I was on hormonal birth control the first twenty years I had my period, never had PMS, and always thought it was a completely made up/exaggerated thing by neurotic women. I also score extremely low, like outlier weirdo level for a female, on neuroticism.
But once I went off hormonal BC, I had to admit it was definitely real. Embarrassingly so, and I really hate the idea that my mood/personality is controlled by a monthly cycle like that. I don't even usually know when I'm going to get it because I don't pay attention, but whenever I do, it's like, oh THAT'S why I was such an irritable bitch yesterday.
I think neurotic women are just more likely to get upset about, amplify, and dwell on ANYTHING with a negative valence, whether it's an event or a mood or a physical condition.
I can help you out there. Scott Alexander is great on therapy, the low level details of psychology, and a wizard on social commentary, but he's not that strong on trait theories of personality.
So, Neuroticism is a well established trait that's fairly easy to measure with surveys. What Aella is doing here looks fairly sound. Some people may not like the shortness of her scale, but nobody wants to sit through hours of questions, and trimming survey length is really important to reduce test fatigue. An established measure of personality, the TIPI, measures Neuroticism with fair validity using only two items: https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/ten-item-personality-measure-tipi/
(It is common for short scales to correlate with each other, which isn't exactly what you want, and this survey looks like its measure of Neuroticism might have leaned a bit towards the Agreeable side, but frankly I like that - I prefer the HEXACO to the Big Five, and Hexaco uses Emotionality, which is close to what Aella had here.)
As for her results, her sample size was quite large, and all of her findings were highly significant. This is a big deal, as studies are often published with titles like "Groundbreaking Counterintuitive Results: Is Our Study The Most Important Thing Ever?" based on mining surveys of bored college students for dozens of relationships and then pouncing when one of them barely makes the usual cutoff of p < 0.05. Aella's sample seems mostly to be full of motivated respondents, and her p-values are all quite low, so there's basically no chance that we saw these results just because she's just combing the data for random correlations.
In fact, everything that she reports is so commonly seen throughout the psychological literature that this is really nothing other than a replication. This is worth stressing: None of her findings are news. They are already known. Moreover, that's absolutely a good thing, since psychology still hasn't really taken steps to deal with the replication crisis; Aella may just be a random blogger, but she's a smart cookie, and this is a reassuring set of findings.
I wonder how much this could be explained by people experiencing mood-based PMS symptoms while taking the survey being more likely to say they worried about things and were more mentally ill, basically just because of the experience of those symptoms.
You could also hypothesize that "feminine traits" form a real cluster, meaning they are correlated to some degree. For instance, women who have a higher hip/waist ratio might on average wear more makeup, or score higher on neuroticism, than more androgynous women. If so, you would expect that higher reported levels of PMS would be correlated with higher neuroticism, as well as all other "feminine traits".
Hey Aella, what are you making your graphs with, XL? You'd be better off using scatterplots and showing trend lines - then there's no need to switch X & Y axes.
Dang, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on here? Are people who are more neurotic / self-reportedly mentally ill that way because of some core underlying belief or buy-in, and that’s the same buy-in that causes one to believe in mood-based PMS symptoms? Or are objectively more neurotic people exactly the types that form these beliefs in the first place?
To put it another way, is Geography of Madness really a book about people with neurotic tendencies? Or are neurotic tendencies something one believes themselves into having?
(also, please do include more Midjourney, I love seeing what people create with it!)
I was on hormonal birth control the first twenty years I had my period, never had PMS, and always thought it was a completely made up/exaggerated thing by neurotic women. I also score extremely low, like outlier weirdo level for a female, on neuroticism.
But once I went off hormonal BC, I had to admit it was definitely real. Embarrassingly so, and I really hate the idea that my mood/personality is controlled by a monthly cycle like that. I don't even usually know when I'm going to get it because I don't pay attention, but whenever I do, it's like, oh THAT'S why I was such an irritable bitch yesterday.
I think neurotic women are just more likely to get upset about, amplify, and dwell on ANYTHING with a negative valence, whether it's an event or a mood or a physical condition.
And now I need Scott Alexander to comment on this so I know what to think about it :)
I can help you out there. Scott Alexander is great on therapy, the low level details of psychology, and a wizard on social commentary, but he's not that strong on trait theories of personality.
So, Neuroticism is a well established trait that's fairly easy to measure with surveys. What Aella is doing here looks fairly sound. Some people may not like the shortness of her scale, but nobody wants to sit through hours of questions, and trimming survey length is really important to reduce test fatigue. An established measure of personality, the TIPI, measures Neuroticism with fair validity using only two items: https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/ten-item-personality-measure-tipi/
(It is common for short scales to correlate with each other, which isn't exactly what you want, and this survey looks like its measure of Neuroticism might have leaned a bit towards the Agreeable side, but frankly I like that - I prefer the HEXACO to the Big Five, and Hexaco uses Emotionality, which is close to what Aella had here.)
As for her results, her sample size was quite large, and all of her findings were highly significant. This is a big deal, as studies are often published with titles like "Groundbreaking Counterintuitive Results: Is Our Study The Most Important Thing Ever?" based on mining surveys of bored college students for dozens of relationships and then pouncing when one of them barely makes the usual cutoff of p < 0.05. Aella's sample seems mostly to be full of motivated respondents, and her p-values are all quite low, so there's basically no chance that we saw these results just because she's just combing the data for random correlations.
In fact, everything that she reports is so commonly seen throughout the psychological literature that this is really nothing other than a replication. This is worth stressing: None of her findings are news. They are already known. Moreover, that's absolutely a good thing, since psychology still hasn't really taken steps to deal with the replication crisis; Aella may just be a random blogger, but she's a smart cookie, and this is a reassuring set of findings.
The moral of the story is that being anxious/vulnerable/emotional/sensitive makes life hard, but that's typical for the ladies. Blame evolution: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/venus-and-mars
I wonder how much this could be explained by people experiencing mood-based PMS symptoms while taking the survey being more likely to say they worried about things and were more mentally ill, basically just because of the experience of those symptoms.
You could also hypothesize that "feminine traits" form a real cluster, meaning they are correlated to some degree. For instance, women who have a higher hip/waist ratio might on average wear more makeup, or score higher on neuroticism, than more androgynous women. If so, you would expect that higher reported levels of PMS would be correlated with higher neuroticism, as well as all other "feminine traits".
Hey Aella, what are you making your graphs with, XL? You'd be better off using scatterplots and showing trend lines - then there's no need to switch X & Y axes.
My two cents - ditch the AI art, I'm sick of seeing AI art.
Also, yeah, the nocebo effect is a lot stronger than people realize!
Nononono Aella, the art is great!
> should i start including more on-theme midjourney art at the end of my blogposts?
I strongly vote "no".
In your emails, please can you tag the art you use with the creator's name? It's stunning and they deserve credit. Thank you.
It is credited as being created by midjourney.
Thank you Sol. I can now see the citation on my laptop. It wasn't visible earlier on my phone using dark mode. Apologies.
Dang, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on here? Are people who are more neurotic / self-reportedly mentally ill that way because of some core underlying belief or buy-in, and that’s the same buy-in that causes one to believe in mood-based PMS symptoms? Or are objectively more neurotic people exactly the types that form these beliefs in the first place?
To put it another way, is Geography of Madness really a book about people with neurotic tendencies? Or are neurotic tendencies something one believes themselves into having?
(also, please do include more Midjourney, I love seeing what people create with it!)
If I had to guess I would say neurotic people are more likely to pay close attention to their emotional state. It kind of goes with the territory.