Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 20 TranscriptApril 25, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: Welcome to the last class. Before starting the lecture I just want to do some final procedural issues. Again, your reading responses have been completed. Your essays have been all completed and the grades will be available sometime next week. The teaching fellows are currently grading them like crazy. Your experimental participation requirement is up until May 7th. Please finish it by then. If not-just please finish it by then. Your exams on Monday. Last class-somebody asked me whether I was going to post an old exam and I said, Well, you dont need it because you-I already posted a midterm and it looks like the Midterm, and one of the teaching fellows e-mailed me and essentially said, Why are you so damn lazy? laughter So, I posted the old final.Some of you require special accommodations for the Final. The arrangements will be precisely the same as for the Midterm and Judy York should be contacting you to set up the arrangements. If there are any problems with that, definitely contact me as soon as possible but you should be hearing from Judy York concerning special arrangements.Finally, the review sessions are going to be held tomorrow and on Friday. Please note: It turns out the original class schedule for the Thursday review session is booked. The review session will be held in this room from 6 oclock to 8 oclock and once again, the teaching fellows have graciously agreed to run these review sessions.Okay. This lecture will be a some slightly shorter lecture than usual. What I first want to do is finish off the discussion of clinical psychology from last lecture and then have a little brief discussion about some very interesting research on happiness. We talked-we ended last lecture with a discussion of some early-some of the history of treating mental illness and we saw that it was rather gruesome, unsuccessful, and arbitrary. For the most part, we do better now, and Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema reviewed some of the therapies with focus on therapies for depression. The textbook talks in detail about therapies for different disorders including schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and so on. The question which everyone is interested in is, Does therapy work? And this proves to be surprisingly difficult to tell. Part of the problem is if you ask people who go into therapy, Did you get better after therapy? for the most part theyll tell you that they did but the problem is this could be a statistical byproduct of whats called regression to the mean.So, the idea looks like this. This line plots how you feel from great through okay to awful and it goes up and down and in fact in everyday life youre going to-some days are going to be average, some days will be better than average, some days worse than average. You could plot your semester. You could do a plot every morning when you wake up or every night before you go to bed. You could put yourself on a graph and itll come out to some sort of wiggly thing. Statistically, if something is above average or below average its going to trend towards average just because thats a statistical inevitability. When do people go to therapy? Well, they go to therapy when theyre feeling really crappy. They go to therapy when theyre feeling unusually bad. Even if therapy then has no effect at all, if its true that peoples moods tend to go up and down after you feel really bad youll probably improve rather than get worse. And so this could happen-the normal flow could happen just even if therapy has no effect at all.And so, simply getting better after therapy doesnt tell you anything. On the worst day of your life you could do naked jumping jacks on the roof of your college for ten minutes. I guarantee you your next day would probably be better. That doesnt mean naked jumping jacks are helping you. Rather, it just means that the day after the worst day of your life usually is not as bad as the worst day of your life. It can get worse, but usually it just trends to average. What youve got to do then is you have to take people at the same point who would get treatment and compare them to people who do not get treatment or what we call a control group. And this is an example of this. So, this is for people who are depressed. This is statistically equal. They start off pre-therapy. They all go for therapy but because in this example theres a limited number of therapists, some of them are put on a waiting list and others get a therapist. Its arbitrary. Its random, which is-which-making it a very good experiment. And in this example, you could see those who received cognitive training were better off. They had lower depression scores than those that received no therapy at all.In general, in fact, we could make some general conclusions about therapy. Therapy by and large works. People in treatment do better than those who are not in treatment an