If you love to curl up on the couch and watch a re-run of your favorite TV show (who doesn’t?!), you’re in luck.  Research by Jaye Derrick has shown that watching re-runs might actually provide a mental boost.

Derrick, a researcher at the University at Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions, conducted two related studies that were covered in Science Blog.  In the first, half of the participants were asked to perform a structured task, while the other half were asked to do a less structured task.  Then, half of the participants were asked to write about their favorite TV show, while the others listed items in their room.  Finally, participants were asked to complete a difficult puzzle.

Overall, those who wrote about their favorite TV show wrote for longer if they had completed the structured task (rather than the unstructured task).  According to Derrick, this indicates that they were seeking out their favorite TV shows and wanted to spend more time thinking about them.  In addition, those who wrote about their favorite TV shows performed better on the difficult puzzle.

Similarly, in the second study, participants were asked to complete a daily diary; and those that reported effortful tasks were more likely to seek out a rerun of their favorite show.  Derrick explained,

“When you watch a favorite re-run, you typically don’t have to use any effort to control what you are thinking, saying or doing. You are not exerting the mental energy required for self-control or willpower,” Derrick explains. “At the same time, you are enjoying your ‘interaction,’ with the TV show’s characters, and this activity restores your energy.”

But, this effect is specific to re-watching favorite TV shows; just watching television does not provide the same benefit. So, if you’re going to veg out, make sure you’re watching a re-run!

TSP’s Media Awards may have taken the summer off, but journalists and social scientists assuredly did not! We are excited to announce the winner of the June 2012 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science:

“The Rise of Genocide Memorials,” Clare Spencer, BBC News

In her write-up of Spencer’s piece, TSP’s Hollie Nyseth Brehm showed how Spencer called on the expertise of psychologist Sheila Keegan along with her own research to help explain the phenomenon of genocide tourism—an act that is not without controversy, and Spencer does not shy away from discussing it.

As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we work hard to winnow our favorite nominees. And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers cheer and encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important (if not always rewarding) work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.

Okay, so that’s a little misleading. But, as Clive Thompson writes in the September issue of Wired magazine, that’s precisely the point. “Wander into the pop science section of any bookstore and you’ll be told—over and over again—a disturbing fact: Everything you know is wrong. About everything. Seriously, everything!” From Talent is Overrated to The Social Animal, Thompson has noticed that telling people they’re wrong about some seemingly familiar truth is increasingly popular: “it’ll take a renegade outsider—like, say, a ‘rogue economist’—to pierce these veils of ignorance,” “revealing a ‘secret’ long ‘hidden’ from you.”

Thompson offers three ideas for why it is we might be drawn to the “Everything You Know Is Wrong!” trope (since it’s fairly obvious why writers and media outlets—The Society Pages’ authors are no exception—adopt it). First, and most fundamentally, he says that the world is confusing and we may be drawn to those who promise to illuminate it. Fair enough. Second, perhaps “it’s a side effect of what David Shenk… called ‘data smog.’ When you live with an ever-expanding surplus of research… it may paradoxically make you increasingly unmoored from what you actually believe—so you’ll swallow anything.”

Or, third, “Perhaps our willingness to have our basic beliefs overturned is a sign of intellectual health. This mindset is, after all, key to the scientific method.” Maybe we truly, deeply learned the lesson of all those science classes, becoming true lovers of skepticism willing to embrace uncertainty, theory, testing, and a “delight in a genuinely counterintuitive argument.”

Thompson ends on a cautionary note:

Now, I’m not suggesting that all of these “secret side” articles hold water… some are awfully lazy… But the readers—they’re out there searching and questing, and that’s good.

Or to put it another way, Everything You Know About Everything You Know Being Wrong Is Wrong.

Unless, of course, I’m wrong.

Welfare reform turned 16 years old this week and continues to grab headlines and garner controversy. Lately, assertions by Mitt Romney that President Obama is “gutting” welfare reform by removing the work requirement have fueled political debates and media fact-checking. As NPR reports, several fact-checking organizations have found Romney’s statements to be patently false, including a “four Pinocchios” rating from The Washington Post.

FactCheck.org explains:

“A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted ‘a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.’ The plan does neither of those things.”

“Work requirements are not simply being ‘dropped.’ States may now change the requirements — revising, adding or eliminating them — as part of a federally approved state-specific plan to increase job placement.”

“And it won’t ‘gut’ the 1996 law to ease the requirement. Benefits still won’t be paid beyond an allotted time, whether the recipient is working or not.”

Even Ron Haskins, a Republican architect and staunch supporter of welfare reform, contradicts Romney’s claims. He told NPR:

“There’s no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform.”

Yet, these rumors persist and many people believe them. What could be driving this? Political scientist Martin Gillens, who wrote Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, contends that race has something to do with it.

Gillens said his research shows that Americans think about welfare in a way that aligns pretty neatly with their perceptions about race. For example, whites tend to believe that most poor people are black. But actually, poor people are more likely to be white than black or Hispanic.

Gillens said it’s impossible to know whether the Romney campaign decided to play into a racial strategy or whether it’s an accident. But in a way, it doesn’t matter.

“Regardless of what their conscious motivations are, the impact of these kinds of attacks on welfare and, in particular, on the perceived lack of work ethic among welfare recipients, plays out racially and taps into Americans’ views of blacks and other racial stereotypes,” he said.

This, plus concern that Obama hopes to turn the United States into a “government-dependent society,” makes welfare reform the talk of the town during this year’s presidential race.

For more on welfare reform and race, see our Office Hours podcast with Joe Soss on “Poverty Governance” and our feature called “American Poverty Governance As It Is and As It Might Be.”

At the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting in Denver, researchers presented their on-going research to colleagues in the field. This week, several news sources have covered sociologists’ findings about how events in the lifecourse (like getting married, divorced, or having kids) are related to health issues.

Medical News Today reports on a study by Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske, finding that moms who work full-time are healthier at age 40 than are other mothers. Particularly concerning is that the least healthy mothers at age 40 are those who are persistently unemployed or in and out of work, not by choice. Consistent work, these findings suggest, may be good for women’s health.

Co-author Adrianne Frech, Assistant Sociology Professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, told the press, work is good for both physical and mental health, for many reasons:

“It gives women a sense of purpose, self-efficacy, control and autonomy.”

“They have a place where they are an expert on something, and they’re paid a wage,” she added.

NBC News details research conducted by Michael McFarland, Mark Hayward, and Dustin Brown exploring how marriage is related to biological risk factors, such as high blood pressure. They found that women who were continuously married for longer periods of time had fewer cardiovascular risks, whereas women with experiences of divorce or widowhood had increased risk factors.

For women, the researchers found, the longer the marriage, the fewer cardiovascular risk factors. The effect was significant but modest, McFarland said, with every 10 years of continuous marriage associated with a 13 percent decrease in cardiovascular risk.

But when marriage is disrupted, it can be hard on the health. Women who were continuously married had a 40 percent lower count of metabolic risk factors than women who experienced two episodes or divorce or widowhood, the researchers found.

Finally, Deseret News picked up on research presented by Corinne Reczek, Tetyana Pudroyska, and Debra Umberson (also highlighted on Citings&Sightings). Their research found that being in a long-term marriage was associated with more alcohol consumption for women (compared to divorced or recently widowed women). In an interesting contrast, however, married men drink less than other men.

Our survey results show that continuously divorced and recently widowed women consume fewer drinks that continuously married women,” they wrote. “Our qualitative results suggest this occurs because men introduce and prompt women’s drinking and because divorced women lose the influence of men’s alcohol use” when the marriage fails.

As these studies indicate, it is essential to consider how social factors may be related to health outcomes, and sociologists are well positioned to contribute cutting-edge research on these issues.

TSP’s Media Awards may have taken the summer off, but journalists and social scientists assuredly did not! We are excited to announce the winner of the May 2012 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science:

“Paying for the Labors of Love,” Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

In her engaging and thorough review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self (the author was the subject of her own Citing in May 2012 with a New York Times Op-Ed), Shulevitz wrote:

I guess you’d call it popular sociology, but I think of it more as an act of mourning. …Hochschild’s look at how we meet some of our most personal needs with the aid of paid strangers doesn’t try to be exhaustive; goes light on figures and statistics; and, when itemizing the most outrageous advances in the market for love and care, never lapses into that magazine journalist’s tone of wry amusement. …Hochschild isn’t really interested in the extremes of the outsourced life. She wants to know what it feels like to be caught in the middle of it. An ethnographic sociologist rather than a quantifier of social trends, Hochschild elicits thoughtful reflections from ordinary people. Then she uses those reflections to chart the confusing intersections between commerce and private life…

By going on to engage Hochschild’s book and other, relevant sources (including novels that illustrate “the gulf between employers, who imagine that relations between themselves and their emotional delegates are mutually beneficial, and the employed, who grasp the cash they take is meant to make them invisible”), Shulevitz shows the deep literary knowledge and willingness to delve into even daring topics that earned her editorial roles at New York Magazine, Slate, and Lingua Franca, as well as bylines in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and more.

As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we do work hard to winnow our favorite nominees. In this case, we’ve actually chosen a piece that has not yet been featured on our site, though it is well-deserving of many a read. And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers cheer and encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important (if not always rewarding) work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.

For one-percenters like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, it’s easy to get the world’s fastest divorce. Their legal split took only two weeks. But for the poorest of Americans, divorce is still a luxury item.

So begins the Huffington Post’s coverage of new research out from Ohio State University researchers Dmitry Tumin and Zhenchao Qian, the gist of which is long-term separations are increasing. The authors report that, in their longitudinal study of over 7,000 people, about 85% of spouses who separated got divorced within 3 years, but about 15% hadn’t signed the papers within 10 years. HuffPo goes on:

…[R]esearchers said there was an economic reason… they simply could not afford to get divorced, especially when there were children involved. The study found that the married-but-indefinitely-separated group generally had only a high school education, were black or Hispanic, and had young children.

And the economic reasoning is both a push and a pull. There is the base cost of getting divorced, of course: ranging from just hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the complications of bringing in lawyers to take care of custody arrangements and joint property, it takes some cash to split up. But there are the financial benefits of staying married to consider, too: joint tax returns and shared health coverage are among those cited by HuffPo’s author Catherine New, along with the lower cost of shared rent or a mortgage, childcare costs that can be alleviated by swapping duties within the household, and so on.

New adds one final thought for those optimists who think it’s not the money—a separation might actually just be bringing those 15% closer again (the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” line of reasoning): the Ohio State study finds that 5% of separated couples did get back together. But half of those got divorced anyway.

It’s the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, which means thousands of sociologists have invaded downtown Denver to present their current research.  While much of the research is newsworthy, several studies have already garnered public attention.

One study presented at the meeting, profiled in Live Science and a number of other sources, found that marriage appears to drive women to drink.  According to University of Cincinnati’s Corinne Reczek and her coauthors, it’s not because they’re unhappy.  Rather, it’s because they are influenced by their spouses’ drinking habits.

Previous studies had shown that married people drink less than single people.  This new study confirms this relationship in men but shows that married women actually drink more on average than women who were never married, divorced, or widowed.

For more on drinking and marital status, check out the article here!

“Ze,” the person sitting next to me at the fire said. “Ze,” I repeated tentatively. In my first year of graduate school, I wound up doing fieldwork at a radical environmental conference in the mountains of Oregon.  While I learned about setting up roadblocks and doing tree sits, I also learned about gender-neutral pronouns.

Most texts aren’t quite to the point of using “ze.” But, according to a new study by Psychologists Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile, gaps between the use of “he” and “she” in books have narrowed. As a writer from Associated Press explains, the study tracked pronouns in almost 1.2 million texts in Google books archives. In 1950, the ratio of male to female pronouns was roughly 3.5:1. By 2005, it had shrunk to less than 2:1.

“Those numbers are quite staggering,” says James W. Pennebaker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns and chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas in Austin. “Pronouns are a sign of people paying attention and as women become more present in the workforce, in the media and life in general, people are referring to them more.”

Books by and about women have proliferated in the last half-century. However, more books by women do not mean that more books are getting reviewed or more women are getting to write for literary publications. For example, the nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has shown that men receive more space in magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

The continued prevalence of male writers/male reviewers is “very much the old guard hanging on, as they always do,” Belieu [the Executive Director of VIDA] adds. “But the progressive mind wins in the long ball game.”

And maybe we’ll even more “ze’s” in texts in the future!

The doodle on the Google home page today may have raised a few eyebrows. Featuring a dark-skinned man running over a course of hurdles on a pink track lined with green grass, for some, it conjures up the historically problematic association of African Americans with watermelons. An op-ed in Five Towns Jewish Times contemplates whether the doodle is racist, or if it should be dismissed as an unfortunate coincidence. The piece cites a post by Lisa Wade, sociologist and TSP blogger, to unpack why such images are offensive when placed in historical context:

“African Americans,”  the argument went, “were happy as slaves.  They didn’t need the complicated responsibilities of freedom, they just needed some shade and a cool, delicious treat.”

The pervasive association with watermelons has reinforced the stereotype of African Americans as simple-minded and inferior, thus justifying systems of oppression and inequality. With this problematic history, perhaps Google would do well to reconsider this doodle.