Classes – Page 3 – Psychology and More

False memory, Instagram, and Brian Williams

In our Honors General Psychology course, we studied memory a couple weeks ago. The students read a Scientific American article by Elizabeth Loftus about her research on misinformation effects in memory. They were also assigned to write a response paper, and many of them related stories of their own memory fabrications and distortions. Here are a few (anonymous) excerpts:

After thinking about the influence others can have on childhood memories I realized that I mostly remember the stories my family has told me about my childhood; I myself do not remember the events.

When I was four years old, my older sister willed me to remember eating pizza and disliking it. Though I did not remember this event at first, I came to believe it after repeated suggestion. From personal experience, once a false memory is in place, it feels extremely real and convincing. For the next seven years, I would not eat pizza, which is one of my favorite foods.

if my parents retell a story of them buying a new car multiple times, even though I was not present for the purchase, I start visualizing the trip to the car lot, and those visualizations become more real to me. The more I think about the trip, the more details I fill in, and the more real it seems. This type of situation has occurred many times in my life. Having lived through this odd occurrence myself, I am able to easily believe the data collected by Dr. Loftus.

A couple of recent opinion pieces in the New York Times help illustrate these points well. In “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives,” novelist Teddy Wayne explores whether snapshot photos easily taken with mobile devices are beginning to supplant memory for the experiences themselves. In contrast with previous generations, where film and developing was relatively expensive, we cheaply and easily document the minutia of everyday life via photos and videos in the cloud, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. Then the memories surrounding those snapshots and clips slip away.

He cites some research showing this:

Linda Henkel, a professor of psychology at Fairfield University, wrote a 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science in which subjects were given digital cameras and led around an art museum on a guided tour. They were told to photograph certain objects and merely observe others. The participants remembered fewer details about the objects if they had photographed them, as they effectively outsourced their memory to the camera.

“In general, we remember the photographs,” Dr. Henkel said in an interview. “It’s like the family stories we tell. There’s the original experience, and then the story everyone tells every Thanksgiving. The story becomes exaggerated, a schema of the original event. The physical photo doesn’t change over time, but the photo becomes the memory.”

He also points to the recent news story about TV news anchor Brian Williams, who has been accused of lying about his experiences covering the war in Iraq, and suspended from his job for 6 months. His story transformed over the years from being behind a helicopter that was shot down to being in the helicopter that was shot down. Tara Parker-Pope writes a blog post about the possibility (I will say “likelihood”) that it is not so much intentional lie but unintentional memory distortions. She quotes Elizabeth Loftus:

“You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s a teaching moment, and a chance to really try to get information out there about the malleable nature of memory.”

As you will tell by some of the almost 1200 (!) comments to the blog, many people do not believe in the fallibility of memory. Perhaps they are convinced of their own memories as being infallible. I hope none of my students will fall into that camp after our reading and discussions.

Link to Teddy Wayne’s article “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives”

Link to Tara Parker-Pope’s article “Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?”

Psychoanalysis and therapy

In Abnormal Psychology this week, we will be discussing psychotherapy. The NY Times has an opinion piece on the process of psychotherapy from the point of view of a patient. He suddenly and without warning has suicidal ideations and obsessive thoughts about hurting his children. His story is about the power of psychoanalysis. Also note that he is a very active participant in his therapy, which is important for successfully navigating the morass of emotions and memories that come to play in abnormal behavior.

I talked with increasing freedom and trust about anything and everything — dreams, memories, doubts, fears — and about matters that had been hiding in closed rooms of my mind.

Link to the article: Psychotherapy as a Kind of Art – NYTimes.com.

The importance of the biopsychosocial approach to understanding mental illness

In Abnormal Psychology yesterday, we discussed the film Back From Madness, which we watched as a class. One topic raised by a student was how important social support was for the recovery of people in the film.

There is a general misconception (perhaps promoted by pharmaceutical companies) that treating mental illness involves merely “fixing” the neurochemistry or brain circuitry that is responsible for the mental illness. As we will see in class, the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is much more complex.

An Op-Ed in the Sunday Times Magazine questions the categorization of people with mental illness as simply having an underlying neurochemical imbalance. It calls for a more nuanced notion of mental illness:

The implications are that social experience plays a significant role in who becomes mentally ill, when they fall ill and how their illness unfolds. We should view illness as caused not only by brain deficits but also by abuse, deprivation and inequality, which alter the way brains behave. Illness thus requires social interventions, not just pharmacological ones.

I agree, and always point out that diagnosis and treatment should always proceed from the biopsychosocial (emphasis intentional) perspective—that although the individual’s biology plays a part in predisposing a person to illness, individual construal processes and social systems are very (perhaps more) important in diagnosing and treating psychological disorders.

Link to the article: Redefining Mental Illness – NYTimes.com.

The benefits of heuristics and impulse decisions

The NY Times has a very good article illustrating the benefits of heuristic decision making processes over algorithmic ones. In this case, the author is talking about how long he spends making purchasing decisions. This is very familiar to me.

the time I spend overanalyzing prices will cost me way more money, in the form of opportunity costs and cognitive drain, than I could ever hope to save.

We generally believe that the best decisions come from examining all options and making a decision based on all available evidence. But, this evidence gathering comes at a cost: in this case, the personal resources (financial and otherwise) that are spent making the decision.

We need to accept that we can’t always make the best decisions, but we can make good ones. Generally, good decisions will make the most of our resources and free us to move on to other important things.

In cognitive complexity theory, one of the things we drive home is the idea that the situation might determine the maximum amount of complex thinking we can apply to a problem. For example, consider how the US might respond to another massive terrorist attack (or attack from another nation). When deciding whether to go to war or not, we can use more complexity if making a decision in the weeks or months before we are under attack, but in the case of a surprise attack, that kind of complex thinking could take lots of time and resources, two things we are desperately short of in the midst of an attack. In that case, taking the time and resources necessary to consider all the options (high complexity) might result in a slow response and the likelihood of more attacks, versus using heuristics and considering fewer options (lower complexity) which might allow a rapid response to avert another attack.

Link to the article: Getting Over Cold Feet: The Case for Impulse Buying – NYTimes.com.

Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and its implications for police violence against blacks

The NY Times has a good interview with social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and how it illustrates some underlying principles that might have been at work in the recent cases of excessive police violence directed at African Americans. The take-home message is that only through awareness of our unconscious biases can we hope to overcome the tendency to treat groups differently.

One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how it’s different from old-fashioned racism. I don’t think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.

Link to the NY Times article: A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com.

Getting involved in research as an undergrad

SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) published a brief primer on getting involved in research as an undergraduate. It’s worth checking out:

Link to the article at SPSP.org.

Fast food and impatience

In Social Psychology last semester, we read a paper by Zhong & DaVoe* that showed a causal relationship between exposure to fast food logos (as opposed to local sit-down restaurant logos) and impatience through a number of measures. Today Sanford DaVoe published an interesting Op-Ed in the NY Times where he reviews some archival and survey data analysis that shows this effect might be present not only in the lab but in the “real” world, and may affect our well-being. He concludes:

our research highlights the need to think more explicitly about the subtle cues in our everyday living environment. Put differently, one important step you can take to nudge yourself toward being more patient would be to live in a neighborhood that doesn’t constantly bombard you with reminders of instant gratification.

I have a bit of a problem with that last sentence. While some of us have such choices through the benefits of structural inequalities, many do not. As we covered in Stereotyping and Prejudice this semester, the choice of where we live is largely determined by socioeconomic factors including race and its correlate, income.

In addition, television is the major force bombarding us with these reminders; that crosses neighborhood boundaries. Thus, I would call for restrictions or bans on public advertisements for fast food. However, such a public health initiative might not go over well with the more conservative parts of our legislative bodies. Remember that conservativism is correlated with individualism and Protestant Work Ethic which would imply that it is not the environment but rather the individual weaknesses of people who are susceptible to such advertisements.

Round and around, that’s the way things go. — Lucy Kaplansky

Link to “Big Mac, Thin Wallet”, the Op-Ed in the NY Times

* Reference: Zhong, C., & DeVoe, S. E. (2010). You are how you eat: Fast food and impatience.Psychological Science, 21 (5), 619–622. Available here, or here as a PDF.

Personalizing Mental Illness

In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we just finished studying stigma, and mental illness is heavily stigmatized. A recent article in the NY Times is about a project to use oral history to help personalize the experience of mental illness. As we studied, the more you can provide individuating information, the more stereotypes can be weakened in person perception.

One thing I learned was that as soon as you mentioned the word, people stopped seeing the person. They just saw the diagnosis and a collection of symptoms.

Link to the article in the NY Times Well blog.

Some links from my students

I have great students in Social Cognition and Stereotyping and Prejudice. They engage with the class material deeply and connect it to their everyday experience. They often comment about how much they see different forms of social cognitive processes and stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination all around them that they hadn’t seen before taking the class.

They have sent me some links to material online that I thought I’d share.

In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we have been studying prejudice and hate groups. One student sent a link to a page exploring the head of the Arkansas white supremacist organization, who lives in Little Rock’s “Heights” neighborhood, an area of relatively affluent “old money.” An interesting irony is that one of the photos shown from the organization’s Facebook page was of a birthday party at a local pizza restaurant, where all of the members were engaged in the Nazi salute. The ironic part is that the birday party was for a child (shown in a wheelchair) who is disabled. Such individuals were condemned to death under the Nazi regime in Germany as a threat to the integrity of the Aryan race. Click here for the page about the leader, and here for a page from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describing the Nazi’s extermination of disabled individuals.

In Social Cognition, we recently covered ironic processes of mental control, and the fact that the more we focus on suppressing a thought, the more likely it is to affect our behavior. A student sent a link to a commercial for Expedia that illustrates it. Click here for the commercial.

Click here for a Buzzfeed page (inspired by something similar at Harvard) about the experience of stereotyping and prejudice experienced by students (usually of color) at Oxford University who are commonly assumed to have some “exotic” or foreign experience that makes them different/got them admission/etc.

A student sent a link to a video showing some children’s reaction to a recent Cheerios commercial that apparently cause some consternation among adults about it’s portrayal of an interracial family. Click here for the video.

We were discussing affirmative action and a student sent this:
This photo is what I was thinking of for our discussion of affirmative action last week.
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff112/DeeOlive/toon2.jpg
Also this is an interesting website.
http://www.understandingrace.com/home.html

Apparently on campus there was a bit of an uproar over a party that was planned by some students and to which the entire campus was invited. The theme was implicitly racist, and so it naturally caused some consternation. I assume the students who did the planning didn’t realize the implicit racism in the concept:

“So, surprising news. Kind of gossip, but it pertains to class. The entire student body has been invited to a party named “Thugs n’ Kisses” and I don’t think I would see the perpetual racism of it if I hadn’t been in class. Students of all kinds are currently revolting. But I was just going to let you know.”

I sent the student a link to an article on how Halloween costumes represent racist ideology, implicitly and explicitly. Click here for access to the article. Here’s a link to another interesting page on a class project based on that article.

A student sent this link to an “experiment” (not really) that illustrated how attribution might be different for whites or blacks in terms of crime.

Botox, Depression, and Embodiment

In Social Cognition, we read a review article about embodiment – the idea that our cognitions and emotions are influenced by our physiological states. Embodied cognition and emotion research is really in its early stages, but it has a long history – back to Darwin’s studies. Some of these studies (for example, Paul Ekman’s research) indicate that by manipulating our facial muscles to simulate emotions induces the emotional state physiologically and psychologically.

The NY Times has an article on new research that shows greater depression relief among people who had Botox than a saline control injection in their forehead muscles, which are involved in frowning.

I was thinking about this from a social psychological perspective, and believe that at least part of this effect may be a social one. Consider that someone who has a history of depression likely has a social network used to seeing the person depressed. Those individuals may be interacting with the depressed person in ways that reinforce the depression, for example, with pity or sadness (cf. self-fulfilling prophecy). Now consider how those people might respond if the depressed person’s expression has less indicators of depression because of the Botox injections. They may respond to the person with more positive affect and thus lifting the person’s mood.

That proposition has lots of assumptions that I don’t have the time to validate, but it seems plausible on the face.

Link to the NY Times article “Don’t Worry, Get Botox”

[T]hese Botox studies underscore one of the biggest challenges in treating people with depression. [Depressed individuals] might think that the reason they are depressed is that they have little interest in the world or their friends — a mistaken notion that is the result, not the cause, of their depression. They insist that only once they feel better will it make sense for them to rejoin the world, socialize and start smiling. Their therapists would be well advised to challenge their inverted sense of causality and insist that they will start feeling better after they re-engage with the world.

And, I would add to that quote, the world re-engages with them in positive ways.