Psychology Research

On Thursday, for Darwin’s 200th birthday, I went down to Raleigh to the Museum of Natural Science to hear Carl Zimmer’s talk. The room was packed – I got the last empty seat and there were people standing in the back. A very mixed audience, as Museum talks usually are – there were evolutionary biologists there from Nescent and the W.M.Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU, there were Museum staff, and then there were interested lay-people, museum-goers, with no formal background in science but interested and curious. It is not easy giving a talk to such a mixed audience – how to keep the jaded Evolution-warriors interested, while not going over the heads of the non-experts, but Carl delivered masterfully. After introducing briefly Darwin the person and his work, in broad brush-strokes, Carl did an interesting thing – he chose several stories and told us what Darwin thought and wrote about them, and what we now know due to recent exciting research: from evolution of whales, through human evolution, to bacteria and viruses. The result was that he did not tell but demonstrated two points: first, that Darwin was generally correct, and second, that evolutionary biology made tremendous strides over the past 150 years. With each story one was left to think – how cool Darwin would think the new findings are if he were suddenly resurrected and shown the data! The questions afterwards were good – not high-tech questions one would hear at a scientific conference, but good, thoughtful questions by lay audience, the kind often heard at Science Cafes. And only one question refered to the Culture Wars – how do we deal with the existence and influence of Creationists in the USA? If there were any Creationists in the audience, they certainly remained quiet and inconspicuous. Afterwards, Carl and I went back to Durham and joined a bunch of local bloggers, scientists and science communicators, Craig McClain , Anton Zuiker and Russ Campbell among others, for some food and beer at Tyler’s. Good time was had by all. Finally, you should also check Carl’s latest article in TIME: Evolving Darwin Read the comments on this post…

The African lungfish Protopterus , from A Text-Book of Zoology . Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans , an African relative of an eel-like animal that was found by the Austrian explorer Johan Natterer in the depths of the Amazon jungle in 1837. The naturalist sent two specimens back to the Vienna Museum where they were quickly described by Leopold Fitzinger under the name Lepidosiren paradoxa . Fitzinger considered the organisms to be “perennibranchiate reptiles”, meaning that it was a primitive amphibian that did not undergo metamorphosis. Instead, according to the author of a helpful Living Age column, it remained “a gill-breathing, muddy, fishlike groveller, all the days of its life.” The animal Owen had was different,* but it was similar enough to Natterer’s specimen to allow for a close comparison of this important new genus. As a Philosophical Magazine summary of Owen’s lecture reported; Mr. Owen observed, that since the time of the discovery of the Ornithorhynchus [duck-billed platypus] there had not been submitted to naturalists a species which proved more strongly the necessity of a knowledge of its whole organization, both external and internal, in order to arrive at a correct view of its real nature and affinities, than did the Lepidosiren … According to Owen the Lepidosiren was a fish, a creature close to the “perennibranchiate reptiles” but more suitable as a link between cartilaginous fish (like sharks) and the “malacopterygians” (fish like the aquarium favorite the birchir ). Owen’s assessment was eventually confirmed by other scientists, but it was still often presented as an extremely primitive “reptile” (i.e. amphibian) or as the “missing link” between fish and amphibians.** Indeed, Lepidosiren was a “transitional form” that took naturalists by surprise during a time when thoughts of evolution were percolating through the scientific establishment. Even stranger, however, was the claim that in the steaming depths of the Amazon were gigantic individuals of these lungfish that regularly preyed upon large prey at the water’s edge. A December 1847 issue of the newspaper The Friend relayed the report of L.A. da Silva e Souza that the lake Padre Aranda in Brazil was home to creatures called minhocoes that “dwell in the deepest part of the lake, and have often drawn horses and horned cattle under the water.” The creatures were also reported to inhabit Lake Feia, and the local people said they were giant worms that “cause[d] animals to disappear by seizing them by the belly.” The skull of Lepidosiren , from The Illustrated Natural History . (If it reminds you of Dunkleosteus , just wait until next week.) Much of the information from this report came from a widely-reprinted paper by M. Auguste de Saint Hilaire, who had collected anecdotal evidence about the creature during his visit to the region. At first he thought tales of the monster had been inspired by a kind of electric knifefish, Gymnotus , but the local people were already familiar with this animal. A better fit, Hilaire said, was the Lepidosiren which had, of course, been first discovered in the Amazon. Anatomical investigations had revealed just how wicked the jaws of the peaceful-looking lungfish were, and perhaps there was some gigantic form haunting the rivers and lakes of Brazil. Hilaire closed his report with a plea for his fellow zoologists to visit the area to unravel the truth; Zoologists who travel over these distant countries will do well to sojourn on the borders of the lake Feia, of the lake Padre Aranda, or of the Rio des Piloes, in order to ascertain the perfect truth–to learn precisely what the minhocao is; or whether, notwithstanding the testimony of so many persons, even of the most enlightened men, its existence should be, which is not very likely, rejected as fabulous. Hilaire’s colleagues did not seem to be in any rush to confirm his hypothesis, but the minhocao continued to be mentioned every now and then in the scientific and popular literature. The first follow-up report would be delivered by the German entomologist Fritz Muller nearly three decades after Hilare’s notice. As reported an 1878 issue of the Popular Science Monthly (itself a summary of a report that appeared in Nature ) Muller had heard that a fish three feet across was spotted along a river in Brazil. When the person who saw it went to get others, however, the animal disappeared. The party that rushed to the scene only saw the burrow the animal made in its efforts to escape. Similar disturbances of the soil were later seen about six kilometers away, but this was a third-hand anecdote Muller had received from another German who lived in the area. Other reports of churned soil and immense burrows were commonly heard in the region, though, and Muller concluded that theywere made by a gigantic lungfish. Even so, no concrete evidence of the monster fish was found and like Hilaire he could only urge his colleagues to look into the phenomenon further. The reports of Hilaire and Muller must have had some influence as the minhocao appeared in a number of books and periodicals. According to J. Hampden Porter the people who shared the landscape with the giant worm-fish believed that it conspired with the jaguar against humans. Indeed, it was said that some people were so scared of it they had abandoned good fishing grounds out of fear. In a compendium of sea-monster tales by Fletcher Bassett it was said to be an amphibious member of a number of mythical water monsters of the Amazon, so large that it made the water rise when it slipped into the water. (The destruction that such a creature might cause was also alluded to, oddly enough, in the book Days on Staten Island .) It even was mentioned by Jules Verne in the story The Giant Raft , and this is especially significant because some authors took Verne’s story as a primary source. All of these references are rather fleeting, however, and the reports by Muller and Hilaire remained the most detailed. Did anyone ever catch a minhocao? According to an article in Good News in 1878 a boy caught a fish that was three feet across in an area where burrows nearly 10 feet wide had been found. Careful reading, however, reveals this to be a bastardized version of Muller’s report. The author of the article apparently mixed and matched various bits of previous anecdotal reports and conjecture to make a new story. The only original part of it was the author’s speculation that “that [the minhocao] may be a relic of the gigantic armadilloes which in past geological epochs were so abundant in South Brazil.” (This report was cannibalized for the “Table Talk” section of Gentleman’s Magazine that told its readers that proof of “gigantic cuttlefish” had recently come to light. It compared the minhocao to cephalopods, extinct marine reptiles, snakes, and prehistoric armadillos.) As the aptly named article ” A Fish With A History ” stated, the tales of the minhocao were probably based upon the Lepidosiren but taken to extremes for one reason or another. This is made all the more plausible by the way the stories switched from being about a worm-like fish that devoured livestock (Hilaire) to an enormous creature that burrowed in the earth (Muller). During the time between Hilaire’s and Muller’s papers it had been discovered that some species lungfish could cocoon themselves in mucus to wait out the dry season in underground burrows, and this discovery appears to have changed the focus of the stories about the minhocao. That the anecdotes about the creature were not consistent and no specimens had been captured certainly hampered the case for its existence. Perhaps the last of the minhocao was heard in 1894 in a Natural Science article about Lepidosiren . It barely garnered a mention, for despite all the fantastic stories it was never found. There was no reason to think it truly existed, although why such a mythology developed remains an open question. The increasingly-inaccurate reports of the animal in English periodicals can be explained, but where did the legend of giant killer lungfish first spring from? *[And, if I am not mistaken, later turned out to belong to a different genus. Owen had previously briefly described the specimen under the genus name Protopterus in 1837 and this distinction was later upheld.] **[I usually detest the phrase "missing link", but here it is appropriate. The discussion over the affinities of Lepidosiren / Polypterus were going on in the days before On the Origin of Species . Evolutionary language was commonly used in reference to them and Owen certainly cast them as transitional forms, yet the mechanism that affected the transition was missing. It could just as easily be said that the Lepidosiren was a result of God's desire to fill nature up and make sure there were no great gaps in nature, a vestige of the Great Chain of Being into which the fish would have fit.] Post-Script : This post was an off-shoot of some other research I have been conducting, but it is rather strange that I forgot that the remains of an enormous extinct snake, Titanoboa , were announced this week. Titanoboa slithered through the ancient Amazon, and while I am in no way making a connection between it and the minhocao, I am surprised that I did not think of it while writing this post! See the posts by Ed , PZ , Jake , Darren , and Rebecca for more. Read the comments on this post…

In the latest Seed , there’s an interesting dialogue between political scientist James Fowler and physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. I was particularly intrigued by their ruminations on the network dynamics of Facebook: JF: When we move from five friends in real life to 500 on Facebook, it’s not the case that we are having a close, deep relationship with each of those 500 friends. In fact, one of the intriguing things I’ve noticed about these online networks is that they have a property that’s different from realworld social networks. As you know, in the real world, popular people tend to be friends with popular people. But in these technological networks, as in metabolic networks, it’s just the opposite. The nodes with many, many links will tend to be linked to nodes with few links. ALB: Right. JF: It makes me wonder if the dynamics of online social networks are going to be reflective of realworld social networks. Because to a large extent, in your work and some of the work that I’ve done, we’re relying on the idea that what we see online is telling us something about the real world. But there’s a pretty fundamental difference. I’m not on Facebook, so take what follows with a hefty pinch of salt, but there’s some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook “page” and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren’t used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. Consider this elegant experiment, led by neuroscientist Joshua Greene of Harvard. Greene asked his subjects a series of questions involving a runaway trolley, an oversized man and five maintenance workers. (It might sound like a strange setup, but it’s actually based on a well-known philosophical thought puzzle.) The first scenario goes like this: You are the driver of a runaway trolley. The brakes have failed. The trolley is approaching a fork in the track at top speed. If you do nothing, the train will stay left, where it will run over five maintenance workers who are fixing the track. All five workers will die. However, if you steer the train right⎯this involves flicking a switch and turning the wheel⎯you will swerve onto a track where there is one maintenance worker. What do you do? Are you willing to intervene and change the path of the trolley? In this hypothetical case, about ninety five percent of people agree that it is morally permissible to turn the trolley. The decision is just simple arithmetic: it’s better to kill fewer people. Some moral philosophers even argue that it is immoral to not turn the trolley, since such passivity leads to the death of four extra people. But what about this scenario: You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track. You see a trolley racing out of control, speeding towards five workmen who are fixing the track. All five men will die unless the trolley can be stopped. Standing next to you on the footbridge is a very large man. He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley hurtle towards the men. If you sneak up on the man and give him a little push, he will fall over the railing and into the path of the trolley. Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley from killing the maintenance workers Do you push the man off the footbridge? Or do you allow five men to die? The brute facts, of course, remain the same: one man must die in order for five men to live. And yet, almost nobody is willing to actively throw another person onto the train tracks. Greene argues that pushing the man feels wrong because the killing is direct: We are using our body to hurt his body. He calls it a personal moral situation, since it directly involves another person. In contrast, when we just have to turn the trolley onto a different track, we aren’t directly hurting somebody else. We are just shifting the trolley wheel: the ensuing death seems indirect. In this case, we are making an impersonal moral decision. What makes this thought experiment so interesting is that the fuzzy moral distinction⎯the difference between personal and impersonal decisions⎯is built into our brain. When the subjects were asked whether or not they should turn the trolley, a network of brain regions assessed the various alternatives, sent their verdict onwards to the prefrontal cortex, and the person chose the clearly superior option. Their brain quickly realized that it was better to kill one man than five men. However, when people were asked whether they would be willing to push a man onto the tracks, a separate network of brain areas was activated. These folds of gray matter⎯the superior temporal sulcus, posterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus⎯are believed to be responsible for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of other people. As a result, these subjects automatically imagined how the poor man would feel as he plunged to his death on the train tracks below. They vividly simulated his mind, and concluded that pushing him was a capital crime, even if it saved the lives of five other men. Pushing a man off a bridge just felt wrong. What does this have to do with Facebook? I think it demonstrates how thinking about a person in physical terms – as someone we need to physically push – changes how the brain represents that person. When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc. Perhaps – and this is a big perhaps, since nobody has done the scanning experiment – we make social decisions concerning many of our Facebook acquaintances using these “impersonal” brain areas. In other words, we might push a Facebook friend off a footbridge, but we’d never push a real friend. I don’t mean to criticize Facebook. I simply agree with Fowler: Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is. Read the comments on this post…

Does one thing inevitably lead to another? New experiments show that disbelief in free will decreases helping behaviours and increases aggression. Chances are you believe in free will – I do too. To me it seems that one moment I want cereal and soon I have it. Next I want to ride my bicycle and soon I am. Later I have an itchy nose, and, in no time at all, it is scratched. But, say some scientists and philosophers, this sense of agency is an illusion: you were hungry and that’s why you ‘wanted’ cereal; you were bored and fed up of being inside so you ‘decided’ to get some exercise; and as for itchy noses, well there is a biological cause for that as well. From a determinist viewpoint each of these actions, and their causes, as well as their causes and their causes can be traced right back to my birth, then back through my parents’ lives, then right back, like clockwork, to the beginning of the universe. The strong determinist view – that we’re locked in an unchanging web of cause and effect going right back to the big bang – is repulsive to many. And quite naturally so, as free will forms the backbone of so many of society’s structures. The criminal justice system is built on the idea that people can choose whether to obey the law or not, therefore people who don’t obey should be punished. Similarly many religious and/or philosophical systems of thought have the notion of free will at their heart. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emphasised the connection between freedom and responsibility. He thought we must take responsibility for our choices, and that taking responsibility was at the heart of a life well lived. This debate about free will is so interesting – and knotted – that philosophers can’t keep away from it; but psychologists, on the other hand, perhaps sensing no end to the argument, can’t help their minds wandering away to more practical points. They have focused more on how beliefs in free will might affect our behaviour and whether, more generally, there might be some reason why we seem predisposed to think we have it. In new research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , Baumeister, Masicampo and DeWall (2009) theorise that a belief in free will may be partly what oils the wheels of society, what encourages us to treat each other respectfully. They explore this theory with three studies, two on helping behaviours and one on aggression. Free will and helping behaviours In the first experiment Baumeister and colleagues wanted to see how a belief in free will affected how much people were willing to help others. To manipulate their belief in free will participants read statements that either supported free will, supported determinism or had no bearing on the debate. A separate study confirmed that this really was enough to shift people’s thoughts towards determinism or towards free will. Participants then read scenarios in which helping behaviours were explored, for example by asking about giving money to a homeless person. They were asked to rate how much help they would provide to the people in these scenarios. The results showed that, as Baumeister and colleagues predicted, people whose thoughts had been pushed more towards free will were more likely to be helpful than those whose thoughts were pushed towards determinism. So it seems that people really are more helpful when they think they are free to choose as compared to when they believe their actions are pre-determined. Baumeister and colleagues argue that the belief that behaviour is pre-determined encourages people to behave automatically, and often automatic behaviour is selfish. Interestingly there was no difference seen between the free will condition and the neutral condition. What this suggests is that most people do already believe in free and don’t require extra encouragement. Of course we each differ in the amount we believe in free will and this may well affect how much help we are prepared to offer others. A second study by Baumeister and colleagues examined individual differences looking for an association between believing in free will and helping behaviours. Consistent with the previous experiment they found that people who had a ‘chronic disbelief’ in free will were less likely to be helpful to others. Free will and aggression The final experiment flipped the question around: instead of looking at prosocial behaviours they looked at antisocial behaviours. If a disbelief in free will makes people less helpful, perhaps it also makes them more likely to behave aggressively. As before participant’s thoughts were experimentally shifted towards free will or determinism and then their aggressive tendencies were measured. Instead of having people beating each other up in the lab, they chose a more indirect expression of aggression: putting spicy sauce on another person’s food. Participants were introduced to a study about food preferences which, with some complicated manoeuvring, they were encouraged to think had nothing to do with previous statements they read out about free will or determinism. Then they were told to prepare a plate of food for someone else to taste. One of the ingredients they could choose was a hot salsa sauce. The experimenters were interested in whether a belief in free will affected the amount of sauce participants put on the plate. When the participants left, the experimenters measured how much hot sauce they put on the plate. Those who had been primed to think more deterministically had spiced up the food, on average, twice as much as those who were primed to think in terms of free will. This seemed to have nothing to do with being more generous as they didn’t add more of other non-spicy foods, like cheese, to the plate. Believers in free will cheat less These experiments aren’t the first to examine how a belief in free will (or otherwise) affects our behaviour. In a recent study Vohs and Schooler (2008) also found that a belief in free will seems to have a positive effect on people’s behaviour. In that experiment (covered by Cognitive Daily ) participants whose disbelief in free will was encouraged were more likely to cheat on a test. These studies, then, point out the positive effect of free will on a variety of behaviours that most people would consider beneficial. Indeed it seems that most of us already have a firm belief in free will and so we’re already benefiting. Practically the danger is that our thoughts take a more deterministic turn and we move towards more aggression and cheating and away from helping behaviours. Compatibilism: reconciling determinism with free will This leaves us with a serious problem. If we think scientifically about the world then we have to accept that one thing really does lead to another; the reason I ‘decide’ to eat cereal is that I’m hungry, so in some sense the determinist is right. But a disbelief in free will is not only repugnant, it’s also dangerous for society. If we don’t have free will, a perverse kind of anarchism emerges, one which seems to encourage us to act any way we choose. After all if we don’t have free will then we’re not to blame for anything we do. One way some philosophers have tried to resolve this conflict is by pointing out that determinism and free will are not necessarily incompatible. Using everyday notions of free will philosophers have put forward a viewpoint that tries to integrate the two (see philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett’s book ‘ Freedom Evolves ‘ for a cognitive perspective). Classical compatiblists argue that we have free will if we have the power and ability to do things that we want to do. For example, say I want to go and buy a pint of milk for my cereal, and the shop is open, and I can get there, and I have money. For a compatibilist I have free will if I can choose to go, or, alternatively, not go. The fact that I do actually go (mainly because I’m hungry and want to eat cereal) doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t have the choice not to go. Compatibilists emphasise this idea that we have free will because we could have chosen to do otherwise, even if we didn’t. This idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’ is a powerful one, and one that appeals to our everyday experience. It doesn’t solve the dilemma of determinism but at least it provides a stick with which to fend it off. So when one person chooses not to help another, or chooses to behave aggressively, there must be reasons for that behaviour, many of which might appear to deny their responsibility. Ultimately, though, the proponent of free will has to argue this person could always have chosen to do otherwise. We have to cling to this belief, don’t we? [Image credit: evoo73 ]

Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought processes; they are often bizarre and completely unrelated to conventional cultural or religious belief systems, or to the level of intelligence of the person suffering from them. The delusions experienced by psychiatric patients are sometimes categorized according to their theme. For example, schizophrenics often suffer from delusions of control (the belief that an external force is controlling their thoughts or actions), delusions of grandeur (the belief that they are a famous rock star or historical figure) or delusions of persecution (the belief that they are being followed, attacked or conspired against).   Although often associated with psychiatric disorders, delusions can also occur as a symptom of neurodegenerative disorders , and improved diagnostic methods have led to an increase in the identification of brain damage in patients who suffer from them. To date, however, there has not been an all-encompassing theory of how the brain generates delusions. Now though, Orrin Devinsky, a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry at New York University, proposes that delusions are generated by a combination of right hemisphere damage and left hemisphere hyperactivity. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

An astonishing recent discovery in computational neuroscience is the relationship between dopamine and the “temporal differences” reinforcement learning algorithm (which Jake describes wonderfully here , and I’ve described in a little more detail here ). The essential principle is that the difference between expected and received reward can be used to drive learning, and that this abstract learning theory can be tracked by the spikes and dips of dopamine in vivo (for under-expectation and over-expectation of reward, respectively). Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

From the syllabus: Why Psychology?! Psychology 100 is the most popular course at nearly every university and there’s a reason why. The science of psychology covers an amazing range of topics. After all, the mind can do many amazing things! Oh yeah, it also fulfils a GenEd requirement Nearly everyone probably has a different idea of what psychology actually is. That’s not surprising since even people who have been in the field for many, many years still disagree what should be a part of psychology and what should not. Psychology covers topics ranging from depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia to how we generate and understand language, to why we have a particular cell in our brain dedicated to Halle Barry. Some ‘psychologists’ even study things like extra sensory perception (ESP) – although we won’t be studying that in this class (or probably any other class in the psych department). Our goals for this class will be for you to explore two basic ideas: 1.) What do Psychologists study? 2.) How does Psychology impact my day to day life? By investigating these two ideas through the course readings, attending and participating in class, and being diligent in your studying I hope that you will be able to both get a great grade in this course and understand what Psychology is. You will be able to critically explore its place in society as well as the media which so awfully messes it up most of the time. Is this way too much hand wavy b.s.? Or… would you rather see this as a replacement? General Information: This course is a general survey of the field of psychology. Topics include perception, learning, memory, thinking, motivation, emotion, personality, development, intelligence, therapy, psychopathology, and other areas of psychology. Read the comments on this post…

Like many of you, I have recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers, which presents his perspective on success and the people who achieve it. Like his previous books, Outliers is well-written and provocative. We should all pause for a positive psychology moment and be grateful that such a talented writer is among us. Gladwell’s concern is with celebrated accomplishment like that attained by John D. Rockefeller, the Beatles, and Bill Gates. Prodigious achievement is an often over-looked member of the positive psychology family. Getting much more positive psychology attention are the warm and fuzzy family members, the ones we want to hug because they hug back: happiness, hope, kindness, and love. In contrast, accomplishment is elite and exclusive and for many of us not nearly so embraceable. Nonetheless, accomplishment matters mightily and obviously contributes to the life worth living. The arguments advanced in Outliers square with the research as I know it. First, prodigious achievement does not simply happen because of an individual’s genius. Talent matters but is not sufficient. Rather, achievement results from the alignment of all sorts of factors external to the individual: being born in the right time and place, having access to appropriate resources, and receiving instruction and encouragement. No one does it alone. There are no self-made men or women. Rugged individualism is ruggedly wrong. Second, before success is achieved, someone needs to put in years of work perfecting a craft, whatever it may be. Gladwell suggests 10,000 hours as the minimum commitment, and this may be an underestimate. Psychologists who study achievement talk about the 10-Year Rule, meaning that people who make important contributions to a particular field have usually devoted a full decade to the mastery of necessary knowledge and skills. Psychologists also talk about the 12-Seven Rule, meaning that this decade needs to be filled with 12-hour work days, seven days a week. Sound daunting? Of course, but American Idol notwithstanding, there are no shortcuts to excellence. This conclusion may not be what many young people want to hear. I sat on a train the other day next to a young woman. We talked about her career aspirations, and I gently mentioned the 10-Year Rule. She kept changing the topic to "positive imaging" as a better principle to follow. I persisted because it is irresponsible for those of us who know better to let our children think that success comes easy or overnight, that it is just a matter of finding one’s passions and interests, printing business cards, starting websites, or – heaven forbid – simply wishing and hoping for success. Third, Gladwell stresses the role of legacy in achievement, by which he means the affordances of the cultural group into which one is born. In given times and places, legacy makes achievement in a particular domain easier. For example, Gladwell discusses Jewish lawyers from a generation past who were not hired by elite (i.e., WASP-y) law firms and thus had to start their own firms. These elite law firms also did not handle certain sorts of cases – like the occasional corporate takeover – which necessarily fell into the laps of the "other" law firms. As business and legal landscapes changed to make corporate takeovers more common and exceedingly lucrative, it is not surprising who flourished. In closing, I would like to suggest that the ideas in Outliers may apply to another sort of achievement: happiness. Here I mean more than somewhat above-the-scale midpoint life satisfaction. I mean prodigious happiness, not extraverted mania but a life that entails walking on sunshine, one that makes onlookers shake their head and say wow. Each of us probably knows a few people who are happy in this prodigious way. Were they simply born that way? Would they be happy in any and all circumstances? Extrapolating from Gladwell’s book, I say no. A cheerful temperament and secure attachment may set the stage, but a happiness outlier, no less than an achievement outlier, further represents a perfect storm of enabling factors, many external to the person, as well as the absence of disabling factors. This sounds fatalistic and probably not the starting point for a self-help book. But remember the role played by sustained practice in the lives of achievement outliers. There are things we can do to be happier, but these probably take many years to perfect. Research suggests that happiness and life satisfaction do not increase with age. If we take these data at face value, they mean either that people are not trying to be happier or – more likely – that they do not know how to do so. Perhaps this can be a long-term contribution of positive psychology. However, positive psychologists need to do more than provide a reasonable formula. We also need to provide the warning label: This will take a really long time! Can we speak about a happiness legacy? Gladwell’s discussion of legacy is the most interesting part of his book but also the most tenuous. "Culture" is a sprawling term, and in focusing on one aspect of culture to explain achievement, he necessarily ignores all of the others that may also be crucial. So, he attributes the mathematical accomplishments of East Asian school children to the fact that China, Japan, and Korea are rice-based economies. It takes a lot of hard work to grow rice, a cultural lesson presumably carried into the classroom even if a student is not the child or grandchild of rice farmers. True. But there are other features of East Asian cultures that might also matter. Gladwell mentions some of these – e.g., "number" names in East Asian languages are short and consistent. He does not mention the possibilities that the written languages of China, Japan, and (until 1446) Korea engage different parts of the brain than the Western alphabet. He does not mention Confucianism, which has infused East Asia for centuries and not only extols hard work but also places the teacher at the top of the respect pyramid. But I digress. What does a happiness legacy look like? It would be a culture that stresses the sorts of things that lead to a good and satisfied life: family, friends, community, freedom, tolerance, engagement, meaning, and purpose (see my earlier blog entry Book Review: The Geography of Bliss) . It would likely not be a culture that stresses hedonism, materialism, or ruthless competition. It would certainly not be one that tolerates or rewards meanness (see my earlier blog entry Positive Psychology and Assholes). It might even be one in which there were no Wednesdays (see my earlier blog entry Happy Days and Happy Times). That said, I suspect that happiness legacies can be more local. Indeed, to paraphrase Tip O’Neill, perhaps all happiness legacies are local. What is encouraging is that local cultures can be changed. Gladwell provides several intriguing examples of legacy change. He describes how South Korean airlines, once quite dangerous because of culturally-mandated deference that led co-pilots never to challenge pilots, even as their planes flew dangerously off course, became much safer by mandating the use of English – and all the bluntness that entailed – in the cockpits. Gladwell describes how the acclaimed KIPP schools have changed the cultural legacy of their students. As I see it, the KIPP schools in effect have created East Asian classrooms in the inner cities of the United States. Wow. How can we create a cultural legacy of happiness? If you have read any of my other blog entries, you know my answer: Let other people matter. And that means moving beyond the slogan and working diligently over the years to make it so.   © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Your face is a major component of your self-identity, but when you look into a mirror, how do you know that the person you are seeing is really you? Is it because the person in the reflection looks just like you? Or because the reflection moves when you move? Or perhaps because you see the face in the reflection being touched when you reach up to touch yours. Recent studies have shown that recognizing our own bodies depends upon integrated information from the senses of vision, touch and proprioception (the sense of how our bodies are positioned in space). These cues can easily be manipulated, leading to an altered sense of body ownership . By contrast, recognition of one’s own face is believed to depend primarily on visual cues, and so is thought to be more stable. A new study published in the open access journal PLoS One suggests otherwise. It shows that the ability to recognize one’s own face can be disrupted in much the same way as the sense of body ownership. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Each week brings reports of people in the news who pass judgment on others. Last week, Sean Avery, the center for the Dallas Stars, was suspended by the National Hockey League after he made disparaging remarks about his former girlfriend, who had been linked romantically with another NHL player.  President-elect Obama was questioned about his campaign characterizations of Hillary Clinton’s foreign diplomatic skills and experience. Passing judgment is hardly new, but for how many weeks has this been going on?  To find out, I turned back the calendar 148,616 weeks (or roughly 2,858 years) to about 850 BCE, to see what archeologists might have dug up. It didn’t take long to find a judgmental letter from ancient Egypt, composed on papyrus by an official named Pepy. His superior was returning from a voyage and Pepy wrote: How evil it is that you’ve come safe and sound! May your speaking be with all evil…Pepy has acted against you — enduringly, lastingly, for all time and eternity. Pepy’s message is probably clearer in the original (Ancient) Egyptian, but his basic ideas come across.  Egyptian business letters of the time sometimes closed with a wish that the recipient would keep their good hearing. Pepy continued, Bad be your hearing — may you be smitten! Come to me and I’ll see you — we’ll have an evil time. Red ink accentuated the more venomous parts of Pepy’s message, but perhaps there was a happy ending (at least for his superior): there was no address on the papyrus and no indication it had been folded for sending.  Pepy may have possessed considerable self-control. The angry letter above doesn’t specify what precisely troubled Pepy, but other writings make complaints of that era clearer. The Greek poet Homer (c. 850 BCE) found irritating: "The man who acts the least [and] upbraids the most," and the sort who is "the first in banquets but last in fight." Homer created the following rhyme for the person: Who dares think one thing and another tell, my heart detest him as the Gates of Hell. Azitawadda of Adana, the king of a Phonecian city, inscribed a brief autobiography on the gates of the city he ruled sometime before 800 BCE. The King’s account is notable for his judgments of his own character: After inheriting his father’s throne, he said, he had expanded his country, fed his people well, and filled their storehouses. He claimed: …every king considered me his father because of my righteousness and my wisdom and the kindness of my heart. Azitawadda closes his inscription with another sort of judgment — a curse against anyone who would replace his name on the city gate: …whether he removes this gate with good intentions or out of hatred and evil, let…El-the-Creator-of-the-Earth and the Eternal-Sun… wipe out that ruler and that king…! The ancients of the Middle East, it seems, made judgments c. 850 BCE quite a bit like those of today: They wrote poison-pen letters, judged who was brave versus who just liked a party after the fight, valued straight talkers, and threatened others with god’s judgment to keep their behavior in line. In a future post I will broaden this survey and go back still further in time. By doing so, I hope to develop further a picture of the judgments people made of one another in antiquity, and their similarities and differences (if any) from today. Notes: The letter from Pepy is described on p. 93 of R. B. Parkinson (1991). Voices from ancient Egypt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. The quotes from Homer are cited on p. 7 of Dedopulos, T. (2002). The best book of insults and putdowns ever. London: Carlton Books. The autobiographical gate-inscription by Azitawadda is recorded in Pritchard, J. B. The Ancient Near East (pp. 215-216). F. Rosenthal (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (c) Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.