Month: November 2008

The Psychologist has a truly fantastic article on astronaut psychology, treating off-world mental health problems, and the interpersonal dynamics of the space mission.

It is thoroughly fascinating, exceptionally well-written and even contains an interview with astronaut Dr Jay Buckley “a crew member with STS-90, Space Shuttle Columbia’s 16-day Neurolab mission in 1998. The seven-member crew conducted life science experiments focusing on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system.”

I think I’ve just wet myself.

One of my favourite bits is where it discusses what measures they take to maintain the astronauts’ mental health.

This is no small problem and the article notes that psychological problems have been the leading medical cause of long-duration mission terminations.

Depression is apparently a key problem. The article ominously notes that no-one has yet had to use the on-board antidepressant medication, but it does describe a computerised psychological treatment for depression as part of the on-board software package the ‘Virtual Space Station’.

The Virtual Space Station’s depression module will follow the problem-solving treatment (PST) approach to therapy. James Cartreine, the principal investigator on the Virtual Space Station project, says his team chose this form of intervention because it is empirically supported and has high face validity – in other words, it’s immediately apparent to users of the Virtual Space Station how the interactive programme is going to help them.

‘The active ingredient of PST is behavioral activation,’ says Cartreine, ‘getting people with depression to do something – and helping them to feel good about their efforts, whether or not their efforts were successful.’

Because of its focus on identifying problems and working out possible solutions, PST can help combat feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, which is particularly appropriate for people isolated in space in a confined environment. The fact that it’s tangible – it’s geared towards solving observable problems as opposed to cognitive problems – also makes it suitable for astronauts, who have proven to be accepting of the intervention. ‘Astronauts are physical scientists, engineers and programmers – they’re not necessarily used to thinking about their thought processes,’ says Cartreine.

If you’re interested in how the same topic looked in 1959, we discussed some unintentionally hilarious articles from a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry on a rather Freudian ‘space psychiatry’ from that very same year.

 
Link to Psychologist article ‘New horizons’.

 
Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist and I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut.

New Scientist has an article on the psychology and biology on sleeping around – which has been given the wonderfully gentle and inviting name of ‘sociosexuality’ in the research literature.

Rather predictably, the article contains the rather tired ‘men spread their seed, women look for long term partners’ evolutionary psychology explanation, but also does a good job of countering this with some interesting and sometimes surprising studies from the sex research literature.

One of the most interesting bits is where it notes that foetal testosterone exposure is correlated in men with masculine facial features and number of sexual partners in adulthood, and exactly the the same holds for women:

Another factor with strong links to sociosexuality is masculinity. Boothroyd found men with more masculine-looking faces scored higher on sociosexuality, and it seems to be the same story for women. Sarah Mikach and Michael Bailey of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, examined how women’s sociosexuality related to the degree to which they looked, felt or behaved in a masculine way. They found that heterosexual women who had high numbers of sexual partners were more likely to show higher levels of masculinity.

The researchers argued that these women behave in a way that is more typically male and this could be due to early – probably prenatal – exposure to androgens, such as testosterone, that organise typically “male” brains differently from typically “female” brains (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 20, p 141). Supporting this idea, Andrew Clark of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, found a higher rate of sociosexuality in women with a smaller ratio of index to ring finger length – which some researchers believe corresponds to higher prenatal androgen exposure (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 25, p 113).

If you want to rate your own sociosexuality, they’ve also put the questionnaire online.

Unusually for the normally rather coy New Scientist, the article is open-access. Is this a sign that New Scientist are realising that science is like love – it’s better when it’s free, or are they just using sex as a way of getting short-term affection?

We’ll see how we feel in the morning.

Link to NewSci on ‘The dizzying diversity of human sexual strategies’.

Dana’s online mind and brain magazine Cerebrum has a critical and thought-provoking article arguing that mental illnesses like ADHD and child bipolar disorder are too often being used as fig leaves for social problems that we prefer to think of as blame-free genetic disorders that can be treated with simple-solution medications.

The piece is by distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan, considered one of the founders of developmental psychology, who discusses the various social changes that have encouraged differences and misbehaviour to be medically diagnosed and treated – particularly during the last two decades.

The article is timely, owing to it coinciding with recent revelations from an ongoing trial where parents are suing drug makers over the use of antipsychotic medication in children.

The documents show that pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson aimed to carry out research on child bipolar disorder with a specific intention of boosting sales of their medication, as well as countering unfavourable coverage from the media and spinning ‘no result’ studies on the drug.

We usually think of ‘social factors’ as increasing risk for mental illness in the individual, but we also need to remember that there are strong social factors that affect how we think about disorders in terms of their causes, effects and treatments.

One of the strongest social factors is financial pressure, and, as covered by Wired, drug companies are notorious for ‘cooking the books’ in an attempt to bury negative data and spin positive findings in the best possible light.

This has just been reported in yet another damning study on drug company data handling published in the most recent edition of PLoS Medicine.

Link to Dana article ‘The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality’.
Link to PLoS Medicine study on bias in drug trials submitted to the FDA.

The New Yorker has an extended review and discussion of various new books critical of the increasing trend for parents to be overinvolved in their children’s lives owing to the trend for ‘intelligence boosting’ products and activities.

It’s a nicely balanced article that highlights some of the worst trends in ‘overparenting’ while also pointing out some of the flaws with the recent wave of criticism.

To get some perspective, look at “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood” (2004), by Steven Mintz, a professor of history at Columbia. Mintz’s story begins with the beginning of the United States, and therefore he describes children with troubles greater than overparenting: boys dispatched to coal mines, and girls to textile mills, at age nine or ten.

As for the current outbreak of worry over the young, Mintz reminds us that America has seen such panics before—for example, in the nineteen-fifties, with the outcry over hot rods, teen sex, and rock and roll. The fifties even had its own campaign against overparenting, or overmothering—Momism, as it was called. This was thought to turn boys into homosexuals. For the past three decades, Mintz writes, discussions of child-rearing in the United States have been dominated by a “discourse of crisis,” and yet America’s youth are now, on average, “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.”

There have been some losses. Middle-class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are far better off. Mintz thinks that we worry too much, or about the wrong things. Despite general prosperity—at least until recently—the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than it was thirty years ago. One in six children lives below the poverty line. If you want an emergency, Mintz says, there’s one

Over-involvement is certainly a risk, however, and this can be seen even in the very beginning of infancy. One of the key skills psychologists talk about in early life is the ability to self-soothe – in other words, learning to independently manage discomfort and strong emotions.

This begins when babies are getting into sleep routines in the months after being born. There is a temptation to attend to the baby and soothe it as soon as it cries but this can have the opposite effect and the child actually sleeps worse because they don’t have the opportunity to learn to settle themselves.

A recent large study helped to confirm this and found that parents that encouraged independence and self-soothing by not attending to their baby at every cry reported that their child had extended and more consolidated sleep.

Link to New Yorker ‘The Child Trap’ article.

A 2005 article from business psychology journal Organization Studies discusses the psychology of being a bastard. It has a serious point, but is just hilarious for the contrast between the academic language and the subject matter.

The serious point behind the article, written by psychologist David Sims, is to look at how people in business organisations make narratives or stories about someone being a ‘bastard’ to demonize them and persuade others of the fact.

This can be to discount someone else opinion, undermine their status, or to create a dragon against which they can valiantly fight for their own glory.

However, because of the subject matter, it’s frequently funny as it analyses the varied types of company bastards as they’re constructed within organisations. Just some of the section headings are pure genius:

Narrative 1: Clever Bastard
Narrative 2: Bastard ex Machina
Narrative 3: Devious Bastard
A Narrative Understanding of Bastards
Making Sense of Bastards

Link to ‘You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations’ (thanks Olwyn!).
Link to DOI entry for same.