Being Human

A sit-down with Gonzaga's interim president
Bulletin (subscription)
He completed his doctor of philosophy degree in experimental social psychology in 1998, also from Oxford. McCulloh continues to expand his knowledge base. ...

Be a better person -- take a hike
Los Angeles Times
The study, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, might help persuade urban planners to incorporate more parks, ...

Psychology professor Karin Ahlm, former department chair, dies of ...
The DePauw
Throughout her 29 years at DePauw, Ahlm taught a variety of courses, including Psychology of Personality, Psychology of Gender, Social Psychology and ...

The New York Times has an absolutely fantastic article on the psychology and neuroscience of anxiety and how an anxious temperament at birth can ebb and flow during our lifetime.

It's an in-depth article that really does justice to the topic, looking at extensive research into our anxious states, but also carefully questioning some of the sloppy assumptions of many article where brain activity is described as directly representing mental states.

But having all the earmarks of anxiety in the brain does not always translate into a subjective experience of anxiety. “The brain state does not make it a disorder,” Kagan told me. “The brain state exists, and the statement ‘I’m anxious,’ exists, and the correlation is imperfect.” Two people can experience the same level of anxiety, he said, but one who has interesting work to distract her from the jittery feelings might do fine, while another who has just lost his job spends all day at home fretting and might be quicker to reach a point where the thrum becomes overwhelming. It’s all in the context, the interpretation, the ability to divert your attention from the knot in your gut.

The article is incredibly well written and it tackles a huge range of topics in the understanding of fear and anxiety. Highly recommended.

Link to NYT article 'Understanding the Anxious Mind' (via @mocost)

Rick Rubenstein wrote:

Is the usage "I can't speak to the Iranian situation" as opposed to "I can't speak [about/regarding] the Iranian situation" relatively recent (or at least recently accelerating), as I perceive it to be? I feel as though I first noticed it about a decade ago, and found it very strange. I'm now almost accustomed to it.

There's no question that "speak to (a topic)" is quite a bit more recent than "speak of (a topic)", and somewhat more recent than "speak about (a topic)". But Rick is probably not old enough to have noticed the difference.

In the OED's entry for speak, the sub-entry II.11.a. Speak of, which is glossed "To mention, or discourse upon, in speech or writing", is cited from about 825:

c825 Vesp. Psalter cxviii. 46 [Ic] sprec of cyðnissum ðinum in ᵹesihðe cyninga. c950 Lindisf. Gosp. Luke ix. 11 [He] spræcc him of ric godes. c1175 Lamb. Hom. 73 Of þe halie fulht spec ure drihten on oðer stude. c1200 ORMIN 6784 Goddspellboc ne spekeþ þ nohht Off all þatt oþerr genge. c1340 HAMPOLE Pr. Consc. 2683 Here es þe thred parte of þis buke spedde Þat spekes of þe dede. 1422 Secreta Secret., Priv. Priv. 203 Of this Spekyth the boke of Iudyth. 1530 PALSGR. 727/2, I go nowe beyondsee, but if God send me lyfe you shall here speke of me. 1603 PARSONS Three Convers. Eng. II. viii. 481, I shall haue occasion to speake againe of these heretiks in the next chapter. 1730 A. GORDON Maffei's Amphith. 58 The Theatre..is spoke of by Martial. 1818 SCOTT Br. Lamm. xviii, ‘And speaking of red-game,’ said the young scape-grace, interrupting his father. 1884 tr. Lotze's Metaph. 43 A common-place with every philosophy which spoke of Things at all.

In contrast, the sub-entry II.14.e. Speak to, glossed "To treat of or deal with, to discuss or comment on, (a subject) in speech or writing", is only cited from 1610, almost eight centuries later:

1610 J. DOVE Advt. Seminaries 42, I desire them therefore..to speake to these foure points. 1637 HEYLIN Answ. Burton 78, For your charges,..I meane to take them..in order, and speake as briefely to them, as you would desire. 1662 STILLINGFL. Orig. Sacræ II. vi. §4 Though it be a subject little spoken to either by Jewish or Christian Writers. 1706 STANHOPE Paraphr. III. 555 Part of this Scripture hath already been spoken to. 1724 SWIFT Drapier's Lett. Wks. 1755 V. II. 110 A lawyer, who speaks to a cause, when the matter hath been almost exhausted by those who spoke before. 1778 EARL MALMESBURY Diaries & Corr. I. 166 Unprepared as he was for such a proposition, he could not, he said, off-hand, speak to it accurately. 1869 Daily News 28 Apr., The report..was spoken to by the Most Rev. Chairman..and the Bishop of Derry. 1880 Ibid. 19 Mar. 2/3, I wish to call your attention..to..that allegation, and I shall endeavour to speak to it.

As for Speak about (sub-entry II.8), it's cited back to 1300 or so, validating Rick's sense of its antiquity:

a1300 Cursor M. 24795 For to spek abute sum pais. 1605 SHAKES. Macb. I. iii. 83 Were such things here, as we doe speake about? 1671 H. M. tr. Erasm. Colloq. 263 He falls on speaking about the success of their business. 1737- [see 14b]. 1843 J. H. NEWMAN Lett. (1891) II. 430 Sermons which speak more confidently about our position than I inwardly feel.

Rick also asks, "I'm also curious which side of the Atlantic this usage may have sprouted from." It seems clear from the OED entry that all the early action was on the British side of the Atlantic.

More seriously, it's quite possible that there's been a recent to-ward change in the balance of usage among the prepositions used with speak to express topic (which include at least of, about, regarding, on, upon, and to, of course with somewhat different shades of meaning and structural distributions).

Unfortunately, it's going to be a chore to test this quantitatively. One obvious problem is that there may be various things between the verb and a prepositional phrase expressing topic, e.g. "Mr. Pettijohn spoke at length regarding the Rocky Top Road issue". Another, more serious, problem is that in most instances of "speak to", the object of to is the audience, not the topic ("Palin Speaks to Investors in Hong Kong"). So (lacking an automatic classifier with adequate performance), you'd have to get a suitable random sample of instances of speak over time, and classify each one by hand. This is likely to take more work than will fit into one Breakfast Experiment™, at least with the resources now available to me.

[Note that the specific pattern "speak to the * situation" is apparently not common enough to support a trend analysis. For example, it has apparently only occurred once in the NYT news archive since 1981. So the net would have to cast more broadly in order to spot a trend, I think.]

What your photos say about your personality
The Gazette (Montreal)
But Naumann's study, to be published in the December issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, also reveals glitches in our ability to size ...

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Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

USA Today has an interesting piece on how social networking sites are becoming research targets in health and psychology.

The oft-replicated finding in relationship research that, on average, women would be most hurt by romantic betrayal and men by sexual betrayal, is covered by Cognitive Daily.

New Scientist discusses a new imaging study that highlights the importance of the hippocampus in conceptual learning.

Love is a like a zoom lens, according to The Guardian. Sex is like a microscope, or an oscilloscope, depending on what you're in to.

The New York Times has a piece on increased rates of dementia seen in American football players and how the NFL are trying to downplay the data.

Do people really lie three times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new? asks PsyBlog questioning the common statistic.

Time reports on a study finding that social comparisons with thin people who are big eaters can lead people to choose larger food portions.

Gamers are more aggressive to strangers, says New Scientist who clearly haven't read the study which didn't measure aggression to anyone.

Time magazine has another good article on how frequency of email contact can be modelled with a remarkable simple mathematical formula.

Religion protects against drug use in dance. Doping in ballroom dancing, who knew? (apart from Jesus)

Furious Seasons covers a new study finding that the majority of psychiatric drugs are prescribed by family doctors.

I wish I could be at the Encultured Brain conference, organised by the chaps from the excellent Neuroanthropology blog.

The Globe and Mail covers research on how women's attitudes to their genitals is linked to orgasm frequency and health behaviour.

The development of implantable electronic http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/health/research/27eye.html?em=&pagewanted=all">retinas is covered by The New York Times.

Both the British and American psychology associations have just launched their respective history of psychology websites.

New Scientist covers an overly melodramatic promo video by charity Autism Speaks and the spoof videos by people with autism.

The limits of a universal view of mental illness are discussed by Frontier Psychiatrist.

Psychiatric Times has concluded a three part series on the science behind fMRI brain scanning experiments.

Can the right kinds of play teach self-control in children? asks The New York Times as it discusses a radically different approach to child behaviour.

BBC News reports on a new study of treatment for drug addicts in the UK and finds treatment programme successes are encouraging.

Anticipating an interaction with an obese person provokes feelings of social power, reports the BPS Research Digest.

The Neurocritic has a neurogasm which looks more like a shampoo bottle than a drink but Paris Hilton is having one so it must be science, right?

The interesting origins of the British Prime Minister on antidepressants so what poppycock is tackled by Neuroskeptic.

Glenn W. Martin, Ph.D. Honored for Accomplishments in Mental Healthcare
24-7PressRelease.com (press release)
He holds dual Ph.Ds in sport psychology and developmental psychology, is a former licensed mental health counselor in the State of Washington and was a ...

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

Social Studies
Globe and Mail
In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they describe a series of experiments in which older adults had greater memory for “stereotype-consistent ...

Mark Liberman has been writing about the persistent misinterpretation of claims about statistical differences between groups with respect to some property — misinterpretations in which these differences (often small ones) are understood as general (and essential) differences between the groups. A little while ago, Mark suggested that reporting the differences by means of generic plurals ("Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do") promotes misunderstanding and proposed that such generic language be avoided.

In comments, Mark noted that changing the language of popular science reporting is not by itself going to fix an inclination to essentialist thinking (which is all over the place), though it might be a step in the right direction.

Mark looked at groups X and Y with respect to property P, focussing on statistical differences between X and Y. Let's say that members of X tend to have P to a greater degree than members of Y. Then there's a statistical association (perhaps a very weak one) between X and P. And most people have as much trouble understanding statistical association as they do statistical differences. Here, the characteristic error in reasoning is treating the association as invariant: all Xs have P (and no non-Xs do). Again, the error is all over the place, often showing up in objections to claims of statistical association. As in the following case from a September 30 NYT story "Dementia Risk Seen in Players In N.F.L. Study" by Alan Schwarz.

The story begins with a report of an apparent statistical association:

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

Now, the study has a variety of shortcomings, and the association can't be taken as demonstrated. but for the moment let's take things at face value.

What especially interests me in the story (though I have a long-standing interest in dementia and related conditions) is the reaction of NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, who

said in an e-mail message that the study did not diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that "there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems."

"Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports," Mr. Aiello said.

Aiello's response addresses (and rejects) claims not made in the report: that all retired players have memory problems (all Xs have P), and that no other people have memory problems (no non-Xs have P). That is, Aiello chose to treat the association as invariant, when that was clearly not what the report said. I don't see how the reporter could have averted this misunderstanding by more careful wording.

Such misunderstandings — occasioning objections much like Aiello's — arise even when claims are not couched as statistical associations. Quantified statements like "many Xs have P" will do, eliciting objections like "but I'm an X and don't have P". People reason like this all the time, and that's why there are Critical Thinking courses.

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

Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, commenting on my posts about a Dilbert cartoon that skewers "the vacuous way managers talk", asks "What is a 'manager' anyway?"

My only comment here is not on the Bayesian inference but rather on the idea that "managers" are dweeby Dilbert characters who talk using management jargon. I was thinking about it, and I realized that I'm a manager. I manage projects, hire people, etc. But of course I don't usually think of myself as a "manager" since that's considered a bad thing to be.

For another example, Liberman considers a "spokesperson for a manufacturer of sex toys" as a manager. I don't know what this person does, but I wouldn't usually think of a spokesperson as a manager at all.

The LL posts in question were "Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day", 9/26/2009;  "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009; "Another nail in the ATEOTD=manager coffin", 9/28/2009; and "Memetic dynamics of low-hanging fruit", 9/30/2009.

And Andrew's comment is very much to the point.

In the original post on Scott Adams' strip, I used scare quotes in referring to "a despised minority, in this case 'managers'"; and in a later post, I referred to "the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by 'managers', however we define that much-maligned class".  Those phrases were meant as a note to myself to come back to this curious phenomenon of anti-managerial prejudice — but Andrew beat me to it.

I should start with a confession: like Andrew, I'm a manager. I've been one at least since 1980 or so, when I became a group supervisor at Bell Labs; and when I became a department head there, in 1987,  it was no longer possible to look the other way.   At my first "three-level meeting" — involving department heads and their bosses and their bosses' bosses — Brian Kernighan looked across the conference table to me and said "Welcome to the land of the brain-dead". The fact that I left industry for academia didn't save me: the organizations that I now (at least nominally) manage employ several times as many people as the Linguistics Research Department at Bell Labs did.

I suppose that as long as there have been hierarchies, bosses have sometimes been feared, resented, and disliked.  But I think it's a new phenomenon that in large areas of modern culture, managers are stereotypically regarded as stupid.  Andrew Gelman's employees surely don't think that he's stupid, and I hope that most of mine don't think I'm stupid either. But Brian's little joke reflected a now-widely-shared concern that the role of manager, like the role of parent, inevitably causes a sort of tragic cluelessness, in which you become the object of all of your own earlier upward-facing attitudes.

This is mixed up with a different idea, namely that official pronouncements are likely to be bland and even empty. This might mean that the people who craft them are actually especially crafty, but  the idea that corporate statements tend toward vacuity seems to  reinforce the idea that leaders are empty-headed.

[It's for that reason that I was disposed to accept corporate spokespersons as "managers" in the Dilbertian sense — well, that and the fact that otherwise there would otherwise have been no examples at all in the 400-million-word COCA database of "managers" using the cliche under study.  And the sex-toy company spokesperson whose quote I accepted as a possible example of manager-speak actually was a "senior buyer" — check out the original article here.]

However we decide to define "manager", this group is certainly now the object of a complex of negative stereotypes. When and how did this start?

I don't know, and I welcome suggestions.  These attitudes may be connected to the antique European aristocratic disdain for those who are "in trade", and to the (I think related) modern intellectual disdain for the world of business.  These attitudes seem to have been imported from the intelligentsia into  industry through the medium of engineers and especially programmers, who (at least at lower levels) maintain a very different culture from the "suits" in finance, marketing, product planning, and so on.

The word manager has been around for a long time, with something close to its current meaning. With the gloss "A person who organizes, directs, or plots something; a person who regulates or deploys resources", the OED gives citations from around 1600 onwards:

1598 J. FLORIO Worlde of Wordes, A manager, a handler. 1598 SHAKESPEARE Loves Labours Lost I. ii. 173 Adue Valoure, rust Rapier, be still Drum, for your manager is in loue. 1600Midsummer Night's Dream V. i. 35 Where is our vsuall manager Of mirth? What Reuels are in hand? SHAKESPEARE

In the slightly more specific sense of  "A person who manages (a department of) a business, organization, institution, etc.; a person with an executive or supervisory function within an organization, etc.", the citations start about a century later:

1682 A. WOOD Life 22 Nov., The Duke of York hath gained the point as to the penny post against Docuray the manager of it. 1705 J. ADDISON Remarks Italy 443 The Manager opens his Sluce every Night, and distributes the Water into what Quarters of the Town he pleases. 1740 S. RICHARDSON Pamela II. 341 Said he, I think that little Kentish Purchase wants a Manager.

But none of the early citations in the OED, nor the quotes that I find in LION, seem to reflect the modern Dilbertian managerial stereotype.  That stereotype clearly predates Dilbert — but when did it arise? and where did it come from?

In this context, we have to return to Andrew's question: What is a manager, anyhow?  By now, I suppose that the Dilbert empire employs a certain number of people, whom Scott Adams in some sense manages — does he thereby consider himself a "manager" in the relevant sense?

The fuzzy referential boundaries of the managerial stereotype, it seems to me, are a characteristic of social stereotypes in general. This is related to the "some of my best friends are Xs" excuse, and all the other excuses that shift the range of the prejudice away from apparent counterexamples.

[Update — John Cowan's post at Recycled Knowledge, "Why are PHBs stupid?", offers interesting and sensible answers to the questions under discussion.]

Stephen Colbert did a brilliantly funny piece on his show the other night, tackling the introduction of 'snus' to the USA, tobacco pouches that fit under the lip, and the increasing placebo effect, a topic which we discussed recently.

Colbert tries the snus pouches on the programme, which, I have to say, seem remarkably uninviting, and riffs on the health benefits of sugar pills with plenty of laughs.

Link to Stephen Colbert clip (thanks Veronica!)

One of the most powerful pieces in the one-man exhibition of Chen Wen Ling now showing at Joy Gallery in Beijing 798 Art Zone is blandly entitled "What You See Might Not Be Real" in English, but the Chinese title is the raw and raunchy "FANG4PI4″ 放屁 ("emit gas, break wind, flatulate, crepitate, i.e., fart [v.]"). Perhaps the artist didn't want to offend the linguistic sensitivities of potential foreign customers, but I must say that I much prefer to translate the title of the piece directly as "Fart," or, with a bit of license, as "Bull Fart" because the atomic cloud depicted by the artist is coming out of the anus of an enormous bovine.

[This view comes from a story at Business Insider (Joe Weisenthal,  "Finally! Madoff Gets What He Deserves", 9/29/2009); other perspectives are available at ML Art Source and TPM.]

What we see in this impressive sculpture is a horned Bernie Madoff pinned against the wall by the rocket-propelled bull. Just from looking at the whole ensemble, it's pretty obvious what Chen is trying to tell us, but by entitling the piece "FANG4PI4," he invokes additional levels of scorn that are inherent in that term when applied to the words of others. Several of the blogs that have shown this piece claim that as slang FANG4PI4 implies "bluff" or "lie." Actually, it is more accurate to say that it means "talk nonsense," the idea being that one is comparing the words coming out of the mouth of one's opponent to a stream of farts.

Now, if one wishes to increase one's contempt for what one's opponent is saying, one may style his / her words as GOU3PI4 狗屁 ("dog fart"), as in this ringing denunciation: NI3 FANG4 GOU3PI4! (lit. "You are emitting dog farts!" = "What you say is nonsense / bullshit!"), although GOU3PI4 ("dog fart[s]!") shouted loudly by itself gets the message across clearly enough. This is an old expression that may be found as early as 1750 in the Qing Dynasty novel Rulin waishi (The Scholars). If you want to emphasize that what your opponent is saying is not only bullshit but is also completely incoherent, you may declare that it is GOU3PI4 BU4TONG1 ("dog fart not pass through").

If your adversary still does not give in to your withering denunciations, you may embellish them as follows (I shall only give a few of the possible varieties):

FANG4 GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit stinking dog fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE 4PI4 ("emit 'your mother's' fart[s]")

FANG4 NI3 MA1 DE GOU3CHOU4PI4 ("emit your mother's stinking dog fart[s]")

However, one must be careful when one gets into the territory of "your mother's" whatever, since such characterizations are considered to be extremely vulgar and, as often as not, fighting words. We all remember the "Grass Mud Horse" phenomenon from earlier this year, and a lot more could be said about this most offensive of imprecations.

As for "bull," that is NIU2 牛, although I did mention in an early January post that "Happy NIU2 Year" was the most popular STM New Year's greeting in China this year, I have not yet found the time to explore the full range of nuances of NIU2 in current usage ("balls, guts, spunk, awesome, formidable," and so forth). Particularly when combined with "B," viz., 牛B (often written as NB), then we begin to combine all of the androgenic qualities of NIU2 with the estrogenous implications of what "mother's" refers to, resulting in an explosive combination. To do full justice to this aspect of NIU2 would require a modest (or perhaps I should say "immodest") treatise, one that I have not yet found the opportunity to compose. Someday.

[Hat tip to Benjamin Zimmer.]

Appearance tips off strangers to self-esteem, religion, openness ...
Canada.com
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PhysOrg.com
“Vicarious entrapment: Your sunk costs, my escalation of commitment” will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. ...

Nature Makes Us More Caring, Study Says
University of Rochester Newsroom
... only makes you feel better, it makes you behave better, finds a new study to be published October 1 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. ...

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I've happened upon an interesting snippet from the regular Nature "100 years ago" feature concerning a 1907 debate on whether insanity was really increasing or whether it just seemed that way due to changes in diagnosis and treatment methods.

It made me smile because it is almost exactly the same argument that is being had now about whether cases of autism are genuinely increasing or whether this just reflects changes in diagnosis and treatment methods:

Notwithstanding the much improved statistics recently issued by the Lunacy Commissioners, thoroughly satisfactory materials are still wanting for solving the question whether the prevalence of insanity is or is not increasing. The importance of the problem... imparts special interest to a paper by Mr. Noel A. Humphreys on the alleged increase of insanity... This paper shows in a striking manner the value of scientific statistics in checking crude figures.

The author expresses a decided opinion that there is no absolute proof of actual increase of occurring insanity in England and Wales, and that the continued increase in the number and proportion of the registered and certified insane is due to changes in the degree and nature of mental unsoundness for which asylum treatment is considered necessary, and to the marked decline in the rate of discharge (including deaths) from asylums.

From Nature 18 July 1907.

Link to Nature "100 years ago" snippet.
Link to Wikipedia page on epidemiology of autism.

Provost and psychologist: Claude Steele explains his theory of...
CU Columbia Spectator
At Tuesday evening's University Lecture, Columbia's new provost Claude Steele discussed his research in social psychology. ...