Suicides of two health care workers hint at the Covid-19 mental health crisis to come

Wendy Dean
statnews.com
Originally posted 30 April 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Denial, minimizing, and compartmentalizing are essential strategies for coping with a crisis. They are the psychological tools we reach for over and over to get through harrowing situations. Health care workers learn this through experience and by watching others. We learn how not to pass out in the trauma bay. We learn to flip into “rational mode” when a patient is hemorrhaging or in cardiac arrest, attending to the details of survival — their vital signs, lab results, imaging studies. We learn that if we grieve for the 17-year-old gunshot victim while we are doing chest compressions we will buckle and he will die. So we shut down feeling and just keep doing.

What few health care workers learn how to do is manage the abstractness of emotional recovery, when there is nothing to act on, no numbers to attend, no easily measurable markers of improvement. It is also hard to learn to resolve emotional experiences by watching others, because this kind of intense processing is a private undertaking. We rarely get to watch how someone else swims in the surf of traumatic experience.

Those on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those in the hardest-hit areas, have seen conditions they never imagined possible in the country with the most expensive health care system in the world. Watching patients die alone is traumatic. Having to choose your own safety over offering comfort to the dying because your hospital or health care system doesn’t have enough personal protective equipment to go around inflicts moral injury. When facing the reality of constrained resources and unthinkable choices, working to exhaustion, and caring for patients at great personal risk, the only way to get through each shift is to do what is immediately at hand.

The info is here.

Understanding Moral Preferences Using Sentiment Analysis

Capraro, Valerio and Vanzo, Andrea
(May 28, 2018).

Abstract

Behavioral scientists have shown that people are not solely motivated by the economic consequences of the available actions, but they also care about the actions themselves. Several models have been proposed to formalize this preference for "doing the right thing". However, a common limitation of these models is their lack of predictive power: given a set of instructions of a decision problem, they lack to make clear predictions of people's behavior. Here, we show that, at least in simple cases, the overall qualitative pattern of behavior can be predicted reasonably well using a Computational Linguistics technique, known as Sentiment Analysis. The intuition is that people are reluctant to make actions that evoke negative emotions, and are eager to make actions that stimulate positive emotions. To show this point, we conduct an economic experiment in which decision-makers either get 50 cents, and another person gets nothing, or the opposite, the other person gets 50 cents and the decision maker gets nothing. We experimentally manipulate the wording describing the available actions using six words, from very negative (e.g., stealing) to very positive (e.g., donating) connotations. In agreement with our theory, we show that sentiment polarity has a U-shaped effect on pro-sociality. We also propose a utility function that can qualitatively predict the observed behavior, as well as previously reported framing effects. Our results suggest that building bridges from behavioral sciences to Computational Linguistics can help improve our understanding of human decision making.

The research is here.

The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

Robinson Meyer
The Atlantic
Originally posted March 8, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. “We must redesign our information ecosystem for the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published Thursday in Science. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”

“How can we create a news ecosystem … that values and promotes truth?” they ask.

The new study suggests that it will not be easy. Though Vosoughi and his colleagues only focus on Twitter—the study was conducted using exclusive data which the company made available to MIT—their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it.

The article is here.

How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out

Kenneth R. Rosen
The New York Times
Originally published September 5, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

In today’s era of workplace burnout, achieving a simpatico work-life relationship seems practically out of reach. Being tired, ambivalent, stressed, cynical and overextended has become a normal part of a working professional life. The General Social Survey of 2016, a nationwide survey that since 1972 has tracked the attitudes and behaviors of American society, found that 50 percent of respondents are consistently exhausted because of work, compared with 18 percent two decades ago.

Where once the term burnout was applied exclusively to health care workers, police officers, firefighters, paramedics or social workers who deal with trauma and human services — think Graham Greene’s novel “A Burnt-Out Case,” about a doctor in the Belgian Congo, a book that gave rise to the term colloquially — the term has since expanded to workers who are now part of a more connected, hyperactive and overcompensating work force.

But occupational burnout goes beyond needing a simple vacation or a family retreat, and many experts, psychologists and institutions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, highlight long-term and unresolvable burnout as not a symptom but rather a major health concern. (Though it does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which outlines psychiatric disorders, it does appear in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, a classification used by the World Health Organization.)

“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” Ms. Seppala told me. “Biologically we are not meant to be in that high-stress mode all the time. We got lost in this idea that the only way to be productive is to be on the go-go-go mode.”

The article is here.

Hindsight Bias in Depression

Julia Groß, Hartmut Blank, Ute J. Bayen
Clinical Psychological Science 
First published date: August-07-2017

Abstract

People tend to be biased by outcome knowledge when looking back on events. This phenomenon is known as hindsight bias. Clinical intuition and theoretical accounts of affect-regulatory functions of hindsight bias suggest a link between hindsight bias and depression, but empirical evidence is scarce. In two experiments, participants with varying levels of depressive symptoms imagined themselves in everyday scenarios that ended positively or negatively and completed hindsight and affect measures. Participants with higher levels of depression judged negative outcomes, but not positive outcomes, as more foreseeable and more inevitable in hindsight. For negative outcomes, they also misremembered prior expectations as more negative than they initially were. This memory hindsight bias was accompanied by disappointment, suggesting a relation to affect-regulatory malfunction. We propose that “depressive hindsight bias” indicates a negative schema of the past and that it sustains negative biases in depression.

The research is here.

The importance of building ethics into artificial intelligence

Kriti Sharma
Mashable
Originally published August 18, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Humans possess inherent social, economic and cultural biases. It’s unfortunately core to social fabrics around the world. Therefore, AI offers a chance for the business community to eliminate such biases from their global operations.

The onus is on the tech community to build technology that utilizes data from relevant, trusted sources to embrace a diversity of culture, knowledge, opinions, skills and interactions.

Indeed, AI operating in the business world today performs repetitive tasks well, learns on the job and even incorporates human social norms into its work. However, AI also spends a significant amount of time scouring the web and its own conversational history for additional context that will inform future interactions with human counterparts.

This prevalence of well-trodden data sets and partial information on the internet presents a challenge and an opportunity for AI developers. When built with responsible business and social practices in mind, AI technology has the potential to consistently – and ethically – deliver products and services to people who need them. And do so without the omnipresent human threat of bias.

Ultimately, we need to create innately diverse AI. As an industry-focused tech community, we must develop effective mechanisms to filter out biases, as well as any negative sentiment in the data that AI learns from to ensure the technology does not perpetuate stereotypes. Unless we build AI using diverse teams, datasets and design, we risk repeating the fundamental inequality of previous industrial revolutions.

The article is here.

Stress Leads to Bad Decisions. Here’s How to Avoid Them

Ron Carucci
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted August 29, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Facing high-risk decisions. 

For routine decisions, most leaders fall into one of two camps: The “trust your gut” leader makes highly intuitive decisions, and the “analyze everything” leader wants lots of data to back up their choice. Usually, a leader’s preference for one of these approaches poses minimal threat to the decision’s quality. But the stress caused by a high-stakes decision can provoke them to the extremes of their natural inclination. The highly intuitive leader becomes impulsive, missing critical facts. The highly analytical leader gets paralyzed in data, often failing to make any decision. The right blend of data and intuition applied to carefully constructing a choice builds the organization’s confidence for executing the decision once made. Clearly identify the risks inherent in the precedents underlying the decision and communicate that you understand them. Examine available data sets, identify any conflicting facts, and vet them with appropriate stakeholders (especially superiors) to make sure your interpretations align. Ask for input from others who’ve faced similar decisions. Then make the call.

Solving an intractable problem. 

To a stressed-out leader facing a chronic challenge, it often feels like their only options are to either (1) vehemently argue for their proposed solution with unyielding certainty, or (2) offer ideas very indirectly to avoid seeming domineering and to encourage the team to take ownership of the challenge. The problem, again, is that neither extreme works. If people feel the leader is being dogmatic, they will disengage regardless of the merits of the idea. If they feel the leader lacks confidence in the idea, they will struggle to muster conviction to try it, concluding, “Well, if the boss isn’t all that convinced it will work, I’m not going to stick my neck out.”

The article is here.

Cassandra’s Regret: The Psychology of Not Wanting to Know

Gigerenzer, Gerd; Garcia-Retamero, Rocio
Psychological Review, Vol 124(2), Mar 2017, 179-196.

Abstract

Ignorance is generally pictured as an unwanted state of mind, and the act of willful ignorance may raise eyebrows. Yet people do not always want to know, demonstrating a lack of curiosity at odds with theories postulating a general need for certainty, ambiguity aversion, or the Bayesian principle of total evidence. We propose a regret theory of deliberate ignorance that covers both negative feelings that may arise from foreknowledge of negative events, such as death and divorce, and positive feelings of surprise and suspense that may arise from foreknowledge of positive events, such as knowing the sex of an unborn child. We conduct the first representative nationwide studies to estimate the prevalence and predictability of deliberate ignorance for a sample of 10 events. Its prevalence is high: Between 85% and 90% of people would not want to know about upcoming negative events, and 40% to 70% prefer to remain ignorant of positive events. Only 1% of participants consistently wanted to know. We also deduce and test several predictions from the regret theory: Individuals who prefer to remain ignorant are more risk averse and more frequently buy life and legal insurance. The theory also implies the time-to-event hypothesis, which states that for the regret-prone, deliberate ignorance is more likely the nearer the event approaches. We cross-validate these findings using 2 representative national quota samples in 2 European countries. In sum, we show that deliberate ignorance exists, is related to risk aversion, and can be explained as avoiding anticipatory regret.

The article is here.

Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes, new study suggests

Hannah Devlin
The Guardian
Originally posted November 1, 2016

The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society.

The study found that the brain responds more strongly to information about groups who are portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias.

Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, who led the research, said: “The newspapers are filled with ghastly things people do ... You’re getting all these news stories and the negative ones stand out. When you look at Islam, for example, there’s so many more negative stories than positive ones and that will build up over time.”

The article is here.

Shame and Blame in the Therapeutic Relationship

Ami Schattner
JAMA Intern Med. Published online April 04, 2016.
doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.0610

Here is an excerpt:

[The physician-patient relationship] requires full commitment providing information, empathy, and bonding obligatory for patient-centeredness, patient satisfaction, trust, and adherence which translate into "hard" health outcomes. Because clinical care is strongly dependent on this human interaction, it is also susceptible to inherent biases (mostly unintentional) that are one major cause of variation in care. In this context, providers' reactions to certain patients may involve negative feelings adversely affecting the degree of effort invested in their care, diagnostic accuracy, treatment decisions, and level of communication, empathy and support. Stigmatized patients may get different (less than optimal) care, just as "nice" patients may be preferred and receive better care. Instead of empathy and bonding, which have a positive impact on outcomes, censure, absent compassion, diminished bonding, and poor support toward patients who caused their own wretched state are likely, as well as actual variation in care, all compromising patient outcomes. For example, poor provider's empathy and bonding on the part of the clinician was linked to low patient adherence and may be associated with actual discrimination and rationing.

The article is here.