Masks work against COVID

I want to share an observation that’s been on my mind for a while. I was visiting a Zoo with my family before the vaccine was available for regular people, around early Spring 2021. A big Zoo. All the enclosures where animals were indoors (penguins, monkeys and so on) had a big sticker on the door asking to “Please wear a mask for our animals’ sake. They too can get COVID19”. An overwhelming majority were putting on their masks upon reading this sign. Really, close to 99% of people, adults and children alike. At the same zoo, the same people were entering maskless in the Gift Shop and other indoor facilities like toilets and so on. I eyeballed less than 10% were wearing masks in “human enclosures”. I spent a lot of time at this Zoo watching for this behavior instead of looking at the other animals to make sure I’m not imagining things.

My lesson: humans are not deemed worthy the masking trouble, but zoo animals are… Now please explain to me how no mask-wearing is about “freedom”, “COVID is a scam/flu/doesn’t exist”, “masks don’t work” and so on and not about a conscious moral choice to knowingly endanger other people and their kids?

By Neuronicus, 17 August 2021

EDIT: Mrs. Clinton’s first name is Hillary, not Hilary.

REFERENCES:

Howard J, Huang A, Li Z, Tufekci Z, Zdimal V, van der Westhuizen HM, von Delft A, Price A, Fridman L, Tang LH, Tang V, Watson GL, Bax CE, Shaikh R, Questier F, Hernandez D, Chu LF, Ramirez CM, Rimoin AW. (26 Jan 2021). An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 118(4):e2014564118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2014564118. PMID: 33431650. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF P.S. Since this paper was published, dozens of others have been published that say the same thing: wear a mask for all our sakes.

Kahane LH (5 Jan 2021). Politicizing the Mask: Political, Economic and Demographic Factors Affecting Mask Wearing Behavior in the USA. Eastern economic journal, 1-21. doi: 10.1057/s41302-020-00186-0, PMCID: PMC7783295, PMID: 33424048. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

No Link Between Mass Shootings & Mental Illness

By Neuronicus, 25 February 2018

On Valentine’s Day another horrifying school mass shooting happened in USA, leaving 17 people dead. Just like after the other mass shootings, a lot of people – from media to bystanders, from gun lovers to gun critics, from parents to grandparents, from police to politicians – talk about the link between mental illness and mass shootings. As one with advanced degrees in both psychology and neuroscience, I am tired to explain over and over again that there is no significant link between the two! Mass shootings happen because an angry person has had – or made to think they had – enough sorrow, stress, rejection and/or disappointment and HAS ACCESS TO A MASS KILLING WEAPON. Yeah, I needed the caps. Sometimes scientists too need to shout to be heard.

So here is the abstract of a book chapter called straightforwardly “Mass Shootings and Mental Illness”. The entire text is available at the links in the reference below.

From Knoll & Annas (2015):

“Common Misperceptions

• Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent the most significant relationship between gun violence and mental illness.
• People with serious mental illness should be considered dangerous.
• Gun laws focusing on people with mental illness or with a psychiatric diagnosis can effectively prevent mass shootings.
• Gun laws focusing on people with mental illness or a psychiatric diagnosis are reasonable, even if they add to the stigma already associated with mental illness.

Evidence-Based Facts

• Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In contrast, deaths by suicide using firearms account for the majority of yearly gun-related deaths.
• The overall contribution of people with serious mental illness to violent crimes is only about 3%. When these crimes are examined in detail, an even smaller percentage of them are found to involve firearms.
• Laws intended to reduce gun violence that focus on a population representing less than 3% of all gun violence will be extremely low yield, ineffective, and wasteful of scarce resources. Perpetrators of mass shootings are unlikely to have a history of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Thus, databases intended to restrict access to guns and established by guns laws that broadly target people with mental illness will not capture this group of individuals.
• Gun restriction laws focusing on people with mental illness perpetuate the myth that mental illness leads to violence, as well as the misperception that gun violence and mental illness are strongly linked. Stigma represents a major barrier to access and treatment of mental illness, which in turn increases the public health burden”.

REFERENCE: Knoll, James L. & Annas, George D. (2015). Mass Shootings and Mental Illness. In book: Gun Violence and Mental Illness, Edition: 1st, Chapter: 4, Publisher: American Psychiatric Publishing, Editors: Liza H. Gold, Robert I. Simon. ISBN-10: 1585624985, ISBN-13: 978-1585624980. FULLTEXT PDF via ResearchGate | FULLTEXT PDF via Psychiatry Online

The book chapter is not a peer-reviewed document, even if both authors are Professors of Psychiatry. To quiet putative voices raising concerns about that, here is a peer-reviewed paper with open access that says basically the same thing:

Swanson et al. (2015) looked at large scale (thousands to tens of thousands of individuals) data to see if there is any relationship between violence, gun violence, and mental illness. They concluded that “epidemiologic studies show that the large majority of people with serious mental illnesses are never violent. However, mental illness is strongly associated with increased risk of suicide, which accounts for over half of US firearms–related fatalities”. The last sentence is reminiscent of the finding that stricter gun control laws lower suicide rate.

REFERENCE: Swanson JW, McGinty EE, Fazel S, Mays VM (May 2015). Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy. Annals of Epidemiology, 25(5): 366–376. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2014.03.004, PMCID: PMC4211925. FULLTEXT | FULLTEXT PDF.

Further peer-reviewed bibliography (links to fulltext pdfs):

1. Guns, anger, and mental disorders: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R): “a large number of individuals in the United States have anger traits and also possess firearms at home (10.4%) or carry guns outside the home (1.6%).”
2. News Media Framing of Serious Mental Illness and Gun Violence in the United States, 1997-2012: “most news coverage occurred in the wake of mass shootings, and “dangerous people” with serious mental illness were more likely than “dangerous weapons” to be mentioned as a cause of gun violence.”
3. The Link Between Mental Illness and Firearm Violence: Implications for Social Policy and Clinical Practice: “Firearm violence is a significant and preventable public health crisis. Mental illness is a weak risk factor for violence despite popular misconceptions reflected in the media and policy”.
4. Using Research Evidence to Reframe the Policy Debate Around Mental Illness and Guns: Process and Recommendations: “restricting firearm access on the basis of certain dangerous behaviors is supported by the evidence; restricting access on the basis of mental illness diagnoses is not”.
5. Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms: “notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat”.

By Neuronicus, 25 February 2018

Play-based or academic-intensive?

The title of today’s post wouldn’t make any sense for anybody who isn’t a preschooler’s parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous than a more academic-based one. Preschool age is 3 to 4 years;  kindergarten starts at 5.

So what does academia even looks like for someone who hasn’t mastered yet the wiping their own behind skill? I’m glad you asked. Roughly, an academic preschool program is one that emphasizes math concepts and early literacy, whereas a play-based program focuses less or not at all on these activities; instead, the children are allowed to play together in big or small groups or separately. The first kind of program has been linked with stronger cognitive benefits, while the latter with nurturing social development. The supporters of one program are accusing the other one of neglecting one or the other aspect of the child’s development, namely cognitive or social.

The paper that I am covering today says that it “does not speak to the wider debate over learning-through-play or the direct instruction of young children. We do directly test whether greater classroom time spent on academic-oriented activities yield gains in both developmental domains” (Fuller et al., 2017, p. 2). I’ll let you be the judge.

Fuller et al. (2017) assessed the cognitive and social benefits of different programs in an impressive cohort of over 6,000 preschoolers. The authors looked at many variables:

• children who attended any form of preschool and children who stayed home;
• children who received more (high dosage defined as >20 hours/week) and less preschool education (low dosage defined as <20 hour per week);
• children who attended academic-oriented preschools (spent at least 3 – 4 times a week on each of the following tasks: letter names, writing, phonics and counting manipulatives) and non-academic preschools.

The authors employed a battery of tests to assess the children’s preliteracy skills, math skills and social emotional status (i.e. the independent variables). And then they conducted a lot of statistical analyses in the true spirit of well-trained psychologists.

The main findings were:

1) “Preschool exposure [of any form] has a significant positive effect on children’s math and preliteracy scores” (p. 6).

2) The earlier the child entered preschool, the stronger the cognitive benefits.

3) Children attending high-dose academic-oriented preschools displayed greater cognitive proficiencies than all the other children (for the actual numbers, see Table 7, pg. 9).

4) “Academic-oriented preschool yields benefits that persist into the kindergarten year, and at notably higher magnitudes than previously detected” (p. 10).

5) Children attending academic-oriented preschools displayed no social development disadvantages than children that attended low or non-academic preschool programs. Nor did the non-academic oriented preschools show an improvement in social development (except for Latino children).

Now do you think that Fuller et al. (2017) gave you any more information in the debate play vs. academic, given that their “findings show that greater time spent on academic content – focused on oral language, preliteracy skills, and math concepts – contributes to the early learning of the average child at magnitudes higher than previously estimated” (p. 10)? And remember that they did not find any significant social advantages or disadvantages for any type of preschool.

I realize (or hope, rather) that most pre-k teachers are not the Draconian thou-shall-not-play-do-worksheets type, nor are they the let-kids-play-for-three-hours-while-the-adults-gossip-in-a-corner types. Most are probably combining elements of learning-through-play and directed-instruction in their programs. Nevertheless, there are (still) programs and pre-k teachers that clearly state that they employ play-based or academic-based programs, emphasizing the benefits of one while vilifying the other. But – surprise, surprise! – you can do both. And, it turns out, a little academia goes a long way.

So, next time you choose a preschool for your kid, go with the data, not what your mommy/daddy gut instinct says and certainly be very wary of preschool officials who, when you ask them for data to support their curriculum choice, tell you that that’s their ‘philosophy’, they don’t need data. Because, boy oh boy, I know what philosophy means and it ain’t that.

By Neuronicus, 12 October 2017

Reference: Fuller B, Bein E, Bridges M, Kim, Y, & Rabe-Hesketh, S. (Sept. 2017). Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 52: 1-11, doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2017.05.001. ARTICLE | New York Times cover | Reading Rockets cover (offers a fulltext pdf) | Good cover and interview with the first author on qz.com

Pic of the Day: Neil on teaching creationism

Dr. deGrasse Tyson’s picture is from Wikimedia released under PD and the quote is from a “Letter to the Editor” of New York Times retrieved from the Hayden Planetarium website on Nov. 2, 2016.