A Week

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There aren’t really any pre-eating disorder Kate photos in my possession–very few exist–but this isn’t long after it started.

[The eating disorder content note on this post is so loud it tapdances in sequined tights. Skip the latter half if that seems bad for you.]

It’s a Friday. 12:42 in the morning. And I’ve done something for the first time in seven years. I have fed myself properly for a week.

Twenty-one meals in a row.

I have eaten seven breakfasts and seven lunches and seven dinners, one each day, and the last time I can point to and say, “that happened” was when I was fourteen.

It has always made me feel like a child, in the helpless, immature, possibly-unfair-to-children way. Accomplish all manner of things, come of age, go to college, hold a job, spend years working on recovering, and you still can’t feed yourself for a week, can you?

I am twenty one years old, and I have spent one third my life depriving and counting and adding and crying over calorie totals. I have binged and exercised obsessively and hallucinated and measured and feared
and
and

And I did it.

I haven’t beaten the parts of my brain that want this to be a loss–who think failure is eating when you are hungry. But they’re a little quieter, a little cowed. And that’s enough.

Seven years ago, I wore braces. I hadn’t been kissed, and Kate Donovan certainly didn’t exist. I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Was one, actually. And nearly the happiest I could be was starving.

There was this sharp piece in the New Yorker two months ago. We write about anorexia too positively, the author claimed. And she wasn’t wrong. It’s hard to capture what it takes to override something like wanting to survive. So you dig deep when you write, and try to find it–what could possibly be worth all of that?

There was something, though. That intersection of feeling competent and sparkling and happy. God, the happiness. Hard and diamond-bright and just so easy to get. You can’t get away from hunger easily, and the two melded a bit. Feel clenching hunger? A rush of joy. Over and over and over. And the choice? Happiness or food and feeling slightly duller and slower and sadder? Why, you’d have to be crazy to pick eating.

I felt a little bit of it today–late to dinner with an errand that ate into my time. My stomach growled and it flared.

Be happier…go to the gym instead.

It’s a hell of a drug, this madness.

But I’m winning. I will sleep and tomorrow, I will eat breakfast before class. I will come home for lunch, and commiserate with housemates about approaching midterms over dinner. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll slip up at some point. Rome and days of building, you know. It’ll be harder to come back if I make this an all-or-nothing game. So I’ll expect that sometimes, the feelings will win.

But for now? For now, I’ll be really goddamn proud. Proud of eating, imagine that. I’m not sure fourteen-year-old-Kate could have. I’m going to have a hell of a Friday for her.

Monday Miscellany: Ghost-Story Provocative Musicals Edition

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.

 

The Groaning Bookshelf

booksbooksbooks

I asked for books for Christmas. In fact, I got books and money-for-books for Christmas. And not just a novel or two…several shelves worth! And then I got back to school, and found myself with fourteen books to order between just two of my classes. And suddenly, I had a Book List of Formidable Size.

So.

This is what I’m reading in the next ten weeks. They’re roughly sorted by classes and interests (Feminism, Social Policy, Psychology, Not-Psychology) and suggestions and commentary are highly encouraged! I don’t anticipate posting reviews, though the first half–the books for school–will likely inform the next weeks of writing.

Feminisms and Feminist-like Stuff

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Classic feminism book…that I haven’t read. I’ll quietly slink away now.

Women, Race, & Class, Angela Davis
Intersectionality! Feminisms! It’s embarrassing how little I know about Angela Davis. Hopefully, I’ll fix that.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
T
his is a romance novel, and it was assigned for class. A quick search about suggests things about changing the face of feminism? Or resonating therein? I’m sure I’ll find out. The second heading in the Wikipedia entry is for the zipless fuck, so I’m sure it will be dignified and stodgy reading material on the topic of pteromerhanophobia.

Woman on the Edge of TimeMarge Piercy
I…I am really not sure why this was assigned for my feminism class, but hey, it’s got sci-fi undertones and a female lead, so why not?

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks
Yep, bell hooks. Another feminist writer I’ve never properly read. Academic pressure to catch up on necessary reading + needing a specific sort of gen. ed credit = 90% of what caused me to enroll in this class. And 100% of my prior knowledge of this book comes from quotes floating about tumblr, so at the very least I can source-check those!

Social Policy (But Especially Prisons)

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Erving Goffman
Goffman is fairly famous (by which I mean he’s the sixth most quoted author in the social sciences) but my experience of the last book I was assigned that he’d written (Stigma) was…ah…dense. Not impossible to understand, but dense. Probably in part because Goffman coined the term itself, and much of the conclusions he was drawing (people are stigmatized! sometimes they have passing privileges! stigma can intersect with other identities!) didn’t seem new or revolutionary. Anyways, I have to read it, and I’m told that the book lead to the deinstitutionalization and changes in psychiatric care. Also, I’m a sucker for case studies. (I am overly fond of Oliver Sacks’ writing, it’s true.)

The Discovery of the Asylum : Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, David Rothman
How the hell did we end up with prisons and asylums and how did we sort people into each? I have no idea, but apparently I’m going to learn! That is, if my massive textbook order actually arrives.

Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society, James Jacobs
A case study (see: Kate is a sucker for case studies) of an Illinois high-security prison–prisoners, guards, administrators.

The Homeless, Christopher Jencks
Not content with tackling the easy stuff, we’re looking at questions like “why are people homeless?” and “how do we fix it?”

Is There No Place on Earth For Me? Susan Sheehan
Case study (need I say more?) of a young woman with schizophrenia as she goes in and out of mental institutions. Near and dear to my heart–I worked briefly in schizophrenia research/case work.

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, Charles Murray
Did welfare in the 60’s do more harm than good? I have no idea, but Murray has arguments for it. It’ll be an adventure! (Especially since this class has me reading eight books in eight weeks.)

Gaining Ground in Illinois: Welfare Reform and Person-Centered Policy Analysis, Dan Lewis
From the description:

In 1997, then state Senator Barack Obama sponsored legislation in the Illinois General Assembly to study the newly passed federal welfare reform and how it would affect the citizens of Illinois. […] Dan A. Lewis was selected to direct the study and report back to the legislature. For four years, Lewis and his team of researchers tracked a random group of 1,000 people who were on welfare when the new law went into effect. He reported on their income, their general well being, and the lives of their children under the new system. Gaining Ground in Illinois illuminates the findings of the study and offers advice for future policy makers. Lewis uses quantitative and qualitative data to draw clear conclusions but also to make the real experiences of the people he studied as vivid as possible. The reports allowed the legislature to debate the issue with the facts at hand.

You mean, empirical research about welfare laws?! [*buries nose in book*]

Miscellaneous Psychology

Making Habits, Breaking Habits, Jeremy Dean
(1) I want to have better habits, and to make some things I force myself to do (plan meals, drink enough water) to be non-conscious habits.
(2) It would appear that everything I know about habits is completely wrong.
…and (3), I learned (2) from one chapter in, with lots of spiffy new research to explore. Twenty-one days to form a habit? Yeah, no, and how did we get that number anyways? Turns out we pulled it from a doctor who noted that it took 21 days for amputees to habituate to having a missing limb, and then generalized wildly. Not exactly the same as taking a walk after dinner, no?

The Secret Life of Pronouns, James Pennebaker
Social psychology about how we communicate? *Swoon* I actually borrowed a copy of TSLoP this summer, but only made it a few chapters in. A friend gifted me this copy, and onwards we go. Play around with this quiz to get an idea of the research and claims Pennebaker is pulling together.

Listening to ProzacPeter Kramer
A well-known-ish popular psychology book that I keep hearing people reference. I’m overly skeptical–the blurb wonders if Prozac work on character rather than illness–but that might be gimmicky publishing. All things considered, I need to have a better idea of the popular-writing-on-psychiatry.

Against Depression, Peter Kramer
Pennies and pounds and all that–I picked up Kramer’s other book. It seems less sweeping: who has depression, and what’s that like?

Thinking, Fast & SlowDaniel Kahneman
Kahneman’s work on decision-making is worth reading. MegasuperADJECTIVE worth reading. None the least because it’s a nifty shorthand for categorizing feelings in conversation. (“My System 2 knows that this is stupid and completely untrue, but my System 1 is having a lot of trouble with not feeling like I deserve to eat.”)

Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
You know when you get completely caught up in a task and time flies by? You’re working and passionate and impossible to distract? That’s called ‘flow’, coined by Csikszentmihalyi and I haven’t been feeling it. Or the creativity. Which brings us here.

Feeling Good Together, David Burns
I’ve read When Panic Attacks, and I keep suggesting Feeling Good to other people (confession: I’ve only skimmed it.) Though When Panic Attacks didn’t give me new information, I have nearly no knowledge about tackling troubled relationships (the topic of FGT). Marriage/Family Therapy is definitively out of the picture in my future-planning, but Burns writes clearly, if basically.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
I have an odd affection for Baumeister, having once given a very long presentation about why I thought he was wrong. I’ve never read any of his non-academic publications, and since everyone seems to have very certain and completely opposite ideas about how willpower works, I’m starting with the book I hear people citing most in casual conversation.

Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, Marsha Linehan
There’s a reason that this…
Screen Shot 2014-01-10 at 8.09.56 PM…is a well populated and only-sort-of-joking tag on my tumblr. I’m sucker for manuals–the how-to handbooks for some therapeutic techniques. (Not all use them–for instance psychodynamic and existential therapy tend to be far more freeform, and intentionally so.) Linehan is a hero of mine (here’s why), and a post I’ll write another day.

Miscellaneous-But-Not-Psychology

The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass
I’ve taken too long to read the His Dark Materials books. But! Good news! You all were exactly right about how fantastic they are. I’m halfway through The Amber Spyglass.

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Finished today! 10/10 would reread while laughing too loudly at demons and angels and the Hellhound.
“He rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.”
Really, need you know more?

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Mike, who gifted me with Good Omens, included The Screwtape Letters, as the demons of the two seem to be similar. I dunno if I agree yet, but I will sharpish.

An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
T
he only reread on the list–and the only John Green book I’ve read. Boy genius dates 19 Katherines  in a row. Now what? Adventures and sarcastic footnotes, that’s what! I know people have unreasonable attachments to their names–enough that we’ve named the effect and designed a test for it…and yeah, this might have been why I liked the book. Emmas and Matthews and Jameses of the world, let me know if I’m biased?

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh
Because comics drawn in MS Paint have never been so great.

What should I immediately devour? Turn into kindling? What are you reading?

Monday Miscellany: Cold, Cold, COLD

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.)

2013 14!

Recovery: it looked a lot like this, but without the cute animals.

It’s January of 2014, officially that time of year where we decide to switch our calendars and spend two months forgetting we’ve done so. I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but I do reflect on what the past year has brought me.

In 2013 I…:

– wrote quite a lot, got my own blog, and then wrote quite a bit less. I am proud of this, and also quite sure that the latter half is not how it’s supposed to work.

– worked at Fabulous Unspecified Internship, decided what I wanted to do with at least the next ten or so years of my life, and then began applying to grad schools.

– moved to Columbus, interned for the Secular Student Alliance, moved back to Chicago, and then kept working for them.

– spent the whole of 2013 working on recovery, which included leaving therapy, going back to therapy, getting a new therapist, being far less troubled by body delusions (I can see myself accurately in mirrors a lot of the time now!)

– owned a pet rat, and 10/10 would repeat.

– visited the Creation Museum for a women’s conference and went to the NYC Solstice. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which one I liked more.

– maintained close relationships with people who moved. This is a big deal. I’ve actually never been good at keeping in touch with…well, anyone. No ‘friendship permanence’ as it were. Except this year, I did. For the first time, I don’t live in a city with close friends–they live all over the continental US. And we keep in touch. We visit each other and skype and call and text and it’s working.

2013 Posts I Wrote and Liked the Most:

Falling in Love With People

Training Therapists: We’re Doing It Wrong

How Not To Be a Jerk to the Future of Your Movement

Forward Thinking: What Would You Tell Teens About Sex?

Posts I’d Like to Write:

Adoption! A general post about the stuff we keep getting wrong about how adoption works. I’ve actually written this post twice, but dammit WordPress stop deleting my drafts.

Some sort of reflection on my time at Northwestern. Both because this is The Traditional Thing To Do, and because I didn’t particularly enjoy the college part of being in college. I learned a lot of things, I made a lot of friends, I fell in and out of love, and all of that sort of thing, but very little of that was on campus, near campus, or as a result of being at Northwestern specifically.

How I’d Like To See Psychology Taught: I have feelings about this.

Deterioration effects and other ways we could measure the harm of talk therapies. (I wrote a fairly long and detailed paper on Lilienfeld last quarter and would like to be less hamstrung by “focus on the things that will make this an acceptable final paper and also it’s due soon”.)

—–

So! Onwards! To new places and visiting old friends and reading long books!

 

 

 

 

Monday Miscellany: ACT, Autism, Anorexia

1.  I haven’t started the book by the same name, but Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for eating disorders seems fairly promising. (Psych Today article, academic abstract)

2. The New York Times has a lovely piece on the NYC Solstice Celebration, and secular celebrations as a whole.

3.  The title doesn’t convey this very clearly, but gender-flipping characters in children’s books is one way to easily populate a fictional world with equal representation. (Okay, leaving this pull quote up, because it was part of the original post, but do read this comment thread.)

Despite what can seem like a profusion of heroines in kids’ books, girls are still underrepresented in children’s literature. A 2011 study of 6,000 children’s books published between 1900 and 2000 showed that only 31 percent had female central characters. While the disparity has declined in recent years, it persists—particularly, and interestingly, among animal characters. And many books with girl protagonists take place in male-dominated worlds, peopled with male doctors and male farmers and mothers who have to ask fathers for grocery money (Richard Scarry, I’m looking at you). The imbalance is even worse in kids’ movies: Geena Davis’ Institute on Gender and Media found that for every female character in recent family films, there are three male characters. Crowd scenes, on average, are only 17 percent female.

More insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say—implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow. Children’s lit could benefit from a Finkbeiner Test. (Well-intentioned kids’ media can, ironically, introduce their youngest listeners and viewers to gender barriers: The first time my daughter heard the fabulous albumFree to Be … You and Me, she asked “Why isn’t it all right for boys to cry?”)

So Bilbo, with her matter-of-fact derring-do, was refreshing.

4. Scope insensitivity is a hell of a drug. Peter Singer with a nice holiday reminder about separating things that make you feel warm and fuzzy from things that are effective charity donations. And the Gawker piece about the piece (WHY is this a thing, internet?) is on point itself (with bonus self-awareness about clickbait titles!).

“It’s obvious, isn’t it,” Singer asks, “that saving a child’s life is better than fulfilling a child’s wish to be Batkid?” Yes. It is just as obvious as obvious can be. Even a five year-old could see that it’s obvious. But that will not stop this line of argument (and our perhaps overly provocative headline) from enraging those who prefer to luxuriate in a bath of warm and fuzzy emotional validation, rather than to think about this simple fact: In a world of scarce resources and limitless need, it’s just common sense (and common decency) to direct our charitable resources to those who need it the most. It is not moral to pour charity money into non-life-and-deathcauses when that money could be used to actually save human lives.

5. Harrumph. Waiting lists seem to impact effectiveness of treatment. File this under Could We Please Have Fewer Confounds, Maybe?

6. And in other things where Kate is Grouchy But Also More Informed, it seems like oxytocin is not as solidly linked to trusting behaviors as I’d thought.

With the relevant post-Kosfeld data favoring failures to replicate by 3:1, I think a dispassionate reader is justified in not believing that OT increases trusting behavior–at least not in the context of the trust game. Should we do a few more studies just to make sure? Fine by me, but it seems to me that we, as a field, should have some sort of stop-rule that would tell us when to turn away from this hypothesis entirely–as well, of course, as how much data in support of the hypothesis we would need to justify our acceptance of it. In addition, I’m struck by the fact that no one has ever gotten around to reporting the results of an exact replication of Kosfeld. In light of the Many Labs Projects’ recent successes in identifying experimental results that do and do not replicate, I’d personally be content to believe the results of several (five, perhaps?) large-N, coordinated, pre-registered exact replications of the Kosfeld experiment.

And from the same article, a nice reminder that nobody snarks like an annoyed psychologist.

I also remain unconvinced that intranasally administered OT even makes it into the human brain in the first place. (Many experts think the brain is involved in the control of behavior, so this particular gap in our scientific knowledge seems to me like a problem that OT researchers should be taking a lot more seriously.)

7. Still shopping? Give the gift of books. Specifically, this book: Conned Again, Watson! Canon-styled Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve tales based around probability and logic and math. I loved the original Conan Doyle versions, and these fit right in.

8. This post gives me many thoughts, but right now, I’ll present it without comment (though a trigger warning for some glamorizing of eating disorders)

Ginia Bellafante put it well a few years ago, in a book review for the New York Times:“Anorexia is a disease of contradiction: it demands both discipline and indulgence …. The anorexic disappears in order to be seen; she labors to self-improve as she self-annihilates.” Bellafante describes the condition as “an intellectualized hallucination.” That concise definition is better than any I’ve read, and it points to the conflicted way in which we talk about the disease: our intention is critical, but our language is celebratory.

9. The one study to RULE THEM ALL.

And on that note, Happy Monday!

Some ‘Exercise for Mental Health!’ Headscratching

[CN: Brief mention of eating disorders, exercise for weight loss]

“Even a little bit of exercise can improve mental functioning!” 

The little display-quotes at the top of Psychology Today’s page always make me a touch antsy. The thing about writing popular psychology is that you want to to actually be popular, and “well, we tested this on college students, and in at least this one iteration of the research, it seems like mayyyybe there’s a relationship between This One Cool Trick and increased performance on IQ tests”  has far too many caveats to make for a headline. So we assure you that doing ten jumping jacks before bed will make you pass your math test, and the things we’re a little more certain about get less fanfare.

(In the spirit of fixing that, look at this, it seems pretty conclusive that narcolepsy is the result of an autoimmune response to hypocretin neurons. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but is actually worth at least three large headlines.)

But I’m stuck on a bus, and I started thinking about that claim. A little bit of exercise? I mean, I usually feel better for going for a walk, but I’ve never thought that’s a direct result of exercise. More like inevitable results of the interplay of being away from a to-do list, trading fluorescent light for natural light, and stomping around in the snow. Sure, there’s some very basic cardio happening, but I live in the Midwest, the flattest of flatlands.

…which also got me thinking about how I’ll avoid exercising when I’m having especially bad brain days. There’s significant amounts of societal pressure to exercise–to not just be slim but toned and fit and lean–and heading to the gym uniquely taps into a whole host of too-positive feelings about potentially losing weight and fitting into beauty norms.  When you add jerkbrain, then BAM sudden impulses towards obsessive exercising! So I stay away on bad days, and on the good I try to aim my happiness about exercise in the direction of appreciation for strength and endurance building, rather than skinniness.

Which led me to The Hunch*:

It seems unlikely–possible, but unlikely–that exercising briefly is dramatically changing brain chemistry. It seems to improve functioning in moderate depression. It usually improves circulation, which does nice things all over your body. But it also plays into norms about how being a good person means having a gym membership and being healthy (in the colloquial, appearance-based sense).

If we’re going to take the Psych Today quote at face value**–and I’ve been writing on a bumpy bus just so we can–then what if the improvement from just a little exercising is less a function of the actual motions of moving your body, and more to do with the rewards of doing something we’ve been conditioned to associate with being a good person? Sure, there are copious benefits resulting from the exercise -> [mysterious*** brain changes] -> better mental and physical health pathway. But getting them from brief exercise? Seems more plausible that there’s a boost in mood and functioning from doing a societally rewarded action. (“I’m doing a good thing! I am a responsible person!”)

By all means, were this to be correct (and see the part about it being a hunch) this would not be a reason to stop exercising! In fact, it might be a better reason to exercise than ever. Taking advantage of brain quirks, or placebo effects generally, to improve your life is still improving your life.

 —-

*I mean it. This is a hunch. Somewhat more than a wild guess, but only because I think “studies this stuff for fun and a diploma” counts for more than Wild Guesser status.

**Also, I’m disinclined to think that it was entirely made up. There’s likely at least one study suggesting this conclusion.

***Not so mysterious, but if I’m going to be hunch-ing, I’d rather not shoot myself in the foot by also demonstrating a poor grasp of neuroscience.

Monday Miscellany: Solstice, Schizophrenia, Substance Addiction

Robby, Miri and I, reunited and silly with happiness pre-Solstice and post-bagel.

1. I talk a lot with adjectives–things are spectacular and wonderful and glorious and amazing and awesome. But I think, to catch the joy of what the Brighter Than Today Solstice in New York was, I think I’d tell little stories.

How it felt to sing among friends–something I haven’t done in years.
The joy of watching an entire group of people laugh and cry and be in awe together.
Book recommendations flying thick and fast at the reception–attendees carrying books! (That’s not even including CFAR’s box of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)

Joyous singing, gathering, community. What a way to close the quarter.

2. On “why didn’t you tell me?”

3. The language we use to talk about substance addiction matters. In fact, it matters very much:

Those clinicians exposed to the “substance abuser” term were significantly more likely to judge the person as more to blame and more deserving of punishment than the exact same individual described as having a substance use disorder. We tested these terms in a general population sample and found even larger differences with more negative and punitive judgments strongly associated with the “abuser” term.

Luckily, the current federal drug czar (try putting that on your resume) seems to be on board with treating drug addiction more like a complicated problem for science and less like a convenient political football.

4. When I was working in schizophrenia research, and in discussions I’ve had since, that marijuana can trigger earlier onset of schizophrenia in those at-risk already has always been a foregone conclusion. I’ve certainly repeated it enough–bolstered by studies such as this and this. Now, some new research that makes the opposite claim: marijuana has no measurable effect on schizophrenia onset. (academic link)

5. For those with disordered eating, veganism and vegetarianism are not as simple as investment in animal-rights or environmentalism.

Food justice is complicated, and we live in a world in which the use of animals for human profit is taken for granted, often invisible, and ingrained culturally (I just realized there are at least three animal-marginalizing expressions in this post that I wouldn’t have used when I was a vegan). I don’t begrudge anyone what they choose to eat, or not eat, anymore. I respect vegans and I will continue to try to find a place where my values and my health are both satisfied. But I’ve learned that food is so much more than just food––for some, due to health concerns, it’s an enemy. For others, it’s love. For still others, it’s power and control. And for far too many people, it’s an unmet need.

6. An ode to the crazy, messy, impulsive, and uncomfortably honest romance of Love, Actually.

Love Actually is only a traditional romantic comedy insofar as it is a film about romance that has humor. It does not have the structure required of the genre. To be honest, if you’re going to compare it to any one film you should probably compare it to Crash, the working title of which I’d like to think was Racism, Actually.

If the theme of Crash is “We’re all at least a little bit racist deep inside” the theme of Love Actually is “We’re all a little crazily romantic deep inside.”

Love Actually is, in fact, less a film about love as it is a film about people who think they are in love. Almost all of the stories center around people who either early on, or before the film even begins, figure out they’re nuts about someone and then spend the five weeks before Christmas wondering, “What do I do now?” It’s a bit like Hamlet but with romantic gestures instead of, you know, death.

 

7. A long read on the story behind the Intense World theory of autism. Well worth the time, with bonus accessible neuroscience and not-terrible coverage of autism!

What have you been reading lately?

Monday Miscellany: Dunning, Kruger, & I Can’t Even

1. You know you’ve done a good job (or at least, you’re overestimating less than usual…) when David Dunning himself comments on your writeup of the Dunning-Kruger effect. For bonus, read the original paper–or at least the abstract. It begins…

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken .from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

….and it only gets better from there.

2. Beautiful things to look at: a crisp infographic–how many millions of lines of code? Your genome, World of Warcraft, the Large Hadron Collider? And even prettier: abandoned observatories.

3. Once upon a time there was a terrible article about habits of the rich that the poor should emulate. And then there was this article, and we could all go back to trying to live happily ever after.

Dave Ramsey probably wasn’t expecting this much pushback when he shared a piece by Tim Corley contrasting the habits of the rich with those of the poor. In her response on CNNRachel Held Evans noted that Ramsey and Corley mistake correlation for causality when they suggest (without actually proving) that these habits are the cause of a person’s financial situation. (Did it never occur to them that it might be the other way around?)

Ramsey fired back, calling the pushback “immature and ignorant.” This from a guy who just made 20 sweeping assertions about 47 million poor people in the US — all based on a survey of 361 individuals.

That’s right. To come up with his 20 habits, Corley talked to just 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. Ramsey can talk all he wants about Corley’s research passing the “common-sense smell test,” but it doesn’t pass the “research methodology 101” test.

To balance the picture a bit, I wanted to take a fact-based look at 20 things the poor do on a daily basis…

4. NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has Dessa. That is all.

5. Over at Brute Reason, What This Depression Survivor Hears When You Call Religion A Mental Illness

“Whether or not I think someone is mentally ill is more important than whether or not they think they’re mentally ill.”

And in addition to that, the fact that probably zero religious believers think that their religion qualifies as a mental illness is a good indication that you should stop saying that it is. Of course, you can and should disagree with them on other things, external things, like whether or not god exists or whether or not religion is a net good in society or whether or not people can be ethical without religion. But what goes on in their own minds is something they know much more about than you ever will.

My week involved a lot of walking past this sign.

My week involved a lot of walking past this sign.

6.  I have a lot of feelings about this article about negative vs. excessive feelings.

7. This article on internet linguistics. Much thought-provoking. Very analysis. Wow.

In other news, my finals are donedonedoneDONE. (I mean, for at least ten weeks, until the next round. Go away, reality.)

Monday Miscellany: Forensic Psychology, Fighting, & Replicating Research

1. Free access to popular forensic psych articles! I’ve been caught up in work and school, but Citizenship: A Response to the Marginalization of People with Mental Illnesses and The Ethics of Life and Death: Advance Directives and End of Life Decision Making in Persons with Dementia open on my computer.

2. This is not like what I normally post, but THIS IS A WEBSITE FOR UNGRUNTLING. Obviously, relevant to my interests.

3. Wait vs. Interrupt Culture.

4. Captain Awkward #524: How do I fight with my partner without ruining everything? Captain Awkward posts give me the urge to print them out and hand them to passing strangers.

Another part of love is telling the other person when they can help you better, which from your examples it sounds like you’re doing already.
[…]
But you and your partner don’t fight at all, and that is wigging you out. So I want you to think about what a fight is, versus a disagreement or a need. To me, a FIGHT is insulting and yelling and cursing and slammed doors. It’s rage and wanting to hurt feelings and sticking metaphorical pins in your loved one’s soft places.
You do not have to fight to prove that your love is true.

5. A Day in The Life of an Empowered Female Heroine

She strolled up to the bar and planted a firm-yet-sexy pump-encased foot down on the rail. The bartender looked at her and started pulling out little frilly umbrellas and Malibu and speared slices of pineapple to make some kind of girl drink, but she held up her hand. “A whiskey,” she said, her voice low in her throat. “Neat.”

Behind her the pool table exploded. Every man in the bar immediately grew a beard. The jukebox made a record-scratching sound, even though it was an mp3-playing jukebox.

6. Evaluating positive psychology interventions in school. The results are about what I’d expect, but the article is great.

7. What happens when a data-driven person has a tumblr and a divorce? Quantified Breakup.

8. Oh, psychology and reproducibility. Social psychology is a tricksy beast, and one way to tackle that has been the ManyLabs project, which attempted to do large-scale replications of 13 previous findings. Surprising (to me, at least, the occasional cynic) all but two of them replicated. So no, it’s probably not true that exposing people to American flags makes them more conservative, and no, people probably don’t endorse the current social set-up if you show them money. (We should take heed, social-justicey-liberals, these have been two the oft-cited psych-derived talking points.) Concerningly, anchoring seems to be stronger than we thought.
8a) Here’s a thoughtful piece on what we should get from the ManyLabs research.
8b) And some concerns about replication-driven psychology research.

9. Maria Bello’s piece on bisexuality and partnerships makes me ache with feelings. Resonant. Rich. (I’m starting to sound like I’m describing a wine. Just go read it.)

It’s hard for me even to define the term “partner.” For five years I considered my partner to be a friend then in his 70s, John Calley, with whom I talked daily. He was the one who picked me up each time I had a breakdown about another failed romance. Because we were platonic, did that make him any less of a partner?

And I have never understood the distinction of “primary” partner. Does that imply we have secondary and tertiary partners, too? Can my primary partner be my sister or child or best friend, or does it have to be someone I am having sex with? I have two friends who are sisters who have lived together for 15 years and raised a daughter. Are they not partners because they don’t have sex? And many married couples I know haven’t had sex for years. Are they any less partners?