Month: May 2008

Sociologist Harry Collins is interviewed in American Scientist on his fascinating mission to find out what we need to do to be considered an expert and what different types of expertise exist.

Collins has spent many years studying how science works. Not how it is supposed to work, through experiments and falsification and gradual knowledge building, but how it actually works, through social networks, economics and traditions.

He studied physicists who research gravitational waves and realised he was able to have in-depth conversation with gravitational wave theorists even though he couldn’t run the equipments or do the maths. As most expertise plays out in conversation, how much of an expert was he?

Collins and his colleagues wanted to test the difference between tacit knowledge, what we can do without being able to explain, and explicit knowledge, so they devised some fascinating experiments to see if people could tell the difference.

One ingenious experiment involved testing whether people could tell the difference between a colour blind person and normally sighted version from just talking to them about colour. It turns out, they can’t.

Technical decision-making is often a matter of debating in committees and the like, so the way expertise works itself out in conversation was always going to be a central concern. We decided to use the forerunner of the “Turing test”‚Äîthe “imitation game”‚Äîto see whether one kind of expert could be distinguished from another in conversational tests. In the imitation game, a judge asks open-ended questions of, say, a full-blown expert and someone with interactional expertise only, without knowing who is who. The judge tries to tell the difference. In the best-known of the experiments we did in Cardiff, color-blind people were found to be indistinguishable from color perceivers, and we argued this was because the former had been immersed in the language of the latter all their lives.

As a result of this project, the research team have created a ‘periodic table’ of different types of expertise and how they manifest themselves.

Collins’ research is also discussed in an interview for this month’s Scientific American and many of his publications on expertise are available on his website.

Link to American Scientist interview.
Link to Scientific American interview.
Link to Collins’ expertise publications.

Below is an excerpt from psychologist John Kihlstrom’s ¬≠2005 review article on dissociative disorders where he talks about the sudden ‘epidemic’ of multiple personality disorder, now know as DID, in the 1960s and 70s.

Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID is a diagnosis that describes where someone manifests various personalities, often of a diverse range of people – from children to adults of either sex.

It is controversial partly because diagnoses seemed to massively increase when two famous films on the disorder were popular.

Kihlstrom makes the interesting point that the increase in the number of people diagnosed with the disorder was also matched by an increase in the number of personalities each person seemed to have.

An interesting feature of the DID “epidemic” is an increase not just in the number of cases but also in the number of alter egos reported per case. In the classic literature, the vast majority of cases were of dual personality (Sutcliffe & Jones 1962, Taylor & Martin 1944). By contrast, most of the new cases compiled by Greaves (1980) presented at least three personalities; in two other series, the average number of alter egos was more than 13 (Kluft 1984, Putnam et al. 1986).

As Kenny (1986) noted, it was almost as if there were some kind of contest to determine who could have (or be) the patient with the most alter egos. The famous Eve, of course, appeared to have three personalities (Osgood & Luria 1954, Thigpen & Cleckley 1954). But when popular and professional interest in MPD was stimulated by the case of Sibyl, who was reported to possess 16 different personalities (Schreiber 1973), Eve replied with her own account of her illness, eventually claiming 22 (Sizemore & Huber 1988).

Despite the almost-infinite number of possible synaptic connections in the brain, one might say that the mind simply is not big enough to hold so many personalities. The proliferation of alter egos within cases, as well as the proliferation of cases, has been one of the factors leading to skepticism about the disorder itself.

In general, dissociative disorders are where one part of consciousness seems to be ‘split off’ or inaccessible to another.

For example, psychogenic amnesia or conversion disorder (‘hysteria’) are more common examples and hypnosis seems to reliably induce the phenomena in some people.

These are still some of the most mysterious processes in psychology and are fraught with controversy, particularly as they’re often linked to repressed memories from abuse or trauma.

This is one of the more difficult areas to study scientifically because it largely relies on self-report, and Kihlstrom notes there is still no convincing evidence that trauma or abuse leads to amnesia for the event.

Link to PubMed abstract of Kihlstrom’s review.
Link to full-text of pre-print.

Continuing yesterday’s virtual reality theme, The New Yorker has an in-depth article about how US Iraq veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder are being treated in a VR simulation of battle situations.

The VR simulation is actually a modified version of Full Spectrum Warrior, a military tactics video game that was first developed to train US army soldiers before being released as a commercial product.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can be diagnosed if a person has experienced a potentially life threatening experience, and has intrusive traumatic memories, persistently increased arousal, and avoids reminders of the event.

Helping someone re-visit aspects of the original experience is an important part of the psychological therapy. This is relatively easy for someone who was traumatised in a traffic accident, but is considerably more difficult for a soldier who was traumatised in a distant and still-active war zone.

Virtual reality aims to safely simulate the environment and features of combat. The idea is that the intensity can be controlled by the therapist to manage exposure and to make sure the patient is never challenged with more anxiety than they can manage.

“This shows you why you need a trained therapist,” Rizzo said, turning off the machine and watching Aristone, who was bent over, with his hands on his knees, taking deep breaths. “Someone who knows exposure therapy, who knows how little things can set people off. You have to understand the patient. You have to know which stimuli to select. You’d never do what I just did—you’d never flood them. You have to know when to ramp up the challenges. Someone comes in and all they can do is sit in the Humvee, maybe with the sound of wind, and may have to spend a session or two just in that position. For P.T.S.D., it’s really intuitive. We provide a lot of options and put them into the hands of the clinician.”

One of these is Karen Perlman, a civilian psychologist who uses Virtual Iraq with patients at the Naval Medical Center San Diego. Perlman is an apple-cheeked, middle-aged native Californian with cascading brown hair, who, when I met her, was wearing an elegant short black dress with a pink-blue-and-purple tie-dyed silk scarf. At first glance, Perlman does not seem to be the sort of person a young marine would cotton to, but Rizzo says that she has a gift, and so far eight of the nine patients she has treated no longer meet the criteria for P.T.S.D. (This number does not account for those who dropped out.) “It’s a very collaborative relationship,” she told me in February, when Skip Rizzo and I drove down to San Diego. “I know which stimuli I’m going to add as the therapy progresses. I’m not going to overwhelm them. There are no surprises. I say, ‘I think you’re ready for the I.E.D. blast or for more airplanes.’ I’m not only adding more, but increasing the duration of each one. It’s intensive, but for P.T.S.D. you need a treatment that is intensive.”

The team have published some published some initial studies from the treatment which looks promising.

The project joins a growing number of studies that have found VR a promising method for treating trauma.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Virtual Iraq’.

The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover was an influential article by Lindsy Van Gelder that examined how a case of gender-bending identity faking from the early days of online chatrooms impacted on a virtual community.

I’d read it many years ago when it was published in the book, Computerization and Controversy, but have just found a scanned copy on the net as a <a href="
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/classes/cyberspace/resources/Van%20Gelder%201991%20-%20The%20Strange%20Case%20of%20the%20Electronic%20Lover.pdf”>pdf.

It’s entirely anecdotal but it’s a fascinating read (although has been scanned in sideways, so you’ll have to print it, or rotate it on screen – Acrobat users, you can right click to rotate documents).

What I hadn’t remembered was the identities of the person and the alter-ego:

I soon learned that [Talkin’ Lady’s] real name was Joan Sue Green, and that she was a New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, who had been severely disfigured in a car accident that was the fault of a drunken driver. The accident had killed her boyfriend.

Joan had spent a year in hospital being treated for brain damage, which affected both her speech and her ability to walk. Mute, confined to a wheelchair, and frequently suffering from intense back and leg pain, Joan had been at first so embittered about her disabilities that she literally didn’t want to live.

Then her mentor, a former professor at John Hopkins, presented her with a computer, a modem, and a year’s subscription to CompuServe to be used specifically doing what Joan was doing – making friends online…

Over the next two years, she became a monumental on-line presence who served as both a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and (in some cases) her on-line romances, she changed the lives of dozens of women.

Thus it was a huge shock early this year when, through a complicated series of events, Joan was revealed as being not disabled at all. More to the point, Joan, in fact, was not a woman. She was really a man we’ll call Alex – a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be a female, and to experience the intimacy of female friendship.

I first came across the case in Sherry Turkle’s book on the psychology of online identity, Life on the Screen, where she described the story as already having “near-legendary status” in 1995 cyberculture.

There is now a growing body of scholarly work on the psychology of the internet but several episodes seem to have become part of the mythos of the subject, partly because they were used to illustrate psychological points before rigorous empirical work had been started.

Incidentally, I tried to look up the author, Lindsy Van Gelder, on the net but found few details. However, I did find this article from the 1980s where she defends her counter-culture credentials against the fact she owned an IBM PC! (a 5150 if I’m not mistaken).

pdf of Van Gelder’s ‘The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover’.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has a fascinating interview with psychologist Daniel Freeman who discusses his recent study that used virtual reality to study paranoid thinking.

Freeman has pioneered the use of VR in studying paranoia to try and understand how individual psychological differences contribute to suspiciousness and fear.

Of course, it’s possible to use real life environments to see how exposure relates to paranoid thinking. In fact, the same research group has studied how patients with paranoid delusions react to urban environments.

Those familiar with South East London might be interested to know that stressful urban stimulus in this experiment was a walk down Camberwell High Street (as a resident of Camberwell it is disconcerting, although not entirely surprising, to find out I’m living in an experimental condition used to induce paranoid reactions).

For a scientific point of view, one difficulty with using real-life environments to study paranoia is that they are constantly changing and reactive.

This latter point is important because people who are very paranoid might, for instance, behave in a manner that other people find strange and that attracts attention, or in a way that sparks hostility in others.

One way of getting round this is to expose all participants to a virtual reality environment programmed to be identical, so any differences in paranoid thinking between individuals are almost certainly related to how they interpret the situation and not how the environment reacts to them.

In this latest VR study, the environment was programmed to be neutral (a simulation of the London Underground carriage) but about a third of participants from the general population reported paranoid thoughts.

Some of the paranoid thoughts reported in the paper are really quite striking: “There was an aggressive person ‚Äì his intention was to intimidate me and make me feel uneasy” and “One guy looked pissed off and maybe one guy flicked the finger at me”.

I’ve actually been in the simulation, having taken part in a pilot study for a related project, and although it’s a bit clunky (as you can see from the picture) it’s remarkable how its difficult not to have human reactions to the ‘people’ on the train.

Interestingly, the study found that anxiety, worry and the tendency to have anomalous perceptual experiences were associated with paranoid thoughts, as was ‘cognitive inflexibility’ – the tendency to be unable to see alternative explanations for ideas or beliefs.

In the audio interview, Freeman discusses this latest study in more detail and how it relates to what we know about the psychology of paranoia.

UPDATE: Thanks to PsyBlog for alerting me to the fact that a streamed video from the Wellcome Trust has an interview with Dan Freeman and footage from the experiment itself.

Link to RCPsych to podcast on VR and paranoia study.
Link to abstract of study.

The St Petersburg Times has an article on the new generation of rescue robots that search for survivors after disasters. Their creator, engineer Robin Murphy, is designing robots that will aim to provide psychological comfort to trapped victims until the rescuers can reach them.

Murphy has been designing and deploying rescue robots for many years, assisting the rescue teams after the World Trade Centre attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the Utah mine disaster to name but a few.

Recognising the need to alleviate the psychological suffering of trapped survivors, she’s just won a $500,000 grant from Microsoft to develop robots that attempt to comfort the people they reach.

The Survivor Buddy would act as an emergency companion to people stuck in the crossfire of snipers or under the rubble of an earthquake-ravaged building like the ones now littering China.

She envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a victim’s vital signs to doctors. And it should be friendly, she said.

Link to The St Petersburg Times on Survivor Buddy (via AI&Robots).

The most recent edition of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone discussed the philosophy of suicide, looking at how our concepts of self-killing have changed throughout history and whether there is any such thing as a rational reason for ending our own lives.

The philosopher Albert Camus famously stated that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”, something that surely struck Socrates as he killed himself by drinking hemlock.

Suicide in its many forms has inspired everything from condemnation to romanticisation, most focusing on the morality of taking one’s own life and whether it can be justified as a reasonable option.

The programme touches on many of these issues and I was also interested to see a link from the page to an entry on suicide from the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Link to Philosopher’s Zone on suicide with audio and transcript.
Link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on suicide.