Dream Weaving Part 2

After an unnecessarily long delay, I am back to discuss the second study in the paper about seeing other's problems in your dreams. Before I get into the details of the study, I'd like to mention a few things that initially set off an alarm in my head. First, the researcher proposes to be testing a phenomena  but the design of the study is entirely different. From the author's own description of the dream helper ceremony, the dreamers all know the problem of the individual involved and are purportedly trying to direct their dreams toward identifying solutions. This seems to me like another spin on a typical support group as opposed to a psychic experience. It is possible that the dream helper ceremony is poorly described in the paper but I find it more likely that the researcher is merely using this ceremony as a an outside reference point to the internal craziness of the proposed concepts.

In the second study, the researcher attempted to better experimentally manipulate the participants in the study. Whereas before there was a self-selection bias where only participants that claimed to have had a relevant dream submitted their journals for analysis, all participants had to submit their journals. Also, there was an experimental condition where half of the participants were given a picture of a fictional individual though they believed it was a real person. The participants recorded 2 dreams, were shown the picture of the target person. They were told that this person had several life problems but not specifically that they were medical. The participants then recorded 2 more dreams and the dreams were then compared for content.

The new target person was a woman who had a multitude of problems. She had multiple sclerosis, her mother was dying, her husband had died in an industrial accident, her son had been in a car accident, she had been in a car accident where her cousin had died, and her new partner was going through a messy divorce. The experimenter claims to have been blind to the person that was chosen; a friend of the experimenter had volunteered her. This raises a few problems. Whereas in the pilot, the person had 1 problem (breast cancer), this still allowed for the researchers to include a multitude of related codes (torso, limbs, torso, cancer, clinical setting). This person has so many potential problems in her life that a dream about nearly anything could possibly be coded as relevant. Also, if the experimenter's friend proposed this individual, I find it unlikely that the researcher had never heard about any of this person's many problems at some point. Though the researcher may not have realized it, they may have subconsciously considered that the woman with all the problems could be the target and may have directed the students toward her particular kinds of issues.

Additionally, the codes for the person include problems that are not her own, though they are problems she experiences. Her mother's lung cancer, for example, requires a respirator. The researcher proposes that the target's conscious mind is sending out information about her problems that the dreamers are able to connect to and interpret. Why would her mind think about inanimate objects unrelated to the target's problems? It is possible that the respirator is very prevalent but I don't see why it would be sent out as a problem unless the individual was having a problem with the respirator itself. This, as far as I can tell, is not known by the researcher.

Now we get into the results. I have a few problems with the way the analyses were handled. First, the researchers combined the two pre dreams and the two post dreams into a single dream value (one fore pre and one for post), aggregating the codes across the two dreams. The researchers claim that this provides a more conservative estimate because the sample size is lower since the dreams are combined instead of kept separate. This is an irrelevant point. The dreams were about different things and could reflect life events other than a connection to the target individual. Therefore, I feel that a more accurate data treatment would be to keep the values separate. I think aggregating the dreams is probably fine for a final analysis but there is valuable information in comparing the individual dreams pre and post. It makes no sense to aggregate two distinctly different dream types. Additionally, the post treatment dreams should be more similar to one another because they are focused on the target which would give more validity to the results (if they were possibly true)

The researcher compared each code in the dreams separately by both pre and post test values. Therefore, the researcher compares the pre-test values for the torso, head, etc. between the control and the experimental group. He found that there were significant differences for the post-tests for limb problems, breathing problems, and car/driving problems. Note that this is that the mean values in the post-tests were higher for those in the treatment condition than in the control condition. Those that saw a picture of a real woman were more likely to have dreams containing these components than people that saw a fictional person. While this is intriguing, the test the researcher used is rather poor. Since there was a pre-test the experimenter should have used this value as a control. This would wash out the individual characteristics of the dreamers dreams and make a stronger case that the manipulation did something. It would test whether there was a change in the kinds of things the dreamer dreamt instead of just comparing the dreams at each period. As is, the lack of this analysis throws up red flags for me.

From the increased likelihood of the dreamers dreaming about the 3 aspects the experimenter mentioned, he claims that this shows that individuals can accurately dream about other's problems. Though these results could be real, I don't think the interpretation the author makes really stands up. The content of the dreams is not definitively the problems of the target and even the excerpts the experimenter presents in the paper seem vastly different from the real problems of the target person.

The podcasters thought that the willingness of Psychology Today to reprint the findings of this study with little criticism was abhorrent. I honestly do not know why the author was not more skeptical of this piece when it has obvious theoretical and methodological concerns.

Dream Weaving Part 1 - My first post about pseudo science

The paper I want to discuss in this post was brought to my attention by a podcast I enjoy called "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe". This is a variety show that covers several different skeptical or science topics with a few staple segments. In the "News" section they either discuss some new scientific discovery, something from the general news, or articles they think deserve ridicule. In the last episode I listened to, they discussed an article published in Psychology Today, about a scientific paper (by a different author) that had been published in 2013. After I heard the discussion, the dismissive tone of the commentators, and the way in which they wrote off the study, I felt like they hadn't given the studys a fair shake (though the premise was fairly ridiculous).

Once I started reading the Psychology Today article and the original research paper, I started noticing some of the issues that arise when non-social psychologists try and look at our work. I still think that that the paper is ludicrous and poorly done but not for all of the same reasons as the people on the podcast. It was obvious after looking at both that the podcasters didn't have access to the original article and were using the vague generalizations about the methods that the Psychology Today article as actual methods as opposed to a summary of methods. The methods had problems in the study but the criticisms of the podcasters ended up being just far removed enough from what I saw as justifiable criticisms that the authors of either the article or the original research might be able to dismiss the "Rouges" as uninformed.

The article - titled "Can our dreams solve problems while we sleep" - is very short (840 words) and is an overview of 1 of 2 studies published in a paper called "Can healthy, young adults uncover personal details of unknown target individuals in their dreams?" The articles primary goal is to briefly describe the experiment and then provide some elaboration, suggesting that more similar work should be done in the past. As a critique of the research paper, the author seems to take the paper uncritically, praising the author as rigorous and ending the article with two paragraphs that begin "Lets say that some sort of dream telepathy is real" and suggest that there is something very real going on in this study. I am unconvinced by this paper, and the lack of a measurable mechanism in the paper.

I am now onto the 4th paragraph and I have not said what the paper was about. The research paper - published in a fairly low-tier journal called EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing" - provides a rather detailed narrative of the process of this paper's development, which is not common in many of the articles I read. The paper's sole author is Carlyle Smith, a notable researcher on sleep. His past research appears to have primarily focused on the relationship of sleep states and the amount of sleep on memory and learning. Regardless of his past work, this paper arose directly from a course that Dr. Smith was teaching on "Dreams and Dreaming", a reasonable topic of study for a sleep researcher. A student in the class brought up the topic of the "Dream Helper Ceremony" and the instructor decided to do a pilot test in the class. The paper mentioned that this was a senior-level psychology class. From my experience in similar classes, the interests of the students often drive the class and there are sometimes not rigorous syllabi provided, so this seemed reasonable to me.

The "Dream Helper Ceremony" is essentially the idea that a group of individuals come together, hear about the life problem of an individual, and then all go to sleep, focusing their mind on the other's life problem and hopefully dreaming about said problem. The dreams are then shared with the target, who hopefully takes some value from this process. The researcher then decided to design a study that would get at one of the factors of this scenario, whether individuals can dream about the problems of others. In the dream helper ceremony description, the author suggests that the problem is discussed before dreaming, so the jump to looking at whether the content of the problem can come across a dream seems a large one to me.

The researcher provided the students in the class a picture of a person with a problem (the problem was not known to the researcher or the students) but they were told it was health-related. A subset of the students returned with a dream log that they believed represented the target (12 of 65). The researcher coded the dream logs based on a set of criteria that specifically captured elements of the target's health that would be negatively affected. This is a bit of a dubious practice because if the coder has more categories that fit the health diagnosis than other categories, they will be more likely to find matches for the health categories. The podcasters noted this problem. The researcher did weight the extent to which the health mention matched the problem of the person which helps alleviate some concern.  The researchers compared earlier dreams of the 12 with the dreams that the individuals reported as having been about the target. And, surprise, surprise, there was more language that matched the health outcomes in the second dreams. As should be obvious, the students knew that the target had a health problem so they were more likely to dream about those kinds of issues. There is also a self-selection bias because the others did not think they dreamed about the target. This could mean that only those that dreamed about health outcomes reported their dreams and are included in the sample. The researcher noticed these issues and attempted to correct them in the second study.

I'll discuss this study tomorrow.

Computers and Communication

One of my interests since I first became a PhD student was the process of organization through computers. I am actually not sure where this interest comes from precisely as I haven't had a huge amount of experience organizing with others over computers. When I was in undergrad, I took a course called Organizational Communication which I found extremely interesting. The focus of the class was mostly on the ways in which we fail  or succeeded at communicating within organizations. An example in class was how poor communication has led to helicopter crashes or accidental shootdowns.

A part of this course was focused on groups that communicate over the internet. The course was taught by a researcher that studies Wikipedia and the course was partially taught through the Human Computer Interaction group. After taking this class, I became more interested in this topic, literally in the academic sense. I still don't participate in much internet organized work and am notoriously bad at keeping up with friends. While I was working on a book chapter about the rise of the globally distributed group, I was part of one as my adviser spent some time at other schools. This was a period when I severely lost my way in my focus and ended up going through one of the roughest paper proposals I think there has been in my program.

I'd like to discuss some old, but interesting work on the way that people use computers to interact with one another. Sara Kiesler is a prolific and diverse researcher. When I first met her, she discussed how she had recently returned from a trip to Africa where she was interested in their nascent educational system and acted as an adviser. She taught us interviewing techniques, how to engage with subjects and find out what their true reasons were for their actions or thoughts. She seems to have a deep interest in increasing the quality of life for people wherever they are and through many different mechanisms.

She was part of a group of researchers that were interested in how the internet would influence the lives of those that had ready access to it. In this study, the researchers gave internet access to a large number of families in the Pittsburgh area for free. The researchers then looked at the outcomes for each family member and tracked their individual usage. Initially, the signs were not good with several negative outcomes (primarily depression), specifically for adolescents in the household. After more time, however, the positive effects of the internet on the families became more pronounced. Of all possible uses for the internet, the most common was interpersonal communication. The researchers concluded that using the internet to make new ties had a relationship to increased depression but using the internet for other uses decreased depression: http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/progress/index.html

Another interesting study that Sara Kiesler performed that is even older than the Internet study focused just on the nature of the communication that individuals engaged in with one another. In this study, the researchers compared the communications of groups that did a task when the members were either in the same place or communicated over computer text messaging. The use of computers had various effects, positive and negative. Group members were more likely to get angry with one another, make extreme statements, and they had trouble coming to a collective consensus. This was partially that people seem more real when they are in person so it is harder to criticize them so heavily directly. Another way to think about the phenomena is instead that the ability to communicate distributively led the group members to speak their mind more freely.

Another interesting finding was the amount of discussion that was contributed by females in the group. In the face-to-face groups, men were dominant and their opinions were used more as the basis for the decision making process. When the groups instead used a computer, however, the women spoke more and contributed more to the discussion. The researchers suggested that the relative anonymity that the computer mediated communication allowed for let women not feel as self conscious about sharing their opinions. They also suggested that because there were fewer obvious status cues, women weren't in a position where they felt their opinions were less valuable.

Lastly, the researchers were curious if the change in the way people communicate changes the kinds of decisions that they are likely to make (instead of just their ability to make a decision). The researchers found that there was a definite 'risky shift' such that members were more willing to take on ventures that seemed risky if they were communicating online as opposed to face-to-face.

Though this research was published in 1992 (22 years before the publication of this article), we can see that people are using the internet to communicate and engage with one another in the same kinds of ways. Discussions on the internet often devolve into 'flame wars' quickly get off topic, and is full of overly superlative language about the love or hate of particular topics. Risky or at least random decisions being made by groups coordinating over the internet are not uncommon to hear about. It is comforting to a certain extent to consider that we have always found computer mediated communication to be just disconnected from others enough to be incredibly mean to one another. This is not a new phenomenon, it is inherent in human nature. Us humans who have evolved to recognize faces and see truth in one's eyes are sullied by using online communication,...but it does have its benefits. The convenience is unparalleled and studies have shown that we are much more civil when we know who the other person is we are talking to, which is something.