The Mystery of the Vanished Citations

James McConnell’s Forgotten 1960s Quest for Planarian Learning,
a Biochemical Engram, & Celebrity
by Mark Rilling

To readers of McConnell’s (1983) introductory textbook, he and Thompson appeared as antiestablishment youth heroes of the 1960s who single-handedly took on the scientific establishment of learning theory from a laboratory in a kitchen sink of an apartment in Austin,
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and most populous city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties.
 
 
 
  Texas,
Texas is a state in the South Central region of the United States.
 
 
 
  ith a budget of $3.89 for equipment and then, somewhat like Horatio Alger,
Horatio Alger Jr. was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through good works.Texas is a state in the South Central region of the United States.
 
 
 
 
  earned fame and fortune with federal research grants. McConnell’s story had a kernel of truth: Planarian learning really did begin in McConnell’s kitchen sink. McConnell gave Bitterman the fictional name, Sauerman. McConnell wreaked his revenge on Bitterman for the low opinion of his article in the following lines:

Sauerman hates flatworms.., he won’t let us work in the animal labs …. There’s no way to get an A on our project, you know…. Doing research that Sauerman doesn’t approve of….[but this experiment] might even make us famous.

(McConnell, 1983, p. 366.)

Here, McConnell’s fiction deprives Bitterman of the due credit for originally suggesting a planarian preparation.
In the fictional study, McConnell (1983) demonstrated after a delay of almost 20 years that he really did understand Bitterman’s lesson about the appropriate control groups for classical conditioning. In his fictional version, McConnell added the unpaired control group recommended by his former mentor, Bitterman. This control, actually run by Baxter and Kimmel (1963), was not present in the original Thompson and McConnell study.

We’ve got to prove that it’s the pairing of the light and shock that causes any change in the way the worms respond. And the third group gets both light and shock, but they are not paired.

(McConnell, 1983, p. 368.)

The moral that McConnell chose for the fictional story was a lesson about the importance of control groups. How ironic that McConnell was often accused by critics of running experiments that were poorly controlled!

Escaping Peer Review as a Celebrity-Sclentist

Most scientists probably consider their task complete when an article is finally in press. Because the public does not read scientific journals, McConnell believed that a scientist also has an obligation to communicate significant findings to the public through the mass media. Such communication requires skills in public relations, a field in which few psychologists have expertise. McConnell had an edge because he worked in radio and television before his career as a psychologist. He cultivated the press throughout his career as a psychologist, and he thought that professional scientists should cooperate with the press as much as professional athletes (McConnell, 1967b). McConnell was not only a scientist, but also a very successful science writer and pop psychologist. McConnell’s media strategy is best described by the person who knew him best, his personal secretary and business manager of The Worm Runner’s Digest, Marlys Schutjer (personal communication, January 7, 1995):

Jim wanted to say things that would shock people, to create controversy, so as to make people think. He wanted to be controversial. He wanted to get people to say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ He wanted to interest people, but in the end he wound up alienating his colleagues.

For most scientists, the news is the discovery, the original data presented in the article. Journalists also want to know from scientists about their discoveries, but there is more to news than just discovery. For research on animals, journalists also want to know about potential applications of scientific findings to humans. News sometimes involves predicting the future, so journalists often ask scientists for forecasts. In a modern culture permeated with science, the public expects a scientist to assume the role of a prophet. McConnell was a futurist who believed in a behavioral revolution similar to the industrial revolution, so his media work often contained predictions that went well beyond the data. The problem with scientitle journalism is that, unlike the editors of American Psychological Association (APA) journals, journalists do not provide peer review. They are not experts on the science.

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The Science of Humor Is No Laughing Matter
by Alexandra Michel

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Psychological scientists Peter McGraw (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Caleb Warren (University of Arizona) propose that negativity is an intrinsic part of humor — without violating a norm or rule of some kind, a joke just isn’t funny. But violations can’t stray too far; otherwise, they become unappealing or even disgusting and upsetting. According to the researchers’ Benign Violation Theory, a violation is humorous when it breaks a rule or norm but is benign.
McGraw and Warren’s Humor Research Lab (HuRL) has conducted several studies examining the exact criteria that cause us to perceive a comedic situation as benign or not. Along with the severity of the norm violation, a sense of psychological distance from the violation — by space, time, relationships, or imagination — is a key ingredient for turning an unpleasant situation into a humorous one, they posit.
For example, in a study published in Psychological Science, the researchers looked at the effect of psychological distance in terms of time. Inspired by the classic Mark Twain quote, Humor is tragedy plus time, the research team investigated how the passage of time can influence one’s perception of an event as funny or painful.

If distance increases the humor in severe violations (i.e., tragedies), but decreases the humor in mild violations (i.e., mishaps), then autobiographical events that get funnier over time should feature more severe violations than those that get less funny over time, the researchers write.

One study found that the events from people’s lives that became funnier over time were more severe events (like a car accident), while events that lost their comedic effect over time were seen as minor violations (like stubbing a toe).
Another study examined distance by manipulating whether an image was seen as hypothetical or real. A group of 67 students was asked to rate the humor of images from a website. Those in the close condition were told they would be looking at real photos that have not been altered using image design software; participants in the distant condition were told they would be viewing fake pictures that have been altered using image design software.
One picture portrayed a severe abnormality: a Cronenbergian image of a man sticking a finger up through his nose out of his eye socket. The other portrayed a mild abnormality — a man with large icicles hanging from his frozen beard. Using a 6-point scale, participants rated how funny they thought the photos were.
The students rated the more disturbing image of the empty eye socket as more humorous when they were told it was fake, and they reported the less disturbing frozen-beard image as more humorous when they thought it was real.

These findings suggest that there’s a real sweet spot in comedy — you have to get the right mix between how bad something is and how distant it is in order for it to be seen as a benign violation, McGraw said.

The Energizing Effect of Humor

Having trouble finishing a project on deadline? Well, put down that Red Bull and head over to YouTube. No joke — watching funny cat videos at work may not be such a bad thing after all. A study conducted by Australian National University management professors David Cheng and Lu Wang suggests that exposure to humorous stimuli may actually help people persevere in completing tedious tasks.
Across two studies, Cheng and Wang found that people who watched a funny video clip before a task spent approximately twice as long on a tiresome task compared with people who watched neutral or positive (but not funny) videos.
Prior research has found that humor can help facilitate recovery from stressful situations, even prolonging people’s tolerance for physical pain. In the business world, many successful organizations such as Zappos, Virgin, and Google deliberately build play areas into their workspaces and organize fun events to ameliorate the stressful nature of work, boost morale, and increase productivity.
Indeed, in a 2007 article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, APS William James Fellow Roy F. Baumeister (Florida State University), APS Fellow Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota), and APS Fellow Dianne M. Tice (Florida State University) point to humor as a factor that can moderate or counteract the effects of mental depletion.
In line with this idea, Cheng and Wang hypothesized that humor may provide a respite from tedious situations in the workplace. This mental break might not only prevent work-related depletion, but also might facilitate the replenishment of mental resources, ultimately allowing people to persist longer on difficult tasks.
To test this theory, for their first study the researchers recruited 74 students studying in a business class to come into the lab, ostensibly for an experiment on perception. First, the students performed a mentally depleting task in which they had to cross out every instance of the letter “e” contained in two pages of text. The students then were randomly assigned to watch a video clip eliciting either humor, contentment, or neutral emotions.