April 2009 – Page 3

The myth of sex addiction

Finally, a sceptical take on sex addiction. The Times just published an excellent article examining the problem with the concept of being ‘addicted to sex’, something that has almost entirely been an invention of private treatment clinics and the media.

There is virtually no published research on ‘sex addiction’ and it isn’t an officially recognised diagnosis, but it has become fashionable to describe compulsive or non-mainstream sexual tendencies in these terms.

Partly, as the article notes, because addiction has become the 21st century’s label of choice for people who want to medicalise less acceptable sexual behaviours, especially when someone gets ‘caught in the act’.

Dr Philip Hopley, an addiction specialist at the Priory Hospital at Roehampton, southwest London, and a consultant psychiatrist for LPP Consulting, says that public scepticism is ‚Äúunderstandable‚Äù. He says: ‚ÄúThe major concern is where sex-related problem behaviour is labelled an ‚Äòaddiction’ when in fact poor decision-making and/or impulse control lie at the root of the problem. What constitutes normal, average or healthy sex? There is no recommended limit for adults as there is for, say, alcohol – and if there was, would it be different for males and females?‚Äù

Phillip Hodson, a Fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, points out that the whole idea of having an addiction to a natural drive is problematic. ‚ÄúThe excuse, of course, is that nature wants us to have sex to make babies and isn’t bothered about rationing the drive. It’s the same with eating. You cannot really be ‚Äòaddicted’ to normal drives. What’s the cure – to stop procreating or eating?‚Äù Yet perhaps one can’t really blame people for using the term ‚Äúaddiction‚Äù, because compulsivity or mania don’t have quite the same ring. ‚ÄúSex maniac‚Äù sounds like something out of a Carry On film.

The media love sex addiction and go to great lengths to quote media-hungry rent-a-quotes who can make it sound valid.

Unfortunately, the media tends to like people who have already media connections, and so the dissenting voices barely get a byline.

This article is interesting because it is written by Jed Mercurio, a TV drama writer currently researching a book on JFK, so he’s prime ‘get in the papers’ material.

Interestingly though, he used to be a doctor, and knows a fadish medical concept when he sees one. Hence we get a rare sceptical look at a current media obsession.

Link to ‘JFK, Russell Brand and the myth of sex addiction’.

Hemispheres of influence

Discover Magazine has an interesting Carl Zimmer article on one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience – why do we have two cortical hemispheres? And why are they not quite the same?

It turns out that the ‘brain of two halves’ is incredibly common in the animal kingdom and that many creatures also show the behavioural lateralisation that we most readily see in humans as someone being left or right handed.

But it’s no entirely sure why we, or indeed, or animal compatriots, have evolved this way, although various theories are kicking around:

David Stark of Harvard Medical School recently found additional clues about lateralization in his studies of 112 different regions in the brains of volunteers. He and his collaborators discovered that the front portions of the brain are generally less tightly synchronized across the hemispheres than are the ones in the back. It may be no coincidence that the highly synchronized back regions handle basic functions like seeing.

To observe the world, it helps to have unified vision. At the front of the hemispheres, in contrast, we weave together streams of thought to produce complex, long-term plans for the future. It makes sense that these areas of the brain would be more free to drift apart from their mirror-image partners.

Zimmer goes on to puncture the myth of ‘left brained’ and ‘right brained’ people, or indeed, thinking styles, erroneously labelled with these pseudoscientific terms.

While certain cognitive styles have been correlated to greater activation in the left or right hemisphere, to describe a whole class of problems of thinking methods like this is nonsensical because the two hemispheres of the brain work together.

It’s like claiming someone is a good cook solely because they come from Italy. The generalisation is so broad it just doesn’t apply to individual people or situations.

Anyway, the Discover article is an excellent whistle-stop tour through the curious world of brain lateralisation.

Link to Discover on the brain of two hemispheres (via @mocost).

Microchip-in-a-pill drug monitoring

Furious Seasons covers a new microchip-in-a-pill that monitors the stomach and detects what drugs the patient is taking, reporting back to the doctor in real time.

The blurb from the company is even more astounding:

Proteus ingestible event markers (IEMs) are tiny, digestible sensors made from food ingredients, which are activated by stomach fluids after swallowing. Once activated, the IEM sends an ultra low-power, private, digital signal through the body to a microelectronic receiver that is either a small bandage style skin patch or a tiny device insert under the skin. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information such as the type of drug, the dose, and the place of manufacture, as well as measures and reports physiologic measures such as heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

Like Phil Dawdy, I feel a bit freaked out.

This is interesting for psychiatry for two reasons: one, monitoring for recreational drug or alcohol use and two, monitoring compliance with antipsychotics.

Both of these are interesting because these are both controversial legal areas, in that a court can impose an order or conditions that depend on a clean drug screen, and, thanks to the UK’s new ‘now with added coercion’ 2007 Mental Health Act psychiatrists can impose community treatment orders.

This means that a patient can be returned to hospital, against their will, if they’re found not to be complying with their prescribed medication regime. And as involuntary treatment is most commonly imposed on people with psychosis, this usually means taking antipsychotics.

You can see how this technology would be of great use on the monitoring end, but as it supposedly reports on any sort of drug, presumably personal drug use then becomes a data privacy issue.

In other words, you’d have to trust the information technology system to correctly discard the results that you don’t want your doctor to see.

More concerning perhaps is ‘rights slippage’ which is a pervasive problem is psychiatry.

This is the same problem that occurs when a psychiatrist (and thanks to the UK’s new Mental Health Act, now a psychologist) says to a patient who is in hospital of their own free will: “If you leave, I’ll section you”. Essentially, you’re free to go, but if you try, I’ll legally detain you.

You can see how this new technology could be used for similar strategies – if you let us monitor your drug use and medication compliance, we won’t use impose any involuntary treatment, but if you don’t, we will.

For people who voluntarily and knowingly decide to use the monitoring device, you can see how it would be a huge medical benefit, but in psychiatry, where involuntary treatment is possible, the ethical difficulties are amplified.

Also, I don’t think I need to explain the ironies of potentially implanting microchip monitoring devices into people with psychosis who often have delusions about being implanted with microchip monitoring devices.

Link to Furious Seasons microchip drug monitors.
Link to manufacturers website.

Sixty miniature heads used in phrenology

This is a wonderful image of a 1831 set of sixty miniature heads used to demonstrate the principles of phrenology from the Science Museum in London.

The science museum has a page dedicated to the set, which comes in a wonderful wooden display case, that also includes some other images and information about the exhibit.

Phrenology originated with Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German physician, assisted by his colleague, Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1809-72). Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality.

Gall and Spurzheim eventually disagreed and went on to promote rival systems of phrenology. These heads are numbered according to Spurzheim‚Äôs classification. The heads may have been used to teach phrenology but were probably made as a general reference collection.

A wide range of different heads are present. For instance, head number 54 is that of a scientific man; head number 8 is recorded as the head of an ‚Äòidiot‚Äô. The heads were made by William Bally, who studied under Spurzheim from 1828 onwards.

Link to Science Museum exhibit page (via the wonderful <a href"Fortean Times).

The mind of the condemned

How do you cope on death row? In 1962 two psychiatrists were puzzled by the fact that inmates condemned to death in New York’s notorious Sing Sing prison were not overwhelmed by depression or anxiety. They wrote an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry attempting to explain how 13 prisoners managed the fear of their imminent demise.

It’s an uncomfortable and ill-fitting article in many ways. The two psychiatrists are firmly psychoanalytic in their approach, talking of ‘ego defense’ and ‘projective tests’, which seems odd to the modern forensic eye.

Moreover, the liberal use of the contemptuous language of sixties psychiatry pervades the article. The inmates are described variously as “inadequate”, “obsessed with his own power”, “mentally dull”, “self-pitying”, as if these were facts of the world, rather than the disdainful opinions of two comfortably employed prison psychiatrists.

Disturbingly, several of the condemned prisoners are clearly psychotic, and their madness is invariably explained away as a ‘defense mechanism’, little more than a tool for managing their anxieties.

But despite the filtering and selective reporting, it is possible to catch a glimpse of how the inmates managed their lives as the condemned.

This man stands out in the series as being the one who most successfully employed intellectualization as a means of defending against anxiety and depression. He elaborated a philosophy of life and values in which his own criminal career became not only justifiable, but even respectable. He rationalized his crimes by emphasizing the hypocrisy and perfidy of society on the one hand and by comparing himself with policemen and soldiers and others who live honorably ‚Äúby the gun‚Äù on the other. This system was so effective for him that even when execution appeared imminent he maintained his hero‚Äôs martyr role and disdained to request executive clemency.

Of course, we will all die, and in recent years studies on how we live with this knowledge, so called ‘mortality salience’ or ‘terror management theory’ (TMT) research, has become a fertile field of investigation.

Research suggests that when reminded of our own death, we attempt to make ourselves feel better by aligning ourselves more closely with our social groups, cultural values and intimate partners.

But to my knowledge, only one other study has investigated how death row inmates deal with their forthcoming death.

In 2008, two Dutch psychologists, Andreas Schuck and Janelle Ward, analysed the final statements of those executed by the state of Texas to examine how they portrayed themselves and made sense of their situation.

In line with ‘terror management theory’ the majority of the last statements attempted to align the subject with our society’s notion of a ‘good’ person, often in a common pattern or sequence:

subject [reference to the self]; addresses relevant relationships (from closest to furthest); expresses internal feelings (love, hate); defines situation (responsibility, acceptance versus innocence, political statement, denial); deals with situation (self-comfort, religion, wish/hope, forgiveness, self-blame vs. accusation, denial); closure.

It seems that from the prisoner to the public, death makes us conform, and even those who may have been the most callous of killers want to be a good person when they die.

Link to 1962 death row article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to study on Texas executions last words.

Easter psychology research

I’ve just found an entry for a delightful looking study on PubMed entitled ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’.

Unfortunately, the paper isn’t available electronically so we’ll never know whether the Easter egg drawings grew, shrunk and stayed the same over the Easter holiday.

However, we do know from a 1993 study that the famous rabbit / duck ambiguous picture is more likely to be recognised as a rabbit during Easter.

Link to entry for ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’
Link to entry for ‘The Easter bunny in October: is it disguised as a duck?’

The chaos of R.D. Laing

Counter-culture psychiatrist R.D. Laing is the patron saint of lovable rogues, although, according to an article in The Sunday Times, he was a hard man to love. “Being the son of RD Laing was neither amazing nor enlightening,” wrote his son in a biography of his father, “for most of the time it was a crock of shit.”

Inspired by existential philosophers, Laing produced a series of humane and revolutionary books during the sixties that argued that we undervalue both the experience of mental illness and those who are mentally ill.

Madness, he argued, was a transformative experience, rich with personal meaning, that functions like an existential rite of passage. Delusions and hallucinations were the expression of the unmentionable, illustrating the emotional double-booking keeping of the family with an unignorable tear in the fabric between the conscious and unconscious mind.

When you talk to psychiatrists from Laing’s generation, they are rarely complementary. The fact he fuelled the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement (unwittingly, he claimed) is secondary to the fact that they chiefly remember his decline from a brilliant thinker to a tacky drunk.

While his public persona was just saddening, his family life was frequently shattered by his emotional instability. Fathering 10 children by four different women, the Times article recounts how his children remember his emotional neglect, sometimes punctuated with violence.

Yet Laing remains fascinating. Partly we revel in the irony as he highlighted the naivety of his own theories – his depression and alcoholism were hardly a rite of passage, and he embodied the dark force of ambivalent family turmoil that he railed against in his writing.

But partly it’s because he reflects those times when our inadequacies get the better of how we want the world to be. To borrow from Jung, he is the archetypal wounded healer, a modern day Fisher King whose wounds destroyed his kingdom.

Link to Sunday Times article ‘RD Laing: The abominable family man’.

The future of targeted memory manipulation

Wired Science has an interesting interview with Oxford neuroethicist Anders Sandberg about the future of drugs that can reduce the emotional impact of traumatic memories.

The interview uses the term ‘memory editing’ which is not a great label for these drugs, such as beta-blocker propranolol, which largely work by reducing the emotional ‘kick’ stored with a memory of a painful or traumatic experience when taken after the experience or during recall.

This is something that is often misreported by the mainstream media who often starting going off on one about ‘memory erasing’ drugs and the like.

However, it is also not true that propranolol solely effects the emotional aspects. Careful reading of the studies show that people treated with the compound do typically show a slight reduction in their actual memory for traumatic events.

But the interview makes the interesting point that maybe we’re a bit too focused on removing or reducing memories, the problem of inducing false memories is probably more serious:

Wired.com: I’ve asked about memory removal ‚Äî but should the discussion involve adding memories, too?

Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods.

The problem is that it’s the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don’t know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously.

You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they’ll think they’re a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave.

Link to ‘The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs’.

Old skool lie detectors

OObject has a fantastic online gallery of vintage analog ‘lie detectors’ – exactly the type of kit you used to see in old detective films where the police questions would lead to frantic activity on the polygraph as a bead of sweat would run down the perp’s face.

It has everything from a tiny 1920s original MacKenzie-Lewis polygraph to the lie detector in a suitcase Pentograph from the 1980s

Despite polygraph-based lie detectors being rubbish at detecting lies, they’re still admissible as evidence in some US states and widely used by the security services.

Link to gallery of vintage lie detectors (via BB Gadgets).

Involuntary masturbation in alien hand syndrome

I’ve just found this fascinating case study in American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation about a man who lost conscious control over one of his hands after brain injury and suffered involuntary public masturbation episodes as a result.

Involuntary masturbation as a manifestation of stroke-related alien hand syndrome

Ong Hai BG, Odderson

Am J Phys Med Rehabil. 2000 Jul-Aug;79(4):395-8.

Alien hand syndrome is a perplexing and uncommon clinical diagnosis. We report an unusual manifestation of alien hand syndrome in a 73-yr-old man with a right anterior cerebral artery infarct affecting the right medial frontal cortex and the anterior portion of the corpus callosum. We conclude that alien hand syndrome should be considered in patients who present with a feeling of alienation of one or both upper limbs accompanied by complex purposeful involuntary movement.

We tend to think of the cognitive impairments after brain injury as the most disabling – things like loss of memory or speech or language impairment, but we often neglect what we might call social impairments.

Especially when the effect is embarrassing, these can have just as strong an impact because many people massively restrict their lives to prevent causing social discomfort to themselves or others.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

2009-04-10 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Tom has a fantastic post and brief radio segment on the psychology of coffee.

Savant and synaesthete Daniel Tammet gives an interesting interview on the neuroscience of exceptional abilities on the Quirks and Quarks radio show.

The New Republic has an extended review of ‘Hysterical Men’, a new well-regarded book on the neglected history of male hysteria.

Most psychiatrists who wrote clinical guidelines for the American Psychiatric Association had financial ties to drug companies, reports Medical News Today.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a nice study that shows <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/04/our_moral_thermostat_-_why_being_good_can_give_people_licens.php
“>moral behaviour is more like a balancing act than a recital.

An elegant study of how scratching stops an itch is covered by BBC News.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the much discussed ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ paper, will now be <a href="http://chronicle.com/news/article/6236/a-much-debated-neuroscience-paper-has-lost-its-voodoo
“>retitled ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition’ on its May publication.

There’s a great round-up of recent sex and science news on Dr Petra.

An article on the effects of poverty on brain development was published by Economist. You must read an excellent follow-up by Language Log showing all is not what it seems.

BBC News reports on seemingly higher rates of birth defects in babies of women sedated as children in UK care homes.

People with schizophrenia are not susceptible to the hollow-mask illusion, reports New Scientist with cool hollow-mask video.

Scientific American Mind has an interesting piece about mapping the brain circuits in depression for the purpose of modulating them with deep brain stimulation. More background on Neuron Culture.

Investigative journalist Phil Dawdy gives an ass-kicking pharma-sceptical interview on Christopher Lane’s Psychology Today blog.

Psychologist Colin Ross wins the James Randi Educational Foundation award for pseudoscience for his claim that he can send electromagnetic beams out of his eyes and capture them with a machine. Gives him something to do when he’s not writing articles for Scientology magazines I suppose.

Wired has a short but sweet piece on pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing.

Even isolated cultures understand emotions conveyed by Western music, suggest research expertly covered by Cognitive Daily.

The Times has a piece on psychiatrist and Big Pharma target / critic David Healy, branded the ‘enfant terrible’ of psychiatry.

Brain decline reflected in patient’s brush strokes, with photos from New Scientist.

SciAm Mind Matters has an interview with free-thinking developmental psychologist Judith Rich Harris on who influences the social development of children.

High-tech hobbit phrenology? Homo floresiensis may have been cognitively advanced suggests skull study reported in Science News.

Salon reports on a US Army psychologist caught on tape saying “I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD“.

An intriguing new theory on why fever helps autism and how it could finger the brain area the locus coeruleus as key is covered in Time. Scientific paper here.

American Psychological Association Monitor magazine has a two part special on neuroimaging in psychology.

Neuroanthropology finds some vintage Oliver Sacks video footage and discusses the importance of integrating neurobiological and cultural viewpoints.

There’s a fascinating piece on the effect of gendered nouns on perception, plus a great experiment testing Shakespeare’s maxim ‘a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet’, on NPR radio.

Wired has a beautiful image gallery entitled ‘How to Map Neural Circuits With an Electron Microscope’.

A study on people with Parkinson’s disease being bad at lying is covered by Pure Pedantry.

PsyBlog asks whether visual attention can be truly divided.

Mind Hacks thinks about renaming Spike Activity to Spike Train because they’re so damn long these days.

Brains ads, via telepathy

Brain Ads is a web business where you can pay for your product promotion to be telepathically sent to anyone, and indeed, everyone, on the planet. I’ve yet to work out whether the guy is joking or serious.

It has been a long journey to discover that people were reading my mind, and although I came to think this already 7 years ago, everyone denied it. I was even given drugs without my knowledge. It all came down to trusting myself and accepting what I was experiencing.

Slowly I have explored the repercussions that having this ability has had on my life. Consequently, I also began to understand how other people had been using my ablity for their own personal, financial and emotional purposes.

As I realized that TV shows were following my daily thoughts and stores began bringing products I had been wishing for, it finally dawned on me that they were not just teasing me, they were actually getting more viewers and selling more products!

Everyone seemed to be getting a share of the bounty except me!

It’ll cost you $2,000 USD to have your one page advert sent to the world telepathically. Actually, it’s pretty cheap for the advertising world and at least it’s better value for money than a neuromarketing company.

And if that’s not your sort of brain advert, Street Anatomy have a gallery of print adverts that have used some rather nifty brain images.

I recommend click on the images in the gallery, as full size, the pictures are even more impressive.

Link to Brain Ads web business.
Link to Street Anatomy brain adverts gallery (via @mocost).

What are we celebrating?

I’ve just re-read the fantastic Social Issues Research Centre article on social and cultural aspects of drinking and it has an amusing section illustrating the difference between British and French drinking cultures which helps to explain why the British have a reputation for drunkenness when they visit the continent.

The article discusses the link between alcohol and the marking of celebrations in different cultures, noting that in the UK, serving alcohol socially is usually associated with marking the occasion as ‘special’ or ‘different’ in some way whereas in France, booze has a more neutral meaning, so social drink doesn’t so strongly imply something is being celebrated.

The British visit France. Hilarity ensues.

McDonald (1994) provides an amusing illustration of the different perceptions of the drinking/festivity connection in different European cultures, and the misunderstandings that can result:

“Many modern visitors from Britain on a first visit to France have had experience of this for themselves. Drinks may be offered at ten o‚Äôclock in the morning, for example. This is obviously going to be one of those days. What are we celebrating? During the midday meal, wine is served. What fun! What are we celebrating? The bars are open all afternoon, and people seem to be drinking. What a riot! What are we celebrating?

Pastis is served at six o‚Äôclock. Whoopee! These people certainly know how to celebrate. More wine is served with dinner. And so on. Wine has different meanings, different realities, in the two contexts, and a festive and episodic drinking culture meets a daily drinking culture, generating a tendency to celebrate all day. This has often happened to groups of young British tourists, now renowned in France and elsewhere in Europe for their drinking and drunkenness.”

Link to SIRC article ‘Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking’.

The unclear boundary between human and robot

I am pleased to see a letter in this week’s Nature that shows that I’m not the only neuroscientist concerned about the coming robot war. Brain researchers Olaf Blanke and Jane Aspell wrote in to warn about the use of brain-machine interfaces, not to control machines with thoughts, but to control thoughts with machines.

Imagine if insights from the field of cortical prosthetics in human and non-human primates were combined with research on bodily self-consciousness in humans. Signals recorded by multi-electrodes implanted in the motor cortex can already be used to control robotic arms and legs. Cognitive cortical prosthetics will allow the use of other cortical signals and regions for prosthesis control. Several research groups are investigating indications that the conscious experience of being in a body can be experimentally manipulated.

The frontal and temporoparietal signals that seem to be involved encode fundamental aspects of the self, such as where humans experience themselves to be in space and which body they identify with (O. Blanke and T. Metzinger Trends Cogn. Sci. 13, 7‚Äì13; 2009). If research on cortical prosthetics and on the bodily self were applied to humans using brain-controlled prosthetic devices, there might be no clear answer to Clausen’s question: which of them is responsible for involuntary acts?

It may sound like science fiction, but if human brain regions involved in bodily self-consciousness were to be monitored and manipulated online via a machine, then not only will the boundary between user and robot become unclear, but human identity may change, as such bodily signals are crucial for the self and the ‘I’ of conscious experience. Such consequences differ from those outlined by Clausen for deep brain stimulation and treatment with psychoactive drugs.

The letter is a follow-up to a recent Nature piece on potential new ethical issues raised by the development of implantable brain technology.

Unfortunately, these sort of in-house scientific debates rarely do much to raise the public consciousness about the importance of such issues.

However, I have high hopes for the future. Not least because a new film in the Terminator documentary series is soon to be released.

Link to letter in Nature.

Laugh, I almost died

I’ve just discovered some important psychological research on cartoons, which, I think, has an important social message for us all.

A 1983 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that cartoon violence is hilarious, no matter whether you’re adult or child, native or foreign, rich or poor, cat or mouse.

More aggressive cartoons are funnier

McCauley C, Woods K, Coolidge C, Kulick W.

J Pers Soc Psychol. 1983 Apr;44(4):817-23.

Independent rankings of humor and aggressiveness were obtained for sets of cartoons drawn randomly from two different magazines. The correlation of median humor and median aggressiveness rankings ranged from .49 to .90 in six studies involving six different sets of cartoons and six different groups of subjects, including children and adults, high and low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals, and native- and foreign-born individuals. This correlation is consistent with Freudian, arousal, and superiority theories of humor. Another prediction of Freudian theory, that high-SES subjects should be more appreciative of aggressive humor than low-SES subjects, was not supported.

This is a proud day for the Acme Corporation.

Link to PubMed study on the funniness of aggressive cartoons.

Follow your pride

The New York Times has an interesting article on the psychology of pride and how it has an impact on ourselves and others.

The piece starts with the predictable ‘credit crunch’ hook, but goes on to discuss some of the few studies that have investigated the effects of pride.

Considering that it’s supposedly one of the ‘deadly sins’, one study struck me as particularly interesting. The researchers asked participants to take a test and then gave them rigged scores…

The researchers manipulated the amount of pride each participant felt in his or her score. They either said nothing about the score; remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, that it was one of the best scores they had seen; or gushed that the person‚Äôs performance was wonderful, about as good as they had ever seen.

The participants then sat down in a group to solve similar puzzles. Sure enough, the students who had been warmly encouraged reported feeling more pride than the others. But they also struck their partners in the group exercise as being both more dominant and more likable than those who did not have the inner glow of self-approval. The participants, whether they had been buttered up or not, were completely unaware of this effect on the group dynamics.

‚ÄúWe wondered at the beginning whether these people were going to come across as arrogant jerks,‚Äù Dr. DeSteno said. ‚ÄúWell, no, just the opposite; they were seen as dominant but also likable. That‚Äôs not a combination we expected.‚Äù

The article also makes the interesting point that pride is one of those psychological concepts we discuss on a day-to-day basis but which has been largely neglect by research psychologists.

Wisdom is another, and probably by this measure, one of the most neglected psychological areas.

However, I noticed this week that the Archives of General Psychiatry published a review article entitled ‘Neurobiology of wisdom: a literature overview’ which seemed very commendable if not a little over-enthusiastic.

I’ve no idea why it was published in a psychiatry journal. Presumably, a drug company will shortly try and market one of their medications as a treatment for ‘judgement deficit disorder’ or ‘experience-based reasoning fatigue’.

You laugh now, but just wait six months.

Link to NYT article ‘When All You Have Left Is Your Pride’.
Link to summary of wisdom article.