Jim Johnson's List: Psychology

• adolescents may be more risk-averse than adults, a new study has found. Their willingness to engage in risky behavior may have less to do with thrill-seeking per se than with a higher tolerance for uncertain consequences, researchers reported Monday.

  "Teenagers enter unsafe situations not because they are drawn to dangerous or risky situations, but rather because they aren't informed enough about the odds of the consequences of their actions," New York University postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Tymula, co-author of a report detailing the study, said in a statement.

• Adults were more willing than teens to choose to participate in lotteries where the risk was known to be high -- suggesting that they were less risk-averse than youngsters. But adolescents were more willing than adults to choose to participate in ambiguous lotteries, where the risk was unclear.

  "It is not that adolescents actually choose to engage in risks, but rather they are willing to gamble when they lack complete knowledge," the authors wrote.
• teens' tendency to embrace the unknown "biologically makes a lot of sense: Young organisms need to be open to the unknown in order to gain information about their world."

1 more annotation...

• that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior,  and our behavior can change our outcomes

• The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking.
• In Paul Tough's essential book, "How Children Succeed," he describes what's going on. Childhood stress can have long-lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.
• In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure
• But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning -- the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.
• Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, it's become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.
• Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw IQ and are probably more malleable.
• Finally, pop culture has been far out front of policy makers in showing how social dysfunction can ruin lives.

• Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control. Some schools give two sets of grades -- one for academic work and one for deportment.

  And it's not just schools that are veering deeper into the psychological realms. Health care systems are going the same way, tracing obesity and self-destructive habits back to social breakdown and stress.
• But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem
• Maybe it's time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

8 more annotations...

• New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old.
• Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity
• Researchers in France
• team monitored infants' brain activity through caps fitted with electrodes. More than 240 babies participated, but two-thirds were too squirmy for the movement-sensitive caps
• Comparing infant brain waves to adult patterns is tricky, says Charles Nelson, a neuropsychologist at Harvard Medical School. "ERP components change dramatically over the first few years of life," he wrote in an email. "I would be reluctant to attribute the same mental operation (i.e., consciousness) in infants as in adults simply because of similar patterns of brain activity

3 more annotations...

• The Pew Research Center recently found that four in 10 American households with children under age 18 include a mother who is either the primary breadwinner or the sole earner (quadruple the share in 1960). The latter category is largely owing to the surge in single-mother households.

• single mothers are more likely to be younger, black or Hispanic, and less educated, according to Pew, and they have a median family income of $23,000. In those families where married women earn more than their husbands, the woman is more often white, older and college educated and the median household income is $80,000.

  In discussions of Pew's findings, conversations the past few days have veered toward practical questions of men's value.
• The ladies worked earnestly to find positive roles for their hirsute colleagues, noting that men can be useful in family planning, child care sharing, working as part of a team. Although a man's presence was implicit in the hypothetical household, I waited futilely for emphasis to shift to the importance of fathers to their children's well-being.
• Because, simply, children need a father. That not all get a good one is no argument against what is true and irrevocable and everlasting. Deep in the marrow of every human child burbles a question far more profound than those currently occupying coffee klatches: Who is my daddy?

2 more annotations...

• These days one often hears people conflate not only “amount” and “number” but also “less” and “fewer,” as in “There were less students in class today.”
• The fundamental distinction that is glossed over in that usage is the one between the continuous and the discrete.
• Simply put, if someone says, for example, that she has worked continuously for twenty years in a particular office, she means that there were no breaks or gaps in her service at that office during that twenty-year period.
• The meaning of “discrete” becomes clear, however, when one uses it in an example: one has one child, two or more children, or none at all. One instinctively understands that it is absurd to talk about 1.2 or 3.5 children. The same thing applies to apples or oranges in a basket.
• Discrete objects are counted, while continuous ones are measured.

• One often hears that ours is the digital age. What does it mean? It means, for example, that music recorded in the old days was analog, meaning that the signals were continuous.

   

  In contrast, when music is digitized, the signals are sampled at distinct points in time. Yet if the number of sampling points is large enough, and the duration between successive sampling points very close to, but distinct from, zero, then our ears cannot distinguish between the continuous and discrete signals. In other words, it is beyond our powers of resolution. And this sampling at discrete time or space intervals is at the heart of digital technology, the hallmark of our times. Thus when we confound the continuous and the discrete and speak of the “amount” of people, for example, we are in effect saying that digital and analog technologies are the same. Of course, in mathematics itself, there are entirely different sets of ideas and techniques for dealing with continuous as opposed to discrete problems. Any mathematician worth her salt will tell you that they are very different ways of mathematical thinking. (The two points of view meet, however, when one considers asymptotics, i.e. what happens in the long run. This is rather like two parallel lines meeting in the far distance, at what mathematicians call the point at infinity.)

4 more annotations...

• He knew intelligence has a strong biological component. If your parents are smart, you'll probably be smart — even without a lot of fuss about the right schools and learning environments.
• "Well, I may have been wrong," he admits. "It may well be that the environmental boost you can get, or the detriment you can suffer through adversity, may indeed be a little more important at a critical period in adolescence than I had previously thought.
• "Until adolescence there are lots of new connections being made between neurons to store patterns and information collected from the environment,"
• In childhood, the brain adds many synapses in the cortex. This comes at a time when the brain is especially responsive to learning. This is typically followed by cortical pruning in adolescence, as the brain shifts from hyperlearning mode.
• "The developing brain is a much more flexible organ than the mature brain."
• Learning doesn't stop at adolescence, of course, but the "sensitive period" — where the brain is hyperlearning mode — does appear to come to an end. Learning new things gets harder.
• At least that's the typical pattern.
• Among some children with very high IQs, the brain appears to stay in learning hyperdrive for an extended period.
• "Even if in the end the IQ ends up being determined to a large extent by the genes, if there's been a period where the environment makes a difference, that could have lifelong consequences,"

7 more annotations...

• Dyslexia may be caused by impaired connections between auditory and speech centers of the brain, according to a study published today in Science.
• When people learn to read, their brains make connections between written symbols and components of spoken words. But people with dyslexia seem to have difficulty identifying and manipulating the speech sounds to be linked to written symbols.
• found that phonetic representations of language remain intact in adults with dyslexia, but may be less accessible than in controls because of deficits in brain connectivity.
• Even when the study participants were not doing any tasks, activity in these areas was less correlated in the brains of the dyslexic people than in the controls, suggesting that they had weaker communication between their auditory and speech centers.
• "the problem seems to be in pathways down the road that help us assemble those sounds and produce those sounds when we read out loud"

3 more annotations...

• New research explores gender disparities in business school enrollment by the different ways men and women appear to process ethical compromise.
• at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, David, and she's noticed over the years that there are always more men than women in her classes
• men tend to have more lenient ethical standards than women, and secondly, that negotiators are more likely to tell a blatant lie to a female counterpart than a male counterpart.
• men tend to apply ethical principles egocentrically. And what that means is that when an ethical decision affects them negatively, they're likely to perceive the situation as being unethical. But when the situation benefits them, they're likely to say: Well, it's a gray area - it's not such a big deal.
• at in every step of the process, right from business school on to the actual corporate world, women are confronting a triple hurdle. The first hurdle is that men are more willing to accept jobs that involve ethical compromise. Men seem to be less plagued by ethical doubt. And women are not only plagued by ethical doubt, they're actually targeted for deception.
• It's her hope that if women actually understand the way they're thinking about business, that they actually understand that process, they will find a way to stay in the game and also stay ethical.

4 more annotations...

• Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.

  “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,”
• Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement.
• Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading — comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper — and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.

• The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.

  Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions.
• The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
• Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material.
• Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain.

5 more annotations...

• Having a baby alters new mothers' brain activity, researchers have found, and a new study adds the first evidence of such changes in the brains of gay men raising children they adopted through surrogacy.

   

    The men's pattern of brain activity resembles that of both new mothers and new fathers in the study.
• The current study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
• builds on work by neuropsychologist Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University and others, who showed that the brains of new mothers become hyper-reactive to their child's cries and other emotional cues.
• It was not clear if that pattern is a result of the hormonal and other changes that accompany pregnancy or a response to the experience of motherhood.
• The 48 gay fathers raising children with their husbands seemed to be both mom and dad, brain-wise. Their emotional circuits were as active as those of mothers and the interpretive circuits showed the same extra activity as that of heterosexual fathers'.
• Ideally, scientists would perform neuroimaging on men and women before and then after they became parents, to show definitely that any heightened activity followed junior's arrival and was not present before. Until they can do that, Feldman said, she is confident that the telltale brain activity results from parenting.
• One clue: in gay fathers, but not heterosexual ones, the brain also had extra communication lines between emotional and cognitive structures. The more time a man spent as primary caregiver, the greater the connectivity.

5 more annotations...

• Science, Trust And Psychology In Crisis

• There's a gap between what you get in a polished scientific presentation or publication and actual scientific practice — the minute details of what happens in the preparation, execution, analysis and reporting of every study. And that gap can be traversed with more or less diligence and care.

  The gap between practice and publication is one reason psychology is embroiled in what some are calling a "replication crisis" — a lack of confidence in the reality of many published psychological results.
• One of the most common practices to undergo recent scrutiny is so-called "p-hacking," which an article at Nature news includes in a list of statistical muddles encouraged by psychologists' reliance on "p-values," the standard criterion used to evaluate whether a particular pattern of data is likely to result from chance alone
• The best practice is to make most decisions about the study in advance: how many people will participate, whether and why you'll exclude some participants, how you'll define a "regular" listener, and so on. If these decisions are instead made after you've looked at some or all of the data, it's tempting to make the decisions in a way that favors what you expect to find or that supports some other sexy and statistically significant result.
• The more ways you look at the data, the greater the potential to find something with a p-value that meets the criterion of being "less than .05," the magic threshold that governs what psychologists typically consider statistically significant. So without correcting for these choices in some way, you'll inflate the odds of generating a false positive. And because papers rarely include a list of all analyses that didn't pan out in addition to those that did, peer reviewers can only guess at what happened between practice and presentation.
• Researchers who engage in p-diligence are those who engage in practices — such as additional analyses or even experiments — designed to evaluate the robustness of their results, whether or not these practices make it into print.
• If these additional data or analyses reveal anything problematic, p-diligent researchers will temper their claims appropriately, or pursue further investigation as needed.
• P-hacking and p-diligence have something in common: Both involve practices that aren't fully reported in publication. As a consequence, they widen the gap. But let's face it: While the gap can (and sometimes should) be narrowed, it cannot be closed.
• The upshot is that it might not be realistic — or altogether desirable — to close the gap. And so we can't eliminate the role of trust. What we can do is train scientists to traverse it with greater care — with greater p-diligence — and to create a scientific infrastructure that allows them to do so.

7 more annotations...

• A lifetime engaging in intellectually stimulating pursuits may significantly lower your risk for dementia in your golden years, new research suggests.

  Even people with relatively low educational and professional achievements can gain protection against late-life dementia if they adopt a mentally stimulating lifestyle -- reading and playing music and games, for example -- by the time they enter middle-age, the new study contended.
• Artistic endeavors -- including crafts -- participation in group activities and computer work also benefit the aging brain, according to the study, published in the June 23 online issue of JAMA Neurology
• the team tracked nearly 2,000 men and women between the ages of 70 and 89, who enrolled in a Mayo Clinic aging investigation between 2004 and 2009.

1 more annotation...

• The dementia protection afforded by routine intellectual activity alone was weaker than when intellectual activity was also paired up with stimulating jobs and education.
• However, the association seen in this study does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

• Is it possible that hearing such isolated musical components can change the way you think? An ambitious new paper recently published by Jochim Hansen and Johann Melzner in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology argues precisely that.
• The researchers brought pedestrians into a laboratory and played them a short, stripped-down piece of music consisting of a series of alternating chords. Some people heard chords including the tritone; others the perfect fifth.
• What the scientists found is that the simple act listening to either of these two chord sets changed how people processed information in a very basic way
• Underlying these seemingly disparate questions is a relatively new theory in social psychology that has shown itself capable of explaining an impressive variety of human behaviors. It’s known as construal level theory, and its core premise is that there’s a link between how far things are from people and how abstractly they construe them.
• Ponderous, resonant, unfamiliar tonalities—the proverbial “auditory forest”—cause people to construe things abstractly. By contrast, the rapid, consonant, familiar chords of the perfect fifth—the “auditory trees”—bring out the concrete mindset.
• That music can move us is no surprise; it’s the point of the art form, after all. What’s new here is the manner in which the researchers have quantified in fine-grained detail the cognitive ramifications of unpacked melodic compounds.

4 more annotations...

• ne of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease - the most common form of dementia - is the   build-up of beta-amyloid protein deposits in the brain. Now a new study published in the   journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that in some older people, the brain has a way of   compensating for this damage by recruiting extra brain circuits.
• it's very possible that people who spend a lifetime involved in cognitively   stimulating activity have brains that are better able to adapt to potential damage."

• Prof. Jagust says both the groups performed the tasks equally well, but "it turned out that   for people with beta-amyloid deposits in the brain, the more detailed and complex their memory,   the more brain activity there was."

    

  "It seems that their brain has found a way to compensate for the presence of the proteins   associated with Alzheimer's," he adds.

1 more annotation...