I've been more or less MIA on the blog this past week or so. The semester is starting - this is the fist week of classes. That means final tweaking of the syllabus for my classes, meeting with colleagues and students... Not a bad time of year, just hectic. That also means my (non-academic) writing has been non-existent. My email has been piling up too, so I am more or less running behind. On top of this, it's back to the sleep lab next week to try out CPAPs. I have mild to moderate sleep apnea - I stop breathing 20 or so times an hour. Creepy.

Anyhow, the blogs will resume soon. A few book reviews will be coming, etc. 

Trailers for the upcoming season of the Walking Dead have been appearing all over the place recently. I’ve watched them, of course, since I am a fan. The DVR is set up to record all new episodes between now and eternity. The series is well done with a great cast, special effects, and story line. Although, the pace of the series is much too slow at times with seemingly nothing happening for hours on end.

Apocalyptic fiction is hot too, and has been for a number of years now, mostly in the form of zombie novels. The latter have been hit or miss for me, mostly miss to be honest.  If you read one zombie novel, you’ve read them all it seems. That’s an overgeneralization, of course. I can think of a couple of zombie novels that have been quite good. Right off the top of my head is Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry. Actually marketed as a young adult novel, I found the characterizations and the settings to be outstanding. This is one of those novels that actually captures the perspective of a teenager in a horrendous setting. A number of people disliked The Cell by Stephen King, but I really enjoyed it. There is something satisfying about cell phones turning people into zombies, as if they hadn’t already. I’m a university professor and it is not uncommon to see hordes of twenty year olds walking on campus while texting. At times the campus can be eerily quiet with the exception of a faint pattering of thumbs on tiny keypads or screens. Finally, the Swedish zombie novel, Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is a favorite simply because it is such a unique take on the zombie genre.

When it comes to non-zombie apocalyptic novels, I can name a number of stellar examples. First (and second if you consider them separately) are the first two books in the Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin. The Passage and The Twelve are powerful novels that excel because they are literary pieces containing startling and well developed characters and imaginative settings. Each character is an individual with emotion, thoughts, and history. Patterns of behavior and motivations are consistent and logical (which is huge in my humble opinion in making a novel work).  The virals (vampires) are brutal, and survival of characters is not guaranteed. Another creative spin on the part of Cronin is his ability to describe this complex world in a non-linear fashion. I cannot wait for the third in the series.

When you consider top stories of the apocalypse, you have to include The Stand by Stephen King. The weaving of that tale is nicely constructed, although I would recommend reading the first edition/version. King later came out with an extended version which contained portions of the narrative that an editor had deleted when it was first published. I can tell you, the editor was right – there was a reason these sections were initially deleted. They added nothing to the story and were downright embarrassing to read at times.

Finally, a truly horrifying end of the world novel that isn’t a “horror” novel – at least on the surface – is Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Published in 1958, this novel tells the tale of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. I read this as a kid, and the passages that describe the nuclear attack and the immediate panic afterwards are some of the most terrifying words I have ever read. There are scenes that are still seared in my memory. Check out this classic if you haven’t had the opportunity.

Bullying and The Cold Spot, Part 3

I am continuing my comments on bullying with this blog – but first a thanks to The Cold Spot by J.G. Faherty – the ghost story about bullying which got the whole thing started in the first place.

Some practitioners are troubled with the proliferation of bullying programs in our schools (for instance, see Bully Nation by Susan Eva Porter). Their argument is interesting: we’ve adopted a bully-victim mindset that makes the problem worse and not better. According to this viewpoint, labeling one kid a bully and the other a victim has unfortunate consequences. First, the “bully language” is overly simplified and doesn’t address the nuance of the situation and the kids involved. Second, by being labeled, the kids are assigned and seen as fitting the role – which is very hard to escape. As a result, they are either demonized or pitied, and they cannot learn from experiences and grow from the experiences. For the “victim”, this produces victimhood and does not promote resilience. For the “bully”, there is no chance to reinvent him or herself. Third, labels make all kids the enemy – they are pitted against one another (when really, this is an adult problem in terms of how we should structure environments and deal with problematic behavior). Finally, developing anti-bullying programs, which often have zero-tolerance policies, sets up kids to fail – because kids, being kids, are bound to make mistakes in the future.

The folks who see anti-bullying programs as problematic would like to see the bully-victim language discarded. Instead, the emphasis should be on helping kids who are on the receiving end (I’m trying to avoid the “v-word”) develop resilience. Teaching and developing resilience would involve helping kids learn how to deal with unpleasant situations, develop coping skills, assertiveness skills, social support and communication skills, etc. – anything that would lead to personal growth. For the kids who perpetrate the unwanted behavior (avoiding the “b-word”), a pattern of responding should be set up which insures safety first (for all kids) and includes swift consequences for misbehavior – and consequences which “fit the crime” (this includes clarity of expectations – kids need to know ahead of time what is expected of them, and they need to know that consequences will be applied consistently).  In all cases, adults are there to support the kids, remain calm, and model and demonstrate appropriate problem solving behavior.

The advocates to eliminate or move away from anti-bullying programs raise some interesting points. The methods for dealing with the behavior seem on target to me. I don’t know how well their approach would work in a truly dangerous or intimidating environment, especially with older teenagers. I can report on a case with which I am familiar where a therapist took such an approach in helping a child who was bullied unmercifully. The therapist worked with the child to develop coping skills and resilience skills to address the painful distress and isolation of being a target. The results were phenomenal. This kid came out of the counseling with a stronger sense of self, an awareness of personal strength, an awareness of how to deal with unpleasant people, and a renewed sense of assertiveness. This is not to say that the experience became a “piece of cake”. The kid had to deal with some very difficult things – but that kid dealt with them and matured as a result.  While this success was remarkable, I am not convinced that we should move away from anti-bullying programs. For me, the jury is still out.

All of these thoughts as a result of a horror novella called The Cold Spot… I hope Mr. Faherty is pleased that his work generated these thoughts. Bullying is a very sad and frustrating problem, and he captures the issue in a unique way – within a ghost story and then some.  Whatever the form of the narrative, we need to be constantly reminded of how kids are hurt – and in some cases very deeply – on a daily basis from peers while right under the noses of adults.

Okay, I am continuing my comments on bullying with this blog – but first a thanks to The Cold Spot by J.G. Faherty – the ghost story about bullying which got the whole thing started in the first place.

A number of factors related to bullying often come as a surprise to people. First, kids who do the bullying are not the stereotypical antisocial hoodlums. Very often these kids can move among various roles: bully, popular kid, smart kid, jock, etc. They can be members of multiple groups. Second, they do not bully all of the time, so they have friends and social groups – and, this is interesting, they often report having been bullied as well. Third, while boys tend to engage in more physical bullying than girls, girls are masters at relational aggression (e.g., spreading rumors, excluding a girl from the group, withdrawing friendship).  The intent of this social manipulation is to cause damage to another kid’s social standing or self esteem. When you include both physical and relational aggression into the mix, gender differences between bullying in boys and girls disappears. Regardless, bullying of both forms indicates forms of aggressive behavior that occur within a context of an imbalance of power, are intentionally harmful, and occur repetitively.

The consequences of bullying are tremendous for victims: higher rates of depression, stress, isolation, anxiety, and in some cases suicidal ideation. Peer relationships are disrupted, and the disruption can persist into adulthood with these individuals having difficulty developing and maintaining relationships and trusting others.

Interventions to decrease bullying in school settings generally involve: arranging or altering the environment to minimize the circumstances which allow bullying to occur (this could be as simple as having teachers standing at their classroom doors during class transitions to monitor the hallways), training teachers and other school personnel how to identify and respond quickly if they observe bullying, establishing rules and specific consequences for certain forms of misbehavior or problem behavior which are consistently applied,  and developing a solution-oriented mindset where teachers and staff can share solutions that they have found successful in reducing the problem behavior.

I will continue with how The Cold Spot got me thinking about bullying in the next blog…

We’ve seen some startling examples of the negative impact of bullying on victims: media reports of suicide and attempted suicide by children, adolescents, and young adults in college. In addition, many personal accounts of misery and depression of those victims reach us seemingly daily. Yet, the issue persists, despite many attempts to change the way our schools operate and efforts to change our very cultural attitudes toward bullying.

I was reminded again about the topic of bullying after my recent read of The Cold Spot by J.G. Faherty. I found his use of bullying as a device for framing his horror novel to be rather unique and I enjoyed it immensely. As a psychologist and a professor, I am used to addressing bullying from those professional perspectives. I teach a graduate level course entitled Counseling Children and Adolescents, and one of the favorite topics is bullying. The reason, of course, is that the graduate students in our counseling program who are placed in settings (schools and clinics) where they work with kids often come face to face with this issue. Dealing with bullying is difficult. Circumstances vary across incidents, the situations and kids involved are often quite complex, and people (that is, adults) often don’t know how to address it.

I will continue with a discussion on bullying prompted by reading The Cold Spot in the next blog… 

If you’ve been reading the two previous blogs, I’ve been trying to summarize an article by Mathias Clasen entitled “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories” which was published in the Review of General Psychology in 2012. According to Clasen, “Horror stories trigger the evolved danger management systems.” Put another way, Clasen indicates that

“horror fiction capitalizes on cognitive and physiological machinery that is a product of natural selection”

The question remains why many people continue to like horror stories? If horror triggers our danger management systems unnecessarily, why do we seek them out?

Well, here is where it gets a little tricky. More importantly, at least as far as I am concerned, here is where psychology begins to play a huge role. There are two potential explanations:

1.      We can loosely categorize this along demographic lines: Target audiences for horror. In talking demographics, we also end up considering gender roles. The main target of horror movies and the biggest consumers are adolescent boys. Beyond the obvious fact that this group is a little on the goofy end of things to begin with, male adolescents often engage in behavior that has been considered rites of passage. Some of this is culturally sanctioned, other rituals are more informal. Regardless, going to scary movies together and surviving the horror together can be considered a male bonding experience (according to Clasen). “Hey, dude, we survived and we did it together” (although teen boys probably wouldn’t report it in this manner). At the same time, girls tend not to be the market audience, but are often taken to these movies by their dates (the guys who love them – the movies in this case, and maybe the girls). Now, according to Professor Clasen, teen girls like boys who are brave and boys like to reciprocate by being brave (that is, gender appropriate reactions to horror movies). If everything goes according to plan, both parties get their wish – and boys also get to watch a cool movie to boot. According to Clasen, this is known as the snuggle theory of horror. (Please, I’m just reporting his argument).

2.      The second explanation makes more sense to me. Basically, it is this: we vicariously learn how to behave in extremely dangerous situations in the relative safety of a movie theatre or our own homes while reading a book. The situation as portrayed on a screen (or in a book for that matter) is indeed well beyond the norm and highly life threatening – but it is fictional. As a result, we learn how to mentally prepare for and handle unbelievable situations without the risk. This process has its parallel in childhood play. Kids act out practical strategies of survival in all kinds of games and activities. Pretend play is fun and pleasurable – and kids are vicariously learning all kinds of behaviors which are applicable to real life in years to come: problem solving, negotiating, self-control, assertiveness, physical safety responses and so on.

To put it simply, enjoying horror stories allows us to practice survival strategies and to form bonds with other survivors – all within very low-risk situations. As Clasen states, consuming horror is adaptive – we learn new skills for survival and practice and rehearse them in thrilling and uncanny encounters that aren’t real. How cool is that?

What about the people who don’t like horror? Well, I suppose they’ll be relying on us to keep them safe during the upcoming apocalypse. It’ll be annoying, but what the heck – everyone will get a chance to snuggle.

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16, 222-229.

I’ve been talking about an article by Mathias Clasen entitled “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories” which was published in the Review of General Psychology in 2012. In the previous blog, I summarized Clasen’s model that fear and anxiety are evolutionary adaptations to dangerous environments – these are the very emotions that help us deal with dangers… and they served our ancestors well.

This “threat-detection and handling system” has been deeply ingrained in our nervous system over hundreds of thousands of years (or however long we’ve been at this thing).  Professor Clasen says it far better than I can: “Human attention is preferentially engaged by evolutionary recurrent, fear-relevant stimuli”.  So, we’re wired to be frightened by snakes, large animals with fangs, and so on. Some psychologists also suspect we’re hard wired to fear being judged negatively by others. For our unlucky ancestors, being judged unworthy meant banishment from the clan or tribe. Banishment, in turn, meant death. Today, this fear translates into other modern fears of being judged negatively: public speaking, social anxiety, dating anxiety.

All by way of saying, we are preprogrammed to display emotional states of fear and anxiety to certain stimuli, because this reaction faired our ancestors well. However, we can’t go around with this vague response without it being adapted for our current culture. Therefore, the management system is constantly subjected to shaping and refinement to fit the local environment.

Now, as you may have guessed, horror stories fit nicely into threat-detection system. Monsters ghosts, serial killers, zombies, werewolves, vampires all qualify as something that we should react to in order to save our lives. Our reaction is unproductive, however, because books and movies are not a major threat to our survival. However, we have the reaction, the jolt anyway, and get to laugh about it later because, after all, we survived and that really couldn’t happen to us.  (By the way, versions of these monsters have been around forever. So, they are part of our psyche – whether they exist or not. We are on the lookout for these things – we’re programmed to do it…)

More on this topic in the next blog…

I've been absent for a while, thanks to a combination of the July 4th holiday, a round of edits for Birth Offering and grading of final projects for my summer classes. I am teaching two classes this summer session, both master's level counseling courses (Clinical Studies and Counseling Children and Adolescents). I make use of a number of online activities in the summer, and these involve extensive group interaction and video recording. The results this summer have been astounding. Yesterday was the last day of the semester, and all final products were due. The students all did unbelievably fantastic work - although, since they are graduate students they tend to be very motivated. College and Graduate instruction can be extremely rewarding, and I love every minute of it. For those of you whoever wondered about your college professors - yes we do get a real kick out of reading and commenting on well written work...