"Keeping zombie ideas about personality and health awalkin’: A teaching example"

[Kyla]

http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/...-personality-health-awalkin-teaching-example/

(Not about ME )


Excerpts:

Type D personality is not so much a theory, as a tried-and-true method for getting flawed analyses published. Look at what the authors of this paper said about it in the introduction in their discussion. They really did not present a theory, but rather cited precedent and made some unsubstantiated speculations about why past results may have been obtained.

Any theory about Type D personality and adherence really does not make predictions with substantial clinical and public health implications. Think about it: if this study had worked out as the authors intended, what difference would it have made? Type D personality is supposedly a stable trait, and so the authors could not have proposed psychological interventions to change it. That has been done and does not work in other contexts.

What, then, could authors have proposed, other than that more research is needed? Should the mothers of these teenagers be warned that their adolescents had Type D personality and so might have trouble with their adherence? Why not just focus on the adherence problems, if they are actually there, and not get caught up in blaming the teens’ personality?

But Type D has been thung.

Because the authors have been saying in lots of articles that they have been studying Type D, it is tough to get heard saying “No, pal, you have studying statistical mischief. Type D does not exist except for statistical mischief.” Type D has been thung, and who can undo that?

Thing (v). to thing, thinging. 1. To create an object by defining a boundary around some portion of reality separating it from everything else and then labeling that portion of reality with a name.

One of the greatest human skills is the ability to thing. We are thinging beings. We thing all the time.

And

Yes, yes, you might think, but we are not really “thinging.” After all trees, branches and leaves already existed before we named them. We are not creating things we are just labeling things that already exist. Ahhh…but that is the question. Did the things that we named exist before they were named? Or more precisely, in what sense did they exist before they were named, and how did their existence change after they were named?

…And confused part-whole relationships become science and publishable.

Once we have convincingly thung Type D personality, we can fool ourselves and convince others about there being a sharp distinction with the similarly thung “depressive symptoms.”

Boundaries between concepts are real because we make them so, just like between Canada and the United States, even if particular items are arbitrarily assigned to one or the other questionnaire. Without our thinging, we do not as easily forget the various items come from the same “crud factor,” “big mess,” and could have been lumped or split in other ways.

And...

Keeping zombie ideas awalkin’

How did the study of negative emotion and adherence get published with basically null findings? With chutzpah and by the authors following the formulaic D personality strategy for getting published. This study did not really obtain significant findings, but the availability of the precedent of many studies of type D personality to support claims they achieved a conceptual replication, even if not an empirical one. And these claims were very likely evaluated by members of the type D community making similar claims. In his commentary, Ioannidis pointed to how null Type D findings are gussied up with “approached significance” or, better, was “independently related to blah, blah, when x,y, and z are controlled.”

Strong precedents are often are confused with validity, and the availability of past claims relaxes the standards for making subsequent claims.

The authors were only doing what authors try to do, their damnedest to get their article published. Maybe the reviewers are from the Type D community and can cite the authority of hundreds of studies were only doing what the community tries to do– keep the cheering going for the power of Type D personality and adding another study to the hundreds. But where were the editors of Journal of Psychosomatic Research?

 

[alex3619]

Its not about ME, but its very relevant to even our forms of psychobabble aka BPS CBT/GET things. Indeed, nearly all psychiatry is like this. Invented categories.

We, as in humans, seem to feel or convince ourselves we are in control if we have a label for something, even if we do not understand it.

What disturbs me the most are unwarranted and dangerous changes to meaning of terms that can catch the unwary. Normal that is not normal, recovery that is not recovery, pacing that is not pacing, ME that is not ME, CFS that is not CFS, gold standard research that is not gold standard ... and all that from just one research program.

 

[Kyla]

Indeed. The parallels with the way ME has been treated by the BPS school is why I posted it.

In particular:

That these sorts of theories snowball as "accepted wisdom", even without sufficient evidence for the initial claim.
Eg - the recommendation that Oxford criteria be retired ...but still endorsing research based on it

The disinterest in actual health outcomes
eg - no improvement in ANY objective outcome measures in PACE, and every patient survey reporting harms, yet trial is declared a "success"

And on and on and on...

The rest of the article is definitely worth a read.

 

[SOC]

Wasn't there some nasty person (Stalin?) who said something to the effect that if you keep proclaiming a lie long enough and loud enough it will be accepted as truth?

 

[alex3619]

Actually I think that is a Nazi propaganda reference, attributed to Goebbels. However he said something like that in relation to the British, and the way British government lied.

Nevertheless it was Machiavelli who said something like the truth does not matter but what people perceive to be the truth does. I am not sure this was in the Prince, it might have been in his The Republic, but its been a very long time since I read either.