Psychology and Psychiatry: Any Progress?

Over at PsychCentral’s World of Psychology John Grohol quotes David Barker’s take on the question of just how much project the two disciplines have made. [Much longer source article at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog.] The basic take is that the progress has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary:

Psychological science continues to show that our thinking is prone to a host of errors. Consider the phenomenon of illusory correlation. Illusory correlation is seeing a relationship between two events where none exists. The debates over Iraq offer plenty of examples. Not that long ago many Americans believed that Iraq played a role in the attacks of 9/11, a relationship that George Bush denied. Understanding and counteracting distortions of our thinking and reasoning can provide a powerful antidote to many of the ills that beset us.

Psychology has offered a better understanding of our behavior and its relationship to our well-being. The leading causes of death in America, heart disease, and cancer, have strong behavioral components. Encouraging healthy behaviors (diet, exercise) and eliminating unhealthy ones (smoking) are activities that psychologists are well suited to address.

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Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.

Marketing Shyness and Neurotransmitters

Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, was recently interviewed by the Chicago Tribune. I got this courtesy of Ken Pope. Here’s how the interview ended:

Q: The diagnosis “social anxiety disorder” opened up a huge new market
for drug companies marketing SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors). What happened?

A: Basically, as soon as SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) got
FDA approval to sell Paxil as a treatment for social anxiety
disorder … they ran a very expensive public awareness campaign. It was
the “Imagine being allergic to people” campaign. It cost them $93
million – $3 million more than Pfizer spent that year on Viagra.

As they bragged in Advertising Age, it was a way of increasing the
number of diagnoses and creating a new market. First they had to
convince people they weren’t just shy – that they had social anxiety disorder.

Q: Why would people accept that diagnosis?

A: It’s a fascinating question, and a complicated one. You have the
apparent reassurance of a scientific label. You can say, my problem
isn’t to do with me or my psychology or my upbringing.

The label is a strange distancing device. Because it means one needn’t
really think about oneself in the process. It’s really a question of my
neurotransmitters.

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Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

That’s the title of a peer-reviewed study published this month by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, courtesy of Ken Pope’s listserv. The study has an interesting finding — given bad information subjects were more likely to judge it credible if accompanied by irrelevant neuroscience information. This finding is particularly relevant to science reporting as neuroscience “information” has the aura of scientific objectivity that the media loves to invoke. People tend to assume that if something is related to scientific hypothesis that it is “proven”, a fallacy covered here before. Often this information includes non-facts such as the idea that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” a theory that while widely touted remains unsubstantiated, unproven. (The chemical imbalance theory has also been covered on this blog, here.)

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.

What is Blog Action Day? Sixteen Days Left.

And what is a blog for that matter??
A blog is short for web log. It is a forum for people to do a variety of things — anything from keeping a journal, logging their financial woes, taking photos of their cats, publishing their fitness progress — you get the general idea. But this really doesn’t do justice to what is sometimes awkwardly referred to as the “blogosphere”.

Media activism.
For one thing, bloggers have managed to put rather weighty pressure on traditional media outlets such as network news, major newspapers and magazines and so forth. In fact, if you look at many on-line newspapers you’ll find a sidebar where they list the most blogged about articles. Some of these writers are extremely well informed Washington insiders. Such bloggers have generated substantial followings and have enough sway to force mainstream media outlets to respond to their criticisms. Othes are, well, crackpots. But it is psychologically healthy to have more media sources than the ones that are increasingly merging into one great profitable mass.

As Frank Zappa is reported to have said: “Stupidity has a certain charm. Ignorance does not.”

Here are some other links about Blog Action Day:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/blog-action-day/

What is the Blog Action Day about? Basically it is a social initiative aiming to get as much bloggers as possible talking about an issue (the first one will be the environment) on the same day, raising both money and awareness. I firmly believe that the Internet and the technologies that are democratizing the access to information will have a profound impact on the socio-economical problems of the world. This initiative goes on that direction.

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/kanter/blog-action-day-october-15th-who-netsquared-participating

The idea is simple. On October 15th, bloggers around the web will write a post on their blog about the environment. The goal is to start a global conversation about a better future. There are three ways to participate:

• Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
• Donate your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
• Promote Blog Action Day around the web

The selected environmental charities include Greenpeace International, Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club,and the Conservation Fund.

You can follow the event latest news and update on Blog Action Day Blog.

Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.

Interdisciplinary Psychology

Getting up-to-date on psychology.
I chanced upon an interesting blog by someone who’s very much up on some of the happenings in clinical psychology. If you’ curious about what clinical psychology is — how it differs from psychiatry, this is a solid resource. I recommend it.

Interdisciplinary psychology – health psychology.
There are some very interesting things going on in interdisciplinary psychology. Health psychology is a good example. Medicine is cottoning on to the idea that having psychologists in pre- and post-operative situations actually reduces their costs, chiefly in terms of legal liability. In the purportedly “inevitable” issue of psychologists prescribing psychotropic medications (RxP) the public stands to benefit from a collaboration between the medical model of physicians and the more humanistic approach of psychologists. In the past, this has been an uneasy alliance, at best.

Public health.
On another front, psychologists are teaming up with government agencies concerned with how to deal with disaster relief. Sports psychologists are enjoying some success, enhancing individual performance as well as improving team cohesiveness. Psychologists are increasingly consulting on public health issues. Larger pscychological organizations are lobbying at the state and national level.

These activities are not without there pitfalls, but speak to breadth of what psychologists do. We don’t just administer MMPI’s, Rorschachs, and interest inventories. We don’t just do psychotherapy or behavioral modification.

Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.

Psychology in the Media: Better than Average

Manipulating public opinion.
The Washington Times runs a piece today on social psychology and the ways memory can be manipulated. The story has an interesting spin: How public opinion can be manipulated. Chief findings include that people tend to remember denials, myth busting, and statements identified as false at a high rate.

Rules of thumb trip up the brain, yet again.
The brain tends to treat often repeated statements as true, because, as the theory goes, the brain’s rule of thumb is that information frequently accessed is likely useful and true. Kudos to the Post for mentioning that the finding is not an isolated study, and has been peer reviewed, both critical elements in substantial research:

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy.

The brain hears the same assertion repeatedly, then treats it as if it comes from multiple sources. In this way, politicians are able to drum up popular opinion.

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

This underscores the importance of being “devil’s advocate” or having a “minority opinion”. In social psychology, it is believed that minority opinions, tenaciously held, are robust in decision making outcome.

Be careful about what you deny.
Finally, the Post cites another finding about what social psychologists call the “negation-tag”. In many people this drops off — so a statement like “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” is ultimately remembered as the opposite. When making assertions it’s better to simply couch them in the positive. This last finding confirms what psychoanalysts have been saying for decades, perhaps even a century, that the unconscious does not recognize negatives. And of course, as Shakespeare said, “Thou dost protest too much.”

Current findings: Ho hum.
More bonus points to the Post for mentioning that a number of these “current” findings on memory have been around for decades. These are repeats of previous research, a key element in responsible science: replicating findings. Often science stories in the popular press are breathy in their coverage of the “latest findings” as if this represents cutting edge science. Actually, latest findings are findings that need to be confirmed repeatedly.

To couch it in the negative — it’s refreshing to see some not-too-bad science reporting.

Kalea Chapman, Psy.D.