When government made things worse

By Elaine Justice

Government wrangling over raising the debt ceiling, cutting spending and raising taxes has a familiar ring to Emory economic historian Leonard Carlson, who says that throughout the nation’s history, colliding economic philosophies have produced mixed or even negative results.

During the Great Depression, he says, “a couple of really stupid policy decisions come to mind.” Herbert Hoover, who ran for president during a period of prosperity, promised tariff protection if elected. Then, despite the devastation of the 1929 crash, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in 1930.

“Every economist advised against the idea,” says Carlson, adding that leading economists even petitioned the government to no avail. International trade plunged even further as a result.

In 1937, in the midst of the Depression, Congress, increasingly antagonistic to then President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, pushed to cut government spending and raise taxes, causing unemployment to spike again briefly. Looking back, says Leonard, “it’s another example of a move that nobody thought was a good idea at the time, but government went ahead and did it.”

He cites other 1930s Depression examples, such as the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy and the reserve ratio at a time when banks were still reeling from the aftershocks of bank runs after the crash. Banks, nervous about their cash reserves, stopped making loans, further slowing the economy.

“Right now,” says Carlson, “almost every economist is saying don’t default on the national debt, and we still could do it.”

Monkeys embrace 'friends with benefits'

When did the word “dating” start sounding dated?

The new romantic comedy “Friends with Benefits” features Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, acting out the idea that men and women can be both friends and occasional sex partners, without any romantic rituals or messy emotions.

So is this concept a step forward or back on the evolutionary scale?

Rhesus monkeys, known for their brief and frequent sexual liaisons, appear way ahead of humans when it comes to having friends with benefits. The females are the ones in charge of this system.

“Because of the social structure, females essentially control what goes on in a rhesus monkey group,” says Emory psychology professor Kim Wallen, who studies the behavioral neuroendocrinology of sex. “The females control pretty much everything, including sex.”

Although rhesus monkeys don’t form committed sexual relationships, it is not a random free-for-all. They are still constrained by their social structure and social contexts, Wallen says.

“I think that a common theme of what we know from rhesus monkeys and what we know from humans is that sex is actually not a behavior that can be taken lightly. Even though rhesus monkeys may be promiscuous by human standards, sex is actually still a very difficult and challenging aspect of the social life of rhesus monkeys. It threatens the social structure, so they’ve had to develop behavioral ways of dealing with sex. And I think the same is true of humans.”

Related:
The strange science of female pleasure

Psychology's public image problem

By Carol Clark

We are all psychologists, at least in our own minds.

“In everyday life, in love, relationships and work, everyone deals with psychology, and most of us find it fascinating,” says Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld. “That’s great, but it’s a mixed blessing because people confuse familiarity with true understanding. Your mind is actually a lot more complex than you think.”

Lilienfeld hopes to rally his field to do a better job of educating the public and regulating itself. His paper, “Public Skepticism of Psychology: Why Many People Perceive the Study of Human Behavior as Unscientific,” will be published by American Psychologist.

“I hope that policymakers read it,” Lilienfeld says.

The paper counters what he describes as the widespread perception that psychology is “a soft, gooey science” based largely on common sense. The same rigorous, scientific methods applied to the “hard” sciences are used in psychology, Lilienfeld writes. He cites analyses showing psychology research can yield repeatable results comparable to the findings in particle physics.

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is calling for the National Science Foundation to defund its social and behavioral sciences division and focus on “truly transformative sciences with practical uses outside of academic circles and clear benefits to mankind and the world.”

In fact, basic psychology research has played a role in everything from reducing errors made by airplane pilots to helping law enforcement catch criminals, Lilienfeld says.

Related: Five myths about memory (and why they matter in court).

Lilienfeld notes that the powerful imaging tools of neuroscience, which are mapping biological responses in the brain, are immensely useful for some purposes but typically fall short of explaining behavior. “Neuroscience can tell me that when I get scared, my amygdala becomes active. But it can’t explain why I’m scared,” he says. “It can give you correlations, not causation.”

Behavioral research also benefits many aspects of well being beyond the mind. “Mental health issues are a vastly underestimated contributor to, if not cause of, physical health problems,” Lilienfeld says.

Clinical psychology faces some of the same lack of respect as the research realm. Drug companies advertise a quick visit to a psychiatrist for pills to treat disorders such as anxiety and depression. Clinical psychologists, however, offer long hours on the couch, spread over weeks or months.

“Psychotherapy is hard work,” Lilienfeld says. “For most disorders, people have to face some difficult things in order to get better. And yet data shows that, in many cases, psychotherapy works as least as well as medication, and probably better in the long term.”

“Media therapists” like Laura Schlessinger and Phillip McGraw are just adding to the confusion, he says. “Dr. Phil makes claims that go way beyond the scientific evidence, or in some cases, directly contradict the science.”

About 3,500 self-help books are published each year, but only about five percent of them are subjected to scientific testing, Lilienfeld adds. He supports a movement among professional psychologists to establish criteria lists for empirically supported therapies – treatments that have been demonstrated to work in replicated, controlled trials.

Related:
Test your behavioral IQ
The truth about hypnosis
The anger myth: Read this before blowing up

The elephant in the classroom

Three Emory alumni, including Joshua Plotnik, above, are using computer technology to bring Asian elephant research into American classrooms.

By Carol Clark

In 2006, as a graduate student working in the lab of Emory biologist Frans de Waal, Joshua Plotnik showed that an elephant can recognize itself in a mirror. The discovery put pachyderms in a unique class of self-awareness shared only by some apes and dolphins.

Now Plotnik has shown that elephants can Skype – with a little help from humans. He started a foundation called Think Elephants International, which is using video-chat technology to link Asian elephants in rural Thailand with middle school students in New York City.

“We want to bring an otherwise inaccessible, lovable animal into the classroom to teach kids about conservation and animal behavior,” Plotnik says. “When I see how excited the NYC kids are on the other side of the Skype line, I realize it’s worth it.”

Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, Plotnik is based in Chiang Rai, Thailand, where he is further exploring the social cognition of elephants.

The Think Elephants team includes two other Emory alumni – Jen Pokorny (now a postdoc at U.C. Davis) and Christine Webb (now a graduate student at Columbia) – and Darby Proctor, a graduate student at Georgia State.

Left: Plotnik and Webb pose with Poon Larb the elephant in Thailand.

For its initial project, Think Elephants collaborated with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation and East Side Middle School in Manhattan. For the past year, a group of 12-to-14-year-old students attended after-school sessions where they learned about conservation and animal behavior research through live video sessions with the Think Elephants scientists, and once with the elephants themselves.

The middle school students helped design and interpret an actual experiment in social cognition. “We looked at how elephants respond to visual cues given by a human about the location of hidden food,” Plotnik says. “The work of Brian Hare at Duke University suggests that dogs do respond to human visual cues about the location of food, but chimpanzees do not. Hare suggests this is possibly the result of domestication. We wanted to test elephants, which are not domesticated, but in Asia often have a very close relationship with human caregivers.”

The students brought a fresh perspective to the work. “Because I’m around elephants all day, it’s difficult for me to see some of the potential issues that naïve observers pick up,” Plotnik says. “These kids came up with some of the test conditions on their own, and were able to provide important insights into the interpretation of our results.”
Students at East Side Middle School in Manhattan do their best elephant impersonations, as Plotnik joins them from Thailand via Skype.

The middle school students will also help author the paper that the researchers submit for publication. One finding is that elephants may be using different human cues than domesticated dogs. “This make sense in light of the fact that elephants gather much of their social information from olfactory and acoustic cues, rather than visual ones,” Plotnik says.

The Asian elephant is an endangered species, native to Southeast Asia.

“Our ultimate goal is to link American schools with Thai schools, so that both groups of children can work together on research and conservation programs,” Plotnik says. “American kids can be an integral part of raising awareness about endangered species, but it is the next generation of conservationists within range countries like Thailand that are the most important to educate.”

Related:
Cultivating brains for science
Bringing new blood to high school science

Filmmaker turns back the clock in 'Tick Tock'

Steve Jobs once said, “Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. “

That quote, and the terror of a lab safety violation, lead to some serious, last-minute soul searching in “Tick Tock,” winner of both Best Picture and Best Director at the 2011 International Campus Moviefest, recently announced in Hollywood.

Emory junior Ien Chi wrote, directed and edited the short film. The psychological drama was shot in one take on Emory’s Oxford Campus. Shown in reverse, the movie ends, or should we say begins, with a twist. It has already become a YouTube hit with nearly 1 million views.

Chi describes his heroes as Steve Jobs, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. It will be interesting to see where this eclectic mix of science, technology and art leads him next.