rivka

Elsewhere on LJ, marycatelli asked me to provide references for a claim I made. When I went to provide them, I found that my comments to her journal were suddenly being screened. (My initial comments hadn't been.) Gosh. Somehow I begin to question the sincerity of her request for citations.

I understand why someone wouldn't want to risk being proven wrong in their own journal, but dude. Don't ask me to go to the trouble of doing a literature search for you if you don't ever intend to let the results see the light of day.

( I guess I may as well share the information here, instead. )

I did something dumb.

I missed my Prozac a couple of days in a row. That was careless. This is the dumb part: then I decided that since I hadn't had a bad reaction to missing a couple of days, maybe I could just come off it.

Yes, I can sense the look you're all giving your computer screens right now. Michael delivered the same look in person, trust me.

Today I finally realized that, um, being off the Prozac might have something to do with how short my fuse is these days, and how much current life events are filling me with dread.

Yeah, that ol' Ph.D. in clinical psychology is serving me really well.

I wasn't going to say anything in my LJ about it, but I am trying to be publicly honest about this whole process in case it can help someone else.

One of my favorite developmental psych concepts is "theory of mind." It's a complicated idea, but essentially, if you have a well-developed theory of mind, you understand that people have mental states (beliefs, ideas, desires, perspectives) which differ from person to person and affect how people behave.

For example, here's one of the common experimental tasks for assessing theory of mind: There are two dolls, Sally and Anne. Sally hides a marble in a box and then goes away. While she is gone, Anne moves the marble from the box to a basket. Then Sally comes back. Where will she look for the marble? It seems to be a trivially easy question, but before the age of three or four children universally predict that Sally will look for the marble in the basket. Why? Because that's where it is. Around three or four years old, children start to have the ability to understand that even though they know where the marble really is, Sally will act on a false belief about where the marble is.

I've never run Alex through the Sally-Anne task, but I think she's had the basics of a theory of mind for a while. (A lot of fiction doesn't make sense without it.) It's clear, though, that lately she's really been developing a more elaborate sense of other people's mental representations. She's playing with these ideas a lot, figuring out what you can do with them.

Deception, for example. She's figured out the basic concept, but right now she's hilariously bad at it. She'll get a crafty look on her face and announce, "Mom, don't look at what I'm about to do." Then she'll take some cookies out of the package and run away. She's almost got it! She's figured out that if I don't see her do it, I won't know... but now she has to work out the part about not notifying me beforehand.

Or secrets. She's developed a fascination with keeping pointless secrets, I think just because she enjoys the idea of one person knowing something another person doesn't know. She's always asking Michael and I to keep something secret from each other - "don't tell Dad how far we went on the scooter!" "Don't tell Mom what we got at the store!"

Once I went in to tell him about something she'd done wrong, and she asked me (in front of him) not to tell him. When I said "I certainly am going to tell him," she broke in anxiously with "Don't listen, Dad! It's all nonsense!" Heh. Only four years old, and she's already poisoning the well!

I tremble to think about what it will be like around here when she actually masters this stuff.

She's also doing some neat stuff with perspective taking. At the museum, as we left one room to go into another, she commented: "If someone was out here, they'd think we were coming into the room." At the O's game we went to, which the O's predictably lost: "If someone was from Detroit, they would say 'Hooray, the Tigers won!'" It always comes out of nowhere - she's just doing it for practice, I guess.

Alex participated in another study at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Child Development this week. She's done this from time to time, and it's always a lot of fun. This time they were interested in the relationship between preschoolers' counting ability and their ability to compare quantities.

First they had Alex do some straight-up counting of animals on cards. Next they gave her cards with pictures of two kinds of animals interspersed. They asked her (for example) to count the giraffes, count the elephants, and then say whether most of the animals were giraffes or elephants.

If you'd asked me to predict the results before we entered the room, I would've said that Alex would do a decent job of counting but that she would have trouble making a relative comparison of quantities when the numbers were close. When I saw that the animals were scattered randomly across the card instead of being neatly lined up, I figured that she'd have trouble counting them accurately, too. (It's hard for a little kid to remember which ones they've already counted.) I was surprised to see that her ability to count a random array has significantly improved - she made two or three errors, but was only ever one off. And she didn't make any mistakes on the comparisons.

Afterward, the experimenter told me that so far (Alex was the 250-somethingth subject) they haven't found any relationship between counting ability and comparative estimation. Some kids are great counters but can't figure out which one has the most. Some kids can't really count very well at this age, but unfailingly say which are the most animals - even when it's a question of 8 versus 7. So it seems that these two number skills are completely separate developmental processes. Isn't that fascinating?

(Also fascinating, if you are a big old cognitive development geek: this paper (warning: PDF) reporting the results of the last study Alex was in, which shows how ridiculously good two-year-olds are at learning new words, even in challenging contexts.)

Last, but not least, there's been a new development this week that may have implications for this journal. Alex was hanging out by my side while I read LJ. I started to leave a comment in wiredferret's journal, and suddenly a little voice piped up, "Why did you write my name?" Oops. She's been able to recognize her name for a long time, but apparently now she's following along with my typing and picking out her name from a block of text. So that's a little... constraining.

I kept thinking that I must've forgotten some of my May books, but the truth is that I think I hardly read anything in May. A lot of magazines - I got caught up (sort of) on the New Yorker. May was pretty angsty, and I think I just wasn't up to doing much. I did read a few new-to-me books, though. ( Andrews, Ginott, Burau, White )
Total for May: 4.
Total for the year: 35.

Every time I start work on grantwriting, I think about how interesting it would be to document the steps of the process in my LJ, so that people can see how a vague research idea turns into a fully-formed proposal. Every time, it quickly becomes clear that just writing the grant is enough of a monumental energy drain, without adding writing about the grant to the mix. So nothing gets posted because the task just seems to large.

I'm in the middle of preparing an application to the National Institutes of Health, in response to a call for research on how people make decisions about treating a life-threatening illness. I'm proposing to study how people with HIV make decisions about starting anti-retroviral therapy. In particular, I want to combat the ridiculous tendency that medical decision-making research typically has of assuming that it's a purely logical process of weighing risks and threats against benefits. I think that irrational factors often play a critical role in medical decision-making.

One factor I want to examine is the extent to which people have a cynical, suspicious, mistrustful attitude towards HIV research and treatment, and the extent to which they buy into AIDS conspiracy theories. This morning, I've been working on developing a questionnaire to measure those attitudes. I thought I'd go ahead and post my working version of it, to give people a glimpse of what I'm doing. Comments and suggestions are very much welcome. ( Read more... )

I never got around to presenting my dissertation data at the primary conference in my field - mostly because by the time I finished the damn thing, the research I was doing was completely separate from my dissertation topic. I always had HIV stuff to present at the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Besides, it's not a conference that tends to bring in many people with either child/developmental interests, or disability interests, so my dissertation topic was off the beaten track for the meeting.

But this year I thought, what the hell. I submitted an abstract based on my dissertation research, and it was accepted for presentation as a poster. (I knew I wasn't going to be offered an oral presentation, given the off-the-beaten-trackness.) Now I'm putting the poster together, which means, among other things, that I pulled out the photos of misbehaving children which I used for our analog measure of abuse potential.

There's a lot more information about the analog task at that link, but essentially, we showed parents slides of various child behaviors and asked them how they would respond. Some of the photos are normal kid stuff, and some of them are really not. There's a mix of normal behaviors, rule violations, destructive behaviors, and dangerous behaviors.

[photos removed]

I thought people might be interested in seeing the photos, so I uploaded about a dozen of them to my Flickr account. You can see the whole set here. (Photos have been taken down.)

Because they're research items, I'm only going to leave them up for a few days - so look now, if you're curious.

Last year I intended to do the 50-book challenge. (50 books that are new to me - re-reads don't count.) I posted about my books for January and February. Then in March I read a couple of Lauren Slater books that I couldn't bring myself to write up, and didn't post my March list. Or my April list, jotted down on scratch paper which I promptly lost. It all went to hell after that.

So I'm trying again this year, but from the outset I am giving myself permission to just note the title and author of a book, if I want, without any additional commentary.

( Stevens, Best, Johnson, Harris, Kagan, Menzel & D'Aluisio, Westerfeld. )

Total for January: 9
Total for the year: 9

Alex was in another research study yesterday. This one was apparently tons of fun.

They're studying short-term memory. Previous studies have found that babies Alex's age have a short-term memory of about three items. So if you hide three items in a box and let them retrieve two, they'll keep searching for the third - but if you hide four items and only let them retrieve two, they may not realize that there are more in there. Adults' short-term memories can be assisted by "chunking" - grouping the information to be remembered in larger units. For example, it would be hard for most people to reproduce the letters

NYCFBILSDFDR

after only being exposed to them for a couple of seconds, but it would be relatively easy if the letters were presented as

NYC FBI LSD FDR

Babies are the same way. If they're presented with four identical toy cats which are then hidden in a box, they're more likely to keep searching until they find all of them than if they're given four totally different toys. The similarity of the items lets them chunk them together so there's less to remember.

This study was looking at the middle ground, where items are similar (four different toy cats, four different toy cars, or two cats and two cars) but not identical. The experimenter had a black box with an opening at one end shielded by two strips of Spandex. Alex could reach between the Spandex strips, but couldn't see in (although she certainly tried, by pulling one strip of Spandex way out and then peering in). The experimenter showed her the toy cats or cars, put them in the box, and then pushed the box forward to let Alex retrieve them. Unbeknownst to Alex, the experimenter was secretly holding two of the toys at the back of the box so that they were unretrievable. So she'd get the first two out, no problem, and then there would be a little pause to see if she kept searching.

Alex found the whole thing very exciting. She bounced and pointed when the toys were shown, reaching eagerly for the apparatus. After enough repetitions of the experimenter's rigid script ("Alex, look! Look! See this? See this?") she started pointing and saying "Look! Look!" herself. She also tried her best to re-hide the toys after she took them out of the box. (Hey, the experimenter kept putting them in the box, so obviously that was how you played with them!) I couldn't really tell how diligently she was searching for the unretrievable ones, and how the different experimental conditions affected her searching - that will be a matter for videotape coders.

She got a T-shirt and a fancy award certificate for participating. I was sorry to hear that they won't have any more studies for her until she's 28 months. Apparently they've found that research participants in the early toddler years are more trouble than they're worth.

---

New books she asks for by name: Where's my cow? ("Cow cow!"; a current obsession which may be demanded ten times a day), Splash! ("Spass!")

New words: cereal, bottle, truck, tree, squirrel, grapes, strawberries ("s'raw"), go, jeans (seems to apply to any pants or shorts with a fly front), shirt, down, yes, dark, yogurt, cracker, water, head, barrette, house, food, Cheerios, night (for "good night" or going to sleep), Zoe, neck (seems to specifically mean "necklace," applied both to my flaming chalice pendant and my parents' dog's collar), hot, thank you ("daysoo"), clap, Bill, pen. "Cow" and "splash" are also new words, but I don't know if she realizes they have any meaning beyond book titles. Mostly multisyllabic words are expressed as a single syllable, so yogurt becomes "yo" and barrette is "b'reh.".

New word for which I am probably going to hell: Tie-tie (meaning "tired"), courtesy of Cute Overload. I did not intend to deliberately teach Alex baby talk, I swear, but one day after her nap I couldn't resist saying, "Poor Alex, she's still so tie-tie." She immediately grinned at me and said "Tie-tie" - I think she's heard enough English that she could kind of tell that it wasn't a real word, just silliness. (The ability to recognize whether something is likely to be a word in your native language develops before actual understanding does.) And then she remembered it. A couple of days later she got me up very early in the morning, and I told her, "Mama's tired." "Tie-tie," she said, and grinned like a fool. Oops.

Edited to add: Here's the picture that forever added "tie-tie" to my vocabulary.

The latest edition of my college alumni magazine mentioned that one of last year's graduates is now in her first year of graduate school in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa. Reed is a small enough college - about 1,200 students - that having another Reedie follow my exact educational path seems like quite a coincidence.

The transition from Reed to Iowa was a terrible culture shock for me. At Reed people always used the line that it was "like a graduate school for undergraduates" - the curriculum included a qualifying exam in one's major and a required senior thesis involving original research; the classes were based on rigorous (if not to say vicious) discussion and deconstruction of primary texts, rather than textbooks; and students tended to take themselves very seriously as scholars and as adults who were solely responsible for their own private lives.

If Reed was like a graduate school for undergraduates, the psychology department at Iowa - at least for first-year clinical students - felt a lot more like an undergraduate college for graduate students. Our schedules were dictated to us, with no choice of courses. Our courses tended to be lecture-based and heavy on memorization; in the rare class that had a strong discussion component, students tended to address their comments to the professor rather than to each other. (That ethos was so strong that I once had a student stop me after class and ask me to stop responding to her comments. I wasn't being harsh, or anything, she just felt that I was putting myself above her by taking the professor's role of evaluating what students said.) At my first psych department party, someone tried to pressure me into drinking more beer than I wanted to. And I was the only person in the department who was openly not straight, as well as the only person with a disability. I was also one of only a very few people who were... outside of the very center of the midwestern American cultural mainstream. Things got much better as time went on, especially the classes - but let's just say that my adjustment was rough.

I don't know if this other Reedie is feeling any of the same things that I did. But just in case, I dropped her an e-mail telling her who I was, mentioning that I had struggled with the transition, and offering to be a friendly ear if she wants to talk to someone who's been there. I hope it's some help to her.