Two Minds Blog

I wrote previously about my colleague Dr. Mustafa Ozkaynak's study of fatigue among emergency-room nurses, which showed how fatigue impairs decision-making, especially at the level of the Narrative Mind. In a new paper that we published from the same dataset, Dr. Ozkaynak's team examined psychometric properties of the Swedish Occupational Fatigue Inventory (SOFI). We found that the emergency-room nurses' experience of fatigue was a good fit with what people have reported in other occupational contexts, with 4 different aspects of fatigue: (a) lack of motivation, (b) physical discomfort, (c) sleepiness, and (d) an overall "lack of energy" scale that both encompasses the other 3 elements of fatigue and also has some unique items associated only with lack of energy. We tested whether 2 additional items from another tool, which are generally understood to measure (e) mental fatigue, would be a meaningful addition to the SOFI, but in this case they were not -- either ...

The idea of "bootstrapping" in statistics means re-using limited data in creative ways to draw a broader conclusion. In ordinary discourse, though, the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" refers to self-help. In my last post I wrote about the current Federal policy backlash against antidepressant medications; some of that antipathy may date from a uniquely American view of how people can improve themselves and their life circumstances. Jess McHugh's book Americanon : An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books argues that self-help is actually the single more characteristic literary form generated by Americans over the history of the United States.  McHugh used publishing data to identify the books by U.S. authors with the largest circulation and the greatest public impact, from colonial times onward. Her results were not works of literature, science, or religion, but rather books that had a definite psychological slant. They included Poo...

Antidepressant medications are one way to address symptoms of depression. They certainly aren't the only way, with psychotherapy having equivalent benefits in most cases, and exercise outperforming both of these options. I have also taken issue in the past with the way that antidepressants' beneficial effects have created a "brain disease" narrative around depression, which is about how we feel and behave more than it's about the way our brains are wired -- a functional problem rather than a structural one. Still, I recognize that antidepressants are lifesaving for many people, and I would never give blanket advice to suggest that people shouldn't take them. Some folks in the popular media right now are doing just that. The question of whether or not it was a good idea to take antidepressants was common in the early 1990s, when Eli Lilly's new medication fluoxetine (Prozac) had revolutionized the neurochemical treatment of depression. The book Listening ...

I recently came across a book by Professor Gilly Salmon titled  eModerating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online , published in the year 2000. I was just getting started as a college instructor that fall, and wouldn't dabble in online education for a few years more. Over the years I have attended my share of workshops about e-learning, online education, technology-assisted teaching, massive open online courses, micro-credentials, and whatever else was the buzzword of the day. A lot of what's in the book feels quaint at this point (teach your students that in online culture, capital letters suggest SHOUTING!). But there's a chapter toward the end that felt almost prophetic, in which the author identifies four potential futures for online teaching and learning: 1. On Planet Contentous , "content is king." Information flows from experts to novices, content-oriented online courses can have thousands of learners simultaneously (MOOCs, anyone?) and technology is ju...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  defines a "belief" as "the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. ... Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a 'propositional attitude,' [where] propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express. For example ... 'snow is white.'" Beliefs, then, (a) are expressed in language, (b) refer to some specific contents such as "snow," and (c) express some truth about those contents. The truth need not be an empirical statement about the world -- propositions such as "x is the square root of x-squared" are also beliefs under this definition even when there is no empirical referent for "x." Beliefs can be about a single thing, or about the relationships between things, in which case they might or might not be expressed as formal rules: e.g., "every bird has wings." Language, representation...

  I have written previously about the link between exercise and mood, including the consistent research finding that aerobic exercise is just as effective in treating depression as either psychotherapy or medication. This week, I'm excited to share a new multi-national research collaboration that I was able to participate in, looking at the mood-exercise linkage in a different way.  In our  just-published article , a German research team conducted a within-person meta-analysis, meaning that they merged raw data from 69 different studies across 14 countries to draw overall conclusions. Each of these studies (including one of mine ) measured exercise parameters using an accelerometer -- either a research-grade device like Actigraph, or a commercial-grade tracker such as a Fitbit, AppleWatch, or Garmin wristband. Each of the studies also collected daily survey data on a measure of mood or subjective well-being. The combination of daily exercise tracking with daily survey da...