Martin Seligman and Steven Maier's research on depression in the 1960s resulted in a concept now found in every introductory psychology textbook - "Learned Helplessness."
Depression can be a cognitive-based problem, not a biology-based one, meaning that one's thinking is messed up, causing the depression. The depressed person has decided that they are helpless to change their situation and they give up, they depress.
The good side of that coin is that there are effective strategies for working on a person's thinking. They are called cognitive therapies.
At the 2009 annual convention of the American Psychological Association, York University psychology professor Myrian Mongrain, PhD, reported on her research with "moderately depressed people."
Participants were asked to either complete a gratitude exercise or listen to uplifting music every day for a week.
"They found that the [gratitude] exercise especially increased well-being among people who tended to focus on the negative things in their lives."
So, are you finding yourself depressed? Get your pencil and paper out, and every day for the next week, list, think about, and write about things for which you are grateful.
Start with, "I am grateful that Dr. G wrote about this on his blog."
October 3, 2009
October 2, 2009
Eat Chocolate, Commit Violence?
I like Professor Lupin at Hogwarts more than I like Professor Moore at Cardiff University. Professor Lupin persuaded Harry Potter to eat chocolate when he was injured because it would have help him get better. Professor Moore says that if you eat chocolate you are more likely to commit a violent act later in life.
The October 2009 British Journal of Psychiatry, reports Simon Moore's research in his article, "Confectionary Consumption in Childhood and Adult Violence."
Moore, PhD, and his associates did a longitudinal study that collected data from over 15,000 children at age 5, 10 and 34. They found that, "Children who ate confectionery daily at age 10 years were significantly more likely to have been convicted for violence at age 34 years."
You proably already know this, but "Confectionery" is British English for "Candy."
Please, please, please don't stop letting your kids eat candy just because of this research! It is correlational in nature. Remember, correlation does not imply causation! The researchers did NOT find that eating candy daily as a kid CAUSES violent crime later in life!
It works the same way to say that the increase in the consumption of ice cream correlates to the increase in drownings. Does eating ice cream CAUSE drownings? Shake your head no. Do drownings cause consumption of ice cream? No, again. There is a third thing that causes both... hot weather. More people eat ice cream, more people are in the water.
Okay, Professor Lupin is a fictional character and Simon Moore is real. But I did find it funny (but probably not significant) that Dr. Moore is at Cardiff University's School of Dentistry. Leave it to a bunch of dentists to find something wrong with candy.
The October 2009 British Journal of Psychiatry, reports Simon Moore's research in his article, "Confectionary Consumption in Childhood and Adult Violence."
Moore, PhD, and his associates did a longitudinal study that collected data from over 15,000 children at age 5, 10 and 34. They found that, "Children who ate confectionery daily at age 10 years were significantly more likely to have been convicted for violence at age 34 years."
You proably already know this, but "Confectionery" is British English for "Candy."
Please, please, please don't stop letting your kids eat candy just because of this research! It is correlational in nature. Remember, correlation does not imply causation! The researchers did NOT find that eating candy daily as a kid CAUSES violent crime later in life!
It works the same way to say that the increase in the consumption of ice cream correlates to the increase in drownings. Does eating ice cream CAUSE drownings? Shake your head no. Do drownings cause consumption of ice cream? No, again. There is a third thing that causes both... hot weather. More people eat ice cream, more people are in the water.
Okay, Professor Lupin is a fictional character and Simon Moore is real. But I did find it funny (but probably not significant) that Dr. Moore is at Cardiff University's School of Dentistry. Leave it to a bunch of dentists to find something wrong with candy.
October 1, 2009
Watch Me Listen To You
How I listen to you changes how you talk to me.
That's the conclusion of some research by Carmiel Beukeboom, reported in his recent European Journal of Social Psychology article, "When Words Feel Right: How Affective Expressions of Listeners Change a Speaker's Language Use."
He had undergraduate students watch a video and then describe it in as much detail as they could to one of two other students (who were actually conferates in the research).
1/2 of the listeners used a positive listening style, smiling and nodding, with an open body position.
The other 1/2 used a negative listening style, frowning and not smiling, with a closed body position.
"Participants describing the film to positive listeners used more abstractions... such as a character's thoughts and emotions, and also included more of their own opinions."
By contrast, those describing the film to negative listeners used "objective facts and concrete details."
Beukeboom concluded, "By merely smiling or frowning a lisener could influence how a speaker reports information and how it is subsequently remembered."
I'll be curious to see my students' body language in class after they read this post. I can hear some of them now: "Let's see if we can get Dr. Grady to give us fewer facts for the next test, by smiling and nodding at him when he lectures."
That's the conclusion of some research by Carmiel Beukeboom, reported in his recent European Journal of Social Psychology article, "When Words Feel Right: How Affective Expressions of Listeners Change a Speaker's Language Use."
He had undergraduate students watch a video and then describe it in as much detail as they could to one of two other students (who were actually conferates in the research).
1/2 of the listeners used a positive listening style, smiling and nodding, with an open body position.
The other 1/2 used a negative listening style, frowning and not smiling, with a closed body position.
"Participants describing the film to positive listeners used more abstractions... such as a character's thoughts and emotions, and also included more of their own opinions."
By contrast, those describing the film to negative listeners used "objective facts and concrete details."
Beukeboom concluded, "By merely smiling or frowning a lisener could influence how a speaker reports information and how it is subsequently remembered."
I'll be curious to see my students' body language in class after they read this post. I can hear some of them now: "Let's see if we can get Dr. Grady to give us fewer facts for the next test, by smiling and nodding at him when he lectures."
September 29, 2009
Critical versus Sensitive
I have read the term "critical period" a couple of times in the last week, once in the journal article I wrote about in my last post, and once in an influencial family-life educator's newspaper column.
The term has a specific meaning in developmental psychology and I think it was used too loosely in the two instances above. Simply put, it was used to make the point that it is extremely important that infants and young children receive cognitive stimulation.
There is no doubt that it is important, one might even say critical, for children to experience sensory stimulation because it creates more neural connections in the brain. Without it, the dendrites in a child's brain are pruned, and cognitive development is delayed or slowed.
But, to say it is "critical" and to say there is a "critical period" in human development are two totally different things.
"Critical period" is an important component of ethology, which is most-identified with psychologist Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian psychologist (d. 1989). Ethology is deeply rooted in biology, and its adherents study animal behavior in an effort to understand human behavior.
Konrad Lorenz theorized that humans have "critical periods" in our development in the same way some animals have them. His most famous experiment was imprinting himself on newly hatched ducklings. They thought he was their "mother" and he had to teach them everything by modeling it for them. There is a "critical period" in which imprinting must take place. If that time frame is missed, the imprinting will not happen.
Lorenz argued that humans have similar "critical periods." For example, it has been postulated that if a child does not develop language before puberty, they will never develop it; the "critical period" has been missed.
Most developmentalists question the existence of critical periods in human development. Humans have, instead, "sensitive" periods. By this we mean that there are some periods in human development in which learning some tasks is easier. For example, learning to speak a language is easier for children than adults. It is not a "critical" period because adults CAN learn a new language, it is just more difficult.
Children born into a bi-lingual family learn both languages easily. Children of parents who move to a foreign country pick up that country's language easily, while their parents struggle. They ask, "Madre, ¿por qué tantos problemas de aprendizaje en español?"
The term has a specific meaning in developmental psychology and I think it was used too loosely in the two instances above. Simply put, it was used to make the point that it is extremely important that infants and young children receive cognitive stimulation.
There is no doubt that it is important, one might even say critical, for children to experience sensory stimulation because it creates more neural connections in the brain. Without it, the dendrites in a child's brain are pruned, and cognitive development is delayed or slowed.
But, to say it is "critical" and to say there is a "critical period" in human development are two totally different things.
"Critical period" is an important component of ethology, which is most-identified with psychologist Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian psychologist (d. 1989). Ethology is deeply rooted in biology, and its adherents study animal behavior in an effort to understand human behavior.
Konrad Lorenz theorized that humans have "critical periods" in our development in the same way some animals have them. His most famous experiment was imprinting himself on newly hatched ducklings. They thought he was their "mother" and he had to teach them everything by modeling it for them. There is a "critical period" in which imprinting must take place. If that time frame is missed, the imprinting will not happen.
Lorenz argued that humans have similar "critical periods." For example, it has been postulated that if a child does not develop language before puberty, they will never develop it; the "critical period" has been missed.
Most developmentalists question the existence of critical periods in human development. Humans have, instead, "sensitive" periods. By this we mean that there are some periods in human development in which learning some tasks is easier. For example, learning to speak a language is easier for children than adults. It is not a "critical" period because adults CAN learn a new language, it is just more difficult.
Children born into a bi-lingual family learn both languages easily. Children of parents who move to a foreign country pick up that country's language easily, while their parents struggle. They ask, "Madre, ¿por qué tantos problemas de aprendizaje en español?"
September 27, 2009
What is a Child's "Job"?
Psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD, at Temple University sums it up when she says, "Play is really important for young children, for social and cognitive development." Play has long been considered to be the "job" of a child.
But play time of pre-school children continues to be eroded by educators and replaced with "learning opportunities." Lea Winerman's article, "Playtime in Peril," in the September, 2009 Monitor on Psychology, quotes Tufts University psychologist David Elkind, PhD, that "children today have eight fewer hours of free, unstructured playtime a week than they had 20 years ago."
Why?
Parents who are afraid of their children "falling behind", and marketers of childhood education products stressing a "critical period" for neural connections before age 3. [Remind me to write about the difference between a critical period and a sensitive period tomorrow.]
Winerman writes (correctly in my view), "The trouble... is that parents and educators are ignoring decades of evidence that young children learn best through active, exploratory play (sometimes guided by an adult) rather than through direct, lecture-style classrom instruction, flash cards and push-button computer learning toys that can push them to memorize facts that they're not cognitively ready to understand... Educators and researchers alike have long known or suspected that children learn from exploratory play.
"Meanwhile, correlational research by Hirsh-Pasek and others backs up the claim that children learn best, in their early years, through play. In one study she found no differences in academic achievement by first grade between children who had gone to 'academic' preschools versus those who'd gone to more play-oriented preschools."
Please notice the following difference that they DID find.
"She did, however, find that the chidlren from academic preschools were more anxious." Play reduces anxiety in young children. Play is important for socialization skills.
The question is not whether young children should learn content. It is, HOW should they learn content?
Hirsh-Paset, in her book, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, encourages parents to "put down the cards and instead play blocks with their children, read to them and encourage make-believe play."
Your child isn't simply playing, she is learning while she plays. That's her job.
But play time of pre-school children continues to be eroded by educators and replaced with "learning opportunities." Lea Winerman's article, "Playtime in Peril," in the September, 2009 Monitor on Psychology, quotes Tufts University psychologist David Elkind, PhD, that "children today have eight fewer hours of free, unstructured playtime a week than they had 20 years ago."
Why?
Parents who are afraid of their children "falling behind", and marketers of childhood education products stressing a "critical period" for neural connections before age 3. [Remind me to write about the difference between a critical period and a sensitive period tomorrow.]
Winerman writes (correctly in my view), "The trouble... is that parents and educators are ignoring decades of evidence that young children learn best through active, exploratory play (sometimes guided by an adult) rather than through direct, lecture-style classrom instruction, flash cards and push-button computer learning toys that can push them to memorize facts that they're not cognitively ready to understand... Educators and researchers alike have long known or suspected that children learn from exploratory play.
"Meanwhile, correlational research by Hirsh-Pasek and others backs up the claim that children learn best, in their early years, through play. In one study she found no differences in academic achievement by first grade between children who had gone to 'academic' preschools versus those who'd gone to more play-oriented preschools."
Please notice the following difference that they DID find.
"She did, however, find that the chidlren from academic preschools were more anxious." Play reduces anxiety in young children. Play is important for socialization skills.
The question is not whether young children should learn content. It is, HOW should they learn content?
Hirsh-Paset, in her book, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, encourages parents to "put down the cards and instead play blocks with their children, read to them and encourage make-believe play."
Your child isn't simply playing, she is learning while she plays. That's her job.
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