Ruminating Out Loud

Much of the bigotry and discrimination directed at underclass people and minorities is based on the disillusioned thinking that ones ability to succeed in life is tied to the individual’s genetic make up. It is no secrete that I strongly believe in the structural disadvantages people from disadvantaged background experience and how that manifests itself in socioeconomic inequities that exist. I was pleasantly surprised to read a column by Nicholas D. Kristof, at the New York Times, entitled How to Raise Our I.Q. I recommend it as a good reading matter for opening oneself to the world of new research that has come to shatter the misconception about the link between I.Q. scores, which are routinely used as a measure of intelligence and aptitude for success, and genetics. Excerpt from the column is provided below:

“If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.

One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study. For example, a French study showed that children from poor households adopted into upper-middle-class homes averaged an I.Q. of 107 by one test and 111 by another. Their siblings who were not adopted averaged 95 on both tests.

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them)…”

This is an interesting concept relating to the averaging effect of decision making and accuracy of outcome. Psychologists Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig from the University of Basel wanted to know if individuals could come up with better answers using a technique they designed and called “dialectical bootstrapping.” It is a method by which an individual mind averages its’ own conflicting opinions, thus simulating the “wisdom of the crowd.” In other words, dialectical bootstrapping enables different opinions to be created and combined in the same mind. A report published on Psychological Science and entitled “The Wisdom of Many in One Mind: Improving Individual Judgments with Dialectical Bootstrapping,” the psychologists present a study in which participants were asked to identify dates of various historical events. After they gave their initial answer, the participants were asked to think of reasons why the answer may be wrong and were then asked to come up with an alternative second (dialectical) answer.

The results … reveal that the average of the participants’ first answer with the second answer was much closer to the correct answer, compared to the original answers on their own. In addition, the dialectical bootstrapping method (that is, thinking about why your own answer might be incorrect and then averaging across estimates) resulted in more accurate answers compared to simply making a second guess without considering why the first answer may be wrong.

These findings suggest that dialectical bootstrapping may be an effective strategy in helping us come up with better answers to many types of problems. The researchers note that while it may be frustrating going back and forth between two different answers, “as dialectical bootstrapping illustrates, being of two minds can also work to one’s advantage.” They conclude, “Once taught about the tool, people could make use of it to boost accuracy of their estimates across a wide range of domains.”

That is the lesson in psychology we get courtesy of a study conducted by David DeSteno and collaborators at Northeastern University and published in  Psychological Science.

Contrary to popular belief, the researchers found that pride not only leads individuals to take on leadership roles in teams, but also fosters admiration, as opposed to scorn, from teammates. “We found that pride is quite undeserving of its negative reputation,” said David DeSteno, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Pride actually constitutes a functional social emotion with important implications for leadership and the building of social capital.”

DeSteno and lead author Lisa Williams designed an experiment including individual and group activities. For the individual activities, certain participants were induced to feel proud. Participants next interacted cooperatively on a problem-solving task and were asked to evaluate their partners’ leadership and likability. The participant who received the pride induction took on a dominant role and was perceived as the most “hands-on” during the activity. In addition, their teammates viewed them as more likable than the other participants.

“These are some of the first findings that show functional outcomes of pride within the context of actual social behavior,” said Williams. “Although when taken to extremes, pride can certainly be maladaptive, this research demonstrates the emotion’s potential for fostering successful interpersonal interaction… “Pride,” they note, “can play an integral role in enhancing team functioning by fostering confidence and admiration.”

There is so much discussion about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that recently became law, otherwise known as the stimulus plan. Below is a graph describing the stimulus increase as a result of different kinds of innate activations. It turns out that the density of neural firing is maximal when we are surprised or startled and ranks higher than fear and terror, which in turn triggers a larger stimulus increase in comparison to excitement.

Surprise-Startle is the neutral affect which gets our attention immediately and then resets our brain to deal with whatever might need to happen next to protect our body. Remember that the affect occurs in a gradient from mild to moderate to intense. The next affect on the chart is Fear-Terror. It increases in density, but not with the rapidity of Surprise-Startle. This allows our minds to run through previous scenes of similar situations. Our reactions will be based on scripts which have been mind-written in previous responses to these similar situations. The slowest stimulus increase is caused by the affect Interest-Excitement. Think about how we might spy something which begins to more and more intrigue us. We look, listen, examine; and as this interest increases we may begin to generate excitement about our discovery. This affect increases in density over time.”

It is hard to believe that this is applicable to all of us. It turns out that it is. The complex organ that we carry in our skull is very much attuned to the process of thinking and analyzing information in real time during conversations or reading. In a a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands describes recent experiments using brain waves to understand how we are able to make sense of sentences. Via Eureka!,

… Van Berkum and his colleagues examined Event Related Potentials (or ERPs) as people read or heard critical sentences as part of a longer text, or placed in some other type of context. ERPs are changes in brain activity that occur when we hear a certain stimulus, such as a tone or a word. Due to their speed, ERPs are useful for detecting the incredibly fast processes involved in understanding language.

Analysis of the ERPs has consistently indicated just how quickly the brain is able to relate unfolding sentences to earlier ones. For example, Van Berkum and colleagues have shown that listeners only need a fraction of a second to determine that a word is out of place, given what the wider story is about. As soon as listeners hear an unexpected word, their brain generates a specific ERP, the N400 effect (so named because it is a negative deflection peaking around 400 milliseconds). And even more interesting, this ERP will usually occur before the word is even finished being spoken.

In addition to the words themselves, the person speaking them is a crucial component in understanding what is being said. Van Berkum also saw an N400 effect occurring very rapidly when the content of a statement being spoken did not match with the voice of the speaker (e.g. “I have a large tattoo on my back” in an upper-class accent or “I like olives” in a young child’s voice). These findings suggest that the brain very quickly classifies someone based on what their voice sounds like and also makes use of social stereotypes to interpret the meaning of what is being said. Van Berkum speculates that “the linguistic brain seems much more ‘messy’ and opportunistic than originally believed, taking any partial cue that seems to bear on interpretation into account as soon as it can.”

But how does the language brain act so fast? Recent findings suggest that, as we read or have a conversation, our brains are continuously trying to predict upcoming information. Van Berkum suggests that this anticipation is a combination of a detailed analysis about what has been said before with taking ‘quick-and-dirty’ shortcuts to figure out what, most likely, the next bit of information will be.

One important element in keeping up with a conversation is knowing what or whom speakers are actually referring to. For example, when we hear the statement, “David praised Linda because. . .,” we expect to find out more about Linda, not David. Van Berkum and colleagues showed that when listeners heard “David praised Linda because he. . .,” there was a very strong ERP effect occurring with the word “he,” of the type that is also elicited by grammatical errors. Although the pronoun is grammatically correct in this statement, the ERP occurred because the brain was just not expecting it. This suggests that the brain will sometimes ignore the rules of grammar when trying to comprehend sentences.

These findings reveal that, as we make sense of an unfolding sentence, our brains very rapidly draw upon a wide range of information, including what was stated previously and who the speaker is, in helping us understand what is being said to us. Sentence understanding is not just about diligently combining stored word meanings. The brain rapidly throws in everything it knows, and it is always looking ahead.”

In a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Kristian Ove Myrseth and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Yaacov Trope of NYU describe that “the mind protects itself against succumbing to temptation for as long as it must, and it does this by devaluing what’s most available.”

Every self-control challenge is a tradeoff of one kind or another, and with chocolates and other desserts it’s a tradeoff between satisfying a sweet tooth and commitment to good nutrition. Although it seems intuitively obvious that the dieter should not keep bonbons in every room of the house, psychological theory argues the opposite. According to counteractive self-control theory, we deflate desire for readily available temptation when indulging conflicts with pursuit of more important goals… They tested this notion by offering women exiting the gym the choice between Power Bars or chocolates and asked them to rate their desire for each. Simple enough, but here’s the twist. Some rated their desire before choosing, and others right after – but before eating. The idea was to compare desire for chocolate when it was readily available, and when it was made unavailable. The psychologists figured that young women at a gym would tend to be health conscious – and thus conflicted over the choice. The results… reveal that the women did indeed prefer the healthy power bars – that is, they devalued the chocolates. However, this preference disappeared as soon as they made their choice, and the unhealthy temptation was no longer an option. So it appears that self-control does in fact operate paradoxically, by actually diminishing desire for what’s tempting and accessible.”

Today, we heard the news about yet another billionaire committing suicide because of the recent economic down turn. Mr. Adolf Merckle apparently lost more than $500m by a wrongside bet on a Volkswagen stock. In a previous post ,we learned about the concept of anomie, which was articulated by Emile Durkheim, in relation of the death of Mr. de La Villehuchet.

It is fascinating to me how such people of tremendous wealth and influence can suddenly find themselves to be helpless and lose the type of grandiosity surrounding their lives. For all practical purposes, even with the type of loss that was incurred, Mr. Merckle would probably still be one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. That perspective is lost on such people and the spiraling down of events catapults them into a state of disfunctionality and illness. It is all the more interesting how Durkheim was able to aptly describe such a condition, which he called anomie and refers to “the breakdown of the normative frameworks of our lives, the upsetting of rules, expectations, one’s sense of one’s place in society, one’s status vis-à-vis others, a social condition with grave psychological effects, leading in extreme cases to suicide.” Indeed, because of thinkers like Durkheim, we have the framework for learning about and making sense of such seemingly bizarre events.

Here is a rude-awakening about a quite storm sweeping through our own backyards. The epidemic of fatherlessness, which is affecting this country more than any other industrialized nation (40% of children in the U.S. are fatherless) is profiled with a heart-breaking detail in a PBS program called “Raising Cain: Boys in Focus.”

Hosted by child psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D., co-author of the best-selling book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys, this documentary explores the emotional development of boys in America today. Thompson consults with some of our nation’s most respected psychologists, social activists, researchers and educators to probe the issues facing boys and find solutions to their dilemmas.

This two-hour documentary provides surprising new research about boys’ inner lives, dispelling a number of commonly held misconceptions, and highlights innovative programs that are bringing out the best in boys. The PBS Parents Guide to Understanding and Raising Boys offers insights and advice from Thompson and other experts on raising boys in America today.

Here is an informational article which discusses the “emotional miseducation” that is perpetuated on boys, which forces them to assume a mask of masculinity to hide the fear lying underneath the bravado and appearance of strength and manhood.

Happiness is the fruit of satisfaction, the result of a fulfillment of want/need and the attainment of meaning to life. There apparently are ways, supported by scientific research, to actively ensure that one is happy.  Recent studies are finding out “how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being.” The ten things that researches in positive psychology have shown to make people feel good are:

1. Savor Everyday Moments

Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to “savor” ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, “showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.

2. Avoid Comparisons

While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction, according to Lyubomirsky.

3. Put Money Low on the List

People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, according to researchers Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. Their findings hold true across nations and cultures. “The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life — it’s very fleeting.” Money-seekers also score lower on tests of vitality and self-actualization.

4. Have Meaningful Goals

“People who strive for something significant, whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations,” say Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. “As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive.” Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, agrees, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable.”

5. Take Initiative at Work

How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.

6. Make Friends, Treasure Family

Happier people tend to have good families, friends, and supportive relationships, say Diener and Biswas-Diener. But it’s not enough to be the life of the party if you’re surrounded by shallow acquaintances. “We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones” that involve understanding and caring.

7. Smile Even When You Don’t Feel Like It

It sounds simple, but it works. “Happy people…see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say Diener and Biswas-Diener. Even if you weren’t born looking at the glass as half-full, with practice, a positive outlook can become a habit.

8. Say Thank You Like You Mean It

People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons. Research by Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, revealed that people who write “gratitude letters” to someone who made a difference in their lives score higher on happiness, and lower on depression — and the effect lasts for weeks.

9. Get Out and Exercise

A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.

10. Give It Away, Give It Away Now!

Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

It has long been known that our own mental states can alter the experience of pain, but these findings suggest that our perceptions of the mental states of others can also influence how we feel pain.

This study shows that even if two harmful events are physically identical, the one delivered with the intention to hurt actually hurts more,” says Gray. “Compare a slap from a friend as she tries to save us from a mosquito versus the same slap from a jilted lover. The first we shrug off instantly, while the second stings our cheek for the rest of the night…

Gray suggests that it may be evolutionarily adaptive for this difference in meaning to be represented as different amounts of pain.

“The more something hurts, the more likely we are to take notice and stop whatever is hurting us,” he says. “If it’s an accidental harm, chances are it’s a one-time thing, and there’s no need to do anything about it. If it’s an intentional harm, however, it may be the first of many, so it’s good to take notice and do something about it. It makes sense that our bodies and brains might amplify our experience of pain when we know that the pain could signal threats to our survival.”

These findings speak to how people experience pain and negative life events. If negative events are seen as intended, they may hurt more. This helps to explain why torture is so excruciating – not only are torture techniques themselves exceptionally painful, but it’s the thought that counts—and makes torture hurt more than mere pain.

On the other hand, if negative events are seen as unintended, they may hurt less. This may explain, in part, why people in abusive relationships sometimes continue to stay in them. By rationalizing that an abusive partner did not intend harm, some victims may reduce their experience of pain, which could make them less likely to leave the relationship and escape the abuse.”