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mushroom comments on Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've been reading studies on interventions to improve mood.
It seems worth taking seriously the possibility that we live in a world in which all single interventions have small to tiny effect sizes, and that, once we've removed factors known to have large negative impact, the mutable difference between people with mostly good mood and people with poorer mood comes down to a huge number of these small differences.
Some forms of therapy resemble this (examining a bunch of different thought patterns in CBT). Some studies claim to examine "lifestyle changes", but they often do it in a really lackluster and low-compliance way, such as "we gave this group of depressed people a pamphlet with 50 things they should change about their lives, and compared them to the group we aggressively tracked and encourage to exercise daily".
Since we have good evidence for small positive effect sizes for a bunch of different things, I'd love to see good evidence on how those effect sizes combine. But I can't find this research.
Any thoughts? Pointers?
The fact that the average effect size in a population of an intervention is small doesn't mean that there aren't individual members in that population that benefit a great deal.
Over time I also think of mood as less of a one dimensional thing. People often change the way they judge their happiness, so you don't have a constant standard.
Getting compliance is really hard.
Small effect sizes are easier to hallucinate into being real.
Did you run this search?
Yes, or closely related queries. I usually use google scholar, but I haven't found it to be better or worse than pubmed's results, unless I'm looking for something very specific.