Thursday, January 31, 2008
The New York Times
January 31, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Rebate Psychology
By NICHOLAS EPLEY
Chicago
THE House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday that would try to stimulate the economy, in part, by sending “tax rebates” to more than 100 million families. The logic of a tax rebate is that people will spend more money if they have more to spend. Unfortunately, psychology may interfere with that logic.
Research on decision-making demonstrates that describing a financial windfall as a “rebate” — instead of something equally accurate — increases the likelihood that people will save it. If Congress and President Bush want to increase consumer spending, they should have pitched these $600 and $1,200 checks as “tax bonuses” instead.
Changing the way that identical income is described can significantly affect how people spend it. In an experiment I conducted at Harvard with my colleagues Dennis Mak and Lorraine Chen Idson, participants were given a $50 check. They were told that this money came from a faculty member’s research budget, financed indirectly through tuition dollars. Roughly half of the participants had this money described as a “rebate,” whereas the others had it described as a “bonus.” When unexpectedly contacted one week later, participants who got a “rebate” reported spending less than half of what those who got a “bonus” reported spending ($9.55 versus $22.04, respectively).
We observed this same pattern in other experiments when participants were asked to keep a written record of their spending, as well as in experiments in which the participants were allowed to purchase items in the lab. “Rebates” are understood to be returns from money already spent. A rebate, psychologically speaking, is the return of a loss of one’s own money rather than a pure gain provided by someone else, so it is unlikely to be seen as extra spending money.
Getting a rebate is more like being reimbursed for travel expenses than like getting a year-end bonus. Reimbursements send people on trips to the bank. Bonuses send people on trips to the Bahamas.
This is more than merely a matter of political spin. Decisions depend very heavily on how people’s options are described.
People are more willing to treat 600 people infected with a deadly virus when they are told the treatment will save 200 of those lives, than when they are told that it will kill 400 of them. People are more likely to donate to a charity when the cost is described in terms of pennies per day instead of dollars per year. And more people say they could live on 80 percent of their income than say that they could save 20 percent of their income.
Descriptions are the psychological equivalent of a camera lens. Psychologists use the term “framing effects” to describe their influence. An investment banker who is delighted by saving $5 on a pair of shoes but disgusted by receiving $1,000 for a year-end bonus has experienced the power of framing effects.
If the current proposal for tax rebates sounds familiar, it’s because we have indeed been here before. In 2001, Congress and President Bush returned $38 billion to taxpayers in the form of $300 to $600 tax rebates, with the hope that Americans would stimulate the economy by spending them. But research conducted by two University of Michigan economists, Matthew Shapiro and Joel Slemrod, found that only 28 percent of the people in a national survey reported that they spent most of their rebate checks soon after receiving them. In a country where the personal savings rate has become negative by some accounts, people seem remarkably able to save at the very time their government needs them to spend.
In another experiment my colleagues and I conducted, taxpayers asked to recall the 2001 tax rebate reported that it seemed more like “extra income” when researchers described it as a tax bonus but more like “returned income” when it was described as a tax rebate.
This is exactly the kind of difference in perceptions that would increase spending of bonuses relative to rebates. Describing the checks as rebates highlights that this is simply one’s own money being returned. A bonus, however, is extra cash to be spent.
Under the House plan, the checks that would arrive in people’s mailboxes would go to those who pay the least income taxes, or even pay no income tax at all. Saying the checks are bonuses — or anything else that would call to mind thoughts of receiving a gift rather than getting a reimbursement — may not only be a more effective description for this stimulus package, but it may also be more accurate.
A hamburger can be described as 10 percent fat, but you had better call it 90 percent lean if you want your dinner guests to eat it. Politicians are thought to be expert spin doctors, able to choose the right words to fit any occasion, but they do not seem to be paying attention to how to sell the stimulus package so that consumers spend with patriotic abandon.
Nicholas Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
January 31, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Rebate Psychology
By NICHOLAS EPLEY
Chicago
THE House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday that would try to stimulate the economy, in part, by sending “tax rebates” to more than 100 million families. The logic of a tax rebate is that people will spend more money if they have more to spend. Unfortunately, psychology may interfere with that logic.
Research on decision-making demonstrates that describing a financial windfall as a “rebate” — instead of something equally accurate — increases the likelihood that people will save it. If Congress and President Bush want to increase consumer spending, they should have pitched these $600 and $1,200 checks as “tax bonuses” instead.
Changing the way that identical income is described can significantly affect how people spend it. In an experiment I conducted at Harvard with my colleagues Dennis Mak and Lorraine Chen Idson, participants were given a $50 check. They were told that this money came from a faculty member’s research budget, financed indirectly through tuition dollars. Roughly half of the participants had this money described as a “rebate,” whereas the others had it described as a “bonus.” When unexpectedly contacted one week later, participants who got a “rebate” reported spending less than half of what those who got a “bonus” reported spending ($9.55 versus $22.04, respectively).
We observed this same pattern in other experiments when participants were asked to keep a written record of their spending, as well as in experiments in which the participants were allowed to purchase items in the lab. “Rebates” are understood to be returns from money already spent. A rebate, psychologically speaking, is the return of a loss of one’s own money rather than a pure gain provided by someone else, so it is unlikely to be seen as extra spending money.
Getting a rebate is more like being reimbursed for travel expenses than like getting a year-end bonus. Reimbursements send people on trips to the bank. Bonuses send people on trips to the Bahamas.
This is more than merely a matter of political spin. Decisions depend very heavily on how people’s options are described.
People are more willing to treat 600 people infected with a deadly virus when they are told the treatment will save 200 of those lives, than when they are told that it will kill 400 of them. People are more likely to donate to a charity when the cost is described in terms of pennies per day instead of dollars per year. And more people say they could live on 80 percent of their income than say that they could save 20 percent of their income.
Descriptions are the psychological equivalent of a camera lens. Psychologists use the term “framing effects” to describe their influence. An investment banker who is delighted by saving $5 on a pair of shoes but disgusted by receiving $1,000 for a year-end bonus has experienced the power of framing effects.
If the current proposal for tax rebates sounds familiar, it’s because we have indeed been here before. In 2001, Congress and President Bush returned $38 billion to taxpayers in the form of $300 to $600 tax rebates, with the hope that Americans would stimulate the economy by spending them. But research conducted by two University of Michigan economists, Matthew Shapiro and Joel Slemrod, found that only 28 percent of the people in a national survey reported that they spent most of their rebate checks soon after receiving them. In a country where the personal savings rate has become negative by some accounts, people seem remarkably able to save at the very time their government needs them to spend.
In another experiment my colleagues and I conducted, taxpayers asked to recall the 2001 tax rebate reported that it seemed more like “extra income” when researchers described it as a tax bonus but more like “returned income” when it was described as a tax rebate.
This is exactly the kind of difference in perceptions that would increase spending of bonuses relative to rebates. Describing the checks as rebates highlights that this is simply one’s own money being returned. A bonus, however, is extra cash to be spent.
Under the House plan, the checks that would arrive in people’s mailboxes would go to those who pay the least income taxes, or even pay no income tax at all. Saying the checks are bonuses — or anything else that would call to mind thoughts of receiving a gift rather than getting a reimbursement — may not only be a more effective description for this stimulus package, but it may also be more accurate.
A hamburger can be described as 10 percent fat, but you had better call it 90 percent lean if you want your dinner guests to eat it. Politicians are thought to be expert spin doctors, able to choose the right words to fit any occasion, but they do not seem to be paying attention to how to sell the stimulus package so that consumers spend with patriotic abandon.
Nicholas Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
The New York Times
January 28, 2008
This Land
A Violation of Both the Law and the Spirit
By DAN BARRY
RIPTON, Vt.
Imagining that late December night of long darkness, you can almost hear these youths of Vermont tramping up to the isolated farmhouse to intrude upon the sanctuary stillness. The break of snow beneath their feet would be the least of it.
They had driven or walked a half-mile up a snow-covered lane called Frost Road, then trudged past a large blue sign that explained the historic significance of the farmhouse and the cabin beyond. And now they were entering the coldness of an uninhabited place, carrying with them cases of beer, bottles of rum and a store of ignorance about things that matter here.
Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
The damage left in their wake reflected some alcohol-induced mischief tinged with certain anger. Broken window, broken screen, broken dishes, broken antiques. Pieces of a broken chair used for wood in the fireplace. Gobs of phlegm spat upon hanging artwork. Vomit, urine, beer everywhere. And a blanket of yellow, pollenlike dust, discharged from fire extinguishers in parting punctuation.
Before long, distressing word spread from Ripton to Middlebury and beyond that the preserved farmhouse once owned by Robert Frost had been vandalized — desecrated, some said. If these children of the Green Mountains knew this house was once Frost’s, then shame. If they did not know, then shame still; they should have. How many had been weaned on Frost? How many had tromped through here on class trips and family outings?
It seemed once that Robert Frost would be with us forever, like some lichen-laced stone in a field. But finally he did die, in 1963 at the age of 88, leaving biographers to quarrel about his merits as a man and readers to marvel over his body of work, which, among other achievements, twinned a mastery of language with wisdom about natural things.
Here, though, Frost lingers. Peering down from his portrait in the Middlebury Inn. Speaking through snippets of poetry displayed at the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. Shuffling in spirit around the Homer Noble Farm, which he bought in 1939 and lived in during summer and fall: there in the rustic cabin above, writing, ruminating, while his close friend and protector, Kay Morrison, in the now-vandalized farmhouse just below, screened visitors eager for an audience with the great and garrulous bard — who might very well talk and talk until those visitors fairly begged to be dismissed.
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.
A day or so after the vandalism, a passing hiker alerted Middlebury College, which now owns the property, that the farmhouse door was open. Then a car wedged in snow off the main road led the authorities to a young man who said he had been at a party in the area. Oh really, said Sgt. Lee Hodsden of the state police.
With the help of Officer Scott Fisher of the Middlebury police, who is based mostly at Middlebury Union High School, Sergeant Hodsden gathered names, called in witnesses and heard accounts of that night, some delivered through tears, a couple with indifference. What emerged was a small-town epic about so much more than $10,000 in damages.
A 17-year-old boy who had once worked as a kitchen aide at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus recognized the remote farmhouse’s potential for parties. He also knew a young adult willing to buy the central party ingredient, alcohol, at the Hannaford Supermarket. Word spread by mouth and text messages.
Mix 30 or more young people with 150 cans of beer, a few bottles of liquor and some drugs, put them in a museumlike,unheated house in the dead of winter, and the ensuing discussions will not center on the sublime construction of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Some played drinking games, some got sick, some did damage, and all followed that snowy path out, bound together by a secret that could not keep.
Even a frozen meadow sends ripples when disturbed.
Rippling through Middlebury College, which dispatched a cleaning crew to the farmhouse. Kelly Trayah was among those who cleaned up the vomit, repaired the furniture, wiped the yellow dust from the many books, and now he wonders whatever happened to respect for elders. He is 37.
Through the college’s classrooms, where the English professor and nature writer John Elder, intimately familiar with the farmhouse and cabin, wonders what possibilities the destruction might provide. Could this violation of Frost lead to a celebration of Frost?
Through Middlebury Union High School, where administrators and teachers are talking about disconnection and, once again, substance abuse. For the rest of the year, the principal, William Lawson, predicted, “there will be a lot of Robert Frost quoted.”
Finally, through the state police barracks, where Sergeant Hodsden had more than two dozen young people photographed, fingerprinted and cited for unlawful trespass, with a few also cited for unlawful mischief. He cannot shake the indifference of one youth in particular, who asked whether he could use his mug shot on his Facebook page.
In conveying his disgust over this communal breach, the police sergeant employed the Frostian technique of repetition.
“They should have known,” he said. “They should have known.”
nytimes.com/danbarry.
January 28, 2008
This Land
A Violation of Both the Law and the Spirit
By DAN BARRY
RIPTON, Vt.
Imagining that late December night of long darkness, you can almost hear these youths of Vermont tramping up to the isolated farmhouse to intrude upon the sanctuary stillness. The break of snow beneath their feet would be the least of it.
They had driven or walked a half-mile up a snow-covered lane called Frost Road, then trudged past a large blue sign that explained the historic significance of the farmhouse and the cabin beyond. And now they were entering the coldness of an uninhabited place, carrying with them cases of beer, bottles of rum and a store of ignorance about things that matter here.
Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
The damage left in their wake reflected some alcohol-induced mischief tinged with certain anger. Broken window, broken screen, broken dishes, broken antiques. Pieces of a broken chair used for wood in the fireplace. Gobs of phlegm spat upon hanging artwork. Vomit, urine, beer everywhere. And a blanket of yellow, pollenlike dust, discharged from fire extinguishers in parting punctuation.
Before long, distressing word spread from Ripton to Middlebury and beyond that the preserved farmhouse once owned by Robert Frost had been vandalized — desecrated, some said. If these children of the Green Mountains knew this house was once Frost’s, then shame. If they did not know, then shame still; they should have. How many had been weaned on Frost? How many had tromped through here on class trips and family outings?
It seemed once that Robert Frost would be with us forever, like some lichen-laced stone in a field. But finally he did die, in 1963 at the age of 88, leaving biographers to quarrel about his merits as a man and readers to marvel over his body of work, which, among other achievements, twinned a mastery of language with wisdom about natural things.
Here, though, Frost lingers. Peering down from his portrait in the Middlebury Inn. Speaking through snippets of poetry displayed at the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. Shuffling in spirit around the Homer Noble Farm, which he bought in 1939 and lived in during summer and fall: there in the rustic cabin above, writing, ruminating, while his close friend and protector, Kay Morrison, in the now-vandalized farmhouse just below, screened visitors eager for an audience with the great and garrulous bard — who might very well talk and talk until those visitors fairly begged to be dismissed.
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.
A day or so after the vandalism, a passing hiker alerted Middlebury College, which now owns the property, that the farmhouse door was open. Then a car wedged in snow off the main road led the authorities to a young man who said he had been at a party in the area. Oh really, said Sgt. Lee Hodsden of the state police.
With the help of Officer Scott Fisher of the Middlebury police, who is based mostly at Middlebury Union High School, Sergeant Hodsden gathered names, called in witnesses and heard accounts of that night, some delivered through tears, a couple with indifference. What emerged was a small-town epic about so much more than $10,000 in damages.
A 17-year-old boy who had once worked as a kitchen aide at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus recognized the remote farmhouse’s potential for parties. He also knew a young adult willing to buy the central party ingredient, alcohol, at the Hannaford Supermarket. Word spread by mouth and text messages.
Mix 30 or more young people with 150 cans of beer, a few bottles of liquor and some drugs, put them in a museumlike,unheated house in the dead of winter, and the ensuing discussions will not center on the sublime construction of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Some played drinking games, some got sick, some did damage, and all followed that snowy path out, bound together by a secret that could not keep.
Even a frozen meadow sends ripples when disturbed.
Rippling through Middlebury College, which dispatched a cleaning crew to the farmhouse. Kelly Trayah was among those who cleaned up the vomit, repaired the furniture, wiped the yellow dust from the many books, and now he wonders whatever happened to respect for elders. He is 37.
Through the college’s classrooms, where the English professor and nature writer John Elder, intimately familiar with the farmhouse and cabin, wonders what possibilities the destruction might provide. Could this violation of Frost lead to a celebration of Frost?
Through Middlebury Union High School, where administrators and teachers are talking about disconnection and, once again, substance abuse. For the rest of the year, the principal, William Lawson, predicted, “there will be a lot of Robert Frost quoted.”
Finally, through the state police barracks, where Sergeant Hodsden had more than two dozen young people photographed, fingerprinted and cited for unlawful trespass, with a few also cited for unlawful mischief. He cannot shake the indifference of one youth in particular, who asked whether he could use his mug shot on his Facebook page.
In conveying his disgust over this communal breach, the police sergeant employed the Frostian technique of repetition.
“They should have known,” he said. “They should have known.”
nytimes.com/danbarry.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The New York Times
January 17, 2008
Generation Me vs. You Revisited
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
IN each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:
a) “I have a natural talent for influencing people”
b) “I am not good at influencing people”
a) “I can read people like a book”
b) “People are sometimes hard to understand”
a) “I am going to be a great person”
b) “I hope I am going to be successful”
These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with “Which Superhero Are You?” but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)
Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.
“Anything we do that’s political always falls flat,” said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. “It doesn’t seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents’ generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they’re more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them.”
Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.
Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”) Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.
“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.
Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press).
Ms. Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the ’70s. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” she said in an interview. “Well, that never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s, when people thought about ‘What do we need to teach young people?’ ” She points to cultural sayings as well — “believe in yourself and anything is possible” and “do what’s right for you.” “All of them are narcissistic,” she said.
“Generation Me” inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like “It’s all about me,” “Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic” and “Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids.”
Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called “The Narcissism Epidemic.”
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.
Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”
Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.
Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)
Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”
Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said.
Ms. Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it “the boyfriend test.”) “There’s a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what’s important is what they predict,” she said.
Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.
“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”
January 17, 2008
Generation Me vs. You Revisited
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
IN each of the following pairs, respondents are asked to choose the statement with which they agree more:
a) “I have a natural talent for influencing people”
b) “I am not good at influencing people”
a) “I can read people like a book”
b) “People are sometimes hard to understand”
a) “I am going to be a great person”
b) “I hope I am going to be successful”
These are some of the 40 questions on a popular version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. It may seem like a just-for-kicks quiz on par with “Which Superhero Are You?” but the test is commonly used by social scientists to measure narcissistic personality traits. (Choosing the first statement in any of the above pairings would be scored as narcissistic.)
Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.
“Anything we do that’s political always falls flat,” said Ricky Van Veen, 27, a founder and the editor in chief of CollegeHumor.com, a popular and successful Web site. “It doesn’t seem like young people now are into politics as much, especially compared to their parents’ generation. I think that could lend itself to the argument that there is more narcissism and they’re more concerned about themselves, not things going on around them.”
Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.
Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”) Others warn that if young people continue to be labeled selfish and narcissistic, they just might live up to that reputation.
“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.
Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press).
Ms. Twenge attributed her findings in part to a change in core cultural beliefs that arose when baby-boom parents and educators fixated on instilling self-esteem in children beginning in the ’70s. “We think feeling good about yourself is very, very important,” she said in an interview. “Well, that never used to be the case back in the ’50s and ’60s, when people thought about ‘What do we need to teach young people?’ ” She points to cultural sayings as well — “believe in yourself and anything is possible” and “do what’s right for you.” “All of them are narcissistic,” she said.
“Generation Me” inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like “It’s all about me,” “Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic” and “Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids.”
Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called “The Narcissism Epidemic.”
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.
Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”
Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.
Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)
Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”
Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said.
Ms. Twenge said she understands that sentiment but that the inventory has consistently proved to be an accurate measure. (She calls it “the boyfriend test.”) “There’s a fair number of personality tests that when you look at them they may seem odd, but what’s important is what they predict,” she said.
Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.
“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Michael Pollan’s excellent new book, “In Defense of Food.”
1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, or c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, or c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
Monday, January 14, 2008
The New York Times
January 15, 2008
Mind
Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
With the possible exception of “the dog ate my homework,” there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis.
Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.
No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.
Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it.
I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he “felt stalled and not self-actualized” and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman.
It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband’s girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.
In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.
But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”
Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. “I love my wife,” he said, “and I don’t know what possessed me.”
It didn’t take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. “It was like we were dating all the time,” he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.
Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else’s needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.
Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”
Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.
So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?
The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?
Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.
Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
January 15, 2008
Mind
Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
With the possible exception of “the dog ate my homework,” there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis.
Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon.
No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive.
Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it.
I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he “felt stalled and not self-actualized” and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman.
It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband’s girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.
In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.
But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”
Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. “I love my wife,” he said, “and I don’t know what possessed me.”
It didn’t take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. “It was like we were dating all the time,” he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.
Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else’s needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.
Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
But surely someone has had a genuine midlife crisis. After all, don’t people routinely struggle with questions like “What can I expect from the rest of my life?” or “Is this all there is?”
Of course. But it turns out that only a distinct minority think it constitutes a crisis. In 1999, the MacArthur Foundation study on midlife development surveyed 8,000 Americans ages 25 to 74. While everyone recognized the term “midlife crisis,” only 23 percent of subjects reported having one. And only 8 percent viewed their crisis as something tied to the realization that they were aging; the remaining 15 percent felt the crisis resulted from specific life events. Strikingly, most people also reported an increased sense of well-being and contentment in middle age.
So what keeps the myth of the midlife crisis alive?
The main culprit, I think, is our youth-obsessed culture, which makes a virtue of the relentless pursuit of self-renewal. The news media abound with stories of people who seek to recapture their youth simply by shedding their spouses, quitting their jobs or leaving their families. Who can resist?
Most middle-aged people, it turns out, if we are to believe the definitive survey.
Except, of course, for the few — mainly men, it seems — who find the midlife crisis a socially acceptable shorthand for what you do when you suddenly wake up and discover that you’re not 20 anymore.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The New York Times
January 13, 2008
Fresh Starts
Coaches Wanted in the Game of Life
By EVE TAHMINCIOGLU
NOTHING quite fit Shawn Driscoll’s schedule, or her passion, until she became a life coach. Her job is to help people set and achieve goals in their careers and their personal lives.
“I’ve always been good at advising people and coming up with strategies, so life coaching leveraged my natural talent, and it gave me more flexibility than a corporate job,” said Ms. Driscoll, who lives near Detroit and has two young children. A former consultant for Ernst & Young, she became a life coach in 2004.
Life coaches are like personal trainers for the psyche, and their ranks are growing. Many Americans want to go “from good to great,” and they’re looking to life coaches to get them there, said Carol Kauffman, assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder and director of Harvard’s Coaching and Positive Psychology Initiative.
Many coaches, like Ms. Driscoll, are accredited by a coaching organization. But no degrees or credentials are required to begin working as a life coach. There is also no federal or state oversight of the industry.
Robert Klein, a Westport, Conn., psychotherapist and past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, said that coaching tends to stress adaptive and coping skills, whereas psychotherapy tends to focus on issues like anxiety and depression.
“There are potential problems when someone comes in for life coaching and they actually have some serious, diagnosable mental or emotional problems and the person is not trained to recognize it or treat it,” he said. “I think it’s something we should keep our eyes on because in life coaching there is no licenser, no state board of professional accreditation. Anyone can call themselves a life coach.”
The industry has worked to improve credentialing, but at this point coaches’ participation is all voluntary. The International Coach Federation, based in Lexington, Ky., is among the groups that offer various levels of credentials, along with a code of ethics.
Ms. Driscoll took coaching courses through Coach U, a school based in Andover, Kan., that is accredited by the federation. The coaching program cost about $4,000 and was conducted via telecast. It included 132 hours of training and took her about two and a half years to complete.
Through the federation, she also received certification that required 60 hours of training; 250 hours spent coaching clients; and an oral exam with a federation assessor, among other requirements. To keep her certification, she said, she will have to keep accumulating training hours and remain an active coach.
It’s all been worth it, she said, because “it’s something that’s powerful and purposeful.”
According to a study commissioned by the International Coach Federation, there were more than 15,000 personal and business coaches in the United States in 2006. Kay Cannon, the federation’s past president, said that her group has about 13,000 members, up from 3,240 in 2000. (These include both life coaches and those with more of a corporate focus.)
The federation’s study, performed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, surveyed 5,415 coaches, mostly in the United States. Fifty-eight percent said they worked part time and earned an average of $26,214 a year. Those who worked full time reported an average salary of $83,608.
Ms. Driscoll says she earns about $70,000 a year working Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. She has 10 to 12 clients at any given time. Her fee is $450 a month, which covers three hours of private coaching sessions, either over the phone or in person, and unlimited e-mail communication. She also offers group coaching sessions at a community center.
One of Ms. Driscoll’s former clients, Gina DeLapa, signed up for three 45-minute sessions of life coaching in 2004 when she was having trouble adjusting to her move back to Michigan from California. “She gave me permission to shine,” said Ms. DeLapa, who runs an office etiquette firm in Ada, Mich. “Shawn asked crucial questions. She said, ‘It seems as though you have extremely high standards on how you treat other people, but you’re willing to accept a lot less.’ She would make insights like that.”
Life coaches are filling a niche for people who face problems but don’t need psychotherapists, said Michal Ann Strahilevitz, who holds the research chair in consumer behavior at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.
And many life coaches were formerly in the mental health field. One of these is Joshua M. Estrin of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who made the transition from psychotherapist to life coach in 2003. He charges $50 to $75 for a coaching session. He noted that life coaching tends to be more focused on the present and on the future compared with some other forms of therapy.
“I help guide clients and give them the tools they need,” he said. “Coaching is about finding your inner expert to reach your goals. My job is to give my clients a tool belt.”
Fresh Starts is a monthly column about emerging jobs and job trends.
January 13, 2008
Fresh Starts
Coaches Wanted in the Game of Life
By EVE TAHMINCIOGLU
NOTHING quite fit Shawn Driscoll’s schedule, or her passion, until she became a life coach. Her job is to help people set and achieve goals in their careers and their personal lives.
“I’ve always been good at advising people and coming up with strategies, so life coaching leveraged my natural talent, and it gave me more flexibility than a corporate job,” said Ms. Driscoll, who lives near Detroit and has two young children. A former consultant for Ernst & Young, she became a life coach in 2004.
Life coaches are like personal trainers for the psyche, and their ranks are growing. Many Americans want to go “from good to great,” and they’re looking to life coaches to get them there, said Carol Kauffman, assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder and director of Harvard’s Coaching and Positive Psychology Initiative.
Many coaches, like Ms. Driscoll, are accredited by a coaching organization. But no degrees or credentials are required to begin working as a life coach. There is also no federal or state oversight of the industry.
Robert Klein, a Westport, Conn., psychotherapist and past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, said that coaching tends to stress adaptive and coping skills, whereas psychotherapy tends to focus on issues like anxiety and depression.
“There are potential problems when someone comes in for life coaching and they actually have some serious, diagnosable mental or emotional problems and the person is not trained to recognize it or treat it,” he said. “I think it’s something we should keep our eyes on because in life coaching there is no licenser, no state board of professional accreditation. Anyone can call themselves a life coach.”
The industry has worked to improve credentialing, but at this point coaches’ participation is all voluntary. The International Coach Federation, based in Lexington, Ky., is among the groups that offer various levels of credentials, along with a code of ethics.
Ms. Driscoll took coaching courses through Coach U, a school based in Andover, Kan., that is accredited by the federation. The coaching program cost about $4,000 and was conducted via telecast. It included 132 hours of training and took her about two and a half years to complete.
Through the federation, she also received certification that required 60 hours of training; 250 hours spent coaching clients; and an oral exam with a federation assessor, among other requirements. To keep her certification, she said, she will have to keep accumulating training hours and remain an active coach.
It’s all been worth it, she said, because “it’s something that’s powerful and purposeful.”
According to a study commissioned by the International Coach Federation, there were more than 15,000 personal and business coaches in the United States in 2006. Kay Cannon, the federation’s past president, said that her group has about 13,000 members, up from 3,240 in 2000. (These include both life coaches and those with more of a corporate focus.)
The federation’s study, performed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, surveyed 5,415 coaches, mostly in the United States. Fifty-eight percent said they worked part time and earned an average of $26,214 a year. Those who worked full time reported an average salary of $83,608.
Ms. Driscoll says she earns about $70,000 a year working Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. She has 10 to 12 clients at any given time. Her fee is $450 a month, which covers three hours of private coaching sessions, either over the phone or in person, and unlimited e-mail communication. She also offers group coaching sessions at a community center.
One of Ms. Driscoll’s former clients, Gina DeLapa, signed up for three 45-minute sessions of life coaching in 2004 when she was having trouble adjusting to her move back to Michigan from California. “She gave me permission to shine,” said Ms. DeLapa, who runs an office etiquette firm in Ada, Mich. “Shawn asked crucial questions. She said, ‘It seems as though you have extremely high standards on how you treat other people, but you’re willing to accept a lot less.’ She would make insights like that.”
Life coaches are filling a niche for people who face problems but don’t need psychotherapists, said Michal Ann Strahilevitz, who holds the research chair in consumer behavior at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.
And many life coaches were formerly in the mental health field. One of these is Joshua M. Estrin of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who made the transition from psychotherapist to life coach in 2003. He charges $50 to $75 for a coaching session. He noted that life coaching tends to be more focused on the present and on the future compared with some other forms of therapy.
“I help guide clients and give them the tools they need,” he said. “Coaching is about finding your inner expert to reach your goals. My job is to give my clients a tool belt.”
Fresh Starts is a monthly column about emerging jobs and job trends.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
The New York Times
January 1, 2008
Personal Health
No Gimmicks: Eat Less and Exercise More
By JANE E. BRODY
A desire to turn over a new, more healthful leaf typically accompanies the start of a new year. My mail, for example, has been inundated with diet books, most of which offer yet another gimmick aimed ultimately at getting the gullible reader to eat less and exercise more.
Publishers assume, correctly, that the shock of the scale after nearly six weeks of overindulging on food and drink will prompt the purchase of one or more books on dieting by people who are desperate to return to their pre-Thanksgiving shape.
And really, it doesn’t matter whether you choose a diet based on your genotype or the phases of the moon, or whether you cut down on sugars and starches or fats. If you consume fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight, you will lose.
My advice here is to save your money, toss out (or donate to a soup kitchen) the leftover high-calorie holiday fare, gradually reduce your portion sizes and return to your exercise routine (or adopt one if you spent too much of ’07 on your sofa).
Slowly but surely the pounds will come off. And as Aesop said, slow and steady does indeed win the race. Gradual weight loss, achieved on an eating-and-exercise regimen that you can sustain indefinitely, is most likely to be permanent weight loss.
If you’ve been reading this column for years, no doubt you already know that. But I believe it bears repeating at least once a year, not because I want to further depress the booksellers’ market, but because I’d rather you spend your hard-earned money on foods that can really help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight and good health.
The basics of good nutrition have not changed.
Meals replete with vegetables, fruits and whole grains and a small serving of a protein-rich food remain the gold standard of a wholesome diet. Still, at both ends of the age spectrum as well as in between, recent months have held some new findings — and some surprises — that are worth noting.
Perhaps most distressing to a chocoholic like me was a report in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Circulation that while dark chocolate can indeed improve coronary circulation and decrease the risk of heart-damaging clots, most dark chocolate on the market is all but stripped of the bitter-tasting flavanols that convey this health benefit.
The color, in other words, tells you nothing. Now it’s up to manufacturers to label the flavanol content — not just the percentage of cocoa, which may have no flavanol at all.
Focus on Brain Food
As the population ages and the prevalence of dementia rises, increased attention has focused on how diet may help keep cognitive decline at bay. A heart-healthy diet that keeps clogged arteries from limiting the brain’s supply of oxygen and nutrients has been linked to a lower risk of dementia.
Likewise, omega-3 fatty acids in fish and fish oil, which counter inflammation, appear to protect the brain as well as the heart and joints. A recent analysis of 17 studies in the journal Pain found that daily supplements of these fatty acids significantly reduced inflammatory joint pain.
But now there may be a new kid on the block: vitamin B12. A 10-year study with 1,648 participants in Oxford, England, found an increased risk of cognitive decline in older adults who had low blood levels of vitamin B12. This vitamin is found only in foods from animals, yet it is common for older people, especially those on limited budgets, to cut back on foods like meats and fish.
Strict vegetarians, who have long been cautioned to take B12 as a supplement to prevent a deficiency, can add brain protection to the list of potential benefits. The rest of us should feel comfortable about eating red meat and poultry as long as it is lean and consumed in reasonable amounts. A serving of cooked meat, fish or poultry is only three to four ounces.
The British researchers noted that high blood levels of homocysteine had previously been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and that B12 is one of the vitamins, along with folate and B6, that lower homocysteine levels. However, the researchers found no benefit to cognitive function from folate.
Foods to Fight Cancer
Here we come full circle. A decade after the American Institute for Cancer Research issued its first major report on diet and cancer, a new magnum opus in concert with the World Cancer Research Fund was published late last year. Based on 7,000 studies of 17 kinds of cancer, it concluded that being overweight now ranks second only to smoking as a preventable cause of cancer. “Convincing evidence” of an increased risk resulting from body fatness was found for cancers of the kidney, endometrium, breast, colon and rectum, pancreas and esophagus.
Other major findings of increased risk included red and processed meats for colon and rectal cancer, and alcoholic drinks for cancers of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast, and colon and rectum.
“Convincing evidence” for cancer protection was found for physical activity against colon and rectal cancers, and for breastfeeding against breast cancer. “Probable” protection against various cancers was also found for dietary fiber; nonstarchy vegetables; fruits; foods rich in folates, beta-carotene, vitamin C and selenium; milk, and calcium supplements.
January 1, 2008
Personal Health
No Gimmicks: Eat Less and Exercise More
By JANE E. BRODY
A desire to turn over a new, more healthful leaf typically accompanies the start of a new year. My mail, for example, has been inundated with diet books, most of which offer yet another gimmick aimed ultimately at getting the gullible reader to eat less and exercise more.
Publishers assume, correctly, that the shock of the scale after nearly six weeks of overindulging on food and drink will prompt the purchase of one or more books on dieting by people who are desperate to return to their pre-Thanksgiving shape.
And really, it doesn’t matter whether you choose a diet based on your genotype or the phases of the moon, or whether you cut down on sugars and starches or fats. If you consume fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight, you will lose.
My advice here is to save your money, toss out (or donate to a soup kitchen) the leftover high-calorie holiday fare, gradually reduce your portion sizes and return to your exercise routine (or adopt one if you spent too much of ’07 on your sofa).
Slowly but surely the pounds will come off. And as Aesop said, slow and steady does indeed win the race. Gradual weight loss, achieved on an eating-and-exercise regimen that you can sustain indefinitely, is most likely to be permanent weight loss.
If you’ve been reading this column for years, no doubt you already know that. But I believe it bears repeating at least once a year, not because I want to further depress the booksellers’ market, but because I’d rather you spend your hard-earned money on foods that can really help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight and good health.
The basics of good nutrition have not changed.
Meals replete with vegetables, fruits and whole grains and a small serving of a protein-rich food remain the gold standard of a wholesome diet. Still, at both ends of the age spectrum as well as in between, recent months have held some new findings — and some surprises — that are worth noting.
Perhaps most distressing to a chocoholic like me was a report in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Circulation that while dark chocolate can indeed improve coronary circulation and decrease the risk of heart-damaging clots, most dark chocolate on the market is all but stripped of the bitter-tasting flavanols that convey this health benefit.
The color, in other words, tells you nothing. Now it’s up to manufacturers to label the flavanol content — not just the percentage of cocoa, which may have no flavanol at all.
Focus on Brain Food
As the population ages and the prevalence of dementia rises, increased attention has focused on how diet may help keep cognitive decline at bay. A heart-healthy diet that keeps clogged arteries from limiting the brain’s supply of oxygen and nutrients has been linked to a lower risk of dementia.
Likewise, omega-3 fatty acids in fish and fish oil, which counter inflammation, appear to protect the brain as well as the heart and joints. A recent analysis of 17 studies in the journal Pain found that daily supplements of these fatty acids significantly reduced inflammatory joint pain.
But now there may be a new kid on the block: vitamin B12. A 10-year study with 1,648 participants in Oxford, England, found an increased risk of cognitive decline in older adults who had low blood levels of vitamin B12. This vitamin is found only in foods from animals, yet it is common for older people, especially those on limited budgets, to cut back on foods like meats and fish.
Strict vegetarians, who have long been cautioned to take B12 as a supplement to prevent a deficiency, can add brain protection to the list of potential benefits. The rest of us should feel comfortable about eating red meat and poultry as long as it is lean and consumed in reasonable amounts. A serving of cooked meat, fish or poultry is only three to four ounces.
The British researchers noted that high blood levels of homocysteine had previously been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and that B12 is one of the vitamins, along with folate and B6, that lower homocysteine levels. However, the researchers found no benefit to cognitive function from folate.
Foods to Fight Cancer
Here we come full circle. A decade after the American Institute for Cancer Research issued its first major report on diet and cancer, a new magnum opus in concert with the World Cancer Research Fund was published late last year. Based on 7,000 studies of 17 kinds of cancer, it concluded that being overweight now ranks second only to smoking as a preventable cause of cancer. “Convincing evidence” of an increased risk resulting from body fatness was found for cancers of the kidney, endometrium, breast, colon and rectum, pancreas and esophagus.
Other major findings of increased risk included red and processed meats for colon and rectal cancer, and alcoholic drinks for cancers of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast, and colon and rectum.
“Convincing evidence” for cancer protection was found for physical activity against colon and rectal cancers, and for breastfeeding against breast cancer. “Probable” protection against various cancers was also found for dietary fiber; nonstarchy vegetables; fruits; foods rich in folates, beta-carotene, vitamin C and selenium; milk, and calcium supplements.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Well
A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: January 1, 2008
After the holidays, many shoppers load up their carts with storage bins, shelving systems and color-coded containers, all in a resolute quest to get organized for the new year.
The country’s collective desire to clean up is evident in the proliferation of organization-oriented businesses like the Container Store and California Closets. Reality shows like “Mission Organization” on HGTV and “How Clean is Your House?” on Lifetime feed a national obsession to declutter. The magazine Real Simple has even created a $13 special issue on cleaning house.
Getting organized is unquestionably good for both mind and body — reducing risks for falls, helping eliminate germs and making it easier to find things like medicine and exercise gear.
“If you can’t find your sneakers, you aren’t taking a walk,” said Dr. Pamela Peeke, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and the author of “Fit to Live” (Rodale, 2007), which devotes a section to the link between health and organization. “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?”
But experts say the problem with all this is that many people are going about it in the wrong way. Too often they approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.
Measures like these “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale.
“It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”
Excessive clutter and disorganization are often symptoms of a bigger health problem. People who have suffered an emotional trauma or a brain injury often find housecleaning an insurmountable task. Attention deficit disorder, depression, chronic pain and grief can prevent people from getting organized or lead to a buildup of clutter. At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.
Compulsive hoarding is defined, in part, by clutter that so overtakes living, dining and sleeping spaces that it harms the person’s quality of life. A compulsive hoarder finds it impossible, even painful, to part with possessions. It’s not clear how many people suffer from compulsive hoarding, but estimates start at about 1.5 million Americans.
Dr. Tolin recently studied compulsive hoarders using brain-scan technology. While in the scanner, hoarders looked at various possessions and made decisions about whether to keep them or throw them away. The items were shredded in front of them, so they knew the decision was irreversible. When a hoarder was making decisions about throwing away items, the researchers saw increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision-making and planning.
“That part of the brain seemed to be stressed to the max,” Dr. Tolin said. By comparison, people who didn’t hoard showed no extra brain activity.
While hoarders are a minority, many psychologists and organization experts say the rest of us can learn from them. The spectrum from cleanliness to messiness includes large numbers of people who are chronically disorganized and suffering either emotionally, physically or socially. Cognitive behavioral therapy may help: a recent study of hoarders showed that six months’ therapy resulted in a marked decline in clutter in the patient’s living space.
Although chronic disorganization is not a medical diagnosis, therapists and doctors sometimes call on professional organizers to help patients. One of them is Lynne Johnson, a professional organizer from Quincy, Mass., who is president of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization.
Ms. Johnson explains that some people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item — a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma.
Many clients have already accumulated numerous storage bins and other such items in a futile attempt to get organized. Usually the home space is adequate, she says, but the challenge is in teaching them how to group, sort, set priorities and discard.
Ms. Johnson says she often sees a link between her client’s efforts to get organized and weight loss. “I think someone decides, ‘I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to hold onto my stuff, I’m not going to hold onto my weight,’” she said. “I don’t know that one comes before the other. It’s part of that same life-change decision.”
On its Web site, www.nsgcd.org, the group offers a scale to help people gauge the seriousness of their clutter problem. It also includes a referral tool for finding a professional organizer. But since the hourly fees can range from $60 to $100 or more, it may be worth consulting a new book by Dr. Tolin, “Buried in Treasures” (Oxford, 2007), which offers self-assessments and advice for people with hoarding tendencies.
Dr. Peeke says she often instructs patients trying to lose weight to at least create one clean and uncluttered place in their home. She also suggests keeping a gym bag with workout clothes and sneakers in an uncluttered area to make it easier to exercise. She recalls one patient whose garage was “a solid cube of clutter.” The woman cleaned up her home and also lost about 50 pounds.
“It wasn’t, at the end of the day, about her weight,” Dr. Peeke said. “It was about uncluttering at multiple levels of her life.”
E-mail: well@nytimes.com.
A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: January 1, 2008
After the holidays, many shoppers load up their carts with storage bins, shelving systems and color-coded containers, all in a resolute quest to get organized for the new year.
The country’s collective desire to clean up is evident in the proliferation of organization-oriented businesses like the Container Store and California Closets. Reality shows like “Mission Organization” on HGTV and “How Clean is Your House?” on Lifetime feed a national obsession to declutter. The magazine Real Simple has even created a $13 special issue on cleaning house.
Getting organized is unquestionably good for both mind and body — reducing risks for falls, helping eliminate germs and making it easier to find things like medicine and exercise gear.
“If you can’t find your sneakers, you aren’t taking a walk,” said Dr. Pamela Peeke, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and the author of “Fit to Live” (Rodale, 2007), which devotes a section to the link between health and organization. “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?”
But experts say the problem with all this is that many people are going about it in the wrong way. Too often they approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.
Measures like these “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale.
“It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”
Excessive clutter and disorganization are often symptoms of a bigger health problem. People who have suffered an emotional trauma or a brain injury often find housecleaning an insurmountable task. Attention deficit disorder, depression, chronic pain and grief can prevent people from getting organized or lead to a buildup of clutter. At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.
Compulsive hoarding is defined, in part, by clutter that so overtakes living, dining and sleeping spaces that it harms the person’s quality of life. A compulsive hoarder finds it impossible, even painful, to part with possessions. It’s not clear how many people suffer from compulsive hoarding, but estimates start at about 1.5 million Americans.
Dr. Tolin recently studied compulsive hoarders using brain-scan technology. While in the scanner, hoarders looked at various possessions and made decisions about whether to keep them or throw them away. The items were shredded in front of them, so they knew the decision was irreversible. When a hoarder was making decisions about throwing away items, the researchers saw increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision-making and planning.
“That part of the brain seemed to be stressed to the max,” Dr. Tolin said. By comparison, people who didn’t hoard showed no extra brain activity.
While hoarders are a minority, many psychologists and organization experts say the rest of us can learn from them. The spectrum from cleanliness to messiness includes large numbers of people who are chronically disorganized and suffering either emotionally, physically or socially. Cognitive behavioral therapy may help: a recent study of hoarders showed that six months’ therapy resulted in a marked decline in clutter in the patient’s living space.
Although chronic disorganization is not a medical diagnosis, therapists and doctors sometimes call on professional organizers to help patients. One of them is Lynne Johnson, a professional organizer from Quincy, Mass., who is president of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization.
Ms. Johnson explains that some people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item — a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma.
Many clients have already accumulated numerous storage bins and other such items in a futile attempt to get organized. Usually the home space is adequate, she says, but the challenge is in teaching them how to group, sort, set priorities and discard.
Ms. Johnson says she often sees a link between her client’s efforts to get organized and weight loss. “I think someone decides, ‘I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to hold onto my stuff, I’m not going to hold onto my weight,’” she said. “I don’t know that one comes before the other. It’s part of that same life-change decision.”
On its Web site, www.nsgcd.org, the group offers a scale to help people gauge the seriousness of their clutter problem. It also includes a referral tool for finding a professional organizer. But since the hourly fees can range from $60 to $100 or more, it may be worth consulting a new book by Dr. Tolin, “Buried in Treasures” (Oxford, 2007), which offers self-assessments and advice for people with hoarding tendencies.
Dr. Peeke says she often instructs patients trying to lose weight to at least create one clean and uncluttered place in their home. She also suggests keeping a gym bag with workout clothes and sneakers in an uncluttered area to make it easier to exercise. She recalls one patient whose garage was “a solid cube of clutter.” The woman cleaned up her home and also lost about 50 pounds.
“It wasn’t, at the end of the day, about her weight,” Dr. Peeke said. “It was about uncluttering at multiple levels of her life.”
E-mail: well@nytimes.com.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
The New York Times
January 1, 2008
Mind
The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters
By BENEDICT CAREY
The ideal New Year’s Eve party would come with a psychological voucher, redeemable the next day for a post-mortem session with friends. A chance to relish the night’s humiliations, take bets on who went home with whom, and nominate the guest most in need of therapy, present company included.
An opportunity, that is, to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.
Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.
Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.
Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.
Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.
Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.
A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”
With age, people apparently detoxified their regrets by reframing them as shared misunderstandings, a retrospective touching-up that in many cases might have been more accurate.
In a series of studies, Laura A. King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has had people write down a description of their future as they imagined it before a life-altering event, like divorce. She has found that those who are able to talk or write about this lost future without sinking into despair or losing hope tend to have developed another quality, called complexity.
Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.
Here is how a woman from Dallas described the impact of an early and devastating divorce, in one of Dr. King’s studies:
“I feel fortunate in a backhanded way to have experienced misfortune as a young woman. I feel it taught me humility ... and the ability to regroup. ... Life is good but not lavish. It’s hard work and we have to give each other a hand once in a while.”
Another woman in the same study, who had scored lower on a measure of complexity, described her life after divorce: “What good is anything without someone to share it with? My current goal is only to make enough money to make my monthly bills without withdrawing money from my savings account.”
Dr. King has followed groups of people for years and found that this knack for self-evaluation develops over time; it is a learned ability. “To elaborate on loss, to look for some insight in it, is not just what a psychologically mature person does,” Dr. King said. “It’s how a person matures. That’s what the studies show.”
Good therapists have long known the value of seeing regretted choices in the context of what has been gained as well as lost. A full-blown career in dance leaves little time for a family, or much else. The reverse is also true, of course. Starting a family with that perfect someone at age 22 makes it hard to tour South America with a guitar on your back. And was he really so perfect?
“The idea is move people away from this element of resentment, the sense that if only my parents this or I had done that, I would have what I want,” said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “That’s a dead end.”
Even the perspective from which people remember slights or mistakes can affect the memories’ emotional impact, new research suggests. A recent Columbia study found that reimagining painful scenes from a third-person point of view, as if seeing oneself in a movie, blunted their emotional sting and facilitated precisely the sort of clearheaded self-perception that Dr. King described.
Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own.
Granted, it may be hard to make the case that one of those is the person capsized on the couch, recovering from last year’s last party. But give it a few days. Ghost-busting is possible, but best done without a hangover.
January 1, 2008
Mind
The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters
By BENEDICT CAREY
The ideal New Year’s Eve party would come with a psychological voucher, redeemable the next day for a post-mortem session with friends. A chance to relish the night’s humiliations, take bets on who went home with whom, and nominate the guest most in need of therapy, present company included.
An opportunity, that is, to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.
Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.
Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.
Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.
Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.
Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.
A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”
With age, people apparently detoxified their regrets by reframing them as shared misunderstandings, a retrospective touching-up that in many cases might have been more accurate.
In a series of studies, Laura A. King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has had people write down a description of their future as they imagined it before a life-altering event, like divorce. She has found that those who are able to talk or write about this lost future without sinking into despair or losing hope tend to have developed another quality, called complexity.
Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.
Here is how a woman from Dallas described the impact of an early and devastating divorce, in one of Dr. King’s studies:
“I feel fortunate in a backhanded way to have experienced misfortune as a young woman. I feel it taught me humility ... and the ability to regroup. ... Life is good but not lavish. It’s hard work and we have to give each other a hand once in a while.”
Another woman in the same study, who had scored lower on a measure of complexity, described her life after divorce: “What good is anything without someone to share it with? My current goal is only to make enough money to make my monthly bills without withdrawing money from my savings account.”
Dr. King has followed groups of people for years and found that this knack for self-evaluation develops over time; it is a learned ability. “To elaborate on loss, to look for some insight in it, is not just what a psychologically mature person does,” Dr. King said. “It’s how a person matures. That’s what the studies show.”
Good therapists have long known the value of seeing regretted choices in the context of what has been gained as well as lost. A full-blown career in dance leaves little time for a family, or much else. The reverse is also true, of course. Starting a family with that perfect someone at age 22 makes it hard to tour South America with a guitar on your back. And was he really so perfect?
“The idea is move people away from this element of resentment, the sense that if only my parents this or I had done that, I would have what I want,” said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “That’s a dead end.”
Even the perspective from which people remember slights or mistakes can affect the memories’ emotional impact, new research suggests. A recent Columbia study found that reimagining painful scenes from a third-person point of view, as if seeing oneself in a movie, blunted their emotional sting and facilitated precisely the sort of clearheaded self-perception that Dr. King described.
Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own.
Granted, it may be hard to make the case that one of those is the person capsized on the couch, recovering from last year’s last party. But give it a few days. Ghost-busting is possible, but best done without a hangover.
