Psychology

Conflict Solved

I came of age during a feminist wave that pretty much condemned the desire to be or make oneself beautiful. It was never exactly clear to me why a movement towards androgynous looks – so obviously tending in the direction of the masculine away from the feminine – was a sign of strength, rather than a narrow reaction to society’s demands on women.

But the question remains: Can feminists embrace beauty and beautification, or is it a sell-out to The Man? Is it just one more thing where women are not in control of their fate, but trying to live up to ideals set for them by someone else?

The advantage of having raised feminist sons is that they are perfectly able to solve the conundrum for you when you mull over this at the dinner table, while trying to explain how you are drawn to photograph all the beauty found in people’s hair, their necklines, the way they dress, and, let’s not forget it, their feet. Have to photograph that coveted footwear!

“Of course you can enjoy beauty, Mutti! That is different from forcing ideals onto people, or body shame them when they don’t reach them, or fill their heads with preoccupation with looks rather than ideas. You want to honor bodily autonomy, in both women and men. And you want to think through your choices – if three hours of putting on make-up stops you from volunteering it might not be a cool choice, but you still are free to choose. If your choices are driven by a desire to conform, or please, or not be excluded, maybe think again.”

Indeed, I think we want to free ourselves of gender expectations, but be free to express our gender anyway we want – if that includes stereotypically feminine aspects, from heels to nail polish, so what. We should simply not judge or be judged by ways of self expression. I know that when it comes to theory – in fact I brought my infant sons dressed in perfect pink into my graduate class room to have my students react with glee or frowns or astonishment or pure joy – to discuss gendered issues. I also let my boys play with Barbies which they coveted at childcare, and am certain I would have found that unacceptable if they had been daughters because of the body image issues. But when it comes to practice – myself drooling over lace and pearl- studded veils, or frilly pink, or shining tresses – I still have pangs of bad conscience.

I also remember the far more consequential discussions among women, myself included, who had to make choices after mastectomies. Do you opt for breast reconstruction, or not? It involves serious additional surgery, money and potential obstacle to easy detection of cancer recurrence. Do you opt for false bras, or go flat? Does it matter that you are 30 or 50 or 70 years when the plague hits, partnered or still searching? When looks and sexuality are directly linked in a society that is so focused on these specific body parts, “free” choice is made maddeningly difficult.

https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a37113/can-beauty-culture-and-feminism-co-exist/

So there – here is the juxtaposition of theory and practice, my dialectic approach to fashion: I document the beauty around me, adore it, allow myself to buy funky clothes as long as it doesn’t involve cutting the budget for charity and includes second-hand stores, I skip make-up, and dream of high heels. A start.

And I plan to wear unmatched socks, too!

Musical choice today is the Marshallin from Strauss’ Rosenkavalier who bemoans the loss of beauty and the burden of aging when inside she is and feels like still the same young person she always was. But then she declares that all that matters is how you tackle it. Onwards!

Street Roots

After a week of portraying travel options mostly linked to the past, today I want to direct us to the present. The here and now where we are all called upon to walk on paths shared with those who are less fortunate than most of us. And with those who are steadfastly around to help them. Traveling, in other words, not necessarily for fun and adventure, but for the larger good. Good for social justice as much as for your soul. Down a road that is not necessarily comfortable, either.

These thoughts were triggered by attending a breakfast fundraiser at the ungodly hour of 7:30 in the morning, in the company of hundreds of other slightly bleary-eyed souls, to celebrate the incredible work of Street Roots, our local weekly newspaper produced and sold by people experiencing homelessness and poverty. Here is what they do:

From a beginning of a few volunteers 19 years ago, they have grown to a large organization winning prizes for their journalism, winning political battles affecting housing and poverty, and, most importantly, giving voice to those who are not usually listened to, with their contributed articles and in their interactions with those of us who buy the paper. More detailed history here: http://streetroots.org/about/work#history

The organization has a fighting spirit, in the best possible meaning of the word, not shy to risk losing donors if demanded by principle (they lost an annual $10.000 grant from the PDX Archdiocese for refusing to take Planned Parenthood off their resource guide for people in need, not exactly peanuts.) But they also fight for cooperative action, as was evident by the wide range of city players and business donors present at the breakfast, willing to engage across social class, political and economic divides.

Metro

Portland Fire and Rescue

Trimet

Portland Housing Bureau

Kaia Sand, recently appointed executive director of Street Roots, embodies these core values of principled defiance and energetic partnership quite well. (She’s also one of those more interesting poets meandering at the crossroads of literary art and activism – more on that on another day.) http://kaiasand.net/#wavebook

The award procedures for Vendor of the Year and Keystone member of the Street Roots community were moving,

and I was lucky enough to be close to a beloved 4-legged companion of one of the honorees, Migo the best dressed dog in recent memory.

Still resonating is the keynote address by Michael Buonocore, executive director of Home Forward, (the former Housing Authority of Portland,) which provides access to affordable housing and services for people facing low income, addiction, disabilities and other issues making it difficult to maintain a safe existence.

http://www.homeforward.org/home-forward/welcome

He called on everyone to choose what I called a difficult path at the beginning of today’s musings: to engage in honest interaction with those outside of our comfort zone, when encountering them on the street, when put off by their attire, when seeking distance because of the potential threat to our own emotional well being while confronted with misery.” LEARN TO SEE EACH OTHER. ”

It might provide the best traveling companions yet!

PS: On my way home from the bus after the event I came by this under the bridge that carries the Highway traffic. A steep cement slope, noisy and full of exhaust gases, attracts sleepers desperate to be dry. Regularly dispersed.

Coincidence?

Here is an interesting speech on luck by a Harvard luminary for a commencement some years back.

http://www.harvard.edu/president/2012-baccalaureate-service-updraft-inexplicable-luck

What about those who happen to pay with their lives for being less privileged? (Bad) luck, random event, coincidence? Organizations like Black Lives Matter believe that the frequent police violence against Blacks is anything but. So did many other people, at least when surveyed in 2015.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/systemic-racism-or-isolated-abuse-americans-disagree/392570/

Law enforcement officials, as you might have anticipated, disagree. Maybe a look at the numbers would help to figure this out. Except that numbers are hard to come by.

Just yesterday The Atlantic published an article that offers some statistics about crimes committed by police, on- and off-duty, collected by private individuals, stating “Former FBI Director James Comey went so far as to say in 2016 that “Americans actually have no idea” how often police use force, because the federal government has not bothered to collect the relevant data. Although the FBI now plans to track the number of people killed by police across the United States, by early 2018 only 1,600 of the more than 18,000 state and local law-enforcement agencies had agreed to submit data for the project. And initial data collection had not yet commenced. “

Here are the numbers collected the private database ( I can, of course, not vouch for how comprehensive they are or whether correctly collected. But they agree with other patterns I have seen from other sources.) The numbers ain’t pretty.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/amber-guyger-fallout-how-common-is-police-crime/569950/

But what about the racial bias? The tightest case analysis I could find comes from a 2017 report in the Tampa Bay Times. (Actually I didn’t find it – I’m just lucky to live with guys who bring them to me…) The reporters examined every Florida police shooting between 2009 and 2014 (so even before the Trump disinhibition pattern of racial animosity officially set in) using police reports, law suits, news articles and autopsies to determine the patterns.

There were 827 people shot, 673 of them were either black or white. More (343) black people were shot than white ones (330) – despite the fact that in Florida Whites outnumber Blacks 3:1. If you conservatively disregard all cases that involved violent crimes or threats against police officers, you are left with 147 shootings. Of those 97 were black victims vs 50 white ones.

If we look at unarmed people being shot, Blacks outnumber White 2:1. Pulled over for traffic violation? Blacks shot twice as many times as Whites. They are three times as likely being shot if there was a chase on foot. Same for being suspected of a minor crime, smoking pot or no crime at all. Blacks are four times as likely to be shot in the back.

And if you look at cases where many of these factors intersect, you have the scenarios for many of the more controversial police shootings in the nation.

http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/

Unlucky numbers.

Telltale numbers.

Photographs are from Miami Beach.

Randomness

Psychology
Sep 12, 2018
1 Comments

This is an anatomically correct replica of the brain.

It was knitted across a full year by psychiatrist Dr. Karen Norbert of the National Bureau of Economic Research at Cambridge, MA. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4245919/Psychiatrist-knits-anatomically-correct-woolly-brain.html

Cut or nick one little thread and whole parts of it will unravel. Which is, of course, exactly what can happen when something goes wrong during fetal gestation or a difficult birth or any other number of causes. We have known for years, for example, that when you are born has some link to the possibility of developing a certain disease, like asthma or other respiratory conditions or all kinds of heart disease (yes fellow March babies, that’s us.) Health status is correlated with what happened to the mothers during pregnancy in particular environments lacking in Vitamin D, or exposing you to flu viruses, increasing the likelihood of high fevers, or making them take certain medications for seasonal allergies and the like. Or taking any kind of medication that turns out to have averse effect. Or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, for that matter.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4986668/

There is reason to believe (if you do a meta analysis of many hundreds of studies) that this is also true for mental conditions like ADHD or schizophrenia, with the latter still being mostly correlated with parents genetic predispositions, but additionally associated with birth month.

So the random fact of having been conceived during a certain season of the year will affect the fragility of your brain and body in diverse ways. The random fact of having no timely access to a safe place to give birth can harm your brain. The random fact of some gene mutating and being sent off into your DNA can undermine your health. As a consequence you are outside of societal norms and often have a difficult time to be integrated.

All this came to mind when I met with, photographed and talked to people who are living with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The folks I met happen to have found a community that embraces them and supports them to succeed in areas that are often closed off to this constituency: the arts and performance domain. And succeed they do – the music I heard performed by them knocked me off my chair. But the random assignment of falling outside of what we as a society deem the norm, has usually bitter consequences.

Here is the full report:

PHAME: The Dignity of Risk

Luck

Perhaps it is no accident that we found ourselves discussing the issue of luck at a place that serves fortune cookies. Surrounded by large Chinese families, screaming babies, delicious food, a general hustle and bustle at this huge restaurant where we regularly meet friends, the talk turned to randomness and moral privilege.

I learned – since I grab my education even with my mouth full of fried rice – that the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Moed Katan quotes Rava, one of the rabbinic text’s greatest sages, saying that “length of life, children and sustenance depend not on merit but rather on Mazzal.” That debate started around the belief that people who die young had been punished for a reason, while those who lived long did so on merits. Rava countered those assumptions with an examples of two equally upright rabbis, Rabba and Rav Hisdah, who died young and aged respectively, and whose families experienced corresponding economic decline and ascent. Rava’s assumption that outcome is not divinely predetermined but due to chance factors predates the copernican revolution by about 15oo years!

So what does Mazzal refer to? Plain luck? Matters outside of your control? Elements of our lives over which we have no direct influence – our genes, the place where we were born or when, the socio-economic class we grew up in – or simply randomness?

I am not sure if that was ever clarified by Jewish sages, but I know that the issue is not exactly resolved today either. So many people cling to the notion (phrased by psychologist Barry Schwartz) that People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. In this case you assign credit for outcomes, good or bad by assuming it all or mostly lies within the realm of your own responsibility. Correspondingly, you have no moral obligation to help those who suffer bad outcomes, since it’s their own fault.

Alternatively, you acknowledge that outside chance factors play a huge role in outcome; if they systematically disenfranchise some we might be morally obliged to help them overcome harsh factors that led to their disadvantaged lives if we have been the more fortunate ones.

What we know from psychology is that you bring with you a genetic makeup that sets the path; you also encounter environmental influences that shape you and which play a role in your ability to escape a given path, should it be a bad one. The interaction of these factors try to explain the range of control you have over your fate.

Note that both, genetic make-up and the context you find yourself in, happen to you – if you happen to be born with a certain genetic predisposition towards a disease and you are born in a country where that disease can be fought with easily accessible drugs you are in the clear. If you are born in a country without access to those meds you are sunk. Same for having a specific intelligence level and lucking out on having a rich daddy or not, access to a good school or not, neighborhoods without lead in the water etc…. in other words, both what you bring and what you encounter are pretty much outside of your control when you are young.

What about when you are an adult? Does the merit assumption kick in when you are old enough to take your fate into your own hands? Can you take on responsibility over your life’s circumstances? Make god decisions based on deliberate, rational reasoning rather than following spontaneous base impulses? Maybe that is where you deserve moral credit and the whole idea of meritocracy resides: you keep your impulses in check and choose the high road? Miraculously your hard work gets you access to education, riches follow? You don’t smoke so don’t get cancer? Life improvement is all about personal choice?

Won’t work. Both the capacity for deliberate, rational thinking as well as the need to apply it are unevenly – and unjustly – distributed.

Using rational, deliberate, slow and measured thinking thinking is difficult; additional strain on your system leaves few resources that you can use to accomplish this difficult task. In other words, the capacity that leads to better behavior is dependent on having more basic needs already fulfilled: enough food, physical shelter, educational training and habituation. Your ability to use it depends on external factors, in other words. And even if you were able to use it, say, to decide that hard works gets you into situations that improve your state – access to education which in the end is what it’s about in societies like ours, is not guaranteed. Exclusion on the basis of race and class and set early in life cannot be overcome by good decision making alone.

The need to apply self control is differentially distributed as well – again an external factor. If you have enough external resources – money, lawyers, social and political connections – you don’t need to curb your baser impulses. You just need to have someone clean up their horrid consequence. (Note, I didn’t need to mention any names.) In contrast if you are a female black tennis player and loose it with the umpire, you are held to the highest degree of demanded self-control, needed to not be censured and punished.

Of course if you acknowledge all this, the lucky feel threatened, since they cling to their belief that it is all about their own actions. That opportunistic assumption has moral consequences – how we all engage in projects to assure a more just distribution of resources. Luck,then, has pretty harsh effects beyond the positive ones of singling out the lucky ones.

Below is a link to a good summary article.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege

Photographs today are of swallows – long thought to bring luck to the farms where they nest.

Mind Wandering

Psychology
Jul 6, 2018
1 Comments

Hard to write when it’s hot, the weekend is looming, and vacation is not quite around the corner but beckoning from the recesses of my mind…..

My mind starts to wander, engaging in pleasant fantasies about what I’ll encounter in August, what adventures I might have and what new sights wait to be photographed. Will the future unravel from mysterious heaps like this?

Which tells you right there that your daily essayist is a happy(ish) person, since mind wandering into the future is associated with a positive outlook on life, while mind wandering into the past is more often encountered with people who are unhappy.

By rough estimates we spend about 25% of our waking day with wandering thoughts, that state where we are meant to focus on one thing, but find ourselves all of a sudden thinking about something altogether different. Not in any goal directed fashion either, but just drifting about. The strange thing is that for some time you are not aware that your thoughts have taken a path of their own, but when you realize it you are perfectly able to pinpoint what you have been thinking about.

Slovenia, hah! Balkan anti-fascist memorials hunt. International Graffiti Festival. Viennese Apple Strudel. Pack rain coat yes or no? All while really trying to focus on the blog.

Mind wandering can be consequential and not just for lost time on the job – car accidents happen during that state just as often as with drunk driving. I wouldn’t want the flight traffic controller to engage in mental time travel either. So not an entirely good preoccupation. There is, however some reason to believe that mind wandering enhances creativity; you can stumble, researchers speculate, on previously unlinked ideas that pave the path for novel insights. It certainly does relieve boredom, which is another basically good thing.

So how do you keep yourself on task? Active engagement with whatever you are doing seems to be helpful. (Not just passive reading but re-wording concepts and structuring them for my YDP then should do the trick for me…) Training in mindfulness, whether through brief breathing exercises or longer concentrated practice also improves your ability to stay focused.

If you want to read in great detail about it, go here (before your mind wanders….): https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/middle_way.pdf

Spotting Spot

Psychology
Jul 5, 2018
0 Comments

Many argue such a thing as an “educated eye” exists and makes for being a better eye witness, a better referee, a better chess player or better at judging dogs at dog shows. True or false?

In the courtrooms, for example, judges and juries are especially likely to accept the witness’s report as accurate if the witness is a police officer. It is believed that police have “educated eyes,” with the result that they can recognize faces that they viewed only briefly or at a considerable distance or in the dark after years of night shifts.

On the one hand, this ignores that there are optical properties of the eyeball and functional properties of the photoreceptors which are the same for all of us and don’t change or improve with use for any particular profession. All of us simply can’t see very well in the dark or at far distances.

At a different level, though, it is possible to have an “educated eye”—or, more precisely, to be more observant and more discerning than other people.

For example, when looking at a complex, fast-moving crime scene, police officers are more likely to focus their attention on details that will matter for the investigation—and so will likely see (and remember) more of the perpetrator’s actions (although, ironically, this means they’ll see less of what’s happening elsewhere in the scene).

In the same way, referees and umpires in professional sports know exactly what to focus on during a game. As a result, they’ll see things that ordinary observers would miss. (Fans at the FIFA World Cup in Russia right now might disagree, but trust me.)

The mechanisms are similar to what I described yesterday for auditory input: expectation guides your attention and your ability to interpret or parse a scene. For visual inputs you can only see detail that is landing on your foveas; what lands on your foveas depends on where exactly you’re pointing your eyes; and movements of the eyes (pointing them first here and then there) turn out to be relatively slow. As a result, knowledge about where to look has an immense impact on what you’ll be able to see.

It’s also true that experience can help you to see certain patterns that the rest of us miss. Consider the dog experts who serve as judges at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. These experts are sensitive to each dog’s overall form, and not just the shape of the front legs, the chest, the ears, and so on, with the result that they can make more discerning assessments than an ordinary dog-lover could.

Although all of us can enjoy one of the funniest movies ever made, dogs and all –

Experience can also help you to see (or hear or feel) certain combinations that are especially important or informative. One prominent example involves experienced firefighters who sometimes have an eerie ability to judge when a floor is about to collapse—allowing these professionals to evacuate a building in time, saving their lives and others’. What explains this perception? The answer may be a combination of feeling an especially high temperature and hearing relative quiet — a combination that signals a ferocious fire burning underneath them, hidden under the floor that they’re standing on.

In short, then, people can have “educated eyes” (or ears or noses or palates). This “education” can’t change the basic biological properties of your sense organs. But knowledge and experience can certainly help you to see things that others overlook, to detect patterns that are largely invisible to other people.

Hidden Messages

Psychology
Jul 4, 2018
0 Comments

Happy 4th of July – where you will be bombarded with messages about the state of our nation. Let’s look at a different kind of message, though: You have probably heard periodic reports of “secret messages” contained within pop music – often messages that can be revealed only by playing the music backwards. The messages are claimed to have content that is upsetting or offensive to many people – messages about Satan (thus today’s photographs of hellish creatures), or drug use, or sexual activity. If you take the time to do the quick exercise below exposing you to this music, you will be truly astonished (and laugh!). At least I was/did when I tried it out.

Visit this website: It lets you hear something that might or might not contain a hidden message.

http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking/stairway-to-heaven-backwards.html

First, select the sound clips and play it forwards. Try at that point to guess what the hidden message is.

Then play the clip backwards. Now can you guess what the hidden message is?

Then, as the crucial step, click on the button to reveal the lyrics that are supposedly hidden in the backwards clip, and play the clip again. Now can you hear the hidden message?

So: Is the message really there, because you can hear it? Probably not. You can only hear it when someone explicitly suggests to you what the message is which provides a powerful demonstration that your perception can be guided by expectations and knowledge – so that you can hear things with that guidance that you can’t hear at all otherwise.

Perception, then, is not just a relatively passive process where you are simply exposed to sounds, and they flow into your ears and you hear. Perception is much more active than that. You interpret. You fill in. You add. Of course, the ‘balance’ between the input and your activity shifts. The clearer the input, the more you rely on it. The LESS clear the input, the more you supplement. Likewise, the stronger your expectations and assumptions, the more you rely on them. The WEAKER your expectations and assumptions, the less you rely on them.

The bottom line, though, is NOT that perception is hopelessly and inevitably subjective. When the input is clear, you rely on the input! But, when the input isn’t clear, you do need to be alert to how much your expectations can bias what you see and hear.

Facts, ignored.

Psychology
Jul 3, 2018
1 Comments

# Stay Special

I listed some psychological research yesterday for claims that child/ parent separation has lasting, harmful effects. We might as well continue with psychology for the rest of the week, offering what I hope are a few interesting psychological tidbits.

My sister and I have an ongoing joke between us that refers to my childhood desire to be a famous Hollywood star rather than holding any number of other potentially interesting roles in life. Man, did I miss the bus. That aside, what is it about that longing to be famous? My best speculation has to do with my lifelong preoccupation with mortality, a preoccupation I have surely earned, given the frequent encounters with that crap starting at an early age. That, or a deep streak of narcissism….

If mortality concerns you, you want to have something that lasts beyond your mere existence, I guess. Fame, in other words. And so, any time I get a photo into an exhibit, my beloved sister exclaims:”NOW you are famous! You can rest!”

As a scientist, and a person living in an environment where science is under daily assault, one might want to remember how you put a claim to a test. Is it factually true? Is the evidence weak and ambiguous or indisputable? How precisely must a hypothesis be worded, to make it testable? All matter if we want to be able to trust findings.

Consider the claim “No matter what day of the year you pick, a famous photographer was born on that day.” A search on Google reveals, for sake of argument, that Friderike Heuer is the only photographer born on March 19. Does this observation support the initial claim, because Heuer is famous? (After all, hundreds of people have seen her art or read her blog.) Or does it contradict the claim, because Heuer isn’t famous? (After all, most people have never heard of her.) Both of these positions seem plausible, and so your “test” of this claim about birthdays turns out to depend on opinion, not fact: If you hold the opinion that Heuer is famous, then the evidence about the March 19 birthday confirms the claim; if you hold the opposite opinion, the same evidence doesn’t confirm the claim. As a result, this claim is not testable—there’s no way to say with certainty whether it fits with the facts or not since an essential element in your claim lacked precision – fame had to be defined. (Note that I did not ask to evaluate the hypothesis that Heuer IS famous – you didn’t think I’d be going there, would you now?)

Many feel that scientific facts, even if derived with the appropriate processes, no longer matter, in a political world that has moved beyond facts. Some argue that trying to use facts to convince those who adhere to lies is even counterproductive – see the attached below.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/counter_lies_with_emotions_not_facts.html

It is certainly a huge burden for the scientific community who did and does worry about getting the facts right to now having to think about ways of overcoming public resistance to those very facts (although not for the first time in history.) Figuring out how to do that is obviously essential for subsequent action that protects our and the world’s well-being, whether we think environmental harm, or disease control, resource distribution or multiple other areas. Maybe someone famous will figure it out.

What Country is this?

Today I will let the pictures speak for themselves, mostly. They were taken at Saturday’s rally to protest the separation of children from their families as a result of the Trump administrations’ policies on immigration and asylum.

Over 250.ooo people marched across the cities of the U.S., some 5000 here in PDX, to give voice to their disgust and anger – you wouldn’t know those number if you read the conservative media.

Senator Ron Wyden, who is really rising to the occasion, gave an impassioned and clever speech, leading the crowd in 0 – 10 scoring of Trump’s zero-tolerance and other policies with resounding shouts of ZERO.

Signs ranged from outraged to funny, offered by imploring 7-week olds to raging grannies and grandpas.

As always, a sense of shared purpose and solidarity gave rise to smidgens of hope.

For those of you interested in the science behind the claims that separating infants from their mothers and fathers has life-long consequences, as expressed not only in attachment disorders but also in neurophysiological changes that can affect a range of psychological developments, I refer to the articles below.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/how-mother-child-separation-causes-neurobiological-vulnerability-into-adulthood.html

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/06/neglect.aspx