Walter Mischel Passes Away

Walter Mischel was an important figure in the history of psychology. His famous "marshmallow study" is still cited and picked apart today. Earlier this week, he passed away from pancreatic cancer. He was 88:

Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

Dr. Mischel was probably best known for the marshmallow test, which challenged children to wait before eating a treat. That test and others like it grew in part out of Dr. Mischel’s deepening frustration with the predominant personality models of the mid-20th century.

“The proposed approach to personality psychology,” he concluded, “recognizes that a person’s behavior changes the situations of his life as well as being changed by them.”

In other words, categorizing people as a collection of traits was too crude to reliably predict behavior, or capture who they are. Dr. Mischel proposed an “If … then” approach to assessing personality, in which a person’s instincts and makeup interact with what’s happening moment to moment, as in: If that waiter ignores me one more time, I’m talking to the manager. Or: If I can make my case in a small group, I’ll do it then, rather than in front of the whole class.

In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.

Walter Mischel was born on Feb. 22, 1930, in Vienna, the second of two sons of Salomon Mischel, a businessman, and Lola Lea (Schreck) Mischel, who ran the household. The family fled the Nazis in 1938 and, after stops in London and Los Angeles, settled in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in 1940.

After graduating from New Utrecht High School as valedictorian, Walter completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology at New York University and, in 1956, a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

He joined the Harvard faculty in 1962, at a time of growing political and intellectual dissent, soon to be inflamed in the psychology department by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Baba Ram Dass), avatars of the era of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

This is a great loss for the field of psychology. But his legacy will live on.

Finding Strengths

As part of my job and newly reorganized departments, my boss had many us take the Clifton StrengthsFinder, a measure developed by Donald O. Clifton and Gallup. This measure, developed through semi-structured interviews and subsequent psychometric research, identifies an individual's top 5 strengths from a list of 34. Here are my results:

The book that comes along with the assessment describes the 34 themes in detail and gives very basic information on the measure's development. But for the psychometricially inclined, you can read a detailed technical report of the measure's evidence for reliability and validity here. In general, the measure shows acceptable reliability and construct validity. There are moderate to strong correlations with the Big Five Personality Traits. My themes, specifically, relate to my high Agreeableness and Openness to Experience on the Big Five. (For comparison, here are my Myers-Briggs results.)

The report also talks about how the themes relate to leadership potential. What I'm best at, according to these results, are Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking.

And, of course, I always enjoy taking tests and measures, especially if I think they'll tell me something about myself.

Feeling Honored

Awesome news first thing on a Monday! My paper, "Effect of the environment on participation in spinal cord injuries/disorders: The mediating impact of resilience, grief, and self-efficacy," published in Rehabilitation Psychology last year was awarded the Harold Yuker Award for Research Excellence:

This paper was the result of a huge survey, overseen by my post-doc mentor, Sherri LaVela, and worked on by many of my amazing VA colleagues. The paper itself uses latent variable path analysis to examine how resilience, grief, and self-efficacy among individuals with spinal cord injuries/disorders mediates to the effect of environmental barriers on ability to participate. The message of the paper was that, while improving environmental barriers is key to increasing participation, by intervening to increase resilience and self-efficacy, and decrease feelings of grief/loss over the injury/disorder, we can impact participation, even if we can't directly intervene to improve all of the environmental barriers.

So cool to get recognition that one of my favorite and most personally meaningful papers was also viewed as meaningful and important to experts in the field.

Purchases and Happiness

I've heard it said before that it's better to spend your money on experiences than materials. While I appreciate the sentiment - memories last longer than stuff - something about that statement has always bothered me and I couldn't put my finger on what. But a recent study in Psychological Science, "Experiential or Material Purchases? Social Class Determines Purchase Happiness," helped shed some light on when that sentiment might not be true.

The study is a meta-analysis of past research, as well as a report of 3 additional studies performed by the authors, to determine whether social class determines happiness with experiential versus material purchases. Their hypothesis was that experiences are more valuable to people with higher socioeconomic status - that is, because their material needs have been met, they can focus on higher needs - while materials would be more valuable to people with lower socioeconomic status - people who may struggling with basic needs like food and clothing. They confirmed their hypothesis, not only when examining participants' actual SES, but also when it was experimentally determined, by asking participants to imagine their monthly income had been increased or decreased. As they sum up in the article:

We argue that social class influences purchase happiness because resource abundance focuses people on internal states and goals, such as self-development, self-expression, and the pursuit of uniqueness (Kraus et al., 2012; Stephens et al., 2012; Stephens et al., 2007), whereas resource deprivation orients people toward resource management and spending money wisely (Fernbach et al., 2015; Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003). These fundamentally different value orientations translate into different purchase motives held by people from higher and lower classes (Lee, Priester, Hall, & Wood, 2018).

Stress and Its Effect on the Body

After a stressful winter and spring, I'm finally taking a break from work. So of course, what better time to get sick? After a 4-day migraine (started on my first day of vacation - Friday) with a tension headache and neck spasm so bad I couldn't look left, I ended up in urgent care yesterday afternoon. One injection of muscle relaxer, plus prescriptions for more muscle relaxers and migraine meds, and I'm finally feeling better.

Why does this happen? Why is it that after weeks or months of stress, we get sick when we finally get to "come down"?

I've blogged a bit about stress before. Stress causes your body to release certain hormones, such as adrenaline and norepinephrine, which gives an immediate physiological response to stress, and cortisol, which takes a bit longer for you to feel at work in your body. And in fact, cortisol is also involved in many negative consequences of chronic stress. Over time, it can do things like increase blood sugar, suppress the immune system, and contribute to acne breakouts.

You're probably aware that symptoms of sickness are generally caused by your body reacting to and fighting the infection or virus. So the reason you suddenly get sick when the stressor goes away is because your immune system increases function, realizes there's a foreign body that doesn't belong, and starts fighting it. You had probably already caught the virus or infection, but didn't have symptoms like fever (your body's attempt to "cook" it out) or runny nose (your body increasing mucus production to push out the bug), that let you know you were sick.

And in my case in particular, a study published in Neurology found that migraine sufferers were at increased risk of an attack after the stress "let-down." According to the researchers, this effect is even stronger when there is a huge build-up of stress and a sudden, large let-down; it's better to have mini let-downs throughout the stressful experience.

And here I thought I was engaging in a good amount of self-care throughout my stressful February-May.

Statistics in the News

It's been a long road to our new database management system at work, and while we're still working through issues with vendors, I think we're finally going to be able to publish exam scores to our new system today. (Wish me luck!) In the meantime, here are some statistically-themed news stories I'll have to read later:

• 99% - that's how many requests for access to experimental drugs and treatments are approved by the FDA under the "compassionate use" program; even so, Congress passed a bill providing increased access to experimental treatments
• 5 - the number of eviction notices these parents sent to their 30-year-old son still living at home; a judge agreed it's time for him to move out
• 46% and 50% - the percentage of urban and rural residents, respectively, who report drug addiction as one of the biggest problems in their community
• Less than 20 minutes - how long it will take you to listen to Dr. Frank Newport's 5 key polling insights in this Gallup podcast
• June 27 - the date of the grand opening of the National Museum of Psychology at the University of Akron

Psychology for Writers: Your Happiness Set-Point

A few years ago, a former colleague was chatting with someone about the work she did with Veterans who had experienced a spinal cord injury. The person she was chatting with talked about how miserable she would be if that happened to her, even implying that she'd rather be dead than have a spinal cord injury. Many of us who have worked with people experiencing trauma probably have had similar conversations. People believe they would never be able to happy again if they experienced a life-changing event like a traumatic injury.

On the other hand, we've also heard people talk about how unbelievably happy they would be if they won the lottery or came into a great deal of money in some way.

But you might be surprised to know that researchers have been able to collect data from people both before and after these types of events - simply because they've recruited a large number of people for a study and some people in the sample happened to experience one of these life-changing events. And you might be even more surprised to know that people were generally wrong about how they would feel after these events. People who had experienced a traumatic injury had a dip in happiness but returned to approximately the same place they were before. And people who won the lottery had a brief lift in happiness followed also by a return to baseline.

These findings offer support for what is known as the set-point theory of happiness. According to this theory, people have a happiness baseline and while events may move them up or down in terms of happiness, they'll eventually return to baseline. Situationally influenced emotions are, for the most part, temporary. You might be sad about that injury, or breakup, or financial problem, or you might be elated about that promotion, or lottery win, or new relationship for a little while, but eventually, you revert to your usual level of happiness. Everyone has their own level. Some people are happier on average than others.

This theory also explains why people who are prone to depression need to seek some kind of treatment, often in the form of therapy and medication - interventions to increase your baseline level of happiness. Money or love or new opportunities may help in the short run, but what needs to be targeted is your baseline itself. Obviously events can target your baseline - a person may have an experience that changes their way of looking at the world, for better or worse. But events that only affect your mood and don't affect your thought process or reaction are unlikely to have any lasting effects.

This is important to keep in mind when writing your characters. Situations and events can obviously push their current mood around. But for a change to be permanent, it has to do more than simply make the person happy or sad - it has to change their mindset. A divorce might make a person sad. A divorce that changes how secure a person feels in relationships or leads them to distrust others might result in a permanent change. A lottery win might make a person happy. A lottery win that helps them become financially independent, get out of a bad situation, and completely change their way of life might result in a permanent change.

Think about how your character is changing and why, to make sure it's a believable permanent change and not just a temporary happiness shift. And if it's just temporary, know that it's completely believable for your character to work back to baseline on his or her own.

Psychology for Writers: Knowledge and Perceived Competence

Every once in a while, a psychology theory comes along that is so good, I share it with pretty much everyone, not just fellow psychologists or the psychology-oriented friends. And a great example is the Dunning Kruger effect, which I've blogged about so many times. I share it again today, as a psychology for writers post because I think it is such a good descriptor of human behavior that it could easily influence how you write characters.

The Dunning Kruger effect describes the relationship between actual knowledge and perceived competence (how much knowledge you think you have or how well you know a topic). But to even begin to make accurate ratings on your own competence, you need to know enough about that topic, and, most importantly you need to know just how much you don't know.

If that description doesn't make sense, don't worry - I'm about to break things down. People who know very little about a topic and people who know a lot about a topic often rate their perceived competence very similarly. Why? People who know very little about a topic simply don't know enough to know how much there is to know on a topic. So they may underestimate how much work it takes to become an expert. In essence, they ask "How hard can it be?"

But people who have moderate levels of knowledge on a topic rate their competence much lower - lower than people with high levels of knowledge, yes, but also lower than people with low levels of knowledge. They now have enough knowledge on a topic to be aware of how much more work it would take to become an expert.

If you, like me, prefer to see things plotted out to make sense of them, I offer this graph from a Story.Fund post about the Dunning Kruger effect:

And if you'd like a real life example of the Dunning Kruger effect, I know of no better example than our President, who constantly speaks about topics he knows little about as though he were an expert.

What does this mean for your characters? It explains why complete beginners will often charge into something they know little about - and end up in over their heads. This happens a lot in fiction. But it also means that someone with a moderate amount of competence on something will be extremely cautious and not confident in their abilities. It could explain why someone chooses not to help that brash character that rushes in blindly - they don't have to be uncaring or even have poor self esteem to feel that way. They are simply more aware of their shortcomings and gaps in knowledge.

Today in "Evidence for the Dunning-Kruger Effect"

A new study shows that watching videos of people performing some skill can result in the illusion of skill acquisition, adding yet more evidence to the "how hard can it be?" mindset outlined in the Dunning-Kruger effect:

Although people may have good intentions when trying to learn by watching others, we explored unforeseen consequences of doing so: When people repeatedly watch others perform before ever attempting the skill themselves, they may overestimate the degree to which they can perform the skill, which is what we call an illusion of skill acquisition. This phenomenon is potentially important, because perceptions of learning likely guide choices about what skills to attempt and when.

In six experiments, we explored this hypothesis. First, we tested whether repeatedly watching others increases viewers’ belief that they can perform the skill themselves (Experiment 1). Next, we tested whether these perceptions are mistaken: Mere watching may not translate into better actual performance (Experiments 2–4). Finally, we tested mechanisms. Watching may inflate perceived learning because viewers believe that they have gained sufficient insight from tracking the performer’s actions alone (Experiment 5); conversely, experiencing a “taste” of the performance should attenuate the effect if it is indeed driven by the experiential gap between seeing and doing (Experiment 6).

In the experiments, participants watched videos of the tablecloth trick (pulling a tablecloth off a table without disturbing dishes; experiments 1 and 5), throwing darts (experiment 2), doing the moonwalk (experiment 3), mirror-tracing (tracing a path through a maze displayed at the top of the screen in a blank box just below it; experiment 4), and juggling bowling pins (experiment 6). Through their research, the authors isolated the missing element in learning by watching - feeling the actual performance of the task. In the 6th experiment, simply getting a taste of the feelings involved - holding the pins that would be used in juggling without attempting to juggle themselves - changed ratings of skill acquisition.

During the Olympics, when you watch athletes at the top of their game performing tasks almost effortlessly, it's easy to think the tasks aren't as challenging as they actually are. Based on these study results, even having people simply put on a pair of ice skates or stand on a snowboard might be enough for them to realize just how difficult skating can actually be.

Just to help put things into perspective, here's a supercut of awesome stunts followed by a person demonstrating why you should not try them at home:

Myers-Brigged, 2.0

I've been feeling different lately - for a variety of reasons I won't go into - and just out of curiosity, decided to take the Myers-Briggs again. I'm a social psychologist, after all, and therefore think personality is malleable. So imagine my surprise when I got basically the same result:

The only difference from my previous test is that I'm "turbulent" as opposed to "assertive". Hmmm...

Things I'm Loving Today

What am I loving today? Well..

• This comic from XKCD:

• Chris Stuckman's hilarious review of Fifty Shades Freed:

• And while we're at it, his spot on review of The Cloverfield Paradox (go watch on Netflix first if you want to see it):

• For comparison, you can also check out the review of The Cloverfield Paradox from my friend over at Is It Any Good?
• David Robinson of Variance Explained tells us how to win your office Super Bowl square.
• And finally, this sign I saw on my walk to work this morning:

Statistical Sins: Olympic Figure Skating and Biased Judges

The 2018 Winter Olympics are almost here! And, of course, everyone is already talking about the events that have me as mesmerized as the gymnasts in the Summer Olympics - figure skating.

Full confession: I love figure skating. (BTW, if you haven't yet seen I, Tonya, you really should. If for no other reason than Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.)

In fact, it seems everyone loves figure skating, so much that the sport is full of drama and scandals. And with the Winter Olympics almost here, people are already talking about the potential for biased judges.

We've long known that ratings from people are prone to biases. Some people are more lenient while others are more strict. We recognize that even with clear instructions on ratings, there is going to be bias. This is why in research we measure things like interrater reliability, and work to improve it when there are discrepancies between raters.

And if you've peeked at the current International Skating Union (ISU) Judging System, you'll note that the instructions are quite complex. They say the complexity is designed to prevent bias, but when one has to put so much cognitive effort into understanding something so complex, they have less cognitive energy to suppress things like bias. (That's right, this is a self-regulation and thought suppression issue - you only have so many cognitive resources to go around, and anything that monopolizes them will leave an opening for bias.)

Now, bias in terms of leniency and severity is not the real issue, though. If one judge tends to be more harsh and another tends to be more lenient, those tendencies should wash out thanks to averages. (In fact, total score is a trimmed mean, meaning they throw out the highest and lowest scores. A single very lenient judge and a single very harsh judge will then have no impact on a person's score.) The problem is when the bias emerges with certain people versus others.

At the 2014 Winter Olympics, the favorite to win was Yuna Kim of South Korea, who won the gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She skated beautifully; you can watch here. But she didn't win the gold, she won the silver. The gold went to Adelina Sotnikova of Russia (watch her routine here). The controversy is that, after her routine, she was greeted and hugged by the Russian judge. This was viewed by others as a clear sign of bias, and South Korea complained to the ISU. (The complaints were rejected, and the medals stood as awarded. After all, a single biased judge wouldn't have gotten Sotnikova such a high score; she had to have high scores across most, if not all, judges.) A researcher interviewed for NBC news conducted some statistical analysis of judge data and found an effect of judge country-of-origin:

As a psychometrician, judge ratings are a type of measurement, and I personally would approach this issue as a measurement problem. Rasch, the measurement model I use most regularly these days, posits that an individual's response to an item (or, in the figure skating world, a part of a routine) is a product of the difficulty of the item and the ability of the individual. If you read up on the ISU judging system (and I'll be honest - I don't completely understand it but I'm working on: perhaps for a Statistics Sunday post!), they do address this issue of difficulty in terms of the elements of the program: the jumps, spins, steps, and sequences skaters execute in their routine.

There are guidelines as to which/how many of the elements must be present in the routine and they are ranked in terms of difficulty, meaning that successfully executing a difficult element results in more points awarded than successfully executing an easy element (and failing to execute an easy element results in more points deducted than failing to execute a difficult element).

But a particular approach to Rasch allows the inclusion of other factors that might influence scores, such as judge. This model, which considers judge to be a "facet," can model judge bias, and thus allow it to be corrected when computing an individual's ability level. The bias at issue here is not just overall; it's related to the concordance between judge home country and skater home country. This effect can be easily modeled with a Rasch Facets model.

Of course, part of me feels the controversy at the beginning of the NBC article and video above is a bit overblown. The video fixates on an element Sotnikova blew - a difficult combination element (triple flip-double toe-double loop) she didn't quite execute perfectly. (She did land it though; she didn't fall.)

But the video does not show the easier element, a triple Lutz, that Kim didn't perfectly execute. (Once again, she landed it.) Admittedly, I only watched the medal-winning performances, and didn't see any of the earlier performances that might have shown Kim's superior skill and/or Sotnikova's supposed immaturity, but I could see, based on the concept of element difficulty, why one might have awarded Sotnikova more points than Kim, or at least, have deducted fewer points for Sotnikova's mistake than Kim's mistake.

In a future post, I plan to demonstrate how to conduct a Rasch model, and hopefully at some point a Facets model, maybe even using some figure skating judging data. The holdup is that I'd like to demonstrate it using R, since R is open source and accessible by any of my readers, as opposed to the proprietary software I use at my job (Winsteps for Rasch and Facets for Rasch Facets). I'd also like to do some QC between Winsteps/Facets and R packages, to check for potential inaccuracies in computing results, so that the package(s) I present have been validated first.

New History of Psychology Book to Check Out

One of my favorite topics is History of Psychology. For every psychology class I teach, I often spend the first lecture giving students historical background on the field/subfield, even if that information isn't discussed in the text. I love tracing the background and showing how our current position is a product of or reaction to everything coming before it.

So I'm always excited to learn about a new History of Psychology book to check out:

William James is responsible for bringing the field of psychology to the United States, and is considered the founder of the functionalism school of thought. That is, one of the early debates in the field of psychology was structuralism vs. functionalism. Basically, structuralists focused on whether consciousness is the product of definable components (structures of the mind) and functionalists viewed consciousness as an active adaptation to one's environment, resulting from complex interactions (focused on function of the mind, rather than the individual components). So you can think of these schools as trees vs. forest focus.

You are probably also familiar with James's brother, novelist Henry James (who wrote The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove) and possibly his sister, Alice James (who suffered from life-long mental illness and published her diaries on the topic).

James is well-known for his two-volume Principles of Psychology (which is public domain and can be found here). This new book can be a companion piece to that book and helps place James's work in its historical context.

If only I hadn't made a New Year's Resolution to purchase no books...

Psychology for Writers: Amnesia

When I started getting ready for this blog series, I added some posts to writer groups I belong to, asking people to describe some of the tropes in fiction that drive them crazy. One person commented on how head injuries are portrayed in fiction, and many replied with similar frustrations: people are knocked unconscious for a time and wake up sometime later with no lingering issues, bumps to the head are used to recover memories, and of course, the whole "don't let someone suffering from a concussion fall asleep" nonsense.

Two jobs ago, I worked as a researcher for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Though I didn't study this topic of head injuries myself, many of my colleagues did. (I've also suffered a couple of those in my lifetime, so I can talk about some of the experience firsthand.)

Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is the medical term for a head injury. I was originally going to write this post on TBI, but realized that would make for a very long post - or else, a post in which I gloss over a lot of detail. So instead, I'm going to talk specifically about amnesia.

TBI is usually classified into one of three categories: mild, moderate, and severe. But any insult to the brain can bring with it side effects. The person suffering the head injury will probably experience what's called "post-traumatic amnesia," where they may lose their memory of things happening just before and/or just after the event. And they probably won't remember the experience of hitting their head at all. For a mild head injury, the individual may have a more severe bout of amnesia that comes on later, but will still be short-term. In fact, the delay between the head injury and this amnesia can also be seen as an indicator of severity. For more severe head injuries, amnesia and other neurological symptoms, like seizure, may be almost immediate.

The length of this experience of amnesia is also related to severity. For extremely mild injuries, post-traumatic amnesia may last only a few minutes. For a severe injury, it can last days.

And no, another blow to the head won't bring the memory back. In fact, a new head injury shortly after an old one is very bad, because the brain can't heal itself as well. Too many injuries, and the brain may be unable to heal itself at all. This is why retired professional football players have disorders that look like dementia. Their brain has essentially become scar tissue.

For me, the amnesia happened about 3 hours after the injury - I couldn't respond to questions about who I was, who my family was, the day, or my dog's name (all questions my mom asked me). I remember this feeling odd but not as terrifying as you might think. In fiction, amnesia sufferers wander around terrified, asking who they are. But for me, it was more like the answers to these questions were on the tip of my tongue, and with just a little more time, I could answer all of them. Less "Oh my god, I don't remember!" and more "That's strange. I swore I knew that." So at some level, I knew that I had the answers to these questions somewhere in my brain. 28 years later, I still remember all of this, and all of the questions I was asked at the time. The only memory I have never recovered is the second when my head came in contact with the wall. (The experience in the ER is also a bit fuzzy, but mostly because I kept falling asleep - I was exhausted by that point. And I slept a lot in the months after, as I recovered.)

I was feeling back to normal, memory-wise, within a few hours. Now, there are longer-term side effects of a head injury - things like fatigue, insomnia, and intermittent memory issues, which comprise what's known as post-concussive syndrome. Another post for another day.

So amnesia via head injury is generally short-term unless the person is severely injured, and at that point, a little amnesia may be the least of the person's worries.

It's actually much more believable for someone to experience amnesia as a result of some kind of psychological trauma. Dissociation is a psychological term for when a person loses his or her sense of self, and encompasses a handful of related disorders. What was previously known as multiple personality disorder is a dissociative disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. Dissociation becomes a defense mechanism to protect oneself from re-experiencing trauma.

During dissociative fugue - a much better explanation if you want a character to wander into a town with no memory - the person will often run away from their life and commitments. (In fact, the word "fugue" comes from the Latin word for flight.) While in this state, the person may forget who they are and details of their life. It isn't unusual for a person in a fugue to assume another identity, likely because they realize they need one to function. They probably won't appear to be in immediate distress. After all, the fugue was brought on to escape distress, and to most observers, the person will appear normal. The person may eventually come out of the fugue, but it's harder to predict. Unlike a head injury, which has a physical cause, and therefore a clear trajectory of healing, the block here is psychological and will exist as long as the person needs protection from whatever is causing distress.

Finally, there's a type of dissociation/amnesia many have experienced - alcohol-induced blackouts. Once again, short-term and physical in cause. The hangover will probably last longer than the amnesia itself.

Psychology for Writers: On Fight, Flight, and Fear Responses

This will be a new series on my blog, coming out on Fridays. (I may not post one every single week, but they'll always come out on a Friday.) My goal is to impart some wisdom from my discipline - psychology - to help writers, in part because I see a lot of tropes over and over that are not really in line with what we know about human behavior. (And I have so many writer friends with their own expertise - I'd love to see others share some domain knowledge like this to help us write more accurately!)

One of the big tropes I see is how people respond to extreme fear, usually by soiling themselves in some way. George R.R. Martin just loves to have his characters pee and crap themselves, but he's certainly not the only offender. In fact, I just finished Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King (one of my favorite authors) and Owen King, and was really frustrated when once again, the peeing-oneself-in-fear trope reared its ugly head.

Do people pee themselves in fear? Yes they do. It probably doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it does in books, but then we don't usually encounter some of literature's most fear-inducing creatures in real life. So we'll say for the moment that the frequency with which people pee themselves is fine. In fact, that's not even the issue I have.

The issue I have is when this response occurs. In the books (and movies & TV series too), something scary shows up and the character immediately wets him or herself. Nope. That's not when it happens. It would happen after the fear moment has passed - after the creature has been beaten or moved onto another target, just as the character is beginning to breath a sigh of relief. That's right - you pee after you've been afraid, not during.

How could that be? Let me talk to you for a moment about the fight vs. flight response, for which I've created this visual aid:

Regardless of whether you're going into battle or running way, your body response is the same: in response to some stressor, your body is raring up to go. Specifically, the sympathetic nervous system is getting you ready to expend energy, because fighting or flighting, you're going to be expending energy. Your body releases chemicals, like epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine, and cortisol. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Your pupils dilate. Your muscles get ready for action.

But as these systems are charging up, other systems are slowing or shutting down completely. Your immune response is suppressed. Sexual arousal is suppressed. Digestion slows or may even stop. And your body stops producing waste materials, like urine. It's not very helpful if, just as you're getting ready to fight for your life, you realize you're hungry or need to pee, or if your allergies act up and you've suddenly got itchy eyes, sneezes, and a runny nose. Those feelings go away, temporarily, so you can focus your energy on the surviving.

But after the stressful period ends, your parasympathetic nervous system takes over. Unlike the sympathetic nervous system's "fight or flight" response, the parasympathetic nervous system's response is "rest and digest." (I've also heard "feed and breed," because of the aforementioned impact on sexual arousal.) Those processes that were slowed or stopped start up again. Your muscles relax. You can imagine where this is going.

The best portrayal of this concept I've ever seen was in The Green Mile: the scene where Wild Bill, one of the inmates on death row, grabs Percy, one of the guards, and threatens him. The other guards get Wild Bill to release Percy, who rushes to the other side of the corridor and collapses on the floor. Wild Bill says with a smirk that he wouldn't have hurt Percy. And that's when Del, a fellow inmate, points out that Percy has just wet himself.

Percy is away from Wild Bill and safe. While the emotions he was experiencing when Wild Bill grabs him are still present (he's still upset), his body is returning to its previous physiological state. And that's when his bladder lets go.

So there you have it - if you really want your character to wet him- or herself, it should happen after the character begins "coming down."

I know one question I've gotten when discussing this in the past is, why do animals pee on someone/something in fear? Remember, animals don't have the same highly evolved nervous system that we have. Their systems are not going to shut down in the same way a human's does. Also, their reaction is not directly to fear, but is (arguably) an evolved response that is pretty effective in getting predators to let them go. Sure, an animal could bite instead, but that's aggressive and likely to earn an aggressive response. These animals are generally built for flight, not fight, and peeing is a submissive response. But for humans and other creatures higher on the food chain, being an apex predator means we'll have much different responses than animals that are not apex predators.

Bonus: you could use this information to portray the opposite. Sometimes authors want to show how badass their character is by having them be completely unfazed by something another character finds terrifying. You could have your character walking into battle commenting that he/she is starving and hopes to get something to eat after finishing with this nonsense, or something along those lines.

I know I blog about statistics a lot on this blog, but I'm always thrilled to talk about my discipline too! Any psychology topics you'd like to see addressed here? (Or any tropes you're tired to seeing?)

How Did I Get Here?: From the Desk of a Psychometrician

Psychometrics refers to an area of statistics focused on developing, validating, and standardizing tests, though it can also refer to a methodological process of creating tests, beginning with identifying the exact construct to be measured, all the way up to continuing revision and standardization of test items. As institutions become more and more data-driven, many are looking to hire psychometricians to serve as their measurement experts. This is an in-demand field. And psychometrics is still a rather small field, so there aren’t a lot of people with this training.

For this post, I focused on my own journey – since the only experience I know well is my own – but I plan to have future posts discussing other tracks colleagues (both past and present) have taken. My hope is to give you, the reader, some guidance on entering this field from a variety of starting places.

To tell you more about myself, my journey toward becoming a psychometrician could probably begin as early as 2002-2003, my junior year in college, when I first encountered the field of psychometrics. But it wasn’t until 2014 that I really aimed at becoming a psychometrician, through post-doctoral training. And though I’d been calling myself a psychometrician since at least 2014, I took my first job with the title “psychometrician” in 2016.

Of course, it may have begun even earlier than that, when as a teenager, I was fascinated with the idea of measurement – measures of cognitive ability, personality, psychological diagnoses, and so on. I suppose I was working my way toward becoming a psychometrician my whole life; I just didn’t know it until a few years ago.

But I may ask myself:

Undergrad

I majored in Psychology, earning a BS. My undergrad had a two-semester combined research methods and statistics course with a lab. While I think that really set the foundation for being a strong statistician and methodologist today, I also recognize that it served to weed out many of my classmates. When I started in Research Methods I my sophomore year, I had over 30 classmates – all psychology majors. By Research Methods II, we were probably half that number. And in 2004, I graduated as 1 of 5 psychology majors.

During undergrad, I had two experiences that helped push me toward the field of psychometrics, both during my junior year. I completed an undergraduate research project – my major required either a research track (which I selected), involving an independent project, or a practitioner track that involved an internship. This project gave me some hands-on experience with collecting, analyzing, and writing about data, and is where I first learned about exploratory factor analysis, thanks to the faculty sponsor of my research. And that year, I also took a course in Tests & Measures, where I started learning about the types of measures I would be working on later as a psychometrician.

At this point in my career, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into research full-time, instead thinking I’d become a clinical psychologist or professor. But I knew I enjoyed collecting and (especially) analyzing data, and this is when I first started spending a lot of time in SPSS.

Spoiler alert: I use SPSS in my current job, but it’s not my favorite and in past jobs, I've spent much more time in R and Stata. But it’s good to get exposed to real statistical software¹ and build up a comfort level with it so you can branch out to others. And getting comfortable with statistical software really prepared me for…

Grad School

After undergrad, I started my masters then PhD in Social Psychology. I had applied to clinical psychology programs as well, but my research interests and experience (and lack of clinical internship) made me a better fit with social psychology. My goal at that time was to become a professor. Since I had a graduate assistantship, I got started on some research projects and began serving as a teacher assistant for introductory psychology and statistics. This is where I began to fall in love with statistics, and where I first had the opportunity to teach statistics to others. Many students struggled with statistics, and would visit me in office hours. Working to figure out how to fix misunderstandings made me learn the material better, and turning around and teaching it to others also improved my understanding.

I took basically every statistics course I could fit into my schedule, and tacked on a few through self-designed candidacy exams, workshops at conferences, and self-learning for the fun of it: multivariate statistics, structural equation modeling (including an intermediate/advanced 3-day workshop paid for with monetary gifts from Christmas and birthday), meta-analysis, power analysis, longitudinal analysis, and so on and so on. Surprisingly, I didn't delve into modern test theory and I can't remember if I'd even heard of item response theory or Rasch at this point, but I was only looking around the psychology scene. Those approaches hadn’t reached a tipping point in psychology yet and, honestly I’m not sure they’ve reached it yet even now, but we’re much closer than we were a decade ago.

I also became more exposed to qualitative research methods, like focus groups and interviews, and how to analyze that kind of data, first through a grant-funded position shortly after I finished my masters degree, and then, during my last year of graduate school, as a research assistant with the Department of Veterans Affairs. (By that point, I’d given up on being a professor and decided research was the way I wanted to go.) And that position as a research assistant led directly to…

Post Doc #1

Post-doc #1 was part of a program to train health services researchers. But I had some freedom in designing it, and devoted my time to beefing up my methods skills, becoming someone who could call herself an experienced qualitative (and mixed methods) researcher. I trained people on how to conduct focus groups. I coordinated data collection and transcription of hundreds of focus groups and interviews over multiple studies. I analyzed a ton of qualitative data and got more comfortable with NVivo. I brought innovative qualitative research methods to VA projects. And I published a lot.

A bit before my last year of post-doc #1, I became involved with a measurement development project using Rasch. I was brought on board for my qualitative expertise: to conduct and analyze focus groups for the first step in developing the measure. I was intrigued. I knew all about classical test theory, with its factor analysis and overall reliability. But this approach was different. It gave item-level data. It converted raw scores, which it considered ordinal (something I’d never thought about), into continuous variables. It could be used to create computer adaptive tests and generate scores for two people that are on the same metric even if the two people had completely different items. It was like magic.

But better than magic – it was a new approach to statistics. And as with statistical approaches I’d encountered before that, I wanted to learn it.

Fortunately, the Rasch expert for the study was a friend (and a colleague who thought highly of me and my abilities), and she took the time to sit down and explain to me how everything worked. She let me shadow her on some of the psychometric work. She referred me to free webinars that introduced the concepts. She showed me output from our study data and had me walk through how to interpret it. And most of all, she encouraged me to learn Rasch.

So I wrote a grant application to receive…

Post Doc #2

That’s right, I did 2. Because I’m either a masochist or bat-s*** crazy.

But this time, I had a clear goal I knew I could achieve: the goal of becoming a full-fledged psychometrician. As such, this post-doc was much more focused than post-doc #1 (and was also shorter in length). I proposed an education plan that included courses in item response theory and Rasch, as well as a variety of workshops (including some held by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the PROMIS project). I also proposed to work with a couple of experts in psychometrics, and spent time working on research to develop new measures. I already had the qualitative research knowledge to conduct the focus groups and interviews for the early stages of measure development, and I could pull from the previous psychometric study I worked on to get guidance on the best methods to use. In addition to my own projects, I was tapped by a few other researchers to help them with some of their psychometric projects.

Unfortunately, the funding situation in VA was changing. I left VA not long after that post-doc ended, in part because of difficulty with funding, but mainly, I wanted to be a full-time psychometrician, focusing my time and energy on developing and analyzing tests.

Fortunately, I learned about an opportunity as…

Psychometrician at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

When I first looked at the job ad, I didn’t think I was qualified, so I held off on applying. I think I was also unsure about whether a private corporation would be a good fit for me, who had been in higher education and government for most of my career at that point. But a friend talked me into it. What I learned after the interview is that 1) I am qualified and that self-doubt was just silly (story of my life, man), and 2) the things I didn’t know could be learned and my new boss (and the department) was very interested in candidates who could learn and grow.

Fortunately, I had many opportunities to grow at HMH. In addition to conducting analyses I was very familiar with – Rasch measurement model statistics, item anchoring, reliability calculations, and structural equation modeling and other classical test theory approaches – I also learned new approaches – classical item analysis, age and grade norming, quantile regression, and anchoring items tested in 2 languages. I also learned more about adaptive testing.

A few months after I started at HMH, they hired a new CEO, who opted to take the company in a different direction. In the months that followed, many positions were eliminated, including my own. So I got a 2 month vacation, in which I took some courses and kept working on building my statistics skills.

Luckily, a colleague referred me to…

Manager of Exam Development at Dental Assisting National Board

DANB is a non-profit organization, which serves as an independent national certification board for dental assistants. We have national exams as well as certain state exams we oversee, for dental assistants to become certified in areas related to the job tasks they perform: radiation safety (since they take x-rays), infection control, assisting the dentist with general chairside activities, and so on. My job includes content validation studies, which involves subject matter experts and current dental assistants to help identify what topics should be tested on, and standard setting studies, once again involving subject matter experts to determine pass-points. I just wrapped up my first DANB content validation study and also got some additional Rasch training, this time in Facets.

Going forward, I’m planning on sharing more posts about the kinds of things I’m working on.

For the time being, I’ll say it isn’t strictly necessary to beef up on methods and stats to be a psychometrician – I’m an anomaly in my current organization for the amount of classical stats training I have. And in fact, psychometrics, especially with modern approaches like item response theory and Rasch, is so applied, there are many psychometricians (especially those who come at it from one of those applied fields, like education or healthcare) without a lot of statistics knowledge. It helps (or at least, I think it does) but it isn’t really necessary.


That's what brought me here! Stay tuned for more stories from fellow psychometricians in the future. In the meantime, what questions do you have (for me or other psychometricians)? What would you like to learn or know more about? And if you're also a psychometrician (or in a related field), would you be willing to share your journey?


¹Excel, while a great tool for some data management, is not real statistical software. It's not unusual for me to pull a dataset together in Excel, then import that data into the software I'll be using for analysis.

Reading and Viewing List

Two meetings this morning, so I haven't had a chance to read or watch some open tabs. Today's reading:

• Fallows writes about how actual smart people talk about themselves (and in my favorite response thus far to "stable genius," a friend shared a picture of a stable genius on Facebook - her daughter's horse)
• The Tribune gives us Impossible Tacos - I'll bite
• Also from the Tribune, Medieval Times finally has a queen

And on my watch list:

What the Wrath of Khan's trailer would look like today

Also on the subject of trailers, a recut that makes The Room look like a good movie:

Cracked discusses how 9/11 changed 90s sitcoms:

And Lessons from the Screenplay examines The Fault in our Star Wars:

Teamwork and the Reproducibility Problem

It has been known for some time that psychology has a reproducibility problem, though we may not always agree on how to handle or discuss these issues. I remember chatting with another researcher at a conference shortly after I finished my masters thesis on stereotype threat and its impact on math performance in women. I had failed to replicate stereotype threat effects in my study. She, on the other hand, said her effects were incredibly strong; she described a participant experiencing a panic attack when she was told she had to do math problems, and had even noticed her female participants' math performance was negatively affected when her research assistant had been knitting during the session. (I also remember a reviewer telling me I must have performed the study poorly, not because the reviewer found any flaws in my methods, but because I had failed to reproduce the stereotype threat effects in my research.)

Efforts to handle this crisis thus far have included making psychological research more transparent and large-scale meta-analyses. And a new effort is already underway to harness the power of multiple research labs across the world: the Psychological Science Accelerator. Christie Aschwanden of FiveThirtyEight has more:

[Psychologist Christopher] Chartier, a researcher at Ashland University, doesn’t think massively scaled group projects should only be the domain of physicists. So he’s starting the “Psychological Science Accelerator,” which has a simple idea behind it: Psychological studies will take place simultaneously at multiple labs around the globe. Through these collaborations, the research will produce much bigger data sets with a far more diverse pool of study subjects than if it were done in just one place.

The accelerator approach eliminates two problems that can contribute to psychology’s much-discussed reproducibility problem, the finding that some studies aren’t replicated in subsequent studies. It removes both small sample sizes and the so-called weird samples problem, which is what happens when studies rely on a very particular population — like relatively wealthy college students from Western countries — that may not represent the world at large.

So far, the project has enlisted 183 labs on six continents. The idea is to create a standing network of researchers who are available to consider and potentially take part in study proposals, Chartier said. Not every lab has to participate in any given study, but having so many teams in the network ensures that approved studies will have multiple labs conducting their research.

According to the blog, the Psychological Science Accelerator is taking on its second study, this one on gendered social category representation. And if you're attending the Association for Psychological Science meeting in May, you can check out a symposium on "Large Scale Research Collaborations: Applications in Crowd-Sourcing and Undergraduate Research Experience, Replications, and Cross-Cultural Research." (Day and time TBD - APS is still finalizing the program, and is still accepting poster submissions through the end of this month.)

Statistics Sunday: Mediation versus Moderation

I had a wonderful but very busy weekend, performing Händel's Messiah twice. Unfortunately, this means I didn't have a chance to sit down and write my Statistics Sunday post until, well, Monday. But hey, the holidays are coming soon, many of my university friends are wrapping up their semesters, and a lot of my coworkers are off this week because their kids are home. So it's kind of virtual Sunday, right?

Today, I wanted to write about two misunderstood concepts: mediation and moderation. Both deal with relationships among 3 (or more) variables, but they tell you very different things and are tested in different ways.

I've blogged before about mediation. Mediation can be thought of as another term for "caused by" or "explained by." You have mediation when the relationship between your independent and dependent variables is caused by or explained by their relationships with a third variable. Specifically, it means your independent variable causes the mediator, which in turn causes the dependent variable. It's like a chain reaction. (Note that you also need to have specific methods to get at this notion of cause, so I'm using these terms more loosely than I should be. But when introducing the concept of mediation, I find it easiest to frame it in terms of cause.)

There are two big ways to measure mediation. One is through 3 linear regressions: 1) effect of independent variable on dependent variable, 2) effect of independent variable on mediator, and 3) effect of both independent variable and mediator on dependent variable. If you observe the following:

1. Independent variable has a significant effect on the dependent variable (equation 1)
2. Independent variable has a significant effect on the mediator (equation 2)
3. Independent variable no longer has a significant effect on the dependent variable, but the mediator has a significant effect on the dependent variable (equation 3)

you have evidence of mediation. Fortunately, you don't have to just eyeball your regression results. You would use the results of these regressions to conduct a Sobel test: check out this great website and online calculator to help with understanding and testing mediation.

The other way to test mediation is structural equation modeling. This would work for simple mediations, like the one described above, but is probably more useful when testing complex mediation - for instance, when you have multiple mediators in your chain reaction.

Moderation, on the other hand, is another term for "depends on." That is, the precise impact your independent variable has on your dependent variables depends on where you fall on the moderator. When I used to teach research methods, I'd often have students discuss what effect they think a certain independent variable would have on a dependent variable.

One example I used was divorce: what impact do they think divorce would have on a child's well-being? (I have to thank a past student for suggesting this topic, since they thought it was something most people have encountered: either directly because their parents are divorced, or indirectly because friends' parents might be divorced.) Partway through discussion, I would ask them what they think that impact depends on; what might change that impact? They always have lots of ideas. It might depend on age - it could have a stronger impact on younger children but less of an impact on high school or college-aged children. It might depend on whether the child has siblings - they thought it would be harder on an only child. As the list grew, I would explain to them that these are moderators. And we would say it as, for example, the effect of divorce on a child's well-being depends on their age.

Moderation is tested with interactions, which you can conduct with a factorial ANOVA or multiple regression, where you would create interaction terms. I usually use the latter method, because it gives you the same results as an ANOVA when all of your variables are discrete, and also can be used with continuous variables, while ANOVA cannot. If you're using the latter, I highly recommend this book by Aiken and West - kind of the bible on interactions in multiple regression.

So, as you can (hopefully) see, moderation and mediation reflect different kinds of relationships. (And if this explanation is unclear or you still have questions, please share them in the comments!) And because these are different kinds of relationships, there are situations where you could test both. Yes, crazy as it sounds, there are such things as moderated mediation and mediated moderation. A post for another day!

The Power of the Human Voice

Human beings are drawn to the sound of human voices. It's why overhearing half of a conversation can be so distracting. It's why DJs will talk over the intro of the song, but make sure they stop before the singer comes in. It's why Deke Sharon and Dylan Bell, two a cappella arrangers, recommend arrangements be kept short (less than 4 minutes).

And new research shows yet another way a human voice can have a powerful impact - it keeps us from dehumanizing someone we disagree with:

[F]ailing to infer that another person has mental capacities similar to one’s own is the essence of dehumanization—that is, representing others as having a diminished capacity to either think or feel, as being more like an animal or an object than like a fully developed human being. Instead of attributing disagreement to different ways of thinking about the same problem, people may attribute disagreement to the other person’s inability to think reasonably about the problem. [W]e suggest that a person’s voice, through speech, provides cues to the presence of thinking and feeling, such that hearing what a person has to say will make him or her appear more humanlike than reading what that person has to say.

They conducted four experiments to test their hypotheses: that dehumanization is less likely to occur when we hear the person speaking their thoughts, rather than simply reading them. It wasn't even necessary to see the person doing the talking - that is, video and audio versus audio only did not result in reliably different evaluations. The authors conclude:

On a practical level, our work suggests that giving the opposition a voice, not just figuratively in terms of language, but also literally in terms of an actual human voice, may enable partisans to recognize a difference in beliefs between two minds without denigrating the minds of the opposition. Modern technology is rapidly changing the media through which people interact, enabling interactions between people around the globe and across ideological divides who might otherwise never interact. These interactions, however, are increasingly taking place over text-based media that may not be optimally designed to achieve a user’s goals. Individuals should choose the context of their interactions wisely. If mutual appreciation and understanding of the mind of another person is the goal of social interaction, then it may be best for the person’s voice to be heard.

This research inspires some interesting questions. For instance, what about computer-generated voices? We know we're getting better at generating realistic voices, but what is the impact when you know the voice is generated by a machine and not another human being? Also, the researchers admit that they couldn't test the impact of visual and audio cues separately. But what if you had an additional condition where you see the person, but their words are displayed as captions instead?

What are your thoughts on this issue? And where would you like to see this research go in the future?