// other research

Below is a collection of items related to:

 


// factors influencing IQ test scores

According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, "Intelligence tests predict only about 10% of the variation in real life success" (Epstein, 1999).

Sternberg: "Kids who are white and upper middle class and go to so-called "good schools" tend to perform best on analytical portions of IQ tests. But the students who do well on the creative and practical sections are much more diverse ethnically, socioeconomically and educationally" and "Our research has shown that all three kinds of abilities-academic, creative and practical-can be improved. Abilities are modifiable, flexible. When we give a test, the result isn't indelible; rather, it says where you are now. And that serves as a basis for where you can go" (Epstein, 1999).

Quotes from Frank Miele's Skeptic Magazine interview with Robert Sternberg:

  • When I was very young, I did poorly on IQ tests because I was test anxious. The result was that teachers had low expectations for me and I wanted to please my teachers. So I met their low expectations... I got over my test anxiety and then did extremely well on tests. All of a sudden the expectations were high. To a large extent it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, either way.
  • To a large extent, intelligence is our own creation. It is a creation to describe the fact that in terms of adaptive skills, some people have more than others. I think that you can argue that practical abilities are adaptive... Tacit knowledge is something you pick up from the environment... The tests of tacit knowledge that we use to measure practical intelligence measure what you know.
  • (One study) found that kids that were placed in Iranian orphanages, almost without exception, were mentally retarded, whereas the children who were quickly adopted before the age of two scored at normal levels on intelligence tests, roughly a 50-point difference in obtained IQ.
  • Marian Diamond performed studies on brain mass in rats and found that if you give them an enriched environment, it affects the brain, which becomes heavier and more convoluted.
  • Some years back in the early 1980s the government of Venezuela initiated a country-wide drive to improve the intellectual abilities of the children... They published the results in American Psychologist, which is a leading psychological journal, showing that there had been significant and impressive gains in IQ.
  • The Carolina Abecedarian Project (more information to follow)
  • I think it's hard to maintain the IQ gains. But if you think environment is important in the development of intelligence, and you put people in a really good program and you raise their IQ, and then take them out of the program and put them back in the poor environment in which they started, chances are you are going to lose a lot of the beneficial effect.
  • Early childhood IQs do not predict anything accurately. By around the age of eight, when IQ becomes stable, you are predicting about 50% of the variation in adult IQ.
  • (A)lmost any access route to the high-paying occupations requires you to do well on these tests (SAT, GRE, GMAT, etc.). That will artificially and spuriously create the correlation between high scores and entering into top jobs.

From Leon Kamin's commentary on The Bell Curve controversy:

  • "(E)xtensive practice at reading and calculating does affect, very directly, one's IQ score."
  • Stephen Ceci, Ph.D. of Cornell University: "At the very least, intelligence can be defined as the ability for complex thinking and reasoning. One thing the research shows for sure: much of the ability for complex reasoning depends on the situationÖ knowledge is organized in the mind differently in different domains." According to Ceci's review of research literature (Ceci, 2001):
  • IQ is modestly related to the speed at which you do some pretty simple things
  • Modern neuroimaging techniques demonstrate that cranial volume is correlated with IQ... The correlations, however, are quite small
  • Even when researchers control for such factors (the amount of time mother and child spend together through nursing and the sense of closeness they gain from nursing), there still appears to be a gain of 3 to 8 IQ points for breast-fed children by age three
  • A study conducted by London Board of Education revealed that the IQ of children in the same family decreased from the youngest to the oldest... This suggests that factors other than heredity are at work. The older children progressively missed more school, and their IQs plummeted as a result
  • For each year of schooling completed, there is an IQ gain of approximately 3.5 points
  • For each year of delayed schooling, the children experienced a decrement of five IQ points
  • In a large-scale study, 10% of all males in the Swedish school population born in 1948 were randomly selected and given an IQ test at age 13. Upon reaching age 18 (in 1966), 4,616 of them were tested again. For each year of high school not completed, there was a loss of 1.8 IQ points
  • Two independent studies have documented that there is a systematic decline in IQ scores over the summer months. With each passing month away from school, children lose ground from their end-of-year scores
  • Even among those with comparable levels of schooling, the greater a person's intellectual ability, the higher that person's weekly earnings
  • Intelligence is context dependent: experts were always better at reasoning complexly than non-experts, regardless of their IQ scores
  • Regarding the Flynn Effect: The rise in IQ suggests that whatever it is that IQ tests test, it is not some inherent quality of the mind.
  • In one large-scale analysis of approximately 1 million students enrolled in the New York City school system, researchers found a 14% improvement in IQ scores after the removal of preservatives, dyes, colorings and artificial flavors from lunch offerings

Research lead by Joseph Lee Rodgers, Ph.D. of the University of Oklahoma and published in American Psychologist, asserts that there is "no direct link between birth order and intelligence" nor is their evidence that big families produce less intelligent children (Rogers, 2000).

A study by University of Wisconsin researchers of 600 fourth-graders judged to be at high risk for delinquency and reported in 'Journal of Abnormal Psychology,' Vol. 102, No. 2: "Delinquents score an average of eight points lower on IQ tests than their non-delinquent peers... Students with low IQs are less likely to succeed in school and therefore less likely to respect the school as a bastion of authority. So they don't buy into the value system teachers are trying to transmit" (Psychology Today, 1994).

"Consider music as a sort of pre-language which, at an early age, excites the inherent brain patterns and enhances their use in other higher cognitive functions," says neurobiologist Frances Rauscher, Ph.D.

 

// the flynn effect (IQ scores have been steadily increasing about 3-6 points per decade)

James Flynn: extemporaneous talking leads to creative thinking and new ideas.

In The Rising Curve, Ulric Neisser of Cornell University reviews the Flynn effect and the various explanations for it--including better nutrition and parenting, more extensive schooling, improved test-taking ability, and the impact of the visual and spatial demands that accompany a television-laden, video-game-rich world.

Flynn "decided to follow up with a short monograph on military intelligence tests, because he had a hunch the data had been mishandled and that, in fact, black recruits were making large IQ gains on whites--a trend that would support Flynn's conviction that IQ was linked more to environmental factors than to genetic ones."

"While the book acknowledges that no one knows why test scores are rising, Flynn argues in one chapter that environmental factors must be responsible for the trend." - APA Monitor


// the brain

Christopher Wills, in his book The Runaway Brain, suggests that larger brain size is associated with:

  • increased capacity to handle sensory information
  • increased flexibility
  • decreased predictability in behavior

According to new findings described by William Leonard in the December 2002 issue of Scientific American:

From a nutritional perspective, what is extraordinary about our large brain is how much energy it consumes--roughly 16 times as much as muscle tissue per unit weight... In fact, at rest brain metabolism accounts for a whopping 20 to 25 percent of an adult human's energy needs--far more than the 8 to 10 percent observed in nonhuman primates.

Leonard suggest that the dramatic increase in human brain size is primarily the result of three factors, directly or indirectly related to food consumption:

  • Diet (40 to 60 percent derived from energy- and nutrient-rich animal foods for human ancestors versus 5 to 7 percent for modern chimps)
  • Bipedalism (35 percent more efficient than simian quadrapedalism and leading to "an 8 to 10-fold increase in home range size when compared with that of the late autralopithecenes")
  • Complex social interactions required for cooperative behavior that improved hunting and foraging tactics and, in turn, led to improved diet

According to an article by Kwan Lowe quoting biologist Paul Grobstein of Bryn Mawr College:

The latter innovation would then, in turn, exert selection pressure for increased brain size on other animals, whose survival relates to, among other things, their ability to predict behavior. These resulting increases in brain size would, of course, generate pressure for further increases in brain size. It is because of this positive feedback loop that Wills refers to the 'runaway brain.' I suspect that unpredictability in behavior is not the first thought that comes to mind when people hear the terms "intelligence" or "cognitive ability," but variability may in fact be an important component of what we mean by those terms.

In Jeffery Satinover's book The Quantum Brain, "All computation consists of the elementary logical operations strung together." The three basic operations are:

  • AND
  • OR (inclusive OR)
  • NOT

Two other elementary operations are derived from combinations of the three basic ones:

  • XOR (exclusive OR) = (NOT(A AND B) AND (NOT(NOT A AND NOT B))
  • If and only if = NOT XOR
According to Satinover, "String a batch of NOT XOR nets together and you have a device that not only can carry out higher-order logical operations as instructed, it can search out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be true, on its own, and no matter how complex, whether the human designers of the net have discovered these conditions for themselves or not" (pages 30-32).

// education and training

Interesting thoughts from a Psychology Today interview with pediatrician and author Mel Levine (Gorrell, 2002):

  • The eight neurodevelopmental constructs that affect learning: attention, language, memory, neuromotor function, spatial ordering, temporal-sequential ordering, higher-order cognition and social cognition
  • Throw away labels: "Labels oversimplify kids--they don't take into account a child's strengths. Labels are pessimistic because they imply you're always going to be one way."
  • Build on strengths: "Optimism, strengths, possibilities--we're trying to use a much less pathological view. We substitute description for labeling--rich description with much greater specificity about where the breakdown is occurring."
  • Actively involve the child as a participant: "Routinely, people never bother to ask the kid to be part of the diagnostic team... A lot of what we advocate involves helping a kid understand himself."
    "It's remarkable what kids come up with themselves once they have a clear understanding of what they need to do."
  • Question authority: "(We seek to) educate parents so they can be tougher consumers of their kids' education and testing, as opposed to having blind faith."

"As far back as 1984, ASTD informed us that more than 80 percent of what people learn is through informal means, less than 20 percent of what people learn is through formal instruction on which workplace educators spend so much time and money. That’s confirmed by recent research by the Educational Development Center, indicating that 70 to 80 percent of learning occurs informally through processes that aren’t structured or sponsored by the organization" (Weintraub and Martineau, 2002).

"Learning is primarily the result of experience, collaboration, observation and reading" (Weintraub and Martineau, 2002).

Participants who complete instructor-lead training forget 35-90% of the material within three days (Arch, 2002). The fact that participants forget is not the problem; the problem is that the forgotten information is taught in the first place.

"Many courses take too long to develop and deliver, or much of the knowledge conveyed by those courses is already known by the learners or irrelevant to them" (Weintraub and Martineau, 2002).


// education and technology

Writing about the $350 billion education, author Julie Landry asserts, "(A)fter hundreds of exhaustive studies, there remains no conclusive proof that technology in the classroom actually helps to teach students. In fact, in some cases it hinders learning" despite the fact that "at least 50 cents of every dollar spent on educational supplies goes to technology" (Landry, 2002).

Although companies will spend more than $22 billion on computer-based training in 2002, most of these investments produce poor returns (ASTD, 2001).

90% of people who begin a computer-based module never complete that module (Corporate Executive Board, 2001).

"Bosses often find it difficult to accept employees doing something other than “real work” in their cubicles but don’t mind them being excused to attend a classroom-delivered course" (Segers, 2002).


// pygmalion and placebos

Research demonstrates that teacher's expectations regarding the potential of elementary children resulted in different qualities of teacher-student interaction. Teachers reported that students with "high potential" were more appealing, more affectionate and better adjusted. In 'Pygmalion in the Classroom' (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), Rosenthal replies: "Such communication together with possible changes in teaching techniques may have helped the child learn by changing his self concept, his expectations of his own behavior, and his motivation, as well as his cognitive style and skills." Most surprisingly, students in the "high potential" group showed an average IQ gain of two points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points in overall IQ. There was no difference in the amount of time the teachers spent with the students (Accel-Team, 2001).

In a meta-analysis of 17 relevant studies involving 2784 participants in work environments, employees reporting to supervisors with positive expectations regarding work potential responded with greater productivity than those reporting to supervisors with negative expectations (McNatt, 2000).

"Recent studies suggest that the placebo effect not only exists but may be caused by changes in the physiology of the brain" and "45% of sufferers (of depression) who improve on placebo exhibit clear changes in brain chemistry, not just altered perceptions" (Kaptchuk et. al., 2002).

"(S)cientists at the University of British Columbia found that placebos improved the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in some subjects and that, in these individuals, increased amounts of dopamine were produced in the striatum of their brains" (Kaptchuk et. al., 2002).

"(W)hen physicians are hopeful and enthusiastic about the active treatment in a study, their patients are more responsive to placebo" (Kaptchuk et. al., 2002).

From Against Depression, a Sugar Pill Is Hard to Beat by Shankar Vedantam (Washington Post: Tuesday, May 7, 2002):

  • Timothy Walsh, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, recently found that the placebo effect has grown in recent years. He found that greater percentages of people tended to get better on placebos during trials of antidepressants in 2000 than in 1981.
  • In January, Andrew Leuchter, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, published a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry in which he tracked some of the brain changes associated with drugs such as Prozac and Effexor, which are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. When Leuchter compared the brain changes in patients on placebos, he was amazed to find that many of them had changes in the same parts of the brain, heightened activity in the prefrontal lobe, that are thought to control important facets of mood.
  • Seattle psychiatrist Arif Khan studied the placebo effect in trials submitted to the FDA. His analysis of 96 antidepressant trials between 1979 and 1996 showed that in 52 percent of them, the effect of the antidepressant could not be distinguished from that of the placebo.
  • Findings from a trial last month compared the herbal remedy St. John's Wort against Zoloft. St. John's Wort fully cured 24 percent of the depressed people who received it, and Zoloft cured 25 percent -- but the placebo fully cured 32 percent.
  • As the number of doctor visits for depression rose from 14 million in 1987 to almost 25 million last year, medications were prescribed for nine in 10 patients, according to research published last weekÖ Randall Stafford, the Stanford University physician who conducted the study on doctor visits, found that less than one-third of them in 2001 were to psychiatrists and two-thirds of them were to primary care physicians.

 

// personality and emotional intelligence

Miller (1973) describes all five approaches to religion (as viewed through the lens of a level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs) are "legitimate, but each will seem ridiculous when viewed from above or sterile when viewed from below" (Miller, 1973).

APA Paper: Emotional Intelligence: popular or scientific psychology (September 1999)

"Salovey and Mayer estimate that it (emotional intelligence) accounts for as little as 5 percent of an average person's occupational achievement"

In the psychological literature over the last 30 years, there have been 54,040 abstracts' containing the keyword "depression," 41,416 naming "anxiety," but only 415 mentioning "joy."

"I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain," said Lily Tomlin


// references

  • Ceci, S. (July / August 2001). IQ intelligence: The surprising truth. Psychology Today.
  • Epstein, R. (Nov/Dec 1999). You're smarter than you think. Psychology Today.
  • Gorrell, C. (July/August 2002). The classroom revisited. Psychology Today, pp. 54-56.
  • Jones, M. (September/October 1997). Unconventional wisdom: Emotional intelligence. Psychology Today.
  • Kamin, L. (February 1995). Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Scientific American.
  • Kaptchuk, T., Eisenber, D., & Komaroff, A. (December 2, 2002). Pondering the placebo effect. Newsweek, pp. 71-72.
  • Landry, J. (August 2002). Is our children learning? Red Herring, pp. 37-41.
  • Leonard, W. (December 2002). Food for thought. Scientific American.
  • Lowe, K. (October 1999). Ask the experts: Biology. Scientific American.
  • McNatt, B. (2000). Ancient Pygmalion joins contemporary management: a meta-analysis of the result. Journal of Applied Psychology, pp. 314 - 22.
  • Miele, F. (March 1995). Interview with Robert Sternberg regarding The Bell Curve. Skeptic, pp. 72-80.
  • >Miller, K. (1973). Religious application: The becomers. Word, Waco, Texas.
  • Psychology Today (January/February 1994). Delinquents as dummies. Psychology Today.
  • Rogers, J. (November/December 2000). Are firstborns smarter? Psychology Today.
  • Satinover, J. (2001). The quantum brain. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
  • >Vedantam, S. (Tuesday, May 7, 2002). Against depression, a sugar pill is hard to beat. Washington Post.
  • Wills, C. (1993). The runaway brain. New York: Basic Books.