psychology

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January 24, 2010

Headlines From Psychology, Part 2

Posted by Nathen under advice, anger, contempt, Couples and Family Therapy, decisions, defensiveness, disease, divorce, headlines, healthcare, helping, lists, marriage, marriage and family therapy, probability, psychology, relationships, science, statistics, video
[5] Comments

Here’s part 2. (And if you missed it, here’s part 1.) Again, if you are either interested or skeptical, leave me a comment and I’ll point you to the evidence.

Statistically, Divorce is Not a Good Strategy for Getting a Better Marriage: 50 to 67% of first marriages end in divorce. 60 to 77% of second marriages end in divorce.

Your Brain Has Trouble Giving Information About Probabilities Due Weight, So Pay Attention to Base Rates: We have trouble taking the actual prevalence of events into account when making decisions. For example, people tend to be more afraid of dying in a plane crash (lifetime chance: 1 in 20,000) than dying in a car wreck (lifetime chance: 1 in 100) or even of a heart attack (lifetime chance: 1 in 5). One reason for this is that we confuse the ease with which we can think of an example to be an indication of how likely something is. Try this: What do you think is more common, words beginning with “r” or words with “r” as the third letter?

If You Test Positive For a Very Rare Disease, You Still Probably Do Not Have That Disease: This is a headline that should come from medicine, not psychology, but psychologists are better at probability than doctors, who are no better than laypeople, at least when it comes to thinking about this: Even with a very accurate test, if a disease is very rare, a positive result is still much more likely to be a false positive than an accurate positive. I’m going to explain this, but if you don’t get it, don’t worry. Just remember the headline. It’s true.

The table below shows a hypothetical situation with super-round numbers to make it easier to get. You have gotten positive results on a test that is 99% accurate for a disease that occurs only once in 10,000 people. Most people figure they are 99% likely to have the disease. They are wrong:

	Test Results
Disease Present?	Test Results Positive	Test Results Negative	Row Totals
Disease Present	99	1	100
Disease Not Present	9,999	989,901	999,900
Column Totals	10,098	989,902	1,000,000

Since your test results are positive, you are somewhere in the left-hand column. You are either one of the 99 who both have the disease and whose test results are positive, called “hits,” or one of the 9,999 who do not have the disease but whose test results are positive, called “false positives.” As you may see, even though your test results are positive, you still are 99% likely to be a false positive and not a hit, simply because the disease is so rare.

Yes, this is counter-intuitive. That’s why it’s important. And that’s why statistics are important. Again, if you don’t understand, don’t worry. If you don’t believe it, though, come up with a specific question, leave it as a comment, and I’ll answer it.

If You Need Help, Ask Someone Specific for Something Specific: Bystanders generally do not help people who are in trouble. The bigger the crowd, the less likely someone will help. It’s not because they are bad or lazy. It’s a specific kind of well-documented confusion. Kind of like in the clip below. What you need to know is, if you need help, even if it seems like it should be completely obvious to anyone around, like you’re having a heart attack, falling to the ground, gasping, whatever, point to a specific person and give them specific instructions: “You, in the red shirt. I’m having a heart attack. Call an ambulance.” Do not assume anything will happen that you did not specifically ask for. A corollary of this headline is, if you think someone might be in trouble, don’t assume they would ask you for help, and don’t assume someone else is helping them. Help them yourself. It could mean the difference between them living or dying.

Get Help For Your Marriage When the Trouble Starts (Or Before): On average, couples wait 6 years after their marriage is in trouble to get help. The average marriages last 7 years. That means that most people who come to couples counseling are deeply entrenched in problems that would have been relatively easy to resolve earlier. It is not uncommon for a couple to come in to counseling with a covert agenda to use the counselor to make their inevitable divorce easier. We can do this, but believe me we’d much rather meet you earlier and help you stay together! Also, I’m not joking about “or before.” Couples counselors are well-trained to give “tune-ups” to couples who are doing well. It’s a good idea.

Anger Is Not Destructive of Relationships, Contempt and Defensiveness Are: Everybody argues. Everybody screws up their communications. It’s the ability to repair things that is the key, and contempt and defensiveness get in the way of that.

January 16, 2010

Headlines From Psychology, Part 1

Posted by Nathen under advice, babies, decisions, headlines, normalcy, psycholinguistics, psychology, psychopathology, school, science, sleep
1 Comment

Going though my undergraduate degree in psychology, I was often surprised about information that was well known by the field that should have hit the headlines but never made a dent. In the end it was one of my reasons for going into therapy instead of experimental psychology. At one point I asked my social psychology teacher for an example of basic social psych research that had had a real impact on mainstream society. He could not give me one. I know that basic research is done to find stuff out, not to directly help people, and I support that. I also know that psychology is a baby science, and tackling a very complex set of phenomena, and doing a pretty good job. Still, I was disappointed. It is too bad, because a lot of useful and sometimes very important stuff has been discovered by experimental psychologists, and it is mostly just ignored.

Here are a few things I came across in my classes and reading that I thought should have been mainstream headlines. If you are interested in references, leave a comment and I will get them to you.

It Is Important to Talk to Your Baby, Even in the Womb: Your baby can hear and recognize your voice in your womb, is already learning your language, and wants to hear your voice.

It Is Important to Sleep With Your Baby: Babies are not born fully self-regulating. One way this shows up is that babies do not breath out enough carbon dioxide–sleeping with parents provides them with a pool of carbon dioxide that keeps the baby breathing deeply enough. Another benefit is that their 90 minute hunger cycle (waking and nursing each 90 minutes) helps establish their 90 minute REM sleep cycle, which they are not born with, and also keeps them from getting into deep, delta wave sleep, which is dangerous for babies because they can stop breathing.

Don’t Worry Too Much About Your Decisions: Your brain has mechanisms to ensure that you will think you made the right decision, regardless of what you decide. This can be undermined, however, by thinking of reasons for your decision before you make it. In many cases, your coming-up-with-reasons ability can get in the way of your decision-making ability. As long as you get all the relevant information, you may have a better chance making a good decision without deliberation.

It Works to Ask People to Watch Your Stuff: People who you do not specifically ask to watch your stuff will do nothing while your stuff is stolen. People who you do ask, will go to great lengths to keep your stuff from being stolen.

The Normal Are Not Detectably Sane: The methods of this study were not well laid out, so I do not know how strong this evidence is, but it was quite clever. Normal people got admitted into mental hospitals by saying they had heard a voice say the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Other than that they behaved as usual. None were discovered to be sane by the staff, no matter how long they stayed hospitalized.

July 25, 2009

A Good Idea: Journals of Null and Replicated Results

Posted by Nathen under ideas, psychology, rants, science, Sean Laurent
1 Comment

I’m listening to a great Long Now Seminar by Nassim Taleb about probability in complex systems and it reminded me of a great idea. Nassim gives only what he calls “negative advice,” meaning advice about what not to do. He considers positive advice useless and laments that it’s so hard to find books called Ten Ways to Screw Up Your Life, or How I Lost a Million Dollars, compared to stuff like Ten Steps to Success.

There is a related publishing problem in psychology, and perhaps other sciences: If your idea doesn’t work out, you can’t get it published. Journals do not want to publish failed experiments. They just aren’t sexy. The problem is, at a typical alpha of .05, one in twenty experimental results will be flukes—just random happenings, not reliable, not indicative of anything real going on. Even with a more rigorous alpha of .01, you will get a false positive every 100 experiments you run, on average.

Research psychologists know this. They get a lot of training in statistics. They do not feel certain about their own results until the results have been replicated in other labs. But they rely on what is published for their input. For my honors thesis, for example, I was interested in how the effects of having power over others compares to having power over yourself. So I read the literature on power and designed my experiment first to replicate the results of two experiments from a famous paper which showed evidence for social power inhibiting perspective taking, and then to extend that research a little, by adding a “personal power” condition. Almost every paper on power mentions that social power inhibits perspective taking, and they all cite this famous paper to back them up. The author is prolific and well-respected, and rightfully so. He does really creative, interesting work.

Despite my considerable efforts to duplicate his methods, however, I replicated none of his results. “These are the flattest data I’ve ever seen,” said Sean, my advisor. That was a problem for my honors thesis, because the question I wanted to look at never came up—I had nothing to compare my personal power numbers to. I had a conversation with this famous psychologist later and found out that he had not been able to replicate his results either. Now flat data is not a problem for science; every researcher I’ve talked to about it has said something like, “Hmm! It didn’t replicate, huh? That’s really interesting!” The problem is, that information was already out there and I couldn’t get to it. This scientist knew about the problem, but I didn’t. Now I know about it, but no one outside of my lab will know, because no one will publish it. The next person who has my idea will make the same mistake, and the next.

The solution:

First, an idea either stolen or adapted from my advisor, a high quality psychology journal called Null Results in Psychology, with a mission to publish peer reviewed failures. It might be an online-only journal, because it would need to be big. If such a thing had existed a year ago, I could have run a standard check and saved myself a lot of trouble.

Second, another journal called Replicated Results in Psychology, which would be for publishing peer reviewed, successful replications of previous research. Or perhaps these two could be combined into one. It doesn’t matter.

Third, both of these journals could be attached to a database that compiled and cross-referenced replications and failed replications. Ideally, the strength of a theory or evidence is based on how well it predicts the future. In practice, however, this is only partly the case, and turns out to be true only in the long run. The weight carried by a theory or evidence has at least as much to do with the fame of the scientist who produced it. Everyone is waiting for and immediately reads their new stuff. There is a database which records how often a paper is cited, but the number of citations tells you only the relative fame of that paper. It doesn’t say whether the citations are supportive or critical. And most citations are not either—they are used to support the author’s thinking.

Easy access to null results, replicated results, and a database linking it all together could change the direction and the pace of progress in psychology. It could also make learning psychology more interesting. My professors were mostly very good about not just teaching theories. They presented (and had me memorize) the experimental methods and evidence that led to the formulation of the theories. Even so, I often wondered how soon and in what way these theories would seem quaint, like phlogiston or “the ether”–early evidence supported these ideas, too, after all. I would have loved it if evidence could have been presented like, “OK, we’re starting to feel pretty good about these results, because these variations have been tried by 30 different labs, and 25 of them found the same thing.” I can imagine the groans of my fellow students and the cheers of my professors, which makes me think it’s a good idea.

June 12, 2009

Honors Thesis Posted

Posted by Nathen under honors project, perspective taking, power, psycholinguistics, psychology, questions, school, science, writing
[2] Comments

I just posted the last two papers of my undergraduate career: my honors thesis, “Differentiating the Effects of Social and Personal Power,” and my research project for Psycholinguistics, “The Relationship between Clarity of Enunciation and Idea Density.” They are under ‘writing,’ which is under ‘out’ in my sidebar.

I don’t recommend reading them unless you are a researching these topics (in which case, I do recommend reading them). If you’re not used to scholarly writing, just read the abstracts–the first paragraphs. They tell you everything you need to know. It’s kind of funny that I just worked really hard for over a year on something that almost no one will be interested in reading. It was an astounding amount of work, comparable to making a record, from songwriting and rehearsing to mastering. And a lot more work than some records. This was not a punk record.

Well, since I just said not to read it after I’ve been posting about it for months, I guess I should at least summarize it. Here we go:

Social power is power over other people. Any kind of power. There is a lot of research on what having social power does to you, and it’s mostly bad: more stereotyping, less perspective taking, seeing others as a means to your ends etc. It’s the kind of stuff that might keep powerful people in power. Reading this stuff is pretty alarming for a feminist like me. It’s way more complicated than that, of course, but you’re getting the super short version here.

Personal power is power over yourself. There hasn’t been much research on its effects, just enough to suggest that it’s what people really want when they are struggling for power over each other, the real goal is self-governance.

I tried to test whether personal power has similar or different effects on perspective taking than social power. I was not able to do that, for complicated reasons. I was, however, able to find evidence that people consider personal power a broader category than social power. That is, you can sink to greater depths and rise to higher heights of personal power than you can social power. Second, I found that without a salient reminder of personal power, people did not make a distinction between social and personal power. That’s pretty interesting, because if people are out there trying to claw their way up the hierarchy, it may just be because they haven’t made the distinction between what they probably really want–personal power–and what they are working for–social power.

That may seem intuitive and like “why would you want to spend a year finding evidence for something so obvious?” but for a scientist, coming across something that seems obvious that hasn’t been tested is a gold mine. All kinds of obvious things have turned out to not be true. That’s one cool thing about psychology–it’s a baby science, so those unlooked-at areas are all over the place. There is only one other scientist that I’m aware of that’s looking into this subject too, Marius Van Dijke, in the Netherlands. Luckily, he’s got resources and will likely have much more traction on it than I could as an undergrad with one year to work and a $100 budget.

April 30, 2009

Reaction to Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000

Posted by Nathen under perspective taking, psychology, stereotyping
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Stereotypes are not just ideas. They actually exist, like sinister puppeteers in our brains, pulling our strings at the sight of race, gender etc. Trying to suppress the puppeteers makes them stronger. One way to weaken them is by keeping your attention on taking perspectives: What would it be like to be that person? Not that kind of person, that specific person.

(Want convincing? See Galinsky, A. D., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal or Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 708-724.)

April 25, 2009

Year 38 Goals, Midway Update

Posted by Nathen under Abandon Ship, African dance, Balboa, ballet, blogging, celibacy, cooking, Damian Lester, dancing, Darlene Lester, David Waingarten, goals/intentions, Grace Llewellyn, graduate school, honors project, Karly Barrett, lists, Maya, meditation, mindfulness, practicum, psychology, questions, Reanna, record production, school, science, sleep, songwriting, stress, Zen Zenith
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I am a few weeks past halfway through my 38th year, conveniently marked by my brother Damian’s birthday, and the start of my spring term. Here’s an update on how my intentions for the year are coming along.

1. Add new knowledge to the field of social psychology: I have just finished (I hope) crunching numbers for my honors thesis, and I can say that I have helped produce some new evidence, at least. It is not as sexy as I had hoped, but I have learned a whole lot about the process of psychology research, and that is the main point, as my advisor keeps reminding me.

2. Break my habit of scratching and picking my skin, including biting my lip: I have made some progress here, using a technique Reanna told me about: snapping myself with a hair band around my wrist whenever I had the urge to touch myself. My success varies clearly with my stress level. It requires mindfulness. Another insight/confusion: picking and lip biting, I can tell, are pure stress responses, but the scratching I think is more than that. I seem to be an itchier than normal person. A dermatologist told me that it was the “notoriously harsh” hand-made soap I have been using. I accepted that explanation until I realized on my ride home that he had been wrong. I only use soap on a few key areas. By his reasoning my armpits should be itchier than most of me, and they are not. Any ideas?

3. Celibacy: This has been no problem. I have not been tested, however; no one that I am aware of has wanted to have sex with me. When I first told Grace about this one, she said, “You are going to learn a lot from doing that, but you know, now that you are committed, you will immediately meet someone who will make it very challenging.” Well, not yet.

4. Dance every day, working on 1) musicality 2) vocabulary 3) style: This is going pretty well, though some days my dancing is just a token, so I could say I did. I had a big breakthrough in musicality on my fast dancing at Seattle Balboa Festival in February. The choreography I have been working on with Karly has been helping my working vocabulary. And the main reason I decided to take ballet is to improve my poise and lines. It is easy for me to get into an I-could-be-doing-so-much-more/better state. There is a guy who started in the same beginning class that I did in Eugene who really dove in and is now a rock-star dancer in Portland, winning national competitions. But I still give myself a thumbs up on this one.

5. Finish bachelor’s degree: Yes. I am on track to graduate with honors on June 13, 2009.

6. Get accepted into a couples and family therapy graduate program: Yes. I start in the University of Oregon’s CFT masters program on September 29 (happy birthday to me!), 2009. I’m very excited.

7. Maintain this blog: I have a lot more ideas for posts than actual posts, but I am pretty happy with NME so far. It has been a consistent source of inspiration for me. I get about 20 clicks a day, on average, which seems pretty respectable. The lowest I go is three (two of which are my ever-hopeful-for-a-post Mom, I just discovered), and my peak was 62 on March 31, the day after I posted the guide to my sidebar. I wonder who you all are.

8. Meditate every day: Yes. Sometimes just a few minutes, but yes.

9. Produce a record with David Waingarten: This is not going to happen this year, which I’m sad about. I love this guy’s voice and songwriting. He also makes movies, though, and that’s what he did with his time and money this year. The movie looks good, though. Here’s a preview: This Is Now

10. Record an EP with my band, Abandon Ship: This project is not on schedule, partly because of #12, below, and partly because of how much work an honors thesis is, on top of an internship and classes. I am working on it , but it will almost certainly not be done by my birthday.

11. See healthcare provider each month until all my body concerns are resolved: Yes, I have been doing this. I’ve seen a dermatologist, an orthopedist, a urologist, and two chiropractors. I’m disappointed with the results, so far. I seem to be collecting concerns faster than I am resolving them. Hmm… That makes it seem like I am on my last legs. I am quite healthy, overall, actually.

12. Set up a slick system of musical collaboration over the internet and use it regularly: This has come together much slower than I anticipated, but I have every reason to believe I will be up and running by early May. I can hardly wait.

13. Shift my schedule three hours earlier for at least one term: In bed by 11 pm: I’m very happy with this one, so far. I have not pulled it off perfectly for a term straight—my dance schedule conflicts somewhat with it—but I’d say 90% of the time I’m in bed by 11:30, at least, and that means I’m waking up naturally before my alarm 90% of the time. I love it!

14. Sing out every day: I have not been doing this as I had hoped. I am still inspired to sing out like my friend Zen Zenith, but I have not been working on it with any regularity.

15. Take African dance classes: Yes, I have taken two classes from master dancer Alseny Yansane, and they were awesome. Unfortunately, I have been having this low back pain that has kept me from dancing with that extreme athleticism. When my back stops hurting, I will go back.

16. Write at least one song per month: Nope. I have not written even one complete song. Ouch.

17. Make at least one of each item in Maya’s cookbook: Yummm. I have made four of 19 recipes: Fluffy Whole Wheat Pancakes, Super Hero Granola, Corn Chowder, and Maya’s Tomato soup. They were all excellent except I burned the granola.

April 23, 2009

Stress Cues

Posted by Nathen under being kind to myself, goals/intentions, lists, psychology, school
[5] Comments

I watched a training video for recognizing post-traumatic stress disorder in psychopathology yesterday. Part of it was a Vietnam veteran describing his stress cues—he had to monitor and manage his stress level carefully so that he wouldn’t become scary or dangerous to those around him. He said something like “If I find myself scanning the bushes for gooks, or deciding which person in the room I would need to kill first, if it came down to it, I know that I need to lower my stress level.” The man’s story was moving and I cried quietly throughout it, but at that moment I was surprised to find myself a little jealous of him. My thought was “It must be nice to have such obvious stress cues.” It wouldn’t be nice at all, of course, but the sneakiness of my stress cues does make it difficult to manage my stress, which is a big part of my ongoing project to master being kind to myself. I was inspired to come up with a list of stress cues that I could try monitoring, to see if it’s helpful. Here it is so far:

I can feel tension in my solar plexus and between my shoulder blades

I am craving sweets

I am having trouble with focus or motivation

I am grinding my teeth, usually along with a drum beat in my head

I am biting my lip or picking at my skin

I am in the grip of an unpleasant emotion

I am experiencing intrusive thoughts

My writing or typing gets sloppy

I am easily frustrated

I am feeling jumpy

Sitting up straight seems out of the question

April 18, 2009

Mental Effort

Posted by Nathen under being kind to myself, psychology, questions, thinking
1 Comment

What is the sensation of exerting mental effort? It takes energy to think and focus attention, but we can’t directly feel what is going on in our brains. There are no sensory nerve endings in there. I can understand why we feel tired after thinking a lot, but I don’t understand why thinking hard feels effortful in the moment. It really does, though. Some of the thinking I’m doing feels like pushing a boulder up a hill, except more confusing, and my body aches with it–more than I would expect from just sitting and typing and looking at notes. My only idea is that I’m unconsciously flexing muscles when I think, especially in my face, neck, and back, and that produces the sensation of mental effort. What do you think? I’d sure like to be able to apply my brain fully without flexing any extra muscles.

November 11, 2008

A Day in the Life, Fall Term 2008, or How I Am Spending My Year, Part 3

Posted by Nathen under dancing, food, honors project, music, psychology, school, sleep, statistics, thinking
[4] Comments

I documented my day today. It wasn’t an unusual Tuesday, but my days aren’t all like this; I have classes only three days a week and often have a dance practice or something else scheduled. Also, I only wake to an alarm a couple days a week. Still, I think this gives a sense of what I’m working on, the pace, and intensity.

7:45am—Woke to an alarm after more than 8 hours of sleep but kind of groggy and nauseous (not uncommon), and a little dehydrated. Rolled out of bed in about ten minutes. Tamed my bedhead a bit, opened my shades. It’s raining but not hard. I took a photo for the blog and I look grumpy, probably because I am grumpy.

Bedroom Window

Grumpy

Breakfast

Made my oatmeal like I usually do, with a lot of cinnamon and ginger, a big handful of raisins, and with butter and agave nectar on top. Delicious!

Said good morning to a couple early-rising housemates, Kyla and Nick.

Packed my computer bag full of school files. Also rain gear, fruit, a salad, workout gear (optimistically), my water bottle, PDA, and camera.My Load For the Day

Rain Gear

Bike

8:35—Out the door. I bike fifteen minutes to school, mostly on a trail next to the Willamette River. It’s very pretty. The light is grey, the leaves yellow, and it’s cool, not cold.

Bike Trail 1

Bike Trail 2

Bike Trail 3

Bike Trail 4

Bike Trail 5

Willamette River

Franklin Blvd

Straub Hall

Computer Lab

8:50—Lock my bike up at Straub Hall, the psychology building on the University of Oregon campus. I go to the computer lab and start working on a homework assignment for my statistics class (called Applied Data Analysis) that’s due at 3 pm. It’s due every week at 3 pm and usually takes 12-15 hours to complete (and that’s not including the 5-9 hours of reading I have to summarize as part of it, full of sentences like “So, the regression coefficients associated with the contrast-coded categorical predictors in this model that includes their interactions with the covariate tell one about simple mean effects when and only when the covariate equals zero”). I spent 10 hours on the homework, already, over the weekend.

Karyn

9:30—I meet with Karyn, the TA for Applied Data Analysis, and grill her with questions about the homework for 40 minutes. She is very smart and patient.

Labmates

10:10—Back to work in the computer lab. Now several of my classmates are working alongside me. It’s stressful because of how involved the thinking is, and because of how many elements I have to remember and pull together, but it’s also fun, because we’re all in it together. No one else spent all weekend on it or went to see Karyn, though, so I end up doing a more helping than getting helped. It’s good—I understand things much better after I have to make a case for them. We go straight through with no breaks. Instead of my hoped-for lunch (not to mention workout) I eat the banana and apple I brought and drink a half gallon of water.

2:40pm—I email in my homework, 13 pages, 15 hours and 40 minutes long (I’ll post it for fun under ‘writing’), and ride to the local Whole-Foods clone for lunch: a chicken thigh and two bagels. I’m feeling hyped up and pretty good.

Lunch

3:00—Back to the computer lab, I eat them, along with the salad I brought, as I write a weekly update for my practicum: I’m interning 10 hours a week at a residential treatment center for adjudicated youth. I wrote about a “Responsible Decision Making” class I sat in on with them, about homophobia, and how it related to a article I’m reading, called “Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others.” It’s about some experiments that found people (successfully) use prejudice to feel better about themselves when they are put down.

Gerlinger Hall

3:35—I ride to Gerlinger Hall, where my first class is, and finish eating while I read for my Social Psychology class (the paper I mentioned above) and swap homework war stories with another stats student.

4:00—Applied Data Analysis, taught by Dr. Holly Arrow. The lecture is on factorial ANOVAs, which is a method of analyzing data from experiments with multiple independent or quasi-independent variables. I understand most of it. It’s a graduate level class, mostly for undergrads doing honors theses, like I am. It’s really difficult and often confusing but also fun and exciting because it’s such a challenge, and because my classmates are so smart—it’s (exactly) like being in a class that consists of only the one or two other smartest and hardest-working people from all of my other classes. There’s a sense of camaraderie—we can just look at each other and shake our heads, laughing, knowing what we are all going through.

Applied Data Analysis 1

Applied Data Analysis 2

5:20—Ride down the hill to Lillis Hall. It’s dark now, and raining pretty hard. Still not cold, though. It’s been a beautiful day.

5:30—Social Psychology, taught by Sean Laurent, who is also my honors thesis advisor. He’s an entertaining lecturer and the material is all of this counterintuitive stuff about how people are (usually without knowing it) shaped by their situation. For the first time in the term I haven’t done all of the reading for a class (didn’t finish the paper I mentioned above) but it didn’t hurt me. We covered it in a hurry at the end and I have a slightly slower day tomorrow, so I can catch up. We talk first about attitude change and how emotional and intellectual persuasion work best together: Someone is more likely to quite smoking when shown a photo of a diseased lung along with information on how to quit smoking than with neither or just one of those, for example. Then we talked about research on stereotyping and how it relates to death sentences (pretty shocking stuff—worse even than I thought), prejudice, and self-esteem boosting. A classmate, Annalisa, brought a bunch of leftover Halloween candy and I eat a few gummy creatures and body parts. Not great.

Social Psychology - Class

Social Psychology - Sean

6:50—Class is over but I hang out, asking Sean a few more questions about the stereotyping research.

7:15—Ride back to Straub, go upstairs to a lab and work on my honors thesis. I finalize my new measures and manipulations, compose a modification document for the Institutional Review Board, and send it all to Sean to go over before I send it in. These are the final changes to my experiment—ideas I got from my lab when I did my project presentation a couple weeks ago. I’m strengthening the manipulation and adding a couple of measures, like one that asks how much you like your name. Did you know that how much you like your name is a reliable measure of self-esteem? During this process, I see that Patrick Johnston, an old friend of mine from high school, has friended me on Facebook. I’m pretty excited about that. He was one of my favorite people at Yucca Valley High and I haven’t talked to him in almost two decades. No time to make contact now, though.

8:50—I pack up and leave campus. It’s not raining anymore and it’s a really nice ride home. My mind is going strong, thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking about writing this, partly.

Dinner

9:10—Make and eat a light dinner, salad and a couple cheddar-in-corn-tortilla quesadillas. (Oh, and my current supplements, calcium/magnesium/D and fish oil.) The house is dark. My housemates are either gone or sleeping already.

9:30—Begin writing this, listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, my favorite album of my year, so far. In my enthusiasm for the post, I forget that it’s my night to clean the kitchen, leaving it for the third time this term for Kyla to clean tomorrow. (Sorry, Kyla!)

Desk

Stretching Out Space

10:40—Time to chill out and get ready for bed: clean my teeth, stretch, meditate, go over my choreography a couple times, sing a song, and do my daily chart, journal entry, and gratitude prayer. In bed by 11:30.

Bed

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Nathen's Miraculous Escape

psychology

Headlines From Psychology, Part 2

Headlines From Psychology, Part 1

A Good Idea: Journals of Null and Replicated Results

Honors Thesis Posted

Reaction to Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000

Year 38 Goals, Midway Update

Stress Cues

Mental Effort

A Day in the Life, Fall Term 2008, or How I Am Spending My Year, Part 3

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My Last Two Days, More or Less

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