Category: Classes

Categories for classes I teach

Psychology Of A Pedophile

Later in Abnormal Psychology we will be studying Sexual Disorders. One such disorder is generally known as paraphilias, disorders that are characterized by the preference for atypical sexual practices, but most importantly practices or desires that the person is distressed by or that cause harm to another or involve unwilling partners or those who cannot give consent. One such paraphilia is pedophilic disorder. There’s an interesting article in IFL Science on pedophiles that covers the behaviors, causes, and implications.

One of the points made in the article is that 90% of sexual abuse of minors is by someone known to the victim. This statistic made me think of the current moral panic over transgender individuals using the bathroom of their gender identity. A main argument made by the Texas attorney general is that some pedophile might switch gender identity for a day to gain access to children in bathrooms. Specifically, he claimed non-discrimination would set up a situation that would allow “men to have open access to girls in bathrooms.”

Unfortunately his argument is specious, since it involves public schools, which already have policies in place to prevent people from entering the grounds that do not have legitimate business there. So, a pedophile would not be able to walk off the street and into a girls bathroom without breaking the law.

While I can appreciate the horror that any parent will feel thinking that their child could possibly be abused by a stranger in a bathroom, I believe the resources of the state of Texas and the other states joining the lawsuit would be better spent on identifying children at risk for actual abuse in their own homes or by someone they know, and preventing that abuse, or funding treatment, rather than to propose a lawsuit framed by worry about a hypothetical abuse that is statistically much much less likely.

Furthermore, the health and productivity cost to transgender people caused by discrimination is real, not hypothetical. Rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and substance use are much higher (also see this abstract) in transgender people, compared to non-transgender individuals, and it is exacerbated discrimination, and the identity conflict that discrimination sets up.

Why would we want to create policies and laws that limit the potential of anyone to live a full, happy life, and that might contribute to their depression, substance use, and suicide? Oh right, it’s an election year.

Having worked with police forces in Australia and the United Kingdom identifying those who sexually prey on children, people are always asking me how you can tell a paedophile from everyone else. Well, I can tell you one thing – they don’t have horns and tails. They look and act like you and me. Except for one key difference: they’re sexually attracted to children. What Is A Paedophile?

Source: Psychology Of A Paedophile: Why Are Some People Attracted To Children? | IFLScience

Promise derailed

picThe Washington Post has a profile of a star athlete who was bound for the WNBA, until schizophrenia took her off course. It is a striking profile, and well illustrates the potential for stress to sometimes trigger the emergence of this disorder.

Link to the article: How one of the nation’s most promising basketball players became homeless – The Washington Post.

Apple, Human Factors, and I/O Psychology

Fast Company has an excellent analysis, written by the progenitors of the Apple User Interface Guidelines, of Apple’s move away from fundamental design principles in the quest for beauty in their user interfaces.

These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles.

Human factors and I/O Psychology came into play when they developed the original user interface. It seems they are not paying the same attention to experimental evidence of what works.

I have noticed that the Mac OS has become more inconsistent and difficult to use over the last several years. As iOS and Mac OS converge, there are confusions and requirements for me to remember what works when and where. In the past, the consistency and simplicity of the interface made operations much less demanding on the user.

Link to the article: How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name.

Weight stigma negatively impacts mental and physical health

We talked about weight stigma in General Psychology a week or so ago. A good article in the NY Times illustrates the depth of the problem. A new study by a social psychology graduate student, Jeffrey Hunger, at UC Santa Barbara finds:

those who were overweight or obese were more likely to report problems like depression, anxiety, substance abuse and low self-esteem if they had experienced weight-based discrimination in the past.

It also includes a quote from a professor of popular culture, Courtney Bailey:

fat stigma intensified after 9/11, when Americans’ sense of vulnerability translated into increased animosity toward the fat body

This echoes some research we did in Mark Shcaller’s lab at UBC where it was found that perceived vulnerability to disease was correlated with anti-fat prejudice.

Link to the article: Is Fat Stigma Making Us Miserable? – The New York Times.

Making sure we consider the biopsychosocial model

The NY Times has a good Op-Ed piece by George Makari on the problem of mental health being reduced to biological processes. It argues that we need to be careful to not dismiss the power of psychological and social factors in mental health and illness. This is the “biopsychosocial” model I refer to frequently in class. He uses the 2015 study by Kane, et al. that I presented in class as an example of the strength of a multi-modal understanding of mental illness and treatment. He also lambasts the NIH for making new rules that require grants to include biomarkers and neurological circuit investigations in future researcn.

clinical pragmatism has seriously declined in the United States, as psychiatry has veered toward pharmacology

Link to the article: Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem – The New York Times.

The power of false memory

In General Psychology, we just finished talking about memory. There is a good article in the NY Times today demonstrating how eyewitnesses can very easily create false memories of events. Largely this process is enhanced by the strong emotions surrounding traumatic events. We tend to try filling in gaps in memories with our ideas of what “should” have happened, largely as a product of schemas.

Link to the article: Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory – The New York Times.

Loss Aversion and the Stock Market

stockThe stock market losses over the last several days leads some individual investors to panic and start selling, or if they don’t sell, they moan and groan about the losses.

The problem is that the losses are relatively small, but feel like they are bigger than they really are. And the loss feels twice as painful as the equivalent gain would feel joyous. So we freak out.

This is the basis for a well-demonstrated cognitive bias called “loss aversion” in psychology. Justin Wolfers writes about it in the New York Times, and gives credit to the Nobel prize winning psychologist Dan Kahneman, developer of prospect theory.

Link to How Emotion Hurts Stock Returns – The New York Times.

When You’re in Charge, Your Whisper May Feel Like a Shout – The New York Times

In Industrial-Organizational Psychology this fall, the class will be exploring issues such as leadership, organizational systems, and motivation, etc. Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist who has done a lot of research on the dynamics of power in organizational contexts. He has written a good Op-Ed piece about the strong effects (both positive and negative) that we can have on others when we are in a position of power over them.

the words of those with power loom large over those with less power. This is a phenomenon I call the power amplification effect.

via When You’re in Charge, Your Whisper May Feel Like a Shout – The New York Times.

Justice and Bias, Mental Health and Poverty, Oh My!

Two recent opinion pieces provide some interesting perspective on topics we have discussed recently in Social Psychology class: implicit bias and social drift. Implicit bias is the ways we are influenced to judge other people based on baises we are completely unaware of. It has influence in many areas of law and decision making from police shootings to suspect lineups to jury and judge decisions. Adam Benforado is a law professor at Drexel University:

With the aid of psychology, we see there’s a whole host of seemingly extraneous forces influencing behavior and producing systematic distortions. But they remain hidden because they don’t fit into our familiar legal narratives.

via Flawed Humans, Flawed Justice – NYTimes.com.

We also talked about social drift in Abnormal Psychology. Nicholas Christof has an excellent opinion piece summarizing a lot of research on the relationships between poverty and mental health (among other health problems):

If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas like domestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely to have trouble in school, to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, to have trouble in relationships.“There’s a strong association between poverty and low mental health,” notes Johannes Haushofer, a psychologist at Princeton University.

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

via It’s Not Just About Bad Choices – NYTimes.com.

Reasoning and problem solving question

A recent reading quiz question in the area of problem solving confused a student. The student wrote:

Dr. Leighton,
Could you please explain to me why this is wrong? I was confused by the book, because it does say that you can have a “valid but incorrect conclusion” if the “premises use terms inconsistently or ambiguously”, which the term environmentalist is very broad and could be considered ambiguous in the question, so I am not really sure what the correct answer is.

This is a good question. Here is the question and answers from the quiz:

Mr. Smith is running for Congress. Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. Because Alejandro cares about the environment, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist, and he regrets having voted for him. Alejandro’s mistake was forgetting that:

Question
Mr. Smith is running for Congress. Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. Because Alejandro cares about the environment, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist, and he regrets having voted for him. Alejandro’s mistake was forgetting that:
Answers
Selected A. a conclusion is true only if the premises are true
B. a conclusion can be valid without being true
C. premises with ambiguous terms lead to incorrect conclusions
D. both B and C

The student thought both B and C should be correct. The correct answer is A. Why? Here’s what I wrote to the student:

This is a good question. Lets walk through the example.

Remember that a syllogism has a premise and conclusion. In this case, what’s the premise and conclusion?

I think the premise is that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. I think the conclusion is that Mr. Smith will act like an environmentalist.

I don’t think that “environmentalist” here is ambiguous. What I think the issue is whether the premise is correct. So, what is the basis for the premise?

The basis for the premise is what Alejandro heard about Mr. Smith. That’s a pretty suspicious basis for the premise – so I think the weakest part of the example is whether what Alejandro heard about Mr. Smith is true.

The evidence that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist indicates that the conclusion is incorrect, and thus the premise is not true. Thus, the conclusion is only valid if the premise is true.

Does that help?

Lets use another example.

Instead of “environmentalist” we substitute something more ambiguous: how about “can fly?” Then we can get something like:

Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith can fly. Because Alejandro thinks it would be awesome to have someone with superhuman powers in congress, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith doesn’t have feathers and has never been seen flying around the capitol, but instead is just an airplane pilot, and he regrets having voted for him.

Now we have a conclusion (Mr. Smith has superhuman powers) that is based on an ambiguous premise (Mr. Smith can fly).

Make sense?