Tracking Suicide Risk Factors Through Twitter in the US

By Jared Jashinsky, Scott H. Burton, Carl L. Hanson, and others
Crisis  DOI: 10.1027/0227-5910/a000234

Background:
Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. Social media such as Twitter is an emerging surveillance tool that may assist researchers in tracking suicide risk factors in real time.

Aims:
To identify suicide-related risk factors through Twitter conversations by matching on geographic suicide rates from vital statistics data. Method: At-risk tweets were filtered from the Twitter stream using keywords and phrases created from suicide risk factors. Tweets were grouped by state and departures from expectation were calculated. The values for suicide tweeters were compared against national data of actual suicide rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Results:
A total of 1,659,274 tweets were analyzed over a 3-month period with 37,717 identified as at-risk for suicide. Midwestern and western states had a higher proportion of suicide-related tweeters than expected, while the reverse was true for southern and eastern states. A strong correlation was observed between state Twitter-derived data and actual state age-adjusted suicide data.

Conclusion:
Twitter may be a viable tool for real-time monitoring of suicide risk factors on a large scale. This study demonstrates that individuals who are at risk for suicide may be detected through social media.

The entire article is here.

I'm OK, You're Not OK: Right Supramarginal Gyrus Plays an Important Role in Empathy

Science Daily
Originally published October 9, 2013

Egoism and narcissism appear to be on the rise in our society, while empathy is on the decline. And yet, the ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes is extremely important for our coexistence. A research team headed by Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences has discovered that our own feelings can distort our capacity for empathy. This emotionally driven egocentricity is recognised and corrected by the brain. When, however, the right supramarginal gyrus doesn't function properly or when we have to make particularly quick decisions, our empathy is severely limited.

When assessing the world around us and our fellow humans, we use ourselves as a yardstick and tend to project our own emotional state onto others. While cognition research has already studied this phenomenon in detail, nothing is known about how it works on an emotional level. It was assumed that our own emotional state can distort our understanding of other people's emotions, in particular if these are completely different to our own.

The entire story is here.

Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

By John Bohannon
Science 4 October 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6154 pp. 60-65
DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper.

The entire story is here.

10 ways to create “False Knowledge” in Psychology

By Graham Davey

The Graham Davey Blog

Originally posted September 30, 201

There’s been quite a good deal of discussion recently about (1) how we validate a scientific fact (here, here and here), and (2) whether psychology – and in particular some branches of psychology – are prone to generate fallacious scientific knowledge (here and here). As psychologists, we are all trained (I hope) to be scientists – exploring the boundaries of knowledge and trying as best we can’ to create new knowledge, but in many of our attempts to pursue our careers and pay the mortgage, are we badly prone to creating false knowledge? Yes – we probably are! Here are just a few examples, and I challenge most of you psychology researchers who read this post to say you haven’t been a culprit in at least one of these processes!

Here are 10 ways to risk creating false knowledge in psychology.

1.  Create your own psychological construct. Constructs can be very useful ways of summarizing and formalizing unobservable psychological processes, but researchers who invent constructs need to know a lot about the scientific process, make sure they don’t create circular arguments, and must be in touch with other psychological research that is relevant to the understanding they are trying to create. 

The entire blog post is here.

Thanks to Ed Zuckerman for this information.

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER

The New York Times

Published: May 21, 2013 

“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.

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In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

The entire story is here.

Book Review: 'Behind the Shock Machine' by Gina Perry

By Carol Tavris
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published September 6, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

To almost everyone's surprise at the time, upward of two-thirds of the participant-teachers administered what they thought were the highest levels of shock, even though many were sweating and suffering over the pain they believed they were inflicting on a stranger in the name of science. Milgram's experiment produced a firestorm of protest about the potential psychological harm inflicted on the unwitting participants. As a result, it could never be done today in its original version.

Some people hated the method and others the message, but the Milgram study has never faded from public attention. It has been endlessly retold in schoolrooms, textbooks, TV programs, novels, songs and films. What, then, is left to say about it?

According to Gina Perry, an Australian psychologist and journalist, everything. She has investigated every aspect of the research and spoken with seemingly anyone who had a connection to Milgram (1933-84). She describes each of Milgram's 24 experimental variations on the basic obedience paradigm. She interviewed some of the original subjects, the son of the man who played the "learner," Milgram's research assistants, his colleagues and students, his critics and defenders, and his biographer. She listened to audiotapes of the participants made during and after the experiments. She pored through the archives of Milgram's voluminous unpublished papers.

The entire book review is here, unfortunately, behind a paywall.

Fighting the Good Fight: The Relationship Between Belief in Evil and Support for Violent Policies

Campbell M & Vollhardt JR
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
DOI: 10.1177/0146167213500997

Abstract

The rhetoric of good and evil is prevalent in many areas of society and is often used to garner support for "redemptive violence" (i.e., using violence to rid and save the world from evil). While evil is discussed in psychological literature, beliefs about good and evil have not received adequate empirical attention as predictors of violent versus peaceful intergroup attitudes. In four survey studies, we developed and tested novel measures of belief in evil and endorsement of redemptive violence. Across four different samples, belief in evil predicted greater support for violence and lesser support for nonviolent responses. These effects were, in most cases, mediated by endorsement of redemptive violence. Structural equation modeling suggested that need for cognitive closure predicts belief in evil, and that the effect of belief in evil on support for violence is independent of right-wing authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and dangerous world beliefs.

The entire article is here.

Institutional Corruption and Pharmaceutical Policy

Institutional Corruption and Pharmaceutical Policy
An Edmond J. Safra Center Symposium
(forthcoming)
Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 
Vol. 14, No. 3 (2013)

The goals of pharmaceutical policy and medical practice are often undermined due to institutional corruption — that is, widespread or systemic practices, usually legal, that undermine an institution’s objectives or integrity. The pharmaceutical industry’s own purposes are often undermined. In addition, pharmaceutical industry funding of election campaigns and lobbying skews the legislative process that sets pharmaceutical policy. Moreover, certain practices have corrupted medical research, the production of medical knowledge, the practice of medicine, drug safety, and the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of pharmaceutical marketing.

As a result, practitioners may think they are using reliable information to engage in sound medical practice while actually relying on misleading information and therefore prescribe drugs that are unnecessary or harmful to patients, or more costly than equivalent medications. At the same time, patients and the public may believe that patient advocacy organizations effectively represent their interests while these organizations actually neglect their interests.

The entire journal is here.

The articles are organized into five topics: (1) systemic problems, (2) medical research, (3) medical knowledge and practice, (4) marketing, and (5) patient advocacy organizations.

The Contribution of the Quality of Therapists' Personal Lives to the Development of the Working Alliance

By Helene A. Nissen-Lie, Odd E. Havik, Per A. Hoglend, Jon T. Monsen, and Michael Helge Ronnestad

Journal of Counseling Psychology. 2013 Aug 19

Abstract

Research suggests that the person of the psychotherapist is important for the process and outcome of psychotherapy, but little is known about the relationship between therapists' personal experiences and the quality of their therapeutic work. This study investigates 2 factors (Personal Satisfactions and Personal Burdens) reflecting therapists' quality of life that emerged from the self-reports of a large international sample of psychotherapists (N = 4,828) (Orlinsky & Rønnestad, 2004, 2005) using the Quality of Personal Life scales of the Development of Psychotherapists Common Core Questionnaire (Orlinsky et al., 1999). These factors were investigated as predictors of alliance levels and growth (using the Working Alliance Inventory) rated by both patients and therapists in a large (227 patients and 70 therapists) naturalistic outpatient psychotherapy study (Havik et al., 1995). The Personal Burdens scale was strongly and inversely related to the growth of the alliance as rated by the patients, but was unrelated to therapist-rated alliance. Conversely, the factor scale of therapists' Personal Satisfactions was clearly and positively associated with therapist-rated alliance growth, but was unrelated to the patients' ratings of the alliance. The findings suggest that the working alliance is influenced by therapists' quality of life, but in divergent ways when rated by patients or by therapists. It seems that patients are particularly sensitive to their therapists' private life experience of distress, which presumably is communicated through the therapists' in-session behaviors, whereas the therapists' judgments of alliance quality were positively biased by their own sense of personal well-being.

Introduction

The notion that the psychotherapist as an individual is important for psychotherapeutic outcomes stems in part from the well-known and frequently cited finding of meta-analyses that therapy outcome appears to be less related to the use of different therapy methods associated with established schools of therapy, and significantly related to differences between the individual psychotherapists providing the therapy (Benish, Imel, & Wampold, 2008; Blatt, Zuroff, Quinlan, & Pilkonis, 1996; Huppert et al., 2001; Kim, Wampold, & Bolt, 2006). Moreover, in efforts to identify the characteristics in therapists that promote treatment success or failure, the studies to date suggest that experience level, type of training, theoretical orientation, and so forth have limited value in distinguishing between more or less successful therapists (Beutler et al., 2004; Dunkle & Friedlander, 1996; Sandell et al., 2007; Skovholt & Jennings, 2004; Strupp & Hadley, 1977). Instead, therapists' interpersonal qualities appear to be more relevant, such as their facilitative interpersonal skills (Anderson, Ogles, Pattersen, Lambert, & Vermeersch, 2009); their ability to be affirmative, responsive, and empathic (Bohart, Elliott, Greenberg, & Watson, 2002; Najavits & Strupp, 1994); their ability to resist counteraggression when confronted with devaluation and rejections by patients (von der Lippe, Monsen, Ronnestad, & Eilertsen, 2008); and their interpersonal functioning in their personal lives (Dunkle & Friedlander, 1996; Hersoug, Hoglend, Havik, von der Lippe, & Monsen, 2009b). Hence, although therapists are professional helpers, it may be that their personal characteristics are more important than their professional qualifications in determining their therapeutic capabilities. This suggestion echoes the statements of Rosenzweig (1936), Strupp (1958), and Rogers (1957, 1961), who emphasized that studying the personal characteristics of psychotherapists is necessary in order to understand patient development in psychotherapy.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Meritocracy or Bias?

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Education
Originally posted August 13, 2013

Critics of affirmative action generally argue that the country would be better off with a meritocracy, typically defined as an admissions system where high school grades and standardized test scores are the key factors, applied in the same way to applicants of all races and ethnicities.

But what if they think they favor meritocracy but at some level actually have a flexible definition, depending on which groups would be helped by certain policies? Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over others.

Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.

The entire story is here.

Introducing deprescribing into culture of medication

By Catherine Cross
Canadian Medical Association
Originally published August 12, 2013

An Ontario pharmacist has received a government grant to develop clinical guidelines to help doctors determine whether patients are on medications they no longer need or that should be reduced.

"We don't normally test drugs in the elderly, but they are taking many drugs. As they get older and get more chronic conditions, the number of medications increases," says Barbara Farrell, a clinical scientist with the Bruyère Research Institute in Ottawa, Ontario.

Sometimes when medications are deprescribed or reduced, "confusion will clear, or they'll stop falling, and a lot of literature supports that," says Farrell, who received the $430 000 grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.

The entire story is here.

Science Is Not Your Enemy

An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians

By Steven Pinker

The New Republic

Originally published August 6, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The entire story is here.

Consider a Text for Teen Suicide Prevention and Intervention, Research Suggests

Adolescents Commonly Use Social Media to Reach Out When They are Depressed

Ohio State University
Press Release
June 24, 2013

Teens and young adults are making use of social networking sites and mobile technology to express suicidal thoughts and intentions as well as to reach out for help, two studies suggest.

An analysis of about one month of public posts on MySpace revealed 64 comments in which adolescents expressed a wish to die. Researchers conducted a follow-up survey of young adults and found that text messages were the second-most common way for respondents to seek help when they felt depressed. Talking to a friend or family member ranked first.

These young adults also said they would be least likely to use suicide hotlines or online suicide support groups – the most prevalent strategy among existing suicide-prevention initiatives.

The findings of the two studies suggest that suicide prevention and intervention efforts geared at teens and young adults should employ social networking and other types of technology, researchers say.

“Obviously this is a place where adolescents are expressing their feelings,” said Scottye Cash, associate professor of social work at The Ohio State University and lead author of the studies. “It leads me to believe that we need to think about using social media as an intervention and as a way to connect with people.”

The entire press release is here.

Recent Findings Force Scientists To Rethink The Rules Of Neuroimaging

MedicalNewsToday.com
Originally published on July 13, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Brain mapping experiments all share a basic logic. In the simplest type of experiment, researchers compare brain activity while participants perform an experimental task and a control task. The experimental task might involve showing participants a noun, such as the word "cake," and asking them to say aloud a verb that goes with that noun, for instance "eat." The control task might involve asking participants to simply say the word they see aloud.

"The idea here is that the control task involves some of the same cognitive processes as the experimental task, in this case perceptual and articulatory processes," Jack explained. "But there is at least one process that is different - the act of selecting a semantically appropriate word from a different lexical category."

The entire article is here.

The original paper is here.

Low Hopes, High Expectations: Expectancy Effects and the Replicability of Behavioral Experiments

By Olivier Klein and others
Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(6) 572–584
DOI: 10.1177/1745691612463704
http://pps.sagepub.com

This article revisits two classical issues in experimental methodology: experimenter bias and demand characteristics. We report a content analysis of the method section of experiments reported in two psychology journals (Psychological Science and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), focusing on aspects of the procedure associated with these two phenomena, such as mention of the presence of the experimenter, suspicion probing, and handling of deception. We note that such information is very often absent, which prevents observers from gauging the extent to which such factors influence the results. We consider the reasons that may explain this omission, including the automatization of psychology experiments, the evolution of research topics, and, most important, a view of research participants as passive receptacles of stimuli. Using a situated social cognition perspective, we emphasize the importance of integrating the social context of experiments in the explanation of psychological phenomena. We illustrate this argument via a controversy on stereotype-based behavioral
priming effects.

The entire article is here.

50 Shades of Gray Matter

By Sally Satel
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published July 9, 2013

You’ve seen the headlines: This is your brain on God, envy, cocaine. And you’ve seen the evidence: slices of brain with Technicolor splotches lit up like the Las Vegas Strip.

On average, one new book about the brain appears every week. In universities, new disciplines of neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, and neurolaw are flourishing. “If Warhol were around today, he’d have a series of silkscreens dedicated to the cortex; the amygdala would hang alongside Marilyn Monroe,” one observer quipped.

It is easy to see why the brain is a hot commodity. As the organ of the self, it makes sense to think that understanding how the brain works can help us understand ourselves, repair our flaws, and perfect our nature.

The entire blog post is here.

First major study of suicide motivations to advance prevention

Media Release
The University of British Columbia
Originally posted on June 13, 2013

Published in the official journal of the American Association of Suicidology, the work gives doctors and researchers important new resources to advance suicide prevention, improve treatments, and reduce the likelihood of further attempts.

“Knowing why someone attempted suicide is crucial – it tells us how to best help them recover,” says Prof. David Klonsky, UBC Dept. of Psychology. “This new tool will help us to move beyond the current “one-size-fits-all” approach to suicide prevention, which is essential. Different motivations require different treatments and interventions.”

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The study also finds that suicide attempts influenced by social factors – such as efforts to elicit help or influence others – generally exhibited a less pronounced intent to die, and were carried out with a greater chance of rescue. In contrast, suicide attempts motivated by internal factors – such as hopelessness and unbearable pain – were performed with the greatest desire to die.

“It may be surprising to some, but focusing on motivations is a new approach in the field of suicide research – and urgently needed,” says Klonsky. “Until now, the focus has been largely on the types of people attempting suicide – their demographics, their genetics – without actually exploring the motivations. Ours is the first work to do this in a comprehensive and systematic way.”

The entire media release is here.

Breaking the Seal on Drug Research

By KATIE THOMAS
The New York Times
Published: June 29, 2013

Here are som excerpts:

For years, researchers have talked about the problem of publication bias, or selectively publishing results of trials. Concern about such bias gathered force in the 1990s and early 2000s, when researchers documented how, time and again, positive results were published while negative ones were not. Taken together, studies have shown that results of only about half of clinical trials make their way into medical journals.

Problems with data about high-profile drugs have led to scandals over the past decade, like one involving contentions that the number of heart attacks was underreported in research about the painkiller Vioxx. Another involved accusations of misleading data about links between the antidepressant Paxil and the risk of suicide among teenagers.

To those who have followed this issue for years, the moves toward openness are unfolding with surprising speed.

“This problem has been very well documented for at least three decades now in medicine, with no substantive fix,” said Dr. Ben Goldacre, a British author and an ally of Dr. Doshi. “Things have changed almost unimaginably fast over the past six months.”

Much of that change is happening because of what Dr. Goldacre calls an “accident of history.” In 2009, Dr. Doshi and his colleagues set out to answer a simple question about the anti-flu drug Tamiflu: Does it work? Resolving that question has been far harder than they ever envisioned, and, four years later, there is still no definitive answer. But the quest to determine Tamiflu’s efficacy transformed Dr. Doshi and others into activists for transparency — and turned the tables on drug makers. Until recently, the idea that companies should routinely hand over detailed data about their clinical trials might have sounded far-fetched. Now, the onus is on the industry to explain why it shouldn’t.

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Earlier this month, Dr. Doshi opened what he hopes will be a new chapter in his quest for greater understanding of clinical trials. He and several other researchers published what amounted to an ultimatum to drug companies: publish your data, or we’ll do it for you.

The entire story is here.

Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do.

by David Dobbs
Neuron Culture
September 15, 2010

Here is an excerpt:

Researchers generally use these (trolley) scenarios to see whether people hold a) an absolutist or so-called “deontological” moral code or b) a utilitarian or “consequentialist” moral code. In an absolutist code, an act’s morality virtually never depends on context or secondary consequences. A utilitarian code allows that an act’s morality can depend on context and secondary consequences, such as whether taking one life can save two or three or a thousand.

In most studies, people start out insisting they have absolute codes. But when researchers tweak the settings, many people decide morality is relative after all: Propose, for instance, that the fat man is known to be dying, or was contemplating jumping off the bridge anyway — and the passengers are all children — and for some people, that makes it different. Or the guy is a murderer and the passengers nuns. In other scenarios the man might be slipping, and will fall and die if you don’t grab him: Do you save him … even if it means all those kids will die? By tweaking these settings, researchers can squeeze an absolutist pretty hard, but they usually find a mix of absolutists and consequentialists.

As a grad student, Pizarro liked trolleyology. Yet it struck him that these studies, in their targeting of an absolutist versus consequentialist spectrum, seemed to assume that most people would hold firm to their particular spots on that spectrum — that individuals generally held a roughly consistent moral compass. The compass needle might wobble, but it would generally point in the same direction.

Pizarro wasn’t so sure. He suspected we might be more fickle. That perhaps we act first and scramble for morality afterward, or something along those lines, and that we choose our rule set according to how well it fits our desires.

The entire blog post is here.

Why Don’t Cops Believe Rape Victims?

Brain science helps explain the problem—and solve it.

By Rebecca Ruiz
Slate.com
Originally posted June 19, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

This is rape culture in action. It puts the burden of proving innocence on the victim, and from Steubenville, Ohio, to Notre Dame and beyond, we’ve seen it poison cases and destroy lives. But science is telling us that our suspicions of victims, the ones that seem like common sense, are flat-out baseless. A number of recent studies on neurobiology and trauma show that the ways in which the brain processes harrowing events accounts for victim behavior that often confounds cops, prosecutors, and juries.

These findings have led to a fundamental shift in the way experts who grasp the new science view the investigation of rape cases—and led them to a better method for interviewing victims. The problem is that the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies haven’t been converted. Or at least, most aren’t yet receiving the training to improve their own interview procedures. The exception, it turns out, is the military. Despite its many failings in sexual assault cases, it has actually been at the vanguard of translating the new research into practical tools for investigating rape.

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This is why, experts say, sexual assault victims often can’t give a linear account of an attack and instead focus on visceral sensory details like the smell of cologne or the sound of voices in the hallway. “That’s simply because their brain has encoded it in this fragmented way,” says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who trains civilian and military law enforcement to understand victim and offender behavior.

The entire story is here.