Recent article by Andrew Steptoe points to neuroendocrine and cardiovascular correlates of daily affect

Steptoe applies a methodology which he perfected studying the positive psychobiological effects of a good cuppa to show that positive emotion, like tea, has many positive effects and can guard against stress. This study uses ecological momentary assessment (EMA) whereby mood is assessed using rating scales at four periods throughout the day. They also use a stress test to evaluate cardiovascular reactivity and then relate this to affect throughout the day. Having a high level of positive affect througout the day means that you have lower levels of systolic BP at rest and after the stress task and also quicker diastolic BP recovery. Interestingly, having low positive affect was predictive of a greater cortisol response and this effect was independent of negative affect. Those who were high in positive affect did not differ from those low on positive affect in terms of negative affect indicating that they are separable concepts rather than existing on a continuum from negative to positive. Positive emotion aslo has independent effects indicated that merely focusing on removing ill-being is not enough.

This article pre-empts what will be quite a significant piece of work when the bloods from this study come back to show relationships between daily mood and a variety of measures of immune function, inflammation, and neuroendocrine function. They did not, however, include cardiovascular measures across the day. Steptoe seems to prefer to examine stress in the laboratory and relate this to daily affect. Coupling both methodologies would be worthwhile. The DRM may offer advantages over EMA and incorporating both into a study and seeing their level of similarity may be worthwhile.

Overall, demonstrating a protective effect of positive emotion on biological stress hormones which is independent of age, BMI, or importantly negative affect is a valuable finding which needs to be replicated in a larger sample.


Neuroendocrine and cardiovascular correlates of
positive affect measured by ecological momentary
assessment and by questionnaire

NBER 13430 Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field

Stefano DellaVigna
The research in Psychology and Economics (a.k.a. Behavioral Economics) suggests that
individuals deviate from the standard model in three respects: (i) non-standard preferences; (ii) non-standard beliefs; and (iii) non-standard decision-making. In this paper, I survey the empirical evidence from the field on these three classes of deviations. The evidence covers a number of applications, from consumption to finance, from crime to voting, from giving to labor supply. In the class of non-standard preferences, I discuss time preferences (self-control problems), risk preferences (reference dependence), and social preferences. On non-standard beliefs, I present evidence on overconfidence, on the law of small numbers, and on projection bias. Regarding non-standard decision-making, I cover limited attention, menu effects, persuasion and social pressure, and emotions. I also present evidence on how rational actors -- firms, employers, CEOs, investors, and politicians -- respond to the non-standard behavior described in the survey. I then summarize five common empirical methodologies used in Psychology and Economics. Finally, I briefly discuss under what conditions experience and market interactions limit the impact of the non-standard features.

Social integration is associated with less drinking and smoking and higher levels of well-being

The positive effects of engaging in conversation with a broad range of people such as a spouse, friend, neighbor, a fellow member of a community group, or work colleague on a regular basis are discussed in this article. It is thought that the positive effects of social integration are due "social pressure by the network to stay healthy and by greater responsibility of socially integrated people to others". This research is based on what is a pretty poor measure of ones social network (i.e. endorsing a yes/no response to engaging in conversation with a set list of categories of people at least once every two weeks). I think moving beyond scale measures of social support (e.g. receive a little, a lot of support etc.) to measures which actually record the frequency and content of interaction will allow a marked advance in the study of social networks. Measures such as well-being, drinking and smoking could be administered via social network sites such as bebo and facebook which contain a wealth of information in regard to the way in which people are related (e.g. as friends, family, in a relationship etc) and using this information combined with frequency of interaction, content analysis for emotional references and social network analysis on a large sample would produce the best data currently available in this regard.

Why Would Social Networks Be Linked to Affect and Health Practices?

greenstone iraq paper

michael greenstone has written an econometric analysis of the effects on the surge in Iraq on key indicators of Iraqi stability such as casualties, guards trained, financial market indicators.

this looks likely to be a template for a lot of similar work applying economic analysis to contemporary controversies.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014427%20

worth also reading Steven Levitt's commentary

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

J

I was just reading on the Columbia Stats Blog about a statistical program called J, which is related to R. I have heard that R is good for graphing, but it appears that J is quite good too. R is still on my to-do list, and now J is too!

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/09/plot_the_data.html

"Focus on one good paper!"

Do you have four or five half-finished academic articles on your desk but would rather start a sixth than submit one? Do you often think that if you just carry out one more experiment then your work will be good enough to write up - but it never is?

Perhaps it seems that you spend all day working, but have nothing to show for it, or that you are just too busy to focus properly on your research?

If so then you may be a victim of "self-sabotage", according to the Times Higher Ed Supplement.

"Perfectionism, over-committing and procrastination are rife among PhD students and can stop talented high achievers from completing their theses on time or at all, according to Hugh Kearns, head of the staff development and training unit at Flinders University in Australia.

And because the stakes for academics only get higher after gaining a doctorate, self-sabotage can be a career-long problem.

The nature of the PhD encourages isolation, prompting anxiety to grow alongside a certain degree of perfectionism, Mr Kearns told the UK Higher Education Researchers' Development conference this week. Over-committing is a frequent response to this fear, giving students an excuse for failure.

For others, the knowledge that the thesis can never be perfect is so crippling that they can develop what he has jokingly termed "read-itis" or "experiment itis".

Supervisors should be careful not to let students go unsupported for long periods of time on the assumption that they'll get in touch if there is a problem. "That's the last time they're going to come to you," Mr Kearns said.

He also urged supervisors to "give that normalising effect, and explain where the standard is" since many dedicated PhD students end up writing as if for a Nobel Prize. He reminds students at his workshops: "If you hand in a thesis it's very likely you will be successful."

Mr Kearns is speaking in UCD on 4th Octocer on both time management for PhD students and the "seven secrets of successful PhD students": http://www.ucd.ie/graduatestudies/transferableskills/transferableskills_workshops_odgspdt.htm

There is a workshop on the "seven secrets" for PhD superviosrs on the 5th October.

Priming social identity in order to determine the effects of social norms on time and risk preferences

In this new paper social-category-salience is manipulated through priming in order to evaluate the effect of having a certain social identity on economic preferences. What is found is that social identity is of great importance to the choices people make. Typically, Asian people would be thought of as having a cultural history of traits such as patience. In this study it was found that making the Asian aspect of Asian-Americans' identity more salient resulted in less steep discounting. There are several other results of a similar nature in the article below.

This paradigm offers an interesting way in which to study the effects of, for instance, social class on time and risk preferences as it would typically be thought that being of a lower social class is associated with steeper discounting. It has previously been found that class distinctions in conformism go in the direction of more liberal attitudes through the higher social classes and greater conformism in regard to views relating to sexual infidelity and homosexuality in lower classes. In one sense this seems counter intuitive. Theorising around Bourdieu's habitus would suggest a diffusion of social etiquette from the upper classes downwards. However, perhaps this is a combination of the narrowing of the gap between classes in the last two hundred years and also a result of upper class hypocrisy using methods such as manners as a form of class distinction and then engaging in more liberal behaviour in a "do as I say not as I do mentality". Either way, it would be interesting to see the direction in which priming social class would have on aspects of self-control and time and risk preferences.


Social Identity and Preferences

We may complain about UCD students but...

..but it seems that there is much more to worry about if one teaches in a UK university. According to the Times Higher Ed Supplement, The first survey of students' behaviour towards university staff has revealed "the extent to which the latter are subject to harassment, verbal abuse and assault.

More than half the staff responding to the National Student Conduct Survey had experienced student misbehaviour at least five times, while a quarter had encountered physical, verbal or written threats. For 11 per cent of staff experiencing a series of incidents, such events occurred on a daily basis.

The survey was carried out by a team at Nottingham Trent University, led by Deborah Lee from the School of Social Sciences.

Dr Lee presented her findings to the annual Universities Personnel Association (UPA) conference this week. She told The Times Higher it was time universities started to take the issue seriously".

Intelligence means greater capacity to use self-regulatory resources rather than greater self-regulatory capacity per se

This is the distinction put forward by Shamosh et al. (2007) in a recent article in cognition and emotion. The authors surprisingly found that those higher in fluid intelligence used more self-regulatory resources on an emotional suppression task. This is somewhat surprising as theoretically fluid intelligence and self-regulatory ability should both rely on executive functioning. However, the authors propose that better performance on Raven's progressive matrices, a good indicator of fluid intelligence, relates only to the ability to utilise self-regulatory resources rather than ones overall level of resources in general.

The authors relate their findings back to a study by Baumeister and colleagues from earlier in the year which found that self-regulatory delpletion has physiological correlates in terms of glucose levels. Specifically, the propose that those higher on fluid intelligence recruit a greater number of neural susbstrates during self-regulation and they also use less efficient processes. An alternative explanation which the authors do not discuss directly is the possibility that those high in fluid intelligence are more responsive to sad scences from films and need to use more self-regulatory resources to suppress their emotional response to the scene (In this case a clip from 'Terms of Endearment' which I haven't seen but has been described as "a manipulative, soap-operatic melodramatic tearjerker").

In general I am finding it hard to make sense of this finding. Theories around thought and emotional suppression would all claim that a higher level of self-regulatory resources should be associated with an improved ability to suppress and better post suppression performance. One would think that being higher in fluid intelligence, which typically means better working memory and the ability to sustain and shift attention, would mean a better a higher capacity for self-regulation. However, the finding discussed may be a way of explaining another counterintuitive finding that those high in conscientiousness are likely to be lower in fluid intelligence and vice versa. Perhaps, fluid intelligence thus has its benefits and disadvantages, mainly being able to burn up your self-regulatory resources over a short-time period but then being unable to do anything else for the rest of the day! I can think of a few people who work in this manner so this may be the reason..


The relation between fluid intelligence and
self-regulatory depletion

play policy

below is a bbc artilce detailing a recent call to have a national debate on the importance of play in children's lives. it relates also to earlier posts on "junk sleep" and nutrition deficits. it would be interesting to see some research on the role of consumer electronics on kids well-being in ireland. we have the results from Frey and others claiming that TV usage at the high-end reduces well-being and can be thought of as reflecting self-control problems. This should be more pronounced for children i would have thought.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6986544.stm

Economist urges variable fees to cut oversupply of humanities graduates

Universities should set student tuition fees according to how much a degree subject is valued by employers, a leading education economist has argued.

There will soon be too many arts and humanities graduates, and the value of their degrees is likely to fall below the cost of the tuition fees paid to obtain them, Anna Vignoles of the Institute of Education said.

Already recent graduates in some of these subjects earn no more than school leavers with A levels, and for young graduates the rate of return on a degree has fallen dramatically in the past eight years, she pointed out.

Article here.

The negative impact of impact factors

It was reported on the Columbia Statistics Blog that Greg Mankiw links to an article on his blog by Peter Lawrence on the mismeasurement of science. Lawrence writes:

Modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research. Scientists are ranked according to these measures, a ranking that impacts on funding of grants, competition for posts and promotion. The measures seemed, at first rather harmless, but, like cuckoos in a nest, they have grown into monsters that threaten science itself. . . .

The journals are evaluated according to impact factors, and scientists and departments assessed according to the impact factors of the journals they publish in. Consequently, over the last twenty years a scientist's primary aim has been downgraded from doing science to producing papers and contriving to get them into the "best" journals they can. Now there is a new trend: the idea is to rank scientists by the numbers of citations their papers receive. Consequently, I predict that citation-fishing and citation-bartering will become major pursuits. . . .

magic mushrooms

an interesting RAND Europe report below that deals with the classifications of drugs in the UK. Mushrooms, a bit like cannabis, are the subject of frequent debate about whether they should be exempted in some medical cases from sanctions for use and also about whether it is too strict to have them as class A drugs in the same category, for example, as heroin (for cannabis the debate is whether they should be downgraded from Class B). A couple of researchers have begun to examine the use of the active agents in magic mushrooms in treating OCD and the report also references some interesting papers on the physiological effects of mushrooms.

i would like to do some work on the behavioural economics aspects of different types of drugs. there is a lot of economics work on cannabis, heroin and cocaine. but i havent seen anything to date on hallucinogenics. mushrooms could be really interesting in this regard. RAND cite a figure of 340,000 people using them in the UK in 2004/5. the demand for this type of experience is an interesting to study. i would also be interested in comparing the socio-economic profile of usage to the socio-economic profile of convictions.


http://rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR362.pdf

Scandal of Irish Schoolchildrens' Nutrition

According to the Irish Independent, tens of thousands of children are going to school every day without breakfast or with only junk food for their lunch.

"We have some children who might be lucky enough to bring a packet of chewing gum with them for lunch" one teacher is quoted as saying in a draft report which has been seen by the Irish Independent.

The Healthy Food for All Guide has been prepared by Dara Morgan, a consultant dietician and nutritionist for St Vincent de Paul, the Combat Poverty Agency and Crosscare, the social care agency in the Dublin Archdiocese.

Article

Douglas Almond

Ive blogged about Douglas Almond's work before. Below is another example of a very interesting natural experimenting examining the effects of pre-birth exposure to toxins, this time looking at the Chernobyl disasters effect on Swedish children

http://www.nber.org/papers/w13347


the other working papers on his site are really worth reading

http://www.nber.org/~almond/

Environmental and Urban Economics Blog

This is the blog of Matthew Kahn author of Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment which is reviewed here:http://mek1966.googlepages.com/jrs.pdf

The environmental and urban economics blog:http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com/

National Well-being Accounts

Would be interested to get a discussion going around national well-being accounting and its potential uses and extensions. below is a 2004 by kahneman, krueger and colleagues

http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/Toward%20Well-Being.pdf

Ecological Economics Journal

"The journal is concerned with extending and integrating the study and management of “nature's household” (ecology) and “humankind's household” (economics). This integration is necessary because conceptual and professional isolation have led to economic and environmental policies which are mutually destructive rather than reinforcing in the long term."

For more see: Ecological Economics

This journal includes a recent paper entitled "Happiness, geography and the environment" authored by UCD researchers Finbarr Brereton, J. Peter Clinch, and Susana Ferreira.

Abstract:
In recent years, economists have been using socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics to explain self-reported individual happiness or satisfaction with life. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), we employ data disaggregated at the individual and local level to show that while these variables are important, consideration of amenities such as climate, environmental and urban conditions is critical when analyzing subjective well-being. Location-specific factors are shown to have a direct impact on life satisfaction. Most importantly, however, the explanatory power of our happiness function substantially increases when the spatial variables are included, highlighting the importance of the role of the spatial dimension in determining well-being.

Calculating tragedy: assessing the costs of terrorism

In this article Frey et al. (2007) consider the ways in which the effects of terrorist activities have been calculated in the past with a focus on the number of incidents or the impact on the economy. However, such measures are a poor indication of the utility losses associated with terrorism as indicated in their discussion of thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland

"Frey et al. (2004) calculate a hypothetical willingness-to-pay of a resident of Northern Ireland for a reduction in the number of fatalities to the average level of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Accordingly, a resident of Northern Ireland (with average household income) would be willing to pay around 41% of his income for a reduction in terrorist activity to the level that prevails in the more peaceful parts of the country or the sister republic."

A life-satisfaction approach suggests that the decrements in experienced utility associated with terrrorism far outweigh the soley economic consequences.

Culturally determined affective state preferences

The recent interest in mindfulness based therapeutic intervention in both psychological research and clinical practice can be put down to a number of factors including the preference for high arousal positive emotion in contemporary Western society. This contrasts with an Eastern preference for low arousal positive emotion as evident in Buddhist teachings. Mindfulness therapy can be seen as a way of counteracting the over stimulation which is promoted in contemporary Western society. For instance, recent discussions have focused on 'junk sleep' or the prolonged sleep onset and sleep disturbance associated with multimedia use prior to sleep. Negative effects of playing video games are proposed to be due to the influence of bright screens and violent or obstructive aspects of games which can disturb physiological signals such as heart rate and EEG theta waves. The source of supposedly very different culturally determined arousal preferences may be religious orientation, a possibility explored by Tsai, Miao, & Seppala (2007). As the positive arousal associated with the anticipation of gain has been implicated in response to monetary reward and increased arousal has been associated with punishment it would be interesting to see if cross-cultural differences in time and risk preferences were mediated by differences in ideal affect.

Cowen: house price slump is not unwelcome

Finance Minister Brian Cowen has said that the current turmoil in the property market is "neither unwelcome nor surprising" despite plummeting house prices around the country. The comments were reported in a story from today's Irish Independent:

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/cowen-house-slump-is-not-unwelcome-1070012.html

House prices have fallen by more than E9,000 or 3pc since the start of the year, according to the latest edition of the Permanent TSB / ESRI house price index.

The average price paid for a house in Ireland in July now stands at E301,267 - down 0.7pc since the end of July last year.

Niall O'Grady, Head of Marketing at Permanent TSB bank said the overall picture is one of a housing market "marking time" after a decade of phenomenal growth.

http://www.fxcentre.com/news.asp?1824288

The story in the Independent also says that: "The difficulties in the Irish property market were highlighted last week at a new housing development in Delgany, Co Wicklow, where people who bought houses for €700,000 have been shocked to learn that new houses of similar design on the same estate are now being sold for €595,000 -- a drop of €105,000".

The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance

A new NBER paper by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, "The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance", examines the causal effect of studying on grade performance using an Instrumental Variable estimator. Their approach takes advantage of a unique natural experiment - they have collected unique longitudinal data that provides detailed information about all aspects of this experiment. The results suggest that human capital accumulation is not predetermined at the time of college entrance.

Some Talks This Week at the Centre

Tuesday 4th September 2pm - Wen Zhang, UCD Geary Institute, "Friend or Foe: A latent structural equation model of non-cooperative strategic behaviour with evidence from game-show data"

Thursday 6th September 3pm - Alex Gillespie, Stirling University, 'Intersubjectivity: Searching for a methodology'.

Friday: Irish Society of New Economists.

All events are in the UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room.

spotting the end of a housing boom

the recent paper below by Robert Shiller of Yale examines historical housing booms and busts

http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d16a/d1610.pdf

webographic questions

One of the most interesting papers at the MESS conference was this one below by Schonlau, Kapteyn and Van Soest. Webographic Questions were discussed quite a bit in general throughout the event.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR506/

Abstract

Inference from Web surveys may be affected by non-random selection of Web survey participants. One approach to reduce selection bias is to use propensity scores and a parallel phone survey. This approach uses demographic and additional so-called Webographic or lifestyle variables to balance observed differences between Web survey respondents and phone survey respondents. Here the authors investigate some of the Webographic questions used by Harris Interactive, a commercial company specializing in Web surveys. Their Webographic questions include choice of activities such as reading, sports and traveling and perceptions about what would constitute a violation of privacy. They use data from an existing probability sample of respondents over 40 who are interviewed over the phone, and a corresponding sample of respondents interviewed over the Web. They find that Webographic questions differentiate between on and offline populations differently than demographic questions. In general, propensity score adjustment of variables in the Web survey works quite well for a number of variables of interest (including home ownership and labor force participation). For two outcomes, (having emotional problems and often experiencing pain) the process of adjusting for demographic variables leads to the discovery of an instance of Simpson’s paradox, implying a differential mode effect or differential selection. They interpret this mainly as the result of a mode effect, where sensitive questions are more likely to receive a positive response over the Internet than over the phone.

The Economic Value of Teeth

Sherry Glied - Columbia University and NBER
Matthew Neidell - Columbia University

http://www.bu.edu/econ/seminars/health/spg07/teeth_wages_glied_neidell.pdf

January 2007

Abstract: Healthy teeth are a vital and visible component of general well-being, but there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate its effect on labor market outcomes. In this paper, we examine the nature and magnitude of the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes by exploiting variation in access to fluoridated water during childhood. The politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local water districts suggests exposure to fluoride during childhood is arguably exogenous to other factors affecting earnings. We find that children who grew up in communities with fluoridated water earn approximately 4% more as adults than children who did not. The effect is larger for women than men, and is almost exclusively concentrated amongst those from families of low socioeconomic status (SES). We find that occupational sorting and consumer discrimination explains the mean impact of oral health on earnings, but employer discrimination explains the impact for low SES individuals.