Some thoughts on Education, Genetics and Heritability and IQ

Some of you may have seen this story in the Guardian. I have been avoiding commenting on it until after the comments section was closed, because I hope to do some discourse analysis on both the newspaper report and the comments section, to try to find out how people are using the terms intelligence and heritability in everyday(ish) language.

The Guardian also usefully made the source material available. What I want to do in this blog entry is discuss the substantive points Dominic Cummings makes with regard to education, genetics, heritability and IQ.

IQ as a measurement of Cognitive Ability

On page 68 of  Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities Cummings suggests that if you ask the question of people what proportion of kids with an IQ of X could master integration, and then goes on to say that research on children with different cognitive ability should be done.

IQ, of course, isn't a measure of cognitive ability. If one wanted to do this research then measuring actual cognitive ability (in mathematics) would be the thing to do, not measuring IQ. One reason for this is that IQ tests are made up of several different abilities, another is that the nature of standardisation of the IQ tests obscures the underlying cognitive abilities.

It may be that the people that Cummings has asked this question are just being polite by saying that no empirical research has been done, rather than pointing out to him the stupidity of the question.

IQ not the only thing that affects academic performance

Cummings cites Lewis Terman on the idea that IQ is not the only thing that affect academic performance. This is of course true, but given that IQ was developed to predict educational attainment I tend to see this as a proof of failure of concept rather than anything else.

The extremely limited capacity of short term working memory (p72)

In talking about the way that basic research is being ignored in education Cummings talks about the extremely limited capacity of short term working memory being a reason why information may not be retained from a lecture. I often use short term memory as a great example of the difference between academic and lay understandings of psychology concepts. Short term memory refers to the few seconds after being exposed to, say a list of words, and the capacity of short term memory is normally seen as 7 plus or minus two things.

Working memory is a different topic it is a theoretical framework that refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information.

So short term memory doesn't include memory of what happened over the last hour.
And short term working memory appears to be a conflation of two separate things.

On page 72 Cummings begins his confused ramblings about genetics.

The heritability of educational outcomes

Cummings cites with approval some work by Plomin on using heritability statistics on things such as phonics tests (70% heritability), reading and maths tests (at ages 7,9 and 12) as showing 60-70% heritability and GCSE as showing approximately 60% heritability.

Cummings is careful to talk about heritability as being about the amount of variance as due to genetic factors, but, like Plomin, seems to have a willfully ingenuous view on what, if anything, heritability statistics might reveal.

Like that other greatly misused statistic regression there appears to a tendency to conflate the assumptions of the test with what the test can tell us.

With regression one of the assumptions of a regression model is that the predictor variables cause the dependent variable; however it is often used as if the regression equation reveals whether or not a predictor variable (in a battery of tests) is causal.

With heritability there are a whole bunch of assumptions that need to be met before the statistic can be used.

The heritability statistic was created by Ronald Fisher who is also responsible for creating the ANOVA statistic so beloved in social sciences. A lot of Fisher's work related to problem particularly in crop breeding, where it could be know with a high degree of certainty the precise environment crops were exposed to, and a good idea of what we would now call the genetic background of the crops.

While there is no need to know which gene (or genes) are responsible for any trait that may be open to heritability analysis if it is assumed there is more than one gene they need to act upon each other in an additive way, rather than interacting with each other.

The other assumption is that 'the environment' acts in an additive way rather than interacting with the genetic component.

These assumptions seem far fetched when it comes to IQ tests. They are stretched beyond any credible breaking point when it comes to testing educational outcomes.

I have no doubt that genetics and environment play an important role in educational outcomes, but I am sceptical that we can reduce the complexities of their interactions to a single number. Even if we can then heritability is not that number for any trait where there is interaction between genes or interaction between genes and the environment.

Why study Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology

I expect that this will be covered either in the editorial or one of the earlier articles.

The position is the one that Dai Jones has developed writing in our books, and that I teach to in the current year three module.

Even if Psychology were a natural science there would still be good reasons for studying historical and conceptual issues.

• Interest - historical gossip, who did what to whom and how it affects the academic discipline.
• Understanding - Why did theory (x) being and why did it drop out of fashion.
• Learning past lessons - There are lots of examples of poor psychology, how can we avoid that in future,
• Critical understanding - Trying to understand psychology in its social context.

Different reasons for studying history need different types of historical writing.

However if psychology is not a natural science, because of the reflexivity issue (what psychologists say about human psychology directly and indirectly changes human psychology) then it becomes more important to study historical and conceptual issues.

There are also a bunch of reasons to do with current psychology and a need to understand how things have reached this position.

• In 2013 the Clinical Division of the BPS published a position paper highly critical of DSM V. (http://dcp.bps.org.uk/dcp/the_dcp/news/dcp-position-statement-on-classification.cfm)
• In the UK professional psychology is overseen by the Health Professions Council
• What are the relationships between psychology and health professions, how might these impact upon psychology?

There is an historical precedent, with the way that psychotherapists lobbied to become part of the medical profession in the 1910s, this had several impacts on the discipline and on the practice of psychotherapy in the USA.

• Upon formation of the Coalition the current government set up the 'Nudge Unit' using insights from psychology to change people's behaviour without recourse to legislation.
• Seligman the founder of positive psychology has met the PM. Positive psychology techniques have been used by the Nudge Unit.
• What networks does psychology as a discipline tie into, how might this affect the discipline?

Psychology has long tried to have influence with government, and some of things psychologists do seem to tie into this, but also governments (mis)use psychological findings a process which needs to be critically interogated.

• The American Psychological Association excuses psychologists working with the CIA and US military from normal ethical processes. "Enhanced interrogations" normally have a psychologist present.
• How have ethical codes developed and why are they important?
• What is the relationship between psychology and the military? 

Psychology has long had relationships with the military, from the Great War forwards. The military often have protected budgets and can be a good source of research funding.

• Cohen (1992) suggests Psychology studies are chronically underpowered.
• Straightforward replications are hardly ever published.
• Fraud in published psychology papers threatens our attempts to be taken seriously (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/13/scientific-research-fraud-bad-practice)
• The credibility of psychology has also been undermined by a recent US supreme court ruling. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201304/can-video-games-cause-violence
• Why are we so bad at quantitative methods when part of the way that, some, define psychology as a science is by the methods being used. 

I argue that part of the reason for this is the mechanical way that methods in psychology are understood, arguably a lingering affect of methodological behaviourism.

Historical understanding helps to open up these questions, and in addition helps to tie psychology back into its philosophical background.

Emebedding Conceptual and Historical issues in the Psychology curriculum

Opportunity for a possible paper, just about to send an abstract off for this, after chance to review and revise it for a special issue of of History and Philosophy of Psychology, coming out of some workshops on teaching CHiP Dai and I have contributed to over the last two years.

As it seems to help my process of writing I intend to blog about the paper as I write it.

Here is the first draft of the abstract.

For over a decade the CHiPs coverage at the University of Gloucestershire was isolated in three stand alone modules. The optional year two module recruited poorly, losing out to traditional applied modules, and although the compulsory year three module always had enthusiastic support from a minority of students, module evaluations revealed a group of students who felt that the coverage came too late in the degree. Spurred by University wide changes following the new fees regime in England the whole degree was redesigned for the 2012 academic year. A commitment to teach CHiPs across the whole of the first year provision was established. Integrating conceptual and historical issues into first term research methods teaching, in particular, has led to the opportunity to consider how psychological knowledge production works, rather than teaching research methods as a set of procedures to follow. In addition combining this with material on critical thinking has enabled us to move beyond seeing critical thinking as merely the application of scientific methods to everyday life and towards helping our students be critical about the ways that psychology operates in society. Initial student evaluation of this material has been much more positive than for the stand alone modules.

Any comments welcome. The abstract needs to be submitted by 30 September.

Pre-registration and Psychology publications

A couple of months ago the Guardian published this article on pre-registration of (mainly) psychology studies. This was followed by this article arguing against pre-registration.

This second article made me despair.

So I am going to look at it point by point after a bit of an introduction.

While there are a range of methods used in psychology the discipline has taken to a possible over reliance on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST).

There are conditions where NHST is great, especially when effect size estimations are also used, clinical trials, and in psychology when you are testing for an effect where you have a good idea of what size of effect matters outwith the laboratory, and you have a good model of that process to test in the laboratory. If NHST is the right way to understand data then there are a set of rigorous procedures that need to be followed else the results are likely to be inaccurate.

Now despite the fact that every psychology degree includes extensive research methods training it does appear that psychologists generally don't really understand what NHST is for, possibly because we use some fairly inaccurate short hand to try to introduce the concept to students.

We tend to say things like, probability that the effect is non-random, or that the effect is real.

However the NHST is not telling us the probability, it is telling us if an effect in a particular study will apply to the population that the sample was drawn from.

Obviously not all research is suited for NHST, I do qualitative research and historical research, neither of which use NHST, but also if you do not have a representative sample then NHST are not the thing you should be using. There are also arguments for using Bayesian statistics more generally, but that is not the argument I am making here. All quotes hereafter are from the Times Higher article.

Limiting more speculative aspects of data interpretation risks making papers more one-dimensional in perspective.

One of the issues is that these 'speculative' aspects of data interpretation tend to be done with NHST after looking at the data, that is not speculative it is wrong. Where exploratory data analysis is done it should clearly be labelled as such, and reporting significance levels shouldn't happen.

..commitment to publish with the journal concerned would curtail researchers’ freedom to choose the most appropriate forum for their work after they have considered the results.

I am not sure what this means, the meaning I can put on it is that if you find something unexpected, by doing statistical tests ad hoc you may want to publish these somewhere. Well you can but as you have broken the fundamental rules of NHST then that is fraudulent unless you clearly mark it as exploratory data analysis. The correct thing to do in this case is to design a study to test the potential phenomena, and pre-register that study.

With no results to go on, reviewers would be more likely than ever to rely on reputation, which would count against junior scientists.

 Most journals claim their review process is blind. Good to see proof that it actually isn't. I have long suspected this, even without names one tends to know what colleagues are working on in the same field. It might be important to work out how we can do genuine blind peer reviewing else our discipline is a laughing stock.

In addition, the requirement to refine studies and their interpretation prior to data collection would prevent us from learning from our mistakes along the way.

This tends to lead to data peaking and changing stimulus materials, instructions and even measures as one goes along, all of which invalidates NHST. The correct thing to do is of course to learn the lessons and run a fresh study.

Moreover, in my fields (cognitive neuroscience and psychology), a significant proportion of studies would simply be impossible to run on a pre-registration model because many are not designed simply to test hypotheses.

Well yes, so in those studies NHST results are not being erroneously reported, no problem with that at all and that is a good point. Psychology needs to look carefully at what it is doing and what science actually might be. However it does on

...many of the participant populations introduce significant sources of complexity and noise

 And these participant populations are not ones that can be used to make statements about the general population, so why exactly would NHST be used here.

So in summary, lots of reasons not to use NHST, however, we want to use them badly and fear pre-registration might stop that being done.

Why Psychology cannot be a science

At some point in the future when the science of psychology is well established ideas like this will be taught to undergraduates in the discipline so they can have a good laugh at foolish people who died before they were born, a bit like we do at the moment with Freud, Watson, Eysenck and so forth.

According to the standard, textbook, histories of the discipline psychology overcame the objections of Kant in establishing psychology as a discipline. Kant argued that an empirical science of psychology was impossible for two reasons. The first that psychological phenomena were not open to quantification, and so the only quantity that psychologists would be able to measure was time (either the time psychological phenomena persisted, or the time gaps between psychological phenomena). The second that psychological phenomena were subjective and would not be open to objective measurement.

Now there was a lot more going on than this, and there is a nice overview here with suggestions for further reading. I think one could plausibly argue that psychology has not been successful in meeting the objections of Kant, and one can see the impact of trying to overcome the objections in the way the discipline has changed across time. Those are not the arguments I am going to make.

The argument I am going to make is based on the work of Kurt Danziger, especially the sort of work he does here, and which is also associated with the work of Ian Hacking.

Danziger makes two points, one of which is common to all disciplines, the other of which is only common to a subset of disciplines.

The first point is, that areas of knowledge begin with a vocabulary that comes from the language of the host society, and which contains assumptions, some of which may remain unexamined for some time because they seem natural. In all disciplines the vocabulary of the area of knowledge changes across time, a specialist vocabulary comes into existence, and this specialist vocabulary may feed back to the language of the host societies. In natural sciences, to some extent, as evidence is gathered the nature of concepts and their associated vocabularies may change because of that process. However, the changing vocabulary does not affect the objects being studied; although they may change our understanding of those objects and regardless of language as knowledge increases peoples may gain technologies that can affect the objects of study.

In disciplines like psychology (other examples would include aspects of psychiatry, sociology and economics) things are different, because the description of the object of study can change the object of study.

Danziger in his 1997 book Naming the Mind makes the case for how this has happened for the concepts of intelligence, motivation and personality, attitudes, behaviour and learning; and variables. His more recent book, Marking the Mind makes a similar case for memory.

So what does this mean. I am going to use my usual teaching examples.

Natural Science

Across time our understanding of dinosaurs has changed. During the nineteenth century our understanding of dinosaurs, based on fossil evidence, was often of great lumbering creatures which inevitably became extinct. In the early twenty first century our understanding of dinosaurs is of a complex variety of animals, each superbly suited to their own ecological niche, some of which became extinct through extreme events, some of which through selection pressures evolved into different species, like, for example, chickens.

Neither of these understandings of dinosaurs affected how dinosaurs understood themselves.

Now of course the objection to this example is that dinosaurs (although not their descendants) are no longer with us, so a second example, I normally use Ether theory or Germ theory depending on how I feel.

Across time our understanding of infection and diseases has changed.

Prior to the nineteenth century the predominant theory of disease transmission was miasma theory:

The miasmatic position was that diseases were the product of environmental factors such as contaminated water, foul air, and poor hygienic conditions. Such infection was not passed between individuals but would affect individuals within the locale that gave rise to such vapors. It was identifiable by its foul smell. (wiki)

While there was earlier work leading up to it, in the nineteenth century germ theory developed, with evidence suggesting that for some infectious diseases microorganisms are the cause.

As germ theory developed and came to be accepted, how we reacted to the possibility of infection through germs changed our behaviour, and we developed technologies to ameliorate the possibility of infections.

However diseases did not change because our understanding of them changed, from being contained in Miasmas to being contained in microorganisms.


Disciplines like Psychology

Bystander inaction. People are less likely to act to help someone if they see themselves as one of many witnessing whatever it is that needs help.

There are two general exceptions to this, people who believe they have the professional skills to help, and people who have been thoroughly taught about the bystander inaction effect.

The study of psychology alters the psychology of people. Psychological research alters how people think about themselves and affects their behaviour.

It is not just psychology where this happens, there are other disciplines with similar looping effects. Belief that a certain level of government debt is harmful has led to austerity, which has because it is such a ridiculous mistake, led to government debt growing. Economic theory affects economies.

For a more fun example watch Hysteria.

Does it matter?

Yes and no. There is no point in trying to 'prove' psychology is a science by doing research that gets more and more obtuse.

There is a point in trying to make our measurement tools and theories the best we can so we can best explain what is going on now, without worrying about the universality of findings.

Letting go of a narrow obsession with a limited notion of what psychology should be like because it is a science is I think a good thing. And ironically it might lead to us being better at collecting data, testing hypotheses and building theories.

Brains!

 

Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, 2010. 1(1):1-5

Unless you are a dualist who believes that consciousness exists apart from the body it will come as no shock that brains are a necessary part of human (and salmon) psychology.

However, there are some issues around what we ought to, and ought not to, say on the basis of techniques such as fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging)

The first point is this is a graph, not a direct image of the brain.

The technique, as explained in the Wiki article, is to compare blood flow across time.

In the case of the graph above the dead salmon was exposed to pictures of human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence, either socially inclusive or socially exclusive. The salmon was asked to determine which emotion the individual  in the photo must have been experiencing.

The brain activation graph shows the difference in activation, as detected by fMRI when the dead salmon was exposed to the two types of picture.

Except of course the salmon was dead, the researchers bought it at a supermarket, and unless we have thoroughly misunderstood the difference between dead and alive there was no blood flow.

Which leads to the second point, the need for adjustment for multiple comparisons.

The anomalous graph is caused because there is no (or inadequate) adjustment made to the null hypothesis statistical tests used to 'detect' the difference given the (large) number of multiple comparisons being made.

This issue is so well documented at this point that any researcher who publishes research based on fMRI data who has failed to do appropriate adjustments for multiple comparisons ought to be seen as fraudulent. Although that may not have been as apparent in the early years of this century, and there is a technical argument about the correct way of doing these adjustments for multiple comparison.

So there we have the basics, however seductive it is to think we are looking at something akin to an X-ray of brain activation we are actually looking at a graph. Beware of any research which does not robustly adjust for multiple comparisons.

Just because it appears in brain imaging it doesn't mean it is just a biological phenomena

In the next post I will address some of the issues around the philosophy of what I am discussing, and thereafter will post something more concrete about the relationships between brains, bodies and the environment for human psychology. For right now hold on to the idea (unless you are a substance dualist) that anything that happens in the mind also happens in the brain.

So if I have learnt to fear dentistry, which I have, then that fear of dentists is materially represented in my body and brain. That is not the same as saying that my fear of dentistry is caused by my biology.

This blog post by Neurocritic illustrates the problems of inadequate reporting of research to make it sound like once a psychological issue can be 'brain scanned' it is biological and open to straightforward intervention with drug therapies. However, it is not only the reporting that is at fault here, it also appears to be a default position of at least some psychology and neuroscience authors that the 'brain scan' (graph of difference in blood flow) shows a biological reality for psychological phenomena.

Beware of the dichotomy that biological is real, not biological is false (or constructed).

This is a particular issue in sex and gender research, where if a graph of difference in blood flow can be   shown for men and women then that particular difference is seen as biological in origin. Despite the possibility that the differences between men and women, for a particular difference, can be at least as plausibly be explained by social process.

Just showing a graph of differences in blood flow in the brains of two categories of people does not equal an explanation of the differences between those categories of people.

Psychology, methods and science, why worry?

Over the last couple of months I have been toying with ideas around Psychology, methods and science.

I suspect that what I want to say will be a bit bigger than one blog post, so I intend to do a series of posts.

This installment is about why I think we have a problem.

As someone with an interest in conceptual and historical issues I tend to range a bit more freely over the psychological literature than specialists in a particular area. Some of the problems which are acknowledged in one aspect of psychology seem to be mirrored in other areas of the discipline. If the problems are even more widespread than that it seems to implicate the whole discipline.

We do not routinely test for similarity instead of difference

One of the outstanding issues in Psychology is something I first became aware of with the Psychology of Sex and Gender.

While most of us, most of the time, act and talk as if there are psychological differences between men and women the scientific evidence for those differences is at best contested, at worst none existent.

What tends to happen is that an area of possible, psychological, difference is opened up by a statistically significant difference being published. Over time a bunch of other people do similar (although not identical) work. After some more time a meta analysis is carried out on the findings, and the results of the meta analysis suggest that the original difference is small and inconsistent. This may lead us to believe that the genders are more (psychologically) similar than different.

However, while I strongly believe that psychological differences that we can detect using our current methods are small and inconsistent, that is not the same thing as saying the men and women are psychologically similar. We simply have not been testing for similarity, and lack of evidence for difference is not the same as evidence in favour of similarity.

Psychology studies are routinely under powered

In the paper Cohen, J. (1994). The earth is round (p < .05). American Psychologist, 49, 997-1003. Cohen argues that there are a number of problems with null hypothesis significance testing. One of the problems highlighted is that psychology studies are routinely under powered.

This suggested teaching exercise might help you grasp what this means, and may act as a useful teaching resource if you ever have to teach statistics.

One trouble with having a routine of under powered studies (studies with too few participants for a given effect size) is that we get studies published followed by a number of failures to replicate. After some time someone will do a meta analysis and suggest that the original finding is smaller and more inconsistent than originally thought. All this strikes me as a huge waste of resources.

We do not routinely try to replicate results

While the recent controversies around Bem may have put this into focus in psychology it is very difficult to get a straightforward replication published. Psychologists work around this by doing "conceptual replications" replicating the idea, but not the study. However, this is surely missing the point. When researchers do meta analyses of psychology studies they try to include unpublished studies (normally Ph.D. dissertations) that did attempt replication. Unfortunately we do not know about the missing studies because of the next problem.

We do not routinely register studies before they are run

We simply don't know how big the 'file drawer' of studies is, people occasionally try to make a guess but without routinely registering studies before they run we cannot know so fairly important information about whether an apparently interesting finding has been extensively tested.   

We do not know the relationship between our studies and the world outside of the laboratory

In order to carry out science like investigations of human psychology it is necessary to simplify phenomena so that we can test for some of the things that might affect human psychology, while concentrating on a sub-set of things that might affect human psychology. What psychologists mean when they talk about 'controlling unwanted variables'.

One of the questions is can we do that in a meaningful way. I suspect we can but all too often we do not try to. There is a famous talk given by the physicist Richard Feynman on Cargo Cult Science.

All too often we don't know what our laboratory studies, with humans, actually mean because we haven't done the basic work (Feynman also makes some points about replication, which means the problem of lack of replications stretches back at least to the mid twentieth century).

Most psychometric tests have not been tested for predictive validity

Which is ultimately the same problem as above, but for personality tests.

We routinely use poor sampling methods

Psychologists routinely use undergraduate students, self selecting samples, and samples drawn purely from clinical populations. That they/we then go on to make universal claims about human psychology from these samples is just bizarre.

Next episode being careful with 'brain scans'

Happiness, Positive Psychology and Measurement

Recently the OECD's Better Life Index has made some headlines, this example is from the Guardian and has the headline:

World's happiest OECD countries: in full

 A little reading around the headline quickly shows that this is not subjective happiness, it is based on eleven topics, Housing, Income, Jobs, Community, Education, Environment, Civic Engagement, Health, Life Satisfaction, Safety and Work-Life Balance.

 It does with the inclusion of Life Satisfaction include one subjective measure, which is assessed by survey. The ranking of the countries on this one measure can be seen here and a discussion on trying to measure subjective life satisfaction can be found here.

So this is about happiness as such, however having recently seen a talk on happiness by my friend and colleague Dave Webster I have been thinking about measuring happiness.

Measuring Happiness

Can happiness be measured?

Positive psychologists are investigating ways to measure happiness, they have one measure under construction (Authentic Happiness Inventory) and two other measures of happiness, the General Happiness Scale and the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire. All of these are accessible via Dr. Martin Seligman's homepage, although you have to register to take the tests. In the interest of disclosure last time I took these tests my scores were, Authentic Happiness, 4.04 out of 5; General Happiness Scale, 7 out of 7; and 9 out of 10 on the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire. All of these are quite high scores compared to most people that fill in the scales, I lost points on Authentic Happiness by scoring low on questions like question 4,

A. My life does not have any purpose or meaning.

B. I do not know the purpose or meaning of my life.

C. I have a hint about my purpose in life.

D. I have a pretty good idea about the purpose or meaning of my life.

E. I have a very clear idea about the purpose or meaning of my life.

and question 12,

A. In the grand scheme of things, my existence may hurt the world.

B. My existence neither helps nor hurts the world.

C. My existence has a small but positive effect on the world.

D. My existence makes the world a better place.

E. My existence has a lasting, large, and positive impact on the world.

I think that happiness can be measured at least as well (or as badly) as any other psychological object. As I detail in Chapter Nine of Tyson, Jones and Elcock there are problems with the whole psychometric enterprise, and measurements, be they attitudes, intelligence, personality, happiness or character strengths, are at best culturally and historically contingent and have meaning only in relation to the populations they have been developed within. For the happiness scale currently under development that population appears to be anglophone web users who are interested enough in the topic to use the website.

One of the dangers of all of these measuring tools is that they reify a particular working through of a concept, and that in turn may act as a political tool to promote one notion of what human beings are like.

All such measuring tools suffer from what Rom Harré called the 'meaning problem' which he applied more generally to the testing conditions in which psychology investigations take place. The problem is that people participating in a psychological experiment or survey may bring a variety of meanings to the situation, only some of which will match with what the investigator intends them to be. In effect these measuring scales may be measuring a varieties of happiness, not a single thing.

Multi-item scales tend to have better psychometric validity than single item scales, which leads to a second problem, people can respond to the individual items completely differently and yet be given the same overall score.

Finally there are a set of technical problems because the basis for these scales being equal interval scales is a, probably misapplied, principle of psychophysics, the just noticeable difference, which makes sense for an individual case, but may not when using aggregated data.

So can happiness be measured, a qualified yes. I prefer the types of metrics that the OECD use rather than the attempts to measure individual subjective happiness. If you believe personality tests measure personality, attitude scales measure attitudes or intelligence tests measure intelligence then happiness scales are just as good!

 

 

Division of Clinical Psychology Position Statement on Classification

The British Psychological Society, Division of Clinical Psychology, released this position statement yesterday. Some elements of it were discussed on Sunday in the Observer and on other media outlets.

What I intend to do here is briefly comment on each of the major sections of the statement.

Context

Much of the emphasis is on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorders rather than dementia, neuropsychology and learning disability. As the positions statement makes clear there has been considerable disquiet and debate about those diagnostic categories for over a decade. There is also growing disquiet about the ever increasing reach of diagnostic categories into everyday life and the medicalising of more and more aspects of everyday life.

The position statement is careful to note that biological factors are not being ignored, but that the primacy given to them by a disease model needs to be challenged.

The Role of Clinical Psychologists

Obviously the position statement re-affirms the role of clinical psychologists.

The Rationale for a Paradigm Shift

I am normally uneasy with the term paradigm shift being used in the social sciences, however this position statement does the use the term to mean a fundamental shift in world view, which would seem to fit well with the original meaning.

Core Issue 1: Concepts and models

Six conceptual issues are described:

1. Interpretation presented as objective fact
2. Limitations in validity and reliability
3. Restrictions in clinical utility and functions
4. Biological emphasis
5. Decontextualisation
6. Ethnocentric bias

While these are not a surprise to me it is apparent that much of that debate has not penetrated that far outside of the academy.

Core issue 2: Impact on service users

1. Discrimination
2. Stigmatisation and negative impact on identity
3. Marginalising knowledge from lived experience
4. Disempowerment

The hope is that this paradigm shift can address these issues.

There then follow five action points.

Action point 1
To share within the DCP and through pre-qualification training and continuing
professional development, the issues raised by this statement. The aim is to
achieve greater openness and transparency about the uses and limitations of
the current system, and enhance service users’ and carers’ awareness and
understanding of the issues.

Action point 2
To open up dialogue with partner organisations, service users and carers,
voluntary agencies, and other professional bodies in order to find agreed ways
forward. This will necessarily include safeguarding access to health and
social care, benefits, work support, and legal and educational services that are
currently diagnosis-based.

Action point 3
To support work, in conjunction with service users, on developing multifactorial
and contextual approaches which incorporate social, psychological
and biological factors.

 Action point 4
To ensure that a psychosocial perspective and psychological work are
included in the electronic health record.

Action point 5
For the DCP to continue to promote the use of psychological formulation as
one response to the concerns identified in this statement. 

 I feel in addition to these actions there is a need to enter into dialogue with people in general, as well as service users, carers and partner organisations.

Brains, Reality and Mental Distress

The Observer today has a number of interesting articles.

How to Spot a Murder's Brain

Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
  
Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?
 
Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness?

Although the comments section after each of them are frustrating and annoying.


Three of them, all but the 'Murder's Brain' are part of a series brought about by the statement to be released on Monday 13 May from the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society calling for a fundamental re-thinking of how professionals understand and treat mental distress.

After that statement is released I will have a go at saying more about it.

Meanwhile mental distress exists and sometimes people need help with it from a range of sources including medicine. One of the potential upsides is that people will start looking beyond medicine at ways to make mental distress less likely and to ameliorate its effects. One of the potential down sides of moving away from the medical model is that it will become an excuse for further cutting the already inadequate services for people with mental distress. It is also important that we do not jump into the Positive Psychology position of just helping individuals with building up resilience but look at broader social and societal issues as well.

Positive Psychology, the Nudge Unit and 'Sham Tests'

There are a couple of articles in the Guardian about a 'sham test' that jobseekers are being compelled to do.

Main Guardian article

Follow up article

The video at the top of the article is worth looking at.

As is the original blog post about the test, and the test itself is worth looking at, signature strengths test.

I am horrified that people are being told that they have to take the test, with the threat of a sanction (removal of benefits) if they do not.

Having completed the test these were my results:

Thanks for completing the signature strengths questionnaire, your results are below.



This exercise has been shown to find peoples' strengths in scientific studies and you may find it useful to identify your strengths and use them to inform your job search, CV or use in interviews. You may also find it useful to try to incorporate your strengths in your daily life and play to them whenever you can.



You should aim to use your strengths whenever you can. This could be in the your job search choices, your CV or at interviews. You could also apply these to your daily life. <strong> You should aim to use each one of your signature strengths in a new way everyday for at least a week.</strong>



Strength 1. Fairness

Treating all people fairly is one of your abiding principles. You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people. You give everyone a chance.



Strength 2. Love of learning

You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.



Strength 3.  Originality

Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.



Strength 4. Bravery

 You are a courageous person who does not shrink from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain. You speak up for what is right even if there is opposition. You act on your convictions.



Strength 5. Loving

You value close relations with others, in particular those in which there is sharing and caring. The people to whom you feel most close are the same people who feel most close to you.

As far as I can tell this is a shotened version of the VIA character strengths survey, available upon registration here. That test has 240 items, compared to only 48 on this version, last time I took the VIA these were my top five.

Here are your scores on the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. For how to interpret and use your scores, see the book Authentic Happiness. The ranking of the strengths reflects your overall ratings of yourself on the 24 strengths in the survey, how much of each strength you possess. Your top five, especially those marked as Signature Strengths, are the ones to pay attention to and find ways to use more often

Your Top Strength

Curiosity and interest in the world You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.

Your Second Strength

Fairness, equity, and justice Treating all people fairly is one of your abiding principles. You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people. You give everyone a chance.

Your Third Strength

Forgiveness and mercy You forgive those who have done you wrong. You always give people a second chance. Your guiding principle is mercy and not revenge.

Your Fourth Strength

Love of learning You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

Your Fifth Strength

Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness Thinking things through and examining them from all sides are important aspects of who you are. You do not jump to conclusions, and you rely only on solid evidence to make your decisions. You are able to change your mind.

There are a number of issues that arise for me.

Coersion

Forcing people to take a test under threat of stripping their benefits does not seem a good way to get people to reflect upon themselves. (I know I've already mentioned this, but it is very important).

Lack of Validity of a Short Form

There are twenty four character strengths in the VIA, with ten  questions per strength.
 That allows for each character strength to have a score of (depending on scoring system, but lets assume 1-5 per question) of between 10 and 50. The short form allows between 2 and 10. With the possibility of multiple ties. Indeed completely tied responses give a 'top 5' character strengths. Precisely how those are chosen is very difficult to know and might be a propaganda tool.

This is not a personality test

This has been talked about as if it were a personality test. It is not. I obviously (see previous posts) have issues about positive psychology but it is deliberately trying to achieve something different to personality testing.

The allegiance between positive psychology and government

In my conference presentation, and in the paper I am working on, I am worried about the ways that positive psychology appears to be forming allegiances with aspects of state power. This continues to worry me and needs a more thorough analysis.


 

Conference Report!

The history and philosophy section conference was great!

The Monday was a day on resources in the teaching of Conceptual and Historical issues in Psychology.

Dai Jones did a session on using and choosing text books; which was good and informative. Then there were very informative sessions on the BPS origins project and what the Science Museum can offer to the teaching of psychology both for undergraduates and 'A' level students. Thanks to Kelly Auty and Phil Loving for those sessions. Chris Howard and Lovemore Nyatanga did a presentation about some of the ways they teach CHiPs at Derby, after some group discussions Alan Collins and Pete Lamont led a discussion on what next. Which sort of became a theme of the conference, which might be ironic for a History conference.

After a really enjoyable meal with all the contributors back to the Travel lodge and on to the next day.

Day One

Not going to describe every paper I went to, but they were interesting, witty and led to many things to think about.

Martyn Pickersgill gave the opening keynote and that set the historical scene very well, in terms of how the DSM was developed and although it is a history I know well there were still aspects I had not fully appreciated.

In the first session of papers I went to, session 1B (see conference programme linked earlier) the main theme was sex, especially the 'paraphilic disorders' but also more general sex and gender issues.

To some extent that theme carried over into the second set of papers I went to, 2A. Finally rounded that off with some more sex, with the papers from 3A.

I want to introduce some of that material into my Gender and Sexualities module at Gloucestershire.

Day Two

Spent the first session fretting about my paper rather than going to any papers.

Session two included my paper. But also there was an interesting linkage between all four of the papers, it was almost a spontaneous symposium.

Session three I went to the symposium developed by John Cromby, David Harper & Paula Reavey. Dai is hoping that some of that material can find its way into the Psychology and Mental Health module we run.

Finally a truly great keynote from Ian Parker to finish a very good conference indeed.

Thanks to everyone who was involved in organising, presenting and taking part!

Square Pegs Round Holes

Anarchistic Epistemology for Qualitative Psychology

 Paul Feyeraband 1924-1994

This isn't about positive psychology, but more about the gnawing despair I have when thinking about the current instantiation of qualitative methodologies within psychology.

Qualitative psychology appears to be falling into the same trap that some quantitative psychology fell into, the notion that by following a set of procedures then valid knowledge will follow.

There are a number of possible reasons why this has happened.

Wanting to be taken seriously

By having a set of prescriptions in parallel with the sorts of prescriptions that quantitative psychology has perhaps there is a hope that will promote qualitative psychology as worthy. The most successful qualitative research approach across the social sciences, grounded theory, has long adopted the notion that "Care in applying the grounded theory methodology correctly is the single most important factor in ensuring rigour" (Cooney, 2011, p17). And from one of the originators of grounded theory

Grounded theory refers to a specific methodology on how to get from systematically

collecting data to producing a multivariate conceptual theory. It is a total    methodological package. It provides a series of  systematic, exact methods that start with with collecting data and take the researcher to a theoretical piece that is publishable.

Glaser, 2010, p 1.

Despite the early authors in psychology, such as Potter and Wetherell (1987) are careful to point out that their guidelines are guidelines, not a recipe to follow, it feels that twenty six years later we have lost that sense, and instead there is an expectation that following rules will lead to positive outcomes.

Teaching qualitative methods

Doing qualitative methods as an undergraduate student can be threatening. Very often students are confronted with the idea that Psychology is not a natural science at the same time that they are trying to learn ways to do research. It is less threatening to be told as long as a set of prescriptions are followed then they will get good marks, than to be told that the heart of qualitative methods is a joyful confusion. This problem is exasperated when methods teaching is divorced from theoretical and conceptual issues. In these circumstances it is more likely that students are taught a set of procedures and exhorted to work hard. Just like with quantitative methods students are likely to take those lessons on board, research is hard work and not fun, and if they try to navigate the maze we have set for them then they will get their reward.

A tentative solution

Discover anarchistic epistemology, along with an expectation that doing qualitative research is fun.

I might return to this in a slightly more coherent form later in the year.  

References

Cooney, A. (2011). Rigour and grounded theory. Nurse Researcher, 18(4), 17-22.  

Glaser, B. G. (2010). The Future of Grounded Theory. Grounded Theory Review, 9(2), 1-14.

Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology : beyond attitudes and behaviour  London : Sage

Positive Psychology and the use of whig history

This is inspired by some of the discussion after the research seminar on Monday, as well as this blog post that CJ posted some time ago but reminded me of yesterday.


In their introduction to positive psychology Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) provide an historical sketch. That historical sketch presents all the main failings of whig history; past psychology being presented only from the position of the current authors, movements being praised or denigrated from a position that some current form of psychology is the correct one; and a particular failing of whiggish histories of psychology, that the approach to psychology adopted by the authors solves any problems that they have identified.

I have looked for an open access copy of Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi to link to, but unfortunately I have not been able to find one, so with regret you will have to rely on my description of it. Those of you that have institutional or personal access to the American Psychologist will be able to better judge if I am being fair in my characterisation of them.

I have been influenced by Yen's 2010 paper on the historical narratives in Positive Psychology, and by the ideas expressed on the Anarpsy facebook group.

 The history of psychology from a positive psychology perspective

The historical sketch of psychology found in Seligman and Csikzentmihalyi goes like this:

Before world war II psychology had three missions, "curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent." (p6)

After world war II, because of funding being made available by what was then called the Veteran's Administration, psychologists found they could make a living by treating mental illness, and because of funding provided by the National Institute of Mental Health academic found they could get funding for research if that research was about pathology.

In the 50 years that follow "the other two fundamental missions of psychology--making the lives of all people better and nurturing genius--were all but forgotten." (p6).

Seligman and Csikzentmihalyi describe the situation; "Psychologists saw human beings as passive foci: Stimuli came on and elicited responses (what an extraordinarily passive word!). External
reinforcements weakened or strengthened responses. Drives, tissue needs, instincts, and conflicts from childhood pushed each of us around." (p6)

One potential branch of psychology, which first created this critque of psychology was Humanistic Psychology. According to Seligman and Csikzentmihalyi this came into existence a decade later than the immediate after war period.

Unfortunately, humanistic psychology did not attract much of a cumulative empirical base, and it spawned myriad therapeutic self-help movements. In some of its incarnations, it emphasized the self and encouraged a self-centeredness that played down concerns for collective well-being (p7)

Even worse, in their history Humanistic psychology was responsible for self help books, that now crowd out the scholarly tomes on psychology.

The three missions of psychology

It is hard for me to reconcile the three missions identified by Seligman and Cskizentmihalyi and the history of psychology. However I will try to compare these three missions with my understanding of the history of Psychology, that understanding owes a debt to the work of Kurt Danziger, Graeme Richards and Dai Jones.

Curing Mental Illness

There is an ongoing discussion over whether Freud and the other pre WWII psychoanalysts should be seen as a part of the mainstream discipline, or a competitor discipline that was more successful than psychology because it held the promise of curing mental illness. That argument was live at the time and their are contemporary psychologists who very much saw it as part of the discipline, and others that rejected it. The first and second world war are both important to the rising profile of psychology. During the first world war the US army recognised the potential problems of shell shock, and supported the efforts of Woodworth to create a screening test for recruits; with those picked up by the screening test to then be subjected to a clinical interview by a psychiatrist. The test was never introduced as thankfully the war ended, and Woodworth sold a slightly altered test to businesses who wanted to screen out potentially 'maladjusted' employees. In the UK C.S. Myres, and W. McDougall were pivotal in getting recognition for shell shock, and advocating psychological treatments for it. Best known because of Pat Barker's regeneration trilogy is W.H.R. Rivers. Rivers should be known to psychologists because he co-founded the British Journal of Psychology, and was instrumental in helping to run the first two experimental psychology laboratories in the UK, had prior to this gained his MD, and used his own version of 'the talking cure' to try to help officers suffering from shell shock.

However, in the USA, psychology gained credibility, just after world war one, for the intelligence tests run on recruits.

There is a theme here which Seligman and Cskizentmihalyi do not pick out, the alliances psychology has formed with the military as part of promoting and defining the discipline. It goes beyond trying to deal with the suffering of soldiers, and developing psychological tests for recruits. In world war two the 'American Solider' research project, as well as launching the American version of social psychology as if it were the only version available, led to a range of changes to US army practice including "Expert and Combat Infantrymen’s Badges, revision of pay scales, the demobilization point system, and influenced what appeared in Yank, the Army Weekly, Stars & Stripes, and Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” propaganda films". Latterly psychologists have been instrumental in helping the US torture suspects in Gauntanamo bay. It is odd that this historical theme was not picked out by Seligman and Cskizentmihalyi as positive psychology has firmly allied itself with the US military for
the Comprehensive Soldier (and family) Fitness project. However they are trying to claim their product is better than 'psychology as usual' rather than just being a slight re-branding.

 Making the lives of all people better

There have been, and still are, several organisations within psychology that have this as their remit. Community Psychology, as exemplified by Isaac Prilleltensky has long pursued the idea of giving people meaningful control over their lives as a step towards improving well being. As Community Psychology dates back to 1965 it is disruptive of the narrative that Positive psychologists are weaving. Critical Psychology, which again develops during the time period which Seligman and  Cskizentmihalyi claim psychology is only interested in working within the model of the DSM. Both of these do include a thorough critique of the psychological mainstream, whereas positive psychology reinforces that mainstream while attempting to carve a professional niche.

Even in that positive psychology is not unique in proclaiming an attempt to make the lives of all people better, sports psychology, health psychology and educational psychology all attempt to do that.

Identifying and nurturing high talent

From within the mainstream of psychology sports psychology, educational psychology and occupational psychology might all realistically claim that they have been identifying and nurturing high talent.

However, a more pervasive theme, that Positive Psychology joins in with 'psychology as usual' is classification of people. Intelligence tests, personality tests, attitude scales and now character strengths and virtues, are part of the continuing effort by psychology, since the early part of the twentieth century to classify people, and in a Foucaultian twist get people to classify themselves.

Conclusions

Positive psychologists write a history of the discipline in order to position Positive Psychology as something new and radical.  Unfortunately there appears to be nothing new or radical about it. The themes of forming allegiance with the power of the nation state through working with the military has a long history, as does producing classification systems that reflect current concerns. By writing such a poor history of psychology the main thing that it did for me was to make be sceptical of any claims about history and culture that were made subsequently. However, while there have been dissenting and critical voices as far as I can tell most psychologists cannot recognise this as poor history. That perhaps is also an important lesson.

The Templeton Foundation and Positive Psychology

While reading around about Positive Psychology I had noticed that the John Templeton Foundation was one of the listed financial supporters for the research listed on the 2005 paper.

When trying to work out the method adopted in the empirical work to establish the commonalities of the virtues across time I read up a little on Ninian Smart whose work they used as a starting point for deciding on which texts to read I noticed Ninian Smart was due to give a Templeton lecture at the time of his death.

So I decided to see if the John Templeton Foundation published a list of fundees and projects. On the front page I came across this which is interesting.

There some parallels between positive psychology and objectives that the John Templeton Foundation has.

Seligman and Csikszentmihaly claim that one the missions of psychology before WWII was the nuturing of exceptional talent; while there are a few examples of that scattered across the history of psychology I would contest the idea that it has been one of the missions of psychology. It is however one of the aims of the John Templeton Foundation.

The virtues that the foundation support

awe, creativity, curiosity, diligence, entrepreneurialism, forgiveness, future-mindedness, generosity, gratitude, honesty, humility, joy, love, purpose, reliability, and thrift.

Map well onto the character strengths and virtues that positive psychology assert are universal.

All very speculative right now, although Templeton did fund the movement at its beginning.

http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grants/positive-psychology-research

Edited to Add. 12/2/13

Positive psychology character strengths and Templeton virtues

1. Creativity - Creativity
2. Curiosity - Curiosity
3. Open Mindedness - 
4. Love of learning -
5. Perspective - future mindedness
6. Authenticity - honesty
7. Bravery - 
8. Persistence - reliability
9. Zest - Joy
10. Kindness - generosity
11. Love - love
12. Social intelligence
13. Fairness
14. Leadership - entrepreneurialism
15. Teamwork
16. Forgiveness - forgiveness
17. Modesty - humility
18. Prudence - thrift
19. Self regulation diligence
20. Appreciation of beauty and excellence - awe
21. Gratitude - gratitude
22. Hope
23. Humour
24. Religiousness

So the Templeton virtues have been proven by science to be ubiquitous across time and cultures by positive psychology, well that is handy.

Positive Psychology as a form of Cultural Apologetics

This blog post is meant as a summary of the research seminar I am doing on Monday at the University of Gloucestershire. I am imagining that it serves three purposes.

First it will help me get the structure of the talk down. When I lecture and give conference papers I prefer to work without notes, but that does mean I need various strategies to help me.

Second a number of people aren't able to come to the seminar and have expressed regret, so this format will give them an opportunity to see what I had to say.

Finally some might prefer this as a forum for raising arguments and objections rather than doing that face to face.

Positive Psychology as a form of Cultural Apologetics

Positive Psychology is the movement within psychology, whose manifesto was laid out by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000).

As a scientific movement Positive Psychology has three pillars, subjective experience, character strengths and virtues and the creation of positive institutions in society.

In the historical sketch that they give psychology had come to focus too much on dealing with mental health issues and suffering, and had thus lost sight of two missions which they claim the academic discipline had before World War Two, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling and identifying and nurturing high talent.

With positive psychology, they claim, it will be possible to re-discover these historical missions of psychology, and we will be saved from a negative and misanthropic discipline, that views people as victims and only tries to relieve suffering without trying to build talent.

In 1997 writing in his book about how psychological language has been culturally created Kurt Danziger uses the example of motivation. As a term it has a short history,first used in the current psychological sense in 1904, gaining popularity as a term in that sense from the 1920s on. Originally used to mean having some biological need an attempt was made in the 1930s to create a none biological list of human needs. Of this effort, coordinated by Henry Murray in 1938 Danziger says:

Elevating one set of historically contingent conventions to the status of universal human needs not only emphasized their importance for the society in which they originated but provided a rationale for proselytizing efforts elsewhere. (Danziger, 1997 p123).

So the focus of this effort is whether or not the Character Strengths and Virtues identified within Positive Psychology are truly ubiquitous, and are mere descriptions of a universal human nature; or if they are historically contingent conventions. If they are historically contingent conventions then the claims they are universal act as a call for people to act in certain ways, and thus are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Interventions based upon Positive Psychology become about individual change in order to conform with a particular model of humanity, rather than being about helping or inspiring people. The hopes that Peterson and Seligman expressed that the CSV becomes as important to psychology as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual become a little more sinister if the implicit purpose is to turn us all into happy members of the American middle classes who confirm to a 21st Century notion of what is to be human while believing it is the only possible way to be people.

Evidence for Ubiquity

  
Virtues
There are two lines of evidence about the commonality of virtues and character strengths. One is about virtues and based on the questions:

Would the virtue catalogs of early thinkers converge?
Would certain virtues, regardless of tradition or culture, be widely valued?

Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p204)

The second is about character strengths and based on cross national comparisons of people who have filled in the appropriate character strength survey, available from for example Seligman's website.

I will start by showing the results for the literature based empirical work.

Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p204)

Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p207)

There are a variety of textual analysis techniques available, unfortunately the technique used in not explicitly named in the paper and I am not convinced that even if they had used some systematic method to come to a set of results that there would be much point to the exercise.

This is, however what their method consisted of, from the published paper. They chose Smart's (1999) survey of World Philosophies as a starting point. From that they chose the traditions he talks about with the most readily accessible texts. From those texts they chose the ones that including a 'virtue catalog'. Following a review of those texts they came up with their six Virtues, and then went through the texts looking for what was said about that virtue within it, sometimes with the virtue only being apparent at a 'suitable level of abstraction'.

It might be worth saying that Smart asserted it was possible to study empirically some aspects of religions and other world views, these include the ritual, experiential and institutional aspects. With aspects like the doctrinal, mythological and ethical needed participation and dialogue to understand them.

Even if they had attempted a more hermeneutic understanding of their chosen texts I still doubt that it is what they claim it to be. The claim is that this is a description of the virtues, rather than a prescription. It is, at best, a description of prescriptions. 

That is might be someway towards cultural apologetics can be evidenced from the Wiki entry on virtues, which include this paragraph. ^{(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue, accessed 10/2/2012).}

After three years of study, 24 traits (classified into six broad areas of virtue) were identified, having "a surprising amount of similarity across cultures and strongly indicat[ing] a historical and cross-cultural convergence." These six categories of virtue are courage, justice, humanity, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom

 

^{This assertion might be on its way to becoming cultural common sense.}

 <sup>Character Strengths and Cross National Comparisons

As far as I can tell no similar exercise was used to provide a justification for the character strengths. So for claims that these are universal the empirical evidence is based on survey work.



The survey work was initially conducted via the web.  Two of the things they say about this struck me. The statement that the results of these surveys may reveal something universal about human nature. That, while acknowledging that it was a self selecting sample (people with internet access, who are interested enough in 'authentic happiness' to go to the website, register, and fill in one or more scales) the sample was at least as good as a clinical sample or a sample of undergraduates. The statistical tool they used was a correlation of the rank orders of which virtues were highest to lowest.

That statement: "Our results may reveal something about universal human nature" based on an obviously biased sample and inadequate statistics perhaps reveals better than anything else why we should regard Positive Psychology as an explicit attempt at trying to promote one set of culturally contingent beliefs about human nature as if they were universal.

Consequences

In their 'history of psychology' Seligman and co-authors claim that for the second half of the twentieth century psychology has been too focused on mental health, and positive psychology provides the solution to this problem. I doubt that the problem has ever existed. Of course were I, like Seligman, to ignore areas of psychology like occupational and sports psychology I might believe that.
Were I to ignore community psychology, with its attempt to work within comunities to provide a resource of psychological skills and knowledge to people to create positive outcomes I might even be able to delude myself into thinking that positive psychology is something new. It is however stunningly more successful in terms of being media friendly and essentially unchallenging than community psychology. 

There is also the consequence that scientifically literate, philosophically literature  and theologically literature, if they delve into the evidence behind claims for universality might regard psychology with (even) less merit than they did before.

It does however act as a good propogandising tool, and there are already those re-casting their particular interests as 'positive psychology' to try to get some benefit from the brand recognition that positive psychology will give them.</sup>

References


Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language. London: Sage.

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification. Washington, D.C.: APA Press and Oxford University Press.

Seligman, M. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5

Seligman, M. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.5.410