Month: December 2009

Adverts from psychologists in the Personals section of the New York Magazine.

Marriage-Minded Jewish Doctor – Successful. 43-year-old behavioral psychologist and entrepreneur. I’m 5’11”, slim, considered handsome, and have many diversified social and cultural interests. More importantly, others judge me to be warm, sensitive, romantic, altruistic and capable of great love and devotion. I’d love to hear from you if you are a highly educated, emotionally mature woman, interested in a relationship leading to marriage. 9896

Slender, Dark-Haired, Very Pretty – Bright, funny psychologist, young 37, blues and jazz fan, seeks witty, sane, attractive man, 30-45. NYM M182

Your Mother’s Dream: 28, handsome, caring Jewish psychologist. Into Jazz, arts, sports. Seeks and interesting attractive woman. Photo/phone. NYM H108

Dynamic, Attractive Psychologist – Seeks secure Jewish man: 30’s. Be sincere, successful and witty. Enjoy NYC and nature. Bio/photo/phone. NYM S910

Tall, Slender, Attractive – Intelligent Black woman, 36, PhD psychologist, seeks warm, emotionally mature, active, successful, professional man, 30-46. Nationality unimportant. Please send letter, photo, phone. NYM B395

Affectionate, Attractive, Caring – Older NJ psychologist seeks attractive woman for a loving, enduring relationship. Please include photo and phone. NYM B341

Beautiful, Slim Jewish Divorcee – 45, successful female media psychologist with private practice, seeks male with usual demographics – but believes in chemistry above all. 9778

Handsome Psychologist – Sincere, down-to-earth, looking for bright attractive woman, 30-45. Photo. 4338

Very Attractive Single Woman – Psychologist / writer, seeks leftist man who is fit, funny and fortyish. NYM P036

Tanglewood anyone? – Lovely picnic, Boston Symphony… Engaging, cheeky LI psychologist, pretty, trim, 60s, understated, seeks like male. 5209

Woman Psychologist – 37, blond, sexy, great sense of humor, optimistic, love to cook and loves the outdoors, down-to-earth, voracious reader, whimsical. I am looking for a sensitive, sexy, successful, witty, generous, smart, kind man who wants an intimate relationship. If this is you, please send a note. 8477

True Romance – Desired by psychologist 44, 5’7″, brown hair, serious artist – with pretty woman, intelligent, passionate, self-reliant, beautiful eyes, sexy smile, any race or age. Please write. 6806

Sensual-Spirited Psychologist – 40something, 5’5″ brunette seeks handsome, humorous, honest professional with strong Jewish consciousness, family values and love of the arts – for joyful, marriage-minded relationship. 4148

Slim Pretty, Jewish Widow – Psychologist, 48; strong cultural interests, liberal politics. Enjoys country, beach. Intelligent, sensitive, emotionally stable woman seeks make counterpart to share life. Photo?/bio/phone. NYM G404

Attractive Psychologist, Male – 38, warm, funny, smart and successful would like to meet a truly beautiful woman (both inside and outside) under 34. Photo much appreciated. NYM G423

Successful Male, PhD, Psychologist – 41, 5’10”, slim, warm, caring, sensitive, health conscious, non-smoker, Jewish (not religious). Seeks vivacious, tender, professionally accomplished woman with depth and emotional resources open to becoming best friend/lover/wife. NYM V320

Pretty School Psychologist – Caring, slim, Jewish woman, 36, with zest for the outdoors, seeks thoughtful, active, attractive, professional man, 35-45, for long-term. Note/photo please. 8624

“How But In Custom – And in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” Jewish psychologist, 36, bright, verbal, attractive, a lover of Yeats, seeks man with romantic heart and high values. NYM K142

Send No Photo – Warm, loving, attractive, sexy psychologist, mother, 47, seeks professional man, 45-58, who values honesty, closeness, simple pleasures. Appreciate meaningful reply. NYM R372

The New York Times has an sensitive and in-depth article about the difficult decision to administer strong sedative drugs to terminally ill patients to ease their suffering at the expensive of potentially quickening their death.

It is, in all but one respect, a very good article, however it does contain a monumentally stupid paragraph:

For pain, the guidelines list opioid drugs, including morphine, methadone and fentanyl.

Doctors say that other drugs used for sedation are ketamine, an anesthetic and sedative popular at rave parties, and propofol, an anesthetic, which was ruled, with lorazepam, to have caused Michael Jackson’s death. In very high doses, sodium thiopental is used as a sedative in the three-drug combination used for lethal injections.

You could link almost any drug (or indeed, any substance – table salt – for example) to some nefarious use or lethal outcome. In fact, some of the most demonised street drugs – heroin and cocaine – have common and legitimate medical uses.

Medicine is always a case of balancing the positive and negatives of any treatment for the benefit of the patient. Context-less examples tell us nothing about this balance.

Other than that, the article is very good and really gets to the core of why end-of-life sedation is such as difficult topic, both emotionally and medically.

Link to NYT article ‘Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation’.

The Boston Globe covers an interesting new study finding, seemingly paradoxically, that loneliness can be spread from person-to-person and can work its way through social networks.

The paradox is resolved by the important point, outlined by one of the study’s authors, John Cacioppo, that ‚ÄúLoneliness isn‚Äôt being alone, it‚Äôs feeling alone”. In other words, it’s not about having social contact but about feeling like you have meaningful relationships.

This feeling, it turns out, was increased or was more likely to occur when one person had contact with a person who already reported themselves to be feeling lonely.

The paper Cacioppo co-wrote with Christakis and Fowler, published in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that having a friend who reports feeling lonely makes a person 52 percent more likely to feel lonely. In another measure, they found that, for each additional day per week a person reported feeling lonely, his friends reported an additional lonely day per month. Not only that, having a friend who has a friend who feels lonely makes a person 25 percent more likely to feel lonely, and at three degrees of separation (a friend of a friend of a friend) the odds are still increased by 15 percent…

The spread of loneliness seems to have its own particular characteristics. Women, for example, seem to be more susceptible than men. Also, the more lonely people a person knows, the more likely she herself is to become lonely. That trait distinguishes loneliness from something like alcoholism: Having an alcoholic friend increases your odds of becoming an alcoholic, but having three alcoholic friends makes you no more likely than having just one…

Distance also seems to matter to the spread of loneliness. The authors found that living close to a lonely friend was more likely to make their loneliness contagious Рif the friends lived more than a mile apart there was no significant effect. This was in contrast to obesity, which, Christakis and Fowler have found, doesn’t require physical proximity to spread. In other work, the two have found that an obese friend who lives in the next state can still make you more likely to gain weight.

Not mentioned by the Globe article was the interesting finding that loneliness spreads most strongly through mutual friends but only weakly through family members.

The study, which you can read the study in full as a pdf, was drawn from data from the famous Framington Heart Study which tracked the health of a small community over many years and, rather fortuitously, asked who was related to and friends with who, initially for the purposes of tracking people down if the researchers lost contact.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The loneliness network’.
Link to PubMed entry for loneliness study.
pdf of full text of study.

I’ve just found this excellent Fast Company article from last year challenging the idea that there is a ‘tipping point’ in fashions or trends driven by small numbers of highly connected people who have a disproportionate influence over which new products or ideas become popular.

The piece is based on work by Duncan Watts, a physicist and sociologist, who created numerous computer simulations of how trends move through society in a similar way to how medical scientists model how diseases spread.

One study has suggested that the role of key highly influential people in starting fashions or trends is likely to have been vastly overstated. This conclusion has rattled the cages of many in the marketing world who have been focussed on identifying and targeting ‘trend setters’ for many years.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion…

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they’ve broken out. “They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they’ve identified the people who did it first, and then they go, ‘Okay, these are the Influentials!'” But who’s to say those aren’t just Watts’s accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn’t their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

However, Watts’ work is largely based on computer simulations. These have the advantage of having to be based on very explicit well-defined descriptions of the phenomenon, which many of the more popular accounts are not, but have the disadvantage or having to include various assumptions and simplifications about what actually happens when people pass on ideas.

The Fast Company article is interesting as it looks at how some core marketing ideas are being tested by Watts, and how the public relations world is reacting to having some of their assumptions questioned.

Link to Fast Company article ‘Is the Tipping Point Toast?’