Academic referencing made (really) easy
I usually don't get excited over software. But an academic reference manager claiming to be "like iTunes" and turns out to be excactly that simple and intuitive, allowing me to stay organised in research and save hours of time, is almost to good to be true.
I was introduced to Sente by word on the street - the PhD street to be specific - and I have patiently waited for their next major update before purchasing it. A few days ago Third Street Software thus decided to release a public beta of Sente 6, which I have been testing since.
The interface is quite intuitive. I create a library for each project, and when I come across a new source I just drag and drop it into the library window. Sente will then attempt to find the reference for me, or allow me to search for the reference myself:
The articles are then copied into the library file, which allows me to throw away the downloaded files, usually named something obscure like "sdarticle-9707104011.pdf" from my download folder, and browse the articles inside Sente. The software further allows me to organise the library in a very iTunes-like fashion, including a rating system with the famous iTunes stars.
When I start writing the essay, report, dissertation or whatnot, I keep my Sente library open and drag and drop references into the document as I type. Then I just add {bibliography} wherever I want to put it and select a style (APA 5, obviously) to make Sente automatically convert all references for me.
I've only used five articles in this example library; the undergraduate edition of Sente allows up to 250. Postgraduate researchers need even more and as the library grows to huge sizes there are very powerful tools to keep it organised. But that's a different story. I could post screenshots of my dissertation library when I get there, but I presume the demand for it would be quite low. More examples and the software itself is available here. Unfortunately, Sente is available only for Mac users - those stuck with Windows will have to use Endnote.
Revision period
A minor bird
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.-- Robert Frost
Revision period
noun
The time of year when the students that will pass examinations are troubled, and those that will fail are celebrating.
The Purgatory
Art is long and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still like muffled drums are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
-- H. W. Longfellow
Poetry is famous for in brevity and wit describing feelings unlike any other forms of text. An extract from A Psalm of Life by Henry ("The Beard") W. Longfellow, the first line in this quatrain epigram describes how I wished I felt about educating my stubborn mind above the masses of society; the last three describe how I actually feel, in this very moment.
Exams are closing in. I was a few heartbeats from the grave, symbolically or diabolically almost failing my first year for not being active enough in an inane (twist that tongue of yours!) experiment participation scheme. Then, like a fresh wind carrying me out of the purgatory, came the realisation, or epiphany if I were religious. Essays are to be written, exams to be sat; but in a year's time, art will still be long, and time still fleeting.
Learning to Write
Learning to write is a lifelong quest; no matter if you're a poet, an academic or, like me, the casual blogger. Personally I'm criticised, more than often, for employing nearly incomprehensible language. Indecipherable to whom?
Nevertheless, I stumbled upon a journalism related podcast on writing. It's quite brief, consisting of a few minutes long episodes with one idea in each episode - much like a paragraph. Yet it captivates the essence of expressing oneself efficiently and with the clarity of unspoilt water. Thought you might like it, and if you don't - stop reading Aftonbladet / The Sun / similar adult comics, and get those literary neurons firing.
Famous Faces
I don't think I've fully grasped the intellectual environment university has brought me. It's still all about jotting down those notes, listening to those people-that-are-supposed-to-know-their-stuff, yawning, and having a mind wandering off to that upcoming club night.
However, it's not at all like secondary school. The lecturers are not only great teachers, but often brilliant minds and splendid researchers - no matter how well they tend to hide it 
While reading through studies and theories it's not too seldom that I have encountered my university mentioned, and it's not entirely implausible that the researchers mentioned are people I have listened to, or even spoken to.
Recently, I was reading a journal article arguing for a rejection of the Kraepelinian paradigm in favour of a complaint-oriented approach. It basically features the idea that instead of attempting to group together mental illnesses and give them names such as 'schizophrenia' or 'manic depression', there should be a focus on the specific symptoms presented by the patient.
"I show that recent psychological research has revealed much about the mechanisms underlying each of these complaints. For example, auditory hallucinations occur when the individual mistakes inner speech for an external stimulus, and delusions appear to be the product of abnormal inferential processes."1
Then it dawned on me. Bentall. I had heard that name before. He was the one delivering an excellent lecture on the 'history of approaches to mental health', introducing me to the Lobotomobile. Though, I'm not sure it was a good realisation to make, since for the rest of the article I couldn't stop thinking of Dr. Freeman roadtripping with his ice pick and death wagon across the US.
- Bentall, R. (2006). "Madness explained: why we must reject the Kraepelinian paradigm and replace it with a 'complaint-orientated' approach to understanding mental illness." Medical Hypotheses 66(2): 220-33. [↩]
Measuring the mind
This week I've been investigating attention bias -- an assignment for the lab class in experimental psychology. More specifically, I've been testing the cognitive processing of food-related words in relation to eating habits or disorders. If you're of average to high intelligence, you will ask yourself how it's possible to measure how the mind is processing words -- it's not like we have a modern LCD screen in our forehead, presenting cognitive processing times. Damn, why didn't I pick computer science instead?
However, the answer is simple: the Stroop effect. Take a look at these lists of words, and read out the colour of the words (not the words themselves). Note: if you're reading this from a feed reader, you will probably have to visit the actual post to view the colours.
| Same colour & word | Different colour & word |
|---|---|
| Green | Blue |
| Blue | Black |
| Black |
Green |
| Red |
Red |
| Blue | Black |
| Black |
Green |
| Green | Red |
| Red | Blue |
Did the second column take longer time to read? The time difference in reading the lists highlights a cognitive interference, which can be measured and compared to other results in an experimental setting. But how does this relate to attention bias in eating disorders? Read out the colour of the words (again, not the words themselves) in the following lists:
| Neutral | Biased |
|---|---|
| Hat | Fat |
| Table | Sugar |
| Sock | Dessert |
| Keys |
Weight |
| Chair | Cake |
| Sink | Beer |
| Wall | Burger |
| Phone | Cheese |
The first column acts as a reference list of neutral words. The hypothesis is that the second, food-related, list will take longer time to read if the participant has concerns related to eating; thus the attention bias, or 'distraction'. There might, however, be no significant effect at all if English is not your native language, and you lack connotations to the biased words.
Internal experimental validity (are we actually measuring the right thing?) is maintained by an accompanying ordinal scale questionnaire about eating habits. Statements such as 'I am terrified about being overweight' is rated by the participant in terms of how s/he agrees with it. The words are also paired in length and extrapolated over an entire page to give more accurate time data.
If the list of food-related words has an effect on cognitive processing in individuals with eating disorders, it could be used by a psychologist to determine and, if required, intervene with such attitudes.
I hope this post provided some insight about the tools psychologists may use to assess (dig in) our invisible minds.
In need of a zeitgeber
My sleep has been disturbed over the last few months. I stay awake all night watching films, blogging and even cooking food. Then I sleep through half of the days, waking up for no less than a full scale nuclear war (and that hasn't been tested - yet :twisted: ). Luckily though, I'm in possession of course literature in neuropsychology, and might be able to shed some light on what goes on in the brain.
Normally, people (and apparently rats) have an internal biological clock stipulating a daily sleeping pattern, referred to as circadian (circa: about, dies: day) rhythm. Research on rats has shown that a stimulus, known as zeitgeber, can reset this rhythm. A common such stimulus is light; we fall asleep when it gets dark outside, and wake up as light enters our room in the morning.
The biological clock itself is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a part of the hypothalamus. The question is how the SCN is instructed to control circadian rhythms. Something tells me the nucleus, per se, doesn't recept light as it's hidden deep inside the brain.
Freedman and a bunch of brainy (pun intended) men in lab coats investigated this in 1999. They determined that genetic manipulating of the rods and cones (the thingies providing visual information from the eyes) did not affect the rats' circadian rhythm synchronisation with light. However, removing their small rat eyes did have such an effect. Thus, there has to be another photoreceptor communicating with the SCN.
In 2000, Provenciano and another bunch of lab coats provided an explanation to this. They found a photopigment, subsequently named melanopsin, in the ganglion cells of the retina, the axons of which transmits information to the SCN and some other 'stuff' (the thalamus and the olivary pretectal nuclei - though I don't know how important those are).
It thus seems that we have photopigments in the retina, providing information to the SCN, which regulates the circadian rhythms telling me to go to sleep. Now, why doesn't it work? I've deduced three options to test my sleeping disorder:
- Remove the eyes - possibly painful experience, with no positive outcome whatsoever
- Designing a drug that controls melanopsin communication with the SCN - would tell me whether my retinal ganglion cells are dysfunctional. However, I don't really know how to design drugs.
- Buying a new set of eyes and an SCN over eBay, and have them installed by old Soviet doctors in a remote part of Russia. However, I don't really know any doctors in Russia.
This leaves me to one, extreme, final resort - I might have to reset the circadian rhythm manually by going to bed early every night and forcing myself to wake in the mornings. The utterly horrible thought makes me shiver.
Boys and girls
I've stayed up all night and abused caffeine in order to write up a lab report about gender differences in identifying emotions in facial expressions. Thus far I've managed to:
- Watch "A View to a Kill" - the last Bond movie with Roger Moore
- Watch an episode of House MD
- Read a clinical manual for emergency physicians
- Learn that a bitter almond odour coming from a body may indicate Cyanide Toxicity
- Learn that rectal tone (as recorded with digital imaging equipment) may reveal essential details about the state of the patient.
- Read through my immense blogroll
- Read through parts of their blogrolls
- Call campus security to stop a mass psychosis from occurring (the inebriated inhabitants of a flat across the courtyard played some sort of game, which included tossing glass bottles from the kitchen to the road beneath)
- Contribute with 400 words to my lab report
Anyway, our results were in line with those of other studies, and suggested that females have an overall advantage in recognising basic emotions linked to facial expressions. There is, however, one slight aberration with males being superior at identifying male aggression. I wonder if there's an evolutionary perspective to the findings...
And to eliminate a line of enquiry from the comments section:
Q: Does this mean that I can pull an angry face on random women and get away with it?
A: No, 65% of the female sample still recognised male anger. And 80% of their boyfriends (?) will remove that angry face from the scene.
Mind the lawn?
I had an online discussion with a mate the other day. As usual, the conversation drifted away from Google to psychology and back to Google again. Upon discussing the mind he stated in a rhetorical question that 'Doesn't research show that we are psychologically the same? Just put in different situations.'
It's an ongoing debate in psychology. We refer to it as a question of nature vs nurture. Are we born with distinct preset minds, or do we develop all behaviour with time? The ubiquitous eclectic approach is to place these phenomena on a spectrum, rather than discrete categories. That is, we are born with certain potentials within the framework of which we develop skills and qualities determining behaviour. Perhaps the prevalence and distribution of intelligence in the general population will testify to that, the leading theory being the rubber-band hypothesis, in which intelligence is viewed as a rubber-band, with genetics dictating its innate length, and the environment its stretching factor.
Yet there is nothing simple at all about the study of our mind. The brain, evidently the root of most or all behaviour, is often referred to the most complex structure known by man. In the discussion I put it analogically that 'the brain is too complex to be widely regarded as producing the same behaviour between individuals. It's like saying that Lawn A is the same as Lawn B, just with winds directing their blades into different position. But at closer scrutiny the lawns are naturally not the same, even considering external factors.'
Nevertheless, a vast amount of studies show, and aim to do so, that we do behave similarly, ceteris paribus. That's what supports predictions of behaviour and justifies psychology as a science, rather than an art.
Proper planning and preparation prevents…
[Time is 03:27 GMT]
I'm having my first exam later today - social/mental health/health psychology, and I have completely relied on my previous knowledge from secondary school. Though I'm quite unsure on its effects on the upcoming exam, since I've skipped half the classes and skimmed through powerpoint presentations (don't blame me, it was an utterly boring and repetitive course)
But it might end up well, as I completed an online 'practice exam' a few minutes ago with the following results:
Started: 21 January 2009 02:57 Submitted: 21 January 2009 03:06 Time spent: 00:08:40 Total score: 120/160 = 75%
There were 16 questions, thus I gave them a mere half minute each - whereas I'll have twice the time in the real exams. 75% is a 'first class' grade, 40% being needed for a pass. And yet again, a pass will suffice as the first year results don't count to the final degree.
But somehow, I think that the real test won't be as easy as one might think. They have surely arranged so that we all fail in one way or another, unless we chronologically state all theories and symptoms of schizophrenia with names and dates.