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I can't tell where they flipped the directionality around for the headline, because the first line of the article is "People with depression are more likely to

I can't tell where they flipped the directionality around for the headline, because the first line of the article is "People with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to perceived inequality" and the rest of the article sticks to that finding. It seems intuitive that people with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to X, for all X.

matthberg 9y ago
It looks like the author is assuming the converse, and also assuming that perceiving inequality is the same as being unselfish. All in all, the title is quite misleading.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That only makes sense if you mentally edit out the words 'feel bad about' from before 'perceived inequality'. If your interpretation depends on ignoring a whole clause, it's flawed.
mfoy_ 9y ago
Yeah... The headline and the rest of the article are out of sync. It's not "Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression", it's "People who Wind Up with Depression Are More Likely to be Unselfish". Which kind of sounds like a non-story.
notananthem 9y ago
Yeah that's why Vice isn't a news/research source
- Pigo 9y ago
  Having looked at their frontpage recently, it's amazing how far it's fallen. Not that I every considered it a reliable source, but it genuinely had some interesting articles in the past. There was one article about the actual story that inspired True Detective that really stuck with me. Now it's just another place to vent about the President.
racer-v 9y ago
Nope - clinical depression is different from "feeling bad in response" to a specific stimulus. If you do something hurtful to me and I feel bad about it, that's not depression. When nothing is happening and I feel bad in general, that's depression. The article says, people who feel bad in response to specific types of stimulus (a perceived slight), rather than just shrugging it off, are more likely to develop full-blown clinical depression down the line.
- lliamander 9y ago
  However, there is a personality trait, Neuroticism, which has to do with sensitivity to negative emotion, and also does correlate with depression, anxiety, etc. In other words, if you are higher in Neuroticism (i.e. more susceptible to negative emotions) then you are more likely to also develop clinical depression.
  - racer-v 9y ago
    What is the state of personality theory constructs with respect to empirical validation (e.g. fMRI)?
    - pizza 9y ago
      As for fMRI, while it's not particularly under existential threat re:empiricism, it's not necessarily a silver bullet: http://blog.brainfacts.org/2016/07/are-fmri-data-analysis-methods-reliable/ http://blog.brainfacts.org/2016/07/are-fmri-data-analysis-me... Personally, my opinion is that the ambiguity of people's self-perceptions of their persona allows there to be an asymmetry between the harm they might get receiving advice about their personality and the benefit they might get from heeding advice about personalities that they can at least envision themselves as being perceived by others as having, if that makes sense. It probably isn't particularly empirical, but I don't know if we will get to a science of personality within our lifetimes (but (maybe..?) it would be nice to be proved wrong).
anigbrowl 9y ago
It seems intuitive that people with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to X, for all X. Nonsense. Depressed people are not just sad about everything, and depression affects selfish and unselfish people alike. Trying to derive general laws from shallow stereotypes is likely to compound misconceptions. Doing so to engage in pedantic critiques of a headline while ignoring the rest of the article is just a waste of time for everyone.
kazinator 9y ago
The spurious directionality is introduced by the unfortunate insertion of the phrasal verb "wind up". Likelihood as such doesn't have directionality; it expresses the frequency of co-occurence of two phenomena. That is to say, "Unselfish People More Likely to be Depressed" doesn't assert causality as much, and "Depression Correlates with Unselfish Traits" even less.
tzar 9y ago
From the study: > Here, we demonstrate that functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in the amygdala and hippocampus induced by the inequity between the self and other rewards during an economic game can predict participants’ present and future (measured one year later) depression indices. This seems to suggest that the headline is not terribly inaccurate with respect to the study itself, at least. Unselfishness (sensitivity to economic inequality) predicts markers for depression.

matthberg 9y ago

It looks like the author is assuming the converse, and also assuming that perceiving inequality is the same as being unselfish. All in all, the title is quite misleading.

anigbrowl 9y ago
That only makes sense if you mentally edit out the words 'feel bad about' from before 'perceived inequality'. If your interpretation depends on ignoring a whole clause, it's flawed.

mfoy_ 9y ago

Yeah... The headline and the rest of the article are out of sync. It's not "Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression", it's "People who Wind Up with Depression Are More Likely to be Unselfish". Which kind of sounds like a non-story.

notananthem 9y ago

Yeah that's why Vice isn't a news/research source

Pigo 9y ago
Having looked at their frontpage recently, it's amazing how far it's fallen. Not that I every considered it a reliable source, but it genuinely had some interesting articles in the past. There was one article about the actual story that inspired True Detective that really stuck with me. Now it's just another place to vent about the President.

racer-v 9y ago

Nope - clinical depression is different from "feeling bad in response" to a specific stimulus. If you do something hurtful to me and I feel bad about it, that's not depression. When nothing is happening and I feel bad in general, that's depression. The article says, people who feel bad in response to specific types of stimulus (a perceived slight), rather than just shrugging it off, are more likely to develop full-blown clinical depression down the line.

lliamander 9y ago
However, there is a personality trait, Neuroticism, which has to do with sensitivity to negative emotion, and also does correlate with depression, anxiety, etc. In other words, if you are higher in Neuroticism (i.e. more susceptible to negative emotions) then you are more likely to also develop clinical depression.
- racer-v 9y ago
  What is the state of personality theory constructs with respect to empirical validation (e.g. fMRI)?
  - pizza 9y ago
    As for fMRI, while it's not particularly under existential threat re:empiricism, it's not necessarily a silver bullet: http://blog.brainfacts.org/2016/07/are-fmri-data-analysis-methods-reliable/ http://blog.brainfacts.org/2016/07/are-fmri-data-analysis-me... Personally, my opinion is that the ambiguity of people's self-perceptions of their persona allows there to be an asymmetry between the harm they might get receiving advice about their personality and the benefit they might get from heeding advice about personalities that they can at least envision themselves as being perceived by others as having, if that makes sense. It probably isn't particularly empirical, but I don't know if we will get to a science of personality within our lifetimes (but (maybe..?) it would be nice to be proved wrong).

anigbrowl 9y ago

It seems intuitive that people with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to X, for all X. Nonsense. Depressed people are not just sad about everything, and depression affects selfish and unselfish people alike. Trying to derive general laws from shallow stereotypes is likely to compound misconceptions. Doing so to engage in pedantic critiques of a headline while ignoring the rest of the article is just a waste of time for everyone.

kazinator 9y ago

The spurious directionality is introduced by the unfortunate insertion of the phrasal verb "wind up". Likelihood as such doesn't have directionality; it expresses the frequency of co-occurence of two phenomena. That is to say, "Unselfish People More Likely to be Depressed" doesn't assert causality as much, and "Depression Correlates with Unselfish Traits" even less.

tzar 9y ago

From the study: > Here, we demonstrate that functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in the amygdala and hippocampus induced by the inequity between the self and other rewards during an economic game can predict participants’ present and future (measured one year later) depression indices. This seems to suggest that the headline is not terribly inaccurate with respect to the study itself, at least. Unselfishness (sensitivity to economic inequality) predicts markers for depression.