People who hate long weekends

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 3:55 PM - 30 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Though the condition isn’t in any medical book, it could unofficially be called the “Long Weekend Blues,” or, perhaps, LWAD (Long Weekend Affective Disorder). Many people, it turns out, do not look forward to long weekends. In fact, they dread them.

As a 37-year-old Vancouver lawyer says, “Every long weekend feels to me like everyone else has big, unusual fun plans. I dread it. It’s a reminder that my life is a little slow or empty or something. The last long weekend, there was a truck of people dressed up with brass instruments having the time of their lives. As I watched them drive by, I was like, ‘Where are all you people going and how come I don’t know about it?’ It just feels like a long weekend is one big party I had no idea about.”

Another woman, 41, from Toronto, says long weekends depress her because she ends up doing chores; she also feels like she’s missing out on some sort of party, which makes her feel lonely. “I just try and get ahead for the week, making my lunches, doing groceries, going to the dry cleaner. Long weekends aren’t attached to anything meaningful except maybe some dead queen.” Still, she jokes, “They should call it ‘No Suicide Long Weekends.’ ” She adds, “I get really sad because my daughter is all grown up and isn’t around and all my friends seem to go visit their families. One of my friends said, ‘We’re going to visit my in-laws so my husband can fix their roof.’ They weren’t looking forward to it, but on my end I thought, ‘That’s nice that you have something to do.’ Not that I would want to fix their roof either. But what was I going to do? Buy another book?”

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The stuff of war, raw and uncensored

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Holleron/Canadian War Museum; Emanuela Appetiti

One of the first images confronted by a visitor to the Canadian War Museum’s War and Medicine exhibit is a photograph of a young American veteran of the Iraq war, shirtless, his back to the camera while his mother, a woman with grey hair and large eyes, embraces him. About one-third of the soldier’s head is missing. “There’s this mother who’s going to be caring for her son, who’s in his late 20s, for the rest of her life,” says Tim Cook, co-curator of the exhibition. “This show is not just about battlefield trauma. It’s about the long-lasting impact of war. It’s about hurting and healing and caring.”

A balanced mix of emotion and material history, the show was developed by the Wellcome Collection in London, England, and the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, Germany. But Cook and fellow curator Andrew Burtch have adapted it by adding 150 images and artifacts, some from the museum’s permanent collection, others unique and unlikely to have been widely seen before. There’s a ceramic pot for holding leeches—once widely used to “bleed” infected patients—from the Museum of Health Care in Kingston, Ont.; a small display on Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who pioneered mobile blood transfusion during the Spanish Civil War and died a hero in China; and a handwritten copy of the poem “In Flanders Fields,” sent by its author, Canadian doctor and soldier John McCrae, to an American friend. The letter is normally housed at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine.

Other items are more gruesome. A section of the show titled “The Body” demonstrates the physical damage caused by war and its attendant diseases. There are models of blown-apart faces and syphilitic genitals, as well as other body parts: a punctured skull, a brain traversed by a bullet, a leg bone riddled with holes created when pus from an infection tried to force its way through. “We haven’t pulled any punches. This is the stuff of war,” says Cook.

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How to get anyone to do anything fast

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

Asking someone to do something rarely gets the results you’re after. In fact, it will likely backfire, writes Yale psychologist Michael Pantalon in a new book for anyone frustrated at not being able to entice a stubborn person to do things differently. “When someone tells us that we have to do something, it may set us up for a virtually irresistible compulsion to do the exact opposite,” notes the author.

The six-step method Pantalon describes in Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything Fast has a success rate of nearly 100 per cent, he claims, and takes no more than seven minutes to implement. “I developed it at the request of busy emergency room doctors seeking to motivate patients who came into the ER because of alcohol-related accidents and medical problems. The doctors had about seven minutes to influence semi-inebriated patients who didn’t necessarily see themselves as needing help.”

After first acknowledging a person’s resistance to change, which is a “surprisingly effective way to get people to be less defensive,” ask your subject how willing they are, on a scale from one to 10, to do the thing they don’t want to do. Take the husband who wants to skip a weekly dinner with his wife’s family so he can stay home to watch the game, writes Pantalon. “If you ask [your wife] flat out, her first response might very well be, ‘Yes, I mind. I’d rather you come with me.’ Her brain simply hears ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Instead, say something like, “I’d like to run something by you. There’s something I’d like to do, and I want to get a sense of how you feel about it. On a scale of one to 10, how ready do you think you might be to let me off the hook this Sunday so I can stay home and watch the game?’ ”

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Teenagers wired to take risks

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 5:42 PM - 5 Comments

Teenagers seem to be hard-wired to take risks. Scientists who study the adolescent brain are finding that experimentation is a natural part of these years, even though some risks can have serious consequences. Among those aged 10 to 24, three-quarters of all deaths are from preventable causes, like motor vehicle accidents and suicide, according to the most recent U.S. Youth Risk Behavior Survey. It can be hard for parents to recognize the difference between “normal adolescent behaviour,” like experimenting with drugs and sex, and what’s cause for real concern, says Dr. Blaise Aguirre, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Today’s teens are “stressed out,” Aguirre  says, and it’s taking a toll. Over the last five years, there’s been a steady increase in the number of anti-depressants prescribed to Canadian teens, according to IMS Brogan, a health information and consulting company. “One in five teenagers, and one in four Ivy League students, are now self-injuring,” or cutting themselves, often in moments of emotional distress, Aguirre says. There’s evidence eating disorders are on the rise, too.

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How to quit putting things off

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 15 Comments

Getty images; iStock; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

People confess to procrastination and then laugh it off, like the 900,000 members of the Facebook group, “I was doing homework then I ended up on Facebook.” For many, though, procrastination isn’t funny. Look at the poet Samuel Coleridge, writes Piers Steel, the Calgary professor who’s becoming known internationally for his insights on procrastination, in his new book The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things off and Start Getting Stuff Done. The poet spent 25 years writing the poem Kubla Khan. His excuses were legendary. For other people, Steel writes, the pain of procrastination “is about diets postponed, late-night scrambles to finish projects and disappointed looks from the people who depend on you.”

The good news is that techniques for treating procrastination exist. “They are scientifically proven. It’s not a question of will they work. They’re vetted,” Steel tells Maclean’s. “I was one of the first guinea pigs for this.”

Steel knows that procrastination is not the by-product of perfectionism, as it was once believed. The theory that “we delay because we are perfectionists anxious about living up to sky-high standards” feels good, he writes, but doesn’t pan out. “Neat, orderly and efficient perfectionists don’t tend to dilly-dally.” Laziness isn’t the problem either, he says. The truly lazy person thinks, “I don’t want to do this. You can force me to do it but I have no desire to do it.” The procrastinator, on the other hand, wants to do the work, “yet finds when the moment of action comes, they keep putting it off.”

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How to get adult kids out of the house

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, September 13, 2010 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/ iStock/ Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

If your adult child is still hanging around the house jobless after graduating, you’re not alone in feeling frustrated. But here’s a tale of hope from psychologist Brad Sachs, taken from his new book Emptying the Nest: Launching Your Young Adult Child Toward Success. Years ago, Sachs treated a young man he calls Richie, who performed abysmally at school. “How he ultimately graduated, I will never know.” Richie’s only interests were video games and electric guitar. After high school, he lived with his parents, unemployed. “He started a rock band but couldn’t get it off the ground, possibly because the band members were smoking too much pot,” writes Sachs.

Richie was 20 when his parents contacted Sachs, who “helped Richie understand how his behaviour was actually eliciting the parental nagging he so detested, and helped the parents to see that many of their efforts to motivate him, despite being well-intentioned, were backfiring.” A few years back, Sachs heard from Richie, who emailed: “I wanted to happily let you know I am now a millionaire.” Turns out Richie found a way to harness his passion for video games and guitar. He went on to be one of the designers of the video game Guitar Hero.

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‘Emotional’ Computers

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Bloom Image/ Getty Images

“Emotional computer” sounds like an oxymoron. “I’m a computer scientist, and I know the computer is not emotional in any sense,” says Beverly Woolf. But she is one of a few pioneering researchers developing just that: a computer that can identify its user’s mood and respond—with encouragement, empathy, even advice. Using sensors and cameras, this technology determines an individual’s emotional state from indicators such as heart rate and facial expression, with up to 80 per cent accuracy.

So far, emotional computers have been used by one population especially vulnerable to frustration, distraction and misery: students learning math. Woolf, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her colleagues have created a computer system that gauges the skills and feelings of students as they perform math online. The computer then tailors its questions and voice messages—offering, say, congratulations or help. The goal is to give each student the cognitive and emotional support he or she needs for optimal learning—but can’t always get from a teacher whose attention is divided. Woolf calls this the “personalization of education,” and says “every child can learn. We just have to figure out how to teach them.”

This is a major advancement in the realm of “intelligent tutors” or computer-based learning tools that focus on cognitive ability alone. “It is the frontier of knowledge,” says Claude Frasson, a world-renowned trailblazer in this area of science, and director of the elite Higher Educational Research on Tutoring Systems lab at the Université de Montréal. “This is a convergence of artificial intelligence, educational psychology and neurology.” There is a growing appreciation among computer scientists of the impact that feelings have on knowledge acquisition: “A lot of people now are starting to say we have to worry about the emotion,” says Woolf, who is spending her sabbatical at the Université de Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal. “People don’t learn if they’re in a sad state or anxious.”

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It takes a village to raise an idiot, He did it for the kids and Bad times for burkas

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

It takes a village to raise an idiot
Jacques Rogge and the rest of the executive board of the International Olympic Committee have relented and will allow the Australian International Olympic Committee to fly its iconic “boxing kangaroo” flag from a balcony of the Vancouver Olympic Village. The flag was ordered removed because the IOC bans unauthorized commercial symbols, and the cartoon ’roo is trademarked, albeit only to the Australian Olympic Committee. The dispute fired up Aussies everywhere. Deputy PM Julia Gillard called it a “scandal.” Vancouver radio phone-in callers raged at the IOC’s bully tactics. IOC spokesman Mark Adams called the issue “a storm in a teacup.” Meantime, athletes are streaming to the Oz sector of the village for a photo with the giant ’roo.

He did it for the kids
It was death in the afternoon for any bull that Jairo Miguel Sànchez Alonso faced Saturday at an arena in southwest Spain. The 16-year-old killed six bulls without mussing his sparkly white suit of lights. He returned to Spain after several years apprenticing in Mexico, where there is no minimum age for fighters. He almost died there in 2007 when a bull gored him. Alonso holds no grudges. “I feel quite bad when the bull has been good and you see the expression on his face, the innocence,” he says. “He has given you his bravery.” The event, while bloody, had a softer side. It was a fundraiser for children with autism.

Bad times for burkas
French Prime Minister François Fillon announced this week he’ll deny citizenship to a Moroccan national who forces his French-born wife to wear a burka. “If this man does not want to change his attitude, he has no place in our country,” he said. Meantime, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s call for a law banning full burkas is gaining steam. He has declared the full veil and body covering “not welcome” in France, and inconsistent with the country’s values. It’s certainly not welcome in Paris post offices. Two burka-clad robbers walked into a post office in the Paris suburb of Athis Mons, an area with a large immigrant Muslim population. They pulled out handguns and stole the equivalent of $6,000.

Blades of glory
Germany’s Katarina Witt and Canada’s Elizabeth Manley met on the ice in Vancouver Sunday, 22 years after the Teutonic bombshell and Canada’s sweetheart squared off in Calgary during the 1988 Olympics. Witt won gold but Manley, under enormous home-country pressure, pulled off the skate of her life to finish second. Both women are doing television colour commentary in Vancouver, but they took a turn on the Robson Square ice rink with young members of the Coquitlam Skating Club. “We’re not here for a rematch,” joked Manley, 44. “Not at our age, I’m 20—plus tax.” Replied a razor-sharp Witt: “Oh, my God! How much are taxes here?”

Tea time in Tennessee
Cranky country singer and musical comedian Ray Stevens’s flagging career was ready for a death panel. Then the 71-year-old singer of such novelty hits as Ahab the A-rab and Gitarzan wrote We the People, a lighthearted attack on President Barack Obama’s health care initiative. The video, which shows Stevens strumming a bathroom plunger and singing, “You vote Obamacare, we’re gonna vote you outta there,” is a YouTube hit and an unofficial anthem of the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement. Stevens sang at the group’s convention in Nashville on the weekend, where Sarah Palin raised eyebrows with her $100,000 fee for giving the keynote speech. “That’s a lot of damned tea,” grumbled one delegate.

Do as I say, not as I…ahh-choo!
As deputy health minister for the Czech Republic, Michael Vit has the job of deciding whether to impose mandatory swine flu vaccinations on “all people indispensable for the functioning of the country.” The day after receiving the assignment, Vit came down with H1N1 himself. “I have muscle problems, a headache, simply all symptoms of the flu,” he said. The deputy health minister admitted he had yet to receive the vaccination. “As you see, I’m a living example.”

‘Funeral’ for friends, and strangers
Canadian orchestral rockers Arcade Fire made it to the Super Bowl last weekend, when the group’s stirring anthem Wake Up, from their hit CD Funeral, was used in a series of NFL promo ads. While the group is protective of licensing its music, they had their reasons in this case. They turned over the fat licensing fee to Partners in Health, an agency with deep roots in Haiti. Band member Régine Chassagne’s family came from the island. She expressed her grief in an article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper: “I am mourning people I know. People I don’t know. People who are still trapped under rubble and won’t be rescued in time.”

Broom versus stick
Icy, obsessed with winning and not above the occasional cheap shot. Yes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and hockey are a match made in heaven. Hockey is “deeply reflective of the character of the nation,” he explained in a pre-Olympic interview with Sports Illustrated. Harper, who has studied the origins of the sport, said it contributes to “a uniquely Canadian sense of belonging in a community across the country.” Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff waxes poetic about a different sport: curling. Naturally, he identifies with the skip. “It’s the leadership and the precision, and the quiet,” he told the Globe and Mail. Apparently he’s not the sort of skip who shouts unseemly commands like, “Hurry, hurry hard.”

Very, very teed off
A Kelowna, B.C., entrepreneur is cashing in on Tiger Woods’s extramarital mayhem. Mike Caldwell has produced the Mistress Collection, a boxed set of 12 golf balls, each bearing a portrait of one of Woods’s mistresses. “He likes to play a round with them…and now you can, too!” notes his website, tailofthetiger.com. Caldwell says he sold 1,500 sets at US$54.90 in the first six days. Less than impressed is Joslyn James, an adult film star and alleged Woods mistress. She called a news conference to denounce the balls as hurtful and in bad taste. “It bothered me to think that someone would be standing with a dangerous club in their hands hitting a ball with my photo on it,” she said. She then showed her sensitive side by releasing 100 tawdry text messages she said she received from Woods.

You don’t want a visit by Oscar
Oscar the cat has a near infallible ability to detect which of the patients in the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I., is next to die, says Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician. When Oscar curls up with a patient, staff know to phone the next of kin. “It’s like he’s on a vigil,” says Dosa. Such insight would come as no surprise to cat owners, who are themselves terribly smart. Certainly smarter than dog owners, according to a study by Dr. Jane Murray at the University of Bristol. Winston Churchill was a cat lover. Paris Hilton loves dogs. Want more proof? Cat owners (if anyone really owns a cat) are 1.36 times more likely than dog owners to hold a university degree. They’re also 100 per cent less likely to have to follow behind their pet and scoop droppings off the sidewalk.

Gay but not cheerful
The headline in the Seattle Weekly says it all: “Gay, mentally challenged biracial male cheerleader claims discrimination.” All that high school student Benjamin Grundy wants is to shake his pom-poms like the girls on the squad at Garfield-Palouse High School in tiny Palouse, Wash. Instead, the cheer coach suggested he’d make a great mascot. He was eventually given a cheerleader’s top but denied the rest of the uniform, pom-poms, and the right to join the dance routine. “I was reduced to standing there and moving my arms,” he says. The school board denies discrimination, but Benjamin’s mother, Suzanne Grundy, is pressing the case with the ACLU and her congressman. “The combination of a biracial, mentally challenged gay male may be too much for them,” she told the local TV station.

L’état c’est moi
Quebec’s Lieutenant-Governor Pierre Duchesne has revived a tradition that ended 44 years ago—awarding medals, in gold, silver and bronze, and bearing his coat of arms, to those making contributions to their communities. The practice of awarding such medals ended in 1966 after Quebec nationalists condemned the symbolic tie with the monarchy. Duchesne has no such qualms: he also invoked royal privilege to avoid testifying before a national assembly committee on how he spends some $1 million annually in taxpayer money. His refusal to testify was condemned by all sides of the legislature.

Disharmony in the house of Wang
It was Hong Kong feng shui master Tony Chan’s skills in arranging buildings to create a positive life force that drew Chan to the eccentric, pigtailed property magnate Nina Wang. He began a 15-year affair with Wang, 23 years his senior. Now, he’s accused of arranging her $4-billion fortune in a manner auspicious to himself. When she died at 69 in 2007, he claimed to be her sole heir. Her family contested the will, and he’s charged with forgery.

She also has a Ph.D. in thankless tasks
Leila Ghannam, a former Palestinian intelligence officer, is the first woman governor of Ramallah, the unofficial capital of the West Bank. Her challenge is to quash a resurgence by hard-liners in Hamas. “My intelligence experience, like my degree in psychology, helps me carry out my job,” she says.

If you're an aural learner, read this aloud to yourself

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 7:08 AM - 25 Comments

A new study in the APS journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest [PDF] inquires into the scientific basis for one of the most influential fashions in current pedagogy: the idea that different students have different kinds of optimal “learning styles”. The number of “learning style” taxonomies being peddled by various authors and theorists is in the dozens. It’s a lucrative business, as Pashler et al. point out, and it has gotten a firm toehold in the public schools and education textbooks (and, he might have added, in homeschooling literature). One of the most popular theories is the “VARK” schema, which sorts the human species into visual, aural, “read/write”, and kinesthetic learners.

If you’re like me, you may have encountered this notion in the guise of somebody’s excuse for doing poorly, or for somebody else doing poorly, on a course or a test. I suspect that the younger you are, the more likely you are to have heard it. And I sometimes suspect, heaven forgive me, that the function of much educational research is to keep parents supplied with such excuses—to provide middle-class children with prefabricated “sick roles”, in the argot of sociology. But I digress. Continue…

Am I the only sane one working here?

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

“If you feel confused and frustrated by the insanity at your office, you are not alone. Sometimes it seems as if the whole world of business has gone crazy,” writes clinical psychologist Dr. Albert Bernstein in a new book, Am I the Only SANE ONE Working Here?: 101 Solutions for Surviving Office Insanity.

Among the problematic characters Bernstein tackles is the colleague whose work isn’t done and who lies about it. “Never ask why,” advises Bernstein. “He may say it wasn’t really his fault, because no one gave him the information he needed. This may pull you into an argument about who sent him what and when, but that won’t get you the PowerPoint any more quickly. He will not learn anything from your lectures and his mistakes, except that he is a screw-up, to which he readily admits.” Continue…

Are older children really the smartest?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 2:34 PM - 1 Comment

Birth order has been used to explain every personality trait under the sun, the New York Times reports, yet differences between oldest, middle and youngest children are far from straightforward. For example, research has shown that second-born kids tend to be exposed to less language than eldest children, which could help explain a 2007 study from Norway which found that oldest siblings’ I.Q.’s were about three points higher than younger brothers (it was based on Norwegian military records, so all the subjects were male). Even so, differences are modest. In fact, everything from family size to socioeconomic status influence a child’s development; as the saying says, no two children grow up in the same family, because each sibling’s experience is entirely different from the other. “Too many parents are haunted by experiences both good and bad that they identify with their birth order,” Dr. Peter A. Gorski, a professor at the University of South Florida, told the newspaper, adding that it can turn into “self-fulfilling prophecies.”

New York Times

Is a therapist allowed to do that?

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 9 Comments

Early on in the half-hour HBO drama In Treatment, Dr. Paul Weston, a therapist portrayed with understated aplomb by the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, is seen struggling to unclog the toilet in his home practice. Soon, Laura arrives, an alluring 30-year-old anesthesiologist who insists both that she is in love with him and that he secretly loves her. “I am not a realistic option,” Paul tells her, addressing an infatuation common to psychoanalysis called erotic transference. Suddenly, Laura stands. “I need to pee,” she says. “It’s blocked up,” replies Paul. Laura moves to the door to Paul’s home, domain of his wife and children. Paul grows uncomfortable. “I bet that didn’t come up in med school—a patient in love with the therapist asks to use a bathroom,” says Laura. “What should the therapist do?”

Actually, the question rarely comes up. “This is why I have ambivalence about the show, it seems like there’s a career’s worth of ethical dilemmas in every season,” says Ryan Howes, an L.A. psychologist who groans each time an episode appears in his TiVo cue, so much does it feel like a continuation of his workday. “I find myself doing a lot of backseat driving.” Yet he’s hooked, as are many therapists, who hail the drama as the most accurate depiction of their work yet to hit movie and TV screens. At once cerebral and earthy—how often do TV plots turn on a toilet plunger?—as well as gloriously talky, In Treatment, now in its second season on HBO Canada, is as close to theatre as it is to the 50-minute sessions it so faithfully reproduces. And it’s at least as prone to hyperbole.

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