Although we sometimes refer to sadness as “the blues,” depression can often feel more like a state of unrelieved gray. Some recent research has found that in the retinas of depressed people, the response to black/white contrasts was notably lower than in healthy people. This backs up an earlier study which found that depressed people had a harder time detecting differences between black and white (I’m assuming they were talking about fairly subtle differences). The effect of viewing a more monotone world seems obvious (what a downer), but it’s not clear to me how to interpret it. This seems like evidence of a glitch in the sensory equipment that’s associated with depression. On the other hand, some researchers think that depression might be (or might have been) an adaptive withdrawal from the world; in that case, the change in vision might be part of the mechanism that causes that withdrawal. At any rate, the effect was big enough that they could tell most of the depressed people from the healthy ones.
This video, which pairs words from Carl Sagan with images from from Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe and Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System, gives Carl Sagan’s poetically expressed description of how our species has grown into a better understanding of the universe. Enjoy.
I’ve posted a couple of links lately to stories about humans, chimps, and violence. The New York Times recently ran a brief interview with two primatologists who study bonobos, the hippy cousin of chimps and humans. The title of the article is “Why Bonobos Don’t Kill Each Other,” and while that question isn’t really answered, it’s still an interesting look at bonobo research.
I’m really enjoying Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
The survey, which its authors report as the first representative sample of the entire planet, asked respondents about their income levels, standard of living, overall evaluations of their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, and numerous quality-of-life indicators such as the degree to which they feel respected or autonomous or find their jobs fulfilling.
The results seemed to identify two different aspects of happiness: an overall feeling that your life is satisfactory and the experience of positive emotions. Life satisfaction does correlate fairly well with income, but evidently the link between enjoying life (or not) on a day-to-day basis is much less well correlated with income. Basically, the study seems to have identified two different types of resources: the possession of economic resources affects life satisfaction, and the possession of psychological/social capital affects day-to-day reports of positive or negative feelings. The study shows that these two flavors of happiness are separate, but I wonder about how they are related.
John Horgan at the Scientific American has written a follow-up to Nicholas Wade’s recent article on chimp violence. Horgan reviews the evidence for and against the theory that chimp violence is widespread and that our hominid ancestors inherited the tendency toward violence from our common ancestor with the chimps. Specifically, he explains why he has become skeptical of the theory. What kind of species are we really? Within the limits of our genome, we’re the kind of species we choose to be, but we may be going less against the grain than we sometimes think when we choose peace.
To understand the full spectrum of the human religious experience, it makes sense to study unbelievers, who have almost certainly been exposed to religious beliefs but chosen not to accept them, as well as believers. Researchers in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo are surveying atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, skeptics, humanists, etc., to try to get a handle on how they view and experience life. If you fall into any of those categories, consider contributing your data points. You can find the survey and more at the Atheism Rising web site. Yes, you probably live in a country that is WEIRD (or maybe WIRED or even WIDER, as a friend pointed out), but they’ve got to start someplace. (Although actually I’d be very interested in learning about the areligious in non-WEIRD cultures. On a somewhat-related tangent, I’ve long wondered what freethinking types did during the Middle Ages in Europe, for example, or in other times and places where everyone was assumed to belong to the prevailing religion.)
That’s a western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) country. Odds are most of you live in one too. So it’s unfortunate, according to a recent study, that people who live in such countries—and typically a particular subset of those people, to boot—provide much of our data on human psychology and behavior.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia examined a comparative database of information from various behavioral sciences and found that it would be hard to find a population less suited for broad generalizations about humans than the inhabitants of WEIRD countries, who provide far and away the majority of data for behavioral studies. The areas they looked at included “visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.” College students in the US are a subgroup that has its own quirks that differentiate it even from the general run of WEIRD people, and I’m guessing that they are one of the more heavily used groups for psychology research.
So whatever other reservations you may have about things like how well surveys or lab experiments capture people’s real-life behavior and attitudes, add to that the possibility that what we’re learning about is really an atypical batch of humans. A few years back I read David Buller’s book on evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books), in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.
, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.
, in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.