I was at a conference all weekend, and most of last week, so apologies for posting consistently, then disappearing. I’m going to crawl out from under this homework pile, and blogalogging shall resume!

1. I’m in a class about the Hebrew Bible this quarter, and we just covered the first two-thirds of Genesis. Which makes The Ride Back To Beersheba a timely link. (h/t Taylor)

2. “Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who refused to accept defeat in World War II until finally surrendering in 1974, died today. In thematically related news, Obamacare opponents have organized their latest campaign to repeal the “Obamacare bailout.”” That is a real opening to this article, and I think I love it.

3. Today in expensive things I want but shouldn’t buy, Durr watches. They vibrate every five minutes–no clock face, no readout–and make you attend to how much time is passing. Temporal orientation!

4. Wendy Davis Drops an Atomic Truth Bomb on Desperate Sexist Republicans. This headline is a real thing. On the other hand, this is a tumblr for kick-ass ledes.

5. On the other hand, Politico has a thoughtful article on Davis. Unlike many pieces of such style, it doesn’t pretend to know if it can answer whether she would make a good governor. Even more appealing to me–it doesn’t gloss over details in pursuit of a pretty picture. Yes, it’s possible that Davis’s ambition and work ethic might have resulted in the eventual divorce of the Davis family. Is it that surprising that a power shift within a relationship could be destabilizing? Journalists, take heed.

While she has been portrayed as the materialistic beneficiary of a duped husband, let me offer another plausible interpretation: At some point Jeff Davis astutely realized he had married a woman who aimed to do more than answer phones and serve salads. He saw that it would be not just in her interest, but his, if he facilitated her advance. He helped her go to law school not only out of the goodness of his heart but because he was betting on her economic prospects, as women have long bet on the prospects of men. How many hundreds of thousands of American women worked to put a husband through law or med school? Did we criticize the men who benefited? Jeff Davis did for his spouse what wives have long done for husbands: He invested in her—their—future.

6. I did not expect to find that a post titled “Why Scientific Papers Are Like Pop Music” would be an entirely apt metaphor, but here we are.

7. More snarky research papers.

8. Researchers have invented a bra that unhooks for ‘true love’. Yes, that is an actual claim they are making. I…..

…yeah, on that note, I think we’ll end. Happy Tuesday! If you live in the arctic tundra that is the Midwest, I hope you’re staying warm. Elsewhere, I am envying you. And I like winter.

1. The Edge Question is up: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? I haven’t made it through all of them (and every time I try, I lose hours to exploring past questions too). This response, Science as Self-Correcting, is one of the best thus far. It is a feel-good trope, it is a great way to make a fast and sloppy argument for science over religion, but it is simply not accurate. We’re not great at correcting ourselves in the best of circumstances, why would this mysteriously be true in science? (h/t Ed Yong)

But hiring, promotion, and grant committees typically don’t value the contributions made by individual researchers using these tools. As long as this continues, progress may be slow. As Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals. Even after the defenders of old practices assume their final resting places, the antiquated traditions sometimes endure, in part from the support of institutional policies. A policy does not die until someone kills it. New reforms and innovations need our active support—only then can science live up to its self-correcting tagline.

2. I would really really like to see a psychotherapeutic treatment for anorexia succeed. Unfortunately, what I see is poor data collection,, treatments with little impact, and statistical handwavery. This is an excellent exploration of one such study, but contains photos of anorexia and discussion of weight.

3. And speaking of disordered eating, Andrea looks at eating disorder prevention, and what actually works. Using evidence!

4. Also at SED, misophonia in patients with eating disorders. File this under “…hunh”

5. 

A lot of people have a red handle installed deep in their person, where if somebody yanks on it, it hurts. For some people, it’s some terrible mistake they regret, and for some people, it’s something they’re always trying to get better at that hasn’t worked, or a relationship they can’t repair, or a weakness that makes them self-conscious, or a memory that’s sort of awful. I’m not any better or worse off than anybody else in having something like this in my nature/history; the only difference between mine and anybody else’s is that mine ison the outside.

I mean, let’s say your red handle is that you have a busted relationship with your parents. You’re a happy person, but there’s this one thing that’s really hard, that you haven’t really figured out, that’s just … a thing you haven’t overcome. Imagine if you had to walk around with a big sign around your neck that said, “Once called my mother a terrible name and we haven’t spoken in 10 years.” So that everybody knew – strangers, friends, nice people, mean people, salespeople, people on the train, people who drove by you in their cars while you were walking. Eeeeeeverybody. This is what it’s like to have your red handle on the outside. It can feel a bit like you are at the mercy of literally everyone.

In other words, stop with the fat jokes at Chris Christie. Actually, drop the proper noun there. People are fat, and sometimes this is their red handle, and perhaps you should stop pulling it.

6. Things West Wing taught me. Well, that and forever associating Andrew Jackson’s presidency with cheese.

7. SW friends in particular, you should be reading the whole sky, but this piece on book recommendations in jail ought to convince you. I’ve linked previously to Doing time.

8.  I might endorse switching to describing biases and heuristics as doing mental triage–there are all sorts of flaws with biases–people view them as universally negative, then don’t want to consider that they might have been caught in one, people use them to snipe at arguments rather than address substance, etc–and heuristic isn’t a sticky word that people are liable to recall and use. (h/t Peter Hurford)

Again, we all do this, but we are often reluctant to admit it because we want to present to the world a façade of rationality: I hold my views firmly because I have carefully examined the alternatives and have justifiably rejected them. And sometimes we have indeed carefully examined the alternatives; but usually we haven’t. We’ve undertaken intellectual triage and set a great many possibilities aside with limited or no scrutiny. This is what Dawkins has done with Christianity; he just thinks he hasn’t.

In general, practicing such triage is okay — indeed, it has to be okay because there’s no plausible alternative until we live much longer, eliminate sleep, and acquire faster internal processors — but it’s the sort of thing that can easily go wrong, primarily because, as a self-justifying defense mechanism, we try to fortify our position by attacking or dismissing all the people who believe the things that we’ve decided not to investigate.

9. I’m probably not going to get tired of analyses of the marshmallow test, but this one is from the NYT, and it’s excellent.

1. I love everything about snarky psychology writing. Which makes these hidden gems in psychology publications wonderful.

B.J.H. would also like to thank the U.S. Immigration Service under the Bush administration, whose visa background security check forced her to spend two months (following an international conference) in a third country, free of routine obligations—it was during this time that the hypothesis presented herein was initially conjectured.

2. I think I contribute more to practical psychology than theoretical, lab-research stuff, but this makes me pretty happy I didn’t test that hypothesis.

3. Over at Science of Eating Disorders, Tetyana keeps investigating Mandometer(r) treatment for eating disorders. In particular, their claims about EDs not being mental illnesses.

Reason #1: The failure of psychotherapy argues against an underlying mental health disorder. The poor long-term remission rate for patients with eating disorders using interventions aimed at treating their psychiatric symptoms (reviewed in the Introduction) suggests that these symptoms are not the cause of their eating disorder.

Oh, now I understand! If it’s not cured by psychotherapy, it’s not a disorder! Hey, where are you going with those goal posts?

4. I know I wrote a whole piece about an overgeneralization spotted on PsychToday, but these Ten Research-Based Wedding Vows are brain-meltingly adorable.

5. I have a dopey devotion to Netflix. It has brightened many a badbrain day and been a source for all those Big Lebowski references that had been stumping me. This longread on reverse engineering Netflix is joyous.

6. Electroconvulsive therapy gets a terrible rap–in my experience few undergrad psych students seem to even know it’s a viable therapy for some with depression and bipolar disorder. This theory is appealing (lookie there, full text!), but if wanting neatly packaged theories to be true made them so, damn, would research be easy.
[Laymen’s version of conclusions promoted by paper: getting electroconvulsive therapy changes how much grey matter you have. How this changes is what can be used to predict how patients respond to ECT. Also, since the grey matter changes are localized, it might be possible to use a more targeted type of intervention in the future.]

7. Family goes in for 23anMe genetic testing, finding out that daughter isn’t related to her father. Normally, this would lead to family tensions and uncomfortable conclusions. Not…quite? (h/t Ed Yong)

8. Dr. Isis on how we structure graduate programs. Predictably, I read this between working on grad school applications.

Graduate education in the United States is structured such that advancement is predicated on success in a couple of high-stakes events. As a student, I took a qualifying exam in my second year and it tested my basic knowledge of my field. I took another exam in my third year which tested my understanding of the scientific method and process. At the end, I defended my thesis. At the time, each of these events felt like they could make or break me; if I failed, my career was over and there was no redemption for me. In retrospect, having now been on the other side of this process, I realize that there was enough investment in me that I was not going to be allowed to fail miserably. I was too clouded by the idea of failing a test to be able to see that.

Structuring graduate education as a series of high-stakes events is problematic. There are few events in my career that feel high-stakes anymore. I submit an article to a journal, it gets reviewed and rejected. I take the reviews, revise the paper, and try again. I write a grant. It doesn’t get funded. I revise it and submit it again. Or I submit another one. I teach and get some negative feedback. I incorporate that feedback into my lectures next term. Short of complete and total incompetence, no single event really has the potential to end my career. With each thing I do, I learn and I keep plugging forward toward my goals. I surround myself with mentors and more senior scientists who objectively and routinely evaluate my career and provide me feedback.

Due to horrifying cold and some reasonable concerns by drivers about the safety of piloting a double-decker bus on incredibly icy roads, I’m spending a few more days in Columbus, Ohio, complete with cuddling and this hot chocolate. Stay warm and safe, lovely readers! Here’s some links to read by the fire.

1. To be honest, I expected this study, When Sex Doesn’t Sell: Using Sexualized Images of Women Reduces Support for Ethical Campaigns, to be poorly conducted. I was pleasantly surprised to see attention to confounding variables and replications!

In Study 1, a sample of Australian male undergraduates (N = 82) viewed PETA advertisements containing either sexualized or non-sexualized images of women. Intentions to support the ethical organization were reduced for those exposed to the sexualized advertising, and this was explained by their dehumanization of the sexualized women, and not by increased arousal. Study 2 used a mixed-gender community sample from the United States (N = 280), replicating this finding and extending it by showing that behaviors helpful to the ethical cause diminished after viewing the sexualized advertisements, which was again mediated by the dehumanization of the women depicted. Alternative explanations relating to the reduced credibility of the sexualized women and their objectification were not supported.

2. Voldemort! Horcruxes! Harry Potter name-calling! This is international diplomacy. No, really, it is.

3. You should definitely not listen if you find discussion of childhood sexual abuse triggering or especially unpleasant, but This American Life did a segment on recovered memories. The movement, which is an embarrassing chapter of psychotherapy, involved therapists assisting and encouraging their clients in falsifying memories, usually about sexual abuse (though you’ve likely heard of the satanic ritual abuse cases). TAL interviews one victim of the therapy, and Linda Ross, a therapist who practiced this therapy, implanting false memories for years, before recanting.

4. This. This so much. Even my favorite books–those by Tamora Pierce, with feminist, strong, spidren-slaying heroines–play into this trope. I’m quite sure that Cosmo and fashion models aren’t realistic models, but find me an admired protagonist woman who isn’t slim or lanky or statuesque. (Source article wasn’t my favorite, but is here)

One of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about eating disorders and body esteem in general was a comment on my blog a while ago that I regret being unable to find now. The writer was saying that most people think girls want to be skinny because of Hollywood and Vogue. This girl wanted to be skinny because she wanted to be a protagonist.

She didn’t expose herself to mainstream fashion magazines or TV; she was interested in art films and books and indie music. But no matter how alternative the movie, the protagonist was almost always skinny. And wanting to be a protagonist means wanting to be someone, as most people do. Apparently, your story is only worth hearing, you’re only someone, if you’re skinny—it’s like, theblueprint of a human. Once that’s down, you’re allowed to be as interesting and protagonist-y as you want! Apparently.

No matter how much people our age have been raised on girl power and believe in yourself and you are beautiful, ignoring the beauty standards of the culture we live in is close to impossible. And as this lady pointed out, these standards and expectations exist outside mainstream culture like reality TV and tabloids; they exist in punk and indie cultures, in “artsy” Tumblr cultures that are all about looking like a fairy, but only if you’re a skinny white girl.

5.  I’m not planning to have children, but this post by Julia was wonderful. What would you add. (Twitter friend suggested identifying enemies and responding appropriately to hate, Facebook friend suggested rhetoric and argument, particularly assessing the claims of others.)