This holiday season has been populated by parties, parties, parties. It seems like all our friends are having holiday parties to celebrate this year. We kicked off the holiday party season with a small dinner party a couple of weeks ago. There will be pictures to follow - I just have to snag them off my camera during one of those rare moments I'm at home. While the usual suspects are at most of the parties, you'll be able to distinguish one party from the next based on my tights. I'm in a "tight" phase - you'll see.
During the week last week, we had a BU School of Ed party at Cornwalls in Kenmore Square. Now, I've been a BU student for the past 5.5 years, minus one year away for an actual job (gasp). Over that time, I've met so many school counselors, coaches, teachers, professor, ed policy makers, athletic trainers, psychologists, etc. These people have popped in and out of my life - some sticking around for years, others just for a class or two... Last Tuesday, at the BU School of Ed party, I saw almost all of them. I missed my old school counseling classmates (they're all out in the field working), but I managed to see almost everyone else. It was a great, and kinda surreal, night.
Last Friday night, we had 2 parties planned for the same time (yes, we're that cool), so I turned down the second invitation we received so we could go to the first party. I found out, though, about an hour before the party was planned to start, that it was canceled. So, Brad and I found ourselves in a delightful position of having NO plans ("delightful" is not used sarcastically here). So, we bucked down with a bottle of wine, Season 2 disc 1 of Madmen, and our jammies.
On Saturday night, we had our track team's holiday party at Dan's house in Cambridge. It was great to see people in more than just shorts and sports bras... and a super excuse to wear a different set of tights. We played a fantastic game of trivia (created by Bruce). My team (Team Saiko - which is Japanese for Team Awesome) placed 2nd overall which, I'd like to point out, is higher than Brad's team placed.
On Sunday, Brad and I had a lazzzzzy day. We slept in, lounged around, and played in the snow in the morning. Then, we got all dolled up and hit up Duozo for some sakitinis and sashimi. If Oishii is an "A", Fugakyu is a "B", then Duozo sits at a very VERY solid "A-". I highly recommend it. Following our dinner, we cabbed over to The Opera House to see the Nutcracker, drink champagne, and munch on peanut M&Ms. The show was PHENOMENAL. We capped off the night with a cheese plate and a couple glasses of port at the Ritz's bar. All in all, a perfect day for my purple tights.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Step 2...
Thank you for the MANY MANY well wishes for yesterday's interview at UMass Boston. I didn't realize so many people read the blog - I had 'good luck' coming at me from all angles.
I received notice today that I am one of the finalists for the position, and have a day long interview on January 25th that includes lots more stuff on my end - a research presentation, e-portfolio, etc...
I know what I'm doing over my holiday break.
I received notice today that I am one of the finalists for the position, and have a day long interview on January 25th that includes lots more stuff on my end - a research presentation, e-portfolio, etc...
I know what I'm doing over my holiday break.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Top choice interview
I have an official interview at my top choice position for next year - a tenure track full time professor position at the University of Massachusetts. The interview is December 15th. Yay.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Laura's Good News
I haven't posted in awhile - rather, I've been spending my waking (and sometimes non-waking) hours dissertating the last few days of my 20s away. I took a weekend break 2 weekends ago to spend time with our fantastic family and friends for Brad's 30th birthday. Once I get some pictures online, I'll post away... For now, lets just say Brad was totally surprised by his surprise party, loved spending the whole weekend with Nate and Lisa, and was ecstatic to see his and my family at Bruce and Christy's place for his birthday night. To round out the birthday celebration, we'll be going to the Weezer concert on December 7th to relive our middle school years! How exciting.
So, the title of this post "Laura's Good News" doesn't even refer to Brad's birthday weekend. Brad's birthday weekend deserves, and will get, a post of its own.
What is Laura's Good News, you ask?
I just met with my adviser about my dissertation. Let me preface this post by stating that I spent 30 hours a week in the fall of 2008 creating my first 3 chapters of my dissertation, proposed my research idea in January of 2009, gathered data every Monday and Thursday of the spring of 2009, and have spent about 30-40 hours most (not all) weeks from the summer until now writing. Because I'm doing an exploratory designed mixed-method study, I have quite a lot of data to go through. For the first part of my dissertation, I created a protocol adherence rating form and assessed the fidelity of a youth development program to a conceptual model by training independent raters in the model and the protocol adherence rating form. For the second part of my dissertation, I interviewed approximately 30 people involved in the program (students, teachers, advisers, etc), gathered quantitative data on their program attendance and self-assessed conduct throughout the program in relation to the program's goals, and gathered pre- and post- tests on 3 different scales measuring the climate, motivation levels, and responsibility outcomes of the student participants in the program. I have spent the last few months writing up the first part of the study and the qualitative piece of the second part, and am just about to start analyzing the quantitative piece of the second part of the study. I met with my adviser today who told me she thinks my project is too big and recommended to my committee that I slice out the rest of my data and only include that which I have already analyzed! What does that mean for me? It means I have at least 120 hours of work cut from my life AND it means that there is almost no way I can't graduate this May unless something goes terribly wrong (which could still happen).
All that happened before 10 am on a Monday morning. This is going to be a good week.
So, the title of this post "Laura's Good News" doesn't even refer to Brad's birthday weekend. Brad's birthday weekend deserves, and will get, a post of its own.
What is Laura's Good News, you ask?
I just met with my adviser about my dissertation. Let me preface this post by stating that I spent 30 hours a week in the fall of 2008 creating my first 3 chapters of my dissertation, proposed my research idea in January of 2009, gathered data every Monday and Thursday of the spring of 2009, and have spent about 30-40 hours most (not all) weeks from the summer until now writing. Because I'm doing an exploratory designed mixed-method study, I have quite a lot of data to go through. For the first part of my dissertation, I created a protocol adherence rating form and assessed the fidelity of a youth development program to a conceptual model by training independent raters in the model and the protocol adherence rating form. For the second part of my dissertation, I interviewed approximately 30 people involved in the program (students, teachers, advisers, etc), gathered quantitative data on their program attendance and self-assessed conduct throughout the program in relation to the program's goals, and gathered pre- and post- tests on 3 different scales measuring the climate, motivation levels, and responsibility outcomes of the student participants in the program. I have spent the last few months writing up the first part of the study and the qualitative piece of the second part, and am just about to start analyzing the quantitative piece of the second part of the study. I met with my adviser today who told me she thinks my project is too big and recommended to my committee that I slice out the rest of my data and only include that which I have already analyzed! What does that mean for me? It means I have at least 120 hours of work cut from my life AND it means that there is almost no way I can't graduate this May unless something goes terribly wrong (which could still happen).
All that happened before 10 am on a Monday morning. This is going to be a good week.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Just awesome....
I've claimed for a long time that the hard and soft sciences are interdependent and not at all mutually exclusive. While my claims are not all that controversial and many people within psychology share my opinion, its still fantastic to read op-ed columns that support these thoughts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1
The Young and the Neuro
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 12, 2009
When you go to an academic conference you expect to see some geeks, gravitas and graying professors giving lectures. But the people who showed up at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s conference in Lower Manhattan last weekend were so damned young, hip and attractive. The leading figures at this conference were in their 30s, and most of the work was done by people in their 20s. When you spoke with them, you felt yourself near the beginning of something long and important.
In 2001, an Internet search of the phrase “social cognitive neuroscience” yielded 53 hits. Now you get more than a million on Google. Young scholars have been drawn to this field from psychology, economics, political science and beyond in the hopes that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.
These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology. Matthew Lieberman of U.C.L.A. is doing research into what happens in the brain when people are persuaded by an argument.
Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.
Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.
Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.
Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.
All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.
The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.
Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.
But a study by Saaid A. Mendoza and David M. Amodio of New York University showed that if you give people a strategy, such as reminding them to be racially fair, it is possible to counteract those perceptions. People feel disgust toward dehumanized groups, but a study by Claire Hoogendoorn, Elizabeth Phelps and others at N.Y.U. suggests it is possible to lower disgust and the accompanying insula activity through cognitive behavioral therapy.
In other words, consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.
Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.
The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1
The Young and the Neuro
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 12, 2009
When you go to an academic conference you expect to see some geeks, gravitas and graying professors giving lectures. But the people who showed up at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s conference in Lower Manhattan last weekend were so damned young, hip and attractive. The leading figures at this conference were in their 30s, and most of the work was done by people in their 20s. When you spoke with them, you felt yourself near the beginning of something long and important.
In 2001, an Internet search of the phrase “social cognitive neuroscience” yielded 53 hits. Now you get more than a million on Google. Young scholars have been drawn to this field from psychology, economics, political science and beyond in the hopes that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.
These people study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology. Matthew Lieberman of U.C.L.A. is doing research into what happens in the brain when people are persuaded by an argument.
Keely Muscatell, one of his doctoral students, and others presented a study in which they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.
Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa studied Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations. The two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.
Mina Cikara of Princeton and others scanned the brains of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched baseball highlights. Neither reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. This is a look at how tribal dominance struggles get processed inside.
Jonathan B. Freeman of Tufts and others peered into the reward centers of the brain such as the caudate nucleus. They found that among Americans, that region was likely to be activated by dominant behavior, whereas among Japanese, it was more likely to be activated by subordinate behavior — the same region rewarding different patterns of behavior depending on culture.
All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that.
The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.
Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.
But a study by Saaid A. Mendoza and David M. Amodio of New York University showed that if you give people a strategy, such as reminding them to be racially fair, it is possible to counteract those perceptions. People feel disgust toward dehumanized groups, but a study by Claire Hoogendoorn, Elizabeth Phelps and others at N.Y.U. suggests it is possible to lower disgust and the accompanying insula activity through cognitive behavioral therapy.
In other words, consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.
Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.
The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.
Monday, October 12, 2009
A mezcla of events
Our most recent trip to Manhattan.
Brad lookin' fly in our hotel lobby.
Weirdly, Armani had very few clothes and lots of ramps.
Nothing like an afternoon cocktail.
Central Park.
Sue & Kim's trip to Boston.
Our visit to the North Shore. One of my favorite places in the world.
Soccer with buddies.
A picture from my Senior Memory book. I filled it out when I graduated from high school. Little did I know it would be a 12 year journey.
Brad lookin' fly in our hotel lobby.
Weirdly, Armani had very few clothes and lots of ramps.
Nothing like an afternoon cocktail.
Central Park.
Sue & Kim's trip to Boston.
Our visit to the North Shore. One of my favorite places in the world.
Soccer with buddies.
A picture from my Senior Memory book. I filled it out when I graduated from high school. Little did I know it would be a 12 year journey.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Laura's Birthday Weekend - A Month Ago!
This post is a long time coming. For my birthday, Brad took me to Nantasket Beach and then to World's End Reservation. Below are some pics from our day's adventure (and the night before en route to my birthday party in Cambridge)!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
4th of July
Our 4th of July weekend was low key AND a ton of fun. On Friday night, a group of us had dinner at the West Side Lounge in Cambridge. Then, the next day, we spent the day at a friend's house for a bbq/birthday party/moving away party/4th of July party. Lots to celebrate! That night, we enjoyed the Boston fireworks! A great weekend!
Friday, June 19, 2009
Wet
Wet - the best way to describe today. Before work, Brad and I went to Peet's Coffee House to enjoy a tasty beverage and we were pelted by relentless rain! Good thing I finished my run super early this morning before the downpour began. Brad is running the Green Mountain Relay this weekend up in Vermont and the forecast is for warm rain all weekend. The relay is intense - 12 runners run a total of 200 miles in a 24 hour period, starting at 7 am tomorrow morning.
My weekend is full of fun and work...plans with friends, dissertating, and business building. I am also in the middle of a couple of projects related to sport psychology...writing a few papers for publication and recruiting some people to serve as ambassadors for the Junior World Cup in Field Hockey next month.
Happy Weekend!
My weekend is full of fun and work...plans with friends, dissertating, and business building. I am also in the middle of a couple of projects related to sport psychology...writing a few papers for publication and recruiting some people to serve as ambassadors for the Junior World Cup in Field Hockey next month.
Happy Weekend!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
HPC's logo design by For the Muse
The incredible logo design to the left is designed by For the Muse.
I explained HPC's philosophy to Theresa Redmond, owner of For the Muse:
Hayden performance consulting (HPC) is dedicated to developing and maintaining optimal athletic performance through facilitating the development of cognitive skills, techniques, perspectives, and processes. HPC incorporates into its practice Arete, the ancient Greek’s notion of striving for excellence with courage and strength. HPC’s goal is to help performers strive for excellence in their chosen craft.
From this philosophy, Theresa took the idea of pursuing excellence and "developed it further to include the ideas of 'reaching goals' and 'striving for unity of mind and body'". From here, the ring concept emerged as a symbol of growth, and completeness.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Hayden Performance Consulting (HPC)
I am starting my own performance consulting business, using a sport psychology model, to serve athletes and other performers (including businesses, coaches, musicians, doctors, etc). I hired someone to create my website, which is currently under construction, another person to create my business logo, which is currently in the works, and plan to officially get the business rolling within the next 2-3 weeks. To start, however, I have created a blog that will serve a different purpose than that of the website. While the website is informative in relation to services provided, the field of sport psychology, the nature of HPC, the blog is more organic and ever changing in nature. It will include entries with sport psychology tips and tricks, current events, conferences and other happenings in the field, etc... it will also link to related businesses as I hope to develop a network of young professionals in the sport business trying to 'make it'. So, check it out for yourselves by linking to the blog on the right side of this webpage. Any comments or questions you have about any material you see (or don't see) on the site should be asked via the comment section of the site, not via my email, as I'm sure if you have questions about something, other readers have similar questions. I want the most information to reach the most people possible. Enjoy!
Quite a weekend
We had an incredibly fun weekend! On Friday night, we went out to dinner with Katie and Ted and watched Hangover, one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. On Saturday, Brad watched the track races over at Bentley College and I went to a bachelorette party. Without giving away details, lets just say there were drag queens, gobs of very happy gay men (end of Gay Pride week in Boston), a mechanical bull, and lots of pole dancing (not by me, of course). Whew! On Sunday, Brad, Kit, Chris and I went to Rockport, up the coast, and spent the day scouring the rocky cliff, enjoying lobster on the water, eating strudel and salt water taffy, and watching the rain pelt the ocean's surface. It was THE New England day.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Over the years
At Mike's Pastrys in the North End with Brad's college friends
An Indoor 5K at the Harvard Track
Hiking in Kauai
Hiking in Amherst, MA
Laura and Katie at Oishii
Laura and Luke in Central Park, NY
Emily and Brad at the Olympic Marathon Trials in NYC
Laura running
Thanksgiving in Boston with the Aulies
Our 'hood
Post 10K in Michigan
Brad overlooking the Charles River and Boston
Brad working hard in our crib
Luke's high school graduation
Dinner at Laura and Brad's pad
Laura and friends at Top of the Hub in Boston
Our anniversary
Day 1 of homeownership
Hayley and Claire, childhood friends, visiting in NYC
Brad skiing in Vermont
New Years Eve in Holly, MI
New Years Eve at Fox and the Hound, Michigan
Skiing in Up North Michigan
Mark and Luke
Laura in the Boston Commons
Brad and Laura in Cape Cod
Our engagement party
An Indoor 5K at the Harvard Track
Hiking in Kauai
Hiking in Amherst, MA
Laura and Katie at Oishii
Laura and Luke in Central Park, NY
Emily and Brad at the Olympic Marathon Trials in NYC
Laura running
Thanksgiving in Boston with the Aulies
Our 'hood
Post 10K in Michigan
Brad overlooking the Charles River and Boston
Brad working hard in our crib
Luke's high school graduation
Dinner at Laura and Brad's pad
Laura and friends at Top of the Hub in Boston
Our anniversary
Day 1 of homeownership
Hayley and Claire, childhood friends, visiting in NYC
Brad skiing in Vermont
New Years Eve in Holly, MI
New Years Eve at Fox and the Hound, Michigan
Skiing in Up North Michigan
Mark and Luke
Laura in the Boston Commons
Brad and Laura in Cape Cod
Our engagement party
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