Laura’s Psychology Blog

As you may have noticed, I am experimenting with the use of Loneliness with my introductory psychology students. We’re doing a lot of out of class projects, but I also wanted to incorporate some in-class activities. Yesterday, we tried to apply one of the principles of improving social connection suggested by John Cacioppo and Bill Patrick–”extend” yourself.

Our interviews resulted in many animated conversations.

I borrowed liberally from an exercise that Mr. F remembered from his MBA coursework at USC. USC is very hands-on, and they’re a great source of practical classroom activities. The MBA activity was geared towards formal job interviewing, so we needed to tweak it a bit, but it worked out really well.

We started out with a short discussion of what it meant to “extend” yourself to others–focusing on others instead of the self, initiating conversations rather than waiting for another person to start talking, and learning about the other people in the classroom. Then we divided the class in half–I just used odd and even birthdays–and one group had the assignment to interview someone from the other half for 5 minutes (I brought a noisy timer) and learn something “positive” about the person that others might not know. We had the potential “interviewees” stay seated and raise their hands, and the “interviewers” rushed around to find an interviewee. After 5 minutes, they found a second person to interview, then we switched roles for the next two rounds. So everybody was an interviewer twice and an interviewee twice.

When all the interviews were done, I asked for a volunteer to come up to the front, and then his/her interviewers were asked to come up and share what they had learned. Then the interviewee could comment on how accurate they had been. We shared the results of three interviews. We have some amazing students!

I was very pleased with how the activity went. The decibel level in the classroom was shocking–I fully expected professors from neighboring classrooms to come in to complain. You can’t have 30+ animated conversations going without making some noise. At first, I noticed that some of the students seemed quite reserved, but over the course of 4 interviews, everybody seemed to lighten up. One correction I would make, and Mr. F chided me a bit for not noticing this in his directions, would be to specify that you needed to interact with four different people. Some dyads just switched roles at the halfway mark. This wasn’t a big problem, but I think it’s better to have four other people to talk to.

We ended the class considering another “extend” activity suggested in Loneliness. This was for out-of-class time, because the idea is to greet people like supermarket clerks. This produced quite a bit of discussion, as many students had worked as clerks. One student remarked that clerks in his store are trained to greet customers, but it’s often disheartening to have little positive feedback. Another said that most customers in her experience were very friendly, leading to a discussion of big city versus small town (San Luis Obispo has about 45,000 residents, but many students are from LA or the Bay Area). Another student worked in a department store, and said that he had to be careful about asking elderly customers “how are you,” because they would stay and talk for half an hour. Needless to say, this provoked additional discussion about how seniors might not have anyone to talk to and the level of loneliness many experience.

All in all, it was a fun class section. Much better than listening to me go through PowerPoints. I’m really excited about how Loneliness is providing a theme for our quarter.

Once again returning to our political theme, we have a new study that suggests that optimism is an important part of the political process.  According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the most optimistic candidates have won the U.S. presidency more than 80 percent of the time since 1900.

Using an analysis tool called the Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE), the U. Penn researchers analyzed speeches given by this year’s candidates at their respective party conventions and at the Saddleback Forum on Faith, coding for optimism.

Drum roll…..and the results show……that John McCain and Barack Obama demonstrated equal optimism, and Sarah Palin was more optimistic than Joseph Biden, who was “by far the most pessimistic of the four.”

Palin and Biden Differ in Optimism

In addition, the researchers looked at the candidates’ patterns of attribution, and found that the Republicans were more likely than the Democrats to attribute positive outcomes internally and negative outcomes externally, a pattern we see most frequently in the general population, at least according to classic research by Miller and Ross (1975) on the self-serving bias [1]. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding out there in the blogosphere about this finding of the U. Penn study–people view the self-serving bias as a bad thing to do, but really it’s the typical thing to do.

In fact, people who reverse this bias, blaming themselves deeply for failure and viewing their successes as resulting from chance or luck are much more likely to have low self-esteem issues and depression. I’m all about thinking honestly, and learning from your mistakes, but we also need to keep our chins up to do so.

If this discrepancy between the candidates is representative of their followers, it might help explain the “happiness gap” we discussed in an earlier post, and it is certainly consistent with the optimism findings.

Nobody really knows what people are likely to do in the privacy of the voting booth until the results are in, but these speculations can be a lot of fun.

By the way, if you’d be interested in participating in the Positive Psychology Center’s online research, you can choose from many ongoing studies here.

1.  Miller, D.T., & Ross, M. (1975).  Self-serving bias in the attribution of causality:  Fact or fiction? Psychological Bulletin, 82, 213-225.

I confess to being a competent, but not at all accomplished dancer, in spite of my parents’ efforts in my childhood years to introduce me to ballet.  Our instructor was a fairly frightening Frenchwoman, who dramatically used only her last name, Collinette.  She seemed to us kids to be about a thousand years old, an illusion helped along by her stories of sharing the stage with the magnificant Pavlova.  I enjoyed the lessons, but at 5′9″, it’s not like a dance career was in the cards.  I still enjoy watching dance performances, and Mr. F, whose interests run much more to football, was kind enough to procure tickets while we were still in high school to a performance by Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA.  Wow!

So it was with interest that I read about a new article in Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column by Columbia’s John Krakauer.  Krakauer notes that music and dance together might constitute a reward “double play.”  We know that music has the ability to activate pleasure circuits in the brain. Add to that the existence of mirror neurons–special neurons that activate when we either perform an action or see another perform the same action.  Krakauer suggests that mirror neurons might allow us to feel pleasure when we see someone perform a skilled activity well, because we can empathize or feel how much fun it would be to be that good.  Although I’m not much of a TV watcher, isn’t Dancing With the Stars in about its 7th season or so?  And even though I can’t relate to Karen’s strength (my personal record in the shot put is a whopping 25 feet, and she threw nearly 58), it was always fun to watch her throw. At times, I felt like I was trying to mentally levitate the shot for her, sort of a Harry Potter “wingardium leviosa” thing.

I would add a couple of other observations to Krakauer’s.  First, music and language are tightly related. Children who understand rhythm in preschool generally turn out to be very good readers later on, an argument on behalf of emphasizing music in the schools.  It would be interesting to know if language has the same or different effects on the reward circuits of the brain. Then let’s not overlook the ability of music to bring people together socially, as we can observe when people sing a school’s alma mater together at the end of a tough football game, or people’s emotional reactions when they hear “Taps.”  It goes without saying that such bonding is going to be reinforcing. As far as dance goes, Krakauer seems to have glossed over the obvious.  I’m no anthropologist, and there are many forms of dance, but isn’t one of the driving forces behind dance all about sex?  (Note to Google–please be kind here. Psychologists do use the “s” word on occasion)  Seems to me most people find that behavior somewhat reinforcing, too.  Who’s to say that our own “dirty dancing” isn’t just the human version of animal mating rituals?

She Looks Impressed By His Style

So although my ballet activities are relegated to the past (isn’t it amazing what kids can do without ever knowing what muscle soreness is?), I still enjoy watching it–well, at least when football isn’t on TV!

John Cacioppo & Kristin Graham

Recently, noted Psychologist and Social Neuroscientist John Cacioppo gave an interesting interview on his new book  loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection .

Army Captain Kristin Graham discussed the effects of loneliness on army personnel returning from deployment and reintegrating into civilian society and reconnecting with friends and family.

click to listen to the interview

This quarter I am using John Cacioppo and William Patrick’s book as an added reader in my Introductory Psychology class. By the way, Captain Graham is my eldest daughter.

Laura

my other blog s on the book loneliness : Loneliness Update ,  Loneliness: Human Nature

Continuing our tribute to the psychology of political attitudes, which we started with a discussion of the “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals, is today’s entry–an article appearing in the prestigious journal Science that claims that conservatives are “three times more fearful” than liberals [1].

Now I know as psychologists that we have to be eternally vigilant about rejecting results out of hand on the basis of “common sense,” but the overt silliness of this conclusion jumps out immediately.  Officers of the US military are overwhelmingly conservative, but I can’t imagine anyone describing them as “fearful.”

Does Arnold look scared?

Part of the problem can be traced to the authors’ interpretations of their results. They claim (and I have some difficulty picturing Science reviewers allowing this to go forward) that the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) is a measure of fear.  It is my understanding that a safer interpretation is that the GSR measures “arousal.” It is very difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference between specific states of arousal using the GSR, including fear, anger, surprise, and sexual arousal, which all produce very similar responses. The other measure used was eyeblink rate, which like the GSR, can change due to many factors, including anger.

I think what we can take out of this experiment is that in this very small, non-representative sample (46 adults from Lincoln, Nebraska) political attitudes may have some connection with the types of reactivity to environmental stimuli that form the basis of personality. But I don’t recommend that the authors suggest to our own California Governator that conservatives are sissies.

1.  Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Douglas R. Oxley, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, Peter K. Hatemi, and John R. Hibbing (19 September 2008) Science 321 (5896), 1667. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627]