an exception. Very few real relationships start in bars.)
Responsiveness. We like people who seem interested in us. Eye contact, questions, turning towards bids for attention. Check your clients for an exaggerated sense of putting themselves out there.
Approach/Affiliation. If you want someone to approach you and choose you, you need to be accessible and receptive. These are much like the awareness, familiarity, and responsiveness principles, above.
I have to admit, I felt slightly excited as the moment of Harold Camping’s prophesied Judgment Day approached. Partly it was the anxiety for all of these sincere folks finding themselves so colossally wrong, like “Oh, that is going to hurt.” Partly, though, I think the excitement was from an younger part of myself that gravitated toward myth-based thinking. I did attend a couple of Christian churches off and on with my family growing up, but I don’t think that was it. My parents were never into the wrath-of-God kind of religion, and we never went to those kinds of churches. In fact, the first theological statement I can remember from my parents was when my mom told me, at 7 or 8, that heaven and hell were not places, but states of mind.
So I don’t think it was religion. I think it was the hundreds of fantasy novels I read as an adolescent. I loved those fantasy novels! I loved the romantic, adventurous, magical universes they created. And in a fantasy novel, the prophecy is always true. I can’t think of one exception. Only the heroes believe it, and it’s always true.
I think the part of me that loves those fantasy novels wondered if maybe Harold Camping was right, and we actually live in a much simpler and more cruel world than my adult self has constructed from the modern and post-modern myths called science and philosophy. It makes me wonder if my past adult focus on doomsday scenarios, like nuclear holocaust and human population explosion, or my current fascination with type-2 climate change is fueled by that same part of me.
I always ask my six-year-old friend Akira if he has the stuff he needs to go swimming, plus a couple of joke items for fun. Today:
Me: Got your goggles?
Akira: Yep.
Me: Got your swimsuit?
Akira: Wearing it!
Me: Got the money?
Akira: Yep [waves it]
Me: Got your butt?
Akira: [Nods solemnly and points]
Me: [Noticing he has nail polish on] Got your nail polish?
Akira: Yes! And earlier today I had paint all over me, and my face was all white!
Me: Oh, were you doing some miming?
Akira: [Serious] No, I can’t do any miming. I don’t have an invisible wall.
PTSD was recognized in the early 1970s and formalized in 1980, largely the result of work by and with US veterans of the war in Vietnam. Many people who think about these things consider this recognition to be a turning point in psychological diagnosis. In fact, one way of thinking about psychological diagnosis is that most of what we now call Mental Disorders are basically variants of PTSD–the ways that different people respond to different traumas. If the committee working on version V of the DSM were to humor us, they might rename the tome The North American and European Catalog of Post-Traumatic Stress Behavior Patterns Plus a Few Other Human Difficulties.
Here’s a fuzzy map from the wikipedia article, showing PTSD rates. The darker the red, the more PTSD, and the lighter the yellow, the less:
Here are the criteria, word for word, from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR, pages 467 and 468:
Diagnostic criteria for 309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
A. The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following were present:
(1) the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others
(2) the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Note: In children, this may be expressed instead by disorganized or agitated behavior
B. The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in one (or more) of the following ways:
(1) recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions. Note: In young children, repetitive play may occur in which themes or aspects of the trauma are expressed.
(2) recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Note: In children, there may be frightening dreams without recognizable content.
(3) acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur on awakening or when intoxicated). Note: In young children, trauma-specific reenactment may occur.
(4) intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event
(5) physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event
C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma), as indicated by three (or More ) of the following:
(1) efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma
(2) efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma
(3) inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma
(4) markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities
(5) feeling of detachment or estrangement from others
(6) restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings)
(7) sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)
D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before trauma), as indicated by two (or more) of the following:
(1) difficulty falling or staying asleep
(2) irritability or outbursts of anger
(3) difficulty concentrating
(4) hypervigilance
(5) exaggerated startle response
E. Duration of the disturbance (symptoms in Criteria B, C, and D) is more than 1 month.
F. The distrubance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Specify if:
Acute: if duration of symptoms is less than 3 months
Chronic: if duration of symptoms is 3 months or more
Specify if:
With Delayed Onset: if onset of symptoms is at least 6 months after the stressor
Jim Berkland seemed to predict a large earthquake in mid- to late- March 2011 somewhere in North America. Watch the footage here. (The Fox commentator is pretty funny. At one point he says to pay attention because “he is a pretty good geologist.”)
There was no large earthquake during that time, but we can’t really know if Berkland was technically wrong, because what he actually predicted was a “high probability” of a large earthquake in North America. If you want to know how accurate a predictor who uses language like this is, you have to track outcomes of a whole bunch of their predictions, not just one. This is what Philip Tetlock does in his research on prediction accuracy–track the outcomes of hundreds of predictions of political experts. He also had to force the experts make specific enough predictions that they would either be true or false, not ambiguous–not always an easy task. Berkland, while casting a wide net, was fairly precise with “large earthquake” and “North America,” though we must wonder whether he would have claimed success if there had been a large earthquake, say, in the northern Pacific.
I’m not sure how many earthquake predictions Berkland has made, but if there have been enough, we could judge his rough accuracy: When he predicts a high probability of an earthquake, does it happen most of the time? When he predicts a low probability of an earthquake does it usually not happen? How about a medium probability?
The point is, if your prediction is of a probability, rather than a certainty of an event, we need to do some statistics to figure out if you’re a good predictor. And this is the form that careful people make their predictions. If, on the other hand, you tend to make predictions about certainties–100% or 0% probability events, it’s quite a bit easier to check your accuracy–as long as you make sufficiently specific, falsifiable predictions. Most prediction by ideologues, for example, set up what Tetlock calls an “outcome-irrelevant learning situation,” a situation in which the predictor can claim they were right no matter what actually happens. Every ideologue, therefore, is in the position to explain what happened, using their own ideology.
An example of that may be the Mayan-calendar predictions. Here is Graham Hancock on Art Bell’s radio show, seeming to predict something happening on December 21, 2012. It is full of talk of cataclysms, the end of the world, tumult, a ball of fire hitting the earth, etc. (And lots of talk about how accurate the Mayan calendar was, as if having a really accurate way to measure time lends credence to your predictions. Better ask the guy who invented the atomic clock!) I bet these guys will be patting themselves on the back on 12/21/2012 if a ball of fire does hit the earth. But if nothing particularly tumultuous happens, will they be wrong about anything? No. They are not precise at all, and they attach no probability to their “prediction.” There are plenty of “just mights” and “maybes” and “a window of about 40 years.” They even say that if humanity gets their act together in some vague way, we might avert what may or may not have been coming. This is a perfect setup for an outcome-irrelevant learning situation.
Tetlock says that when predictors are wrong, they generally either claim to be right in some way, based on the fuzziness of their prediction, or they use one of several “belief system defenses.” The most common of these is “Just off on timing.” The other two major defenses are the upward counterfactual defense, or “you think this is bad?” and the downward counterfactual defense, or “you think this is good?”
If nothing particularly tumultuous happens on 12/21/2011, and we ask Bell and his guest about it, how will they respond? They might use “just off on timing,” and blame our modern, inaccurate calendars. More likely they would claim to have been right, something like, “All the war and bad stuff happening on the earth–this is what we were talking about. It’s just a lot more slow and drawn out than we thought.” There is some, small, chance that they might cop to being wrong. I haven’t listened to Bell in over a decade, and I can’t remember how he handles his predictors being wrong, or if he even addresses it.
Berkland could also claim to be right: “Well, there was a high probability of a large earthquake, but not everything with a high probability happens every time.” A “just off on timing” defense would be pretty weak for him, since timing is everything in earthquake prediction.
The third predictor I’ve been thinking about, though, has given himself very little wiggle room. It takes guts to make a prediction like this. According to Harold Camping, next Saturday, May 21, 2011:
“A great earthquake will occur the Bible describes it as “such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.” This earthquake will be so powerful it will throw open all graves.The remains of the all the believers who have ever lived will be instantly transformed into glorified spiritual bodies to be forever with God.
“On the other hand the bodies of all unsaved people will be thrown out upon the ground to be shamed.
“The inhabitants who survive this terrible earthquake will exist in a world of horror and chaos beyond description. Each day people will die until October 21,2011when God will completely destroy this earth and its surviving inhabitants.”
That’s from his website, which you can see here. I have also heard Camping say that millions of people are certain to die on May 21, 2011, and every day thereafter until the very end, October 21, 2011. I have heard him say “It is going to happen.” I have heard him say “It is absolutely certain.” I was disappointed when I heard him back down from that, recently, saying he can’t be absolutely certain, but he has stuck with “going to happen” and “there is no doubt.”
I wonder how Camping will react if his predictions are wrong. The counterfactual defenses won’t apply at all. It will be very difficult to argue that he was right in some way if there is not at least the largest earthquake ever recorded (that would be at least a 9.6), that all buried bodies are somehow exposed (ideally as the result of the earthquake), that millions of people will die on May 21, and that approximately 7 billion people will die by October 21.
So my prediction is that he will use “Just off on timing” and go back to calculating the real day of judgment. Based on social psychology research, I will also predict that in general, this event will increase believers conviction, rather than decrease it. And if I am wrong, I will do my best to just admit it.
My Formal Case Presentation is due tomorrow, so I did not have time to write anything in honor of my amazing mom, but here are a couple of my favorite photos of her with me:
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 