B.F. Skinner quotes

I came across a few quotes here and there from BF Skinner:

• The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

• I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.

• Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.

Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007)

June 25, 2007

The founder of rational emotive behavior therapy, Albert Ellis, died Tuesday at the age of 93 following an extended illness. His work and theories provided the basis for what is today known as rational-emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) a form of cognitive behavior therapy, which has become an effective treatment approach for many different disorders.

His straight talk approach to cognitive therapy, with an underlying focus on general principles was groundbreaking in its day; in contrast today, many counselors apply many of his theories and therapeutic principles in therapeutic situations. It is interesting to note that while Ellis's ideas were initially met with resistance within the psychological community, a 1982 survey of clinical psychologists ranked Ellis as the second most influential therapist (behind Carl Rogers and ahead of Sigmund Freud).

Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. “Neurosis,” he said, was “just a high-class word for whining.” He was also quoted as saying, “the trouble with most therapy is that it helps you to feel better,” he said in a 2004 article in The New York Times. “But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”

His basic message was that all people are born with a tendency to distort everyday perceptions that sabotage their ultimate quest for happiness. But he recognized that people also had the capacity to change themselves. The role of therapists according to REBT is to intervene directly, using strategies and homework exercises to help patients first learn to accept themselves as they are (unconditional self-acceptance, he called it) and then to retrain themselves to avoid destructive emotions — to "establish new ways of being and behaving,” as he put it.

In 2005, Ellis became involved in legal disputes with the institute that he had founded after he was removed from its board and his weekly Friday seminars were canceled. While he was reinstated last year after a judge ruled that he had been wrongly removed, his relationship with the institute remained strained.

Girls' Rumination on Problems Actually Causes Depression

Amanda Rose, in an study published in the July issue of Development Psychology has found that girls who talk very extensively about their problems with friends are likely to become more anxious and depressed (Prospective Associations of Co-Rumination With Friendship and Emotional Adjustment: Considering the Socioemotional Trade-Offs of Co-rumination)

The six-month study, which included boys and girls, examined the effects of co-rumination - excessively talking with friends about problems and concerns. Rose discovered that girls co-ruminate more than boys, especially in adolescence, and that girls who co-ruminated the most in the fall of the school year were most likely to be more depressed and anxious by the spring.

When girls co-ruminate, they're spending such a high percentage of their time dwelling on problems and concerns that it probably makes them feel sad and more hopeless about the problems because those problems are in the forefront of their minds. Those are symptoms of depression. In terms of anxiety, co-ruminating likely makes them feel more worried about the problems, including about their consequences. Co-rumination also may lead to depression and anxiety because it takes so much time - time that could be used to engage in other, more positive activities that could help distract youth from their problems. This is especially true for problems that girls can't control, such as whether a particular boy likes them, or whether they get invited to a party that all of the popular kids are attending.

The study involved 813 third, fifth, seventh and ninth grade students. The participants answered questionnaires that assessed co-rumination, depression, anxiety and the quality of their best friendship in the fall and spring of the school year.

Ironically, although co-rumination was related to increased depression and anxiety, Rose also found that co-rumination was associated with positive friendship quality, including feelings of closeness between friends. Boys who co-ruminated also developed closer friendships across the school year but did not develop greater depressive and anxiety symptoms over time.

What's intriguing about theses findings is that co-rumination likely represents too much of a good thing. Some kids, especially girls, are taking talking about problems to an extreme. When that happens, the balance tips, and talking about problems with friends can become emotionally unhealthy. Rose recommended adolescents should be encouraged to talk about their problems, but only in moderation and without co-ruminating.

This is an interesting study for several reasons. The most important is that it calls into question the utility of individual therapy for children (especially girls). If it can lead to further depression and anxiety, is it an ethical thing to do? Talking about the problem may be useful up to a degree and then it may become too dangerous.

Therapy effectiveness and efficacy studies point to activities that will engage the body as well as active solution focused therapy as better methods of dealing with these issues.

Overweight Children Face Stigma

The July issue of Psych Bulletin has an article which indicates that overweight children are teased by their peers as early as age 3. They face bias from their parents and teachers, giving them a quality of life comparable to people with cancer, a new analysis concludes. Children who report teasing, rejection, bullying and other types of abuse because of their weight are two to three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts as well as to suffer from other health issues such as high blood pressure and eating disorders, researchers said.

Even with a growing percentage of overweight people, the stigma shows no signs of subsiding, due to the fact that television and other media continue to reinforce negative stereotypes.

Children as young as 3 are more likely to consider overweight peers to be mean, stupid, ugly and sloppy. A growing body of research shows that parents and educators are also biased against heavy children. In a 1999 study of 115 middle and high school teachers, 20 percent said they believed obese people are untidy, less likely to succeed and more emotional.

Video Game Addiction

The AMA has held discussions recently as to whether or not "video game addiction" is a viable psychiatric condition.

According to the report prepared by the AMA's Council on Science and Public Health, based on a review of scientific literature, “dependence-like behaviors are more likely in children who start playing video games at younger ages.” Overuse most often occurs with online role-playing games involving multiple players, the report says.

World of Warcraft (WOW) is among the most popular. Other games include Second Life.

This is, I believe, an important step to dealing with this issue, however, we need to look at other issues to help children get out of the house to play and socialize more. Labelling another addiction in children is another way of blaming children, when what is really at fault is the environment (i.e., our society

Emailing without tears: Best Practices for School Psychologists in the Use of Email

It is a testament to the power of the Internet that there have been several books recently released which deal with the issue of “email etiquette”. There was once a time when email was a novelty, but now, it is currently a part of our common practice as school psychologists. And since email is an important feature of our practice, we should try to develop some general guidelines to ensure that all people who read them understand the emails that we send.

People seem to consider email as a hybrid of many other forms of communication. To some people, emailing is similar to the act of writing.

However, most people can type faster than they can write, and they may compare emailing to the act of speaking, an activity that for many of us is effortless. This is unfortunately a wrong comparison – when a person speaks, he or she can correct herself if the listener misunderstands them, since it is a “real time” activity. In contrast, emailing is not in “real time”; in fact, the receiver may read an email in 5 minutes or 5 days.

This fundamental assumption of email is critical: the process of email is more similar to writing a letter than it is to speaking. In contrast, most people treat it more like speaking rather than writing a letter.

As such, there are certain steps you should take in order to ensure that your email is clear and easily understood by your receiver. Here are some other general guidelines:

• Your email should be longer than a few words and way shorter than a novel. Too many people may write emails that read, “OK” or “Me too” vs. “Thank you for the invitation. Of course I will attend the meeting”. Also, emails are not the forums for novels. Always assume that the person you will write to will receive hundreds of emails in one day, so keep your message as short and sweet and to the point as possible.
• Use punctuation. But use it sparingly and only when necessary. There is a spectrum of tendencies that this guideline refers to: Some people include an overabundance of punctuation (especially exclamations), while others seem to forget everything about punctuation once they sit in front of a computer.
• Spell-check before you send it out. Spellchecking an email before it is sent out is not just a matter of common courtesy, but will help ensure that the receiver will understand your message.
• Try to not use too much formatting. Many emails include lists of points, (e.g., agendas, talking points for meetings, etc.) A good rule of thumb is that if you need to include a list that targets more than four points, it may be better to include your list as a document attachment (i.e., an MS Word or WordPerfect document). Some modes of accessing email do not allow for an easy display of list formatting. For example, many people access email from their telephones; lists often come up with garbled characters.
• Make sure you are aware of who you are responding to. All to often a sender sends an email to a group of people, and one receiver may inadvertedly respond to the entire group, when in fact that receiver may have wanted to respond to the original sender. This is also the case with listservs. Prior to getting trigger-happy with the send button, review which address or addresses you are sending the email to.
• To Cc or not to Bcc. That is the question. There are three ways to receive an email. The sender may send it To you, Cc the message to you (Cc = “carbon copy”) or they may Bcc the message to you (Bcc = “blind carbon copy”).

Sounds simple, right? Well, no, not really. First, there are users who have no idea that the Cc exists. When you receive an email, every address that the message was sent To or Cc’ed to shows up in one column, so it is hard for the receiver to know who the message was intended for, who the sender thought it might be a good idea to provide FYI (For Your Information). In cases such as this the receivers have no clue as to who should take action so either they all do something or they all do nothing. Prior to the Cc’ing people, take a good look at the people on your list – do they truly need to know about this message? If not, then get rid of them. People already receive too many emails so try to be polite and limit their work.

Bcc is an even murkier problem. The addresses in the Bcc are like Cc except that the addresses in To and Cc do not know that the addresses in the Bcc are included in the conversation. The To and Cc' addresses are blind to the Bcc addresses. Consider the problems that Bcc can engender and try to not use it; some may even consider it unethical.

• Put a signature on it. Never, ever, ever assume that the receiver knows who you are. Even if your email address is your name. At the very least, your signature for each and every email should include:

• Your name
• Your title (M.S., M.S.Ed., Ph.D., etc.)
• Your position (School Psychologist, Director, etc.)
• Your affiliation (university, district, agency, etc.)

Most email programs allow you to set a standard default signature.

• Try to minimize your use of abbreviations. Abbreviations are rampant on the Internet. But not everyone knows what these abbreviations mean. Please be polite to your receiver and explain what your abbreviations mean when you are using them. Otherwise, you run the risk of confusing people.

Here is a list of some of the more commonly used abbreviations on the Internet.

BTW by the way
FYI for your information
IMHO in my humble opinion
LOL lots of laughs
ROTFL rolling on the floor laughing
TTYL talk to you later

• Keep the formatting of your email as simple as possible. Some email programs such as America Online or Outlook allow you to customize the look of your emails by providing a background or additional characters in the email when it is sent out. In general, this is an inconvenience for many individuals, who may need to spend a good deal of time downloading extra files in order to read your email.
• Respect the thread. We have all had the opportunity to exchange a flurry of emails with one particular colleague when planning some type of activity. A “thread” is a series of emails that share the same subject or topic name. Most email services will organize these emails into an easily cohesive group that can be accessed.

Should someone email you with the subject line, “Meeting on Monday” , when you answer, you should open that email and simply respond. Many people will create a brand new subject in order to respond. Not only is that time consuming to you the sender, but also there is a risk that the receiver will view this email as a totally different issue, and may not deal with the message effectively.

• Anger Management. The use of caps indicates that someone is angry about something. Avoid them, unless you are really angry. “I can’t make the meeting,” means that the person cannot attend, while “I CAN’T MAKE THE MEETING,” means that the person cannot attend and s/he is angry at some slight to the schedule.
• If it comes from your work email address, then it comes from work. Consider this situation. A professional is at home at 9 pm, and send an email to a parent who is having problems with her child. This professional recommends something to the parent. That recommendation is coming from the office, despite the fact that the sender may have been at home, late at night. Every email that you receive or send from your work address is considered work-related; as such, it can be placed in a student’s permanent record or subpoenaed in a court of law. Please consider that before you run to send out an email.
  

For more information, please consult the following -

Websites:

http://www.iwillfollow.com/email.htm
http://www.emailreplies.com/


Books:

Miller, S. (2001). E-Mail Etiquette: Do's, Don'ts and Disaster Tales from People Magazine's Internet Manners Expert. Warner Books.

Steele, J. (2006). Email: The Manual: Everything You Should Know About Email Etiquette, Policies and Legal Liability Before You Hit Send. Marion Street Press.

Self-Efficacy

According to Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is “the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations” (1995, p.
2).

In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation. Bandura described these beliefs as determinants of how people think, behave, and feel (1994).

Since Bandura published his seminal 1977 paper, "Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change," the subject has become one of the most studied topics in psychology. Why has self-efficacy become such an important topic among psychologists and educators? As Bandura and other researchers have demonstrated, self-efficacy can have an impact on everything from psychological states to behavior to motivation.

The Role of Self-Efficacy

Virtually all people can identify goals they want to accomplish, things they would like to change, and things they would like to achieve. However, most people also realize that putting these plans into action is not quite so simple. Bandura and others have found that an individual’s self-efficacy plays a major role in how goals, tasks, and challenges are approached. People with a strong sense of self-efficacy:

• View challenging problems as tasks to be mastered.
• Develop deeper interest in the activities in which they participate.
• Form a stronger sense of commitment to their interests and activities.
• Recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments.

People with a weak sense of self-efficacy:

• Avoid challenging tasks.
• Believe that difficult tasks and situations are beyond their capabilities.
• Focus on personal failings and negative outcomes.
• Quickly lose confidence in personal abilities (Bandura, 1994).

How does self-efficacy develop?

These beliefs begin to form in early childhood as children deal with a wide variety of experiences, tasks, and situations. However, the growth of self-efficacy does not end during youth, but continues to evolve throughout life as people acquire new skills, experiences, and understanding (Bandura, 1992).

According to Bandura, there are four major sources of self-efficacy.

1. Mastery Experiences“The most effective way of developing a strong sense of efficacy is through mastery experiences,” Bandura explained (1994). Performing a task successfully strengthens our sense of self-efficacy. However, failing to adequately deal with a task or challenge can undermine and weaken self-efficacy.

2. Social Modeling Witnessing other people successfully completing a task is another important source of self-efficacy. According to Bandura, “Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers' beliefs that they too possess the capabilities master comparable activities to succeed” (1994).

3. Social Persuasion Bandura also asserted that people could be persuaded to belief that they have the skills and capabilities to succeed. Consider a time when someone said something positive and encouraging that helped you achieve a goal. Getting verbal encouragement from others helps people overcome self-doubt and instead focus on giving their best effort to the task at hand.

4. Psychological Responses Our own responses and emotional reactions to situations also play an important role in self-efficacy. Moods, emotional states, physical reactions, and stress levels can all impact how a person feels about their personal abilities in a particular situation. A person who becomes extremely nervous before speaking in public may develop a weak sense of self-efficacy in these situations.

However, Bandura also notes "it is not the sheer intensity of emotional and physical reactions that is important but rather how they are perceived and interpreted" (1994). By learning how to minimize stress and elevate mood when facing difficult or challenging tasks, people can improve their sense of self-efficacy.

Family upheaval causes stress induced physical probelms in adoelscents

A study in the journal Developmental Psychology, says family turmoil and violence causes stress-induced physical problems in adolescents.

The presence of a responsive, supportive mother, however, appears to reduce the negative physiological changes. This study is the first to look at how maternal responsiveness may protect against cumulative risk.

The findings suggest the physiological toll of coping with multiple stress events is significantly greater than with that of coping with a single event.

The researchers used an index called "allostatic load" to measure stress-induced changes in neuroendocrine hormonal systems, cardiovascular responses and metabolism, which indicate the severity of wear and tear on organs and tissues, the university said.

Further Work on Abnormal Face Processing in Children with Autism

Katarzyna Chawarska, Frederick Shic, Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar are due to present a paper at the International Meeting for Autism Research May 3-5 in Seattle, Washington. Their paper will focus on previous findings regarding face recongition in children with autism as well as new research as well.

• Toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty focusing on people's faces and making eye contact, but these researchers found that these same toddlers do not have difficulty looking at photographs of faces.
• They also found that toddlers with ASD spend most of the time examining the eyes. This is a surprising finding, given that avoiding eye contact is one of the classic hallmarks of autism.
• The results suggest that pictures of faces and eyes are, by themselves, neither inherently unattractive nor inherently aversive to toddlers with ASD. Therefore, the limited attention to faces and eyes observed in natural settings may be due to the fact that faces don't stand out to them as much as other objects in the environment.
• There also may be heightened arousal related to the complex social and perceptual context in which faces usually occur.
• The study examined visual scanning patterns and recognition of faces and abstract patterns in toddlers. The data were collected through an eye-tracking system.
• When given time to familiarize with a picture of a face, both groups spent more time looking at the outside features of the face, such as the hair, ears and the neck compared to the their typically developing peers.
• The researchers postulated that toddlers with disabilities were having a harder time encoding information regarding facial identity because they were simply looking less at facial features, which are of greatest help in extracting this type of information.
• Those toddlers with ASD who adopted a pattern of looking at faces which closely resembled the pattern of typical toddlers, were less socially impaired and were also better at face recognition
• While typical and developmentally delayed toddlers move quickly between various inner elements of the face, scanning rapidly between the left and right eye, toddlers with ASD tend to look longer at specific facial features than other children, which might signify an idiosyncratic approach to face processing specific to ASD in early development.

Follow-up to yesterday's post

The Associated Press reports that across America, college counseling centers are strained by rising numbers of mentally ill students and surging demand for mental health services - a challenging trend as campus officials try to identify potential threats like the unstable Virginia Tech gunman.

And even when serious emotional problems are detected, university officials often feel constrained in how they respond due to an array of laws and policies protecting students' rights and privacy.

Reasons for the surge include the Americans with Disabilities Act, which gives mentally ill students the right to be at college, and increasingly sophisticated medications which enable them to function better than in the past.

A survey last year by the American College Health Association found that 8.5 percent of students had seriously considered suicide, and 15 percent were diagnosed for depression, up from 10 percent in 2000. The Anxiety Disorders Association of America found that 13 percent of students at major universities and 25 percent at liberal arts colleges are using campus mental health services.

On the downside, she and her colleagues see stress levels among students far higher than a generation ago due to increased workloads and financial strains, often coupled with lack of healthy lifestyles.

Complicating the overall picture is a web of laws and policies that limit the options for worried staff members. Troubled students generally can't be forced to obtain treatment, and privacy laws may limit sharing information about them, even to the extent that some parents have sued schools - including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Oregon Institute of Technology - for not advising them of their children's serious disorders.

Nonetheless, officials on many campuses have set up committees to pool information about students with emotional or behavioral problems so patterns can be detected in what might otherwise be seen as isolated incidents. The trick, officials say, is to find the proper balance between respecting a student's rights and protecting the university.

I wonder if President Bush's committees will recommend monies to help universities deal with the problem as opposed to blaming state organizations and universities...