 Yeah, thank you Lawrence. So as you're walking out, I would like to thank Lawrence and McGill for organizing this and also just for as Lawrence mentioned, I've definitely benefited from participating in this workshop from all of you as well, but also for in these McGill events over the last five or six years kind of critically you know shaped the way I think about some of these issues. I'd also like to thank Connie and the FPR for organizing this event. I think it's been a great event. It's been nice to get to know everyone a little bit. Okay, so so what I want to, I'm going to talk about the broad topic of field methods, but it's not going to be that as that broadly defined. I am going to focus most particularly on culturally sensitive assessments of what I would call, rather than mental health, I would call subjective well-being. And I'm going to focus on some examples from two studies. One is a study among the, an indigenous group in central India referred to as the Saharia, who are sometimes referred to as conservation refugees. I'll refer to, I'll explain that a little bit in a moment. And then also on some of my work in virtual worlds, which I also understand in particular online games of various kinds, which I understand as kind of communities and social places and communities and worlds of a kind. And in particular, I'll focus on, in those two contexts, how I developed these kind of culturally sensitive, subjective well-being, kind of positive and negative experience scales that actually became quite important to answering some of the questions that I had in some of the, in these, in these two studies. And you know, trying to, you know, through talking about those examples, my main goal is to help you see how you might even integrate some of these same techniques into your own projects. A key takeaway message, if you, you know, you don't remember anything else, you know, like Ian Gold's talk, is the context matters? And so I'm going to talk about both some ethnographic and then what I would call these kind of cognitive anthropological cultural domain analysis techniques that can help you establish meaningful context. So ethnography for kind of general social and ecological context and then these, this kind of these cultural, this cultural domain analysis, things you've heard us talk about, like freelisting and pile sorting, and then these analytical techniques, like cultural consensus analysis and cultural consensus analysis, to elicit what I would call meaningful or I would call frames of meaning or frames of reference. Sometimes referred to as cultural models. I take a very, so I take, I take a very cognitive anthropological cultural knowledge approach to these kinds of issues. You know, what are the kinds of things that people know that shape the way, not only their subjective well-being, but in general the way they think and behave. And people have kind of personal kinds of understandings of various kinds, but they also have what I, what I call cultural understandings, which in this framework is understood to be socially learned and transmitted kinds of understandings. You know, you've heard a little bit of discussion between myself and Lawrence and others. This is a kind of this schema or cultural models or cultural frames of reference approach. It is what I would call a kind of representational approach to knowledge, like the kinds of things that people know, and even that people have these kind of inner representations of knowledge in their heads in some sense. But the big takeaway, it's this kind of inside what's in you and what you know, the kind of interaction between that and your environment and your society that is real key here. There are readings, and I have the recommended, I think only the required readings, which really focus on these two scales. There's only two required, I mean required is a loose word. I don't know who actually read them. You can, if you're interested, you can read them. A lot of things I'm going to go over quite quickly or there obviously in much more detail. But there's also some other recommended readings, mainly by myself and my collaborators, which if you're interested in these topics, you know, you can look at those as well. I have more caveats, but I think I'm just gonna well, maybe just a couple more things. One thing, so this this cultural models approach, I think it's very useful and I hope you'll see some of the ways it's useful, and I think it's actually relatively easy to do. Through these, you know, interviews, freelisting, pal sorts, kinds of things that you can understand kind of cultural domains of understanding. That's why I'm talking about it, and that's why I do it. It's definitely not everything. So don't be confused. I don't want to be doctrinaire here. It's more that there's going to be some techniques that I think are pretty easy to integrate into some of your projects as one kind of proxy of culture. A lot of my colleagues in the natural sciences and ecology, etc. They say, hey, I want to, you know, I want to understand culture and I want to get into my project. How do I do that? This kind of schema, cultural frames, consensus, consonants, etc. approach is a way to do that. It's not the only way. Ethnography is important. You know, interpretive, qualitative methods are very important, but they're harder to integrate into a kind of maybe a more quantifiable, you know, scientific kind of study coming from another discipline. And this is another, this is a way you can actually measure culture, a proxy for certain dimensions of culture that can be readily, very readily integrated into your projects. Okay. Last thing is, if you have questions, just ask. I was thinking again of Ian Gold. I think I am invested in getting through all these slides, but I'm more invested in you understanding and, you know, finding things that are useful and interesting to you. Okay. So first, so I'm going to go through a couple studies and kind of give you a behind the scenes view of some of the things that I was doing. So I'm going to start with the Saharia, these conservation refugees, and then I'm going to talk about the virtual worlds. And in the middle, I have a little, little fun thing that we're going to do. Okay. So I want to start with this discussion of the Saharia indigenous groups. It's a human displacement study. So the, the, the Saharia or a community of the referred to as Adivasis or first inhabitants. So like India's indigenous groups or India's, if you're an American or United States Indian, India's Indians, right? So there are actually hundreds of these groups that are less fully integrated into a caste society, for example. So the first study I want to talk about is assessing in the, a displacement study. So what some people would call internally displaced peoples rather than refugees. So there was a community that was moved outside of a, a wildlife sanctuary for various conservation ends. And then a community, and then others that were left, you know, in the buffer zone of this conservation area. And I was comparing kind of subjective and other forms of well-being in this context. Okay. So context matters. So let's get at least a few photographs. So this is one of the main villages I worked in. Pseudonymously, I call it Bhaktya. And this is actually, so you can see, you can see the, the, the village here in the front with these kind of thatched huts. And then the, the wildlife sanctuary is actually, you know, in the back. And this is actually a trash heap where, you know, you dump some of your plastic or, you know, other kinds of things there. So these are some of the Saharia children. As most anthropologists will tell you, the kids will follow you around and they're curious about what you're up to. And they ask a lot of questions. Here's a scene of this. So this is if you, if you walk, you know, a couple of kilometers from that village area, for example, you get to this. So it's like a highland village in the buffer zone of the sanctuary. So if you walk a little bit, you get to these kind of, you know, cliffs and you look down into this, you know, vast sanctuary that these groups and these groups are now excluded from. And other groups have been, they, they lived down in this more lowland area and they're not there anymore. They've been moved outside the, the core and the buffer zone of this sanctuary. Just another shot. It really is a, a vast, I mean, it's not vast. I would consider a relatively big, you know, forest with a lot of ecological integrity as well. And that's one of the reasons why it was chosen as a site for something I'm going to talk about in a moment and why these communities, these villages were moved out of there, about 20 villages. So just for example, here's a, so here's a fence that in key areas, I guess I could use my pointer just to get used to it here. So in key areas, there's, there's these, these fences. It's not like, you know, if you want to get behind, you know, by this fence, you can, it's more of almost a symbolic marker that, you know, this is where the sanctuary is. You're not really supposed to go in this sanctuary. You're not supposed to, you know, you're not supposed to go in it. You're also not supposed to harvest food, certainly not hunt, you know, not, you know, graze your, your, your, your goat, you know, have your goat's graze, etc. And remember, this is traditionally, this was exactly what you did. You would go into these areas and do all that stuff, and now you don't. Now why were these, why were these groups moved out? And this is, this is why, not this particular lion, but lion. So there, there's actually, I don't know if you know this, but there's, there is a population of Asiatic lions. You all know this? There's like one remaining population of Asiatic lions. Do you know where it is? I'm just curious if you're aware of it. So it's not just Africa that have lion. It's in India, yeah, and in the particular, in the good, good guess. Yeah, thank you, Samuel. And in the state of, of Gujarat, in the gear sanctuary. So as, as some of you more ecologically minded people will know, it's very, this is a valuable, you know, it's a kind of, you know, one of these high profile, you know, species and, and, you know, the, and, and, and a kind of valuable species from a conservation point of view. And if you have all of them in one place, they're vulnerable, right? So the government's idea is that we need to establish a second population of these Asiatic lions. So theoretically this could be a win for conservation. If we can find a spot, you know, we move them there. Unfortunately for the Saharia, their homes were the spot, right? Or at least some of these Saharia. So they got moved out of this area. Now the ironies are that, you know, the plan was from the late 90s, and that's when this kind of displacement event started. It took a couple of years, and by early 2000s, these communities have been displaced, and there are still no lions in this, in this place, right? And there might not be lions, because the state of Gujarat, for example, doesn't want to give them up. So it's like a political event, because it's a big tourist revenue and other kinds of things. So the plan now is actually cheetah, which also had a habitat in India, throughout the Middle East, you know, for example. In India they were signs of royalty, you know, for example, but there are no cheetah remaining in India. So these would be African cheetah. I find this whole thing kind of, you know, I guess infuriating or at least ironic in, you know, different levels. I am going to talk about some ecological kinds of things. So let me just draw your attention to water is a big deal, and water scarcity. So this is like a common daily scene. So women will walk, you know, sometimes kilometers, either to the one functioning tube well in the village, which often isn't functioning. And so if it's not functioning, then you go to this other kind of waterhole that is generally has some water in it. But it's like, it's for, it's for humans, and it's for animals, and it's further away. But anyway, water is a big deal. And so I just wanted to draw attention to this. The way you gather water and so forth is gendered. And so it's typically women who make this trip several times a day. And this will, you know, you're carrying back to your home all the water you're going to use for, you know, for cooking and cleaning and, you know, washing and all sorts of things. This is a structure in the core of the sanctuary that is now abandoned. So this is what I call an old Maziran. And then this is a new Maziran. So this is where the displaced villagers, this is one village. So I ended up visiting many, many villages, all the displaced villages, you know, like around 20, all these buffer zone villages around five or six. But then in the end focused on a couple of them. So this is new Maziran. And this is, this is another structure. It's actually a kind of temple of a kind. And then you see here, for example, you know, these, these, these kinds of flags are when you make a prayer or a request to the deity, if that, if that request is answered, then you, then you, you know, you tie a flag there as a sign that the request has been answered. Okay, this is all just context. Let me get a little more into some of the findings of the study. Okay, so the context is in central India and in the state of Madhya Pradesh and kind of Northwestern Madhya Pradesh, you have this wildlife sanctuary and you have this core area and then you have this larger buffer zone area that I only show part of it here. And you have this old village here that's in the core and you get moved out to, out here. And then you have this other village here that is, that is still there, Beirutha. And, and so these became a kind of focus. Now if you saw in the title of that, of the study, if you fall, if you saw the title of that paper, I'm really focused on mental health or subjective well-being in the context of this, of this right here and comparing these two, these, these two villages. I refer to this as a natural experiment and you're going to see, Suzanne is going to talk a lot more about this. So this is kind of a prelude to some of that. The idea being that these two villages, Beirutha and Maziran, you know, they, they're a few kilometers away, well six or seven, it's not trivial, but they're, you know, relatively close. They have daily kinds of exchanges, they intermarry, they're economically bound together, socially bound together, etc. And so you have this event where one's displaced and the other isn't, right? So it's almost like a, it's like a, it's not a natural disaster. It's like a kind of human-induced disaster of some kind with the, it's, and it's almost becomes like an experimental, you could call it like an experimental treatment effect, right? You have two, they're not, it's not random and there are some differences. I already told you one is more lowland, one is more upland and they are a little bit apart, right? But they are, you know, genetically, you know, quite similar. I'm not gonna say identical, but quite similar through intermarriage, etc. Demographically quite similar. Same kind of mixed forging, etc., kind of economy, right? And now one gets hit with this, you move here, you lose your home, right? And the other doesn't. You see what I mean by that? This is probably, is this very familiar, this notion of a natural experiment? How many of you have heard of this? Okay, so almost everyone, it looks like. Look, for a typical cultural anthropological study, they, typically anthropologists wouldn't do these kinds of things, right? But me, you know, I do, I do the ethnography and the observations, but then I'm always looking for ways to better identify causality, for example. So this is one of those instances where I say, oh, interesting, there's a kind of natural experimental human induced disaster here. Let's see in a almost, in a more causal sense, what that did to people, right? Okay, so I can ask you, and I haven't told you a lot of context yet, so don't worry. I think you're gonna have a clear intuition on this, but I'm just kind of curious what you think. If we're looking at subjective well-being and mental health, and so remember, I'm not comparing old Mazira, I'm comparing Baruda and new Mazira, right? Where would you expect the highest, the most positive kind of, the strongest flourishing to be occurring in Baruda or new Mazira? How many people think Baruda? The highest flourishing, okay? And how many people think new Mazira? Okay, I'm getting the same thing some of the other speakers had. A lot of you don't have an opinion yet. It's good. You're being careful scientists, right? And you want to withhold judgment. That's fine. Some of you who think Baruda is having the highest positive well-being, why? I'm curious you're thinking. Okay, so change is stressful. Now this was an event, so a lot of the data collection was 2011, 12, and 13. So this was the event, the displacement event was 99 to 2001. So there is time to somewhat adjust. So maybe immediately afterward, I'm not saying I disagree with you. I'm just saying it's, time is an issue here, right? Others thinking of why either you chose, you can say either one, either why you chose Baruda or a new Mazira. Yes, that's all. Have you read this paper? Very smart. That took me a long time to figure out in the field. I'm not saying it then means that they have higher or lower subject, but that's a huge factor. There's actually a kind of a secondary displacement. Before I did the ethnography, my intuition was you lose your home and it's terrible. I mean, you're a refugee, you're an internally displaced person, and what could be worse than that? And it is bad, but there are these secondary effects. And one of the big ones is what happens if all your neighbors leave? So all 20 villages here, some in the buffer zone. And then because when these people leave, maybe even some of the other buffer zone is not as long or as interesting to be there. So there's tremendous cultural economic loss, right? When you're isolated, what else can happen? Maybe you have ideas, maybe you don't. Well, okay, maybe you don't know, but I learned this through ethnography. When you're a vulnerable village in the middle of nowhere, the Indian state ignores you. Who's going to know? We said we're going to build it too well. We didn't. Who knows, right? There are predatory, and predatory maybe is too strong a word, but there are very dominant, wealthy, herding cats from other parts of India, especially Rajasthan, a state I love, but they come in there with all their camels and all their goats and their water buffalo, and they trample your fields and they harass you. It turns out there are bandits in the area. There are some high-profile kidnappings where I was there of some school teachers, for example, and who can, you know, there's less kind of state control and good and bad, right? There's more criminality, right? And remember, you lost access in Bharuta to the core, so you can't do a lot of things. There's a big river there that you don't no longer have access to, fishing. Okay, can I ask you again? Okay, so, and maybe I'm biasingly, I'm being tricky here, you know, because there's maybe an intuitive, but then maybe you want to be smart, you want to be counterintuitive, but now you have a little bit more information, so there's like loss of home over here, but then there's other secondary stuff here. So who thinks that the highest flourishing would be in Bharuta? Oh, well, now no one? Okay, and then what about New Mazurans? And we're still getting a skewed sample. Okay, more people in New Mazurans. Well, it turns out the highest flourishing is actually in Bharuta. So we had a lot of measures, but let me just, let me pause here for a moment, because I think this is important the way I think about how I do anthropology these days. There's a kind of more exploratory and then a more confirmatory phase. Via the ethnography, I learned so much, and when I say ethnography, maybe that's unfamiliar, you may have a little more time to talk about that, but I mean over, I started in 2007 or 2008 coming to this area. And so every summer, even in some springs, I would come here and you spend a month, two months, and you travel, and you talk to people, and you do observations, you do interviews, you have a research team with you, and you slowly learn political, social, other processes, right? But the point is, via ethnography, via ethnography, I learned so much, but I actually did not know the answer. I actually did not have a clear answer in my head where I would see the most flourishing or by contrast compromised mental health, right? So this is why I use what I would call more confirmatory methods. Confirmatory methods can be more kinds of observations, kind of more systematically directed observations towards certain domains of experience, along with structured interviews. It can be these even still qualitative methods, but it can also be things like a field survey or a biomarker of a kind, for example, right? Okay, so what we did was, and when I say we, I have a team, and I'll show you a little bit of that in a moment. So we looked at a lot of measures, and we had a lot of scale. So in the confirmatory phase, we had this long survey that we constructed. We asked a lot of different kinds of things, and we had various indices for assessing mental health and well-being. One was a translated into Hindi. So these are very, they're dialects of Hindi, you know, you could say. So I learned Hindi when I was a grad student, and I speak Hindi, and I also have, you know, field assistants working with me who are there for, when you have to be really precise, like on a survey, for example, who are administering the surveys, which is it's better if they do it than if I do it, right? But anyway, so we translated like a Hopkins depression anxiety scale. So like a short version, like 10 items, six like depression items and four anxiety items. But it, but you know, that raises the question, and this is, this is kind of getting to one of the more central points that I'll be developing today. You know, okay, an anxiety depression scale, where there's really no exact equivalent, there's no really word for depression. I mean, there is like duke and utsav and sadness, for example, and there are a lot of symptoms that might look a lot like depression, but they don't talk about depression. There is this weird syndrome called tension, which is actually an English word that was brought in by the British, which is, looks like a kind of stress condition, and Bonnie Kaiser and Joe Weaver and others have written on, I've written on that as well. So tension is interesting, but it's not depression. What is it? You know, how do you know? Okay, we're going to get to that. But anyway, it's like, okay, so this depression anxiety scale, right? So that's one, one version. And then, then we had this Brad, but then it's like, okay, but maybe this is South Asia. So we go one step further. The Bradford somatic index, it was developed for a kind of alternative to more somatic, who's heard of this, the Bradford somatic? Oh, well, okay, great. Yes, like it's developed actually in Pakistan. And it's a kind of, it's another scale. In that paper, if you're interested, I talk about all this, right? So it's in that paper, all these scales and measurement issues, etc. So I'm talking in a more schematic way right now. But the Bradford somatic scale is, it's a more, okay, maybe in South Asia, depression is more somaticized. It's expressed through these bodily complaints, more than mental or subjective complaints. And so there's another scale called the Bradford somatic scale that we also used. But, but then I'm thinking, but that's a, come on, urban Pakistanis, and this is like central India, Adivasi communities, you know, etc. Better, but still not good enough. So what do we do? We build our own scale as well. And that's where we use these free listing techniques that I'm going to show you in a moment of the prompt in this case, I'll go ahead and give it to you now, but I'll talk about it more in a moment, is when things are going well or poorly in your life, what kinds of experiences, or you have to like fiddle with a little bit, what kinds of experiences do you have in your mind and your body? And then sometimes we said what kind of emotion, then you can kind of clear if you're like, you know, what do you mean and you use different words? You try to codify that across the free list interviewers. But anyway, so what kind of, you know, emotions, positive and negative, loosely do you have when things are going well or poorly in your life, your family? You know, we said like in your own life and your family's lives, and people would list things and you take the most common kinds of items. So I'll talk more about that in a moment and give you some more flesh on that, put some more flesh on that. But at this point, on pretty much every indice, Baruta was higher. So in terms of flourishing, sorry, let me be very clear, they're doing better, so they're flourishing more. So less depression, less anxiety, less, you know, somatic depression like symptoms, more balance of positive compared to negative effect. Okay, but then the next thing, so that's, that is what we found and I would call that confirmation of some ethnographic kinds of insights. But the next thing is why? You know, you can, I was thinking, okay, we have the survey data and we have a lot of material and other kinds of livelihood kinds of things, and then we also have these mental health outcomes. You know, what kinds of associations can we find? I'm curious if you have a good, any kind of idea, what kinds of things would you expect to kind of predict or be associated across these two villages, be associated with some of these mental health outcomes. Do you have a sense of that? I mean, there are literatures on this, like on refugees and displacement. I'm just curious to any of you have a sense of that. Yes, the social support is a big one and we found very clear patterns, and again, you have to find the meaningful way to ask about that. So it's things like we learn and we kind of adapted the scale, like when you have a problem, do you have people to go for food, or people to take care of your kids, or give you a loan, or help you out when you're ill, right? And so there's a clear relationship between social support, for example, and the subjective well-being indices. Anything else? Yeah, housing is tricky and this is another thing where ethnography is very important because one thing in Maziran, everyone got the same house, and everyone got the same amount of land, pretty much. I'll maybe I'll qualify that in a minute. There's irrigation in your closer river or not, so there are, but it's a good idea and that is a thing that we have, at least in Beirut, we have things like, yeah, do you live in a kacha, like a kind of shack, or do you have like a cement base, which is considered better in higher status? And yeah, that's another good one. Other kinds of things? Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to get to that in a moment. That's the obvious one. It's like kind of livelihoods and material livelihood and SES, right? That's tricky, so I'm going to save that, but that's a good one. It's certainly something we are looking at, right? Well, that ends up, I think, being the key one. It's hard. How do you ask that, right? And so I'm going to talk about that in just a moment. Yeah, Samuel. I wonder if generation may be a factor, you know, age, yeah, cultural dissonance as well. So it's probably really productive to have, you know, everybody's in the village and you outsource your expectations that community is fine, but for those younger people who may relate more to the dominant culture. Yeah, no, there are, age is another good one. So I think there are, you know, gender and age, and maybe those are important in their own right, and maybe there's some kind of interaction across villages. Those are certainly important. Did you find out that maybe younger people had higher stress? Yes, there is a kind of age effect. Well, it turns out that the young people, maybe they want to be displaced. Maybe you're near a market and you're near more where the action is, and maybe you're earning a little more. It's easier to migrate for wage labor, etc. Yes, Anna. The shift in the generational role could be a real issue. So in fact, that's going to be someone who's younger, takes on an ability to adapt and an ability to make use of that change. And the consequences for interpersonal relationships with that. Yes. Family destruction. Yes. Yeah, no, those are, I totally agree. So age is a very important one. So certain demographic factors, yeah. So, past the career of distress, so you're already in this field before the moment, probably, yes. Good point. Yeah, good point. Yes, well, you guys, well, that's how I do it, yeah. I just want to say that I just, I don't think you need to look at this in terms of cultural influence now, or you don't have a functioning before that. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, so reviewers have certainly pointed this out to us, right? And this is the thing that natural experiments, they kind of fall prey to. So they're different kinds of experiments. So do you have pre-experimental measures? You know, something I'm going to talk about telomeres in a moment, was there a mortality selection? So this is why I wouldn't say experiments are, natural experiments have exactly the same quality. They get closer, I think, to causality with some careful interpretation, I think, but it's a good point. Okay, so let me just, let me wrap this up and then move on a little bit. Look, the point is, well, two you didn't mention, food and water and security. I guess maybe you're thinking food and security is related to SES, maybe in part. But food and water and security turned out to be huge. And you kind of have to know how important water is, both for just drinking water and for your animals and also for farming. But those were huge. But here's the point I want to make is that we did, we had all these material livelihood kinds of predictors. And then we also had some other kinds of social kinds of change kind of predictors. We ran many, many regressions. Almost invariably things behave, you know, kind of as you would expect as I expected after the ethnography, especially with our own great, you know, positive and negative affect scale. But no matter what regression we ran, village remained a predictor. Always. Now, not on depression and anxiety, sometimes depression and anxiety and other kinds of negative, subjective well-being can be quite well predicted by material livelihood and other kinds of standard things. But happiness, and we had questions about spiritual flourishing, for example, you could, it was, you know, Beruda was always doing better on the highest flourishing dimension, no matter what controls we put in. And so in a sense you couldn't explain it away by some other secondary factors such as, and especially, and this is the important point, especially a material and livelihood factor. Because remember this is in the context of the Indian state saying, look, we paid you for this move. We paid you quite well. We gave you a new house. We gave you farmland. We built you wells. We helped find you jobs, right? And maybe all that is the case, right? There's certainly corruption in this context, but there's certainly some truth to that, right? But there's something remaining about that loss of homeland that is irreducible, I would say, right? To these other kinds of factors, which I think was a real finding, you know, here. It was really interesting to me, especially on like, you know, happiness, spiritual flourishing, et cetera. This is kind of a side note, but I just want, I want to draw your attention to a complexity here, because SES was mentioned. How do you measure SES in a context like this? And let me give you, because this is something, oh, SES. Oh yeah, okay, maybe gender is more straightforward. They're getting more complex these days, but maybe not, less so in these, you know, in these contexts. But SES, I mean, come on, it's not like you, you don't have a salary job. No one in these villages has a salary job. In the displaced village, a few, but certainly not in Beirut. Education, what would you expect for education here? A fifth grade education, like a primary school education, is a great luxury. And actually education was another really good predictor. Yeah, exactly right, Laura. Yeah, yeah, basic literacy. I think that's the explanation, but if you have basic literacy, now there are other endogenous, you know, variables, maybe your family's doing better. You know, what were the circumstances that allowed you to get that education? So again, I'm careful with the causal language here, right? But education is a great predictor of positive, subjective well-being. And my sense is it's about basic literacy. Okay. But yeah, Samuel. Are you first going to look at SES, sort of within the village variation, or looking at the broader context of India? Well, I'm not even thinking about the broader context of India. I'm really thinking about two villages where things are a little bit different, but you could look in the broader context of India. But let me, what, do you have a question behind that? I'm wondering, like, yes, within those communities, what are some new markers applying those status, for example? Yeah, yeah, but how do you figure that out? So there are things like, again, like, you know, freelisting, you know, what kind of features does a high, you know, a high quality individual, I mean, a high status individual have. But let me just, okay, so let me just give you a little bit of the complexity here, and this is a kind of a side note. So foraging of gum and resin, so you scrape the, you own these trees, you inherit them from your family, and you scrape them, and you collect this gum, mouse. It gets obvious on these photos, but you never know. And then you collect it, about four or five different kinds of gum used for medicines or edible oils or plastic manufacturing. There are merchants who come and they put these in big bags, and you sell them by the kilo. That's a good source of income. You also are doing a lot of wild foraging still, now in the buffer zone of kind of a wild spinach here, very tasty, right? But how do you, how do you quantify that, right? Informal foraging economy. How do you even know what they're foraging? Do you see where I'm going with this? It's like, well, okay, maybe everyone is what I would call a cultural domain. You know, what are plant, what are, what are, what are the valuable plants that you forge from the fore? That's a free listing activity. But then they're like, what do you mean by valuable? Oh yeah, you're like, well, the ones you eat, the ones you use for medicine, the ones you sell, you know, right? See what I'm saying? And then, and then the next step is, okay, you get the list and the most salient items. Which ones do you actually collect? And how much, right? How much you earn from them? You're not earning anything from them, but you're getting them and they're helping you in various ways, right? But it's even more complex, yeah. Can I come back a little bit to the next slide? Yeah. So what kind of religious are you talking about in the language profession that you can see in your own community? Or? No, I'm talking about, no, no, so they have, so they have, India has this, you know, kind of ambitious program. We're going to have a primary school in every single village. So when I say literacy, all I mean is you, it's, they call it, like, fifth grade pass. I pass the fifth grade, whatever, it's a bureaucratic administrative. You qualified, it has nothing to do with, I mean, there are poets in these villages and there are people who are very, they're storytellers and they're very, you know, orally literate. That's a weird phrase, but you know what I mean? Because literacy comes from like the notion of writing down things. But anyway, but yeah, so it really is just you passed fifth grade. Now, I think, but still what that means is you can read, there's a document circulates from the government. You can pretty much read it. You can sound things out and people might help you with a word if you don't know it, right? And you can sign things, right? So you can participate more in state structures, right? Let me, let me be clear. One thing though, the kinds of populations I'm talking about when, you know, the topic of, you know, the weird populations, the western educated industrialized rich democratic populations, you know, I'll see these world value studies. Oh, you know, we've, we've found, you know, India is like this or, you know, there's, you know, Asia is like this or China or, you know, whatever. And I'm always asking myself, you know, are the Saharia included in these world value studies? Even there was a recent really good one that came through and it's like 80 countries. And I was reading the abstract and it's like, oh, but, you know, in parentheses, most of our respondents were, were college students. And I'm like, okay, I don't want to be too harsh. It's like, that's pretty good 80 countries you're getting out, but then what about the Saharia, right? And not just, so when we're talking about, you know, the kind of universalism and kind of generalizing a kind of universal psychology, universal values, with some kind of variation, are we still talking about largely literate, wealthy, democratic, you know, urban kinds of popular or not. So that's just kind of a side note and not just on economic issues like I'm talking about here, but many other kinds of issues, right? You know, values and belief and practice, etc. But anyway, they also, they do monsoon fed irrigation. So they don't have irrigated farms typically. But during the monsoon season, you know, the rains come in and you've planted these seeds and you plowed them. And maybe you have a kind of a water pump that pumps in water from a local pond, you know, for example. But that takes money and resources, etc. So you also farm. I see I don't have any more slides. I'll save that. The point is that you're a farmer, but crops fail. And the camels eat your crops and they stomp them down. The rains fail. You're also a migrant laborer. So when, you know, peanuts and cotton are being harvested, maybe that's a good time to leave. And then maybe you're doing your survey at that time and there's a kind of sampling bias, right? The point is, even something is, what my scene is straightforward is SES is actually quite complicated. I'm not going to solve it here. It turned out that some of the measures that we're showing patterns as we predicted, one was a very simple, how well off are you compared to other Saharia that you know? And it was like one, two, three, you know, like poor, doing okay, wealthy. I'd have to, yeah, in the material domain. Yeah, I have to look at exactly. I mean, I have, you know, this was 2011. I have to look at exactly. But it's, but the point is, is like, if you think you're doing less poorly than others in your context, that can, you know, have an effect on it. It can be related in interesting ways to subjective well-being. Well, that's the thing is, I was going to give a little wrinkle there. But one thing we found was that in Maas Iran, people tended to say, even though they were actually objectively seemingly, because we also had like, we had an estimate like crops and crop earnings and we had an estimate wage labor. And we had land estimates, at least in Beirut, if not in, you know, in Maas Iran, where land was pretty equivalent. But we had irrigated land. Irrigated land worked pretty well. But in Maas Iran, where by many standards, it was actually objectively wealthier. People would often subjectively say, we're less, doing less well. On average, the mean is lower than in Beirut. Now why would that, do you have a sense of why that is? So in Maas Iran, the displaced village, you're saying, I'm not doing well, even though by objective standards, you're doing well. You're more likely to make that, you know, to kind of make that mistake. Not a mistake, but, you know, that kind of judgment. Versus in Beirut, where you might even overestimate your financial livelihood well-being, even though you're not doing as well. Yeah. Yeah, Lisa. You were talking before about the spiritual well-being, right? So the relationship to the place, the ancestral land. How is the ritual component of public view? I'm going to get to that. I have a little segment on ritual. So let me, I'll save that for, it's very important. And it's, there's a paper I'll show you in a moment. Yeah. Yes. Maybe there's a greater variation of wealth in Beirut than there is in, so if there's a greater variation, you would probably, because you can't, like if you're asked the objective of wealth, how wealthy do you think you are? You're comparing yourself to other people in the community. So if everyone is more or less similar to you, and it might not say you're going to get your way before? Yeah, that's, you're on exactly the right track. That's exactly what we found. I would give a little bit of a caveat is that the key is that for the Maziran displaced villagers, you're moving toward other caste Hindus who are often quite wealthy, or a lot wealthier, not wealthy by Indian standards, a lot wealthier than you are, right? So the variation is actually more in that Maziran context. And then the subjective assessment is you're making an assessment toward these wealthy caste Hindus and you're comparing and you're saying, oh, well, I'm not like them, right? So you have a greater kind of frame of reference, right? But you see the point, because I don't want to get, this is not the main focus here, but you see that SES, all these variables that you might have a sense of cannot be readily measured in these, it takes a little fiddling. I just want to make a couple of points is this is a team, and if any of you are planning on doing things like this, so I have Dr. Chakrapani Upadjai, who's one of my main field collaborators. And these are now, these are some of his students and postdocs who are now, they've been working with me and Dr. Chakrapani since 2005 on a first project that I'm not talking about today and in Rajasthan in these Bill tribal areas. And they're the field researchers, they're the collaborators who are distributing the survey, field testing the survey. You can't do this alone, right? And Chakrapani is a brilliant guy and a brilliant field worker and a friend, right? And there's a warmth to him that helps on every level, right? So it just helps to have, so these are my middle class, you know, we move from Udaipur into, for them it's an adventure, it's high adventure. You know, they're middle class educated Indians and they're like, oh, we're going to these trot, they're a little nervous, you know. And during, I'm going to talk about Holy, this Feast of Holy that I'm going to talk about. And they all hid inside this, they closed themselves off inside this school and they locked the door because they didn't want, because they were worried about things that could happen and I'll say a little bit more about that, right? Now this is, I know, I debate about whether to show this photo but this is me, this is me with, now because I want to make a few comments here that are actually kind of interesting comments and I know this looks kind of colonial and weird and all that, but it's like, they were very protective of me. So I want to go out and explore, you know, I want to explore the, you know, the, yeah, you're not, I shouldn't say too much about going into the center of the, you know, sometimes we get official permission, we hike into the center of this, you know, wildlife sanctuary, right? But they're like, no, no, no, you can't do that. They're, you know, they're bandits and they were, like I say, they're a high profile kinds of kidnappings, for example, these school teachers and ransoms and so forth, but there's not, there's no gun culture in India. Do you know that there's no gun culture in it? No one has a gun, right? But these tribals, these Adivasi communities in this wastes, they were gifted guns by the government because they killed, they actually killed, this is a weird story, but they killed this high-profile bandit that was kind of terrorizing the region. And then it became this news story, this was, you know, maybe 20 years ago. And they, so it was brought to attention how they were suffering at the hands of these depredations. And so the government granted them these, I don't think they're very well functioning, but they're like these kind of blunderbuss, you know, shotguns to protect them, to protect themselves. Now it's tricky, because in a wildlife sanctuary you can imagine, you know, from the state's point of view, this could be misused and used for hunting, et cetera. I won't make any comment on that. So anyway, when I was wandering, you know, with them they would always have like kind of an armed guard right with me into the, you know, even the waterhole. And this is a big, the reason I bring this up, because this is an important issue because it shows the kind of vulnerability. These are not just imagined kinds of vulnerability. Women in particular, when they go to this waterhole, they're afraid of outsider men, whether they're bandits or not, who might harass them, assault them, you know, in various ways. And then these groups are afraid of a lot of these outsiders, and they, not just bandits, but other more dominant communities that can pretty much do what they want. So this is actually a real issue that pointed to some vulnerabilities. Okay, I'm going to speed up a little bit. I was hoping by, so we've gone about 50 minutes, and I was hoping by the, a little after an hour, I can move to the virtual worlds, but I still have some things I want to say here. But I will start speeding up a little bit. When we tell this story to the Indian, government, I work closely with the forest department, and they're like, well, these are just what people are telling you, because again, these are like subjective measures, you know, self-assessments of how well you're doing and mental health. It's kind of fluffy, right? From certain points of view, it's like, it's not really objective. So what we decided to do was we wanted to look at actually something quite different on the biological level to again, in this natural, experimental kind of context, assess the impact of displacement on telomere length. And some of you may, you know, or may be aware of this literature, but telomeres are understood to be this little protective cap that sits on the ends of your chromosomes and serves a kind of protective function against degradation, with the idea that if the telomere somehow becomes degraded, then there's risk of your DNA, your functional DNA also becoming degraded. So some people have proposed that telomeres are almost like a chronometer, like your telomere length, you know, associated with your actual age can kind of tell you, are you aging in a more accelerated or a more decelerated fashion? So we actually worked with Susan Bailey, who's a telomere scientist at CSU and she and David Marronon, who was her postdoc, they gave us this. And I'm telling you this because this is a little behind the scenes stuff, I don't know a lot about telomeres. I mean, I learned a lot because I, you know, want to know the thing, but the protocol and how you collect them, et cetera, you know, I learned from Susan Bailey, right, and her postdocs. And so there's a nature protocol that tells you the kinds of alcohol to bring and the kinds of tubes. And we ended up collecting mouthbuckles cells where you're scraping the inside of the cheek. And with a little child's toothbrush, and then you have like alcohol and a vial, and then you put the, yeah, you've done this, Laura. Really? Yeah, and then you break, interesting. Yeah, and you know, you break it off and you seal it and you ship it. In this case, we did ship it or you carry it out. But each biomarker that you use has its own protocol and you need, so I'm an anthropologist. You know, I need a biologist and specifically a telomere biologist to tell me how to do this correctly because these are biochemicals. In a study I'm going to talk about, we thought about using oxytocin. But it turns out in the field conditions that I was in, oxytocin is it's too big in a fragile molecule and we couldn't do it, right? Even though we would have very much liked it, right? So anyway, we collected, so we had these medical professionals come out from the district and so we collected a lot of medical data, heart rate, pulse, blood pressure, BMI, all that kind of stuff and we did a kind of more biocultural analysis on telomere link. Now I can ask you again, where would you think would have the kind of more accelerated, harmful, telomere degradation? Do you think that confirmed our subjective well-being story or not? I mean, I'm just curious, do you have any intuition on that? Maybe you don't. Do you have a sense of would that displaced village, you know, Maziran or that non-displaced village have the longer telomere? Yeah, and that's what we found. Yeah. How much shorter? This is like, these are terrible questions. So it turned out it was like when you control for all of us, first of all we did find, we used, we looked at cortisol, I'll talk about in a moment, and salivary amylase, you know, the autonomic nervous system and also this HPA axis, you know, stress system. And we did find associations between these two well-known stress molecules and telomere links, which is good, you know, you certainly, and then we also Bradford somatic, you score higher on the Bradford somatic, you know, symptom syndrome, for example, and you also have shorter telomeres, more somaticized kind of depression, for example. So I'll name him because he, you know, Guljar, he was one of my respondents, he wanted a souvenir, he wanted one of these little vials because, you know, it's very, it's very, I love this guy. I mean, you got, you're meeting him every day and he wants to do it right and he's spitting, this is not the buckle cells, this is the cortisol. We also collected salivary, you know, we did salivary cortisol analysis, right? So we have these little vials and we arrive every morning over like a, you know, like an eight or nine day period and, you know, here they are, you know, sometimes I think our jeeps would wake people up, you know, this was in Maziaran, we're staying in the forest village, right? So anyway, we, you know, we did this kind of stuff. Just a couple of slides here, storage is very important because, and this is, again, a little bit behind it, you don't, maybe you don't think about this stuff. There's not electricity. There's not electricity in Verruta. There is in Maziaran, but it's intermittent. It's just, does cortisol need to be in a refrigerator? It doesn't need to be, there's oxytocin. I didn't know before I'm like, I'm going to do this and you want to do it right, right? So it turns out cortisol, you know, spit is, it's kind of okay at room temperature, but it's better cold and even better frozen. So we use, we have this refrigerator with a little freezer, right? And then these ice packs, you know, and we would store our samples in this little, and then it was powered by a diesel-driven generator that became my enemy and kind of the bane of my existence because it, you know, you're on a budget from NSF and it's like, well, I think we can get the cheaper diesel generator in second hand and it's half the cost and then, and then I can, you know, give more respondent gifts and have funds to do other kinds of things. Well, that was in hindsight was not a great idea because, you know, the generator would clunk out and then we're in the middle of the forest so you got to drive like 20 kilometers and try to find a mechanic who can fix it. So, and it turns out cortisol, one thing it is sensitive to and so I'm giving you the behind, I don't think we mentioned this in the article. The cortisol is sensitive to thaw and refreezing and so, you know, we kind of seal this up and have the ice pack and kind of pray. You know, there is this, you know, we're going to see what we think we're going to see and we're not going to get too much noise. Religion and then I'm going to turn to a little exercise and I'm going to pivot a little bit. So religious ritual is good medicine for indigenous Indian conservation. I was not just interested in suffering. I was interested in sources of resilience and it turns out that religion looks to be one of those. So I mean, just look at this, I love this photo. This is, this is this Mataji, this mother shrine just above this forest village and you can see this is actually the village headman and another individual we were traveling with you know, prostrating himself before in respect and a kind of relaxation and confidence and feeling of protection et cetera that you get you know, from that kind of extent. This is deep stuff. This is not trivial stuff. This is like, this is protection, this is meaning, this is life, right. And so, so this was the comment I made, you know, even yesterday about global mental health, you know, when you're looking for treatments, why are you looking to like a CBT cognitive behavioral intervention? Why not look to this? That's my question, right? I mean, doesn't this work? So we tested that and now you can see that we have a lot of different, we have biomarkers so we were collecting so we actually were collecting these biomarkers over to like nine day periods during two ritual occasions. One of them was Navratri, the nine days of the goddess. And so these are, they're, you know, they're festive occasions where you're visiting like a fair and you dress up and you eat well and it's punctuated by a kind of highlight where you're actually, it's this act of worship accompanied by the the goddess and other deities descending into the mediums bodies, right? Which, you know, they're getting, the mediums are getting one kind of effect but then you're in the audience and you're asking questions and you feel like God is with you and God has manifested him or herself. And so the idea is that, you know, if you're interested in these kinds of stress responses, this is giving a kind of relaxation, kind of stress alleviation response, kind of like what Amir Raj was talking about, for example. And then the other one was Holy. And so just for example, the two days you can have, you know, first you destroy Holika, you make this big effigy in the forest and you, you burn this demon. It's all part of this ROM and Robin kind of story. And then the next day you do the colors. And when I first was describing this, this project to some of my collaborators, I had an affiliation with the Indian Institute of Forest Management in Bhopal and I was describing what I wanted to do and I had all these possibilities of the rituals I could consider and they had to be two rituals kind of close together. So they're not identical, right? But because one village, because I'm in one village my team and then I'm with in another village and they're like, oh yeah, you got to do Holy. And I'm like, okay, yeah. Because Holy is like a festival of colors and laughter and come on, if you don't see an effect from Holy, you know, you're not going to see an effect, right? So that's what we did. So we did Holy. A lot of creativity. This was like this improvised boom box with the DJs and they would circulate the village and they would sing and dance and chant and there was music and then they would get it was considered labor like pay so they would get paid for dancing and it's seen as a part of the kind of festival and singing and men and women both do it. The finding was what do you think? Did we see improvement in all these psychobiological maybe I should just stop asking these questions. We did see an improvement in all these psychobiological measures including cortisol but also all you know positive demographics all that stuff and I think I had yeah so and it was dramatic so 34 percent post-ritual drop in anxiety across the two villages assessed via the Hopkins improvements of 27 percent 29 this is just nine days 27 percent 29 percent and 19 percent on our three health outcomes diurnal cortisol slope diurnal slope self-reported stress and this positive negative ethics scale that I'm talking a little bit about I think this is remarkable and there's no psychiatric intervention that would have that kind of improvement over such a short period of time now I often get this question is like well Helen is it last right yes what was the reduction in cortisol yeah I'm going to talk a little about cortisol in a moment so I'll explain that a little more I'll say it yeah I probably should have put those slides ahead of time but I didn't so I'll say something about that in a moment yes yeah yeah no you didn't you didn't you were paying attention it sounds like now one thing is I would say is I don't know if any of you noticed that my glasses are pink right here do you notice this someone that was not a style choice it could have been but it was not it was actually holy and the reason I raised that issue is because every time I see that I'm like I remember this this day right when I was drenched in those color have I even showed oh I haven't shown that yeah this day yes yeah I remember this day those are the same glasses right so but that's a weak answer to how long does this last the strong answer is that if you know Hinduism this is a kind of rejuvenating kind of a you know there are these rituals that happen not every day but quite regularly not this dramatic but as a kind of mental health you know intervention of some kind there's reason to think that this stuff is is is is is it's it would be long lasting because of the nature of the way Hinduism works you know according to the calendar I should say a few qualifications we did more analysis than just that we saw improvements we also saw things like if you if you have more of a sentient more of a sense of vulnerability there's a stronger effect if you have more of a major mental health kind of problem there's less of effect there's still an effect there's less of an effect and that to me that's interesting because in this particular paper my team and I were arguing look this is more of a source of mental health resilience more of a protective function then if your major you know you suffer from something that we you know is like major depression you might not want to celebrate holy you know for example just a little comment on cortisol so we did look at the thing so here's this molecule but the thing we were interested in was this diurnal slope so as we heard from the stress in the brain lecture there's this cortisol awakening response here and then when you're aroused in the morning you know you have a certain kind of response and then it kind of declines over the course of the day um and so what we were actually seeing was an improvement in the slope we couldn't get the cortisol awakening response because it was just too challenging to get there before people woke up not just because we don't wake up that early but because there's actually irregular kind of waking up times during the day so what we did was we were looking at the slope or the course of the day so the idea is over the course of the ritual the idea is that a flat or a flatter slope it's a kind of a less responsive kind of response and so if you see a steepening it's understood it's a proxy but it's understood to be a more responsive cortisol system okay here's the pivot I want to talk about one of the scales that we use and this is where I'm getting to some of the stuff that is is of most direct interest and I am going to speed up just a little bit but first I want to do something different do you have because I want to talk about cultural models it's going to do you have a clear image in your mind or do you are there words you could associate with Donald Trump so I did this little exercise with my my psychanthro class in 2016 right during the election right before the election in hindsight it was a little bit of a mistake and it was riskier than I thought it was going to be 2016 but I did it and I wanted to show them the kind of cultural models approach I wanted to elicit a model both Trump and also Hillary Clinton but I'm curious with Trump could you is anyone brave enough to list a word that you might okay narcissist now I'm going to ask you do people on one to five is that a good word to describe Trump okay other words okay anyone else what about Clinton narcissists okay okay they're overlapping okay so we asked student and we to be fair we said try to think of a positive term and negative term we collected us I was going to do this exercise in here but we wouldn't have time I collected on the board all these free listed and let me jump out of this real quick and just show you a little bit where I'm going here so so we could we I constructed this little Google Forms survey and so with Trump you can see some of the items here and I'm I'm just going to show you this is Google Forms is a really intuitive little survey very editable there are many of these and Kathy would be the pro on the next generation of this kind of field survey but I found this very useful and so we I created this little survey and you know and I sent it to my students and it comes out in this little form and I want to focus on this right here remember what we're interested in doing here is everyone has what I would call a personal model you have like an opinion on Trump and you could probably come up with items that you associate with Trump but the but the question is how much agreement is there among a sample that those could be good items right and so that's what oh yes thank you sorry you didn't see any of that you didn't see it okay I was just talking to the anyway you'll see this but okay so there's a notion of a personal model and a free list you might have things that you associate with Trump or with with Clinton but the idea is do others share those beliefs with you so this is the kind of exercise that that I did and I want to just run through these because as you're going through it I want to see does this correspond you'll see you'll get a sense of how this free listing technique works remember we're taking free list and then making judgments about the most salient items in a free list you know sampling is obviously very important in this in this case it was just my class and we're putting them on this little survey and then asking people okay so you can see what my class said so and these are the terms right so outsider is this going to work like this yeah racist try to get a sense if there's a greed do you think there's agreement right oops businessman sexist now what are these terms again just remind me they're or remind yourself it's my classes offered representation of items associated with Trump right that may form a kind of cognitive object that could be variably that could be learned in some way through practice and interaction discourse etc strong not so much agreement there there's okay narcissistic blunt dumbass okay not as much agreement as you might think though right law oh you know I guess that's the the Laker scale the stronger oh yeah yeah five is strongly agree good thanks Samuel yes also so no no that's different this is just this is just a liker it is on that survey do you strongly agree that this is a term that correctly identifies through the free list then I then I put it on that little field survey and then I circulate the survey and then students responded one to five whether they agree right loud I am going to honest okay well oh not honest right yeah fear unapologetic brat there's a beauty to this and the reason I'm showing you this because you don't know what's going to show up right and you can't say your respondents are right or wrong it's their view right that's the cultural you know domain kind of uninformed corporate visionary not just okay not misogynistic tough radical prince that might have been my yeah well anyway I won't out that person power savior no childish no nonsense small fingered totally normal speaks okay this is going on a little longer but let's change authentic punishment incompetent discipline not politician not making America great again rich aggressive okay look I'm showing you this but the idea that I'm trying to to communicate here is you could I want you to think on your own projects and maybe we could even talk about this this afternoon is there a schematic object that could be meaningful to your project right and Clinton do we want to run through Clinton or we don't have a ton of time maybe are you interested in Clinton of course okay this isn't okay it's interesting experience crooked this is actually interesting it will help me make a point intelligent but remember any domain of inquiry this is just this is like what I call presidential candidates at this point Lawrence yeah I want to ask is presumably within this these things are correlated in certain ways yeah on certain individuals yeah oh yeah for sure position oh yeah yeah yeah so yes that kind of cluster and say look here too oh yeah three models that are playing yes yes yes yeah we I'll say something about that yeah the devil well that's strong educated a traitor that's strong understanding oops I skipped one liar tough guilty no no it's a free list I asked the prompt was what are words that you associate good and bad from my class from my class my class we did they wrote on a little piece of paper so they didn't have to out their own political so they'd write it down and then my grad students I would get up on a board right two faced there are cluster themes so committed people it's their word I don't know feminists empathetic fascist strong evil reasonable Khaleesi do you even know what that's like Game of Thrones right strong woman leader right mother of dragons mother corrupt okay I'm gonna I'm gonna move on but you get the idea right so look let me let me make one point is we actually did a consensus analysis and overall there's strong consensus on Trump overall there's consensus across the two candidates but when you do them individually there's strong consensus on Trump we did factor analysis cluster analysis et cetera and there's like one Trump dimension he's like Trump is Trump was our interpretation Hillary not consensus and more dimensions and it was actually kind of interesting to me it was a kind of window into Trump is someone I understand I have a very clear model of and maybe less so as Lawrence suggested we did collect a lot of demographic this was just an exercise I don't want to get too serious about it but we had demographic political affiliate I won't even show we had demographic affiliation et cetera that that behave predictably Republican Democratic et cetera okay let me continue the last minute some this is probably the most important part of the talk um because I want to I want to pivot a little bit all that context and all that stuff I told you about the Saharia a lot of the success of those analyses were the fact that we built up we did a free list as I told you this right we did a free list on emotions right remember the positive and negative affect scale correct that became the key instrument on all those analyses and I hope you see it's not that different it's this the process is the same the Trump Clinton it just depends on what your cultural it could be parenting right we were talking yesterday like an ideal model of parenting and maybe that plays into even a a stricter parenting model maybe that plays into maybe not necessarily negative of well-being right for kids maybe it's seen as engagement of some kind I'm not saying in a certain cultural context right but the point is so we did this for emotions and this was very important to the studies and we got a lot I could go into a lot of detail here but at this point I'm just going to say what you know this this free listing technique and other kinds of related techniques allowed us to get a set you don't just translate depression you get a set of meaningful emotional experience then you can ask well how often do you have a desire to work during the day and I mean you have to phrase the question correctly right there are a lot of desire desire to work desire to meet people desire to move around desire to eat they're not really it wasn't exactly emotions it's things that when you're feeling good you know what kinds of you know things do you feel in your mind in your body right so just as one example that measure behaved very appropriately when we were doing analyses on here's Maziron the displaced village the balance of positive to negative is the lowest right positive to negative of emotions is the lowest right that's what we expected then there's Beirut these are both displaced peoples of a kind the kind of primary displacement and the secondary displacement these are not displaced villages but here's one suffering from more deforestation and here's one suffering from little deforestation so less ecological degradation the point all the point I want to make here is that it behaved very in a very expected fashion we did do like cluster or kind of factor analyses on these items so we did the all the positive items for example and we you know had a somewhat complex solution here but you know the feeling of being fit and fine a kind of just well-being in your body in your mind is kind of the first factor feeling of light desirous I mentioned that these are the kind of components of those yes yeah yeah when and I have to go the exact words are important but when things are going well or poorly in your life what kinds of things do you feel in your mind in your body and I've had scholars say you know can I just you know I want to use this can I just of course you you got to find the right prompt right this was we're just kind of experimenting around you can adjust it and find the right prompt for getting these emotions right so social the desire you know feeling connected to others and then upright one point I would make here is this does not correspond that closely to a western diagnosis right diagnostic you know kind of no solid in a way the negative items were things like tense I use tense even though it wasn't the highest loading item because there is this tension you know kind of understanding in this part of the world a feeling of weakness you know kind of drain low energy I mean we call it suffering but originally I was like well it's like depression but it's like the kind of emotional side of depression rather than the somatic side of depression but you can see the items here suicidal like crying lonely craving it was a single item sometimes you're not supposed to use single items we did that in that case I have this idea that if you do if you break down emotional suffering to these kinds of components you can actually you can actually start to see things structures of things at different levels symptoms clustering together clusters of symptoms either getting named or not getting named that can form an interesting kind of dialogue with a western nosology another shift of directions I just have a few minutes so I'm just going to say I am going to present a scale but then we're we're almost out we have another it looks like 10 minutes 8 minutes so I'm going to just say I'm going to show you how we did similar things in the context of virtual worlds and then I'll have to stop so let me do I'm just going to skip that so we did the article I had you read and if you if you really want to get into how to do this in a kind of consensus framework and what is consensus and what's the literature this would be the article to read even more so than the indigenous so we did a similar kind of thing and this time you know we actually did it through interview analysis but we were looking at kinds of common positive and negative kinds of gaming experiences and we were very we were very interested to get a kind of balance we wanted both the negative outcomes and you can't see very well but only eight of these items or what I would call addiction type symptoms so things like withdrawal they're marked if you can see the little footnote here negative cognitive salience withdrawal tolerance and so forth but there are other kinds of problem gaming experiences like a feeling of social isolation being connected to me playing too much right or a need for social approval or the community being somehow toxic or me getting really frustrated and angry which isn't exactly addiction something else right and so we ran some analyses and I'm going to go through a couple of studies really quickly on that instrument and here's one and we found out something very interesting it turns out that loneliness this is the internet gaming disorder a common kind of gaming disorder nine items scale turns out loneliness is a very good predictor of problem gaming and also you know inversely related to positive gaming experiences and strongly positively related to negative gaming experiences but we did identify through this SCM path analysis certain kinds of things that corresponded with our ethnography if you're lonely and you get very involved with gaming you can see the little positive you build social support because because you prove yourself in a safe environment hey these are these people are respecting me I'm a good gamer I make friends you actually see less kinds of problem gaming or you're lonely you get really involved in gaming you build up social support you reassess the way you think about the value of your gaming in a more positive way and again you experience less problem gaming the point is in a kind of path analysis again by using this kind of measure and you could do this also with a positive negative ethics so we used IGD in this context because of the audience that we were speaking to you see things that gaming and what looks a lot like addiction high involvement another scale we built yeah high involvement is correlated with addiction addictive gaming but through certain paths high involvement can serve quite different functions positive and so this this plays into a kind of ideas about I have about engagement versus addiction we collected blood from gamers who scored on a continuum of this positive and negative scale and in this case and I don't have time to say a lot about this but our scale if you have a higher balance of positive compared to negative kinds of gaming experiences you have more of this epigenetic distress you're more likely to have this epigenetic distress profile which we heard described as CTRA the conserved transcript in response to adversity so the problem gamers by our scale it turns out that the the GD the gaming disorder the IGD didn't work very well and I have things to say about that it's not an insiders cultural model culturally sensitive scale our scale worked right now I have things to say about that but if you have a higher balance of positive compared to negative you have less of this gene expression distress scale if you have a higher balance of negative compared to positive gaming experiences you have more of the CTRA gene expression distress distress scale what is this distress scale we heard some people talk about it but it's basically 52 genes that are immune function genes things like inflammation interfere on antibody production of various kinds and it's the kind of proxy that Steve Cole Carol Werthman others have developed is the kind of proxy of an experience of the feeling of stress anxiety threat uncertainty when you're experiencing certain kinds of physical and social threats your immune function is very responsive and it up or down regulates now why is this important this may be you may think oh well it's obvious but there's there's a lot of debates like there's no such thing as gaming distress that's the kind of a parody of it but the idea is like do certain kinds of problem gaming experiences assessed by our scale again as we looked at telomeres do they manifest themselves in the soma in the body and in the immune system and they do so these gamers to simplify who are more problem gamers or have a greater feeling as revealed by the body of a threat of a feeling of threat and uncertainty right now it turns out that loneliness and social isolation is a big piece of this story not the whole story but a lot of that some of that explanation goes away when you include loneliness and social isolation we couldn't include a lot of controls because of the sample size last thing I'll say and I will have to end we did another factor analysis and this is quite surprising and this is some work in review so we actually had survey data from North America China and North America and in Europe as well and so we did some kind of comparisons of the structure of these 21 gaming experience items remember the thing that's interesting here and something that Lawrence could tell you a lot more about is the symptoms pool what's the symptoms pool and if you go into these situations and you just have the common gaming disorder symptoms so I've got my eight symptoms I know what addiction is it's addiction addiction is addiction you can't see this kind of stuff if you do the ethnography the interview analysis the free list etc you expand the symptom pool symptoms pool is also boredom and toxicity and frustration and anger right it's not just tolerance and withdrawal and cognitive preoccupation in a negative sense etc and then you do the factor analysis you can say are the addiction symptoms holding together in a kind of predictable way across culture now the cultural relativists in my I mean come on there's so many ways that this distress could be configured the analysis showed somewhat to my surprise is across each of these context there was something that looked a lot like addiction we had eight addiction symptoms they're just like there first factor in North America there all eight of them all eight of them first factor in North America all eight of them first factor in Europe six of the eight in China what good enough right good enough but then there's some interesting nuances in North American China there's a kind of I push myself too hard a kind of achievement motivation and I feel lonely loneliness contributes my overplay they're also there so I think the story was that you know addiction something like gaming disorder as proposed by the WHO it was just approved you know in June of this year as official to be included in the ICD-11 is not bad there's something like that is a cognitive experiential behavioral object in the world but culture's important right and I think I have to end there thank you this menu little tangential another thing have you on stage I'd love to use a little about another notion you've developed in your video game what study videos and wellness yes yes I use this to share with us on how how how we use the feedbacks game that's a great question to study that in different cultural possibilities so this was systematic interview this is so yeah there's a so Joe Weaver and and Bonnie Kaiser in association with Dr. Kermire's Journal Transcultural Psychiatry they have an issue on idioms of distress coming out and cultural syndromes and kind of new approaches so my team we have an article coming out on that and I didn't get to show you some of that analysis but I'll just respond to to Samuel's so this analysis will be there if you're interested I think it's very important to talk about the positive and not just the negative side so you can see this is we're being kind of clever but every negative being thinking about World of Warcraft all the time yeah that might interfere with your relationship but maybe it feels it's like positive anticipation so every negative experience you can think of a kind of parallel positive cognate experience so we are very careful to assess again sometimes it's interviews and structured interview analysis I use a program called Max QDA that helps us with our coding and managing our coding and counting times a certain themes arrive arise and so forth but this is very important because for me both in the Saharia case and in this case if and I I think I I'll repeat the comment but I said it I think it was yesterday if someone has scores huge on this all these negative kinds of symptoms you know very high and almost no positive benefit that's a problem to me but what if they're equal or what if they're both high and one and positive is a little higher it's different right so I think looking at I would encourage you all to think about developing scales that also you know account for positive kinds of experience because as you learn there are a lot of reasons to do this a lot of them are just to understand the phenomenon better because I think that addiction is probably better understood as high involvement higher negative to positive kinds of experience not just gaming not just put negative experiences right it has it's a number of things right yeah yes yes I agree this is what you just said at the end and not knowing your work that well but a lot of what is understood as what happens in addiction is a certain avoidance so you're going to have yes certain positive effects by indulging in any avoidance that will come out so if you're if you have social phobia and you suddenly have social environment when you're able to interact with people that will inevitably be positive in in that scale of avoiding something yes which doesn't necessarily mean that that's true so I'm just throwing out no it's a good point I do I think of I think the way I've come to understand this is there's there's temporary escape and even dissociative escape and I've written about this 2011 culture medicines like I actually use that term dissociation temporary dissociative escape from your bosses and problems in relation to is good it's healthy that's different in long-term avoidance and there are ways a little less so in this instance though I think our conflict item picks up some of that if you're avoiding things and the problems aren't going away you gotta I have to look at how it's phrased you're gonna be magnifying certain kinds of problems that's so the caveat that we have in is gaming disorder good or bad it's like well this is one view of it it's not with clinical patients it's not longitudinal it's not clinical interview right so there are a lot of other methods and that's it's good that you mentioned that because that's a bigger point that I would say the same thing I made the same point I made with cultural schema and model it's it's one proxy for something come at these phenomena with a lot of different proxies and measures and try to understand the phenomena from different points of view using different methods it's a great question yes yeah I want to perhaps I may appreciate your yeah sure you're always interested in terms of understanding the context of your relationship on life on life and on your life the relationship to relationship to relationship with the the the the the I wonder how effective the kind of the that this kind of the this team I can the model the team the team that considering The fact that in most cultural countries, the emotion is not just a romantic thing, but they are more like a cognitive conflict, more like a political life. And the question then becomes how one can speak for a difference. So I think the chance to present some of the contemporary family of special friends is that we don't have to worry about the colonial ethics of the people. They talk about things like the identity of the public, the Indian, of being a male Indian, of being a woman Indian, being a woman Indian from a brown class from Southern India, in an adolescent church in the Middle East. And they say things like, it's more about the economy of human knowledge. And if you come there with a state protection to a village, the kind of information that's being reviewed to you is completely different than coming there with your own need of an adolescent surgeon. Of course there's been a need that a listening man in the room cannot grasp the complexity of the cultural experience, but it becomes a way of thinking about the knowledge of how one enters such a world. So it's a very interesting finding that it's important to get more kinds of value from later, but in terms of understanding the political context of the emotion we are in, one needs to develop a different kind of approach to that. And with what kind of emotion did it play for all of us all? Yeah, no, great. I wasn't, I agree with you, but I was instructed not to talk while you're talking, because it creates problems with recording. So I wasn't chiming in. Yes, you're making great points. So I don't think I can respond to everything you said, but I would say first of all, when you work with a team, and so you saw part of my team, Dr. Chukrapani, for example, I mentioned. So we'd have discussions every night. And so that's one thing, is you do see the phenomena. I moved from being a lone ethnographer. This is a larger story about how I moved from being a certain kind of cultural anthropologist, lone ethnographer to working in teams, using mixed methods, et cetera. I totally agree with you. I saw so many things through their eyes. And again, they're middle class, Hindu caste, Indians, educated, so they're only seeing certain things. We had local research assistants. Guncham Sharma, I could have mentioned him. So many insights, right? We wanted to bring women with us into the field, but it turns out bringing a middle class Udaipuri young woman with strange men and a jeep into the middle. Central India is not tolerated very easily. So that was a kind of bias that we couldn't do that, though my preference would be to have women on the research team as well, right? That's part of the other thing I would say. I totally agree with the complex. I think this is one vision of how to get at these emotional experiences. We use the notion of emotion or a certain kind of experience. You could use symptoms. If you have a kind of syndrome, like a locally named syndrome, you could take a slightly different approach. But if you see things in the field, things happen. Someone told you something. It's fair game to build other kinds of things into the scales that seem meaningful even if they weren't particularly salient in the free listing, for example, context. So I think the context of ethnography and observation and a richer interview and then something happens and you ask people about it, you start to get at other kinds of things, right? Now, some of that stuff you're talking about on the level of the factor analysis, when you start seeing clusters of experiences and you start trying to give them names, and sometimes they are named or sometimes they're not named, right? So when the symptoms or the experiences start to cluster together, you start to see other kinds of things. Does that answer some of or address some of the kinds of things you're talking about? If you thought there was an emotion term, I'm not doctrinaire. Like in a grounded theory approach, I didn't talk about interview coding, et cetera, but in a grounded theory approach, they're really doctrinaire or in certain forms of cognitive anthropology. It can't be theory driven. It can't be top down. So you can't bring in anything that didn't appear in the context of, say, the free listing problem. I'm not like that. If there are things that you think should be meaningful in a theory driven kind of way or your own experience or whatever, you can test them in some sense and see how they resonate with local kinds of people and then incorporate them into your measures, I would say. Okay.