The value of values affirmation in education and beyond

Reblogged from NeuWriteSD.org.

The fields of social and cognitive psychology constantly provide examples of how small changes in the environment can impact cognition which may seem shocking in their simplicity. Cleaning one’s hands may lead to an increased feeling of moral cleanliness [1], a patch of gray may appear as much darker or lighter in brightness depending on the context [2], and visual influences on speech perception, as when the mouth of someone speaking mismatches the sound, can drastically change the sounds that we hear [3]. Perhaps, then, it should not be so surprising that a subtle change in psychological mindset, induced by a relatively short task, should be able to dramatically influence academic performance.

Read more at NeuWriteSD.org.

Oxytocin, bonding, and breastfeeding

Reblogged from NeuWriteSD.org:

Valentine’s Day is a time for expressing love, and while its title may initially conjure up socially normative images of candle-lit dinners, long-stemmed roses, and canoodling with a romantic partner, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the kind of love that prevents our species from dying out: that of a mother and infant. The bonding that takes place in the first six months of life is complex and still quite mystifying, but likely involves the touch, attention, and care of the mother, as well as a whole lot of hormones. And one aspect of an infant’s first few months that encompasses all of these factors is breastfeeding. Not only is breastfeeding important for nutrition, including brain and body development, but it is also an important factor in the earliest stages of human social development. Here we will touch on just some of the science behind why choosing to breastfeed may lead to benefits for babies and their bonds with their mothers.

Read more at NeuWriteSD.org.

Minimum wage in the United States

The last several months have seen continuous protests and reports of companies like Walmart and McDonald's treating their employees unfairly, including the ostensibly unfair rate of pay (and of benefits) doled out to employees. It's easy to imagine that raising minimum wages constitutes a simple answer, but some argue that there are economic disadvantages to doing so. I'm certainly no economist, but I thought I would do a small amount of digging around to see what I could see about the history of minimum wage in the US and its current implementation. I'm not sure about the best way to fix low pay rates for those working at megalo-companies like MacD's and Wally World. Is it a pay raise? (Maybe. Almost certainly, in the short-term.) Is a path up the corporate ladder? (Goodness no.) Is it the re-thinking of our entire society? (YES! in my dreams, that is.) Maybe it's more about conceptualization of what minimum wage is there for, how raises should be implemented, and incentives like time and money for employees to take part-time courses. In any case, here's what I learned.

A (small amount) of historical background

The minimum wage for labor in the United States was first put forth in 1938 in the Fair Labor Stands Act (FLSA [1]). To put this in perspective, the first country to enact such labor standards was New Zealand, in 1894 [3]. Although typically-cited reasons for minimum wage laws include providing a sum commensurate with a frugal lifestyle and protecting sweatshop workers, the institution of such wage laws in the United States has a darker history. In 1938, the first national minimum wage of 25¢ was so high that it must have wiped out many of the industries currently paying lower wages, at the time. David Bernstein and Thomas Leonard write that such laws were often “…designed to exclude immigrants, women, and African Americans... [and] demanded the exclusion of various so-called “defective” groups from the American labor market” (p. 177 [2]). More specifically, Bernstein and Leonard point to acts created during the Great Depression, such as the Davis-Bacon act of 1931, which had a disproportionate effect on African Americans’ ability to procure work in certain industries; and many state-specific minimum wage laws formed specifically for women, who were de jure considered to be unequally deserving of pay for men’s work.

The federal minimum wage is currently set at $7.25, and there is no overt discrimination based on gender or race in its terms (though I hesitate to even mention the current state of affairs of minimum wage and immigration). Even so: the current rate does not apply to all full-time or part-time employees across the United States. In some cases, a higher state minimum wage will apply. In others, the federal wage may supersede the state wage, if the state wage is lower. But when exactly must the federal rate be considered? From the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA): “The Act applies to enterprises with employees who engage in interstate commerce, produce goods for interstate commerce, or handle, sell, or work on goods or materials that have been moved in or produced for interstate commerce. For most firms, a test of not less than $500,000 in annual dollar volume of business applies (i.e., the Act does not cover enterprises with less than this amount of business). However, the Act does cover the following regardless of their dollar volume of business: hospitals; institutions primarily engaged in the care of the sick, aged, mentally ill, or disabled who reside on the premises; schools for children who are mentally or physically disabled or gifted; preschools, elementary and secondary schools, and institutions of higher education; and federal, state, and local government agencies.” The FLSA goes on to list individuals who are not covered, including people working at telephone companies, newspapers, “recreational establishments”, teachers, computer professionals, amongst others. I am not a lawyer. I likely am missing some of the jargon in here. But the FLSA, from the start, makes it clear that not everyone is treated equally.

Minimum wage by state today

Let’s get a sense of the spread of minimum wage across states. As with federal wage laws, each state may impose its own laws on when these wages apply. A total of 22 states have imposed wages higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. The top payers include Washington state ($9.32) and Oregon ($9.10). An additional five states also boast minimum wages above $8.00 (Connecticut, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont) along with Washington, D.C., currently clocking in at $8.25, but with a promise to increase its minimum wage to $11.50 by the year 2016 [2]. Another five states (California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island) have their minimum wages set at $8.00.

Which states have opted to impose set minimum wages, but below the federal rate? Only four. Arkansas and Minnesota have rates of $6.25 and $6.15, respectively, and Georgia and Wyoming are perhaps stuck in another decade with rates as low as $5.15. The remainder of the states who impose a minimum wage (a total of 20) sit right at the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Before doing some background reading for this post, I had no idea that there are currently states which do not impose their own minimum wage at the state level. Geographically, these are all southern states east of the Mississippi River: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

One thing that seems immediately clear is the resistance of southern states to conform to the national standards of minimum wages. Considering the deep roots of the system, since its inception, discriminating against groups performing particular jobs in those regions (read: minority groups performing low-wage employment in the South [2]), perhaps this modern trend should not be surprising.

Interim summary

So, here’s what I’ve learned so far: States vary considerably in what they consider to be a fair minimum wage. Federal laws don’t include everyone, even today. Historically speaking, stamping on a minimum wage was a good way to quit paying people doing “lesser” jobs, and it likely had a hand in wiping out certain industries. But of course, there is a quite defensible side to enacting minimum wages, and that is to ensure that people make at least a living wage.

I’d be interested to hear about the parents, each making $15k (what the federal rate would put you at, roughly), raising two kids on that wage. Not to mention the single parent tasked with the same set of circumstances. Skilled labor markets are so nearly obsolete that I scarcely dare say they are “on the decline”. Folks who don’t have the resources and privileges (and sometimes, luck) to embark on a path (academic or otherwise) to a different lifestyle and/or career are without many options from the days of skilled labor and industry. And what are many left with? Jobs in the service industry that rely on the minimum wage. Maybe that’s enough of my ranting for now, but I think of this post as a “Part 1.”

Sources:

1. United States Department of Labor. Minimum Wage Laws in the States. Accessed 20 January 2014. Available online: http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm
2. David E. Bernstein & Thomas C. Leonard. 2009. Excluding unfit workers: Social control versus social justice in the age of economic reform. Law and Contemporary Politics, 72(3), 177-204. Accessed 20 January 2014. Available online: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1533570
3. Gerald Starr. 1993. Minimum Wage Fixing: An international review of practices and problems. Accessed 20 January 2014. Available online: http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1981/81B09_266_engl.pdf
4. Ned Resnikoff. “D.C. raises its minimum wage.” MSNBC. Accessed 20 January 2014. Available online: http://www.msnbc.com/all/washington-dc-minimum-wage-hike

When Men Tell Women to Smile

I'm not big on social media--I pretty much stick to Facebook, which mostly keeps me apprised of a) when friends are having parties; b) the latest batch of posts about “Why Grad School Sucks” / a feed of one-liners about “How You Know You’re in Your Thirties” from Buzzfeed; and c) the newest photos of my friends’ small ones—the latter of which is without doubt the best reason to use Facebook, in my humble opinion).

But recently, an acquaintance posted an article (“When ‘Life Hacking’ Is Really White Privilege”) by blogger Jen Dziura, host of the Williamsburg Spelling Bee. After enjoying the post, I poked around her feed for just a moment, long enough to find another article (apparently her top hit): “Benevolent Sexism and “That Guy” who Makes Everything Awkward.” I clicked, pretty certain of what I would read: an article about how sometimes people have expectations about women, like the fact that they should be nice, sweet, charming, etc., and how subtle behaviors (like opening doors for women or other seemingly unobtrusive/chivalrous gestures) may shape women’s behaviors and men’s attitudes simultaneously. You know, something similar to what she and countless others have said about subtle or implicit actions that guide behaviors leading to white privilege/racism.

But although the post explicitly did mention opening doors, and did contrast the notion of women who conform to stereotyped expectations (smiling, friendly, sweet, calm) with those who do not (<insert ostensibly any dissimilar set of adjectives>), I was surprised by its focus: men who apparently see women as goddess-like creatures with mystical powers from whom they can draw energy and replenishment. Ok, sure, the idea of “standing behind your man” is not old. And I would argue that the ability to provide some degree of energy and comfort to one’s partner—irrespective of sex or gender—is a quality worth seeking out in oneself and in potential dates/mates/lovers. The author, however, was decrying men in the workplace who expect women to fulfill this type of role.

I must be lucky to have never experienced this form of “benevolent sexism” in its extreme form. I do not have the statistics on it, but I would imagine that my line of work (which has resulted in my being a graduate student in science for 56 out of the 63 months since I graduated from college and a contractor at a science and engineering company for the other 7) is less prone to the more overt forms of this sexism. I have a few experiences which I will staunchly defend as being “on the line”—such as being redirected to a male colleague and not expected to understand how to do my own statistical analyses at one point, or being told that I looked like a prettier version of Lindsay Lohan by a male direct superior—but its difficult not to blame oneself for not communicating better that yes, I understand how to do this part of my work or no, I don’t really enjoy being compared to former Disney stars who later became sensationalized objects as they grew into adults under the harsh spotlight of the media. Were those a part of implicit sexism? Maybe not. Was I unsure how to cope with them, and did they strain my relationship with my superior? Yes. Could they have happened in the same way if I were a man? It’s hard to say.

The places where I have mostly encountered benevolent sexism are not at work, thank goodness. They are walking down the street, boarding an airplane, having a beer with a close friend at a local brewery, or waiting in line for refreshments after a choir performance. “Smile,” men will say.

I would like to meet the woman who, after hearing a command to change her physical appearance to a form that would please one of those men a bit more, feels more like smiling. I would like to meet the woman who, after being told that her reflection of her emotional state is not good enough, not meeting expectations, wants to thank the man who recently informed she shouldn’t feel free to have control over her own emotions. These aren’t the men who hate women—these are the men who think it is appropriate to enlighten strangers about the reflection of their emotions on their face.

I am not the only person who has written about men telling women to smile. There has got to be a better approach than turning and yelling, but I’m not sure what it is. Generally, it has been for me to ignore them. Sometimes, that is not possible. The stranger on the airplane who catcalled it to me from his seat was easy enough to ignore. Surely, he assumed I was simply annoyed by the process of traveling and that it would cheer me to hear his plaints. The fact that I was personally grieving for another reason was none of his business, and it sure as hell was not his business to tell me to smile, but really, what harm was he doing? The stranger at a bar approaching my roommate and me who was likely trying to strike up a conversation, however, was a bit more difficult. Lucky for me, my friend has more refined social graces, and the conversation moved on to a discussion about science and technology. People who I know and want to respect, however, make things a bit more difficult. Meaning well is one thing, but there comes a point where I feel it is my duty as a person, and as a female person, not to let it slide. That doesn’t mean turning to them, as I might to a guy on the street, and staunchly declaring, “Women are people too.” It doesn’t mean walking away and saying nothing. Usually, it means gritting my teeth, forcing myself utter something resembling a chuckle, and saying something like, “It’s been a long semester.” If I'm feeling particularly combative, I might even manage, "It's not necessary to smile all the time."

Thankfully, others are also thinking about how to get men to stop telling women to smile, including a Kickstarter project funded in October for an outdoor public art series and this slutty nifty sweater.

Antidepressants, plasticity, and language development

Reblogged from NeuWriteSD.org:

As an attendee at the 5th annual Society for Neurobiology (SNL) conference, four years had passed since my first exposure to the meeting–a discussion of the state-of-the-art research being done on the neuroscience of language processing. In those four years, things have happened! This meeting left me marveling at new advances and the number of presenters successfully using new technologies. Techniques of note included ECoG (electrocorticography) (1), TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) (2), and even pharmacological studies reaching down to the molecular level investigating speech perception of babies in utero (3).

Read more at NeuWriteSD.org.

Memory

On a recent trip to visit my former home of Cambridge, I found myself playing piano and singing with friends on several occasions. The last night I was there, I opened a Broadway songbook to a tune by a man whom one friend dubbed the "Kenny G of musical theatre"-- namely, Andrew Lloyd Weber. The tune was from Cats:

Daylight
I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn't give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin.

Jibing aside, ALW has some out-of-the-ballpark hits, and although I feel most of my friends cringe every time I want to play the song, I can't shake the notion that "Memory" is one of them. If you took the song out of the context of the musical Cats and handed it to a soulful songstress to sing, I firmly believe that we'd think of it a little differently. But more to the point, Weber uses the term "memory" quite aptly in his music, showing that the here and now will one day become a memory too. And maybe the memories of multiple nights spent walking down memory lane will be consolidated into a more abstract memory.

Memory has been on my mind a lot recently, and not just memories of old friends in old towns. In a seminar class in the linguistics department, we are reading papers devoted language and what psychologists call "working memory" -- the memory for stuff we're doing in the here and now, and theorized to include some set of representations that occupy a more privileged status than other stuff. In my own research, I think more about that other stuff, i.e., "long-term memory" -- the imprint we have of all our experiences, plus a whole helluvalotta hypothesized structure which leaves us with many theorized types of memories. "Procedural memory" refers to learned behaviors, mostly typified as motor skills or procedures. Examples might be playing a musical instrument, riding a bike, lots of what goes into driving a car, and, some would say, even certain aspects of language processing. "Declarative memory" refers to memories for facts about the world and the stuff in it ("semantic memory") and to memories for particular events, or episodes, that we have personally encountered (so-called "episodic memory"). For my own part, I'm very interested in understanding how this last breakdown (between memory for stuff we know, or at least think we know, and memory for stuff we've directly experienced) should be thought about. Surely the stuff we directly experience can become part and parcel of the stuff of "facts" that we know -- we see a lot of red apples, and so we come to believe that apples are (at least often) red. But what's the internal organization of all that, and what stuff do we actually access when we're talking about apples?

There are plenty of questions to ask with regard to language and long-term memory. Whether understanding someone who is talking about apples requires someone to engage in processing all of the perceptual information about apples (such as their color) is a question that is part of a hot topic in cognitive science currently. But in my own research, I hope to answer a slightly broader question, which gets at some of the same nitty-gritty questions regarding which features of a concept are accessed during its processing--does the amount of information about (or experience with) a concept directly affect how easily it is processed during language comprehension? The structure of that information will almost certainly have consequences for processing, as well.  For instance, the information might be neatly bundled together (let's say we are apple experts and know that really red apples are also shiny and large, encompassing information about perceptual aspects of apples) or more sparse (perhaps we don't really know much about red apples other than we've seen them grow on trees in Washington, and our parents used to pack them in our lunches when we were kids, facts that are not as neatly related).

In my research, I'm starting out by investigating these kinds of questions using short texts (jargon-y term here would be "discourse") where I manipulate the amount of information that is given about various people who are described in the text.  But what I really want to know is how understanding language about stuff we really know a ton about (people who are very close to us; topics we've spent years studying; our favorite hobby, whether it be cooking or painting or singing; cities we know well) might differ from understanding language about stuff that's more vague to us (sort of like when I hear my friends talking about baseball in front of me; or like when I talk about sight-reading choral music to the people talking to me about baseball!).

I'm thinking our rich memories may help us understand each other at times and perhaps hinder our communication at others.

Vegan things

Here are some delicious vegan things in San Diego.

1. Anything at Plumeria. It's in University Heights, and I am fairly certain there are at least two other good vegan restaurants nearby, though I haven't tried 'em yet. Plumeria is exclusively vegetarian, though some of their dishes contain dairy and other animal products. However, most (possibly all) of their dishes can be made vegetarian. I'm getting used to the idea of eating meat substitutes since moving here, mostly because fake duck is just so damn good.

2. Vegan chai donuts at Dark Horse. It's a tiny coffee shop in Normal Heights; I ended up there with a study buddy recently after the larger coffee shop down the street was too packed on a Sunday afternoon. Only a few seats, but not typically very crowded. The iced coffee with almond milk was good, too.

3. An extensive vegetarian menu including amazing homemade tofu at Dao Fu, formally Tao, also in Normal Heights. They don't give you the opportunity not to try their homemade tofu, in fact. You are given an on-the-house salad with the stuff the moment you sit down.

4. A third Normal Heights spot, LeStat's, has several vegan options, including vegetarian cupcakes and vegetarian chili. It's spicy and delicious. And the cupcakes taste like they are created from heaven. There's also a LeStat's in University Heights on Park.

5. North Park's Sipz is pretty much can-do-no-wrong vegan. I always get the same things and split with friends because they are so delicious I can't bring myself to order anything else: kung pao "chicken", the dynamite roll, the caterpillar roll, and sometimes a vegan red velvet cake slice. If you didn't think vegan sushi could be good, I dare you to try theirs. There are other Sipz locations, though I haven't tried them.

6. Many options at the Hillcrest Farmer's market on Sunday mornings, including vegan cheesecake. If you think you're being healthier by eating vegan sweets, beware; this baby is made pretty much wholly of oils from cashews. While delicious, they're not exactly non-fattening.

7. Roots, located on the UCSD campus, is almost surely one of the reasons UCSD consistently gets voted top vegan campus. My favorites: sweet potato fries, the Root burger, and the Hetch Hetchy.

Originally I had thought of making a new themed blog (I'm a fan of themes) in which I'd report on all sorts of restaurants in terms of their vegan-friendliness. It seems that perhaps there is not a large need for this (one can of course use Yelp! to search for veganness within a specific restaurant), so I'm holding off.

In other news, the quarter is drawing to a close, meaning that summer is drawing near! In San Diego, that means we are entering what I have heard named "June Gloom". Unfortunately, the month that is typically nicest in eastern cities is one of the saddest in the south of California. However, it seems to perk up in the afternoons, when the clouds have been clearing (at least recently). This afternoon it was still a bit cloudy when our softball team (which I am a part of almost only in name; I played in just one game this term), the Earthpigs, won the intramural championship game! ...by default, since the opposing team only showed 55 minutes late. No matter, we still won championship t-shirts (a first for me, in sports) and got to eat celebratory Popsicles. Snort snort snort.