Thursday 30 December 2010

Depression the 'Black Dog'



Managing Depression with Cognitive Techniques: The Power of Our Thoughts:

·                Although we may not always be aware of our thoughts, they nevertheless can have a strong effect on how we feel and behave in response to a particular situation or event.

(a)   Re-learning our A-B-Cs:
·              According to the cognitive theory, the effect that our thoughts can have on our physical, behavioral and emotional responses to a particular situation can be illustrated using the following diagram:

A = Activating event or situation that we experience
                             ê
B= Beliefs or thoughts regarding the situation
                             ê
C = Consequence: How we feel or act based on these beliefs 

·              Let’s illustrate this model using an example:
Example 1:
Person 1:    A (Activating Situation) = A friend does not return your phone call

B (Beliefs/Thoughts) = “I must have done something to upset them. I am such a horrible person.”

                   C (Consequence/Effect) = Anxious, upset, depressed 

Person 2:    A (Activating Situation) = A friend does not return your phone call

B (Beliefs/Thoughts) = “They’re probably just really busy, and haven’t had time to get back to me yet.”
                            
C (Consequence/ Effect) = Content, neutral

·                    The above example shows how two people may experience the same situation (e.g., having a friend not return one’s telephone call), but have very different reactions to the event based on how they interpret and evaluate the situation according to their thoughts and beliefs.
Depression is one of the most common but least talked about mental issues and many of us will have to face it some time in our lives. In adolescence it is particularly common since we have to come to terms with leading life as an adult, sexual maturity, independence, self-reliance, friendships - future careers and, of course examinations. This is enough to get anybody down! Depression can be fairly common among first year university students and most colleges are adept at dealing with it. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a way in which we can help ourselves.
A major characteristic of depressive thinking is that we always think the worst, as in the example above. If somebody is grumpy or offhand with us we may assume they don't like us, when, actually, they may have just had a major row with their parents or just eaten something that disagreed with them. So, if we think differently we can alter the chain of thought that leads us to emotional self-abuse: and that is what it is. We punish ourselves because, in some sense, we believe we don't deserve to be liked. Most people's lives are too busy for them to go out of the way to target us for ill-treatment.
This change in thought pattern is often enough to stave off depressive thoughts and more serious illness. If it does become more serious there are very effective modern drugs such as PROZAC which can lift the mood by changing brain chemistry but they only work for about 50% of people. Counselling is often highly effective as we learn WHY we feel so badly about ourselves.
The important thing is to ACT which is often what we feel least like doing if we have this debilitating illness. So, ABC and ACT! There is something that can be done.

Thursday 23 December 2010

The Psychology of Christmas

As a Christian I have to ask myself, particularly at this time of year, why I believe. On the face of it, it is absurd to think that a virgin was told by an angel that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit of God and would give birth to a Son who would be the saviour of the world. So why do I believe that in the depths of my soul ? It's not an easy question to answer, the hardest questions never are.

This painting by Fra Angelico may give a clue, it is the Angel Gabriel telling Mary the good news that God has chosen her to bear His Son. Mary accepts the will of God just as Adam and Eve had rejected it. For me, there is the sublime mystery of the action of the unknowable here upon this earth. The ineffable beauty of Mary's response to Gabriel: " Behold! the handmaiden of the Lord". The Magnificat her inspired words on the purpose of her coming Son's life, he who will exalt the poor above the rich and invert the values of this World. If human beings have no hope then we are spiritually dead.

So, it is a coming together of divine love and humanity, of a love so great it is beyond our knowing and the fragility of humanity. In a time which has known greater wickedness than ever before, when even Herod's slaughter of the first born would struggle to get a newspaper headline, is it not a miracle that, if we choose, we can believe that the humble babe of Bethlehem was born to give us Hope. A hope that true reality may not be the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda ,or Bosnia, but the possibility of redemption , in thw words of the prophet Isaiah:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.
Isaiah, 9. 6

Sunday 5 December 2010

Intuitive psychology rubbish!!!!!

Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Effect

December 6th 2010
Faceless
[Photo by Lawrie Mullins]
Many people quite naturally believe they are good 'intuitive psychologists', thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people's attitudes and behaviours. We each have information built up from countless previous experiences involving both ourselves and others so surely we should have solid insights?
No such luck.

In reality people show a number of predictable biases when estimating other people's behaviour and its causes. And these biases help to show exactly why we need psychology experiments and why we can't rely on our intuitions about the behaviour of others.
One of these biases is called the false consensus effect. In the 1970s Stanford University social psychologist Professor Lee Ross set out to show just how the false consensus effect operates in two neat studies (Ross, Greene & House, 1977).

False consensus

In the first study participants were asked to read about situations in which a conflict occurred and then told two alternative ways of responding. They were asked to do three things:
  • Guess which option other people would choose,
  • Say which option they would choose,
  • Describe the attributes of the person who would choose each of the two options.
The results showed more people thought others would do the same as them, regardless of which of the two responses they actually chose themselves. This shows what Ross and colleagues dubbed the 'false consensus' effect - the idea that we each think other people think the same way we do when actually they often don't.
Another bias emerged when participants were asked to describe the attributes of the person who made the opposite choice to their own. Compared to other people who made the same choice they did, people made more extreme predictions about the personalities of those who made didn't share their choice.
To put it a little crassly: people tend to assume that those who don't agree with them have something wrong with them! It might seem like a joke, but it is a real bias that people demonstrate.

Eat at Joe's!

While the finding from the first study is all very well in theory, how can we be sure people really behave the way they say they will? After all, psychologists have famously found little connection between people's attitudes and their behaviour.
In a second study, therefore, Ross and colleagues abandoned hypothetical situations, paper and pencil test and instead took up the mighty sandwich board.
This time a new set of participants, who were university students, were asked if they would be willing to walk around their campus for 30 minutes wearing a sandwich board saying: "Eat at Joe's". (No information is available about the food quality at 'Joe's', and consequently how foolish students would look.)
For motivation participants were simply told they would learn 'something useful' from the study, but that they were absolutely free to refuse if they wished.
The results of this study confirmed the previous study. Of those who agreed to wear the sandwich board, 62% thought others would also agree. Of those who refused, only 33% thought others would agree to wear the sandwich board.
Again, as before, people also made more extreme predictions about the type of person who made the opposite decision to their own. You can just imagine how that thinking might go. The people who agreed to carry the sandwich board might have said:
"What's wrong with someone who refuses? I think they must be really scared of looking like a fool."
While the people who refused:
"Who are these show-offs who agreed to carry the sandwich board? I know people like them - they're weird."

We're poor intuitive psychologists

This study is fascinating not only because it shows a bias in how we think about others' behaviours but also because it demonstrates the importance of psychology studies themselves.
Every psychologist has, at some point, been driven to distraction when trying to explain a study's finding by one form of the following two arguments (amongst others!):
1. I could have told you that - it's obvious!
2. No, in my experience that's not true - people don't really behave like that.
As this social psychology study shows, people are actually pretty poor intuitive psychologists. One of the few exceptions to this is when the answer is really really obvious, such as asking people whether it is OK to commit murder. But questions we can all agree on are generally not as interesting as those on which we are divided.
People are also more likely to assume someone who doesn't hold the same views as them has a more extreme personality than their own. This is because people think to themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, surely all right-thinking (read 'normal') people think the same way as me?
Well, apparently not. Although knowing that we don't know other people is a great start.
And that is one good reason why we need psychology studies.

Reference
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279-301.