Priming and Prejudice

If you have never done so, watch this video, then meet me down below and we'll talk. 

Pretty cool, right.  So aside from being a neat little feature of how our minds work what does this have to do with families and couples?  This experiment is a great way of demonstrating "priming".  We are focused on what we are primed to experience and miss what we aren't primed to see.  In the case above we are primed to see basketballs not gorillas.  Having our limited attention focused on the basketball means that we have less attention for noticing the bizarre detail of the gorilla.      

This has very real implications for human interactions.  Confirmation bias is a kind of priming in which we give great weight to cases that confirm an idea we have about the world and discount cases that don't confirm our idea.  If I believe that tall people are untrustworthy, I will see examples of tall people behaving in untrustworthy ways and view them as representative, but I will tend to discount examples of tall people behaving altruistically.  This explains why more pernicious prejudices like race prejudices become re-enforced and are so hard to break.  Here's a great example of racial priming. 

These aren't bad people, but both black and white people are primed to see a young, white guy as a parks employee and a young, black guy as a thief.  If you want to check out your own priming on race and a variety of other social factors, check out ProjectImplicit and try one of their tests that allows you to assess how your implicit, unexpressed values line up with your expressed values. 

Priming happens on a micro level in a couple or family, too.  When the relationship in a couple or between a parent and child becomes fraught with bad feelings, a person becomes primed to see the negative qualities or behavior they expect and -- like with the gorilla -- may completely miss unexpected, positive moments for which they are not primed.

In "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and How to Listen so Kids Will Talk," Elaine Mazlish and Adele Faber talk about "catching" kids being good; noticing and calling out when a kid does the right thing.  They present it as a way for kids to feel that they can succeed, which is important.  But just as important is what "catching" a kid doing good does for a parent.  It re-primes him or her. 

If you find yourself counting basketball passes all the time with your spouse or kid -- watching for them to do the expected and annoying thing -- re-prime yourself.  Look for good, look for gorillas.  They're more common than you think.  

Do you love schools? The energy of teens? Teachers who care? British Accents?

I am loving The School (Educating Essex).  Nothing I have ever seen captures what schools feel like, for good and bad.  This is a perfect rebuttal to most depictions of teens and teachers on TV.  You must stick around for "Am I amused?" at 9:30. I am waiting to see a social worker/school counselor. 

Poverty, Families and Mental Health

A great blog post called "5 Stereotypes about poor families and education" in the Washington Post a few days ago quoted extensively from a book by Paul C. Gorski titled Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty.  The excerpt offers a lot of research to dispel some common negative myths about poor people that impact the way schools and educators tend to approach them and how that impacts their experience of school; poor people don't value education, poor people are lazy, poor people are more likely to be substance abusers, poor people are linguistically impoverished and -- the biggy -- poor people are ineffective parents.  

This is a tricky subject because some things about poverty can have an impact on kids' school performance as well as physical and mental health.  Well-intentioned governments and schools generally want to respond to those negative effects in order to ensure that kids growing up in poverty have the best opportunities they can (or say they do, at any rate).  But as Gorski points out fuzzy thinking about how exactly poverty does or doesn't impact kids and families can be deleterious on a classroom or a public policy level.  

“Stereotypes can make us unnecessarily afraid or accusatory of our own students, including our most disenfranchised students, not to mention their families. They can misguide us into expressing low expectations for poor youth and their families or to blame them for very the ways in which the barriers they face impede their abilities to engage with schools the way some of us might engage with schools.”

The WP post doesn't discuss the tings we do know about the ways in which poverty (or things that are highly correlated with it) impact kids and families though I am assuming the book will do just that.  Paul Tough wrote a great piece a few years ago for the New Yorker called "The Poverty Clinic."  The article looked at a medical clinic which used the findings of the Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences study to treat poor families.  The upshot of the study and Tough's article is that childhood trauma is a huge risk factor for both physical and psychological illness both in childhood and in later life.  Since poor people are much less well insulated against trauma, they are, on average, at greater risk.  Trauma both intensity and frequency are a great predictor of difficulty in school and later life, but not poverty per se.  

The other piece of really interesting research about differences in family style between poor and middle-class families and how that impacts education that Gorski alludes to in the extract, but that doesn't get a lot of play is Anette Lareau's distinction between middle-class "concerted cultivation" versus poor and working class "accomplishment of natural growth."  While not contradicting Gorski, Lareau does portray the poor/working class families in her study as less organized around talk and less at ease with certain kinds of parent involvement (Gorski says that poor families may want to be involved but may feel turned-off by the ways schools invite participation, which tends to be geared towards middle-class parents). 

Finally, one of the things that Gorski doesn't address in the blog post is varieties of poverty.  Because poverty itself is not the cause of academic failure or ill health or family dysfunction, but certain things that are often associated with poverty are risk factors for all those things, we should look at and think about the way differences between poverties impact those factors; for example, not every poor community increases exposure to trauma for kids.  Some poor communities are better at insulating their young against trauma than some wealthier communities.

Most disasterous parent-child sex talk ever?

Talking with kids about sex can be tough for parents even when we think we're ready for it.  Julia Sweeney gives the best (or worst) account of having the sex talk with a child ever. 

I actually think listening to this is a great way to prepare yourself for talking with kids about sex.  Once the topic comes up, kids, especially young kids may ask all sorts of questions that we might never expect, but that are pretty obvious if you take some time to consider it from their perspective.  After all, everything about sex seems pretty unlikely to an eight year old. 

Also her account is loving and humorous and sort of makes the point that we all make mistakes when we talk about sex with kids, and if we have a loving relationship with our kids, we will get lots of chances to go back and talk more.  The importance of having an ongoing dialogue with your kids about sex was demonstrated by a 2008 study done by researchers at Ste. Justine hospital, here in Montreal.  That study found that while parents assumed their adolescents looked to friends and celebrities to shape their attitudes towards sex, teens (the study was of teenage girls) report that it is their parents who are their most significant role models, but that despite that they do not feel comfortable talking with them about sexuality.  So take heart, your child will look to you more than peers or the popular culture for her ideas about sexuality but you should start laying the groundwork for conversations about sex early.   

Who delivers mental health care?

Dr. Suzanne Koven has just written a great blog post that is required reading for anyone who cares about mental health care in North America, called "Should Mental Health Care be a Primary-Care Doctor's Job?"  She points out the degree to which medical mental health care has been downloaded to primary care docs who may or may not feel up to the task. 

“I’m comfortable helping people get through life’s more common emotional challenges, like divorce, retirement, disappointing children. If you’re hearing voices, or if you walk into my office and announce that you’ve decided to kill yourself, as someone did not long ago, I know exactly what to do: escort you to a psychiatrist. But what about the lawyer who’s having trouble meeting deadlines and wants medication for attention-deficit disorder? Or the businesswoman whose therapist told her to see me about starting an antidepressant? Or the civil servant trying to shake his Oxycontin addiction? They’ve all asked me to treat them because they don’t want or can’t easily access psychiatric care. ”

Here in Quebec, the recent Bill 21, which regulates the act of psychotherapy, gives physicians automatic access to the title of psychotherapist though their training in mental illness and mental health may be limited depending on what their experience in medical school and residency was.  While there are many doctors who are great psychotherapists and who have taken the time to get trained, becoming a doctor involves training in diagnosis of mental illness and some psycho-pharmacology and only a cursory understanding of different forms of psychotherapy.  (The purpose of Bill 21 is to protect the public by ensuring a minimum of training for psychotherapists.  It has serious ramifications for people who use mental health services but remains largely unexamined in French or in English media). 

Dr. Koven points out that fewer medical students are going into psychiatry in the US (sorry, I can't give Canadian stats) so both the public and general physicians have less access to doctors who specialize in mental health.  I also have seen that there is a feeling among patients that psychiatrists are pill-pushers while a GP may be more accessible and take the time to know a patient better ad this may make people even more likely to rely on generalists.  (My experience of psychiatrists has actually been that they are more likely to prescribe talk therapy with or without medication than GPs, but that is very impressionistic.) 

Recent changes to the way health care is delivered in Quebec make it harder to access a psychiatrist directly through the public system.  In order to see a psychiatrist you must first go to a public health clinic, a CLSC, rather than go to a psychiatrist in the public system directly (except for emergencies).  This can be good because people can be seen by a social worker or psychologist at a CLSC which may be what they need, but it re-enforces the model of psychiatry being practiced only with the very seriously mentally ill or the very wealthy.  Finding a psychiatrist to really follow someone with obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, to ensure that medication is appropriate and effective and to consult with the therapist, whether s/he is a GP or a social worker, is very hard.  It may account for why fewer people want to go into the field, too.  After all, who wants to go into a medical specialty where you are supposed to fathom the mysteries of the human heart and human relationships but are unable to form relationships with patients because you see them on an assembly line, and on top of that, you will mostly see people whose illnesses can at best be managed but are without cure? 

The label of "sex addict" and sex negativity.

Dr. Marty Klein makes a really fascinating argument about the term "sex addiction" in an article in "The Humanist"; that that label  is a way for people not to have to reckon with the conflict between their desire for what certain kinds of sex gives them and the consequences of acting out their desires.    

“New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.”

— http://thehumanist.org/july-august-2012/you%E2%80%99re-addicted-to-what/

He goes on to argue that this condition of wanting certain things sexually and not wanting to take responsibility for the consequences is made more troublesome by a sex-negative culture which punishes people for wanting any kind of sex or relationship that isn't socially sanctioned. 

“...the diagnosis of sex addiction is in many ways a diagnosis of discomfort with one’s own sexuality, or of being at odds with cultural definitions of normal sex, and struggling with that contrast...”

The culture today communicates two out-of-sync messages about sex pretty strongly; one, that we should be ecstatically sexually fulfilled all the time and two, that non-socially-sanctioned sex is highly dangerous and scary (gay, non-monogamous, kinky).  And there is the meta-message which says that commenting on the discrepancy between these two messages -- "Everybody may not be sexually and romantically fulfilled with one, opposite-sex partner for the rest of their lives" -- is not allowed.  A million romcoms have taught us that everyone will end up in a monogamous, same-sex couple and will never feel the desire to masturbate or fantasize about other people or look at pornography because they are so fulfilled.  According to Marty Klein, the label "sex addiction" leaves us stuck in that double bind rather than helping us step out of it. 

"You worked hard" not "You're so smart"

Po Bronson, (co-author with Ashley Merryman of the great book "Nurtureshock") wrote an article a few years ago called "How not to talk to your kids" about the pitfalls for kids of receiving certain kinds of praise.  It was based largely on the work of researcher Carol Dweck.   

““When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.”

The article is a great read and the research is an example of interesting social science (that doesn't rely on over-interpreted fMRI images).  The upshot is that kids, probably all of us, need to be encouraged to view intelligence as maleable and process-related rather than static and inherent.  It is a good way to avoid trapping kids in what Alice Miller called the "drama of the gifted child," the need to protect a false, perfect image of one's self from failure.  "You worked hard" encourages us to try new things and, as the incomparable Ms. Frizzle says, "Get messy.  Make Mistakes."

When do kids 'get' irony?

The ability to understand that other people have different ideas and information about the world from one's self emerges in most kids by around four years old.  This ability that most of us share is really nicely illustrated by this video.  According to psychologist (and brother-of-Borat) Simon Baron-Cohen, kids with Autism Spectrum disorder have a much harder time with tasks such as these.  A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology found that empathy and the ability to understand irony are correlated in kids. 

“Empathy was strongly associated with several aspects of irony comprehension and processing, suggesting that emotional reasoning abilities are important to development of irony comprehension. ”

— http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00691/full#h5

Makes sense.  Irony is a disconnect between what a person says and his or her inner state.  By around eight years of age most kids can 'get' that disconnect.  The authors point out that these are both areas that are difficult for people with ASDs.  Empathy and reading irony both require projecting one's self into another person's inner experience; Theory of Mind.  In the case of irony, one has to do that while swimming upstream, as it were, against the current of the literal message.  I have noticed in my practice how hard and frustrating it is for kids with ASDs to read and irony.