May 08, 2008

Male body symmmetry, more female orgasms:

The link between attractiveness and facial symmetry seems to hold across both black and white faces, but also in non-human primates, according to a study just published in the open-access science journal PLoS One.

One of the most striking studies in sex and symmetry research isn't mentioned, however. A 1995 study found that the likelihood of female orgasm during sex was related to the extent of bodily symmetry in the male partner.

The study was led by biologist Randy Thornhill and recruited 86 young couples who completed a number of relationship questionnaires, including one on how often the female partner orgasmed during sex. The males then had their bodies measured and assessed for how much one side differed compared to the other - a measure of bodily asymmetry.

In the final analysis neither the male's age, wealth, social skills, physical attractiveness or relationship style predicted the frequency of female orgasm. Only male bodily symmetry was statistically associated with the chance of the women climaxing during sex.

The researchers thought that maybe women who have more orgasms, or who are just more sexual, simply get the more symmetrical (maybe hotter) guys. But when they looked at frequency of orgasm outside copulation (such as during oral sex or masturbation), the relationship to male symmetry disappeared, suggesting that this wasn't the case.

This study, and the new study published in PLoS One, also suggested that symmetry was associated with more masculine features generally - a bigger body in the orgasm study, and a more typically male face in the PLoS research.

The evolutionary explanation suggested by the authors is that female orgasm during copulation may make pregnancy more likely, so it's an adaptive strategy to increase fertility when making love to males with genes more likely to lead to healthy children.

How orgasm increases with body symmetry is not clearly understood, though. The authors speculate that female perception of a highly symmetrical male might psychologically prime sexual arousal, but the mechanism is left largely to guesswork.

Link to PLoS One study on attractiveness and symmetry (via Anthro).
Link to abstract of orgasm and symmetry study.

—Vaughan.

May 06, 2008

A rough guide to self-harm:

The New York Times has a concise article that discusses adolescents who self-harm through cutting, burning or deliberately damaging themselves. Self-harm is curious because it is one the most psychologically complex of behaviours and yet we have a simple but largely inaccurate cultural stereotype - attention seeking teenagers.

There are many, many types of self-harm, some more culturally acceptable than others. Self harm is often accepted as part of fashion or ritual (piercings, scarring), or can be due to genetic abnormalities (e.g. Lesch-Nyan syndrome), or as a result of learning disabilities or brain injury.

It can be because of delusional or psychotic ideas; OCD type urges, like hair pulling or skin picking, which people often want to resist but can't; or can be an indirect result of other difficulties, such as damaging the body through drugs, alcohol, or an eating disorder.

The type discussed in the article, and what we normally think of in our cultural stereotype, is often an adolescent or young adult who cuts or burns themselves.

The motivations vary, and yes, a minority do give 'wanting attention' as a reason. Sometimes this is a learnt response when they've been in an environment where the only time they have been given any care or attention is when they've damaged themselves.

However, the vast majority try their best to hide what they do and it can be a source of significant shame.

As noted in a recent review on the area, this group tends to use self-harm as a way of managing strong emotions and cutting is associated with a build-up of tension and the feeling of relief at the time of committing the act.

People who self-harm are more likely to be depressed, impulsive and poor at problem-solving and self-harm is often a way they've found, at least temporarily, to control otherwise overwhelming emotions.

Although the risk of suicide is increased in adolescents who self-harm, only a minority will go on to kill themselves. Just over 1% in a recent study with a 26 year follow-up.

There's still not a great deal of research on which are the best treatments with the biggest reviews being inconclusive, but recent findings suggest that self-harming problems can be treated with psychological therapy.

Link to NYT article on self-harm.

—Vaughan.

May 05, 2008

Brain trends exposed in 'state of the neuron' study:

A fascinating study on the social trends in neuroscience research has found that New York is happening but Boston is hot, dementia researchers are the most influential, high-level processes are hip and that neuroscientists need to practice professional 'birth control' to avoid mass starvation.

The results come from a paper just published in PLoS One that used the abstracts from five years' worth of Society for Neuroscience annual conference presentations to map out emerging trends in brain research.

The study did a series of 'bibliometric' analyses. That is, it used software that looked for links between people, topics, geographical location and other points of interest over time by analysing the text of presentation summaries.

The SfN conferences always happen in the States, so there's certainly a bias, but they're generally considered the most important international meeting of the year, so the paper is full of gems about neuroscience now and in the future. I've pulled out a few below.

The global "hubs" for neuroscience research seem to be concentrated in the northeast region of the United States (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore/DC vicinity), Southern California, Tokyo, Montreal, and London.

New York City consistently ranks as the top producer of neuroscience research, but when population size is included, Boston and Baltimore come out particularly well, as they rank high in both the raw number of authors and per population participation in SfN meetings.

There has been a shift in general scientific interest from 'low-level' research on cellular processes such as ion channels, synapses, and cell membranes, towards more 'high-level' research on things like vision, movement, and neuroimaging.

A useful graph shows words which have decreased in frequency in the research summaries over the years on the left, and words increasing in frequency on the right.

In a social network analysis, the neuroscientists with the largest betweenness centrality, a measure of influence over the network, were not necessarily those with their name on the largest number of research presentations.

Interestingly, most of these scientists conduct research in the field of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, and the authors of the study speculate that this may be because the area is well funded and that it involves a diverse range of research techniques. Therefore, the researchers are likely to be connected with many others in the field.

A cluster analysis of themes looked at which research areas formed coherent groups. It's interesting to compare SfN's traditional classification of topics with the results of the analysis which found spontaneous groupings.

While there is some overlap, areas like 'pain and trauma', the 'behaviour of song birds' and 'sleep' seem to have formed strong groupings by themselves.

In terms of the population shift in neuroscience, about 60% of researchers seem to be 'transitory', probably students or outside collaborators who don't remain in the field for long.

However, the growth of the neuroscience community has been massive, while the total funding has remained steady.

The authors suggest that like in any population boom, research institutions should use the equivalent of 'birth control' to keep numbers down, otherwise they'll be more people than jobs, and lots of people will be work-starved.

Starvation, of course, regulates a population, although is a rather painful process for those who expire due to lack of resources.

Link to full text of PLoS One paper on neuroscience trends.

—Vaughan.

May 04, 2008

Vengeance and the recycle of violence:

Two recently published articles on inter-group violence highlight the how the cycle of vengeance is remarkably similar across two different cultures: one in tribal peoples from New Guinea, the other in street gangs from Chicago.

In an article for The New Yorker Jared Diamond writes about the cycles and social customs surrounding vengeance in New Guinea by examining how one Handa tribesmen sought to exact revenge on another tribe for the death of his uncle.

The social customs about what counts as vengeance, how and whom it may be exacted upon are complex, but it's interesting that Diamond concludes that the desire for vengeance is a powerful motivation (ranking alongside love, anger, grief, and fear) which feeds the cycle of retribution even past the point where the original cause of the conflict has been lost in the sands of time.

A similar theme is echoed in an article published in today's New York Times on gang violence in Chicago. It focuses on a project called CeaseFire started by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin.

The project uses an interesting method which thinks of violence like a disease which can be transmitted through vengeance, and so applies an approach taken from disease prevention models to try and stop the spread of shootings.

Slutkin employs mostly ex-members of the Chicago underground who know both the streets and the players to intervene and mediate disputes when violence has flared on when the situation seems ready to explode.

The idea, just like in clinical epidemiology, is to target the most 'infected' members to reduce transmission - in this case, by engaging those causing the most violence and cooling the need for vengeance.

After a quick search, there seems to be remarkably little research on the role of vengeance in violence (although almost all supports its role).

This tends to parallel the research into violence in general. As one of the biggest killers in the world, I'm always struck by how little attention it gets.

Link to Jared Diamond article 'Vengeance is Ours'.
Link to NYT article 'Blocking the Transmission of Violence'.

—Vaughan.

April 28, 2008

Evolution of the troubled mind:

I just listened to a recent edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind on evolutionary approaches to mental illness. While the topic isn't new, it's interesting that the two clinicians try to directly apply some of the ideas to their work treating patients with mental disorders.

Almost all evolutionary accounts of mental illness attempt to explain why we still have mental illness when it so markedly reduces the chances of reproductive success.

Most theories, and indeed the ones discussed on the programme, argue that in small doses the genes that raise risk for mental illness are useful in promoting creativity (e.g. psychosis / mania), maternal withdrawal (e.g. in post-pregnancy depression), self-preservation (e.g. anxiety) or some other presumably adaptive behaviour in specific situations.

I'm fairly tolerant of these theories, on the basis that they're hard to demonstrate but plausible, but I have less time for Paul McClean's 'triune brain' theory which one of the interviewers seems to favour.

In fact, everytime I hear the phrase 'reptilian brain', I reach for my spear.

This is often invoked in discussions about evolutionary psychology as a seemingly more sensible alternative to Freudian theories.

What makes me chuckle is that they are remarkably similar. Freud argued that we are a subject to evolutionary ancient drives of the Id that must be controlled by the Ego, McLean suggested that we are a subject to evolutionary ancient drives of the reptilian brain that must be controlled by the neocortex.

For an updated and significantly more sophisticated version of these arguments, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp's 2002 article [pdf] on the weakness of evolutionary psychology without neuroscience is well worth a read.

While we're on the subject, distinguished biologist and sufferer of depression Lewis Wolpert recently published an open-access article on 'Depression in an evolutionary context' which is well worth a look.

Link on AITM on evolutionary approaches to psychiatry.
pdf of Panksepp's article on 'neurevolutionary psychology'.
Link to Wolpert's article on evolution and depression.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2008

Growing up on antidepressants:

The New York Times has an article on the increasing number of people who have been on antidepressants drugs since their childhood years and have experienced 'growing up' while medicated.

Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.

The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.

So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. The longest maintenance study to date of one of the newer antidepressants, Effexor, lasted only two years and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.

In fact, there are no reliable long-term studies even of drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin) that are widely used in children.

One of the most interesting things is the huge amount of comments the article has attracted, with many people sharing their own experiences of a medicated adolescence.

Link to NYT article 'Coming of Age on Antidepressants'.
Link to 'editors choice' of comments.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2008

Reality trails by mobile phone:

MIT's Technology Review magazine has an interesting article on 'reality mining' - using mobile phone call and positioning data to build advanced models of social networks.

The article is part of their 2008 emerging technology series and looks at how data gathered from the mobile phone network can tell us about human behaviour.

The core technology is hardly new. The police have been generating social networks from phone records since the early to mid 90s in an attempt to solve cases.

What is new, however, is MIT's Sandy Pentland has been using positioning data from mobile phones to look at how close people are to each other over time, to make the social networks much more accurate and information rich.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships.

Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network.

In a paper published last May [pdf], ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

This may strike you as equally terrifying and exciting. Obviously, it has huge potential for abuse by authorities, but the possibility of doing research on fully consenting participants who agree to be tracked for short periods for scientific research is huge.

There's also a great short video where Pentland discusses the technology in a bit more detail, and mentions the possibility of using the data for informing how diseases spread through social networks,

While we're on a social / mobile network tip, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the work of a Nokia anthropologist. He works largely in the developing world to try and understanding how phones are used and what effects they have on the social fabric and economic potential of the area.

Neuroanthropology also has a commentary on the article, pulling out some of the key social concepts it touches on.

Link to TechReview article on 'reality mining'.
Link to video of Pentland discussing the technology.
pdf of full-text scientific paper.
Link to NYT article 'Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?'
Link to Neuroanthropology commentary.

—Vaughan.

April 03, 2008

Female anger at work seen as worse, a character flaw:

Psychological Science has just published an eye-opening study that found that women who express anger at work were thought of more negatively than men and were assumed to be 'angry people' or 'out of control'. Male colleagues who did the same were typically viewed in a more positive light and were assumed to be upset by circumstances.

The study was led by psychologist Victoria Brescoll and the abstract of the study is below:

Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace.

Psychol Sci. 2008 Mar;19(3):268-75.

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women's emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., "she is an angry person,""she is out of control"), men's emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person's anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

Along similar lines, a study we reported last year found that women who bargained for more money during job interviews were typically thought of as more 'difficult' than men who did the same, particularly when a man was doing the evaluating.

Link to abstract of study on women and workplace anger.

—Vaughan.

March 26, 2008

Demanding sex differences:

Language Log has a great post looking at differences in empathy between males and females, and highlights a new study showing race differences as well.

The punchline is that it's actually really hard to say whether either of these results reflect true differences because the samples tend to be unrepresentative of the population, and measures of empathy tend to be influenced by the social situation in which they're taken.

They grab this paragraph from a review article on empathy measurement:

In general, sex differences in empathy were a function of the methods used to assess empathy. There was a large sex difference favoring women when the measure of empathy was self-report scales; moderate differences (favoring females) were found for reflexive crying and self-report measures in laboratory situations; and no sex differences were evident when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal reactions to another's emotional state.

This article is from way back in '83, but more recent studies have tended to support the main idea that the overall difference between men and women in empathy is fairly negligible when behaviour, rather than self-report, is examined.

These sorts of social influences on experimental findings are known as 'demand characteristics'.

The classic example is an attractive female researcher asking men about penis size, but the effects can be quite subtle and only come to light in subsequent replications of the study (if at all!).

One of my favourite studies in this area looked at the supposed tendency for people who experience 'sensory deprivation' to have hallucinations and suffer severe emotional and cognitive impairment.

In 1964 psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe compared two groups of participants in a sensory deprivation experiment.

One group of participants was greeted by white coated researchers standing next to emergency equipment, were asked for their medical history and given serious looking tests, were told to report any strange sensory distortions and were informed that if they wanted to stop the experiment, they had to press a panic button.

The other group was greeted informally by researchers in casual clothes, weren't given any medical checks, and were told to report their experiences freely as they occurred. To stop the experiment, they just had to knock on the window.

The actual sensory deprivation procedure was the same for both groups, but the participants given the formal medical introduction reported greater emotional disturbance, unusual experiences and mental distress. Furthermore, they tended to do much worse on the cognitive tests given afterwards.

While this didn't 'disprove' any of the unpleasant effects of sensory deprivation, it did show that they are heavily mediated by expectation which is implicitly inferred from the testing situation.

Needless to say, this can affect any type of study, so scientists are always on the look out to see if it might be responsible for new findings.

Link to Language Log article on empathy, sex and race.
Link to study on demand characteristics and sensory deprivation.

—Vaughan.

March 25, 2008

The Lives They Left Behind:

PsychCentral has alerted me to a wonderful online exhibit based on the lives of several psychiatric patients whose belongings were found in suitcases in an old asylum attic years after they had passed away.

All the individuals were patients at the Willard Asylum, some for as long as 62 years.

Unfortunately, the site is a bit over-Flashed which means it's not the most intuitive to navigate, but it's worth grappling with the menus at the bottom of the screen as the stories are incredibly touching.

The photo on the right is of 'Frank':

On June 7, 1945, Mr. Frank #27967 went into the Virginia Restaurant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and was served a meal on a broken plate. He became upset and caused a disruption outside the restaurant, yelling and kicking garbage cans. The police were called, and, instead of arresting him, brought him to the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital. From there, he was transferred to Brooklyn State Hospital, and on April 9, 1946, he was admitted to Willard, one of a growing number of African American patients transferred to Willard from New York City in the 40s, due to over-crowding...

Mr. Frank # 27967 never escaped the consequences of that day outside the restaurant in 1945. In 1949, he was transferred from Willard to the Veterans Administration hospital in Canandaigua, NY, and in 1954 to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh. He died there 30 years later, having spent more than half his life in an institution.

The site also has a great deal of information about the hospital itself, audio recordings of memories of the institution and more information about the book and touring exhibition which is on the road right now.

In fact, it's currently on show at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art in Auburn, New York.

Link to The Lives They Left Behind online exhibit.

—Vaughan.

Where angels no longer fear to tread:

The Economist has an article which serves as an interesting summary of some of the recent work on the psychology and neuroscience of religious belief.

It's a little bit clumsy in places. For example, it summarises some of the work on the role of the temporal lobes as saying that "religious visions are the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain".

Certainly, temporal lobe seizures are associated with religious experiences. A recent review reported that about 0.5% to 3% of people with the condition experience them.

But this work suggests that this is only one factor and actually minor functional changes are probably more important in the general population [pdf].

It's also important to note that this sort of neuroscience research typically looks at beliefs and experiences concerning the 'supernatural' elements of religion.

However, the Economist article also discusses some recent psychological research looking at the influence of religion on social reasoning and touches on the possible evolutionary explanations for the widespread and persistent nature of religious ideas.

Link to Economist article 'Where angels no longer fear to tread'.

—Vaughan.

March 22, 2008

Normality bites:

BBC Radio 4 has just concluded another run of its fantastic series Am I Normal? which looks at the science of differences in our minds, brains and abilities.

The series has done a remarkably good job in exploring the psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience of common human concerns and how they differ across the population.

This stretches from distinct pathologies and medical disorders at one end, to normal variation at the other - although 'normal variation' itself contains a diverse array of differences.

The latest series looked at shyness and social phobia, dyslexia, maths and selective mathematical difficulties and, finally, insomnia and sleep.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because psychological concerns are known to play a huge role in maintaining the patterns of broken sleep and subsequent anxiety.

For example, a well-replicated finding is that people with insomnia vastly under-estimate the amount of sleep they get during the night, sometimes sleeping several more hours that they think they do (Tom discussed some of this research in on Mind Hacks back in 2004, and the full text of a recent scientific paper on the topic is available online as a pdf).

Evidence also suggests that worry feeds into this biased perception of sleep, and that there is also quite a discrepancy between how people with insomnia perceive the impairments they experience in their waking life, and what neuropsychological tests actually find.

This isn't to suggest that people with insomnia are exaggerators (it's worth noting that they do have genuine sleep difficulties), simply that one of the main difficulties is how they evaluate their sleep and its impact - which tends to prolong or make the problem worse.

This is why psychological and behavioural treatments (such as cognitive therapy or changing the environment or daily routines) are particularly effective in treating sleep difficulties.

Link to BBC Radio 4 Am I Normal? series (via BPSRD).

—Vaughan.

February 29, 2008

Autism reconsidered:

Wired covers the beginning of a possible revolution in how we understand autism from both a humanistic and a scientific point of view.

The article starts by discussing Amanda Baggs who is a non-speaking but incredibly articulate young woman with autism.

We discussed her video previously on Mind Hacks which remains a remarkably inspiring challenge to how we understand and value people who experience the world differently.

This alternative view of autism as a variation rather than a disorder in human neurology has been taken up by some researchers, and the article also looks at how recent neuropsychology research is starting to reframe the condition.

The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used...

What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals' scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.

While the majority of autism research is very much disorder based, the article is a wide-ranging look at the autism spectrum and a great review of some of the new thinking that beginning to challenge the status quo.

Link to article 'Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know'.

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2008

An Unquiet Lecture:

Someone's uploaded a video to YouTube of the fantastic Kay Redfield Jamison discussing her own experiences with bipolar disorder.

Jamison is a psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on the science of the condition that's often called manic depression.

She was known for her groundbreaking work on the disorder for many years before she 'came out of the closet' and described her own experience in her powerful and lyrical autobiography An Unquiet Mind.

Having attempted suicide and become quite psychotic at times, she has experienced the most extreme edges of the condition.

In this lecture, rather than presenting any of her considerable scientific research, she discusses the subjective experience of the highs, lows and distortions of thought that can occur in this mood disorder.

Link to Kay Redfield Jamison lecture (via AHP/WoP).

—Vaughan.

Child's play is a tough problem:

Children's play has long fascinated psychologists. The post-Freudians saw it as a direct expression of the human unconscious and its often been seen an essential, if not slightly mysterious, element of a healthy childhood.

The New York Times has a wonderfully in-depth article on the latest scientific discoveries on the role of play in development, most of which attempts to answer the question 'if play is so energy consuming and dangerous, why do almost all mammals engage in it when young?'.

One fascinating bit discusses 'play signals', body postures that are specifically used by humans and other mammals to advertise the fact that they're playing, and so none of the rough-and-tumble is mistaken for aggression:

Social play has its own vocabulary. Dogs have a particular body posture called the ‘‘play bow’’ — forelegs extended, rump in the air — that they use as both invitation and punctuation. A dog will perform a play bow at the beginning of a bout, and he will crouch back into it if he accidentally nips too hard and wants to assure the other dog: ‘‘Don’t worry! Still playing!’’

Other species have play signals, too. Chimps put on a ‘‘play face,’’ an open-mouthed expression that is almost like a face of aggression except that the muscles are relaxed into something like a smile. Baboons bend over and peer between their legs as an invitation to play, beavers roll around, goats gambol in a characteristic ‘‘play gait.’’ In fact, most species have from 10 to 100 distinct play signals that they use to solicit play or to reassure one another during play-fighting that it’s still all just in fun. In humans, the analogue to the chimp’s play face is a child’s smile, an open expression that indicates there is no real anger involved even in gestures that can look like a fight.

...[in humans] Brown could detect some typical gestures that these 2- and 3-year-olds were using instinctively to let one another know they were playing. ‘‘Play movement is curvilinear,’’ he said. ‘‘If that boy was reaching for something in a nonplay situation, his body would be all straight lines. But using the body language of play, he curves and embraces.’’

The article also looks at the possible benefits of play for brain development, and what role play takes in the learning of social roles and moral behaviour.

Link to NYT article 'Taking Play Seriously'.

—Vaughan.

February 19, 2008

Personality plagiarism rife on internet dating sites:

When you present yourself to potential suitors in an online dating profile, you are, in the terminology of psychology, 'constructing the self'. Perhaps it's not surprising then, that the most attractive profiles are being ripped off and plagiarised by lazy daters wanting to freeload on the most creative members' personalities.

The Wall Street Journal has an article which looks on how this practice has developed and uncovers several cases where romantic lines, funny descriptions and personal reflections are copied over and over again.

Psychologist Sherry Turkle's ground-breaking book Life on the Screen looked at the online construction of the self during the days of text based communication, MOOs and MUDs.

As we become increasingly tied to our online profiles, owing to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Facebook and numerous dating services, it's not surprising that they become more intimately associated with our own ideas about who we are.

They are also more easily copied than offline ways of expressing ourselves, leading to the situation where daters wanting to get lucky can just remix other people's personalities to maximise their chances of success.

Link to WSJ article 'The Cut-and-Paste Personality'.

—Vaughan.

February 15, 2008

Them and Us:

I remember a recently admitted patient, nose-to-nose with his psychiatrist, screaming at her "you don't know what I'm going through - how the fuck do you know what it's like little missy?".

The psychiatrist finished the discussion, saying she'd come back to him later, and after a brief pause to collect herself, moved on to the next patient in the ward round.

It is still an incredibly vivid memory for me, partly because everyone else in the room knew that the psychiatrist had been a patient herself, as she had a lifetime's worth of experience dealing with her own mental health issues.

Study after study has shown that psychiatrists have higher rates of mental illness than the general population.

Research published in 2001 revealed that 56% of female psychiatrists have a family history of mental illness, and just over 40% have experienced one themselves - almost twice the rate of other doctors. Undoubtedly as a consequence, psychiatrists have double the rate of suicide of the general population.

Psychiatry is certainly a stressful job, but research has also found that there are higher rates of mental disorder in future psychiatrists, suggesting many go into the profession precisely because of their experiences.

Other mental health professionals are much less studied, but from my own experience, I suspect the histories and motivations of mental health nurses, psychologists and social workers and so on are are likely to be similar.

The reason I mention this is because Phil Dawdy has just written a powerful article on responses to a recent murder of a psychologist in New York.

Several people wrote comments to his original notice saying that the murderer was likely on a whole bunch of meds that were making him crazy; and, mental health workers hurt patients all the time, so they get what they deserve.

It is quite apparent that unlike in other areas of medicine, the mental health system has a 'them and us' attitude.

Ironically, it is the single area of medicine where 'them' are most like to be 'us', regardless of whether you're a patient or a professional.

Link to Phil Dawdy on murder of a New York psychologist and reaction.

—Vaughan.

February 14, 2008

Love blossoms in the lab:

Love is the most exalted and sublime of human emotions. It has inspired breathtaking works of art, journeys through continents and even the tragedies of war. Given its powerful hold on humanity it's surprising that it's been traditionally neglected by the brain sciences. In spite of this, a new dawn in romance research has begun to bud in recent years, and love has finally blossomed in the lab.

While romantic love has always been an obsession of the psychoanalysts, they were often creating little more than a new poetry of emotion, often beautiful, often bizarre, but rarely explaining more than their own metaphors.

Always a little late to the game, it wasn't until the end of the 1990s that neuroscience fell head over heals for love. The first to become inspired by this new passion was, as if we needed to ask, an Italian.

Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues measured levels of a protein that transports the neurotransmitter serotonin in the blood of 20 people who had recently fallen madly in love, 20 people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and 20 healthy comparison participants.

People with OCD experience intrusive, obsessive thoughts and are often described as having an 'over-valued idea' - an almost semi-delusional state where a particular thought becomes the focus of attention.

Marazziti, already an established OCD researcher, knew that serotonin had previously been linked both to obsessional thoughts and to sexual attraction, and wondered whether something similar might be going on in the early stages of romance.

She found that the group of patients with OCD and the recently love-struck were no different in terms of the serotonin transporter protein, suggesting the brain began to function markedly differently as love blossomed.

Although measuring the blood is a fairly crude way of looking at how the brain works, the researchers were struck by the similarities between these two states:

This aspect we believe underlies the obsessive pre-occupation so characteristic of the early stage of love (which, in rare instances, might persist for a lifetime of abstract idealization that leads to poetry and music dedicated to the love object). As far as we are aware, this is the first report of changes in the 5-HT [serotonin] transporter during a physiological state; it would suggest that being in love literally induces a state which is not normal - as indeed suggested by a variety of colloquial expressions used throughout the ages in different countries, all of which refer generally to falling 'insanely' in love or to being 'lovesick'

Since this initial flirtation, love has become a hot topic in the neurosciences, with whole conferences dedicated to it and numerous scientific studies being published every year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the traditional connection between love and madness has not been dispelled by these recent studies.

In fact, a 2007 study that looked at new love in adolescents found so many striking similarities between the intensity of teenage romance and hypomania, a symptom of manic-depression, that the authors warned researchers to look out for the love-struck when conducting research with young people, so as not to bias their results.

Link to abstract of study of the serotonin transporter and romantic love.
Link to abstract of study on hypomania and adolescent love.

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2008

Faking a labour of love:

I've just found an interesting page on Wikipedia that discusses the concept of 'emotional labour': where employees are expected to regulate their outward emotional reactions so they are consistent with the company's goals, regardless of their internal feelings.

A classic 'emotional labour' worker would be a shop assistant or a waitress, where the employee has to control their emotions and maintain a pleasant demeanour even when customers are being difficult, annoying or even abusive.

This concept was apparently first devised by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the book The Managed Heart.

However, a distinction is made between 'surface acting', where the display doesn't need to match internal feelings at all (as when waitressing), and 'deep acting' where the employee is expected to genuinely feel the emotions (like in nursing).

Apparently, 'surface acting' jobs are associated with stress, feeling inauthentic and depression, while 'deep acting' jobs are associated with increased job satisfaction.

How well this is supported by empirical evidence is anyone's guess, but it's an interesting concept.

Link to Wikipedia page on 'emotional labour'.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2008

Orgasm and the brain: body, soul and sensory nerves:

How does the brain generate orgasm? It's one of the most under-investigated human experiences but two articles, one in the LA Times and another in The Psychologist, discuss some of the key developments of recent years.

The LA Times article is a good description of some of the most interesting neuroscience studies in this developing field, but is a little uncritical in places.

Apparently "About 43% of women and 31% of men in the U.S. between ages 18 and 60 meet criteria for sexual dysfunctions, according to a 1999 report on the sexual behavior of more than 3,000 U.S. adults".

This report was a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that classified sexual dysfunction as reporting any one of the following during the last 12 months:

(1) lacking desire for sex; (2) arousal difficulties (ie, erection problems in men, lubrication difficulties in women); (3) inability achieving climax or ejaculation; (4) anxiety about sexual performance; (5) climaxing or ejaculating too rapidly; (6) physical pain during intercourse; and (7) not finding sex pleasurable

Almost all of which fall within the normal range of a year's worth of regular sexual experiences, which probably explains why a third to almost half of people surveyed experienced at least one - but hardly a marker of a serious medical problem in itself.

There's a much better article on orgasm in this month's The Psychologist by Barry Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer and Beverly Whipple, authors of a recent book on 'The Science of Orgasm'.

It looks at the research on the roles of neurotransmitters in orgasm, as well as what the brain scanning literature tells us about brain activity during sexual arousal and release.

Most interestingly, it has a good discussion of non-genital orgasm:

As reviewed in Komisaruk et al. (2006), there are published reports of orgasms elicited by stimulation also of lips, hand, knee and anus occurring during dreaming sleep, of phantom limbs, from electrical or chemical stimulation of the septum, amygdala or thalamus of the brain and of the spinal cord.

Orgasms have also been described by men and women when they suffer epileptic seizures that are triggered by specific activity (e.g. brushing the teeth: Chuang et al., 2004), or that occur spontaneously. While these epileptic orgasms are in some cases described as ‘unwelcome’ (Reading & Will, 1997), others describe them as pleasurable, one woman refusing anti-epileptic medication for that reason (Janszky et al., 2004)

We have measured autonomic and brain activity during orgasms that women have produced by thought alone. During the thought orgasms, the magnitude of the increases in heart rate, blood pressure, pain threshold, pupil diameter, and brain regions are similar to those that we observe during vaginal or cervical self-stimulation-induced orgasms (Whipple et al., 1992). It is not surprising that in those cases of thought-induced orgasms, the specific genital sensory thalamic and cortical, and specific limb-motoric regions, are not activated.

The article notes that a number of different nerve pathways may serve to communicate sensual stimulation to the brain, which may account for why different sites of stimulation can produce orgasm.

Link to LA Times article 'Science of the orgasm'
Link the The Psychologist article on orgasm.

Full discloser: I'm an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

February 07, 2008

The he-haw boys and the eye-drillers:

A 61 year-old lady was admitted to a Florida hospital with florid hallucinations after suffering a stroke to her thalamus. She saw curious strangers and visitors with odd clothes, but rather unusually, the ones on the right always seemed pleasant and happy, whereas the ones on the left always seemed fearful and unsettling.

The case was reported in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and is of interest because the emotional content of the hallucinations seem to match the dominant emotion of the corresponding hemisphere of the brain.

[The patient] described the right visual hallucinations as consisting of "college age boys in colourful Hawaiian shirts" that "are too happy, talk too much", and that are somewhat "too energetic". The patient called them the "he-haw boys," and reported that she could hear them talking.

The left visual hallucinations were described as "men in black religious clothes that make no noises." The patient called them "the eye drillers", and stated that "they look a hole right through you". The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination. The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination.

This is not the first time that hallucinations have been reported to be differing in emotional tone depending on which side of space they appear.

This is likely due to the way emotion is processed in the brain.

Perception of negative emotions often relies largely on the right hemisphere, where positive emotions are processed by both the right and the left hemispheres. In fact, this pattern of brain response has been found in children as young as 10 months old.

The woman in this case report didn't suffer damage to the hemispheres directly, but to the thalamus. This area is often called the brain's relay station as it is extensively connected to hemispheres, so damage in this area can often mimic damage to the cortex.

Link to PubMed abstract of case report.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2008

Impostors and the subtleties of self-presentation:

'Impostor Syndrome' is where someone feels they aren't as competent as everyone else thinks they are and fears they could be found out.

I've heard the term used by psychologists and in everyday language to describe this situation but never realised it's been the subject of serious psychological research.

Several studies have looked at the issue and The New York Times has a brief article on the findings. They suggest that the 'syndrome' is actually more subtle than the simple description lets on - in fact, it may be a way of managing others' expectations.

In a study published in September [pdf], Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.

In an interview, Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. “It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it,” she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive.”

Link to NYT article on 'impostor syndrome'.
pdf of McElwee and Yurak's paper.

—Vaughan.

February 05, 2008

Girl power comes of age:

Clinical psychologist Dan Kindlon has been researching children and adolescents for over 20 years and argues that the psychology of American girls has radically changed in recent years owing to the effect of feminism and increased equality.

Harvard Magazine has an article on what he calls 'alpha girls' in his new book - confident girls and young women with high expectations and high self-esteem.

"The psychological demons that used to affect girls and women in this country just don’t affect today’s girls in the same way," Kindlon asserts. In the 1980s and early ’90s, Carol Gilligan (formerly Graham professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now a professor at New York University) and other feminist psychologists wrote that girls in their teens compromise their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby "losing their voice." In 1992, influential American Association of University Women (AAUW) research on late-1980s data on girls born in the 1970s found that girls' self-esteem plunged in middle school, compared to boys', and that classroom sexism (such as teachers' calling on boys more than girls, or more competitive than cooperative learning) was a cause. The AAUW report recognized positive trends, such as young women’s ascent in college enrollment, while recommending correctives for the continuing shortfalls.

Alpha girls are created in large numbers when the society that they are born into has sufficient equal opportunity, Kindlon says: "It wasn’t until the early to mid '80s—when schools really started to get serious about Title IX, when women first began to outnumber men in college, when women began moving into leadership roles, such as Congress, in significant numbers—that societal conditions had changed enough to permit the alpha girl explosion." He set out to discover how Beauvoir's "inner metamorphosis" has changed girls' psychology in the years since the AAUW report.

Link to Harvard Magazine article 'Girl Power'.

—Vaughan.

February 03, 2008

Illegal ink: reading meaning in criminal tattoos:

Until fashions changed in recent decades, a tattoo was widely considered the mark of the soldier, the sailor or the criminal. The tattoos of offenders have sparked particular interest as they can be highly symbolic coded messages that have been thought to be a glimpse into the psychology of the criminal underworld.

The interest in 'criminal ink' stretches back to the 19th century when Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso started collecting pictures of tattoos from captured or murdered Mafiosos.

Lombroso believed that persistent offenders were biologically defective who reflected an 'atavistic' throwback to a primitive stage of human development.

He further believed that criminal tendencies could be seen in the shape of the face, skull and body, and could be divined by studying tattoos, which were a reflection of the "fierce and obscene hearts of these unfortunates".

While Lombroso's ideas on criminality and the body proved to be little more than prejudice and conclusions drawn from poorly guided research (he failed to compare how often the same traits appear in non-criminals) the idea that criminal tattoos were a sort of 'symbolic code' proved to be closer to the mark.

Russian prison tattoos from the Soviet era are some of the most complex of these symbolic codes and determine an offender's place within the strictly organised and brutally enforced criminal social order.

Russian prison guard Danzig Baldaev collected pictures of these tattoos for over 40 years, mostly during the period of Soviet-run gulags, and carefully documented the images and their meanings.

He published a Russian book on the tattoos in 2001 and later his work was re-published in English in two volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.

Racist, graphically pornographic and violent images are common but apparently accurately reflect the vicious and oppressive nature of the prison camps. Others are political, some romantic, and many a combination of a number of these themes.

The images are satirical, offensive and disturbing both in their explicit content and their implicit meaning. While some are 'earned', others are forcibly applied and intended as punishments.

The tattoos are intended to reflect the life, status and experiences of the prisoner, and most importantly, they allow others to 'read' the person in the most literal sense.

The Russian criminal tattoo is a means of secret communication, an esoteric language of representational images which the thief's body uses to inform the world of thieves about itself. This language resembles thieves' argot and it performs a similar function - encoding secret thieves' information to protect it from outsiders (fraera). In exactly the same way as argot endows standard, neutral words with 'strictly professional' meanings, the tattoo also conveys 'secret' symbolic knowledge through the use of ordinary allegorical images which at first glance seem familiar to everyone. Even the tattoo 'Heil Hitler!', when applied to the body of a Russian 'legitimate thief' (vor v zakone) may have absolutely nothing to do with Hitler or National Socialism in general. As a rule it is a sign of a thief's attitude of denial (otritsalovka) or the symbol of a refusal to submit to the prison and camp administration and also, in a broader sense, a total refusal to cooperate in any way with the Soviet authorities. (p33, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Vol II).

In effect, these tattoos embody a thief's complete 'service record', his entire biography. They detail all of his achievements and failures, his promotions and demotions, his 'secondments' to jail and his 'transfers' to different types of work. A thief's tattoos are his 'passport', 'case file', 'awards record', 'diplomas' and 'epitaphs'. In other words, his full set of official bureaucratic documents... Tattoos acts as symbols of public identity, social self-awareness and collective memory. They shape stereotypes of group behaviour and set out the rules and rituals necessary for maintaining order in the world of thieves. (p27, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Vol I).

The symbols are extensive and complicated, and owing to their importance, the penalty for faking an unearned tattoo could be a swift and brutal death.

There is a grim irony in the fact that many in the Russian criminal underworld saw themselves as rebelling against the Soviet system while creating a subculture which was more oppressive and almost as bureaucratic. I suspect, however, the irony was lost on many.

The tattoos from the Soviet gulags are not the sole examples, of course. Many criminal gangs use tattoos as a pledge of allegiance and a record of past experience, to the point where Mara Salvatrucha gang members are now trying to avoid getting their distinctive tattoos so the authorities can't identify and 'read' them so easily.

Link to NSFW info/images from Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia I.
Link to NSFW info/images from Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia II.
Link to SFW images from the same collection.
pdf of good essay on Cesare Lombroso, his theories and influence.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2008

Neuroanthropology:

I've been enjoying the Neuroanthropology blog recently which discusses how the cognitive and neurosciences can help us understand culture and social diversity.

For example, trance states are common in some cultures, where they may form the part of certain religious rituals or spirit possession experiences.

There is now increasing interest in understanding the neuroscience of trance states, with a view to better understanding both how they occur and how they are used as key parts of social life by cultures across the world.

The Neuroanthropology blog disusses how culture shapes and interacts with brain function, and what new research tell us about our cultural quirks.

Link to Neuroanthropology blog.

—Vaughan.

January 30, 2008

The bitchy world of online match making:

The New York Times has an interesting yet ironically funny article about the curious world of online dating companies who use 'psychological profiles' to try and make love blossom, but who can't get along with one another.

These are sites like eHarmony, Chemistry and PerfectMatch that instead of letting you browse members' profiles, ask you to fill in questionnaires and suggest dates based on your 'psychological compatibility'.

They use various methods to make the matches that are supposedly based on psychological science, but which haven't been published or released so others can see how valid they are (is that the distant sound of alarm bells I can hear?).

Most amusingly, they seem to be constantly putting each other down in a bid to get the most attention from potential lovers.

In the battle of the matchmakers, Chemistry.com has been running commercials faulting eHarmony for refusing to match gay couples (eHarmony says it can't because its algorithm is based on data from heterosexuals), and eHarmony asked the Better Business Bureau to stop Chemistry.com from claiming its algorithm had been scientifically validated. The bureau concurred that there was not enough evidence, and Chemistry.com agreed to stop advertising that Dr. Fisher's method was based on "the latest science of attraction."

Dr. Fisher now says the ruling against her last year made sense because her algorithm at that time was still a work in progress as she correlated sociological and psychological measures, as well as indicators linked to chemical systems in the brain. But now, she said, she has the evidence from Chemistry.com users to validate the method, and she plans to publish it along with the details of the algorithm.

"I believe in transparency," she said, taking a dig at eHarmony. "I want to share my data so that I will get peer review."

And Bravo to that. Largely because, as the article notes, the information from the millions of people filling in these questionnaires is a potentially valuable source of scientific data.

If the questionnaires become scientifically validated and the algorithms tested, these sites could make an important contribution to understanding the psychology of attraction.

I doubt very much whether they will improve the chances of a long-term relationship (John Gottman's fascinating work suggests the crucial aspects are in interaction style, not the attraction) but they may tell us a few things about how we get drawn towards potential mates.

Obviously though, the companies will have to be a little more open and stop being so defensive. Learn to trust one another. Open their hearts. Stop in the name of love.

And if you're still cynical, you may want to check out an article in this month's Time by the fantastic Carl Zimmer, looking at the evolution of romance.

Romance, it seems, is not a uniquely human pursuit, as it occurs throughout the animal kingdom - unaided by technology. A beautifully romantic idea if you think about it.

Link to NYT article 'Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love'.
Link to Time article 'Romance is an Illusion'.

—Vaughan.

January 23, 2008

Why we love (and flirt):

Time magazine has a couple of articles on the psychology of love, sex and attraction. The first looks at the science of love, from thoughts to hormones, and the second at what we know about flirting.

The love article is a more in-depth look at the topic of the two articles, and touches on studies that have taken place everywhere from the delivery room to the brain scanner.

It's a little basic in places (e.g. it uses the dopamine = reward line a little uncritically), but is otherwise an interesting read.

A deep voice, also testosterone driven, can have similarly seductive power. Psychology professor David Feinberg of McMaster University in Ontario studied [pdf] Tanzania's Hadza tribesmen, one of the world's last hunter-gatherer communities, and found that the richer and lower a man's voice, the more children he had. Researchers at the University of Albany recently conducted related research [pdf] in which they had a sample group of 149 volunteers listen to recordings of men's and women's voices and then rate the way they sound on a scale from "very unattractive" to "very attractive." On the whole, the people whose voices scored high on attractiveness also had physical features considered sexually appealing, such as broad shoulders in men and a low waist-to-hip ratio in women.

This suggests either that an alluring voice is part of a suite of sexual qualities that come bundled together or that simply knowing you look appealing encourages you to develop a voice to match. Causation and mere correlation often get muddied in studies like this, but either way, a sexy voice at least appears to sell the goods. "It might convey subtle information about body configuration and sexual behavior," says psychologist Gordon Gallup, who co-authored the study.

The flirting article is, rather predictably, a bit more light-hearted and largely talks about theories rather than evidence.

You're probably better off trying your luck with the guide to flirting from the Social Issues Research Centre that looks at what sociology can tell us about being playfully alluring.

Link to Time article 'Why we love'.
Link to Time article 'Why we flirt'.
Link to Social Issues Research Centre guide to flirting.

—Vaughan.

January 13, 2008

The psychology of the moral instinct:

The New York Times has a fantastic in-depth article by Steven Pinker on the origins of morality and the psychology of moral reasoning.

It's a comprehensive and enjoyable review of most of the main areas of the recently invigorated 'moral psychology' field.

As well as discussing how lab-based studies are helping us to understand the cognitive neuroscience of moral reasoning, it also contains a number of examples and thought experiments that bring the anomalies in our moral cognition into sharp relief.

Pinker argues that we have a specific reasoning framework for moral situations and that when we deem a situation to have moral implications, this comes into play.

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

Pinker suggests that this process can easily be seen at work, as some things that were previously thought to be an personal difference have now become a moral issue (e.g. smoking) whereas other things that were previously thought to be a moral issue have now become a personal difference (e.g. atheism).

He also covers the development of morality in children, the role of genetics, and the anthropology of morality - how the hypothesised universal moral principles express themselves differently across different cultures.

Highly recommended if you want a guide to this burgeoning area of research.

Link to NYT article 'The Moral Instinct'.

—Vaughan.

January 11, 2008

The art of first impressions:

Frontal Cortex has found an absolutely fantastic video art piece that explores the psychology of first impressions.

It really brings home the fact that first impressions vary so much between individuals and can be vastly wide of the mark as character judgements.

The piece is by film-makers Lenka Clayton and James Price.

The pair also created the fantastic short film People in Order, another very simple premise which is a perceptive look at how people change as they age, and New Love Order, which briefly introduces us to couples arranged in the order of the length of their relationship.

All insightful pieces that are alternately, challenging, poignant, funny and original.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2008

Opinion leaders impotent in ideas economy:

Science News has a remarkably clear and concise article on a study that looked at how ideas spread through social networks. It found that under most circumstances a critical mass of more easily influenced people, not 'opinion leaders', are key to making ideas popular.

One of the major theories in marketing is that new ideas are taken up by the wider population because they are adopted by 'opinion leaders' - respected individuals who others listen to.

The theory goes that when opinion leaders adopt an idea, lots of other people quickly follow. Sort of like a 'leader of the pack' theory.

Researchers Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds wondered whether this was really the case, or whether instead, large numbers of people would embrace a particular idea when a certain number of their more easily influenced peers started to champion it. More of a 'birds of a feather' theory.

Watts and Dodds research how the mathematics of networks can tell us about how social systems work, and so they created various simulated social networks, set up some rules, and then ran the experiments to see how easily ideas would spread.

They simulated individual differences in the model by making each person more likely to adopt an idea if a certain percentage of their social network already believed it.

As some people are more easily influenced than others, the 'people' in the network varied in what percentage of their peers were needed to influence them - in effect, a mathematical simulation of individual scepticism.

The researchers compared how far an idea would spread depending on whether it started with a random individual or with an influential individual who was connected to a lot of other individuals. They found that highly influential individuals usually spread ideas more widely, but not very much more widely. For example, if an individual had three times as many connections as the average person, ideas espoused by that individual almost always spread substantially less than three times as far as the ideas of an average individual. Sometimes, the researchers found, the difference wasn't even measurable...

More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people.

The full-text of Watts and Dodds' paper is available online as a pdf if you want to read the study in more detail, but the Science News article is a great summary.

Link to Science News on 'The Power of Being Influenced'.
pdf of study 'Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation'.

—Vaughan.

A phobia of bridges:

The New York Times has a short but interesting piece on people with gephyrophobia, a morbid fear of bridges.

Phobias are often described as an irrational fear, but most have a reasonable basis to them, as reflected in the fact that phobias most commonly concern things that have an element of danger or risk - such as heights, dogs, spiders or water.

However, the fear gets exaggerated so the perceived danger vastly outweighs the actual danger.

Often the disabling aspect is not the fear itself, but how people begin to restrict their lives to avoid the fear. In a sense, people can become driven by a fear of fear.

Mrs. Steers, 47, suffered from a little-known disorder called gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. And she had the misfortune of living in a region with 26 major bridges, whose heights and spans could turn an afternoon car ride into a rolling trip through a haunted house.

Some people go miles out of their way to avoid crossing the George Washington Bridge — for example, driving to Upper Manhattan from Teaneck, N.J., by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, a detour that can stretch a 19-minute jog into a three-quarter-hour ordeal. Other bridge phobics recite baby names or play the radio loudly as they ease onto a nerve-jangling span — anything to focus the mind. Still others take a mild tranquilizer an hour before buckling up to cross a bridge.

Link to NYT article 'To Gephyrophobiacs, Bridges Are a Terror'.

—Vaughan.

January 07, 2008

Castration anxiety, of a non-Freudian kind:

This interesting study published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine compared the psychological effect of castration on two quite different groups of people: on people with prostrate cancer for whom the procedure was a medical necessity, and for people who wished to castrate themselves on a voluntary basis.

Motivations for voluntary eunuchs vary, but in certain forms the condition is thought to be related to apotemnophilia or 'body integrity identity disorder' - where individuals have a pathological desire to have a limb amputated, often taking quite severe and damaging measures to achieve their aim.

However, eunuchs have had a long and complex social and symbolic role in history that belies the simple fact of the operation.

In fact, there is quite a large online eunuch community, who share an interest in the procedure, whether they're personally motivated to have it, or whether they're just interested in it for, well, whatever reason sparks your interest I suppose.

Modern-day eunuchs: motivations for and consequences of contemporary castration.

Perspect Biol Med. 2007, 50(4), 544-56.

Wassersug RJ, Johnson TW.

This article compares the motivations for, and responses to, castration between two groups of males: prostate cancer patients and voluntary modern-day eunuchs with castration paraphilias or other emasculating obsessions. Prostate cancer patients are distressed by the side effects of androgen deprivation and typically strive to hide or deny the effects of castration. In contrast, most voluntary eunuchs are pleased with the results of their emasculations. Despite a suggested association of androgen deprivation with depression, voluntary eunuchs appear to function well, both psychologically and socially. Motivation, rather than physiology, appears to account for these different responses to androgen deprivation.

Probably not quite the literal form of castration anxiety Freud had in mind when he invented the psychoanalytic term.

Link to abstract of study on PubMed.

—Vaughan.

Milgram's notorious conformity experiment replicated:

The Situationist has a fantastic post on a recent replication of Stanley Milgram's (in)famous conformity experiment which is usually always described as being 'too unethical to perform today'.

In Milgram's original study, participants were asked to give increasingly severe electric shocks to someone supposedly trying to learn a series of word pairs.

In fact, the 'learner' was an actor and no shocks were given, but they screamed as if they were in increasing amounts of pain, while the experimenter ordered the participant to increase the voltage.

The experiment tested how far someone would go in giving pain to another human being when being ordered by an authority figure. 65% of participants continued despite indications that the 'learner' might be unconscious or dead.

It's been a hugely influential study, but was thought to be so stressful for the participants, that it has never been replicated in real life and it was assumed it would be impossible to do so.

However, this replication was carefully designed by Prof Jerry Burger to be as close as possible to Milgram's original study while being modified so it could be fully ethically approved by a research ethics committee (the mark of all good research).

I went to great lengths to recreate Milgram’s procedures (Experiment Five), including such details as the words used in the memory test and the experimenter’s lab coat. But I also made several substantial changes.

First, we stopped the procedures at the 150-volt mark. This is the first time participants heard the learner’s protests through the wall and his demands to be released. When we look at Milgram’s data, we find that this point in the procedure is something of a “point of no return.” Of the participants who continued past 150 volts, 79 percent went all the way to the highest level of the shock generator (450 volts). Knowing how people respond up to this point allowed us to make a reasonable estimate of what they would do if allowed to continue to the end. Stopping the study at this juncture also avoided exposing participants to the intense stress Milgram’s participants often experienced in the subsequent parts of the procedure.

Second, we used a two-step screening process for potential participants to exclude any individuals who might have a negative reaction to the experience. . . . More than 38 percent of the interviewed participants were excluded at this point.

Third, participants were told at least three times (twice in writing) that they could withdraw from the study at any time and still receive their $50 for participation.

Fourth, like Milgram, we administered a sample shock to our participants (with their consent). However, we administered a very mild 15-volt shock rather than the 45-volt shock Milgram gave his participants.

Fifth, we allowed virtually no time to elapse between ending the session and informing participants that the learner had received no shocks. Within a few seconds after ending the study, the learner entered the room to reassure the participant he was fine. Sixth, the experimenter who ran the study also was a clinical psychologist who was instructed to end the session immediately if he saw any signs of excessive stress.

Although each of these safeguards came with a methodological price (e.g., the potential effect of screening out certain individuals, the effect of emphasizing that participants could leave at any time), I wanted to take every reasonable measure to ensure that our participants were treated in a humane and ethical manner.

Interestingly, the study found that levels of obedience were about the same now, as they were in the early 1960s when the original experiment was first run.

This is not the first time that someone has tried to replicate Milgram's experiment. The BPS Research Digest reported on a virtual reality version of the study (admittedly, not a true replication), the full-text of which is available online.

The Situationist post also includes a embedded video of a TV documentary on the replication and notes some disturbing examples where the experiment has been inadvertently replicated when a prank caller directed staff to give shock to two emotionally disturbed teenagers.

Link to Situationist on Milgram replication (thanks Tom!)
Link to Wikipedia page on Milgram's original study.

—Vaughan.

January 04, 2008

Sleep disorders in Disney characters:

A study published in Sleep Medicine has found that several Disney films have surprisingly accurate depictions of clinical sleep problems, particularly a disorder called 'REM sleep behavior disorder'.

Also known as RBD, REM sleep behavior disorder is where normal sleep paralysis doesn't happen during REM sleep, so to varying degrees, a person might 'act out' what they're dreaming.

Three additional dogs were found with presumed RBD in the classic films Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Fox and the Hound (1981), and in the short Pluto's Judgment Day (1935). These dogs were elderly males who would pant, whine, snuffle, howl, laugh, paddle, kick, and propel themselves while dreaming that they were chasing someone or running away. In Lady and the Tramp the dog was also losing both his sense of smell and his memory, two associated features of human RBD. These four films were released before RBD was first formally described in humans and dogs.

In addition, systematic viewing of the Disney films identified a broad range of sleep disorders, including nightmares, sleepwalking, sleep related seizures, disruptive snoring, excessive daytime sleepiness, insomnia and circadian rhythm sleep disorder. These sleep disorders were inserted as comic elements. The inclusion of a broad range of accurately depicted sleep disorders in these films indicates that the Disney screenwriters were astute observers of sleep and its disorders.

This is not the first time that Disney films have featured in the medical literature.

One 2004 study published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry looked at the representation of mental illness in Disney movies (and found, rather disappointingly, that mental illness was typically referred to when one character was denigrating another).

Link to abstract of study on Disney and sleep disorders.
Link to abstract of study on Disney and mental illness.

—Vaughan.

January 03, 2008

The year in sex and psychology:

Psychologist Dr Petra Boyton has just completed her yearly review of the past year in sex, revisits last year's predictions and looks forward to possible developments in 2008.

One of her predictions is that the media will become obsessed with 'future sex'. Indeed, the recently published book Love and Sex with Robots got a huge amount of media coverage, including a review in The New York Times, despite being big on speculation and short on current evidence.

My own personal barometer of the progress of sex research is the balance of how many papers have been published on the neuroscience of orgasm compared to the neuroscience of hiccups.

At the time of writing, PubMed lists 99 papers on the neuroscience of hiccups, whereas only 71 are listed as discussing the neuroscience of orgasm.

Let's hope 2008 does a better job of redressing the balance than 2007.

Link to Dr Petra's review of 2007.
Link to review of last year's sex predictions.
Link to predictions for 2008.

—Vaughan.

December 29, 2007

Finding Alzheimer's:

The New York Times has a fantastic article on the neuroscience of Alzheimer's disease, as well as the human impact of the disorder on individuals and their families.

The article is accompanied by two video reports that weave together personal stories with some of the latest developments in understanding the disorder.

Alzheimer's is a form of dementia, which is where the mind and brain break down quicker than would be expected through normal ageing.

Like many forms of dementia, the first symptoms (such as memory, attention, language or movement problems) appear after a significant amount of brain damage has already been done.

One of the key aims of dementia research is to identify this process while it is still 'silent' to understand how it forms and try and prevent it developing further.

Genetics are one focus, but they are known to be complex. Certain genes (most famously 'ApoE') are known to alter the risk of developing the Alzheimer's in older people, but they're only one part of the puzzle.

However, there is one form of Alzheimer's that is inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, meaning that if one of your parents has it, you've got a fifty percent change of getting it too.

It means that if you've inherited the gene or genes (autosomal dominance implies a single gene, but several are currently candidates), you're almost definitely going to develop the disorder.

Interestingly, this autosomal dominant version of Alzheimer's tends to happen much earlier in life, in the early 60s, 50s or in some cases, even the 40s.

A similar thing happens with other similarly inherited dementias, like CADASIL, where a single gene has been fairly confidently identified.

It's both terrifying and amazing to think that a difference in a single gene, expressing a single different protein, can cause such as massive break down in brain function.

The article also looks at a new type of dye which allows abnormal clumps of amyloid protein, a brain change characteristic of Alzheimer's, to be seen on a PET brain scan done on living people.

At the moment, Alzheimer's can only be diagnosed with 100% accuracy after death, but this new technique could allow brain changes to be tracked in people before they develop any symptoms.

However, it's become clear that you can have protein clumps without having the disease.

Researchers are increasingly talking about 'cognitive reserve', a measure of 'wear and tear' or 'fitness' of the brain, with the idea that the disease happens where various factors tip the brain 'over the threshold' into physical decline.

The 'threshold' is thought to be set by a combination of genetics, physical health, cognitive ability, education and level of activity.

The New York Times article is a wonderful guide to the scientific debates behind the quest to understand the disorder, and the videos really bring home the effect of it.

Link to NYT article 'Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails' with videos.

—Vaughan.

December 13, 2007

Fighting the tide of prison suicides:

The Boston Globe has produced a powerful video documentary and article series on prison suicide and mental illness.

Treating mental illness in prison is a complex business. As Time reported earlier this year, the rates of mental illness are much higher among offenders, confinement is known to worsen mental health, and prison treatment facilities are usually poor.

On top of this, some prisoners attempt to fake mental illness to gain hospital privileges, so working out whether someone is genuinely at risk of harming themselves can be quite tricky.

All of these factors can contribute towards the high suicide rate in prisons, and create tension between staff and families.

As prisons become the asylum of last resort for the mentally ill, desperation, frustration and violence are rising on both sides of the cell door. About 50 times each month, inmates are assaulting prison staff members. And, at nearly the same rate, inmates, many of whom say they are abused by officers, attempt to kill or injure themselves. The Spotlight Team examines the tension between mentally disturbed inmates and their jailers.

The Boston Globe has produced a remarkably comprehensive resource, with video, articles, prisoners suicide notes, official reports, and personal stories.

Link to Boston Globe special report on prison suicide.

—Vaughan.

December 07, 2007

The tickbox revolution in intensive care:

The New Yorker has a completely gripping article on intensive care medicine that while fascinating in its own right, is also interesting as it contains an amazing account of a how a three year old girl was resuscitated and recovered brain function after near drowning, and stresses the importance of behavioural interventions in high-tech medicine.

The article is essentially about an incredibly simple idea that is vastly reducing infection rates and improving survival rates in intensive care - using checklists to make sure that each step of complex procedures are completed.

It's been championed by physician Dr Peter Pronovost and is simple but effective way of reducing cognitive error in high pressure situations.

It's interesting that the idea has found a fair amount of resistance among some doctors, who think that it somehow diminishes their expertise if they have to check against a list, despite the fact that common slips affect even the most competent of people.

One illustration of how complex the intensive care process has become is given near the beginning of the article when it describes a case of a three-year-old girl saved from drowning with what has become a hugely complex, multi-expertise, high-tech medical effort.

Consider a case report in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery of a three-year-old girl who fell into an icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps. She was lost beneath the surface for thirty minutes before her parents found her on the pond bottom and pulled her up. Following instructions from an emergency physician on the phone, they began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A rescue team arrived eight minutes later. The girl had a body temperature of sixty-six degrees, and no pulse. Her pupils were dilated and did not react to light, indicating that her brain was no longer working.

But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. A helicopter took her to a nearby hospital, where she was wheeled directly to an operating room. A surgical team put her on a heart-lung bypass machine. Between the transport time and the time it took to plug the inflow and outflow lines into the femoral vessels of her right leg, she had been lifeless for an hour and a half. By the two-hour mark, however, her body temperature had risen almost ten degrees, and her heart began to beat. It was her first organ to come back.

After six hours, her core temperature reached 98.6 degrees. The team tried to put her on a breathing machine, but the pond water had damaged her lungs too severely for oxygen to reach her blood. So they switched her to an artificial-lung system known as ECMO—extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The surgeons opened her chest down the middle with a power saw and sewed lines to and from the ECMO unit into her aorta and her beating heart. The team moved the girl into intensive care, with her chest still open and covered with plastic foil. A day later, her lungs had recovered sufficiently for the team to switch her from ECMO to a mechanical ventilator and close her chest. Over the next two days, all her organs recovered except her brain. A CT scan showed global brain swelling, which is a sign of diffuse damage, but no actual dead zones. So the team drilled a hole into the girl’s skull, threaded in a probe to monitor her cerebral pressure, and kept that pressure tightly controlled by constantly adjusting her fluids and medications. For more than a week, she lay comatose. Then, slowly, she came back to life.

First, her pupils started to react to light. Next, she began to breathe on her own. And, one day, she simply awoke. Two weeks after her accident, she went home. Her right leg and left arm were partially paralyzed. Her speech was thick and slurry. But by age five, after extensive outpatient therapy, she had recovered her faculties completely. She was like any little girl again.

It's a wonderful article that speaks to a number of important issues in medicine, including the self-perception and culture of clinicians, the importance and power of simple changes in behaviour, and why low-tech capital-free solutions are often the hardest to implement.

Link to New Yorker on checklists and intensive care medicine.

—Vaughan.

November 27, 2007

Morality tales:

The science of morality is becoming a hot topic at the moment, and this week two articles, one in Time and one in Reason, have both tackled the issue.

The Time article is a particularly good example. It's wonderfully written and takes a comprehensive look at the field, taking in evolution, empathy, cognitive neuroscience and culture.

If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn't lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind—one so sublime, we fold it into a larger "soul." The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those q