this is a long entry
The freakin' loving kindness meditation follow-up paper. In late 2006, I asked Barb for funding to do a one-year followup on our meditation participants, to see whether they kept meditating and whether the changes in their lives were sustained. I had to do it on such a shoestring that I couldn't get anyone to write an automated email system, so the automatic daily reminders participants signed up for consisted of me remembering to hit the "send mailing" button after midnight, or waking up early in the morning cursing.
I remember getting my first glance at the data in spring 2007, on a UM lab computer where I was running that economic game study for Stephanie. It wasn't what we expected, but I thought that I understood it, and that fall I did a poster at SPSP and a talk at APS about the data. Then I realized that I didn't get it after all, and lost my enthusiasm for it. The innovative and exciting broadening test was also a complete bust.
In spring 2008, I took a trip to UNC to collaborate with Barb and get the paper started. It was a big old mess of cross-sectional and repeated measures analyses and some rather shaky causal claims. That summer, I was living with euziere after the co-op screwed up my contract for the last time, and we had a fight over this paper, based on the ethics of a priori vs. post hoc analyses and what the author's ethical obligations are. That was a good summer, though, and I have happy memories of the week I spent with her in Pennsylvania after helping her move into her new place. I also remember going to the coffee shop around the corner from her apartment and working on that paper. When I came back to visit some months later, the coffee shop was gone, and I spread out on her floor and worked on the paper instead.
In September, I was busy reworking the data, trying to make sure that I'd left no stone unturned in my previous attempt to do the analyses with every outlier, artifact, and non-responding participant removed. There was a lost weekend, where all I remember is data-grinding, short breaks to play nethack, and a brief interlude when I went for a run down to Divisadero and back, and stopped in a dingy convenience store so I could talk to euziere on the phone. Then, more data grinding until 4 or 5 in the morning. Also, my samurai learned that once a pet dragon goes feral, they stop being amused when you throw treats at them.
At that point, my new job (which I'd started in July) began picking up and I got distracted. My files show a few new revisions to the paper every month, but there were no more big dramatic pushes. We reorganized it a few times more. I invented a whole new method of correcting for multiple comparisons when you have several convergent DVs and are more interested in whether there's an overall effect than in which specific measures are affected. Somehow, nearly a year went by before the paper was fully ready to submit. It was June 2009, and I remember that I was in Boston, sitting at John and Sarah's kitchen table, when I finally clicked the button to send the manuscript off to the Journal of Positive Psychology. I don't remember how it felt.
Four months went by with no word, despite JoPP's promises of a speedy review. I forced myself to be patient. It was September, during the retirement festschrift for Susan Folkman, the Osher Center's beloved founding director, that I finally checked the online status page. It turned out that the reviews had gone out two months ago, and gotten stuck in my spam box!
The reviews were not good. The reviewers picked on every flaw in our logic and rejected all our proposed explanations. The editor suggested that we completely reenvision the paper, making it about positive psychology interventions in general rather than our specific study. Barb and I were game, and so I wrote back to the editor explaining how we'd missed the reviews and requesting an extension on the revise-and-resubmit window. Barb and I corresponded a bit, but then her husband had some medical problems, and we were put on hold for another month.
In November, Barb and I had a lengthy phone meeting. She pitched a bunch of new ideas, and I agreed to several re-analyses that might help us present the paper in a more exciting way. She also persuaded me to heed the reviewers' advice and cut some of the most interesting, complex hypotheses for the paper. I fiercely defended the part about the informant ratings of emotion, because I think the field's reliance on self-reports is such an elephant-in-the-room. Talking to Barb made me feel much more optimistic, and genuinely interested in the paper again! But then I got caught up with other things, and my enthusiasm waned. For the rest of the year the paper gnawed at me, but I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. I wrote several apologetic letters to Barb and several more extension requests to the editor, and the gnawing continued.
At the beginning of 2010 I picked it up again, made some massive progress, and sent it off to Barb. She was busy, and I wanted to make a few more minor changes, and that held us up for another month. I finally got back to it in late February, with only a little drama. That was when I decided I was going to have to cut the informant reports after all, but swore to write them up on their own. I began what should have been the final round of revisions from a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Then came a couple of months of fixing that one last tiny little thing that I had to fix before I could send it in. There were about fifty of them. Barb recommended a small reanalysis, and it took me several days to really get it right. It was the first time I'd ever done a logistic regression, and I was delighted to finally have a use for all the work on risk ratios that we did in my epidemiology classes.
One weekend in March, euziere (who had finished her year in Pennsylvania, done a rotation in Colorado with the BLM, and finally come to San Francisco and moved in with me!) was trying to help me finish up the paper. I tried to describe one of our findings to her, and realized that it was unexpectedly fuzzy in my own head. I later realized this was because a stupid scaling error had prevented me from doing some of the direct comparisons I'd wanted to do (and I'd then forgotten that entire episode). There were a few more unpleasant discoveries about hidden nuances in the data, but ultimately I decided that they weren't show-stoppers. Finally, I got everything together and sent the paper off.
Today, in late April 2010, I got a letter from Todd Kashdan saying that the paper was accepted without further revisions. The Loving Kindness Time 3 manuscript is finished once! and! for! all!
I remember getting my first glance at the data in spring 2007, on a UM lab computer where I was running that economic game study for Stephanie. It wasn't what we expected, but I thought that I understood it, and that fall I did a poster at SPSP and a talk at APS about the data. Then I realized that I didn't get it after all, and lost my enthusiasm for it. The innovative and exciting broadening test was also a complete bust.
In spring 2008, I took a trip to UNC to collaborate with Barb and get the paper started. It was a big old mess of cross-sectional and repeated measures analyses and some rather shaky causal claims. That summer, I was living with euziere after the co-op screwed up my contract for the last time, and we had a fight over this paper, based on the ethics of a priori vs. post hoc analyses and what the author's ethical obligations are. That was a good summer, though, and I have happy memories of the week I spent with her in Pennsylvania after helping her move into her new place. I also remember going to the coffee shop around the corner from her apartment and working on that paper. When I came back to visit some months later, the coffee shop was gone, and I spread out on her floor and worked on the paper instead.
In September, I was busy reworking the data, trying to make sure that I'd left no stone unturned in my previous attempt to do the analyses with every outlier, artifact, and non-responding participant removed. There was a lost weekend, where all I remember is data-grinding, short breaks to play nethack, and a brief interlude when I went for a run down to Divisadero and back, and stopped in a dingy convenience store so I could talk to euziere on the phone. Then, more data grinding until 4 or 5 in the morning. Also, my samurai learned that once a pet dragon goes feral, they stop being amused when you throw treats at them.
At that point, my new job (which I'd started in July) began picking up and I got distracted. My files show a few new revisions to the paper every month, but there were no more big dramatic pushes. We reorganized it a few times more. I invented a whole new method of correcting for multiple comparisons when you have several convergent DVs and are more interested in whether there's an overall effect than in which specific measures are affected. Somehow, nearly a year went by before the paper was fully ready to submit. It was June 2009, and I remember that I was in Boston, sitting at John and Sarah's kitchen table, when I finally clicked the button to send the manuscript off to the Journal of Positive Psychology. I don't remember how it felt.
Four months went by with no word, despite JoPP's promises of a speedy review. I forced myself to be patient. It was September, during the retirement festschrift for Susan Folkman, the Osher Center's beloved founding director, that I finally checked the online status page. It turned out that the reviews had gone out two months ago, and gotten stuck in my spam box!
The reviews were not good. The reviewers picked on every flaw in our logic and rejected all our proposed explanations. The editor suggested that we completely reenvision the paper, making it about positive psychology interventions in general rather than our specific study. Barb and I were game, and so I wrote back to the editor explaining how we'd missed the reviews and requesting an extension on the revise-and-resubmit window. Barb and I corresponded a bit, but then her husband had some medical problems, and we were put on hold for another month.
In November, Barb and I had a lengthy phone meeting. She pitched a bunch of new ideas, and I agreed to several re-analyses that might help us present the paper in a more exciting way. She also persuaded me to heed the reviewers' advice and cut some of the most interesting, complex hypotheses for the paper. I fiercely defended the part about the informant ratings of emotion, because I think the field's reliance on self-reports is such an elephant-in-the-room. Talking to Barb made me feel much more optimistic, and genuinely interested in the paper again! But then I got caught up with other things, and my enthusiasm waned. For the rest of the year the paper gnawed at me, but I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. I wrote several apologetic letters to Barb and several more extension requests to the editor, and the gnawing continued.
At the beginning of 2010 I picked it up again, made some massive progress, and sent it off to Barb. She was busy, and I wanted to make a few more minor changes, and that held us up for another month. I finally got back to it in late February, with only a little drama. That was when I decided I was going to have to cut the informant reports after all, but swore to write them up on their own. I began what should have been the final round of revisions from a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Then came a couple of months of fixing that one last tiny little thing that I had to fix before I could send it in. There were about fifty of them. Barb recommended a small reanalysis, and it took me several days to really get it right. It was the first time I'd ever done a logistic regression, and I was delighted to finally have a use for all the work on risk ratios that we did in my epidemiology classes.
One weekend in March, euziere (who had finished her year in Pennsylvania, done a rotation in Colorado with the BLM, and finally come to San Francisco and moved in with me!) was trying to help me finish up the paper. I tried to describe one of our findings to her, and realized that it was unexpectedly fuzzy in my own head. I later realized this was because a stupid scaling error had prevented me from doing some of the direct comparisons I'd wanted to do (and I'd then forgotten that entire episode). There were a few more unpleasant discoveries about hidden nuances in the data, but ultimately I decided that they weren't show-stoppers. Finally, I got everything together and sent the paper off.
Today, in late April 2010, I got a letter from Todd Kashdan saying that the paper was accepted without further revisions. The Loving Kindness Time 3 manuscript is finished once! and! for! all!