Archive of PsycEXTRA^® Listserv Announcements

Ever wonder what's in PsycEXTRA^®?

We send monthly announcements to the PsycINFO^® Listserv to highlight the content of PsycEXTRA. The monthly announcements showcase the varied content of the database.

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So a Man Walks Into a Bear

Mobile technology — texting, smartphones, apps — has brought about revolutionary change in almost all areas of life in a few short years. Though it's certainly hard to assess the effect of a tsunami from within the wave, research is increasingly trying.

Over the next few months, we'll take a look at mobile technology, the good and the bad, from a number of perspectives. Today, we'll look at texting as a distraction.

While 38 states already ban texting while driving, Fort Lee, New Jersey has upped the ante and passed an ordinance many of us might hope becomes more widespread: a ban on texting while walking. Think it's not necessary?

In April a man in Montrose, California literally walked into a 400-pound black bear. In DC, local blogs call texters "wanderers" for their habit of weaving drunkenly across sidewalks and blocking others — one blogger reported seeing one texter block 14 people, including two furious runners.

A search on thesaurus terms Cellular Phones and Mobile Devices and Distraction with "texting" as a keyword limited to the past 5 years yields quite a few interesting results. Not surprisingly, most of the results relate to the risks of driving and texting. For example, we return the following document topics and types:

• "Attention Demands May Explain Why Texting While Driving Is So Dangerous" (Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2009) is a press release reporting texting as riskier driving behavior than talking on a cell phone.
• "What Does It Take to Get Texting Off Roads?" (Halsey, 2009) is a Washington Post newspaper article that reported on a 2009 distracted driving conference in Washington, DC.
• "Four High-Visibility Enforcement Demonstration Waves in Connecticut and New York Reduce Hand-Held Phone Use (Cosgrove, Chaudhary, & Reagan, 2011) is a brochure/fact sheet that reported on distracted driving demonstration programs in two communities designed to test whether a high-visibility enforcement model can reduce instances of texting distracted driving.
• "Remarks prepared for Ronald Medford, Deputy Administrator, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for the NOYS Teen Distracted Driving Summit" (Medford, 2011) is a transcript of a speech given by the Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that describes texting while driving as "the 'perfect storm of distraction' in that it involves visual, manual and cognitive distractions that together are especially risky."
• "2011 Traffic Safety Culture Index" (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2012) is a report on a national telephone survey on the degree to which traffic safety is valued and pursued.

Not all the research is on driving and texting, however.

In "Dangerous Distraction" (Novotney, 2009), a newsletter article from APA looked at research by psychologists that shows how cell phones, iPods and other technologies make us more accident prone and how they are exploring ways of designing technologies that might help prevent accidents.

The Data That Came in From the Cold

PsycEXTRA is a fascinating database for a myriad of reasons, some of which you might not expect. If you'll step into the Wayback Machine with me, we'll revisit one of the more intriguing ones.

Though PsycEXTRA launched in 2004, its roots run much deeper. Gray literature is, of course, ephemeral for a variety of reasons, sometimes it's not archived, sometimes it's lost or misplaced, and sometimes — queue the sinister music — it's deliberately suppressed.

Quick history: The Freedom of Information Act has had a see-saw history on information made available; passed in 1966 and broadened in the wake of Watergate, a national security exemption in 1982 and an executive order in 2001 made access much more difficult, with a Clinton-era expansion sandwiched between. One effect of all that back and forth was that materials that had been available were doing a Houdini on us, being reclassified and disappearing.

A gray literature database like PsycEXTRA provides a safeguard against that happening, or at least against that happening surreptitiously. Take a look. We do indeed include documents marked "Secret" and redacted with mysterious deletions. For example, a look at some of the CIA's documents yields a bonanza of sources like the following historical reports:

• "Political and Personality Handbook of Iraq" (1991) was prepared on the eve of the First Gulf War after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and provided information on Iraq's political culture and institutions, focusing on analysis of the character of Saddam "Husayn." It also examined the men around him; Saddam's inner circle; Saddam's outer circle; and key military commanders.
• "Perspectives on Growing Social Tension in China" (a heavily redacted report released in 2000) summarized an intelligence assessment of the strains in Chinese society since the student protests of 1988–1989, casting doubts on China's ability to weather them." The report was prepared shortly before the Tiananmen Square massacre and the evaporation of a public protest movement.
• "The Chernobyl Accident Social and Political Implications" (released "as sanitized" in 1999) focused on the impact of the 1986 Chernobyl accident on the Soviet population, popular reaction to the event, and the effect on popular attitudes toward the Soviet bureaucracy and leadership. It includes analysis of the likely long-term psychological impact on the population and on Gorbachev's consolidation of power.
• A series of reports are available on South Africa, among them "South Africa: The Dynamics of Black Politics" (1987). It described and assessed the significance of trends in Black politics in South Africa during some of the most violence filled years of the apartheid struggle. Reviewing impediments to Black organization from the government and within the Black movement, it evaluated the prospects for effective Black protest against a determined White society. Forecast: bloody stalemate and the long-term possibility of a pro-Soviet Black government.

It's hard to stop reading these. But for those of you who are interested, you'll find gold. Even the names of the reports can lure you to spend a day. Who can resist "Concerning Espionage and Social Courtesy" or "Brainwashing From a Psychological Viewpoint" or even "Hypnotism and Covert Operations"? (Now do you think it's a coincidence that gray literature is also called "fugitive"?)

Your Country Is So Fat…

Americans are consuming a diet so high in saturated fats and sugars that we're fattening up like steers in a feedlot. Our weight problem is now so great that a proposal has recently been floated to tax sugar like alcohol or tobacco to try to help stem the tide, and Michelle Obama has launched a Let's Move campaign struggling to get kids (and their families) on their feet and moving.

A look at the numbers is chilling: in 2010, nearly 26 million people in the United States had diabetes and another 57 million people were estimated to have prediabetes. Aside from the personal toll of the disease, the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse estimated the financial cost of diabetes and diabetes-related issues to be about 2% of GNP. More than fighting two wars and the global war on terrorism. More than Katrina. And that cost has nowhere to go but up, with about one in three American kids overweight or obese and the numbers climbing every year.

What information can we find in the PsycEXTRA database that addresses some of the ways diabetes is affecting our children and threatening our society? A search for diabetes as a keyword limited to those 17 or younger brings up a wealth of results in document types that include grants, patents, fact sheets, and clinical trials.

A sample of those results limited to obesity includes the following:

• "Obesity Linked to Poor School Performance" (Sederer, 2010). An article in the OMH News discussed a study on the relation of obesity and diabetes to the mental functioning of children and adolescents. While the relation of obesity to diabetes is well known, their impact on the mental functioning of the developing brains of children and adolescents has been uncharted territory. The results showed that adolescents with type 2 diabetes did more poorly across the board on mental performance tests. This group also showed smaller brain volume for the entire brain and the frontal lobes, the last part of the brain to mature, where much of our reasoning occurs. In addition, physically fit children did better on English language and standardized math tests.
• "Commentary: Restoring Wellness for Our Children" (Grasmick & Lake, 2009). The Maryland Education Bulletin reported that one in three children is overweight before entering kindergarten, and one in three children born today is likely to develop type 2 diabetes earlier than ever as an adult. "We have reached the point where it is predicted that, for the first time in the history of mankind, this generation of children will have a shorter lifespan than their parents." To reverse this trend, we must establish and foster partnerships to improve nutrition education and increase physical activity, literally from birth. The article provides recommendations.
• "Sleep Duration and Pediatric Overweight: The Role of Eating Behaviors" (Hart, 2009). A clinical trial being conducted by the American Diabetes Association was announced that is designed to examine the link between sufficient sleep, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. The trial, projected to end December 2011, will focus on the effect of too little sleep on hormones that regulate hunger and appetite, a factor that places children at increased risk for developing diabetes.

City Upon a Hill

Two hundred years ago, the United States was almost completely rural. Today, we are more than 82% urban. And we're not alone. The world population is now only about 44% rural, and more than a million people are added to our cities every week. Cities create the lion's share of our problems: crowding, pollution, disease. But they also are the incubators of many of our solutions and centers of innovation.

While our cultural mythologies (and politicians) often still tout rural communities and "small town" values as inherently superior to those in urban environments, the city is now the natural habitat for most of us and has a positive ethos of its own. Teasing out information on the positive aspects of urbanization is challenging, but a search in PsycEXTRA of Urban Environments AND "Community Development" OR "Social Change" returns results that make an intriguing start.

The findings include the following:

• "State of Play: How Tot Lots Became Places to Build Children's Brains" (Mead, 2010) described a New Yorker article on the evolution of children's playgrounds from the first municipal playground in New York to today's "imagination playground." The article makes the case for a today's play place that encourages unstructured play and its connection to both more creative thinking and better health.
• "Civic Intimacies and Impossible Neighbors" (Fennell, 2010) is a conference abstract on the transition of urban residents from strangers and ambivalent kin to the civic subject anchored by duties, ties, and practices with the locality. The study reviewed a Chicago experiment to transform troubled public housing projects into smaller-scaled, mixed-income, and racially diverse neighborhoods called "new communities" in an attempt to engineer civic intimacy.
• "Cultural Development and City Neighborhoods" (Rosenstein, 2009) is a report on how cities around the world built and branded urban cultural life as a way to develop local economies and revitalize urban centers. These cultural agencies and programs serve nonprofit cultural amenities such as museums and theaters, target cultural industries such as film and music production, and, more recently, have begun to focus on supporting the artistic workforce within cities.
• "Cities Are Key to Societal Change and Successful Peace Building" (Turk, 2009) was a conference presentation that looked at the pivotal role that divided cites can play in bringing about needed societal change and successful peace building. This presentation focused on Nicosia, Cyprus, divided between Greek and Turkish Cypriots since 1974. Because in Nicosia inhabitants have the most opportunity to interact at the grassroots level, they can begin to affect stability of the island and bring about reunification of an ethnically divided society.