Intentional Chocolate

[Zeuzzz]

I just watched this video on youtube, its the most popular youtube video in the UK at the moment; http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ74EKFFqbE

This video tells the story of the science that brought together advanced meditators and chocolate-lovers to explore the age-old question of why mom's chicken soup tastes so good.

http://www.intentionalchocolate.com/files/article_explore.pdf

EFFECTS OF INTENTIONALLY ENHANCED CHOCOLATE ON MOOD

Dean Radin, PhD,1# Gail Hayssen,1 and James Walsh2

Objective: A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiment
investigated whether chocolate exposed to “good intentions”
would enhance mood more than unexposed chocolate.

Design: Individuals were assigned to one of four groups and
asked to record their mood each day for a week by using the
Profile of Mood States. For days three, four and five, each person
consumed a half ounce of dark chocolate twice a day at prescribed
times. Three groups blindly received chocolate that had
been intentionally treated by three different techniques. The
intention in each case was that people who ate the chocolate
would experience an enhanced sense of energy, vigor, and wellbeing.
The fourth group blindly received untreated chocolate as
a placebo control. The hypothesis was that mood reported during
the three days of eating chocolate would improve more in
the intentional groups than in the control group.

Subjects: Stratified random sampling was used to distribute 62
participants among the four groups, matched for age, gender,
and amount of chocolate consumed on average per week. Most
participants lived in the same geographic region to reduce mood
variations due to changes in weather, and the experiment was
conducted during one week to reduce effects of current events
on mood fluctuations.

Results: On the third day of eating chocolate, mood had improved
significantly more in the intention conditions than in
the control condition (P = .04) Analysis of a planned subset of
individuals who habitually consumed less than the grand mean
of 3.2 ounces of chocolate per week showed a stronger improvement
in mood (P = .0001) Primary contributors to the mood
changes were the factors of declining fatigue (P = .01) and increasing
vigor (P = .002) All three intentional techniques contributed
to the observed results.

Conclusion: The mood-elevating properties of chocolate can be
enhanced with intention.

Key words: Intention, nutrition, mood, chocolate, mind-matter
interaction

(Explore 2007; 3:485-492. © Elsevier Inc. 2007)

I wonder how much more it costs to have someone meditate over your chocolate



Ignoring the apparent absurdity of the actual claims, wheres the mistake in their experiment? i'm no statistician so I cant see where to fault their work

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Figures 3 and 4 on page 4 say it all. The CI's all overlap! The rest of the analyses after that are data mining. Nothing to see here folks.

 

[bethanythemartian]

Hm. There's not enough people to draw any solid conclusion from, not if we're talking about something as hard to measure as 'mood'. Even if they weren't squeezing those numbers as hard as they could.

 

[Apathia]

The road to woo-woo Hell!

 

[Steven Howard]

Stratified random sampling was used to distribute 62
participants among the four groups,

I'm not a scientist or a statistician, but I think if I were doing an experiment like this, I'd try to either get two more volunteers or send two home, so that I'd have the same number of people in each group. I know that probably doesn't matter, but I have to suspect it would make the math slightly easier.

 

[bethanythemartian]

I'm not a scientist or a statistician, but I think if I were doing an experiment like this, I'd try to either get two more volunteers or send two home, so that I'd have the same number of people in each group. I know that probably doesn't matter, but I have to suspect it would make the math slightly easier.

If you were wanting to screw with numbers, you would want the math slightly harder to follow as easily. So that people can't instantly look at it and go 'oh, that's just x'. and all the groups were different sizes- slightly, but enough to screw with the math.

 

[Timothy]

Given the conclusion that future replication of the test may be contaminated by the publication of the results, it's a shame that the researchers chose to publish after using such a trivially small sample size ...

... or is it?

 

[Gr8wight]

I'm no scientist, but does it make any sense to have three times more test subjects than control subjects?

 

[blutoski]

I'm no scientist, but does it make any sense to have three times more test subjects than control subjects?

This is something I see altmed and psi researchers do a lot: overlapping study designs.

There were three different techniques used for 'treating' chocolate, and one control group. Technically, there were three different experiments here, and the results of the three treated groups should not be combined.

This type of design is attractive, because if none of the individual experimental groups provides a statistically significant result, you might want deploy a backup plan of pooling the data into a metagroup. But you can only do that if the groups were using identical protocols, and they obviously weren't. The result is a Simpson's Paradox.

Also: if you're doing multiple metrics, the confidence interval for statistical significance changes. eg: if one metric needs p<=.05, then a three metric study may need (say) p<=.000125. The study did not select a sample size to meet the statistical power required for the protocol they chose.

 

[baron]

This is too fuzzy, basing results on subjective mood measurements. I don't know whether there's an effect or not but hasn't Radin got better things to do, like tighten up his presentiment protocol and increase his subject pool size? Despite being a Radin proponent I'm disappointed with him. Make no mistake, I don't view this as pseudo-science, but I do view it as farting around.

 

[Limbo]

Make no mistake, I don't view this as pseudo-science, but I do view it as farting around.

Yes. Lets quit farting around.

Lets get a HUGE block of chocolate. As big as a house.

Then make a website and put it online. Live cam. Get people from all over the world to meditate on sending happy thoughts to the chocolate. In person or on-line. Preferably in person. Get people who don't meditate to simply send thoughts of goodwill to the house of chocolate whenever they have some extra. The more the merrier!

Have this go on for a month or so.

Then chop up the chocolate and distribute it. Should be enough chocolate for many people to participate in the experiment.

 

[hecaterin]

I, for one, would gladly volunteer my services as a test subject. As long as it's dark chocolate.

 

[blutoski]

Also: if you're doing multiple metrics, the confidence interval for statistical significance changes. eg: if one metric needs p<=.05, then a three metric study may need (say) p<=.000125. The study did not select a sample size to meet the statistical power required for the protocol they chose.

I found the formula for finding the right p value for overlapping studies. See [Fisher's Method].

The point being that their study did not have statistical significance.