Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a German word that, when literally translated, roughly means "harmful joy" or "bad joy." It is a term that has now entered the English language and is the name given to the feeling of glee that one sometimes experiences when observing someone else's misfortunes. Scientific American Mind (Nov. 2010) chronicles several new discoveries through research on schadenfreude about its origins and dangers.

Feeling good about someone else's shortcomings or misfortune is, not surprisingly, biological. More specifically, it is related to competitiveness; the article gave the examples of, thousands of years ago, the individual benefits of "a sexual competitor breaking a leg or a hunting rival falling ill." In the likely Darwinian scenario, those that felt good about such misfortunes undoubtedly had little moral opposition to taking advantage of the opportunities they presented, and prospered.

Today, schadenfreude is experienced often but admitted to rarely. In a society that claims to encourage compassion yet revels in the mistakes of celebrities, reality TV, and political drama, this seems at the very least hypocritical. While seen on an individual-towards-individual basis as mostly harmless, researches warn that schadenfreude could have larger, more dangerous implications when experienced by or towards a group of people. This can lead to the generation of prejudice that eventually can turn to violence, and several researchers believe that exploiting schadenfreude is a tactic many fear groups, such as Rwandan soldiers, Nazis, and militant jihadists use for recruitment.

I'd ask the question, what do you think should, or could be done, about schadenfreude? If it's biological I don't think it can be eliminated, but I also wouldn't want it exploited to harm others. My opinion is that an individual should acknowledge it within themselves and try to keep an eye on it should it grow too strong or in one particular direction.

"Can Living Abroad Make You More Creative?"

The article written by Sternberg, "Creating a Vision of Creativity: The First 25 Years," discusses the theories of creativity in the human mind. Since there are still an abundance of questions surrounding the topic of creativity, Sternberg attempts to describe, " the three stages of his attempt to understand, measure, and develop creative thinking."

Art Markman, Ph.D. delves further in the theory of creativity by examining whether or not studying abroad in a place foreign to oneself in affect develops ones own creativity further. He discusses a test ran by William Maddux, Hajo Adam, and Adam Galinsky in June 2010 in which three different groups of people were tested with the same procedure called the Remote Associates Test. This test presented individuals with three different words that were related, and their task was to come up with a fourth word that did the same. The difference between the three different groups was that two were presented with memory tasks (remembering an experience of another or your own culture) and the third did not experience this initial procedure.

The Remote Associates Test in turn proved the power of studying abroad as a significant learning opportunity and concluded that people that successfully experienced cultures other than ones own are more "creative in a variety of other circumstances." The researchers discussed that the hallmark of creativity stems from understanding how the same tasks present different solutions and understanding why the individuals facilitate these solutions.

Although this article presented a new and interested aspect to psychology and creativity, I felt that it was not thorough enough, and could have investigated the idea further.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Are there any other examples you've found that prove this finding?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201006/can-living-abroad-make-you-more-creative

The G-Factor

Arthur J. Jensen, one of the authors of last week's reading, is considered an "educational psychologist" as per the article after the cut. One would infer from his title that he studies the psychology of education. Apparently this includes the study of intelligence, an aspect he so thoroughly examines as to mince it between races, looking closely at the genetic effect on certain groups' intelligences.

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In this short biography of Arthur J. Jensen <http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/jensen.shtml> his major ideas are outlined — the universal factor of intelligence, blind to cultural influence, broken into two levels:

— Level I abilities account for memory functions and simple associative learning, and Level II abilities comprise abstract reasoning and conceptual thought.

What this signifies is an attempt to separate inherent intellectual potential from that which is affected by cultural influences (realized stereotypes i.e. parents of Asian children that force them to study, since conception, as if the BAR exam could come upon them at any moment). While I agree with this goal, I cannot accept that the "natural" ability of a group, or then, of an individual, is not affected by cultural factors over time.

If a group is continually subjected to unequal treatment in the educational and socio-political arenas, then that individual will not realize any potential he or she may indeed have. Then, it stands that the genes may be affected consequently. Over time, as a sample does not make use of a gene, it will be pruned away, producing what seems to be a natural advantage or disadvantage inherent to the race.

The reason this has any bearing on the subject is because it suggests that in order to better understand education and to better mold it to be effective for everyone, we should be looking at the genetics of a group to be educated. This is a nonsensical waste of time, given that education is a purely social construct anyway, and if any progress is to be made in its understanding and subsequent execution, it must be attacked from the inside — problems with agreement between the culture our students are a part of and the way in which they are educated. Mentalities are completely different today then they were even fifty years ago, and so must education. The workings of a constructed institution must bend to the needs of those who use it, otherwise its existence is null.

It's thus inane to make any mention of differences between racial groups in "general intelligence" when the goal is to equalize students' educational values and to throw away what was once considered racist propaganda.

I understand the role of these studies, and even acknowledge that this judgment is probably far too harshly worded, but when droves of high-school students don't care whether they're in school or at home watching TV, to spend any time or money examining the subtle genetic differences between races seems completely off-mark and wasteful of an entire society's time, and this will be painfully obvious in ten, twenty, or thirty years when this youth is running the world with no idea why it even needs to run.

Marc

Men vs Women IQ

To further my investigation about the IQ test among a group of people, I found this article comparing the intelligence among men and women. This article explores the misconception of men being more intelligent them women. Instead it introduces another idea that “height is positively correlated with intelligence: Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people.” He also includes that by comparing a man and a women who are the same height, women are more intelligent then men. In other words, between a 5’10’’ men and 5’10”, the women is more intelligent. That sounds so absurd, but in our other reading by Jensen and Rushton, the brain sized varied in each race, determining their intelligence. White people have a bigger brain then black. What do you guys think? Is science racist? Sexist? Or just logical?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women

A Global Peek at the Deaf Community

I found this video (link is at the bottom) while looking for documentaries on the deaf community, whatever context that may be in. Surprisingly, one of the first things I found was this short piece that outlines the lives of a community of deaf in the Philippines. Specifically, they take a look at the children in various villages, who are "physically and emotionally abused " and tended to sit "in the corner" of a room when chores were being done. The concept of being deaf does not exist in these small worlds, and accordingly the deaf children are called "Anang" — mute.

The video continues to show a woman who ventures to these villages to find the deaf children and provide them a chance to grow up in a healthy, social environment where they can develop within themselves, with others like them, and with the world at large.

The interesting thing to note here is the deaf's position in the isolated villages, the community they become a part of after rescued, and then to compare this to the nature of the deaf community in America. In all of these cases, isolation is inevitable. However, in civilized contexts where the disability is identified and rationalized, the isolation lends itself towards communal existence. In America, this existence becomes elitist (many parents of expected deaf children, when given the choice, will keep their children deaf instead of medically alleviating the issue). These comparisons allow us to understand the nature of disabilities and normalcy, and their roles/outcomes in different social and personal contexts.

Anang Deaf Community Video

- Marc

PS: Sorry for the late post, it's been a little crazy recently.

Motion Perception

Based off the Hock article on perception and consciousness, I stumbled upon this article, which explores the question of "is perception innate or learned?" but through the study of motion perception. The article analyzes the neuroscience and brain mapping during the times of perception to motions and the visual experience. The article suggests that, in fact, the perception of motions is in fact not innate and it must be learned through the study of visual cortex development. Interestingly, the part about the time frame being essential to sensory perception/experience for development determines if you use this or lose it.

http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/Lichtman/JDclub/pdfs/sengpiel.pdf

"Babies on the Edge"

In this year's November/December issue of Scientific American Mind I found an article detailing a procedure almost identical to the one in our reading for this week. Entitled "Babies on the edge," 12 to 18-month-old infants were placed on a wooden "cliff" and again encouraged by their mothers to advance over the edge. (Instead of a glass surface preventing the babies from toppling, the experiment called for lab staff who actually caught the babies, a lapse in safety procedures that I found a little shocking.) This additional experiment revealed more about infants' sense of depth and comprehension. Those babies that were familiar with crawling and had been doing it for months generally did not go over the drop-off; nor did babies who were experienced (relatively) with walking. However, those babies that had recently begun to walk would "march straight over [the] drop-offs," even if they had been competent crawlers. What the experimenters believe this suggests is that when switching forms of locomotion—namely going from crawling to walking—humans must "recalibrate how they perceive their abilities," or re-learn to see their world and the dangers and challenges it presents.

VISUAL VISUAL CLIFF

This is a video that sort of just makes the reading that we did for today a lot more accessible for visual learners like myself. What I think was interesting was the part with nonverbal communication...that if the mother on the opposite end simply smiled, it made the child more inclined to crawl across the plexiglass/visual cliff. It really shows how important non verbal, facial communication can be - especially when dealing with children who haven't developed verbal communication.

video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyxMq11xWzM

GESTURES AND PEOPLE USING THEM

After reading the article assigned for class I was interested in the concept that blind people don't use gestures as often as people who are not blind so I did a little researching and found this article which seems to contradict the experements done by Iverson and the other folks we read for class. However, this chick quotes Iverson and Goldin-Meadow as saying that " Kids who are blind from birth use gestures when they talk, even when speaking to other sightless people (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow 1998)." and maybe I read the reading completely wrong but I thought that the Kids in the Cafeteria article was saying that they used gestures way LESS than the children who could see. Regardless, I found it interesting that "science has proven" that kids who use hand gestures when they talk learn better than those who do not. The article doesn't talk too much about blind kids and gestures, it only mentions it that one time, but it does talk about the different ways gestures help "free up working memory," help them remember things they've learned in school, and even help them learn new words. It pretty much just pulls conclusions from other experiments and scientific research regarding gestures and children and sums it up into one big article.

don't kill me but I forgot how to make it so you can click the link and it takes you there so ya gotta copy and paste, sorry.

http://www.parentingscience.com/gestures.html