David Lee's List: Health and Psychology

• For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins.
• the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day.
• Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis.
• the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device
• In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship
• The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
• close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships
• exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past
• unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language
• though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills
• I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.
• Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others.

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• near-misses raise activity in the exact same reward circuitry of the brain as wins do
• The reward circuitry runs on the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has been widely, if simplistically, called the brain's reward chemical.
• it underlies the pleasure we get from (and, for some, the addictiveness of) drugs, alcohol, sex, chocolate, gambling, and (for the psychopaths among us) even causing others pain
• Although losing feels subjectively lousy, near-misses nevertheless spritz the brain with the dopamine that makes a behavior addictive.
• The psychology behind this seems to be that people who play slot machines or the lottery, where wins and losses are the result of pure chance, often mistakenly believe that skill is involved.
• Compulsive gamblers have it worst: their brains reacted much more to near-misses than did the brains of casual once-a-month lottery players.
• although near-misses while playing a slot machine felt less pleasant than wins (duh), they increased the desire to play just as much as long as players felt they had some control over their spins—supporting the idea that the illusion of skill underlies the phenomenon.
• near-misses have even greater power over problem gamblers
• A little digging finds that although neuroscientists may be just figuring out the power of near-misses to keep gamblers playing, slot-machine makers have known about it for decades.
• we see yet again that when there is money to be made by understanding the brain, business beats science

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• Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children.
• how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature
• A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
• Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.
• In the 1980s, however, psychologists interested in exploring how much babies know began making use of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes.
• Babies like to look at faces; they mimic them, they smile at them. They expect engagement: if a moving object becomes still, they merely lose interest; if a person’s face becomes still, however, they become distressed.
• well before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false beliefs
• the existence of a universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide variation from society to society
• a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies
• Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.
• Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound.
• chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack
• Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.
• Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality — if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you.
• moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority.
• David Hume argued, mere rationality can’t be the foundation of morality, since our most basic desires are neither rational nor irrational.
• Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants to make some extra money or needs to fulfill an Intro Psych requirement, there’s some truth to the claim that this developmental work is a science of the interested and alert baby.
• All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy.
• Part and parcel of adult morality, for instance, is the idea that good acts should meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative response — justice demands the good be rewarded and the bad punished.
• Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.
• The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires.
• To say that a biological trait evolves for a purpose doesn’t mean that it always functions, in the here and now, for that purpose.
• Many of us care about strangers in faraway lands, sometimes to the extent that we give up resources that could be used for our friends and family; many of us care about the fates of nonhuman animals, so much so that we deprive ourselves of pleasures like rib-eye steak and veal scaloppine.
• We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all; we see racism and sexism as evil; we reject slavery and genocide; we try to love our enemies.
• our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind.
• 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language
• The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology.
• The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go.
• “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”
• “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.”
• Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented.

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• Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.
• Research also shows that an excess of choices often leads us to be less, not more, satisfied once we actually decide. There’s often that nagging feeling we could have done better.
• For example, most of us know that it’s a wise decision to save in a 401(k). But studies have shown that if more fund options are offered, fewer people participate.
• Seeking the perfect choice, even in big decisions like colleges, “is a recipe for misery,”

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