Health and Psychology

I read a lot of research articles.  Clients and colleagues send me links to articles.  I listen to television news reports on science often.  There are some common misconceptions about what people understand.  One of the big issues is looking at things that occur together.  If something happens and another thing generally happens the two things may be correlated.  If there are dark clouds in the sky and my car windshield is wet in the morning I may think it was the clounds causing rain that accounted for my wet windshield and not errant driveway sprinklers.  If I notice a headache when there are flourescent lights on I may start to look to see if they are associated.  The problem with things that occur together is that correlation may have nothing to do with causation.

Unfortunately when people want to make sense of their world they start to view things that may have some weak corellational data in reality through a lens of selective attention and sometimes superstition and then infer causation.  Often these things are passed down as folklore.  Many of these are found in common medical treatment.  We all have heard them "Wear a sweater so you don't catch a cold." "It seems like earthquake weather."  "There's a full moon out, people are going to act crazy."  "If you keep your face like that it will stay that way."  And then we get research to look at these popular correlational things to see what is actually going on.  Viruses cause colds, not a lack of sweaters.  The United States Geological Survey http://gallery.usgs.gov/audios/136 just posted this information showing how old the idea is and that there is no scientific validity to it.  Psychology today put out an article in 2005 refuting the full moon and crazy behavior theory http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200502/full-moon-crazy.

Sometimes we look at animal studies to infer what people do.  Sometimes we look at people to infer what animals do.  Ideas based on different species may or may not generalize to other species.  So the idea that animals require treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder may or may not be valid, but it certainly is an interesting research topic.  www.elephants.com/ptsd/Bradshaw&Lindner_PTSD-rev.pdf. 

When I teach psychological assessment I include common corellational ideas that people often have that may or may not have any scientific validity, but certainly are thought of as at lest corellational if not causitive.  "My illness is the result of (caused by) something I did wrong."  "I had a dream about this event and then it actually happened."  "I've had this paranormal experience."  Or from my old research on what children think causes pregnancy "If you eat too much you get pregnant."  I teach my students to look for research data that looks at predicting events to show causation not correllation.  We look at redundancy in assessment to look for multiple ways to see the same information to verify it is real and is what we think it is.  I teach my students to listen to how data is portrayed in sound bites and to go back to the original research to see if what is said is what was stated in the article.  That helps them be better eventual psychologists.  Doing the same will help people understand the information that they see and hear reported on the news.