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By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: August 30, 2009

Jennifer Tang had a problem.
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Earl Wilson/The New York Times

At a “speed shrinking” event, Diana Kirschner, left, reassured Lauren Wettenstein that online dating “is very normal.”
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Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Eight psychiatrists and psychologists offered three-minute sessions at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Soho.

“I’m engaged and I’m about to move in with my boyfriend,” she said. “I’m a little commitment-phobic. I just don’t know about being with the same person 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I really need to talk to my therapist about this.”

Ms. Tang, a 40-year-old librarian from Astoria, Queens, had an even bigger problem: Her therapist was on vacation. “Whenever she’s gone, I struggle with feelings of emptiness,” she said.

So Ms. Tang took her troubles to the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo on a recent Wednesday night — but not to look up advice in a medical book.

Instead, Ms. Tang went to talk about her fears with a panel of eight psychiatrists and psychologists offering three-minute sessions of what was billed as “speed shrinking” to those whose regular therapists were on vacation or to anyone else needing a very fast dose of advice.

“At first glance, this appears to be a funny, lighthearted thing,” said one of the therapists, Jonathan Fast, who is also a professor at Yeshiva University. “But what I have discovered is that these brief conversations absolutely turn into real therapy. You start with the classic ‘What can I help you with?’ and make a really fast assessment.”

One middle-aged man told another therapist, Diana Kirschner, that he was worried about becoming unemplo

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psychology

Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her books written for general and academic readers include Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming An Artist, and Counterclockwise.

Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books. Her work has led to numerous academic honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to Applied Psychology award from the American Association of Applied & Preventive Psychology, the James McKeen Cattel Award, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize.

The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, “…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making.”

Dr. Langer is a Fellow of The Sloan Foundation; The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science; Computers and Society; The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; The Society of Experimental Social Psychologists. In addition to other honors, she has been a guest lecturer in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Argentina.

Included among her books are:

Langer, E. & Dweck, C. Personal Politics. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Langer, E. The Psychology of Control. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983.

Langer, E. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Da Capo Books, 1989. (Translated into thirteen languages.)

Alexander, C. & Langer, E. (Eds.) Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Schank, R. and Langer, E. (Eds.) Beliefs,

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psychology books

If You’re Happy and You Know It, Tell Your Phone
By Jenna Wortham

Can the Apple iPhone, which supplies hours of entertainment, actually measure your happiness?

Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University, thinks the phone might at least help researchers gather some data about it. Mr. Killingsworth, a former software developer, has helped create an application called “Track Your Happiness” for the iPhone to collect information to determine which factors are associated with happiness.

“The gold standard for collecting this kind of data is what is called ‘experience sampling,’ or taking a sampling from moment to moment,” said Mr. Killingsworth. “But typically that is very expensive and manually intensive to conduct.”

Traditionally, research examining human happiness is conducted by recruiting volunteers to come into a sterile lab office and take a survey.

But it doesn’t begin to scratch at the surface of the evolving way people feel, from moment to moment, depending on what they’re doing, who they are with and what environmental factors might be influencing their perception of happiness, Mr. Killingsworth said.

As a result, he said, “we don’t really know very much about the causes of people’s happiness as they are going about their lives.”

The iPhone is an ideal solution to that problem, he said, because people are always carrying their mobile phones with them — to work, while they’re playing with the kids or when they go out with friends. It can provide a better understanding of how our happiness progresses throughout the day, beyond when study volunteers take a survey at a designated time.

Another advantage of gathering data using a mobile phone is the ease of scalability. “Supporting 1,000 participants isn’t any more work than supporting 100,” Mr. Killingsworth said.

To participate, volunteers sign up for the experiment through the study’s Web site, fill out an introductory survey and schedule the number of times each day they want to be alerted by an e-mail or text messa

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psychology

July 28, 2009, 4:40 pm
Software That Cares
By John Markoff

Along with my article on concerns about progress in artificial intelligence last Sunday in The Times, the paper published a photo of a mobile robot plugging itself into a wall socket to recharge and posted online a short video demonstrating the progress Microsoft researchers have made in building conversational computer systems. If you missed it, take a look:

The video is based on the work of a group led by Eric Horvitz, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. I believe both the robot picture and the video are evocative of technological progress toward artificial intelligence, which is nowhere near to the creation of self-conscious machines but will eventually force socioeconomic changes.

Dr. Horvitz noted that the video, which shows how a patient-intake system can portray empathy, is a side project to his basic research on connecting a conversational system to a set of “knowledge bases” on medical symptoms built with the aid of Dr. Richard E. Behrman, a pediatrics professor at Stanford University, in the late 1990s.

“We explored the construction of visual recognizers for caregiver/caregivee scenarios . . . and also models for asking and confirming with a child and adult,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I was impressed how powerful a response (by viewers of demos . . . and of users themselves) is evoked by the caring shown by the system.”

The work is representative of a generation of artificial intelligence research that relies heavily on a statistical approach based on the Bayesian theorem, in which systems collect evidence based on a prior hypothesis. As evidence accumulates that is consistent or inconsistent with the hypothesis, confidence in its validity changes.

In the video demonstration, it is striking how the system appears to pay attention to either parent or child and to address each person directly. The researchers have developed a similar application that has served as a “receptionist” at one of Micr

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psychology

In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable
By BENEDICT CAREY

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.

The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.

“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.

Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.

Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.

Small differences in how the

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psychology

Worst-case scenarios
Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychology professor, has studied how stress can cause us to say or do something we are trying to avoid. Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychology professor, has studied how stress can cause us to say or do something we are trying to avoid. (Michele Mcdonald for The Boston Globe)
July 27, 2009
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It happens like a mistake in slow-motion: You drive toward a pothole, consciously decide to avoid it, and then steer right into a flat tire. For years, Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner has been studying this type of ironic error - the perverse phenomenon in which the human impulse of staying alert to the worst possible outcome sometimes leads people to do the very thing they hoped to avoid. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
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CAROLYN Y. JOHNSON

Q. What are examples of some of these situations?

A. In a given situation, you know what would be the worst thing to say, the worst spill that could happen, the farthest you could fall, the silliest thing you could do, the most embarrassing possible thing to say. All of those things look like dangers, and the mind is a little bit attracted to them, in that you have to notice these things to know what would be awful. That awareness - that sensitivity we have to the worst thing that could happen - could actually paradoxically create the worst thing under the worst conditions.

Q. What is happening in our brains when we do the exact wrong thing?

A. Under the mental load of stress or distraction or what have you, that awareness [of what to avoid] . . . actually does something: It starts running the body. It influences exactly how we move, how our emotions or attention are drawn, and what we think about. The worst thing can slip out and happen, when it’s exactly the o

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psychology

The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

IN September 1909, during his only trip to America, Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island. Strolling around its three great amusement parks — Steeplechase Park, Luna Park and Dreamland — Freud could observe graphic manifestations of the American id: women whose skirts flew up to their waists while onlookers laughed, demons leering from the mouth of a plaster Hell, grown men riding mechanical hobbyhorses.

“My sense is that Freud probably found it a little seedy, a little less genteel than he would have wanted it to be, and completely American,” Aaron Beebe, the director of the Coney Island Museum, said recently.

Freud later called America “a gigantic mistake.”

Nearly a century after that visit, a new exhibition at the museum, “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-1972” (through March 21), is offering a more positive interpretation of the relationship between Freud and the workingman’s resort. Whatever he might have thought of Coney Island, the show seems to suggest, Coney Island liked Freud.

Created by the media artist Zoe Beloff, the exhibition fills a room with drawings, photographs, artifacts and short films purportedly made by members of a previously unknown group of vocational Freudians founded, Ms. Beloff said, by a man named Albert Grass in the 1920s.

Ms. Beloff described the group as “the only amateur psychoanalytic society that ever existed in this country.” She explained that Mr. Grass might have been working at Coney Island the day Freud visited but only became familiar with psychoanalysis as a doughboy in Europe during World War I. Returning to Coney Island after the war, he gathered his circle of Freud admirers, mostly working-class people from various backgrounds, who met at the society’s office on Surf Avenue to pursue their interests in the life of the mind.

Ms. Beloff said she first became aware of the mysterious group after buying some old home movies at a Chelsea flea market.

“I’ve collected h

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psychology

’m not a big fan of mind mapping, though I concede that it does have its uses. Recently, I learned of a different approach to brainstorming that seems both more practical and better grounded in the way the mind works than traditional, Buzan-style mind mapping. This approach, called the Rico Cluster after its developer
, Dr. Gabrielle Rico, focuses on the creation of a “web” of related and interconnected ideas, rather than radiating out from a central concept, and is intended to leverage the brain’s normal processes of communication between the right and left hemispheres. The idea is to work towards a kind of “critical mass”, where the language- and process-oriented left brain takes over from the visual- and pattern-oriented left.
What is a Rico Cluster?

Rico clustering is a brainstorming tool that emphasizes the connection between left-brain openness and connection-making and right-brain verbalization and ordering. Although it is intended primarily as a writing tool, it can also be applied to teaching — and Rico herself has written about its use as a therapeutic tool, as well.
Here’s the basic idea:

1. Write a word in the middle of a sheet of paper.
2. Circle it.
3. Write down the first word or phrase that comes to mind and circle it.
4. Draw a line connecting the second circle to the first.
5. Repeat. As you write and circle new words and phrases, draw lines back to the last word, the central word, or other words that seem connected. Don’t worry about how they’re connected — the goal is to let your right-brain do its thing, which is to see patterns; later, the left-brain will take over and put the nature of those relationships into words.
6. When you’ve filled the page, or just feel like you’ve done enough (a sign of what Rico calls a “felt-shift”), go back through what you’ve written down. Cross out words and phrases that seem irrelevant, and begin to impose some order by numbering individual bubbles or clusters. Here is where your right-brain is working in tandem with your left-brain, produ

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mindmapping psychology writing writingcenter

Your brain in drive
What happens when an older driver takes the wheel -- and what we all can learn from it

By Drake Bennett | July 26, 2009

For all the indignities that the elderly suffer, they aren’t typically accused of being a menace to society. Until, that is, they get behind the wheel of a car. Here in Massachusetts, a spate of high-profile accidents involving older drivers - a 92-year-old man who killed his wife by backing over her in a parking lot, an 88-year-old woman who allegedly hit and killed a 4-year-old girl in a crosswalk in Stoughton last month, a 93-year-old man who mistook the gas pedal for the brake and drove through the entrance of a Danvers Wal-Mart - have triggered calls on Beacon Hill for measures that would take older drivers off the roads as their abilities decline. Within families, it has heightened anxieties about whether it may finally be time to take the car keys away from elderly parents or grandparents.

The risk is real. While there is a wide variation, people for the most part grow measurably worse at driving as they age. They experience a steady erosion of physical capabilities like strength, eyesight, and hearing. And perhaps more importantly, they also lose the specific cognitive skills that driving requires. Even a healthy aging brain suffers a declining ability to respond quickly, to take in one’s surroundings and identify potential dangers, and to balance and coordinate all of the different tasks that merely backing out of a driveway can involve.

And yet it also emerges that, as a group, elderly drivers are in far fewer accidents per capita than those in any other age group. Older people, it turns out, have a second set of skills that helps them make up for the ones that have diminished. For many people, old age brings a growing awareness of their own limits, and they compensate by driving less and avoiding situations that overtax their abilities. They don’t drive fast, or at night, or on the freeway, or during rush hour. They certainly don’t text and drive. Consciously

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psychology

Sidney Bijou, 100; child psychologist studied awards, behavior

By Benedict Carey, New York Times | July 23, 2009

NEW YORK - Sidney W. Bijou, who adapted a set of simple reward-based psychological techniques to treat troubled children and in the process helped establish behavioral therapy for childhood disorders like autism and attention-deficit disorder, died June 11 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 100.

He collapsed and died while getting dressed, said his daughter, Jude, who had been caring for him. News of his death received only local coverage at the time, but was widely discussed in professional circles.

Dr. Bijou’s studies, showing that small rewards like a hug or piece of candy, given at the right times, could resolve large behavior problems, shook up the field of child psychology, which in the 1950s and 1960s was still dominated by Freudian thinking.

Therapists had typically tried to understand a difficult child’s drives and motives, often in play therapy, by interpreting the small dramas in the dollhouse or between stuffed animals. Yet there was no good evidence that such approaches were effective, and Dr. Bijou, who had worked under the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, decided to attack the bad behaviors directly, and by increments.

A disruptive, defiant boy who struggled to hold his tongue earned instant praise; he might get a hug if he started his homework, a piece of candy if he completed it. If a child became defiant, he would be ignored and perhaps removed from the group altogether for a time - given what parents today would call a “timeout.’’

“He was strongly opposed to the idea that punishment could have a positive effect,’’ said Susan O’Leary, a professor in the clinical psychology department at Stony Brook University, who worked with Dr. Bijou at an experimental preschool classroom at the University of Illinois. “The thinking behind the break, or the timeout, was that if good things were happening in the classroom, then the child would want to participate’’ and begin to

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psychology

Who’s crazy now?
By Alex Beam
Globe Staff / July 17, 2009

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Every couple of decades or so, psychiatrists publish their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which functions as the instruction booklet for their profession. The manual always attracts its fair share of mockery, and the last one was no exception.

That 886-page volume, published in 1994, famously included snoring (“Breathing-Related Sleep Disorder’’; DSM code 780.59), smoking (“Nicotine Dependence’’; 305.10), quitting smoking (“Nicotine Withdrawal’’; 292.0), and jet lag among the nation’s mental disorders. One writer called it “a naked land grab by a profession threatened with marginalization by biomedical research.’’

I am quoting my past self, doubtless a diagnosable disorder of some kind.

Surprise, surprise, the psychiatrists are at it again. The fifth edition of DSM is in the making, and already the fur is flying. “What began as a group of top scientists reviewing the research literature has degenerated into a dispute that puts the Hatfield-McCoy feud to shame,’’ wrote Dr. Daniel Carlat, a professor at Tufts Medical School, on his blog recently.

What’s going on? For one thing, there is continuing pressure to keep adding questionable diagnoses to the DSM stew. There is talk of expanding the ever-fashionable ADHD diagnosis (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to include an adult-onset version. Last time around, some shrinks wanted to include PMS (premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or premenstrual syndrome), an effort headed off at the pass because it risked stigmatizing healthy women. Eating disorders will probably be broadened, too.

In an editorial published in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Allen Frances, the editor of DSM-IV, called DSM-V “a wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatment - a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost

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psychology

Not sure who can be trusted? Ask the CIA
Ex-agents offer tips on deceptiveness

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Correspondent | July 13, 2009

Truth or consequences. Wouldn’t business be easier if you knew who was lying about their ability to deliver? In what sounds like a “Meet the Parents’’ episode, former Central Intelligence Agency agents gave a seminar at Spark Capital recently on evaluating people and identifying questionable behavior. Rob Go, a senior associate at the Boston venture capital firm, blogged his notes.

Core Idea: You need to know what you are looking for, because the brain is very good at dismissing information that it doesn’t think is relevant.

The goal is to find “clusters’’ of deceptive behavior. A cluster is two or more behaviors, when the first happens within five seconds of a question. Examples of verbal deceptive behaviors:

1. Failure to answer the question directly.

2. Overly specific answers.

3. Verbal attacks at the person asking the question.

4. Enhancing qualifiers: “To be perfectly honest,’’ “candidly,’’ etc.

5. Being overly courteous or complimentary: “That’s a great question!’’ “You know, I knew I came to the right place. . .’’

6. Protest statements: A response to a question that is designed to convince rather than convey information. “A CEO of a public company would never do such a thing.’’

Examples of physical deceptive behaviors:

1. Changing one’s anchor point: Shifting in a chair, going from standing straight to leaning on a wall or table, etc.

2. Adjusting clothes, hair, jewelry, etc.

3. Covering one’s mouth or eyes.

There were many others. What was more interesting were the . . . behaviors that are not relevant:

1. Making or not making eye contact.

2. Facial twitches or tics.

3. Closed vs. open posture. It’s about a change in posture, not whether one starts open or closed.

4. General nervous tension.

5. Preemptive responses. Answering before the question is completely asked.
robgo.tumblr.com

Indications of interest. Entrepreneurs who get a chance to deliver th

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psychology

The farce of dueling psychiatrists

By Stephen Bergman | July 13, 2009

THE RECENT verdict of guilty in the “Clark Rockefeller’’ trial was an affirmation by a jury of his peers that he was not insane at the time of the crime. But the duel of prosecution and defense psychiatrists was at best a farce, at worst a travesty of the profession and the law. As a former psychiatrist I am appalled.

For the prosecution: one psychiatrist, famous from Fox TV and psychiatric thrillers, was paid $10,000 for his expertise as part of an “insanity defense,’’ testimony that was challenged by his offering opinions about Rockefeller on TV in advance of the trial; a prosecution psychologist agreed with his diagnosis, basically of a narcissistic character who was “delusional’’ - that is, insane. For the defense: a psychiatrist who had seen the accused once for 2 1/2 hours and had never before testified in court came up with the diagnosis of narcissism and sociopathy - that is, not insane.

Diagnosis of mental conditions is not the same as that of kidney disease. From the birth of psychiatry, diagnoses have been determined not by hard numbers but by cultural/historical norms. After Freud “discovered’’ During Freud’s time, after he “discovered’’ hysteria to be “a wandering womb,’’ the diagnosis became all the rage, as if suddenly hysteria had become epidemic, wombs wandering all over Europe; in recent decades the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has boomed. Hysteria is a rare diagnosis now; perhaps ADHD will decline in popularity as well.

These days, psychiatric diagnoses are based on the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,’’ published by the American Psychiatric Association. This hefty volume is a main money-maker for the association, upward of a million dollars in annual sales. It is written by panels of psychiatrists who are each specialists in their own diagnosis and it is flawed, one example being its listing “homosexuality’’ as a psychiatric disease long after society had not.

It is als

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psychology

Psychiatric drug sought on streets
Growing in popularity as sedative
By Patricia Wen
Globe Staff / July 13, 2009

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Seroquel debuted 12 years ago as a novel drug for adult patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a powerful pill that would help stabilize their emotional lives. Psychiatrists began prescribing these tablets to others - children with serious mental illnesses and adults with anxiety or depression.
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But these days, the use of Seroquel is growing in popularity in a different group: men and women living on the margins who simply want a good night’s rest.

“Seroquel puts you to sleep,’’ said Luis Lopez, 28, a patient at Men’s Addiction Treatment Center in Brockton who used to buy Seroquel tablets from drug dealers. “We all know from the streets that’s how it works.’’

The street use of Seroquel as a sedative is yet another example of how many prescription drugs cross over into the illicit drug market, creating incentives for dealers to illegally obtain the drug and dangers for users ignorant of its side effects. If misused, doctors say, Seroquel can heighten the risk of diabetes, heart and blood pressure problems, involuntary twitches, and rapid weight gain.

Nicknamed Susie Q, Quell, Q, or Squirrel, these pills appear so far to be more psychologically than physically addictive. The drug, made by AstraZeneca, is often sought on the street by former drug addicts or inmates who were first prescribed them to reduce anxiety while confined in institutional settings.

In a 2007 letter published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Emil Pinta, who worked with drug abusers in an Ohio prison, said some inmates were known to fake psychotic symptoms just to continue a Seroquel habit to help them sleep. He urged clinicians to be more wary in prescribing this medication, known by its chemical name of quetiapine, and urged studies “to explore the addiction potential’’ of the drug.

There are

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psychology

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news psychology

Perp walks and privacy

By MATTHEW GILBERT, GLOBE STAFF | July 2, 2009

Supposedly, Michael Jackson was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Even his face was hidden behind surgical masks and the permanent mask of plastic surgery. Talking to interviewers, from Oprah in 1993 and Barbara Walters in 1997 to Martin Bashir in 2003, he seemed like a distant and unknowable star of indefinite gender. He was considered the quintessential pop alien, whether he was doing a perp walk at a Santa Barbara jail or a moonwalk across the concert stage.

But go back and look at the unscripted Jackson, of which there are countless clips on the Web. Re-read his “reality’’ narrative. Over and over during the past two decades, he told us exactly who he was with as much expressiveness as he could muster in his tightened face and laminated voice. He desperately wanted to be known not just as the groundbreaking King of Pop, but as a larger-than-life icon of victimhood. He was, he’d note to anyone who’d listen, the man whose childhood was stolen, and he wanted to represent all lost children. And the more he talked about his victimization - by the paparazzi, by his accusers, by the justice system, by his family, by his physical ailments - the more he seemed to be victimized.

More than most stars before him or since, Jackson wanted us to know that we - his fans, his detractors, the wide world of curiosity seekers - were all responsible for him. That message wound through his work, in the songs “Privacy’’ and “Childhood,’’ for example, about his “painful youth’’; it defined his personal and professional aesthetic, which was an extension of the Peter Pan story; and it led him to expect our sympathy when he said to Bashir about sharing a bed with a boy, “It’s very right, it’s very loving, because what’s wrong with sharing a love?’’ He wanted us to remember that he, a former child star, was far more sinned against than sinner.

You wouldn’t find Madonna asking for our pity, relying on our guilt. And career control, or the appearanc

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entertainment psychology

What the Little Bird Told Me About You: Three Twitter Apps for Psych Analysis
Written by Jolie O'Dell / June 14, 2009 9:52 PM / 15 Comments
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Tomorrow morning, social media and marketing researcher Dan Zarrella is debuting a new way to see into the minds of Twitter users by analyzing their most recent 1,000 tweets.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.

Zarrella wrote in an email tonight that he used RID (Regressive Imagery Dictionary) and LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to parse the data. RID is a text analysis tool composed of more than 3,000 words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis software program that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words in emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech. The program considers positive and negative emotion words, self-references, and words that refer to sex, eating, or religion.

Profiles with updates that are protected cannot be analyzed by TweetPsych.

Let's take a look inside the mind of a few Twitter users. Most of the social media elite tend to have fairly impersonal tweets; hence, their TweetPsych profiles are relatively homogeneous catalogs of upward mobility, obsession with professional affairs, and moral imperativism. Here's a profile of a photographer/mother/homemaker/blogger in Georgia:

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psychology socialnetworking

Psychiatry is a relatively safe profession, but it has a hazard that is not apparent at first glance: if you are in it long enough, there may be no one to talk to about your own problems.
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It is not that way when you start out. Most psychiatric residents spend a good deal of time in therapy with a senior psychiatrist, for a number of reasons — not least, that it is the most intimate way to learn technical magic. Books teach the same thing to everyone who reads them. But no one forgets the crystalline remark their therapist made just to them, and how they viewed themselves differently ever after.

At a certain point, though, you stop being the student and become the teacher. You settle into the details of a career — hospital, research, private practice. Roots go down, time passes. Eventually, younger psychiatrists begin to approach you. Now you are the generation above, saving early-morning slots for residents before they head off to clinic and class. You lower fees and accommodate their hurtling, insane schedules. You remember how it was.

But no amount of wisdom prevents personal frailty. You are never too old for your own problems. Yet when you are the professional others go to, where do you bring your sorrows and secret pain?

Sometimes the situation is clear. During my training there was a formidable psychiatrist who disappeared periodically. Everyone knew she was being hospitalized for a recurrent manic psychosis, and that she would be back to intimidate the trainees as soon as medications had stabilized her.

There was an oddness about it, but no dishonor. Actually, her illness made her more impressive. We are taught to explain that mental illness has a biological component responsive to medical treatment, just like diabetes or heart disease. Her example brought conviction to our tone.

In my residency, I moonlighted in a medication clinic where an elderly psychiatrist was being treated for a dementia he did not recognize. He could not remember simple request

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psychology

Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity
By STEVE LOHR

In today’s recession-racked economy, penny-pinching is a national pastime. But people are still opening their wallets for smartphones.

Sales of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other smartphone models are rising smartly and are projected to increase 25 percent this year, according to Gartner, a research business. Widely anticipated new models like the Palm Pre, which went on sale nationwide on Saturday, will help fuel that growth. Meanwhile, total cellphone sales are expected to fall.

The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather the downturn. And as is so often true when it comes to adoption of new technology, the smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”

The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.

Smartphones are not cheap, particularly in tough economic times. The phones, even with routine discounts from wireless carriers, usually cost $100 to $300, while the data and calling service plans are typically $80 to $100 a month.

But recent smartphone converts are often people who count pennies, including many fr

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psychology gadgets mobile

The Suffolk Superior Court jury deliberating the fate of the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller asked a judge today what prosecutors had to prove in the case in which the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

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Judge Frank Gaziano

Judge Frank Gaziano told the jury that prosecutors had to prove that Rockefeller understood the legal and moral consequences when he kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter last summer after a bitter divorce.

"The Commonwealth does have to prove the defendant could appreciate the criminality or legal import and the wrongfulness or moral import of his conduct," Gaziano told the jurors. "Further, when you asked 'Or can the Commonwealth meet its burden by proving just one of these?' The answer to that question is no."

Rockefeller, 48, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the kidnapping charge. His is also accused of giving police a false name and two counts of assault on a social worker supervising the July 27 visit with his daughter in the Back Bay. Prosecutors allege that the defendant is really Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a con man who came to the United States as a German exchange student in 1978 and never left.

The jury concluded its third day of deliberations late this afternoon. The question about the legal definition of insanity gets to the crux of the case, which hinges on dueling diagnoses from mental health experts, who gave contradictory testimony.

Two defense experts -- Dr. Keith Ablow, a forensic psychiatrist from Newburyport, and Catherine T.J. Howe, a forensic psychologist from Salem -- testified that Rockefeller was legally insane when he abducted his daughter last summer. They told the jury that Rockefeller suffered from narcissistic personality disorder so acute that he had grandiose delusions of wealth and aristocracy that were reinforced when people such as his wife believed his outlandish stories.

The prosecution countered with Dr. James A. Chu, a clinical psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and associate

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