Tag Archives: Research

Happiness, Research, Writing

Evidence-Based Happiness for Teachers: Preliminary Results (and another opportunity)

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We’ve been collecting outcomes data on our Evidence-Based Happiness course for Teachers. From last summer, we have pre-post data on 39 participants. We had VERY significant results on all of the following outcomes

Less negative affect

More positive affect

Lower depression scores

Better sleep

Fewer headaches

Less gastrointestinal distress

Fewer colds

Increased hope

Increased mindfulness

If you’re a Montana Educator and you want to take the course THIS summer, it’s online, asynchronous, and only $195 for 3 Graduate Credits. You can register here: https://www.campusce.net/umextended/course/course.aspx?C=712&pc=13&mc=&sc=

If you’re not an educator, you must know one, and they deserve this, so share it, please!

Now for you researcher nerds. Over the past week, I’ve tried to fit in some manuscript writing time. If you’re following this blog, you’ll already know that I’ve experienced some rejections and frustrations in my efforts to publish out positive psychology/happiness outcomes. I’ve also emailed various editors and let them know what I think of their reviews and review processes. . . which means I may have destroyed my chances at publication. On the other hand, maybe sometimes the editors and reviewers need a testy review sent their way!

Yesterday, a friend from UC Santa Barbara sent me a fairly recent review of all the empirical research on College Happiness Course Outcomes. To summarize the review: There are HARDLY ANY good studies with positive outcomes that have been published. Specifically, if you look at U.S. published studies, only three studies with control groups and positive outcomes have been published. There’s one more I know of. If you want to read the article, here it is:

hobbs-et-al.-2022-positivepsychcourse-meta-analysisDownload

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll be posting a “teaching group counseling” update soon! JSF

Happiness, Research

Savor This!

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As many of you who know me in-person or through this blog, I’m quite capable of backward-savoring. . . which might be why I find this week’s Montana Happiness Challenge activity especially compelling.

Savoring is defined as a deliberate effort to extend and expand positive experiences. Or, as I learned from Dr. Heidi Zetzer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “Savoring is amplifying and extending positive emotions, by lingering, reveling, relishing, or something even more active like taking a victory lap! I also stole this photo from one of Heidi’s happiness slides. Thanks Heidi!!

So, how can anyone—or me—do savoring backward? Enter another fun word: Rumination.

Dictionary.com defines rumination as (1) a deep or considered thought about something. Or, (2) the action of chewing the cud.

Essentially, to ruminate is to think hard. You may be ruminating right now, wondering, “What’s backward or bad about thinking hard.”

Well, in the domain of mental health, we focus on a particular type of rumination. For example, according to the American Psychiatric Association, “Rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences.”

Thinking hard about negative things is precisely the opposite of savoring. And, despite my surface penchant for the positive, both my wife and I would attest to the fact that I’m also an excellent ruminator—as in the psychiatric sense, not so much in the cud-chewing sense.

As we like to say in academia, the research on savoring is damn good. Well, maybe we don’t really like to say “damn good,” but I’m sure someone has said that at some point in time, probably while savoring all the savoring research.  

How good is the research, you ask?

People instructed to savor, depending on the type of savoring, generally report improved mood, increased satisfaction, greater hope for positive life events, increased planning, and a greater likelihood of repeating a previously savor-worthy experience. Just savor that for an extra moment or two. For something so simple, savoring research has damn good outcomes.

This week, our Montana Happiness Challenge savoring activity provides you with a menu of different savoring activities to try out. You can read the details on the Montana Happiness Project website: https://montanahappinessproject.com/savoring

The summary is: For this week the plan is for you to pick one savoring assignment from a menu of research-based savoring activities (below). Each of these activities has research support; doing any of them might make you feel significantly more happiness or less depression. Here are your options:

  • Engage in mutual reminiscence. Mutual reminiscence happens when you get together with someone and intentionally pull up and talk about fun, positive, or meaningful memories. I was on the phone with a friend last week and did a bit of this and it was nice. Now I have memories of us remembering our shared positive memories.
  • Make a list of positive memories. After making the list, transport yourself to reminisce on one of the memories. You can do this by yourself. Retrieve the memory. Play it back in your mind. Explore it. Feel it. Let your brain elaborate on the details.
  • Celebrate good news longer than you would. This is easy. You need to track/observe for a positive message or news in your life that feels good. Then, let your mind linger on it. Notice how you feel. What parts of the news are especially meaningful and pleasant to you? Extend and celebrate the good news.
  • Notice and observe beauty. This activity is mostly visual, but you can listen for beautiful sounds and smells too. Let yourself see color, patterns, and nuanced beauty in nature or in art. Linger with that visual and let its pleasant effects be in your eyes, brain, and body. Notice and feel those sensations and thoughts.

As usual, consider making your savoring public. . . and tag us, so we have more things to savor.

Happiness, Personal Reflections, Research

University of Montana Happiness Class Research Results Round 1 (again): The Structured Abstract

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I’ve spent the morning learning. At this point in my life, learning requires simultaneous regulation of my snarky irreverence. Although I intellectually know I don’t know everything, when I discover, as I do ALL. THE. TIME., that I don’t know something, I have to humble myself unto the world.

Okay. I know I’m being a little dramatic.

After pushing “submit” on our latest effort to publish Round 1 of our happiness class data, less than an hour later I received a message from the very efficient editor that our manuscript had been “Unsubmitted.” Argh! The good news is that the editor was just letting us know that we needed to follow the manuscript submission guidelines and include a “Structured Abstract.” Who knew?

The best news is I wrote a structured abstract and discovered that I like structured abstracts way more than I like traditional abstracts. So, that’s cool.

And, here it is!

Abstract

Background: University counseling center services are inadequate to address current student mental health needs. Positive psychology courses may be scalable interventions that address student well-being and mental health.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a multi-component positive psychology course on undergraduate student well-being, mental health, and physical health.

Method: We used a quantitative, quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest design. Participants in a multi-component positive psychology course (n = 38) were compared to a control condition (n = 41). All participants completed pre-post measures of well-being, physical health, and mental health.

Results: Positive psychology students reported significant improved well-being and physical health on eight of 18 outcome measures. Although results on the depression scale were not statistically significant, a post-hoc analysis of positive psychology students who were severely depressed at pretest reported substantial depression symptom reduction at posttest, whereas severely depressed control group students showed no improvement.

Conclusion: Positive psychology courses may produce important salutatory effects on student physical and mental health. Future research should include larger samples, random assignment, and greater diversity.

Teaching Implications: Psychology instructors should collaborate with student affairs to explore how positive psychology courses and interventions can facilitate student well-being, health, and mental health. 

Personal Reflections, Research, Writing

Concerns about Science

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As many of you know, over the past year or so I’ve been frustrated in my efforts to publish a couple of journal articles. I know I’m not the only one who has experienced this, but this morning we got another rejection (the third for this manuscript) that triggered me in a way that, as the feminists might say, raised my consciousness.

Three colleagues and I are trying to publish the outcomes from a short online “happiness workshop” I did a couple years ago for counseling students. Mostly the results were nonsignificant, except for the depression scale we used, which showed our workshop participants were less depressed than a non-random control group. Also, based on open-ended responses, participants seemed to find the workshop experience helpful and relevant to them in their lives.

Problems with the methodology in this study are obvious. In this most recent rejection, one reviewer noted the lack of “generalizability” of our data. I totally agree. The study has a relatively small n, nonrandom group assignment, yada, yada, yada. We acknowledge all this in the manuscript. Having a reviewer point out to us what we have readily acknowledged is annoying, but accurate. In fact, this rejection was accompanied by the most informed and reasonable reviews we’ve gotten yet.

Nevertheless, I immediately sent out a response email to the editor . . . which, because I’m partially all about entertainment, I’m sharing below. As you’ll see, for this rejection, my concerns are less with the reviews, and more about WHAT IS BEING PUBLISHED IN SO-CALLED SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS. Although I don’t think it’s necessary, I’ve anonymized my email so as to not incriminate anyone.

Dear Editor,

Thanks for your timely processing of our manuscript.

Overall, I believe your reviewers did a nice job of reading the manuscript, noting problems, and providing feedback. Being very familiar with the journal submission and feedback process, I want to compliment you and your reviewers on your evaluation of our manuscript. Compared to the quality of feedback I’ve obtained from other journals, you and your team did well.

Now I’d like to apologize in advance for the rest of this email because it’s a critique not only of your journal, but of counseling research more generally.

Despite your professional review, I have concerns about the decision, and rather than sit on them, I’m going to share them.

Although the reviews were accurate, and, as Reviewer 1 noted, there are generalizability concerns (but aren’t there always), I looked at the most recent online articles published in [your journal], to get a feel for the journal’s standards for generalizability, among other issues. What I found was disturbing.

In the seven published 2023 articles from your most recent issue, none have data that are even close to generalizable, and yet all of the articles offer recommendations, as if there were generalizable data. In the [first] article there’s an n of 8; [the second article] has an n of 6 and use a made-up questionnaire. I know these are qualitative studies, but, oh my, they don’t shy away from widely offering recommendations (is that not generalizing?), based on minimal data. Four of the articles in the most recent issue have no data; that’s okay, they’re interesting and may be useful. The only “empirical” study is a survey with n = 165, using a correlational analysis. But no information is provided on the % response to the survey, and so any justification for generalization is absent. Overall, some of these articles are interesting, and written by people I know and like. But none of them have anything close to what might be considered “generalizability.”

What’s most concerning to me is that none of the published articles employ an experimental design. My impression is that “Counselor Education and Preparation” (not just the journal, but the whole profession) mostly avoids experimental or quasi-experimental designs, and privileges qualitative research, or correlational designs that, of course, are really just open inquiries about the relationships among 2 or more variables.

This is the third rejection of this manuscript from counseling journals that, to be frank, essentially have no scientific impact factor. Maybe the manuscript is unpublishable. I would be open to that possibility if I didn’t read any of the published articles from [your journal and other journals]. My best guess (hypothesis) is that counseling journals have double standards; they allow generalizing statements from qualitative studies, but they hold experimental designs to inappropriately high standards. I say inappropriate here because all experimental designs are flawed in one way or another, and finding those flaws is easier than understanding them.

I know I’m biased, but my last problem with the rejection of this manuscript has to do with relevance. We tried to offer counseling students a short workshop intervention to help them cope with their COVID-related distress and distress in general–something that I think more counseling programs should do, and something that I think is innately relevant and potentially very meaningful to counseling students and practitioners.

Sorry again, for this email and it’s length, but I hope some of what I’ve shared is food for thought for you in your role as journal editor.

Thanks again for the timely review and feedback. I do appreciate the professionalism.

Sincerely,

John SF

If you’re still reading and following my incessant complaining, for your continued pleasure, now I’m pasting my email response to my coauthors, one of whom wrote us all this morning beginning with the word “Bummer.”

Hi There,

Yes! Another bummer.

For entertainment purposes, I kept you all on my email to the editor.

Although I’m clearly triggered, because I just read some articles in the [Journal], I now know, more about self-care, because in their [most recent lead published article], the authors wrote:

“Most participants also offered some recommendations for self-care practices to process crisis counseling. One participant (R2) indicated, “I keep a journal with prayers, thoughts and feelings, complaints and poetry.”

Now that I’ve done my complaining, I need to take time off to pray and write a poem or two, but then, yes . . .  I will continue to send this out into the world in hopes of eventual validation.

Happy Friday to you all,

John

I hope you all caught my clever utilization of recommendations from the offending journal to cope with this latest rejection. The good news is, like most rejections, this one was clarifying and inspired me with even more snark energy than I usually have.

Have a great weekend.

Clinical Interviewing, Personal Reflections, Research, Writing

The Delight of Scientific Discovery

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Art historians point to images like John Henry Fuseli’s 1754 painting “The Nightmare” as early depictions of sleep paralysis.

Consensus among my family and friends is that I’m weird. I’m good with that. Being weird may explain why, on the Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend, I was delighted to be searching PsycINFO for citations to fit into the revised Mental Status Examination chapter of our Clinical Interviewing textbook.

One thing: I found a fantastic article on Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). If you’ve never heard of FAS, you’re certainly not alone. Here’s the excerpt from our chapter:   

Many other distinctive deviations from normal speech are possible, including a rare condition referred to as “foreign accent syndrome.” Individuals with this syndrome speak with a nonnative accent. Both neurological and psychogenic factors have been implicated in the development of foreign accent syndrome (Romö et al., 2021).

Romö’s article, cited above, described research indicating that some forms of FAS have clear neurological or brain-based etiologies, while others appear psychological in origin. Turns out they may be able to discriminate between the two based on “Schwa insertion and /r/ production.” How cool is that? To answer my own question: Very cool!.

Not to be outdone, a research team from Oxford (Isham et al., 2021) reported on qualitative interviews with 15 patients who had grandiose delusions. They wrote: “All patients described the grandiose belief as highly meaningful: it provided a sense of purpose, belonging, or self-identity, or it made sense of unusual or difficult events.” Ever since I worked about 1.5 years in a psychiatric hospital back in 1980-81, I’ve had affection for people with psychotic disorders, and felt their grandiose delusions held meaning. Wow.  

One last delight, and then I’ll get back to my obsessive PsycINFO search-aholism.

Having experienced sleep paralysis when I was a frosh/soph attending Mount Hood Community College in 1975-1976, I’ve always been super-delighted to discover old and new information about multi-sensory (and bizarre) experiences linked to sleep paralysis episodes. Today I found two articles stunningly relevant to my 1970s SP experiences. One looked at over 300 people and their sleep paralysis/out-of-body experiences. They found that having out-of-body experiences during sleep paralysis reduced the usual distress linked to sleep paralysis. The other study surveyed 185 people with sleep paralysis and found that most of them, as I did in the 1970s, experienced hallucinations of people in the room and many believed the “others” in the room to be supernatural. I find these results oddly confirming of my long-passed sleep insomnia experiences.

All this delight at scientific discovery leads me to conclude that (a) knowledge exists, (b) we should seek out that knowledge, and (c) gaining knowledge can help us better understand our own experiences, as well as the experiences of others.

And another conclusion: We should all offer a BIG THANKS to all the scientists out there grinding out research and contributing to society . . . one study at a time.

For more: Here’ a link to a cool NPR story on sleep paralysis: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/21/781724874/seeing-monsters-it-could-be-the-nightmare-of-sleep-paralysis

References

Isham, L., Griffith, L., Boylan, A., Hicks, A., Wilson, N., Byrne, R., . . . Freeman, D. (2021). Understanding, treating, and renaming grandiose delusions: A qualitative study. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 94(1), 119-140. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12260

Herrero, N. L., Gallo, F. T., Gasca‐Rolín, M., Gleiser, P. M., & Forcato, C. (2022). Spontaneous and induced out‐of‐body experiences during sleep paralysis: Emotions, “aura” recognition, and clinical implications. Journal of Sleep Research, 9. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13703

Romö, N., Miller, N., & Cardoso, A. (2021). Segmental diagnostics of neurogenic and functional foreign accent syndrome. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 58, 15. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100983

Sharpless, B. A., & Kliková, M. (2019). Clinical features of isolated sleep paralysis. Sleep Medicine, 58, 102-106. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2019.03.007

Happiness, Personal Reflections

What the Research Says* about Happiness Classes

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I was just now finishing up the Moodle (not Poodle) shell for my upcoming Happiness class. While working, I noticed one more person added into the course. . . so there’s still time . . . and I know some of you have been thinking about it.

Whether you take my class or not, you should consider some form of a happiness intervention with yourself. I’m not saying that because I promote toxic positivity. Instead, although I think we should all explore our pain and deepen our understanding of ourselves, we also need tools that will help us feel better on a daily basis and more tools to help us make sure we’re pointed in a direction likely to create meaningful lives.

This leads me to some highlights from happiness class research.

  1. In a small study of 23 undergraduates in a traditional, face-to-face psychology course format, “students reported gains in hope, self-actualization, well-being, agency, and pathway hopefulness, purpose, and mission in life” (Maybury, 2013, p. 62). Note: there was no control group in this study.
  • In a small study of 18 undergraduates (and 20 control participants who took a social psychology course) in traditional, face-to-face psychology course formats, “the positive psychology students reported higher overall happiness, life satisfaction, routes to happiness, and lower depressive symptoms and stress compared to students in the control course” (Goodmon et al., 2016, p. 232)
  • In a series of three studies conducted during a COVID-19 lockdown in the U.K., the researchers reported (a) undergraduates in a happiness course had higher mental well-being than a waiting list control; (b) during lockdown, the happiness course did not have significantly positive effects, but participants seemed somewhat buffered from negative effects because they had higher subjective well-being than a control group; (c) a short (4 week), online version of the course used with “university staff and students produced significant benefits across a range of mental and personal well-being measures” (Hood et al., 2021, p. 11). Note: there was no control group in the third study.
  • In a series of three large studies (n = 500+ for each) of massive open online courses (MOOCs), adult students reported significantly higher subjective well-being than students in an alternative introductory psychology MOOC (Yaden et al., 2021).

We’ve now—at the University of Montana—have collected data on three of our own happiness interventions (one 2.5-hour workshop and two full-semester courses). We have, or will soon, submit these for publication. Our outcomes included:

Study 1 (a 2.5-hour happiness workshop): We had an immediate statistically significant effect on depression symptoms in our workshop group (n = 28) as compared to the waiting list control group (n = 17). At six-months follow-up, over 60% of the workshop participants reported they were still feeling the benefits from the workshop.  

Study 2 (Spring 2020 class; half face-to-face and half online, due to COVID-19): We had several positive outcomes for our happiness class members (n = 38) as compared to an alternative course control group (n = 41). Positive outcomes included: (a) greater perceived friendship support, (b) greater hope, (c) fewer/less intense negative emotions, (d) better total health, including better sleep and fewer headaches, and (e) slightly improved mindfulness.  

Study 3 (Spring 2021 class; all online): Again, we had several positive outcomes for our happiness class members (n = 36) as compared to an alternative course control group (n = 34). This time, the positive outcomes included: (a) fewer/less intense negative emotions, (b) higher positive emotions, (c) increased hope on both agency and pathways subscales, as well as total hope, and (d) slight increases in perceived friendship support. Unfortunately, we forgot to include the physical health questionnaire.

To summarize, as you can see, happiness classes can have positive effects and that’s why you should still be thinking about enrolling in our happiness course; it begins this coming Tuesday! Click here for enrollment info: https://johnsommersflanagan.com/2021/12/29/the-art-science-of-happiness-3-0-with-jsf-is-coming-soon-you-can-sign-up-now/

*In closing, I should mention that I used anthropomorphizing language in this blog’s title. Rest assured, I realize that “research” as a non-sentient activity, is unable to speak, and so if I were to be perfectly honest, I’d say something like “Research says nothing about happiness classes, because research cannot speak.” The reason for my wanton anthropomorphizing is that I’ve noticed this sort of linguistic error in many popular articles that get lots of attention. . . and obviously, I’m trying to attract attention here.

Happiness, Research, Writing

Research is Hard: Procrastination is Easy

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Before and after a quick trip to NYC (see the photo), I’m teaching the research class in our Department of Counseling this year. This leads me to re-affirm a conclusion I reached long ago: Research is hard.

Research is hard for many reasons, not the least of which is that scientific language can look and feel opaque. If you don’t know the terminology, it’s easy to miss the point. Even worse, it’s easy to dismiss the point, just because the language feels different. I do that all the time. When I come upon terminology that I don’t recognize, one of my common responses is to be annoyed at the jargon and consequently dismiss the content. As my sister Peggy might have said, that’s like “throwing the baby out with the bathtub.”  

Teaching research to Master’s students who want to practice counseling and see research as a bothersome requirement is especially hard. It doesn’t help that my mastery of research design and statistics and qualitative methods is limited. Nevertheless, I’ve thrown myself into the teaching of research this semester; that’s a good thing, because it means I’m learning.

This week I shared a series of audio recordings of a woman bereaved by the suicide of her former husband. The content and affect in the recordings are incredible. Together, we all listened to the woman’s voice, intermittently cracking with pain and grief. We listened to each excerpt twice, pulling out meaning units and then building a theory around our observations and the content. More on the results from that in another blog.

During the class before, I got several volunteers, hypnotized them, and then used a single-case design to evaluate whether my hypnotic interventions improved or adversely affected their physical performance on a coin-tossing task. The results? Sort of and maybe. Before that, I gave them fake math quizzes (to evaluate math anxiety). I also used graphology and palmistry to conduct personality assessments and make behavioral and life predictions. I had written the names of four (out of 24 students) who would volunteer for the graphology and palmistry activities, placed them in an envelope, and got ¾ correct. Am I psychic? Nope. But I do know the basic rule of behavioral prediction: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Today is Friday, which means I don’t have many appointments, which means I’m working on some long overdue research reports. Two different happiness projects are burning a hole in my metaphorical research pocket. The first is a write-up of a short 2.5-hour happiness workshop on counseling students’ health and wellness. As it turns out, compared with the control group, students who completed the happiness workshop immediately and significantly had lower scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (p = .006). Even better, after 6-months, up to 81% of the participants believed they were still experiencing benefits from the workshop on at least one outcome variable (i.e., mindfulness). The point of writing this up is to emphasize that even brief workshops on evidence-based happiness interventions can have lasting positive effects on graduate students in counseling.

Given that I’m on the cusp of writing up these workshop results, along with a second study of the outcomes of a semester-long happiness course, I’m stopping here so I can get back to work. Not surprisingly, as I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, research is hard; that means it’s much easier for me to write this blog than it is to force myself to do the work I need to do to get these studies published.

As my sister Peggy used to say, I need to stop procrastinating and “put my shoulder to the grindstone.”

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Evidence-Based Relationship Factors in Counseling and Psychotherapy

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The medical model of psychotherapy . . . has led us to accept a view of clients as inert and passive objects on whom we operate and whom we medicate. Gene V. Glass, in The Great Psychotherapy Debate, 2001, p. ix

John and Max Seattle

In a 1957 publication in the Journal of Consulting Psychology, Carl Rogers boldly declared:

  1. No psychotherapy techniques or methods are needed to achieve psychotherapeutic change.
  2. Diagnostic knowledge is “for the most part, a colossal waste of time” (1957, p. 102).

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on what Rogers was saying.

**PAUSE HERE FOR SERIOUS REFLECTION**

If diagnosis is a waste of time and therapy techniques are unnecessary, then what can counselors or therapists do to produce positive outcomes? Here’s what Rogers said:

All that is necessary and sufficient for change to occur in psychotherapy is a certain type of relationship between psychotherapist and client.

Rogers’s revolutionary statements refocused counseling and psychotherapy. Until Rogers, therapy was primarily about theoretically based methods, techniques, and interventions. After Rogers, writers and practitioners began debating whether the relationship between client and therapist—not the methods and techniques employed—might be producing positive therapy outcomes.

This debate continues today. Wampold (2001) has called it “the great psychotherapy debate.” This debate has been boiled down to a dichotomy captured by the question: “Do treatments cure disorders or do relationships heal people?” (Norcross & Lambert, p. 3).

Keep in mind that like lots of things on planet Earth, the techniques vs. relationship debate promotes a false dichotomy. IMHO, most “rational” professionals understand that therapy relationships and techniques are BOTH important to positive outcomes. Seriously, how could it be otherwise?

But there is a positive outcome from this debate. Various researchers around the world started focusing on how to define specific relationship factors that contribute to counseling outcomes. Previously, these relationship factors were lumped into a category called “common factors.” Common factors were viewed as the main reason why all therapy approaches tend to produce approximately equal positive outcomes.

Flowing from research on common factors, one of the most fascinating and important movements in counseling and psychotherapy is now called, “Evidence-based relationships” (Norcross, 2011). As it turns out, there’s a large body of existing and accumulating research to help us clearly identify what’s relationally therapeutic.

In the attached link, you’ll find the powerpoint slides that Kim Parrow and I developed for a supervisor training yesterday, at the University of Montana. Our goal was to describe, demonstrate, and discuss 10 specific and observable relationship factors that contribute to positive counseling outcomes. We call them Evidence-Based Relationship Factors (EBRFs). They include:

  1. Congruence
  2. Unconditional positive regard
  3. Empathic understanding
  4. WA1: Emotional bond
  5. WA2: Goal consensus – Focus on strengths
  6. WA3: Task collaboration
  7. Rupture and repair
  8. Countertransference (management)
  9. Progress monitoring (feedback)
  10. Culture and Cultural Humility

The link at the bottom of this post will take you to our powerpoint slides. Also, for more information, you can always check out various theories textbooks, including Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice (from which this blog was adapted). https://www.amazon.com/Counseling-Psychotherapy-Theories-Practice-Resource/dp/1119084202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504292029&sr=8-1&keywords=counseling+and+psychotherapy+theories+in+context+and+practice

EBRFs for Supervisors 2017 FIN

Personal Reflections, Politics, Research, Writing

That time when I conducted a scientific research study designed to test the effectiveness of using hypnosis to break down the space-time continuum and transport 18 people to the future so they could fill-out perfect March Madness brackets.

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Flower in Bricks

You can probably tell by the title of this post that I’m pretty stoked about scientific research right now.

I typically don’t do much empirical research. That’s why it was a surprise to me and my colleagues that, about six weeks ago, I spontaneously developed a research idea, dropped nearly everything else I was doing, and had amazing fun conducting my first ever March Madness bracket research project.

My research experience included a roller coaster of surprises.

I somehow convinced a professor from the Health and Human Performance department at the University of Montana to collaborate with me on a ridiculous study on a ridiculously short timeline.

My university IRB approved our proposal. Seriously. I submitted a proposal that involved me hypnotizing volunteer participants to transport them into the future to make their March Madness bracket selections. Then they approved it in six days. How cool is that?

I managed to network my way onto ESPN radio (where we called the study ESP on ESPN; thanks Lauren and Arianna) and onto the Billings, MT CBS affiliate (thanks Dan).

And, this is the teaser: with only 36 participants, the results were significant at the p < .001 level.

Damn. Now you know. Scientific research is so cool.

Of course, there’s a back-story. While you’re waiting in anticipation to learn about those p < .001 results, you really need to hear this back-story.

Several years ago, while on a 90-minute car ride back from Trapper Creek Job Corps to Missoula, my counseling interns asked me if I could hypnotize someone and take them back in time so they could recall something that happened to them in a previous life. I thought the question was silly and the answer was simple.

“Absolutely yes.” I said, “Of course I could do that.”

Questions followed.

My answers included a ramble about not really believing in past lives and not really thinking that past life hypnotic regression was ethical. But still, I said, “If someone is hypnotizable, then, I’m sure I could get them into a trance and at least make them think they went back to a previous life and retrieved a few memories. No problem.”

Have you ever noticed that once you start to brag, it’s hard to stop. That’s what happened next, for several years.

Somewhat later in another conversation, I started exaggerating bigly. I decided to extend my imaginary prowess into a fool-proof strategy for generating a perfect March Madness bracket. I said something about, “Brains being amazing and that you can suddenly pay attention to the big toe on your right foot and, at nearly the same time, project yourself not only back into your 7-year-old self, but forward in time into the future. That being the case,” I waxed, “it’s pretty obvious that I could hypnotize people, break down the space-time continuum, and take them to a future where all the March Madness basketball games had been played and therefore, they could just copy down the winners and create a perfect March Madness bracket.”

Through this process, I would turn a one-in-a-trillion possibility into absolute certainty.

I enjoyed bragging about my imaginary scenario for several years. That is, until this year, when, I decided that if I was set on bragging bigly, I should also be willing to put my science where my mouth is (or something like that). It was time to test my hypnosis-space-time-continuum hypothesis using the scientific method.

We designed a pre-test, post-test experimental design with random assignment to three conditions.

Condition 1: Education. Participants would receive about 20 minutes of education on statistics relevant to making March Madness bracket picks. My colleague, Dr. Charles Palmer, showed powerpoint slides and provided insights about the statistical probabilities of 12s beating 5s and 9s beating 8s, and “Blue Blood” conferences.

Condition 2: Progressive Muscle Relaxation. The plan was for Daniel Salois, one of my graduate students and an immensely good sport, to do 20 minutes of progressive muscle relaxation with this group.

Condition 3: Hypnosis. I would use a hypnotic induction, a deepening procedure, and then project participants into the future. Instead of having everyone fill out their brackets while in trance, I decided to use a post-hypnotic suggestion. As soon as they heard me clap twice, they would immediately recall the tournament game outcomes and then fill out their brackets perfectly.

Unfortunately, on short notice we only recruited 36 participants. To give ourselves a chance to obtain statistical significance, we dumped the progressive muscle relaxation condition, and just had the EDUCATION and HYPNOSIS conditions go head to head in a winner-take-all battle.

Both groups followed the same basic protocol. Upon arrival at the College of Education, they were randomly assigned to one of two rooms (Charlie or me). When the got to their room, they signed the informed consent, and immediately filled out a bracket along with a confidence rating. Then they received either the EDUCATION or HYPNOSIS training. After their respective trainings, they filled out a second bracket, along with another confidence rating.

We hypothesized that both groups would report an increase in confidence, but that only the EDUCATION group (but not the HYPNOSIS group) would show a statistically significant improvement in bracket-picking accuracy. We based our hypotheses on the fact that although real education should help, there’s no evidence that anyone can use hypnosis to transport themselves to the future. We viewed the HYPNOSIS condition as essentially equivalent to raising false hopes without providing help that had any substance.

IMHO, the results were stunning.

We were dead on about the EDUCATION group. Those participants significantly increased their confidence; they also improved their bracket scores (we used the online ESPN scoring system where participants can obtain up to a maximum of 320 points for each round; this means participants got 10 points for every correct pick in the first round, with their potential points doubling in every round, and concluding with 320 points if they correctly picked the University of North Carolina to win the tournament).

Then there was the HYPNOSIS group.

HYPNOSIS participants experienced a small but nonsignificant increase in their confidence. . . but they totally tanked their predictions. We had a participant who picked Creighton to win it all. We had one bracket that had Virginia Tech vs. Oklahoma State in the final. We had another person who listed a final score in the championship game of 34-23. When I shared these results to our research class, I said, “The HYPNOSIS participants totally sucked. They did so bad that I think they couldn’t have done any worse if we had hit them all on the head with a 2 x 4 and given them concussions and then had them fill out their brackets.”

So what happened? Why did the HYPNOSIS group perform so badly?

When told of the outcome, one student who had participated offered her explanation, “I believe it. I don’t know what happened, but after the hypnosis, I totally forgot about anything I knew, and just wrote down whatever team names popped into my head.”

My interpretation: Most of the people in the HYPNOSIS group completely abandoned rational and logical thought. They decided that whatever thoughts that happened to come into their minds were true and right.

It’s probably too much of a stretch to link this to politics, but it’s hard not to speculate. It’s possible that candidates from both parties are able, from time to time, to use charisma and bold claims to get their supporters to let go of logic and rational thought, and instead, embrace a fantastical future.

Another faculty member in our department offered an alternative explanation. She recalled the old Yerkes-Dodson law. This “law” in psychology predicts that optimal arousal (or stress) is linked to optimal performance. In contrast, too much arousal or too little arousal impairs performance. She theorized that perhaps the hypnosis participants had become too relaxed; they were so under-aroused that they couldn’t perform.

It seems clear that the hypnosis did something. But what? It wasn’t a helpful trip to the future. Some friends suggested that maybe they went to the wrong year. Others have mocked me for being a bragger who couldn’t really use hypnosis to break down the space-time continuum.

What do you think? Do you have any potential explanations you’d like to offer? I’d love to hear them. And, if you have any ideas of which scientific journal to submit our manuscript to, we’d love to hear that as well.

Research

Do You Want to Participate in The March Madness Research Project?

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Madness 2017

If your answer is yes . . . here’s what you should do and what will happen:

  1. Email: ummadness2017@gmail.com and say “Yes, I’m in”
  2. You will be randomly assigned to one of three “March Madness Bracket Training” groups:
    • Relaxation and focusing
    • Hypnosis to view the games from the future
    • Educational information
  3. You will receive an email telling you where to meet. All groups will meet on campus at the University of Montana in a specific room in the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education building at 7pm on Tuesday evening, March 14.
  4. Show up at your designated room. When you arrive, you will fill out an informed consent form, a March Madness bracket, and complete a short questionnaire.
  5. Then you will participate in the training.
  6. After the training, you will complete another bracket
  7. You will leave your completed packet and your brackets with the researcher and it will be uploaded in to the ESPN Tournament Challenge website [we will need your email address to upload your selections into the ESPN system]
  8. You will receive information at the “Training” on how to login and track your bracket. If you lose or misplace this information, you can request an additional copy via email: ummadness2017@gmail.com

To sign up for this research project, email:

UMmadness2017@gmail.com