Siderea

OK, guys, I know a bunch of you have linked to facinating articles about racial performance online (cvirtue, I seem to recall you linked to a couple about Second Life?) none of which I remember where I found them nor can I find them again. Anybody have any helpful pointers?

So one of the APA session I went to was a paper on "social development of the brain" which turned out to be about brain imagine studies of autistic and neurotypical kids.

Now, think about that. fMRIs require you hold still while they're running. How do you get a 4yo to hold still while you take pictures of her brain?

The answer is: you build an fMRI-compatable heads-up display which will show the kid her favorite movie -- so long as she doesn't move. The moment she moves, it goes black. Then you have a mock-up fake fMRI so the kid can practice holding still enough to watch her film. Once she's got the hang of it, you can pop her in the fMRI for however long the movie lasts, and she'll be as still as a statue.

I thought this was completely brilliant. I see a consumer commodity spin-off, actually.

Something to chew on. The presenter on the DSM-V and Personality Disorders that I saw at the APA conference was Lee Anna Clark. I've been reading some of her papers. Apparently her axe to grind is that the personality disorders are an extreme form of otherwise non-pathological personality traits, and that therefore we should be able to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Personality which covers both the pathological and the healthy.

This seems to have a lot fo "face validity". "Face validity" is the high-falutin' term academics use to mean "common sense".

I don't trust "common sense".

With Kagan's admonishment ringing in my ears, I find myself scrutenizing this paradigm with more skepticism. Isn't is an assumption that personality disorder is a difference in degree and not in kind? And a big one? Is it warranted? Certainly it's tidy, but Millon's system of personality disorder had tidiness, and we don't use it anymore (and I don't know if it was in some sense disproven).

Hmmmm.

Dear Internets,

In several days I am going to ask my doctor a slightly awkward question. It's awkward in that it's exactly the kind of question which tends to get a knee-jerk negative answer: it involves inconveniencing the doctor. Or more correctly his phlebotomist.

It's the kind of request which flies much better if it comes with a prepared counterproposal.

Come my appointment, he's almost certainly going to want to punch another hole in my arm. He's bloodwork-happy under the best of circumstances, and this involves a critical illness.

I'm resigned to the blood draw itself. The problem is that I've barely stabilized the skin inside my elbows from their reaction to the adhesives used to hold in/on the IV and past blooddraw bandaids. I'm really unwilling to have any more medical tape on my arms.

Is there some practical alternative to the medical tape? I have liquid bandaid. And I know I clot normal cuts in about 4 minutes. Would sitting applying pressure for 10min then painting with liquid bandaid work? Or is ther some other solution?

From arianhwyvar: NSFW? Menstrual humor. Large image. Avast!!! Let it not be said my head cannot be turned by marketing: I'd buy 'em.

There seems to be an embargo on the journal: my college's subscription to EBSCOHost only reaches to January 2008, and this is the July 2008 issue. Somebody nudge me in six months. :/

sculpin found it!
Counseling clients involved with violent intimate partners: the mental health counselor's role in promoting client safety.

My abdomin isn't giving me ~any problems (the occasional twinge), but I am tired all the time. Clearly, going to an academic conference three days after being discharged from the hospital may not have been the brightest thing I ever did, self-care-wise, but, honestly, it wasn't that rigorous. Yet I have been completely wiped. I got 10hrs sleep yesterday, but was still tired.

And I'd like to observe that it has really been brought home to me, yet again, that language is not my first language. It's something I "run under emulation". Putting ideas into words is, like, one of the first things to take a severe performance hit when I'm tired or in pain, and while I feel too exhausted to do. This is a good part of why I haven't been posting much about the conference or about being hospitalized. I keep thinking of things to say, but haven't been able to marshal the energy to say them in words.

Even decoding what others are saying has been challenging. Academic papers are not easy reading under the best of circumstances, but I was having to struggle more to, for instance, just decode the titles of posters and listings in the program.

I don't know if my tiredness is just whatever ails me in the first place, or a product of my sleep being interrupted to take my middle-of-the-night antibiotic, or a product of the antibiotics themselves, a product of my running around at a conference, or a product of the wacky diet I've been put on. I am suspecting the latter: I've never been on a diet before, and I'm finding it very challenging. I hadn't realized how much veggies and whole grains I normally eat. :( I miss cruciferous vegetables so much I could cry. Yesterday I succumed to temptation and ate three cherry tomatos that garnished my lunch (no ill effects yet.) It turns out I normally have my meat with veggies so I'm finding it hard to get enough meat. The four food groups really are pasta, chicken, broccoli and alfredo sauce. I would expect me to feel out of sorts eating like they have me eating.

Am tired like woah. Did not manage to get in this AM, because of exhaustion and needing to sleep in. Spent the afternoon at a secondary site (Copley Marriott) hanging with divisional programming. Head is very full, but remarkably not with treatment stuff. Didn't do a good job going to treatment panels; got distracted by all the shiney.

Went to a presentation by someone on the DSM-V taskforce for personality disorders; got some seriously hot/deep intel about what's coming down.

Also, I may have accidentally tripped over a partial yet explicit delineation of the hierarchy of prestige in APA journals. (JPSP is *second*, the Review is first.)

The GBLT Div (i.e., SIG) has more members and activity than the Humanistic Psychology Div. The Humanistic Psychologists would like the world to know that they're Not Dead Yet; they are planning on taking over the world, really soon now, by submitting articles to this handy list of journals, arranged in order of prestige. :)

This evening, I networked. I think I sprained something in my soul.

I now -- well, maybe tomorrow -- must email about a hundred people asking for electronic copies of their papers.

So, this was my first ever conference with posters. Ewwwwwwwwwww. How utterly demeaning. Is this, like, required for PhDs? How horrid. I felt so sorry for the Poster People. Am I right in understanding this ritual amounts to a way that the APA (or its divisions) can bless junior/less worthy members with being able to say they "presented at" the APA national meeting, without, you know, actually providing them with a room, A/V equipment, or anyone's undivided attention?

OMG, I want to hug Jerome Kagan's brain.

The Three Cultures, soon.

"I don't know why" re resistance of Am psych to consider (the group? emergent?)

Hypothesis: drugs drove psychodyn out of dsm. (no)

Our social context determines the problems we study.

Factor anaylsis biasing to continua, away from patterns. HALLELUIA

Intercultural Psych. GET THIS ADDRESS.

Piccasso and Poincare -- "if the cafes of 1907 Paris talked about Freud..." (they did!)

Hunters and birdwatchers (awesome -- the cultural diff between physics and biology; personal draws). We should be bird watching; we should "mimic" biologists, not physics.

IQ varies 0% w/ heritability among youth w/ non-college partents, 50%(?!) w/ college.

Listen to the humanists! (The Witnesses, heh.)

FYI, I (hope I) left my cell at home this morning. There's wireless at the convention, so I have web (but not email, effectively). I'll check here for messages, periodically.

I punted on this, but it just came over PhysOrg Med:

Chronic ear infections linked to increased obesity risk

Ear infections are a painful rite of passage for many children. New research suggests the damage caused by chronic ear infections could be linked to people's preference for fatty foods, which increases their risk of being overweight as they age. Scientists from around the country presented their findings on this unexpected connection at the American Psychological Association's 116th Annual Convention here Thursday.

It actually was a session with multiple papers from aorund the US presented, all finding the same basic phenomenon: chronic otitis media in childhood predicts increased BMI in adulthood.

Whole article at: http://www.physorg.com/news137941388.html

Didn't want to get over-taxed, so I slept in and didn't go till this afternoon. Did catch up with qualmish and hung out together for the rest of the day. Heard Gladwell. V. cool, but wrong. :) Then we went out for food in Chinatown, which I haven't made it to in over 5 years, IIRC. I had a wonderful time.

Yes, it turns out I do need to lug the phone book with me. No, the CEP symposia do not require an additional fee if you don't want the CE credits; attendence is free. (WHY is this not printed anywhere?)

You'd think 16k people'd be "a lot". You know: crowded. Well, the APA may be big, but the BCEC is bigger: it has swallowed us with room left over. It feels like a ghost town. Not only are there no lines to the women's room, I had my pick of stalls.

The big downside of all this is OMG my calves. At Burning Man we could have bikes; Pennsic has public transit. Here, we're hoofing it over miles of poured concrete floors. I'm wearing my comfortablest walking shoes; I don't know how the chicks in heels do it.

Maybe the paper sessions are more crowded; I've been on the exhibit floor looking at posters.

Holy @*#&! The APA annual convention makes Kzoo look like an intimate gathering of friends. Srsly: Having not reg'd in time to get program materials in advance for Kzoo2K, I printed them out at work to have on the plane. It was about 3/4th of an inch think. The APA program is a four hundred page phone book. More precisely: four hundred pages in an five hundred page phone book. Yes. I have no idea how I'm going to figure out what I'm going to see. Probably wandering around when I get there. Hell, I don't know how I'm going to carry the program. It should have been printed in a four-volume edition.

Also: 7am?!?! WTF? Who let morning people run this?

ETA: nnnNNNNYYEEEAAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!! HALF of what's being presented by Division 8 -- both symposia --have an extra door fee of $40ea. Division of Personality and Social Psychology, why do you have to be the coolest kid on the block?

PS, Also: does anyone know if psychologists really memorize/remember all the divisions by number? The list goes into the 50s, which is twice the MIT courses, with which I keep having name-space collisions ("What does 'African-American Survivors of Suicide' have to do with EAPS? ...oh, right."). Or is it that people just stick to their specialty silos (as is suggested by the invitation to declare one's affilition at registration)?

ETA: Dude! Baker Kiss-of-Death Award winner and, now, obviously, Harvard University professor Jeremy Wolfe is the head of Div 3. Nice to see him getting on in the world.

I confess I've not been generally impressed with the Journal of Mental Health Counseling, which I get in hard copy as part of my membership in AMHCA.

But the latest issue, July 2008, has a tremendously informative and practical article, "Counseling Clients Involved with Violent Intimate Partners: The Mental Health Counselor's Role in Promoting Client Safety" by Kress, Protivnak, and Sadlak. It could just as well be titled "How Not to Get Your Client Killed". I highly recommend it to all you clinicians. If you don't have access, I can see about scaring up electronic copy to share.

PS this isn't one to read only once you have such a client; it focuses heavily on what you need to do in the very first session it comes up in (at intake, possibly). This is for reading in advance of the situation, not JIT training.

From yakshaver: This strange and fascinating article about the science of memory and Piotr Wozniak, the psychologist-programmer who is using himself as an experimental subject to explore the outer reaches of how computers can program humans to maximize learning and happiness. No kidding.

Doing great, utterly beat. Crashing now.

VoicePost 83K 0:25

“Hi everybody this is Siberia. I'm out, made it to Solid Foods this morning and got set up and, I am out now and I am, in fact, being driven home, yay, as we speak. Thank you all for your kind words and your support and your thoughts and I'll be no doubt posting more very soon in the future. Thanks guys” Transcribed by: alienor

I'm in the hospital. I'm sick. I'm doing really well, all things considered. But I'm going to be here at least overnight.

So, one of two things will ensue: either I will be too busy being sick to lj, or I will be dissociating from the pain and boredom by interneting.

Of all the times for this to happen, between academic terms really is the most convenient. I do, however want to be all better by my next scheduled shift at my internship, Tuesday, and the APA mtg Thurs-Sun. :( We'll see if that happens.

I am not yet receiving visitors, save those already arranged (you know who you are.)

From the_xtina
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/08/05/psa-2/

Often, when someone learns that another person lives with some sort of medical condition, slight or severe, their first reaction is to suggest to that person some way they could make their condition better.

On behalf of all those persons, let me say: Stop.

Think.

Read the whole thing, though the comments are ignorable.

I have to share my favorite variation on this one. I was having an annual physical, and I was complaining that my elbow was being sore when I played recorder. My physican and I discussd the elbow, and I mentioned that since I was so busy with school, I would be probably be taking a break from playing, "... especially if I manage to find an internship." My MD asks about my internship hunt, and I mention that I've having trouble finding a placement.

My doctor then spontaneously launches into Find Siderea An Internship Brainstorming Mode, "helpfully" mentioning every facility he can think of which he has ever heard of providing behavioral health. Now don't get me wrong, I was very happy to get any leads I could get. But:

1) He launched into this without even the vaguest awareness of what the criteria were that I was operating under -- trying to "solve" my problem without even finding out what it was -- e.g. they have to take masters level interns, not just med-students, has to be on the T, etc. So his suggestions were utterly off the wall and useless. And I know this because,

2) it's not like I don't have a yellow pages and google, and I'd talked to all of them already, having been working on this problem for over a year. Furthermore,

3) hey, what about my elbow? Weren't we supposed to be talking about my elbow? Dr. Doctor, I don't think my insurance is paying you to give me internship counseling, for which you are unqualified and, it turns out, manefestly incompetent. Can we go back to talking about my elbow?

*shakes head in disbelief* I mean, this was exactly the situation in which health advice is welcome, and what does the person do? Try to "solve" some completely other problem I didn't want or need or benefit by their help with!