“If you’ve been following the Joe the Plumber story over the past 24 hours, it turns out that he’s not a licensed plumber and apparently makes about $40K a year, so is in no position to buy a business pulling in $250-280K net per year.

“The McCain campaign may not have planted him as a seed, but they certainly are cultivating him.”

October 17, 2008, 12:09 pm – New York Times

A ‘Dose of Nature’ for Attention Problems
Can nature walks help kids with A.D.H.D.?
by Chris Cummins for The New York Times

Parents of children with attention deficit problems are always looking for new strategies to help their children cope. An interesting new study suggests that spending time in nature may help.

A small study conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked at how the environment influenced a child’s concentration skills. The researchers evaluated 17 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who all took part in three 20-minute walks in a park, a residential neighborhood and a downtown area.

After each walk, the children were given a standard test called Digit Span Backwards, in which a series of numbers are said aloud and the child recites them backwards. The test is a useful measure of attention and concentration because practice doesn’t improve the score. The order of the walks varied for all the children, and the tester wasn’t aware of which walk the child had just taken.

The study, published in the August issue of The Journal of Attention Disorders, found that children were able to focus better after the “green” walks compared to walks in other settings.

Although the study is small, the data support several earlier studies suggesting that natural settings influence psychological health. In 2004, a survey of parents of 450 children found that “green” outdoor activities reduced A.D.H.D. symptoms more than activities in other settings.

“What this particular study tells us is that the physical environment matters,” said Frances E. Kuo, director of the university’s Landscape and Human Health Laboratory. “We don’t know what it is about the park, exactly — the greenness or lack of buildings — that seems to improve attention.”

Dr. Kuo noted that the study used tight controls to make sure that the walks were identical except for the environment. Who the child was with, noise levels, the length of time, the time of day and whether the child was on medication stayed constant.

“If we kept everything else the same, and we just changed the environment, we still saw a measurable difference in children’s symptoms,” Dr. Kuo said. “And that’s completely new. No one has done a study looking at a child in different environments, in a controlled comparison where everything else is the same.”

Dr. Kuo said more children were initially involved in the study, but logistical problems like weather changes, late arrivals or changes in medication made it difficult to maintain tight control, leaving the study with just 17 children from which to draw conclusions.

Despite the small size, the study is important because it involves an objective test of attention and doesn’t rely on children’s or parents’ impressions. During the walks, all of the children were unmedicated — participants who normally took medications to control their A.D.H.D. symptoms stayed off the drugs on the days of the walks.

The researchers found that a “dose of nature” worked as well or better than a dose of medication on the child’s ability to concentrate. What’s not clear is how long the nature effect can last.

Dr. Kuo said that while there are “hints” exposure to green outdoor settings offers a benefit, the science isn’t advanced enough to give parents a strict formula.

“We can’t say for sure, ‘two hours of outdoor play will get you this many days of good behavior,’ but we can say it’s worth trying,” she said. “We can say that as little as 20 minutes of outdoor exposure could potentially buy you an afternoon or a couple of hours to get homework done.”

Dr. Kuo said it’s notable that parents themselves consistently report benefits for their children from green settings.

“One reason we believe this is that if the effect were short-lived, we don’t think that parents would have so consistently observed it,” she said. “But they do. They report it over and over.”

The three music sensations that made Akron, Ohio famous join together for the first time in the important battleground state.

In the middle of an arts revitalization movement, Akron plays host to the music legends who are coming home to show their support for presidential candidate Barack Obama.

After 30 years away from Ohio, DEVO organized this effort.

The show happens Friday, October 17, 2008 8pm at the Akron Civic Theatre.

Twenty electoral votes are up for grabs in the swing state, and winning Ohio could play a pivotal role in winning the upcoming presidential election. With John McCain’s campaign recently pulling out of Michigan in an effort to place more resources in states such as Ohio, band members have been persuaded to show their support through a dual act.

“Ohio is where we need to be,” said Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO co-founder and frontman. “We hope to make an impact with this concert, and raise consciousness to what’s happened in Ohio in the past eight years. I think that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are our only hope. That’s why we are here.”

The founding members of DEVO sprang from Akron in the 1970s at a time when the city was in a severe recession and dealing with the after-effects of a failed war.

The Black Keys, a new addition to the ticket, have been a rising sensation in Akron throughout the past decade, also a time of national economic hardships and an on-going war.

All proceeds will benefit the Summit County Democratic Party.

A limited number of tickets are on sale now at the Akron Civic Theatre Box Office by calling 330.253.2488 or visiting akroncivic.com. Reserved seats are available for $25, $35 and $50. A limited number of V.I.P. tickets, which include a post show reception with the bands, are available for $150.

Senator John McCain reacts to almost heading the wrong way off the stage at the conclusion of the final presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York (Reuters).

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=metaphors-of-the-mind

Mind Matters – September 25, 2008 – Scientific American

Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty
A social psychologist explains how abstract concepts can create physical feelings

Chen-Bo Zhong is an assistant professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In recent years, he’s explored a wide variety of topics, from the benefits of relying on the unconscious to generate creative insights to the reasons people often use temperature metaphors (“icy stares,” “cold shoulders,” and so on) when describing acts of social rejection. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Zhong about his latest research.

LEHRER: You recently demonstrated that being socially excluded from a group can make people feel colder, so that they believe a room is colder and prefer warm drinks and snacks, such as hot coffee and soup. What made you interested in this line of research?

ZHONG: I came across this popular 1970s song on YouTube called Lonely This Christmas written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. It goes, “It’ll be lonely this Christmas, lonely and cold, it’ll be cold so cold, without you to hold.” It just occurred to me that maybe what the song describes is more than a metaphor but a real psychological connection between loneliness and coldness. Indeed, my collaborator Geoffrey Leonardelli [a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto] and I found that people not only use coldness-related terms to describe social rejection (for example, “cold shoulder”), but also experience rejection as physical coldness: feeling cold becomes an integral part of our experience of being socially isolated. This research is consistent with recent theories on embodied cognition as well as general research on the connection between mind and body.

LEHRER: What are some other examples of how seemingly abstract thoughts, such as feeling excluded, can have physical manifestations?

ZHONG: Another example would be the relation between morality and physical cleanliness. In my early work “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing” in collaboration with Katie Liljenquist [a professor of organizational behavior at Brigham Young University], we discussed how metaphors such as “dirty hands” or “clean records” may have a psychological basis such that people make sense of morality through physical cleanliness.

When people’s moral self image is threatened, as when they think about their own unethical past behaviors, people literally experience the need to engage in physical cleansing, as if the moral stain is literally physical dirt. We tested this idea in multiple studies and showed that when reminded of their past moral transgressions, people were more likely to think about cleansing-related words such as “wash” and “soap”, expressed stronger preference for cleansing products (for instance, a soap bar), and were also more likely to accept an antiseptic wipe as a free gift (rather than a pencil with equal value).

Further, physical cleansing may actually be effective in mentally getting rid of moral sins. In another study, in which participants who recalled unethical behaviors were either given a chance to cleanse their hands or not, we found that washing hands not only assuaged moral emotions such as guilt and regret but also reduced participants’ willingness to engage in prosocial behaviors such as volunteering Thus physical washing can actually wash away sins. Perhaps this effect is why most world religions practice some form of washing rituals to purify souls. We should be cautious, however, knowing that if our sins are so easily “washed away” we might not be as motivated to engage in actual compensatory behaviors to make up for our mistakes.

LEHRER: Your most recent paper looks at the relation between unconscious thought and creativity. What did you find?

ZHONG: In collaboration with Ap Dijksterhuis [a psychologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands] and Adam Galinsky [a professor of managment at Northwestern University] found that unconscious thought (such as being distracted while still holding a goal in mind) can facilitate the search for creative solutions. These creative solutions may not be consciously recognizable, however. This research was motivated by early psychological research on the “incubation effect,” a hypothesis that a period of inattention can facilitate problem solving. Henri Poincare, for example, described how he was unable to solve an arithmetic problem after a long period of deliberation and only found the solution appear suddenly into consciousness after thinking about something else.

Despite abundant lay observations, empirical research often had troubles replicating the incubation effect in the lab. We suggest that part of the reason may be that even when unconscious thought generates creative solutions, these solutions still need to be transferred into the consciousness. Thus, the lack of empirical support for incubation may not be due to unconscious thought but to the transferring of unconscious solutions to the conscious. Using printing as an analogy: when a printer is not printing calculations of a program properly, it is not always because the program is not working. Instead, the connection between the program and the printer may be severed. Indeed, we found that after a period of unconscious thought, solutions to creative problems were unconsciously activated but participants were not able to consciously express those solutions. This finding suggests that the generation of creative solutions by unconscious thought and the transferring of these solutions to the conscious may be determined by different factors. We are following up this work in our future research.

LEHRER: Does this suggest that taking pills that increase our ability to consciously focus might interfere with creativity?

ZHONG: Not necessarily, for two reasons. First, there is no doubt that unconscious processes may be most active during sleep but they can also be active while people consciously focus on something—just not the problem you hope to resolve. In our study, we manipulated unconscious thought by distracting participants from the task at hand and focusing them on a different, very cognitive demanding task. Thus, to harness the benefits of unconscious thought, one does not need to lose conscious focus. The key is to focus on an unrelated task while still keeping the goal of resolving the original problem. Second, it partially depends on the complexity of the problem. As it turns out in our research and other work by Dijksterhuis, consciously focusing on a problem is more effective than distraction when the problem does not involve remote connections. The advantages of unconscious thought are most prominent when resolving difficult problems that involve weak associations.

LEHRER: A recent paper of yours looked at the power of “negational racial identity” to influence votes. You showed that making Asian and Latino voters think about race in negational terms (thinking of themselves as “non-white”) made them more likely to vote for Obama than Asian and Latino voters who were primed to think about their identity in affirmational terms (being Asian or Latino). You conclude that “negational identity is a meaningful source of social identity” and that “whether one thinks about ‘who one is’ versus ‘who one is not’ has far-reaching impact for real-world decisions.” What are some other examples of “negational identity” at work? And what does this suggest about how people develop an identity?

ZHONG: Another example of negational identity would be the 2004 presidential Democratic primary, people who were once supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidates such as Howard Dean and John Edwards, united over their common lack of support for the current president, George W. Bush (for instance, “anybody but Bush”) in the general election. Likewise, during my graduate study, I saw a Midwest talk radio show advertise itself on billboards with a slogan, “Liberals Hate It!” In both cases people focused on who they were not more than who they were.

The development of identity is a fluid process. Although people certainly differ in how they view themselves, their identity can also be primed or manipulated. The manipulation of the “non-white” identity in my recent article with Adam Galinsky [at Northwestern] and Miguel Unzueta [a professor of organizational behavior at UCLA] is one such example. Whether people see themselves through the affirmational or negational lens has significant social consequences, even though such effects may not be consciously noticed. Affirmational identity tends to assimilate people to their in-group and drive in-group favoritism. Negational identity, on the hand, defines individuals by contrasting individuals to a common non-membership. It may create a broad basis for building a coalition, uniting all who do not belong to the same group. In the meantime, however, it may increase hostility towards the common out-group. By highlighting the fluidity of identity and how easily it can be manipulated by campaigns, advertisements, and speeches, we hope to increase the likelihood that voters will consider specific issues rather than simply relying on group categories.

DANIEL HIGGS
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