Miscellany

For the weekend I am happy to offer a miscellany of stories from the psycho world. I am not going to comment extensively on most of them, because the articles do a generally good job of it themselves. 

The first, from the New York Post, informs us that Botox inhibits your ability to process emotions, especially those of other people. At a time when people in my neighborhood obsess about expressing feeling, the news that Botox makes it more difficult to read emotion comes as somewhat of a surprise-- even though one has suspected this in the past.

The Post reports:

Brain scans showed that Botox injected into the forehead altered people’s brain chemistry, impacting how they interpreted other people’s emotions, a new study published in Scientific Reports found.

In truth, we read emotion by mimicking facial expressions. Dare we say that this is far more effectively when you are talking to someone in person.

As the researchers expected, these findings align with the facial feedback hypothesis, which claims that people instinctively mirror facial expressions in an effort to identify and experience the emotion being expressed in front of them.

The researchers note that the temporary paralysis of the facial muscles caused by Botox hinders a person’s ability to mirror the emotions being expressed in front of them, therefore, altering their brain chemistry as they attempt to interpret the emotions.

Second, also from the New York Post (via Maggie’s Farm), shows how local New York authorities are working to solve the problem of learning loss. As you know, shutting down public schools for months on end caused many children to suffer learning loss. Teachers unions and local politicians are largely responsible, so they naturally are working to pretend that there is no problem.

One way of doing so is by reducing the number of standardized tests. 

The learning loss resulting from the longest public-school closures imposed on blue-state kids in urban districts where teachers unions hold the most sway is devastating and will have generational consequences. 

Now the educators and politicians who supported prolonged school closures are trying to hide the evidence of their unconscionable decisions.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a former teachers-union member and current teachers-union donee, has introduced the ludicrously entitled More Teaching Less Testing Act, which would abolish the third grade through eighth grade standardized math and English tests — the clearest proof of how costly school closures were for learning.

When you put the title through the Orwellian doublespeak reader you get: Less Learning and No Accountability Act.

And now, for our third story, we are happy to report news that others have mentioned for quite some time now. Research has shown that diversity training makes race relations worse. Open and honest discussion, especially the kind that accuses white people of being unconscious bigots, causes more problems than it solves.

John Stossel reports for Taki’s Magazine, via Maggie’s Farm:

[York College professor Erec Smith] was once a diversity officer. He left the position because he thought it was “useless.”

Or worse. “It makes people less likely to interact with people unlike them,” he says. “It’s a minefield now.”

At diversity trainings, employees learn about “microaggressions,” speech that’s subtly biased.

“If you ask somebody what they do for a living, somehow that’s racist,” says Smith. “If you learn that, then why would you take a chance? … ‘I’m going to silence myself’ … not talk to Black people.”

A Coca-Cola diversity training tells employees, “Be less white.” “Being white” includes being “oppressive, arrogant, defensive, ignorant.”

The more you learn about the bad things you might do, the more you will choose not to interact with people of a different race.

As for advancing black people in corporate management, diversity training does not succeed:

A different Harvard Business Review study analyzed data from 800 companies and found that five years after diversity training, the share of Black women managers decreased by 9%.

Fourth, this from suicidal philosopher Clancy Martin, in the Wall Street Journal.

Martin’s thinking about suicide feels slightly confused to yours truly, but here it is. He opens with the thought that the stigma surrounding suicide causes people to hide their suicidal thoughts from other people. He imagines that speaking openly and honestly about suicide is a step toward treatment.

Of course, it might also be a step toward involuntary commitment.

The idea [of suicide] is so thoroughly stigmatized that we are all supposed to pretend that we never think this way. For centuries in the West, and still in many nations today, suicide was considered among the vilest of sins and most heinous of crimes. 

The World Health Organization lists “stigma and taboo” first in its obstacles to making progress in preventing suicide.

To be honest, I have my doubts about whether today’s Americans consider suicide a heinous crime. Most people sympathize with those who are depressed and suicidal. They reach out to them; they do not shun them. Surely, the country is chock-a-block with mental health professionals and pastoral counselors who are willing to converse dispassionately about such matters.

Martin thinks that when we keep these thoughts secret, they get worse:

 

To make matters worse, the perceived need for keeping one’s suicidal impulses secret, while understandable, further spurs on these thoughts. According to the studies, perception both of the stigma of suicide and of oneself as deserving that stigmatization greatly increases one’s risk of dying by suicide. This is particularly true of high-risk groups like adolescents.

The question of suicide clusters, first analyzed over a century ago by famed French sociologist Emile Durkheim, is far from being resolved.

And yet, if the stigma produces more suicides, how can one explain the fact that destigmatizing suicide makes it more, not less, acceptable. As a rule, once you destigmatize something, you get more of it. We have destigmatized divorce and adultery. Now, we have more divorce and adultery.

Martin writes:

A 2019 study in the journal Society and Mental Health of one “suicide cluster” among teenagers in an affluent community concluded that a death by suicide, especially if the person who died was prominent and respected, made suicide more acceptable to other members of the community.

 Still, April Foreman, psychologist and board member of the American Association of Suicidology, cautions that we don’t definitively know the impact of having more conversations about suicide. Stigma has been decreasing recently, she says, without rates coming down.

And also,

Similarly, media coverage of a suicide may either glamorize it or discourage it. The latter is called the “Papageno effect,” named after a character in Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” who changes his mind about suicide because he is shown other ways to solve his problems.

Dare we say that the issue is complicated. Surely, we want to offer effective treatment for those who are contemplating suicide. Perhaps the treatment could be better, but destigmatizing suicide might well cause people to fail to recognize that they ought to get help.

Cross posted on my Substack.