Grumpy is good for careful but not creative thinking

According to new research published in Australasian Science, being grumpy isn’t all bad. Those in a cranky mood are less gullible, think more critically and tend to do better with decision-making.

Joe Forgas, a psychology professor from The University of New South Wales, designed experiments that would induce either a positive or negative mood on the study’s participants. According to BBC News, Forgas would do this by showing films that invoked either happy or sad emotions and having the participants think about positive or negative life experiences. He then had them partake in a variety of tasks, including judging the truthfulness of urban myths and providing an accurate recollection of an event.

Those in a bad mood performed better in each task, making fewer overall mistakes and communicating more effectively. The UK Telegraph reports that those in a grumpy mood were also less likely to make rash decisions based on racial or religious prejudices.

However, a positive mood also has its upsides. Professor Forgas explains:

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.”

Not-so-smart-smear tactics from Consumer Reports

Here’s an update to Consumer Reports charge that STATS is funded by ExxonMobil. Apparently, because STATS received grants from the Sarah Scaife foundation (though not in recent years), and Scaife had stock in ExxonMobil,  therefore STATS was being funded by ExxonMobil.

By the same logic, every employee for Consumer Reports should now disclose the nature of their stock investments and retirement accounts – just in case they turn out to be funded [sic] by the companies whose products they rate.

Meanwhile, back to the science – a top EPA expert today rejected Consumer Reports claim about BPA.

STATS responds to Consumer Reports smear tactics

Consumer Reports posted a response on its blog to STATS criticism of its recent report on BPA. The following is a letter sent by STATS President, S. Robert Lichter Ph.D to the magazine:

In their response to Trevor Butterworth’s criticisms, Andrea Rock and Urvashi Rangan devoted most of their efforts to trying to discredit STATS by linking it to industy. Luckily, this is a scientific debate, in which the best science will ultimately win, regardless of the rhetorical tactics adopted by some participants. Mr. Butterworth will respond further to the scientific issues. But it is necessary to reply immediately to the institutional allegations.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) was founded in 1984 to conduct social scientific studies of media coverage. The Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) was founded ten years later with a different mission – to improve the transmission of scientific and quantitative information to the public. They are independent non-profit organizations that share some administrative personnel and expenses; both are affiliates of George Mason University. The STATS websites describes them as “sister organizations.”

To avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest in its critiques, STATS does not accept industry funding. However, Rock and Rangen claim to have examined documents showing that STATS has received funding from ExxonMobil. Since no such funding has taken place to my knowledge, I call on the authors either to publicly release any such documents so that everyone can examine them or to retract this assertion.

The authors also cast aspersions on CMPA for having once done a study for a tobacco company. Specifically, in 1994 CMPA conducted a content analysis on media coverage of tobacco for Philip Morris. CMPA has done many such social scientific content analyses commissioned by groups in both the private and non-profit sectors. For example, the same year we studied media coverage of tobacco, we examined television’s coverage of Hispanics for the National Council of La Raza.

The most salient question is whether, as the authors intimate, CMPA’s critical faculties were bought off by Big Tobacco money. As it happens, during the 1990’s we were actively involved in conducting and publicizing research on the risks of tobacco in a series of articles, newsletters, and public statements, including Congressional testimony.

The publications began appearing in 1993 (the year before Philip Morris commissioned a content analysis) and culminated in a 1999 Yale University Press book showing that cancer researchers not only “placed tobacco in a league of its own among cancer agents,” they believed the media understates the cancer risks associated with tobacco.

STATS also has an extensive history of criticizing the health risks of tobacco. For a lengthier explication of all this material, click here.

Rhetorical devices aside, it is well to remember that taking industry money isn’t the same as doing industry’s bidding.

S. Robert Lichter
Professor of Communication
Director, CMPA and STATS
George Mason University

The Internet has not discouraged people from visiting cafes, study finds

Past research has hinted that technology might be the cause of social isolation; however, a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that the use of technology actually leads to increased and more diverse social networks.

Keith Hampton, lead author of the report and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, explains:

“It turns out that those who use the Internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages…People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Data about discussion networks was collected using a 2008 telephone survey of 2,512 adults. The study controlled for a variety of factors such as sex, age and education. According to Reuters, here are some of the report’s key findings:

• Social isolation has barely changed since 1985; only six percent of adults have reported no one significant in their life.
• A discussion network is 12 percent larger among cell phone users and nine percent larger for those who use instant messaging and share photos.
• The diversity of social networks was the largest for those who use the internet frequently, 25 percent larger for cell phone users and 15 percent larger for basic internet users.
• The internet has not discouraged people from visiting public places (parks, cafes, etc).
• The average amount of friends and family a person typically confides in has decreased; however, this was not associated with the use of technology.
• People now use cell phones more than landlines to stay in touch.
• Face-to-face contact is still the primary method people use to keep in touch. On average, a person sees their close group of friends 210 days out of the year.

Click here to read the full report.

Common sense urged on treating pain

You would think that pain, being an obvious and compelling condition, would have an obvious and compelling cure. In fact, for years it was a neglected area of medicine; and one that endured willful neglect after falling victim to the war on drugs. Over-anxious law enforcement authorities began targeting doctors who prescribed opioid pain killers in the belief that they were doing so injudiciously, fueling drug abuse across the country. The abuses created by the fear of abuse, and the media’s over-reliance on law enforcement at the expense of doctors, have been documented by STATS (here, here and here).

Thankfully, there appears to be change afoot. John Tierney in the New York Times writes about a new report from the Mayday Fund, arguing for  “a revolution in the training of doctors, the financing of research and the education of law-enforcement officials.”  Given the number of Americans who suffer from undertreated or neglected chronic pain, the report is a vital contribution to public debate.

Consumer Affairs unhappy with STATS

Consumer Affairs, a publication that should not be confused with Consumer Reports, has reported STATS material before;  but this morning, it isn’t happy with us. In fact, it’s so unhappy that we criticized Consumer Reports for its new study on BPA in cans, that it made a few errors of its own.

For the record, I do not have degrees in philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, as the publication claims.  My STATS bio and my own personal website indicate my education, and I don’t actually describe what I read for at Trinity (BA Hons in English and Art History, M.Phil in Reformation and Enlightenment Studies – an interdisciplinary degree that did include some philosophy – for those interested).  I do note that I did  graduate work in philosophy at Georgetown University. I also have an MS in journalism from Columbia University.

Consumer Affairs claims that STATS is “loosely affiliated” with George Mason University in Virginia, as if this was merely a gloss.  But the author fails to note that STATS Research Director, Dr. Rebecca Goldin,  is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at GMU, or that STATS president, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, was a founding professor of the University’s Center for Health and Risk Communication, and that STATS and the Center collaborated on a groundbreaking survey of toxicologists on chemical risks. Would a close affiliation require us to sleep on the Fairfax campus ?

Consumer Affairs, which runs advertisements for BPA-free products and trial lawyers, and which only appears to run BPA stories about studies which find evidence of risk, no matter how tentative  (BPA makes girls mean) while neglecting to run stories about studies which refute the claims of a risk (last week’s massive EPA study), criticized STATS for:

“findings [that]are nearly always presented in an adversarial, take-no-prisoners format that leaves little room for disagreement or scientific discourse.”

STATS primary findings on BPA are contained in a 27,000 word, 50-page analysis that extensively cited the lead authors of three risk assessments, including that of the European Union. In fact, I can safely say that no non-academic publication has reported the issue in such scientific detail. And if God is in the details, so is the devil.

As Consumer Affairs claims,

“Federal guidelines currently put the daily upper limit of safe exposure at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight. But that level is based on experiments done in the 1980s rather than hundreds of more recent animal and laboratory studies indicating that serious health risks could result from much lower doses of BPA.”

But how can we not sound adversarial when we note that this reference dose was affirmed by the European Union in 2006 and 2008 as being safe. (In Europe it is called the Tolerable Daily Intake, or TDI). This can be checked by going to the EU’s risk assessment. A visit there will also explain why the “hundreds of more recent” studies were rejected as methodologically flawed. So the reference dose is not out of date, and the FDA’s recent decision on the safety of the chemical relied on the work done by Europe.

We do not believe its in the interests of scientific discourse to pretend that this – and masses of other statistically rigorous data – doesn’t exist. Or that its impossible to distinguish reliable from unreliable research. We also believe that the European Union’s regulatory apparatus – especially given its deference to the precautionary principle -  is more rigorous than the testing capabilities of Consumer Reports.   If the mainstream media reported the European Union’s findings on BPA – or those of Japan, Australia or New Zealand, or even California, which did not find any cause in the data to restrict BPA -  STATS would have no interest in following this topic.

STATS on NBC Nightly News

Watch STATS on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

November 3, 2009 – STATS’ Trevor Butterworth is interviewed on the controversial chemical BPA after the release of new data from Consumer Reports. You can also check out Trevor’s newest article, Consumer Reports BPA study filled with factual errors for more information.

Don’t bank on the rank

The United States ranks 37^th in the world in health care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Google the key words, and you find 3.7 million instances, with numerous mentions in recent months as the debate on health care reform heated up. What you won’t find are many articles questioning whether the statistic is true.

Enter the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy,” Carl Bialik, to deconstruct this damning statistic. First, it is based on a report released almost ten years ago. Second, this very report is based on out-of-date statistics that are incomplete and inaccurate.

The WHO ranking is composed of five criteria – life expectancy, responsiveness in providing diagnosis and treatment, inequality in health-care outcomes, inequality in responsiveness, and individual spending. The latter three proved to be the most controversial.

One huge issue was that the required data was not readily available for every nation; therefore, Bialik explains, WHO researchers would calculate the relationship between the five factors and whatever available numbers they could find. This means that literacy rates were sometimes used to approximate the quality of health care.

It is also difficult to create a ranking based on life expectancy when it is affected by a variety of factors outside of the heath-care system, such as diet and exercise habits, poverty, and homicide rate.

But wait, there’s more! According to an article from the Cato Institute, the data for each factor was collected from individual agencies and ministries. This creates inconsistencies in definition, reporting and methodology.

When individual spending is removed, the U.S. actually ranked much higher on the list. Bialik writes:

“…the WHO took the additional step of adjusting for national health expenditures per capita, to calculate each country’s health-care bang for its bucks. Because the U.S. ranked first in spending, that adjustment pushed its ranking down to 37th. Dominica, Costa Rica and Morocco ranked 42nd, 45th and 94th before adjusting for spending levels, compared to the U.S.’s No. 15 ranking. After adjustment, all three countries ranked higher than the U.S.”

Click here to see a chart from the Wall Street Journal that shows health care rankings when spending is removed.

Why Stress Makes You Fat

Originally posted on our collaborative site, Ourblook.com

By Erika Schwartz, MD

A recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology looked at data on 1,355 men and women who had their weight and stress levels measured in 1995 and again in 2004.

The findings showed that those who were overweight and obese packed on the pounds even more as time went by and stressors continued and increased.

Those who were thin stayed thin and according to the lead author Jason Block on faculty at Harvard, “The stress effect didn’t appear to impact normal-weight people, just those who were overweight and obese from the beginning of the study.”

The results of this study may be true but as Americans are getting fatter and sicker, we are faced with more problems than ever before.

We are suffering ever-growing rates of obesity and worsening health caused by weight problems.

Stress is a leading cause of this modern-day epidemic – brought about by our frenetic lifestyles or by financial worries from the economic recession.

Stress comes in two varieties:

The CDC diagnoses swine flu by telephone

Every flu season doctors note that many people mistake having a bad cold for the flu, but that their symptoms, even if flu- like, do not mean they have the flu. So what do you think happened when the Centers for Disease Control called 10,000 people by phone and asked them if they had flu-like symptoms? Well, golly gosh, it turns out that one in five kids had “flu-like” symptoms in the past month (you know, the month when kids returned to school to give each other their germs).  The CDC claims that most of the kids probably had swine flu, which, naturally, led some people in medialand — The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and several others who appear to have toned down their headlines during the day– to claim that they actually had swine flu.

But – cough – how could anyone possibly make an accurate diagnosis of swine flu over the phone, when so many people commonly refer to “cold-like” symptoms as having the flu? We have privileged access to our thoughts and feelings, and can tell a telephone interviewer with 100 percent accuracy whether we are happy or sad; but we cannot, alas, discern between viruses when we’re sick; we just know we’re sick with something.

Aside from the limits of self-diagnosis, a telephone survey of this kind is also prey to other kinds of bias, such as whether people were more inclined to affirm that they had flu-like symptons (rather than claim a mere cold) due to the proliferation of swine flu stories in the media.

The false certainty created by ‘guessurveying’ the  incidence of swine flu may well be designed to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated, but laudable ends are rarely well served by such obviously lame means.  It just makes the CDC look unscientific. And that’s the kind of development that can metastasize into full-blown lack of credibility, when, eventually, some news organization starts to ask awkward questions.

And despite the prevalence of stenography in the press, the CDC’s “guessurvey” comes a day after an  investigation by CBS News  found that the Centers told states to stop doing real testing for H1N1 in July — and to stop counting actual cases, decisions which the network reported left some public health experts perplexed. On top of that, CBS’s analysis of state data shows that H1N1 was less prevalent over the summer than expected  and that claims based on apparent symptoms and not actual testing — such as the alleged outbreak of swine flu at Georgetown University — were more likely to over-estimate the  incidence of disease.