Laura’s Psychology Blog

Here in California, we just finished another primary election, and I find it personally refreshing to get a short break from the phone calls and mailers, at least until November rolls around. As I watch little if any network television (with the notable exception of college football), I am at least spared the indignity of having all of this negativity spewed into my own living room.

For those of us who find contemporary politicking unpleasant at best, neuroscience offers a solution! You don’t like politicians’ speeches you say? Well, enter the experts at MindSign, who promise to “take your political speech, both video and or audio and compare it to our database to see if speech is more or less activating than the average brain response for all similar speeches over each and every demographic and political affiliation.”  Oh, they will evaluate your print ads, television ads, and website, too, for $2000 per participant hour plus time needed to prepare reports (they recommend a minimum of 16 participants). So if you don’t like one speech, hey–no worries–they’ll come up with another one you’ll love, tailored to whatever “political affiliation” niche you occupy!

What Exactly Does "Brain Activation" Mean?

Now the word in all of this that catches my eye is “activating.”  I’m sure the MindSign website is a bit dummied down (couldn’t find much in the way of technical data there or published reports), but to me, “activation” of the brain can mean many things–maybe the brain is “activated” because you really hate something.

I understand the need to get the most “bang for the advertising buck,” but shouldn’t politicians be sharing their real views with voters instead of whatever they think we want to hear? I find it somewhat disturbing that the political services page on MindSign is called “Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Once again, technology races along far ahead of any type of discussion about the ethics of its use.

A recent study by Marianne Taylor of Pacific Lutheran University and her colleagues has been getting a lot of press [1]. In a nutshell, Taylor and colleagues found that children until the age of 10 or so view the behavioral differences between boys and girls, such as their different preferences for playing football or with dolls, as biological ordained as the differences in the behavior of different species, like cats and dogs. The cynic in me, and I’m feeling a little cranky today, would suggest that by the age of 10, kids have just learned to be politically correct.

Okay, I obviously don’t believe that ALL gender-related behavior is biological (I like football and the Legend of Zelda), but I think the cultural/socialization thing popular in the 70s was a huge mistake. Poor Bruce Reimer paid for that mistake with his life.

Vervet Monkeys Aren't Socialized to Prefer Sex-Typed Toys

There is substantial evidence suggesting that toy preferences in monkeys follow the same pattern as in human children, and I don’t think we want to be arguing that monkeys are “socialized” into liking boy or girl toys. Click on the link for a New Scientist video of this research:

Monkey Toy Preferences

Human children begin to prefer sex-typed toys between the ages of 12 and 18 months, yet they are unable at these ages to match sex-typed toys to male or female voices, suggesting that they have not yet learned that the toys are supposed to match one gender or the other [2].

Gloria Steinem has argued that research into sex differences is “anti-American.” Wow. What ever happened to “ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free?”

1.  Taylor, M.G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S.A. (2009).  Boys will be boys; Cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development, 80(2).

2.  Serbin, L.A., Poulin-Dubois, D., Colburne, K.A., Sen, M.G., & Eichstedt, J.A. (2001).  Gender stereotyping in infancy:  Visual preferences for and knowledge of gender-stereotyped toys in the second year. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 25(1), 7-15.

I’m always a bit sobered and awed when I read a student’s exam or paper and see my own stuff coming back at me (morphed a bit, to be sure, but recognizable). Teachers have a huge responsibility. I hope that students recognize that although faculty strive for accuracy and objectivity, we’re human beings who make errors, hold strong opinions, and disagree with one another.

College students seem to get this. I’m not sure younger students always do.

So I read with interest about a study conducted at the University of Minnesota, in which Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner surveyed introductory biology students about their high school biology experiences. They found that students’ acceptance of evolution was very dependent on their high school biology experience. Students exposed to evolution only were much more likely to accept its validity than students exposed to both evolution and creationism in the classroom. I’m not saying that exposure to different viewpoints is a bad thing, but I would like to see creationism taught in its proper context, which is philosophy, not science.

Among other findings were that 1/3 of the teachers didn’t major in biology and had never studied evolution and that 1/4 believed that creationism can be proven scientifically.

As mentioned in a previous post, Jon Miller of Michigan State has tracked international beliefs in evolution, and finds that Americans are near the bottom of industrialized nations in their belief in evolution. In a recent class, I asked an anonymous clicker question, using Miller’s wording, and found that 40% of my students did not believe in evolution. That’s just about the same as Miller’s most recent finding, 39%, from the general American public.

Belief in Evolution by Country

So what to do? My position has always been that agree or disagree, believe or not, you need to know what the guy said, whether that’s Sigmund Freud (with whom I generally disagree) or Charles Darwin. Hopefully, that’s respectful of other people’s belief systems while still ensuring that I do my job, which is to present my material as factually and accurately as I can.

But this continuing dilemma over one of the most thoroughly supported theories in the history of human thinking is just a constant reminder that we’re failing in one very important part of the job. Before we get into a discussion of facts, we need to make sure that our students understand the logic and reasoning and methods necessary to establish those facts. If America is failing science, it’s not because we don’t know the facts, but because we don’t use and understand the method.

The search for the basis of happiness is convoluted, to say the least. As we mentioned in an earlier post, happiness is vastly different between conservatives and liberals, world-wide as well as in the United States. Money certainly doesn’t guarantee happiness, which given our current back-to-the-Stone-Age economy, is probably a good thing. But what about the legendary joys of parenting?

Nattavudh Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, argues that parents are no more happy than people without children, and that in the United States, there is a tendency for parents to be less-satisfied than non-parents. Poor Professor Powdthavee has apparently heard a lot of negative feedback on this issue, and tries to deflect some of the ire over to Dan Gilbert.

What I would add to this study, however, would be a measure of how satisfied you are with your children’s outcomes as a moderating factor. In my experience, the unhappiest people I know are those who are disappointed with how their children turned out. Usually this happens when the parents do not share a common set of core values. What is acceptable in a partner can be very different when you see those values applied to raising your children.

One also has to look at the circumstances in which people are parenting. Current data suggest that 40% of American babies born last year were born to unmarried mothers. It’s hard enough to be a good parent without tying one hand behind your back this way.  The Hollywood notion that you can go ahead and have babies and think about marriage later and live happily ever after is just another trip to fantasyland.

The Pew Study on happiness is provocative in its suggestion that conservatives, who report being more satisfied with their family life, are also more likely to be married, to be religious, and to believe in an internal locus of control. People with an internal locus of control will feel personally responsible for how their children turn out, as opposed to believing that parents have little impact a la Judith Rich Harris, and are therefore less likely to adopt the permissive, uninvolved parenting style that usually results in disastrous offspring behaviors.

Not everyone should be a parent, and it’s important to recognize whether you should be or not, but in the right time, in the right place, and with the right person, being a parent can be a source of remarkable joy. I have learned so much from my daughters, and learned so much about myself from the mirror they hold up to me.

Karla, Kristin, and Karen Freberg

We reported previously that the Happiness Gap between conservatives and liberals world-wide was continuing to grow, and new data from the Pew Research Center say that October’s gap is the biggest ever. Unlike the previous report, which focused on differences in attitudes towards “social injustice,” the Pew survey was much more comprehensive.

Republicans Have Been Happier For Years

According to Pew, here are some of the differences between Republicans and Democrats that might account for the gap:

1. Republicans have more money.
2. Republicans have more friends.
3. Republicans are more religious.
4. Republicans are healthier.
5. Republicans are more likely to be married.
6. Republicans like their communities better.
7. Republicans like their jobs better.
8. Republicans are more satisfied with their family life.
9. Republicans like the weather better. (Okay, this one is truly weird, isn’t it?)
10. Republicans have fewer financial worries (This poll was in OCTOBER!!!!!!)
11. Republicans are more likely to think they’ll live better than their parents did.
12. Republicans are more likely to believe in an internal locus of control (my life is under my control) as opposed to having an external locus of control (life is a matter of chance or luck).
13. Republicans have more of what they value in life (and no, this doesn’t mean money–this is life satisfaction).

We still don’t know if being a Republican makes you happy, or if being happy makes you a Republican, or if some other variables lead to being both happy and Republican. But if Republicans can be happy in spite of the current polls and economy, it’s likely that there is something big going on here.