I have a sweet little cousin on the trembling, angst-ridden edge of puberty, and my sister had come up with what she thought was a fantastic idea for a holiday gift: a journal. 

“See, when I was her age,” my sister told us excitedly, “I’d write a little message in my journal, and then give it to my best friends.  They’d write a reply or their thoughts, and then give it back.  We’d just pass it back and forth between one another!”

My fiancee laughed and said, “isnt’ that what little girls are calling ‘Facebook’ these days?”  She’s right, you know: some of us might be able to understand the purpose of a pen and paper, but my little cousin surely woudn’t.  And I think she’s missing something.

A few years ago at Christmas, I came across an old box in the garage and rifled through its contents to find an old letter from my grandpa to my grandma.  Both of them are gone now – as a matter of fact, my grandpa passed away when I was only 2 – and reading the letter was a wonderful and surprising treat.  His wit and charm, his warmth, shined easily through the yellowing, crinkly paper.  I’d never realized how much my Mom’s handwriting had looked like his.   

As grateful as I was for the “Happy Thanksgiving” messages I got on Facebook this year, or the many singing photoshopped-head elf Christmas e-cards I expect to get in the coming weeks, the cards I treasure most come from the 1970s and 80s when I was a kid and our family and friends would send them via (gasp!) snail mail.  And there’s a practical reason I like these cards: I can put them on the windowsills or the mantle.  And my grandfather’s note can be passed around among his great-grandchildren who never knew him.  What on Earth is my cousin going to do with her page of Facebook greetings 20 years from now?

As ironic as it is for me to be writing this in a weblog – which, after all, is just a journal that I’m passing around to all of you to read if you wish – don’t forget to write this holiday season.  Let’s not lose all our books to Kindle, all our cards to jibjab.com, all our sentimentality to e-mail. 

If the pen is mightier than the sword, it stands to reason it ought to be mightier than the microprocessor as well.

This recent Newsweek article points to some psychological research that has been causing a bit of an upheaval (click here for the whole 145 page manuscript if you’re REALLY interested).  The gist of it is that one area of the field – research psychology – is calling the work of another area – that of therapists and counselors – “an unconscionable embarrassment.”  Well, to be specific, a large-scale study has shown that some therapists have a sort of anti-science bias, admitting that they “value personal experience over research evidence” and that they “rely more on their own and colleagues’ experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient.”  This means that even though “scarf therapy” might not do a whole lot for you, therapists who hear that it works from their therapist-buddies might go ahead and use it on you anyway (and charge you for it)(and expect that it will make you better).  The other disturbing half to the problem is that they might choose to use an unorthodox therapy like this even when an effective treatment (e.g., one that has been validated time and again in research trials) is available, because they either don’t keep up with the literature or don’t trust that research support is all it’s cracked up to be.

Well, this is interesting enough in and of itself, and I’ve had a few debates with clinicians over whether or not empirical support ought to count as the end-all, be-all for selecting therapeutic methods (also please note that I don’t for a second think that all therapists are like this in the first place.  I like to imagine that most of them actually know what they’re doing).  But what’s also interesting is psychological science’s accusation of why this is occurring: because many undergraduate psychology programs, they claim, produce weak scientists, and – worse! – these science-weak undergraduates often go on to science-weaker graduate programs for which there is often no research requirement (indeed, this is the selling point).

In some ways, I fear I agree.  At the UC level, for example, a majority of my Psych majors were ex-Biology students on the run from all the math they were expected to complete to get into Med school (where many UC freshmen think they’re destined to go).  When they saw they were expected to take Statistics still, they’d moan and groan and a lot of them would try and flee to Sociology (where they STILL had to take qualitative methodology, at the very least, if not worse).  During research methods, many of my science-phobic students would make it quite clear that they felt this was simply a class they had to get through but that had no real pertinence to them.  They were going to be therapists and really help people, not do all this lame research stuff.  I found myself constantly pointing out to them that being a good therapist meant keeping up with current research and understanding it well enough to evaluate it critically and integrate its findings where appropriate. 

Furthermore, I’ve been noticing another disturbing trend: that is, everyone thinks they need to go to graduate school.  I used to get requests for letters of rec from only my outstanding students; in the last years I was at UC Riverside, I had “C” students begging me for letters.  I warned them that all I could in good conscience write was, “this person did not fail my class,” but they were still happy to get it.  When questioned, many of them pointed to the fact that a plain BA in psychology nowadays (in fact, a plain BA in almost anything) was more or less akin to a High School diploma.  Everything, they told me, had been bumped up one notch: whereas you might have been conisdered pretty educated in the 1950s if you had an Associate’s degree, now you can’t be considered “pretty educated” unless you have your PhD.  This is NOT, I think, the ideal way to encourage people to utilize their strengths the most suitable ways.  Not everyone is meant for a Master’s or PhD program (and these programs are also not what everyone needs!).

So now you have people who fled from math, giving short shrift to their reserach methods and statistics courses, demanding to go to graduate school despite poor performance, and… here’s the last piece… easily finding someplace to go anyway.  That’s right – nowadays, just about anyone can get a MA in psychology – many schools will take anyone who can pay, and one of their big draws is (you guessed it) they aren’t very heavy on the empiricism/quantitative side of psychology.  A lot of these schools aren’t even accredited!  But that doesn’t stop people from getting degrees at them (I just now checked, for example, to find a number of unaccredited universities that will grant the Master’s in Psychology online).

Thank goodness I do not feel this way about the programs at my current institution; smaller and more private though it is, I have seen the director of the brand new PsyD program make every effort to create rigorous admission standards and a rigorous curriculum (just as she has for our clinical master’s degree program). 

Now I’m curious to hear what you think, and whether you think this very same non-science bias occurs (and is rewarded!) in any other discipline?  And what do the sociologists have to say about this belief that everyone must have a graduate-level degree lest they be worthless in the job market?  Do you believe this trend to be true?  In 50 years, will we have to invent a degree that is one step higher than a PhD just to differentiate again??

I love to start a good fight.

Seth

An 11-year-old English schoolboy recently returned to school after summer holiday as a 12-year-old schoolgirl.  Unable to undergo surgery or horomone therapy until age 18, his parents instead changed his name and dressed him in a dress and pigtails.  The child’s classmates were reportedly “confused and tearful,” and the teachers held an emergency assembly in which they told the entire school to henceforth treat the child as a girl.  Parents were most upset (at least, publicly) at the fact that this gender bomb was dropped on them without warning and some lead-in time  to discuss the issue with their own children. 

I had just started thinking over the implications of that incident when it apparently happened again – this time, with a 9-year-old child (some parents just won’t be outdone).  This is one of those rare cases (ha!) where I don’t know exactly where my opinion lies before I begin writing.  On the one hand, I am of the belief that gender identity is not a choice, and would support my son or daughter if they came to realize they identified with the dystonic gender.  On the other hand, this is a pretty adult decision for a child to be making, and without knowing the family personally, I begin to wonder how much of this is a hurting and adamant child and how much is the parent (speaking of hurting children, both gender-switched youths are now apparently now suffering from – prepare to be unsurprised – being horrendously bullied and jeered at).

While overeducated louts such as myself wander around ruminating ponderously over the issue as though it were complex or something, less tentative folks have already started chiming in on the message boards:

“Our society is sick to allow this to happen. I suppose we can’t say anything for fear of not being ‘politically correct’. ”

“There are proably very few experts in this field when it comes to children i just hope the very best were available not some local pc correct psuedo experts.”

Nitpicky English language-related errors aside, I note the citation of political correctness as the reason why no one is apparently in an uproar over the actual gender-changing portion of our story (remember, parents were ostensibly upset because they weren’t given sufficient time to discuss it with their kids)… what do you think?

Is twelve old enough to know that you would rather be a woman for the rest of your life than a man? (my personal answer, is yeah, probably.  But this might be the least controversial part of this).

Is nine old enough?

What would you do if it were YOUR child?

In what way do you think the second incident might be related to the first?  (it might be similar to the way rape victims sometimes come forward in pairs – the first paves the way for the second, comfort-wise.  My colleague sees it more like a spreading virus).

Did these parents handle the situation poorly by not giving the rest of the school enough time to work out the complexities of the issue with their children?

As a psychologist, I realize I’m supposed to have some deep insights into this topic rather than more questions.  But firstly, I’m not that kind of psychologist.  And anyway, I’m not always (or ever, for that matter) particularly insightful.  With issues like this, I’m almost mistrustful of anyone who shows up with all the right answers immediately.  But don’t let me deter you if you’ve got ’em!

I’ve always believed that we’re too overawed by our own technological prowess, but this poster presented last June at the Human Brain Mapping Conference should really serve as a cautionary tale for those of us who glance at fMRI research and figure that the findings are wholly trustworthy.

A graduate student at Dartmouth was busily engaged in two things that graduate students do best: research, and general goofiness.  The research, in the area of decision-making, involved scanning people’s brains while they observed photographs and attempted to guess the emotional valence of the subjects depicted.  The goofiness involved using various objects bought at the supermarket as scanning targets while they were developing their protocols.  A pumpkin went in first, and then a cornish game hen.  Finally, the researcher purchased a whole Atlantic Salmon and strapped him into the fMRI machine.  Ever the scientist, he ran the protocols properly, showing the deceased fishie the photographs and asking it to guess at the emotions being displayed.

A certain amount of false positives are expected, but it was where the false positives were that alarmed the grad student – right in the salmon’s dead little brain cavity. 

Rather than worrying, however, that deceased ectotherms have the ability to successfully read human emotions, we should take this as a warning to have a healthy skepticism regarding the interpretation of fMRI data, especially since multiple comparisons, though recommended, are hardly ever done.  I’m always hearing about how fMRI research has pinpointed the part of our brain that may be responsible for (divorce, personality traits, wristwatch preference)… brain imaging research is amazing and we’ve advanced by leaps and bounds – but in a lot of ways, we’re still swimming upstream.