On Thu, 31 Oct 2013 03:56:41 -0700, Louis Eugene Schmier wrote:
And so?
For some reason, I read Louis' response above and I hear the line from
the movie "Philadelphia" that goes "Please explain this to me like I'm a
six year old." In the movie when this was said, it meant that the
explanation
originally offered did not make sense, possibly because its truth (if
there
was any) was obscured by a confusing style of presentation and verbal
tricks. I do not know why Louis says "And so?" but it could be that
he does not see the death blow dealt to Fredrickson and Losada's
claim of a "positivity ratio" even though he solves differential
equations
in his spare time or he doesn't get it because he has his fingers in his
ears saying "LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" or something else.
I think that the key passage in the Brown, Sokal, and Friedman (2013)
paper is the following:
|On its own, the positivity ratio as propounded by Fredrickson and
|Losada (2005) is not a particularly controversial construct; indeed,
|there is a long history of looking at ratios (e.g., Bales, 1950) and
|non-ratio indices (e.g., Bradburn, 1969) relating positive to negative
|emotions. However, Fredrickson and Losada took matters
|considerably farther, claiming to have established that their use of
|a mathematical model drawn from nonlinear dynamics provided
|theoretical support for the existence of a pair of critical
positivity-ratio
|values (2.9013 and 11.6346) such that individuals whose ratios
|fall between these values will "flourish," while people whose ratios
|lie outside this ideal range will "languish." The same article
purported
|to verify this assertion empirically, by demonstrating that among
|a group of college students, those who were "languishing" had
|an average positivity ratio of 2.3, while those who were "flourishing"
|had an average positivity ratio of 3.2.
WOW! Numbers! If positive psychology can go beyond those squishy
soft concepts and provide actual numbers that operate like physical
constants like the speed of light and so on, then it must really be
scientific valid and rigorous and not just a bunch of happy talk that
has been used by different groups in the past.
But there is less here than meets the eye, as summarized in the final
words of Brown et al:
|We do not here call into question the idea that positive emotions
|are more likely to build resilience than negative emotions, or that
|a higher positivity ratio is ordinarily more desirable than a lower
|one. But to suggest that some form of discontinuity sets in at some
|special value of the positivity ratio - especially one that is
independent
|of all demographic and cultural factors - seems far-fetched. We
|cannot, of course, prove that no such "tipping point" exists; but
|we believe that we have adequately demonstrated here that even
|if it does, Fredrickson and Losada's (2005) article - based on
|a series of erroneous and, for the most part, completely illusory
|"applications" of mathematics - has not moved science any nearer
|to finding it.
|
|Fredrickson and Losada (2005, p. 685) concluded their article
|by observing modestly that "Our discovery of the critical 2.9
positivity
|ratio may represent a breakthrough." Would that it were so.
Is Fredrickson & Losada saying that there is a critical threshold
value above which something "magical" happens or it just an
arbitrary cutoff -- much like what constitutes hypertension which
the medical community has re-defined by reducing the blood
pressure number threshold that identifies the presence of hypertension
(and also consider: what is the critical BMI value for being obese
and what side conditions need to be met for it to be a valid measure
of obesity). Is it real or just fun with numbers?
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
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