Being Human

Kid Tips: Kids love finger food for school lunch
Contra Costa Times
Much that is learned about children in developmental psychology seldom trickles down to the folks who could use it the most: parents. ...

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Cincinnati.com
Baker & Daboll's Amy Katz Named 2009 Athena Award Finalist
Cincinnati.com
At Baker& Daboll, Katz's social psychology background helps her assist clients in understanding the systems in which they work, and to appreciate the ...

Evidence that animals can think about thinking
Insciences Organisation
... where partners from disciplines as diverse as developmental psychology, comparative biology and philosophy respect each other's work. ...

DePauw Mourns the Passing of Prof. Karin Ahlm
DePauw University
She earned her Ph.D. in social psychology in 1984 from Indiana University and completed a public health service postdoctoral traineeship in social ...

An extraordinary 2006 article from The New York Times profiles ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robič who apparently regularly loses his sanity during his races - literally becoming psychotic as he pushes himself to the limit.

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback...

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

It's a wonderfully written article that touches on the man himself, the physiology of fatigue and the psychological strain of intense athletic feats.

Link to NYT article on Jure Robič.

I've just found this remarkable TV interview with Oliver Sacks from 1986, only a year after the publication of his famous book A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It's a fascinating discussion, not least because it's something you don't see much these days - an extended interview that focuses solely on a neuroscientist and his work.

There are no gimmicks or attempts to jazz it up with fancy editing and graphics. We see everything during the discussion, including Sacks' many 'ums' and 'ahs' and even hear a telephone going off half way through!

Still, it's a really wide ranging discussion which covers everything from the effects of brain injury to the role of doctors in exploring their patients' lives.

From what I can make out, the interviewer is Harold Channer who did the piece for a Manhattan-based public access TV network probably before Sacks became well-known.

The video quality is a bit ropey but Sacks has a spectacular beard and is as chaotically engaging as ever. Classic stuff.

Link to Oliver Sacks interview from 1986.

Millcreek Township School Board to toss damaged textbooks
GoErie.com
... students succeed in kindergarten through third grade, said Ron Craig, a professor of developmental psychology and parent of an Asbury kindergartner. ...

Susan Elizabeth Kuehl
Redlands Daily Facts
At the University of Southern California, she earned her BA in social psychology in 1989, and then obtained her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the ...

On a very interesting and informative blog called "This is Xinjiang", we find the following sign over the entrance to an Ürümchi restaurant:

The blogger, an anonymous "foreign university teacher in China's western frontier", captions the photograph thus:

The diverse number of scripts found on Xinjiang signs — Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian — often present a bewildering challenge to Westerners who are used to the Latin alphabet. Here, no one writes English in public places. But Xinjiang's multilingualism can even mislead the locals. For example, this restaurant, located in downtown Urumqi, advertises "Pancakes, Hamburgers, Porridge" in Chinese characters. Unfortunately, the Uyghur "translation" written above that is: ngngoongngkngngnglng.

Who's pulling whose leg?  It is evident that, in this case, the "Uyghur" language written in Arabic script is there for purely decorative purposes, reminiscent of the mirror-reversed Chinese characters in a New Yorker ad sponsored by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism that I wrote about here, or the Hong Kong strip-club flyer used to decorate the cover of a China-themed issue of MaxPlanckForschung.

My guess is that even someone who doesn't know Arabic script or Uyghur language would be suspicious of the numerous repetitions of just a few letters.

Such signage is supposed to be supervised by the official Working Comittee for the Languages and Scripts of Minority Nationalities (少数民 族语言文字工作委员会 Az sanliq milletler til-yeziq xizmet komiteti).

And this is another way to "read" the Uyghur letters: ng_ng_o_o_ng_ ng_k_ng_ng_ ng_lng.  Try it without choking!

USA Today
Narcissism can make politicians leaders ... and cheaters
USA Today
A study published in December in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people who score high in these traits are more likely to ...

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Time magazine has a remarkably one-sided article on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic. The clinic turns out to be a few rooms in someone's house, but the article gives away an interesting if not depressing gem about the likely status of the 'internet addiction' diagnosis in the DSM-V, the next version of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual:

"The central issue is the absence of research literature on this," says Dr. Charles O'Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual, adding that with the backdrop of the health-care debate, now is a precarious time to introduce new disorders that will require more money to treat.

"At this point I think it's appropriate that it's not considered an official disease," says O'Brien. "We are probably going to mention it in the appendix."

The appendix refers to Appendix B, which is a list of diagnoses worthy of future study, and yes, that's the head of the DSM addiction committee saying that an "absence of research literature" makes something worthy of future study.

In which case, I might write to him and ask to have my own diagnosis of "impulsive diagnosis inclusion syndrome" listed on the same basis.

But not only is his reasoning rather odd, he's also wrong. There's quite a sizeable literature on the 'internet addiction' diagnosis and, as noted by a meta-analysis published last year, it turns out to be rubbish.

If you're interested in reading something a little more balanced, I get to spar with Kimberley Young, one of the long-standing 'internet addiction' promoters, in an article in this month's Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Link to Time on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic.
Link to 'internet addiction' scrap in CMAJ.

… or something very close to it, under the heading

Proposal for a new kind of slang following the pattern "metal fork" for "metaphor"

The idea is to replace boring abstract words with very specific concrete things that sound pretty close to the original word. I'd like to build on the single example of "metal fork" for "metaphor."

This idea is based on a recent mishearing. Did I hear "metaphor" and think I heard "metal fork" or was it the other way around?

Here the re-shaping began with a mishearing, which Althouse then reproduced deliberately. When such a re-shaping happens without conscious design, we have some sort of malapropism, and when the re-shaping yields something that seems (to some people) to be especially appropriate semantically, we have an eggcorn (hundreds of examples on the Eggcorn Database).

I've written about deliberately invented examples under the name mock, or play, malaprops. See my posting on "mock eggcorns and their kin", with examples of several sorts.

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

C. Anderson Aldrich Award
AAP News (subscription)
Dr. Perrin received her medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and a master's degree in developmental psychology from the University of ...

MIND Institute Distinguished Lecturer Series
Rocklin and Roseville Today
Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychology and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, England, will discuss “The ...

Luis Acevedo Joins Cheil USA as Creative Director for Dallas Office
SYS-CON Media (press release)
... for the principles of Cognitive Anthropology, Cognitive Psychology, Cultural and Societal Semiotics and Social Psychology/Symbolic Interactionism. ...

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The 76th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience carnival has just appeared on the Neuroskeptic blog and is packed full of mind and brain goodness.

A couple of my favourites include an excellent piece from Providentia about the violin prodigy Josef Hassid whose career was cut short by a brain tumour, and another is a great post on AK's Ramblings about counter-intuitive labels in neuroscience.

A whole lot more mind and brain writing awaits, all bang up-to-date and hot off the press.

Link to Encephalon 76.

Senior Spotlight: Gazda battled injury and came through
Brown and White
"I enjoy the areas of sport and social psychology best." Gazda gives advice to athletes looking to take the challenge of competing at the highest level ...

Some people are hard to persuade. In response to my post "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", Peter Taylor commented:

I argue that the first question to ask is whether hearing someone use the phrase "At the end of the day" conveys information on whether they are likely to be a manager…

Well, a definitive determination of the information gain involved, aside from its limited general interest, would require more resources than I can bring to bear over my morning coffee. But we can make a plausible guess, and the answer turns out to be that the "information gain" is probably pretty small, and is just about as likely to point away from the conclusion that the speaker or writer is a manager as towards it.

The information gain associated with an observation y is

In the current case, this cashes out as the probability that someone is a manager given that we've added to our background knowledge the fact that they said or wrote "at the end of the day"  — call it p(manager | ATEOTD,I) — multiplied by the base2-log of the ratio between this same term p(manager | ATEOTD,I) and P(manager | I), which is the probability that they're a manager given only our background knowledge I. We should sum this quantity over the alternatives in the distribution under consideration, here x=manager and x=not-manager.

Based on the distribution of this phrase in Mark Davies' COCA corpus, p(manager | ATEOTD,I) seems to be about one in a hundred, 0.01. (In other words, out of a hundred speakers or writers of the phrase "at the end of the day" in its figurative meaning, one is a manager, on average. See below for details.)

What about the probability that someone is a manager given only the background distribution, symbolized p(manager,I)? We don't want to use Census Bureau statistics, since being the source of speech or text in the COCA sample is already going to be highly skewed relative to the occupational distribution of the general American population, regardless of what phrases are used.

Before even trying to estimate this quantity, we can look at what the information gain would turn out to be, for a variety of values for this background proportion of managers. If one in a hundred sources of speech or text in COCA is a "manager", then the information gain is 0.01*log(0.01/0.01) + 0.99*log(0.99/0.99) = 0 bits. If it's one in a thousand, the information gain is 0.01*log(0.01/0.001) + 0.99*log(0.99/0.999) = 0.02 bits.

But I'd be very surprised if the proportion of "managers" in the COCA sample was even as low as one in a thousand — and it might very well be more than one in a hundred, not less.

If we search COCA for the phrase "in the final analysis", for example, the first 100 hits include four clear examples of a managerial source, and two other marginal ones. If the actual value of p(manager) is actually .04, then the information gain associated with saying or writing "at the end of the day" will be 0.01*log2(0.01/0.04) + 0.99*log2(0.99/0.96) = 0.024 bits, but tending towards the conclusion that x=not-manager.  Thus if this estimate of p(manager | I) is accurate, use of "at the end of the day" is a small piece of evidence against the hypothesis that the speaker or writer is a "manager".

Unfortunately, I don't see a good  way to get a representative random sample of COCA sources, which we would need in order to estimate p(manager | I) properly. But I invite readers to try to sharpen up these estimates, if they're interested — I've satisfied myself that saying or writing "at the end of the day" provides no useful evidence that someone is a "manager", and may in fact count as a small piece of evidence in the opposite direction.

And for those social scientists still reading this (if any), let me point out that setting up to do this sort of analysis in a more systematic way would provide an interesting laboratory for investigating the quantitative relationship between stereotypes and reality.  The comments on earlier posts in this series make it clear that many Americans are absolutely convinced that "at the end of the day" is manager-speak.  My guess remains that most linguistic peeves associated with despised groups will turn out to be similarly unsupported by evidence.

Details:

In Mark Davies' COCA corpus, there are 2,438 examples of "at the end of the day' in 400 million words, for an overall frequency of 6.1 per million words. The frequency is greater in "spoken" material (basically news interviews) than in other genres:

Size (MW) Freq Freq per MW SPOKEN 81.7 1078 13.2 FICTION 78.8 281 3.6 MAGAZINE 83.3 518 6.2 NEWSPAPER 79.4 409 5.2 ACADEMIC 79.3 135 1.7

And the rate of use has nearly tripled over the past couple of decades:

Size (MW) Freq Freq per MW 1990-1994 103.3 355 3.4 1995-1999 102.9 484 4.7 2000-2004 102.6 689 6.7 2005-2009 93.6 910 9.7

Checking the first (most recent) 200 COCA hits for this phrase, I determined that 51 of them were literal references to the end of daylight, or the end of a working day, or the end of a 24-hour period. That left 149 figurative uses, meaning something like "in the final analysis". Of these, just one was spoken or written by someone I would call a "manager", namely the spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys (Jessica Rae Patton, "Make Love, Not Waste: Bringing Environmentalism into the Bedroom", E: the Environmental Magazine, Sep/Oct 2008):

Day says, " We are working on reduction by offering products in larger quantities–lubricant in a 16-ounce bottle, for instance. Dildos that are glass or wood… will eventually go back to the earth, and if used as they're meant to be used, will last a very long time. " The store no longer carries products containing phthalates. " We offer a huge selection of rechargeable vibrators, " she says, but acknowledges, " At the end of the day, it is still a manufactured product that will eventually end up in the dump. That's the grim reality. " Day notes that the adult product industry hasn't yet figured out how to address this waste. " It's only a matter of time before that person comes forward who figures out how to recycle sex toys. Trust me, every company in the adult industry will use that service! " she says.

The only other source that was close to being a "manager" was a fashion designer ("Hottest, Newest, Latest", Harpers Bazaar, June 2009:

His strong, architectural silhouettes come together to compose a collection of 21 looks, including everything from a modernized interpretation of a tuxedo to a feminine white blouse made of frothy embellished flowers (at right) to exquisite column evening gowns. All in a primary palette of red, white, and black (with some touches of fur detailing), the pieces will be sold at such stores as Bloomingdale's in New York and DNA in Saudi Arabia. " At the end of the day, I didn't know what the reaction would be, but I'm a firm believer that if you do something with pure integrity, you'll find an audience, " Gurung says. Well, this audience is still applauding.

So depending on how you count, we get an estimate of 1 or 2 in 149, or about 0.0067 to 0.013 — let's call it one in a hundred, 0.01.

The other sources for ATEOTD in this sample are pretty diverse — a TV journalist, a rescue hero, a basketball player, a rapper, a country singer, a primatologist, and so on:

Let me press down on that. At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency, some kind of a grand bargain?

Mr-COLLIER: At the end of the day it worked for us and we did what we had to do. Mr-ELLIS: Having got those people off were, particularly in this case, nobody else could have gotten them out. Mr-COLLIER: It' s very satisfying.

Yeah, I mean, Shaq, you know, Kobe does really recognize that Shaq helped him to get three titles and Shaq got another title on his own without Kobe, but at the end of the day, both of them realized that they missed out on opportunities to do something special and - you know, when you' re a little bit younger, you' re a little bit immature and then when you get old and wiser, you reflect on things that would' ve - could have happened.

The rest of Relapse is even more grim. Many of Eminem's new songs depict his drug years in terms that seem to alternate between raw honesty and wild hyperbole. And though rumors have spread that his estranged and reportedly ailing mother, Debbie Nelson, is eager for a reconciliation, a song titled " My Mom " takes aim at her as viciously as ever. (" Don't get me wrong, " he said during last week's Sirius XM interview. " At the end of the day, she is my mother and I do love her. ")

When all this role-playing is over, the wife of country legend Tim McGraw and mother of three girls (Gracie, 12, Maggie, 10, and Audrey, 7) has no problem snapping back to reality. She washes her face, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and slips back into those sweats. Has she discovered anything from stepping into such glamorous shoes? " At the end of the day, for me beauty has a lot to do with comfort and being around my family. And, " she says with a laugh, " most likely no makeup! " Then, with a big hug and a cheery " Thank you! " to everyone on set, she's off to meet Tim at the girls' school for a basketball game.

" It's hard to say what exactly precipitated this behavior, " said Colleen McCann, a primatologist at the Bronx Zoo. " At the end of the day, they are not human and you can't always predict their behavior and how they or any other wild animal will respond when they feel threatened. "

As for "in the final analysis", the four manager-sources in the first 100 hits were:

("Constellation calls off deal with Buffett unit", Business News, Dec. 2008) " In the final analysis, we concluded that the EdF investment represents significant enhanced value for our shareholders and serves the best interest as well of our customers, our employees, our regulators and the communities we serve, " Mayo A. Shattuck III, chairman, president and chief executive of Constellation Energy, told analysts on a conference call.

("Are you paying yourself enough?", Inc magazine, Nov. 2004) And that's something to keep in mind. In the final analysis, says Driskill, whatever you don't take from your company today should eventually come back to you. " Really, when I'm ready to retire, the compensation issue becomes moot, " she says, " because theoretically I will sell the company back to my employees. That's the nice thing — it all becomes your money in the end. "

(" In U.S. Plants and Wallets, The Other Iraq Standoff ", WaPo, Feb. 2003) " The Gulf War triggered a relief trade in equity markets and a brief surge in consumer business confidence, but in the final analysis, we didn't have a normal, self-sustaining recovery until' 93, " said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch &; Co. in New York.

(" An Experimental Examination of Information Technology and Compensation Structure Complementarities in an Expert System Context. ", Journal of Information Systems, Spring 2003) Prendergast (1999) suggests that about one-third of the increase in performance attributable to PC incentives arises from attracting more skilled workers, with the remainder attributable to increased effort. In the final analysis, it is the combination of skill and effort that leads to task performance.

The Psychologist has an excellent article on the psychology behind the classic children's book Where The Wild Things Are. It turns out that the author, Maurice Sendak, was heavily interested in psychoanalysis and intended the book to explore the inner life of children.

The article is by psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb who examines some of the influences on the book and Sendak's other works, noting that the author was in analysis himself and had an analyst as his life partner.

There is a remarkable thematic coherence to much of Sendak’s work, and this coherence links creative efforts that are decades apart and, additionally, links these works to what is known about his early life and formative years. Sendak himself has commented on his single-minded focus, saying, ‘I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is How do children survive?’ But it is more than mere survival that Sendak aspires to, for his children and for himself. He asks the question of resilience: How do children surmount and transform in order to prosper and create? It is tempting to imagine that Sendak conceives of the trajectory of his own life and art as a model for the way he has handled these questions in his works.

By the way, the whole issue of The Psychologist is freely available online, albeit as a slightly unwieldy Flash application.

It's one of the best issues I can remember for a long time. You may want to check out an excellent article on the default network, an interview with Chris Frith, a piece on the psychology of storytelling or a review of recent discussions on the next big questions in psychology.

Link to The Psychologist on Where The Wild Things Are.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. I read Where The Wild Things Are as a child and loved it.

William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences. Grant Barrett has written about his generosity of spirit, and I too was touched by his personal kindness.

I'll be posting a longer remembrance tomorrow in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, but for now I'd like to note one example where Safire, despite his occasional prescriptivist predilections, showed a willingness to heed the work of descriptive linguists. In a 2006 column, he described political "template phrases" such as "No X left behind" and "We are all X now." At the time, I was disappointed that he was unfamiliar with the work of Language Loggers on snowclones. But earlier this year, when Safire approached me for my thoughts on the expression "I don't do X," I nudged him to an appreciation of snowclones, and of Language Log. He followed up the column with another one ("Abbreve That Template") explicitly acknowledging Language Log's pioneering work in snowclonology. Even at the end of his prolific career, he was eager to learn something new.

[Update, 9/28: My Word Routes remembrance is here.]