NHK World, the Japanese educational TV network, recently began broadcasting a series of lectures titled "First Class". One of the talks was by Oxford professor Elaine Fox, a smart and enthusiastic psychologist, on the modern neuroscience of optimism and pessimism. The topic is important, as is Fox's work. But alas, her 2012 book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, subtitled "How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook", is ... thin. Not thin physically, but slow, anecdotal, and excessively first-person in its presentation. Illustrations are cartoonish; charts lack error-bars or confidence intervals. And techniques for attitude-improvement are only sketched, likely without enough detail to help most readers.

So story follows upon story, with feel-good conclusions based only on small samples. Even though the author clearly knows about cognitive fallacies and tries to be objective, the text approvingly cites experiments that confirm preferred conclusions; those that disagree are dismissed in the endnotes. Certainty dominates skepticism. Recent research suggests most psychology studies are literally wrong, irreproducible. Many of Fox's examples share characteristics of such flawed work.

As an incorrigible optimist I truly want to believe the major theses of Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: that brain chemistry, largely driven by genetics, makes some people pessimists — but that proper training can reduce that bias, increase happiness, promote resilience, and help people become better. But Fox doesn't make a convincing case for that. Too bad ...

(cf. Conceptual Metaphor (2012-06-19), Buddha's Brain (2014-07-27), Creativity and Insight Enhancers (2015-08-04), ...) - ^z - 2016-06-04