Itty Bitty Study Leads to Large Conclusions

[nancylebov]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091102/lf_nm_life/us_mood_memory

I was in a bad mood to start with, that's why I didn't quite believe the article. But I might be right.

Aside from cute paradoxes, would somebody public please point out that checking an interesting theory about people in highly limited and artificial circumstances doesn't prove anything?

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

There are a few studies that show various things correlating with the axis from creative to detail-focused. Everything from higher ceilings in the lab, to thinking about love vs. sex. There's something weird going on there, something that primes the brain to think in-the-small vs. in-the-large. Who knows what is actually going on here, but there is....something.

The shame here is in media reporting that makes sweeping statements about the general applicability. These are interesting small effects in the lab; using them in the larger world context is tricky. Nevertheless, ignoring the results completely is also a mistake; this is evidence, in a reasonably controlled setting, of an effect that (one hopes) is statistically significant.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Except that it's not just this one study. This is yet another follow-up study confirming something social psychologists keep seeing in their studies: accurate perception and accurate memory both correlate closely with depression.

Does being cheerful make you stupid? Does being stupid make you cheerful? Does some common root cause result in both stupidity and cheerfulness? They're not neuroscientists, they don't know. They do know though that every attempt to duplicate the finding, no matter what minor tweaks they make in the experimental procedure, produces a reproducible result: optimists notice about half as many details as pessimists, and optimists are about twice as likely as pessimists to reason incorrectly from given facts.

I forget who it was who said, "if you're not paranoid, you're not paying attention!" William S. Burroughs, maybe? But if he'd said "depressed," social psychologists would have backed him up experimentally.

Me? I think that an awful lot of what gets labeled "pessimism" and "depression" in America is entirely sane and healthy and rational sadness about and anger over the results of 30 years of Reaganomics. We've been pitted against each other for 30 years now in an endless dog-eat-dog struggle, devil take the hindmost, and no, you may not grieve for or even maintain friendships with the people who got thrown overboard, not unless you want to end up sharing their fate. I submit to you, as a working hypothesis, that it takes willful stupidity and intentional cultivation of either hypomanic disorder or outright sociopathy to not be sick, sad, and sleepless over this.

We run an economy whose punditocracy is already talking about 1 in 4 of us being unemployed, unemployable, forced onto disability, or (at best) offered part-time hours at starvation-level wages as "the new normal," and our "mental health professionals" deny that 1 in 4, and the at least that many of the rest of us who are their friends and families, any right to feel sad about that. Well, even if we perfect a "happy pill," those 1 in 4 will still be unemployed, unemployable, underemployed, and/or homeless and hungry. Will we really be better off if we're all so stoned and stupid that we don't think about this?

[madfilkentist]

...30 years of Reaganomics.

If not paying attention causes happiness, you must be ecstatic.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

You conflate two phenomena. The perception of our reality and the reaction to it. Both are quite complex and do not go to the main point: whether depression heightens memory or strategic thinking.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

would somebody public please point out that checking an interesting theory about people in highly limited and artificial circumstances doesn't prove anything?

...but you've just eliminated the whole basis of the social sciences!

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Most social science studies work this way, sadly.

I am reminded of Harvard's Law:

Under the most carefully controlled conditions of pressure, temperature and humidity, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Put another way, I don't think a data set is particularly rich until we're talking a thousand or so individuals controlled for relevant factors.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Just proves that some people are too smart to be happy about anything.