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brdgtIn Music, Others' Tastes May Help Shape Your Own
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, classical or baroque, early Los Lobos or late: Taste in music seems a deeply personal matter, guided by a person's unique internal compass. But two new studies suggest that social considerations influence not only the music people buy but the recordings they call their favorites.
In one experiment, social scientists at Columbia University simulated an online music marketplace that included 14,341 participants recruited from teenage interest Internet sites. The researchers provided half the group with a list of obscure rock songs and encouraged them to listen and download the ones they liked.
The teenagers received no other information and did not know who else was participating. The songs were a sampling from a Web site where many virtually unknown bands post their own music.
By tallying song downloads, the investigators produced a rough rating of the songs' quality.
When the other half of the teenagers browsed the same songs, they saw, alongside the titles, the number of previous downloads for each song by other members of their group. And they tended to download at least some of the songs previously chosen, resulting in a top 25 chart significantly different from that of the original group.
By running several simulations of this experiment, the researchers showed that song popularity was not at all predictable when people could see what their peers were doing. Good quality songs tended to do better than poorer ones, but not always: a song called "Lockdown" by 52Metro ranked first in one simulation and 40th out of 48 in another.
"A small group of people making decisions at the beginning had a large influence" on how the songs were ultimately ranked, said Duncan Watts, who, along with Matthew Salganik and Peter Sheridan Dodds, reported the findings in the journal Science.
With little else to guide their choices, people often look to others for cues; curiosity, perhaps along with an urge to affiliate with the group creates a kind of cascade effect in favor of the songs first chosen, Dr. Watts said.
In another report, to be published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that people used musical taste as social currency, to read others' personalities and to reveal their own. The researchers paired off 60 students who did not know one another and instructed them to get acquainted via Internet bulletin boards over a period of six weeks.
The students could talk about whatever they wanted, and music was by far the most popular topic, outpacing movies and sports and all other topics five of the six weeks.
To help determine how music taste is related to personality, the psychologists then had a group of 74 students compile a list of their top 10 albums or CD's. One young man's list included the Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue," and Sonic Youth's "NYC Ghosts and Flowers," as well as John Coltrane recordings; another student's list was all country albums; a third's was dominated by hip-hop, with Lil' Bow Wow the top selection.
After listening to the top 10 compilations, eight judges — also students — rated their peers on standard personality profiles. These ratings were remarkably accurate, when compared with the psychologists' own profiles of the 74 participants.
"They did significantly better on some measures than people do when they see pictures or short films of strangers" in similar studies, Peter Rentfrow of Cambridge University in England said in a telephone interview. Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas was a co-author.
The top 10 lists were particularly good in revealing the authors' taste for variety, intellectual appetite for abstract ideas and willingness to experiment with alternative points of view, a quality psychologists call openness. And a high volume of lyrics in a person's list seemed to roughly reflect sociability, or extroversion, Dr. Rentfrow said.
The top 10 lists revealed little, however, about people's levels of conscientiousness — how neat, responsible and organized they were. "This makes some sense," Dr. Rentfrow said. "You can tell more about these kinds of qualities by looking at a picture."
Eats Shoots, Leaves and Much of Zoos' Budgets
By BRENDA GOODMAN, The New York Times, February 12, 2006
ATLANTA, Feb. 11 — Lun Lun and Yang Yang have needs. They require an expensive all-vegetarian diet — 84 pounds a day, each. They are attended by a four-person entourage, and both crave privacy. Would-be divas could take notes.
But the real sticker shock comes from the annual fees that Zoo Atlanta must pay the Chinese government, $2 million a year, essentially to rent a pair of giant pandas. Giant pandas are also on loan to zoos in Washington, San Diego and Memphis.
The financial headache caused by the costly loan obligations to China has driven Dennis W. Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, to join with the directors of the three other zoos to negotiate some budgetary breathing room. If no agreement with China can be made, Mr. Kelly said, the zoos may have to return their star attractions.
"If we can't renegotiate, they absolutely will go back," Mr. Kelly said. "Unless there are significant renegotiations, you'll see far fewer pandas in the United States at the end of this current agreement."
The San Diego Zoo's contract with China is the first to expire, in 2008. The last contract, at the Memphis Zoo, ends in 2013.
Mr. Kelly says Lun Lun and Yang Yang, Zoo Atlanta's giant pandas, are draining the zoo's coffers far faster than they can be replenished — even though visitors flock to see them. And when people cannot make it through the gates, self-described pandaholics blog with doe-eyed ardor about the bears or stay glued to the zoos' panda Web cams.
Giant pandas are indisputably popular. Two months ago, the public snapped up 13,000 tickets to see Tai Shan, born at the National Zoo in Washington last July, in just two hours. Later that day the free tickets were being traded on eBay for as much as $200 each.
"People will get up in the middle of the night to see the pandas," said Don Lindburg, head of the office of giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo. "I don't think there is a comparable animal. There isn't the enormity of response that you find with pandas."
But after the first year, crowds dwindle, while the expenses remain high. In fact, a panda's upkeep costs five times more than that of the next most expensive animal, an elephant.
A curator, three full-time keepers and one backup keeper care for Lun Lun and Yang Yang at Zoo Atlanta. A crew of six travels around Georgia six days a week, harvesting bamboo from 400 volunteers who grow it in their backyards. (Zoo Atlanta tried growing its own on a farm, as the Memphis Zoo does, but Lun Lun and Yang Yang turned up their noses.)
"It's crazy," Mr. Kelly said. "These bears, year-round, are some of the most pampered animals on the planet. We measure everything that goes in. We measure everything that goes out."
Then there are the contracts, most lasting 10 years. Because China retains ownership of the pandas, zoos lease each pair for $1 million a year. If cubs are born, the annual fee increases by an average of $600,000. In addition, each zoo has agreed to pay another million or so each year to finance research and conservation projects in the United States and in China. Taken together, Mr. Kelly says, the contracts are worth more than $80 million to the Chinese government.
Mr. Kelly said he hoped China would consider the request to reduce the fees because most other countries pay far less for their pandas. Australia and Thailand, he said, pay about $300,000 each year for theirs. So far, China seems amenable to considering it, he said. Chinese officials did not respond to requests for comment.
"There's a perception in China that U.S. zoos are very rich because when they come over, the zoos are beautiful," said Chuck Brady, the chief executive of the Memphis Zoo.
Zoos say they can break even on pandas, but only for the first few years.
"Year three is your break-even year," Mr. Brady said. The Memphis Zoo expects to lose about $300,000 per year on the pandas it leased in 2003. "After that, attendance drops off, and you start losing vast amounts of money. There is a resurgence in attendance when babies are born."
Because they have had cubs born, the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo have fared better financially than Zoo Atlanta and the Memphis Zoo, which still have not had luck with their breeding programs.
"The general feeling on the American side is that when the initial negotiations were done 10 years ago, we had very little information on the impact of pandas on zoos," Mr. Brady said. "Now we're stuck with this template."
Apart from foot traffic, pandas also inspire valuable, enthusiastic corporate sponsorships. FedEx, for example, flew Ya Ya and Le Le, the pandas at the Memphis Zoo, to the United States from China in a decorated "Panda Express" plane. The public was able to track the flight on a designated FedEx Web site.
Fujifilm, Home Depot, UPS and others have donated millions to be sponsors of panda exhibits at zoos, hoping to solidify business relationships with China, which regards the animal as a national symbol.
Mr. Kelly said he expected the negotiations to progress slowly.
"They are listening. They are open. They have not responded to anything other than to say that the items that we put on the table are open to discussion," Mr. Kelly said. "They have indicated they think the zoos need to honor their current agreements before we make changes."
In the zoos' favor is that the lease program has generated important reproductive successes for a species that is critically endangered, said David L. Towne, director of the Giant Panda Conservation Foundation. Only 1,500 giant pandas are believed to be left in the wild.
For now, though, zoos with pandas do not inspire the envy they once did. "It was like having a World Series winner in your town," said Mr. Towne, who lives in Seattle. But now, he said, based purely on economics, "I've told my mayor and everyone else that the last thing we want is pandas."
More and More, Favored Psychotherapy Lets Bygones Be Bygones
By ALIX SPIEGEL, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present.
Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief.
But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing.
Despite this profound change, the cliché of patients' exhaustively revisiting childhood horror stories remains.
"Average consumers who walk into psychotherapy expect to be discussing their childhood and blaming their parents for contemporary problems, but that's just not true any more," said John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
Professor Norcross has surveyed American psychologists in an effort to figure out what is going on behind their closed doors.
Over the last 20 years, he has documented a radical shift. Psychotherapeutic techniques like psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, which deal with emotional conflict and are based on the idea that the exploration of past trauma is critical to healing, have been totally eclipsed by cognitive behavioral approaches.
That relatively new school holds that reviewing the past is not only unnecessary to healing, but can be counterproductive.
Professor Norcross says he believes that cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely practiced approach in America.
The method, known as C.B.T., was introduced in the late 1960's by Dr. Aaron T. Beck. The underlying theory says it is not important for patients to return to the origins of their problems, but instead to correct their current "cognitive distortions," errors in perception that lead them to the conclusion that life is hopeless or that everyday activity is unmanageable.
For example, when confronted with severely depressed patients, cognitive behavioral therapists will not ask about childhoods, but will work with them to identify the corrosive underlying assumptions that frame their psychic reality and lead them to feel bad about themselves. Then, systematically, patients learn to retrain their thinking.
The therapy dwells exclusively in the present. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, it does not typically require a long course of treatment, usually 10 to 15 sessions.
When cognitive therapy was introduced, it met significant resistance to the notion that people could be cured without understanding the sources of the problems. Many therapists said that without working through the underlying problems change would be superficial and that the basic problems would simply express themselves in other ways.
Cognitive advocates convinced colleagues by using a tool that had not been systematically used in mental health, randomized controlled clinical trials.
Although randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific research, for most of the 20th century such research was not used to test the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic methods, in part because psychoanalysis, at the time the most popular form of talk therapy, was actively hostile to empirical validation. When research was conducted, it was generally as surveys rather than as randomized studies.
Cognitive behavioral researchers carried out hundreds of studies, and that research eventually convinced the two most important mental health gatekeepers — universities and insurance companies. Now the transformation is more or less complete.
"There's been a total changing of the guard in psychology and psychiatry departments," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychodynamically oriented therapist who teaches at Emory University. "Virtually no psychodynamic faculty are ever hired anymore. I can name maybe two in the last 10 years."
Insurance companies likewise often prefer consumers to select cognitive behavioral therapists, rather than psychodynamically oriented practitioners. In the companies' view, scientific studies have shown that cognitive therapy can produce results in less than half the time of traditional therapies.
But is it really the case that understanding the past is not necessary to healing? Could thousands of people have saved time and money by skipping over conversations about parents and cutting straight to retraining their thoughts and behaviors?
Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said reviewing the past could be therapeutically important because it could help patients construct narratives of cause and effect.
He pointed to cases of panic disorder. Many people have panic attacks, but a small percentage develop full-blown panic disorder, he said. Those who do not can usually find a rational explanation for their disturbing experience.
"They say, 'That's because I am about to take a midterm exam or I had too much coffee this morning,' explanations that de-catastrophize the bodily symptoms," Professor McNally said.
The rationalizations are effective, he said, even when the explanation is not correct. Merely asserting a logical sequence of cause and effect lets people feel that they have some control, that they are not victims of unexplained forces.
In the same way, people who experience depression can benefit from an explanation for their feelings, an interpretation that allows them to feel that they are able, based on their understanding of the cause, to predict and control their emotions. This is a function of therapies that focus on the past, Professor McNally said.
"Detailed narratives about the past can be assumed under a larger rubric of trying to find meaning or trying to impose order, and thereby controlling one's world and experience," he said. "People say, 'At least I know why I'm unhappy in life.' "
New research suggests that psychodynamic therapy exploring the past can be as effective as cognitive work. In the last three years, psychodynamic therapists have started to subject their approach to same vigorous research as that used for cognitive therapy. The studies show similarly good results.
The basic assertion that it is not absolutely necessary to review the past is now generally accepted. Even Professor Norcross, who says he regularly guides patients to the past when it is warranted, acknowledges that the data are not entirely solid.
"At the moment," he said, "there is no evidence that understanding the origins of your problems is necessary for effective psychotherapy. And there is some evidence that a preoccupation with the past can actually interfere with making changes in the present.
"Obsessive rumination about past events can trap patients in a self-defeating cycle from which they cannot extricate themselves. It can actually retard healing."
News Analysis: Maybe You're Not What You Eat
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet.
The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has exerted a strong pull throughout history. And its appeal continues to this day, medical historians and researchers say.
"It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University.
"It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself," he said. "Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. If not, you get healthy."
That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.
The report, from a huge federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health.
The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of the two cancers or heart disease. But there were limitations to the findings: the women assigned to the low-fat diet, despite extensive and expensive counseling, never reached their goal of eating 20 percent fat in the first year —only 31 percent of them got their dietary fat that low. And the study did not examine the effects of different types of fat — a fact that critics say is a weakness at a time when doctors are advising heart patients to reduce saturated fat in the diet, not overall fats.
The researchers also found a slight suggestion that low fat might make a difference in breast cancer but the results were not statistically significant, meaning they may have occurred by chance.
Still the study's results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts.
For example, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French 19th-century food writer, insisted that the secret to good health was to avoid carbohydrates. Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer, also knew the response his advice would provoke.
" 'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'oh Heavens above!" he wrote in his 1825 book, "The Physiology of Taste." "But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes and those cookies, and a hundred things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs!"
Brillat-Savarin continued, "He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?
" 'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease."
The Frenchman's recipe for good health was only one of many to come. A decade later, the Rev. Sylvester Graham exhorted Americans to eat simple foods like grains and vegetables and to drink water.
Beef and pork, salt and pepper, spices, tea and coffee, alcohol, he advised, all lead to gluttony. Bread should be unleavened, and made with bran to avoid the problem of yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol, he continued. It is also important, he said, to seek out fresh organic fruits and vegetables, grown in soil without fertilizers.
The reward for living right, Graham promised, would be perfect health.
A few decades later came Horace Fletcher, a wealthy American businessman who invented his diet in 1889. He was 40 and in despair: he was fat, his health was failing, he was always tired and he had indigestion. He felt, he said, like "a thing fit but to be thrown on the scrap-heap."
But Fletcher found a method that, he wrote, saved his life: eat only when you are hungry; eat only those foods that your appetite is craving; stop when you are no longer hungry and, the dictum for which he was most famous, chew every morsel of food until there is no more taste to be extracted from it.
Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator, and his followers recited and followed his instructions to chew their food 100 times a minute. Liquids, too, had to be chewed, he insisted. He promised that "Fletcherizing," as it became known, would turn "a pitiable glutton into an intelligent epicurean."
Along with the endless chewing, Fletcher and his supporters also advocated a low-protein diet as a means to health and well-being.
But by 1919, when Fletcher, 68, died of a heart attack, his diet plan was on its way out, supplanted by the next new thing: counting calories. Its champions were two Yale professors, Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, who wrote the best-selling book "How to Live."
"Constant vigilance is necessary, yet it is worthwhile when one considers the inconvenience as well as the menace of obesity," Fisher and Fisk advised their readers.
More recently, of course, the preferred diet, at least for cancer prevention, has been to eat foods low in fat. And that was what led to the Women's Health Initiative, a study financed by the National Institutes of Health comparing low fat to regular diets.
Eight years later, the women who reduced dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease as those whose diets were unchanged.
They also weighed about the same and had no difference in diabetes rates, or in levels of insulin or blood sugar.
It made sense to try the low-fat diet for cancer prevention, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, the director of the Women's Health Initiative.
"In the mid- to late 1980's, there was a body of literature that was suggestive that diet might impact the incidence of breast cancer and colorectal cancer," Dr. Nabel said.
For example, studies found that women acquired a higher risk of those cancers if they moved to the United States from countries where incidence of the cancers was low and where diets were low in fat.
And there were animal studies indicating that a high-fat diet could lead to more mammary cancer.
But intriguing as those observations were, there was no direct, rigorous evidence that a low-fat diet was protective.
The Women's Health Initiative study would be the first rigorous test to see if it was. The study investigators decided to follow heart disease rates, as well.
"Think of it," said Dr. Joan McGowan, an osteoporosis expert who is also a project officer for the Women's Health Initiative. "Here was a hypothesis that just a better diet could prevent breast cancer. How attractive was that?"
In the meantime, the notion that fat was bad and that low-fat diets could protect against disease took hold, with scientists promoting it and much of the public believing it. And a low-fat food industry grew apace.
In 2005, according to the NPD Group, which tracks food trends, 75 percent of Americans said they substituted a low-fat or no-fat food for a higher-fat one once a week or more.
So last week, when the study's results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that the low-fat diets had no effect, the study investigators braced themselves for attacks.
Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, said the researchers knew that some critics would say the women did not reduce the fat in their diets nearly enough. Perhaps a lower-fat diet would have offered some protection against cancer, Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, "what we achieved is probably what was achievable."
Other critics said that the study made a mistake in even aiming for 20 percent of calories as fat. Dietary fat should be even lower, they said, as low as 10 percent.
But Dr. Rossouw said this was unrealistic, because try as they might, people are not able to change their eating habits that much.
"You can't do that," he said. "Forget it. It's impossible."
Critics now are telling the investigators that the study was useless because it focused on total fat in the diet, rather than on saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels. If the women had focused instead on getting rid of fats like butter, had substituted fats like olive oil and had eaten more fruits and grains, then the study might have shown that the proper diet reduces heart disease risk, they claim.
"Lifestyle goes beyond a modest difference in saturated fat," said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, president of the American Heart Association.
Dr. Rossouw responded, "They're telling us that we chose the wrong kind of fat and that we just didn't know."
But, he said: "We're not stupid. We knew all that stuff."
The investigators, he said, had long debates about whether to ask the women to reduce total fat or just saturated fat.
In the end, they decided to go with total fat because the study was primarily a cancer study and the cancer data were for total fat.
If the women had reduced just their saturated fat, their dietary fat content would probably have been even higher, fueling the critics. And, he said, some animal data indicate that polyunsaturated fat may even increase cancer risk.
"We looked at all possible scenarios," Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, given the study's disappointing findings, he was not surprised by the critics' responses.
Not everyone is attacking the study. Many scientists applaud its findings and say it is about time that some cherished dietary notions are put to a rigorous test. And some nonscientists are shocked by the reactions of the study's critics.
"Whatever is happening to evidence-based treatment?" Dr. Arthur Yeager, a retired dentist in Edison, N.J., wrote in an e-mail message. "When the facts contravene conventional wisdom, go with the anecdotes?"
The problem, some medical scientists said, is that many people — researchers included — get so wedded to their beliefs about diet and disease that they will not accept rigorous evidence that contradicts it.
"Now it's almost a political sort of thing," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University. "We're all supposed to be lean and eat certain things."
And so the notion of a healthful diet, he said, has become more than just a question for scientific inquiry.
"It is woven into cultural notions of ourselves and our behavior," he said. "This is the burden you get going into a discussion, and this is why we get so shocked by this evidence."
The truth, said Dr. David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that while the Western diet and lifestyle are clearly important risk factors for chronic disease, tweaking diet in one way or another — a bit less fat or a few more vegetables — may not, based on studies like the Women's Health Initiative, have major effects on health. "We should limit strong advice to where randomized trials have proven a benefit of lifestyle modification," Dr. Altshuler wrote in an e-mail message.
Still, he said, he understands the appeal of dietary prescriptions.
The promise of achieving better health through diet can be so alluring that even scientists and statisticians who know all about clinical trial data say they sometimes find themselves suspending disbelief when it comes to diet and disease.
"I fall for it, too," says Brad Efron, a Stanford statistician. "I really don't believe in the low-fat thing, but I find myself doing it anyway."
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, classical or baroque, early Los Lobos or late: Taste in music seems a deeply personal matter, guided by a person's unique internal compass. But two new studies suggest that social considerations influence not only the music people buy but the recordings they call their favorites.
In one experiment, social scientists at Columbia University simulated an online music marketplace that included 14,341 participants recruited from teenage interest Internet sites. The researchers provided half the group with a list of obscure rock songs and encouraged them to listen and download the ones they liked.
The teenagers received no other information and did not know who else was participating. The songs were a sampling from a Web site where many virtually unknown bands post their own music.
By tallying song downloads, the investigators produced a rough rating of the songs' quality.
When the other half of the teenagers browsed the same songs, they saw, alongside the titles, the number of previous downloads for each song by other members of their group. And they tended to download at least some of the songs previously chosen, resulting in a top 25 chart significantly different from that of the original group.
By running several simulations of this experiment, the researchers showed that song popularity was not at all predictable when people could see what their peers were doing. Good quality songs tended to do better than poorer ones, but not always: a song called "Lockdown" by 52Metro ranked first in one simulation and 40th out of 48 in another.
"A small group of people making decisions at the beginning had a large influence" on how the songs were ultimately ranked, said Duncan Watts, who, along with Matthew Salganik and Peter Sheridan Dodds, reported the findings in the journal Science.
With little else to guide their choices, people often look to others for cues; curiosity, perhaps along with an urge to affiliate with the group creates a kind of cascade effect in favor of the songs first chosen, Dr. Watts said.
In another report, to be published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that people used musical taste as social currency, to read others' personalities and to reveal their own. The researchers paired off 60 students who did not know one another and instructed them to get acquainted via Internet bulletin boards over a period of six weeks.
The students could talk about whatever they wanted, and music was by far the most popular topic, outpacing movies and sports and all other topics five of the six weeks.
To help determine how music taste is related to personality, the psychologists then had a group of 74 students compile a list of their top 10 albums or CD's. One young man's list included the Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue," and Sonic Youth's "NYC Ghosts and Flowers," as well as John Coltrane recordings; another student's list was all country albums; a third's was dominated by hip-hop, with Lil' Bow Wow the top selection.
After listening to the top 10 compilations, eight judges — also students — rated their peers on standard personality profiles. These ratings were remarkably accurate, when compared with the psychologists' own profiles of the 74 participants.
"They did significantly better on some measures than people do when they see pictures or short films of strangers" in similar studies, Peter Rentfrow of Cambridge University in England said in a telephone interview. Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas was a co-author.
The top 10 lists were particularly good in revealing the authors' taste for variety, intellectual appetite for abstract ideas and willingness to experiment with alternative points of view, a quality psychologists call openness. And a high volume of lyrics in a person's list seemed to roughly reflect sociability, or extroversion, Dr. Rentfrow said.
The top 10 lists revealed little, however, about people's levels of conscientiousness — how neat, responsible and organized they were. "This makes some sense," Dr. Rentfrow said. "You can tell more about these kinds of qualities by looking at a picture."
Eats Shoots, Leaves and Much of Zoos' Budgets
By BRENDA GOODMAN, The New York Times, February 12, 2006
ATLANTA, Feb. 11 — Lun Lun and Yang Yang have needs. They require an expensive all-vegetarian diet — 84 pounds a day, each. They are attended by a four-person entourage, and both crave privacy. Would-be divas could take notes.
But the real sticker shock comes from the annual fees that Zoo Atlanta must pay the Chinese government, $2 million a year, essentially to rent a pair of giant pandas. Giant pandas are also on loan to zoos in Washington, San Diego and Memphis.
The financial headache caused by the costly loan obligations to China has driven Dennis W. Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, to join with the directors of the three other zoos to negotiate some budgetary breathing room. If no agreement with China can be made, Mr. Kelly said, the zoos may have to return their star attractions.
"If we can't renegotiate, they absolutely will go back," Mr. Kelly said. "Unless there are significant renegotiations, you'll see far fewer pandas in the United States at the end of this current agreement."
The San Diego Zoo's contract with China is the first to expire, in 2008. The last contract, at the Memphis Zoo, ends in 2013.
Mr. Kelly says Lun Lun and Yang Yang, Zoo Atlanta's giant pandas, are draining the zoo's coffers far faster than they can be replenished — even though visitors flock to see them. And when people cannot make it through the gates, self-described pandaholics blog with doe-eyed ardor about the bears or stay glued to the zoos' panda Web cams.
Giant pandas are indisputably popular. Two months ago, the public snapped up 13,000 tickets to see Tai Shan, born at the National Zoo in Washington last July, in just two hours. Later that day the free tickets were being traded on eBay for as much as $200 each.
"People will get up in the middle of the night to see the pandas," said Don Lindburg, head of the office of giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo. "I don't think there is a comparable animal. There isn't the enormity of response that you find with pandas."
But after the first year, crowds dwindle, while the expenses remain high. In fact, a panda's upkeep costs five times more than that of the next most expensive animal, an elephant.
A curator, three full-time keepers and one backup keeper care for Lun Lun and Yang Yang at Zoo Atlanta. A crew of six travels around Georgia six days a week, harvesting bamboo from 400 volunteers who grow it in their backyards. (Zoo Atlanta tried growing its own on a farm, as the Memphis Zoo does, but Lun Lun and Yang Yang turned up their noses.)
"It's crazy," Mr. Kelly said. "These bears, year-round, are some of the most pampered animals on the planet. We measure everything that goes in. We measure everything that goes out."
Then there are the contracts, most lasting 10 years. Because China retains ownership of the pandas, zoos lease each pair for $1 million a year. If cubs are born, the annual fee increases by an average of $600,000. In addition, each zoo has agreed to pay another million or so each year to finance research and conservation projects in the United States and in China. Taken together, Mr. Kelly says, the contracts are worth more than $80 million to the Chinese government.
Mr. Kelly said he hoped China would consider the request to reduce the fees because most other countries pay far less for their pandas. Australia and Thailand, he said, pay about $300,000 each year for theirs. So far, China seems amenable to considering it, he said. Chinese officials did not respond to requests for comment.
"There's a perception in China that U.S. zoos are very rich because when they come over, the zoos are beautiful," said Chuck Brady, the chief executive of the Memphis Zoo.
Zoos say they can break even on pandas, but only for the first few years.
"Year three is your break-even year," Mr. Brady said. The Memphis Zoo expects to lose about $300,000 per year on the pandas it leased in 2003. "After that, attendance drops off, and you start losing vast amounts of money. There is a resurgence in attendance when babies are born."
Because they have had cubs born, the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo have fared better financially than Zoo Atlanta and the Memphis Zoo, which still have not had luck with their breeding programs.
"The general feeling on the American side is that when the initial negotiations were done 10 years ago, we had very little information on the impact of pandas on zoos," Mr. Brady said. "Now we're stuck with this template."
Apart from foot traffic, pandas also inspire valuable, enthusiastic corporate sponsorships. FedEx, for example, flew Ya Ya and Le Le, the pandas at the Memphis Zoo, to the United States from China in a decorated "Panda Express" plane. The public was able to track the flight on a designated FedEx Web site.
Fujifilm, Home Depot, UPS and others have donated millions to be sponsors of panda exhibits at zoos, hoping to solidify business relationships with China, which regards the animal as a national symbol.
Mr. Kelly said he expected the negotiations to progress slowly.
"They are listening. They are open. They have not responded to anything other than to say that the items that we put on the table are open to discussion," Mr. Kelly said. "They have indicated they think the zoos need to honor their current agreements before we make changes."
In the zoos' favor is that the lease program has generated important reproductive successes for a species that is critically endangered, said David L. Towne, director of the Giant Panda Conservation Foundation. Only 1,500 giant pandas are believed to be left in the wild.
For now, though, zoos with pandas do not inspire the envy they once did. "It was like having a World Series winner in your town," said Mr. Towne, who lives in Seattle. But now, he said, based purely on economics, "I've told my mayor and everyone else that the last thing we want is pandas."
More and More, Favored Psychotherapy Lets Bygones Be Bygones
By ALIX SPIEGEL, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present.
Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief.
But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing.
Despite this profound change, the cliché of patients' exhaustively revisiting childhood horror stories remains.
"Average consumers who walk into psychotherapy expect to be discussing their childhood and blaming their parents for contemporary problems, but that's just not true any more," said John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
Professor Norcross has surveyed American psychologists in an effort to figure out what is going on behind their closed doors.
Over the last 20 years, he has documented a radical shift. Psychotherapeutic techniques like psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, which deal with emotional conflict and are based on the idea that the exploration of past trauma is critical to healing, have been totally eclipsed by cognitive behavioral approaches.
That relatively new school holds that reviewing the past is not only unnecessary to healing, but can be counterproductive.
Professor Norcross says he believes that cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely practiced approach in America.
The method, known as C.B.T., was introduced in the late 1960's by Dr. Aaron T. Beck. The underlying theory says it is not important for patients to return to the origins of their problems, but instead to correct their current "cognitive distortions," errors in perception that lead them to the conclusion that life is hopeless or that everyday activity is unmanageable.
For example, when confronted with severely depressed patients, cognitive behavioral therapists will not ask about childhoods, but will work with them to identify the corrosive underlying assumptions that frame their psychic reality and lead them to feel bad about themselves. Then, systematically, patients learn to retrain their thinking.
The therapy dwells exclusively in the present. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, it does not typically require a long course of treatment, usually 10 to 15 sessions.
When cognitive therapy was introduced, it met significant resistance to the notion that people could be cured without understanding the sources of the problems. Many therapists said that without working through the underlying problems change would be superficial and that the basic problems would simply express themselves in other ways.
Cognitive advocates convinced colleagues by using a tool that had not been systematically used in mental health, randomized controlled clinical trials.
Although randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific research, for most of the 20th century such research was not used to test the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic methods, in part because psychoanalysis, at the time the most popular form of talk therapy, was actively hostile to empirical validation. When research was conducted, it was generally as surveys rather than as randomized studies.
Cognitive behavioral researchers carried out hundreds of studies, and that research eventually convinced the two most important mental health gatekeepers — universities and insurance companies. Now the transformation is more or less complete.
"There's been a total changing of the guard in psychology and psychiatry departments," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychodynamically oriented therapist who teaches at Emory University. "Virtually no psychodynamic faculty are ever hired anymore. I can name maybe two in the last 10 years."
Insurance companies likewise often prefer consumers to select cognitive behavioral therapists, rather than psychodynamically oriented practitioners. In the companies' view, scientific studies have shown that cognitive therapy can produce results in less than half the time of traditional therapies.
But is it really the case that understanding the past is not necessary to healing? Could thousands of people have saved time and money by skipping over conversations about parents and cutting straight to retraining their thoughts and behaviors?
Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said reviewing the past could be therapeutically important because it could help patients construct narratives of cause and effect.
He pointed to cases of panic disorder. Many people have panic attacks, but a small percentage develop full-blown panic disorder, he said. Those who do not can usually find a rational explanation for their disturbing experience.
"They say, 'That's because I am about to take a midterm exam or I had too much coffee this morning,' explanations that de-catastrophize the bodily symptoms," Professor McNally said.
The rationalizations are effective, he said, even when the explanation is not correct. Merely asserting a logical sequence of cause and effect lets people feel that they have some control, that they are not victims of unexplained forces.
In the same way, people who experience depression can benefit from an explanation for their feelings, an interpretation that allows them to feel that they are able, based on their understanding of the cause, to predict and control their emotions. This is a function of therapies that focus on the past, Professor McNally said.
"Detailed narratives about the past can be assumed under a larger rubric of trying to find meaning or trying to impose order, and thereby controlling one's world and experience," he said. "People say, 'At least I know why I'm unhappy in life.' "
New research suggests that psychodynamic therapy exploring the past can be as effective as cognitive work. In the last three years, psychodynamic therapists have started to subject their approach to same vigorous research as that used for cognitive therapy. The studies show similarly good results.
The basic assertion that it is not absolutely necessary to review the past is now generally accepted. Even Professor Norcross, who says he regularly guides patients to the past when it is warranted, acknowledges that the data are not entirely solid.
"At the moment," he said, "there is no evidence that understanding the origins of your problems is necessary for effective psychotherapy. And there is some evidence that a preoccupation with the past can actually interfere with making changes in the present.
"Obsessive rumination about past events can trap patients in a self-defeating cycle from which they cannot extricate themselves. It can actually retard healing."
News Analysis: Maybe You're Not What You Eat
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, February 14, 2006
In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet.
The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has exerted a strong pull throughout history. And its appeal continues to this day, medical historians and researchers say.
"It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University.
"It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself," he said. "Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. If not, you get healthy."
That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.
The report, from a huge federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health.
The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of the two cancers or heart disease. But there were limitations to the findings: the women assigned to the low-fat diet, despite extensive and expensive counseling, never reached their goal of eating 20 percent fat in the first year —only 31 percent of them got their dietary fat that low. And the study did not examine the effects of different types of fat — a fact that critics say is a weakness at a time when doctors are advising heart patients to reduce saturated fat in the diet, not overall fats.
The researchers also found a slight suggestion that low fat might make a difference in breast cancer but the results were not statistically significant, meaning they may have occurred by chance.
Still the study's results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts.
For example, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French 19th-century food writer, insisted that the secret to good health was to avoid carbohydrates. Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer, also knew the response his advice would provoke.
" 'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'oh Heavens above!" he wrote in his 1825 book, "The Physiology of Taste." "But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes and those cookies, and a hundred things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs!"
Brillat-Savarin continued, "He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?
" 'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease."
The Frenchman's recipe for good health was only one of many to come. A decade later, the Rev. Sylvester Graham exhorted Americans to eat simple foods like grains and vegetables and to drink water.
Beef and pork, salt and pepper, spices, tea and coffee, alcohol, he advised, all lead to gluttony. Bread should be unleavened, and made with bran to avoid the problem of yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol, he continued. It is also important, he said, to seek out fresh organic fruits and vegetables, grown in soil without fertilizers.
The reward for living right, Graham promised, would be perfect health.
A few decades later came Horace Fletcher, a wealthy American businessman who invented his diet in 1889. He was 40 and in despair: he was fat, his health was failing, he was always tired and he had indigestion. He felt, he said, like "a thing fit but to be thrown on the scrap-heap."
But Fletcher found a method that, he wrote, saved his life: eat only when you are hungry; eat only those foods that your appetite is craving; stop when you are no longer hungry and, the dictum for which he was most famous, chew every morsel of food until there is no more taste to be extracted from it.
Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator, and his followers recited and followed his instructions to chew their food 100 times a minute. Liquids, too, had to be chewed, he insisted. He promised that "Fletcherizing," as it became known, would turn "a pitiable glutton into an intelligent epicurean."
Along with the endless chewing, Fletcher and his supporters also advocated a low-protein diet as a means to health and well-being.
But by 1919, when Fletcher, 68, died of a heart attack, his diet plan was on its way out, supplanted by the next new thing: counting calories. Its champions were two Yale professors, Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, who wrote the best-selling book "How to Live."
"Constant vigilance is necessary, yet it is worthwhile when one considers the inconvenience as well as the menace of obesity," Fisher and Fisk advised their readers.
More recently, of course, the preferred diet, at least for cancer prevention, has been to eat foods low in fat. And that was what led to the Women's Health Initiative, a study financed by the National Institutes of Health comparing low fat to regular diets.
Eight years later, the women who reduced dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease as those whose diets were unchanged.
They also weighed about the same and had no difference in diabetes rates, or in levels of insulin or blood sugar.
It made sense to try the low-fat diet for cancer prevention, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, the director of the Women's Health Initiative.
"In the mid- to late 1980's, there was a body of literature that was suggestive that diet might impact the incidence of breast cancer and colorectal cancer," Dr. Nabel said.
For example, studies found that women acquired a higher risk of those cancers if they moved to the United States from countries where incidence of the cancers was low and where diets were low in fat.
And there were animal studies indicating that a high-fat diet could lead to more mammary cancer.
But intriguing as those observations were, there was no direct, rigorous evidence that a low-fat diet was protective.
The Women's Health Initiative study would be the first rigorous test to see if it was. The study investigators decided to follow heart disease rates, as well.
"Think of it," said Dr. Joan McGowan, an osteoporosis expert who is also a project officer for the Women's Health Initiative. "Here was a hypothesis that just a better diet could prevent breast cancer. How attractive was that?"
In the meantime, the notion that fat was bad and that low-fat diets could protect against disease took hold, with scientists promoting it and much of the public believing it. And a low-fat food industry grew apace.
In 2005, according to the NPD Group, which tracks food trends, 75 percent of Americans said they substituted a low-fat or no-fat food for a higher-fat one once a week or more.
So last week, when the study's results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that the low-fat diets had no effect, the study investigators braced themselves for attacks.
Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, said the researchers knew that some critics would say the women did not reduce the fat in their diets nearly enough. Perhaps a lower-fat diet would have offered some protection against cancer, Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, "what we achieved is probably what was achievable."
Other critics said that the study made a mistake in even aiming for 20 percent of calories as fat. Dietary fat should be even lower, they said, as low as 10 percent.
But Dr. Rossouw said this was unrealistic, because try as they might, people are not able to change their eating habits that much.
"You can't do that," he said. "Forget it. It's impossible."
Critics now are telling the investigators that the study was useless because it focused on total fat in the diet, rather than on saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels. If the women had focused instead on getting rid of fats like butter, had substituted fats like olive oil and had eaten more fruits and grains, then the study might have shown that the proper diet reduces heart disease risk, they claim.
"Lifestyle goes beyond a modest difference in saturated fat," said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, president of the American Heart Association.
Dr. Rossouw responded, "They're telling us that we chose the wrong kind of fat and that we just didn't know."
But, he said: "We're not stupid. We knew all that stuff."
The investigators, he said, had long debates about whether to ask the women to reduce total fat or just saturated fat.
In the end, they decided to go with total fat because the study was primarily a cancer study and the cancer data were for total fat.
If the women had reduced just their saturated fat, their dietary fat content would probably have been even higher, fueling the critics. And, he said, some animal data indicate that polyunsaturated fat may even increase cancer risk.
"We looked at all possible scenarios," Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, given the study's disappointing findings, he was not surprised by the critics' responses.
Not everyone is attacking the study. Many scientists applaud its findings and say it is about time that some cherished dietary notions are put to a rigorous test. And some nonscientists are shocked by the reactions of the study's critics.
"Whatever is happening to evidence-based treatment?" Dr. Arthur Yeager, a retired dentist in Edison, N.J., wrote in an e-mail message. "When the facts contravene conventional wisdom, go with the anecdotes?"
The problem, some medical scientists said, is that many people — researchers included — get so wedded to their beliefs about diet and disease that they will not accept rigorous evidence that contradicts it.
"Now it's almost a political sort of thing," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University. "We're all supposed to be lean and eat certain things."
And so the notion of a healthful diet, he said, has become more than just a question for scientific inquiry.
"It is woven into cultural notions of ourselves and our behavior," he said. "This is the burden you get going into a discussion, and this is why we get so shocked by this evidence."
The truth, said Dr. David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that while the Western diet and lifestyle are clearly important risk factors for chronic disease, tweaking diet in one way or another — a bit less fat or a few more vegetables — may not, based on studies like the Women's Health Initiative, have major effects on health. "We should limit strong advice to where randomized trials have proven a benefit of lifestyle modification," Dr. Altshuler wrote in an e-mail message.
Still, he said, he understands the appeal of dietary prescriptions.
The promise of achieving better health through diet can be so alluring that even scientists and statisticians who know all about clinical trial data say they sometimes find themselves suspending disbelief when it comes to diet and disease.
"I fall for it, too," says Brad Efron, a Stanford statistician. "I really don't believe in the low-fat thing, but I find myself doing it anyway."
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Date: 2006-02-14 03:38 pm (UTC)Well, some of them anyway.
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Date: 2006-02-14 07:53 pm (UTC)