Naming Emotions

An excerpt from LiveScience.com:

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as “angry” or “fearful”—or two possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they saw.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes—indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

Thomas Paine Quote

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorius the triumph."
Thomas Paine, The Crisis -- December 1776

Another e-card from someecards.com

Bruce Lee Quotes Part 1

"It is like a finger pointing to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

"Be like water because it is soft, resilient, and formless. It can never be snapped."

"Life is a constant process of relating."

"The main thing is teaching a man to do his thing, just be himself...I'm against trying to impose a style on a man. This is an art, an expression of a man's own self."

"The greatest help is self-help; there is no other help but self-help--doing one's best, dedicating oneself wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an ongoing process."

"All the time people come up and say, "Bruce--are you really that good?" I say, "well, if I tell you I'm good, probably you'll say I'm boasting. But if I tell you I'm no good, you'll know I'm lying."

"Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teacup, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend."

"...it's an integral part of the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism, the ideals of giving with adversity, to bend slightly and then spring up stronger than before, to have patience in all things, to profit by one's mistakes and lessons in life."

"To change with change is the changeless state."

IQ and Siblings

From Slate.com:

Eldest children have IQs three points higher than their siblings, on average, in a huge sample of young Norwegian men. The study shows this difference is due to family dynamics, not "prenatal gestational factors," since "second- and third-born men who became the eldest in their families due to the death of one or two older siblings … had IQs close to that of firstborns." Theories: 1) Firstborns get more parental attention. 2) They're presented with higher expectations. 3) They benefit from teaching younger siblings. 4) They strive to achieve, so their siblings seek a less achievement-oriented identity. Critiques: 1) The difference is just an average; when sibling IQ scores differ, there's a 43 percent chance the younger kid scores higher. 2) Smaller U.S. studies differ from the Norwegian one. 3) Previously asserted birth-order effects have been debunked. 4) Younger siblings are less likely to be smart but more likely to be brilliant. 5) Younger siblings may have lower IQs, but they're more interesting. (To debate IQ and birth order, click here.)

Significance Testing

From the Decision Science News Blog:

“About two years ago, I was a reasonable person who argued that tests of statistical significance were useful in some limited situations. After completing research for “Significance tests harm progress in forecasting” in the International Journal of Forecasting, 23 (2007), 321-327, I have concluded that tests of statistical significance should never be used. Here is the abstract:

I briefly summarize prior research showing that tests of statistical significance are improperly used even in leading scholarly journals. Attempts to educate researchers to avoid pitfalls have had little success. Even when done properly, however, statistical significance tests are of no value. Other researchers have discussed reasons for these failures. I was unable to find empirical evidence to support the use of significance tests under any conditions. I then show that tests of statistical significance are harmful to the development of scientific knowledge because they distract the researcher from the use of proper methods. I illustrate the dangers of significance tests by examining a re-analysis of the M3-Competition. Although the authors of the re-analysis conducted a proper series of statistical tests, they suggested that the original M3-Competition was not justified in concluding that combined forecasts reduce errors, and that the selection of the best method is dependent on the selection of a proper error measure; however, I show that the original conclusions were correct. Authors should avoid tests of statistical significance; instead, they should report on effect sizes, confidence intervals, replications/extensions, and meta-analyses. Practitioners should ignore significance tests and journals should discourage them. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2007.03.004

Death Penalty and Causality

The Social Science Statistics Blog has an interesting article discussing a recent paper on the death penalty and whether it has a deterrent effect on crime (specifically murder). Here is an excerpt:

since 1960, will find that homicide rates went up when the death penalty went away, and then homicide rates declined when the death penalty was re-instituted (see Figure 1 of the Donohue and Wolfers paper), and similar patterns have happened within states. So it's not a surprise that regression analyses have found a deterrent effect. But, as noted, the difficulties arise because of the observational nature of the treatment, and the fact that other policies are changed along with the death penalty. ...The problem is that we aren't sure, and we probably never will be unless someone gets to randomly assign death penalty policy to states or countries. This raises a problem that we often face in social science: there are questions that are interesting, and there are questions that we can answer, and the intersection of those two categories is probably a lot smaller than any of us would like. This doesn't seem to be a realization that has crept into the media as of yet, so it is no surprise that studies that purport to give answers to interesting questions will get more coverage than those pointing out why those answers probably don't mean very much.

There are three often-mentioned criteria for causality: 1) the two variables are associated (there is a correlation between the death penalty and murder rates, 2) the cause has to come before the effect (which seems to be the case in the recent paper), and 3) all alternative explanations must be ruled out. This third criteria is the one that is not satisfied in this recent research and is probably the most difficult to satisfy. The authors of the above entry point out one way to satisfy this criteria would be to have an experimental design where the researcher can control the manipulation of when the death penalty is instituted.

Telluride Festival of Nothing

The town of Telluride has a festival of nothing coming in July:

1. Sunrises and Sunsets as normal
2. Gravity will continue to be in effect.
3. The earth’s rotation will be increased to add a few thrills.
4. The laws of physics will be on display.

Friday Fun

someecards.com has some very funny ecards.

Presidental Candidate's Value

Intrade.com is a prediction market. An interesting market that they cover is the value of presidential candidates. You can currently purchase a contract for Barack Obama that costs around $30. If he wins the Democratic nomination, then the owner of the contract gets $100.

Ecstasy and Verbal Memory

A study in JAMA found a correlation between ecstasy use and difficulty remembering words.

[The doctors] recruited 188 volunteers (average age 22) who had not used Ecstasy but reported that they were likely to try it soon. Within three years of the initial evaluations, which took place between April 2002 and April 2004, 58 individuals began using Ecstasy. They were compared with 60 individuals who had the same age, sex and intelligence score but who did not use Ecstasy during the follow-up period. All participants took tests that assessed various types of memory—including attention, verbal memory for words and language, and visual memory for images—at the beginning and end of the study. Verbal memory was tested by memorizing a series of 15 words and repeating them immediately and again 20 minutes later.

During the initial round of testing, wrote the doctors, there were no statistically significant differences in test scores between those who went on to use ecstasy and those who didn't. During the follow-up test, ecstasy users exhibited "significantly lower" verbal recall and verbal recognition abilities.

'Science' and 'Nature' not accepting Word 2007 documents

Science has new guidelines regarding the use of Office 2007:.

"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. ...Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007."

Nature has a similar statement:

"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs."

Traveler's Dilemma

From the Freakonomics Blog:

This month in Scientific American, Cornell economics professor Kaushik Basu revisits his twist on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. Called the Traveler’s Dilemma, the game involves two travelers who find that identical belongings of theirs have been damaged by an airline. The airline manager agrees to compensate both, but first asks them separately to write down the object’s price as any dollar integer between 2 and 100. If both write the same number, he’ll pay each that amount, but if they write different numbers, he’ll assume the lower is the actual price.

Student Awards from APS

Grants and awards from the Association for Psychological Science can be found at:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/apssc/awards/

Statistical Equation of the next Pop Superstar

The Freakonomics Blog has an interesting entry describing a controversy in which one group of statisticians describe the road to becoming a pop culture star using one particular distribution, while another group describes why it does not work. Here is an excerpt:

in 1994, Kee Chung of SUNY-Buffalo and Raymond Cox of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology applied an equation called the Yule-Simon Distribution to this question. Their findings were that the probability distribution implied by the Yule model mirrored data gathered in the pop music industry — thereby indicating that the model could be used as a map to generate the next pop superstar.

Now, the economists Laura Spierdijk and Mark Voorneveld have tested Chung and Cox’s conclusion in their paper, “Superstars Without Talent? The Yule Distribution Controversy.” Using a “parametric bootstrap and several powerful test statistics,” they checked Chung and Cox’s data and found overwhelming evidence refuting their conclusion.

Toe-Nail Necklace

So solving the Rubik's Cube might be interesting, but making a toenail necklace might fit under the category of disgust (see Jon Haidt's research on disgust).

I still don't get it

Here is a webpage that describes how to solve a Rubik's Cube.

Computing User Experience

Hubpages.com has an interesting comparison of an older computer compared to a newer computer in terms of the user experience. Overall, the newer computer has many new 'features' (i.e., multimedia editing, music, etc.) that were not available on older computers. However, the speed of basic tasks (i.e., word processing, boot-up times) have not improved. Here is a summary:

The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

Church Sign Generator 2

I couldn't resist another one.

Church Sign Generator

There is a web site where you can generate your own church sign. Also of interest is a "church sign smackdown."