Month: November 2009

I’ve just found a curious study on whether opera fans are more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one’s family in real life, in light of the fact that this is a common theme in several well known stage masterpieces.

It turns out that they are, and the researchers label the phenomenon the ‘Madame Butterfly effect’ after the famous opera of the same name where one of the lead characters kills themselves to avoid dishonour.

Opera subculture and suicide for honor.

Death Studies. 2002 Jun;26(5):431-7.

Stack S.

The influence of music-based subcultures on suicidality has been the subject of much debate but little scholarly research. While previous work has documented that suicide is a remarkably frequent cause of death in opera, it has not explored the related consequences on opera’s audience. In particular, the possible influence of the opera subculture on suicide acceptability has been largely unexplored. Suicide in the case of life without honor, the “Madame Butterfly Effect,” is a theme in opera. Persons who are drawn into and/or influenced by the opera subculture of honor are hypothesized to be more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one’s family. Data are from the national general social surveys (N = 845). A multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans. Only two variables, religiosity and education, are more closely related to suicide acceptability than opera fanship. These are the first empirical results on the subject of opera and suicide acceptability.

Link to PubMed entry for opera and attitudes to suicide study.

The latest edition of Monitor on Psychology has an excellent article on the psychology of terrorism, looking at both what motivates people to join terrorist organisations and what influences attitudes to terrorist groups.

Being an article in the publication of the American Psychological Association, it’s a round-up of American research on terrorism, however, there are two findings on terrorism which perhaps suggest one of the political challenges in dealing with the problem.

One of those is from terror management theory, in which making people temporarily conscious of a risk to their life or their impending mortality affects how people think about a range of issues, including response to terrorism:

To test whether the theory applies to the conflict between the Middle East and the West, Pyszczynski’s team conducted a set of studies in the United States, Iran and Israel. In all three countries, people who were subtly reminded of their mortality‚Äîand thus primed to cling more strongly to their group identities‚Äîwere more likely to support violence against the out group. Iranians were more likely to support suicide bombing against Westerners. Americans were more likely to advocate military force to battle Islamic extremists, even if it meant killing thousands of civilians. Israelis were more likely to condone violence against Palestinians.

So discussing mortal threat increases people’s desire for violent responses to perceived terrorism.

However, the article makes clear that radicalisation is potentially increased by violent responses and that successful deredicalisation programmes take a supportive rather than a punitive approach:

In preliminary research, Kruglanski and colleagues note that many of these programs share:

‚Ä¢ An intellectual component, often involving moderate Muslim clerics who hold dialogues with imprisoned detainees about the Qu’ran’s true teachings on violence and jihad.

‚Ä¢ An emotional component that defuses detainees’ anger and frustration by showing authentic concern for their families, through means such as funding their children’s education or offering professional training for their wives. This aspect also capitalizes on the fact that detainees are weary from their lifestyles and imprisonment.

• A social component that addresses the reality that detainees often re-enter societies that may rekindle their radical beliefs. A program in Indonesia, for instance, uses former militants who are now law-abiding citizens to convince former terrorists that violence against civilians compromises the image of Islam.

So the political dilemma seems to be that simply discussing the threat of terrorism makes people less likely to support the most effective counter-terrorist programmes, owing to the effect of mortality awareness increasing the desire for violent responses, which, if carried out, could increase support for terrorism in the target population.

Answers on a postcard please…

Link to article ‘Understanding terrorism’.

The Atlantic has an excellent article on how our assumptions about genetic vulnerability to mental illness may be misplaced, as many studies have missed out how the same genetic factors may cause people to thrive but only in quite specific circumstances.

One of the difficulties with psychiatry research is that it often has a sample bias, a blind spot if you will, as it typically studies people who turn up in front of mental health professionals because they’re a problem to themselves or others.

It finds social, psychological or biological factors associated with the problem and then speculates that these might be involved in causing the problem.

Many times throughout history, however, it has later been discovered that perfectly functional people have the same traits but they weren’t specifically looked for and so weren’t included when the theories were devised.

In this case, the article tackles how genes originally identified as ‘risk factors’ for mental illness, could, in fact, be equally well conceived of as ‘sensitivity factors’ that heighten response to all situations.

When these situations include tragedy, abuse, or what in the medical literature are euphemistically called ‘life events’ (essentially, the shit in ‘shit happens’) the result may be an increased chance of mental illness, but when the situations are positive, life-enhancing opportunities, this extra sensitivity may lead to better outcomes.

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness.

Link to Atlantic article ‘The Science of Success’.

Alien or anarchic hand syndrome is where you lose conscious control of one of your hands after brain damage, to the point where it seems to have a ‘will of its own’. There’s a great short article in this month’s Cortex examining how this curious phenomenon has appeared in fiction.

Famously, something similar appears in the film Dr Strangelove to the point where the disorder is sometimes called the ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’.

But it turns out that self-directed hands have also appeared in numerous other works of fiction. I was particularly taken by this plot device:

The phenomenon is usually accounted for as resulting from lesions to the contralateral Supplementary Motor Area (SMA). However, it has also been associated to the severance of the Corpus Callosum and William Boyd, in his short story, ‘‘Bizarre Situations’’, from the collection ‘‘On the Yankee Station’’, embraced this anatomical interpretation of the syndrome. The main character of this novel, who underwent a callosotomy, does not know whether or not his left hand shot his best friend’s wife dead.

The Cortex article is by neuropsychologist Sergio Della Salla who has done a great deal of the research on this condition himself and who also wrote a great article on the condition for The Psychologist back in 2005.

However, it misses out one of the most famous depictions of a hand with a ‘mind of its own’ – from the film The Evil Dead II – where Ash’s hand becomes possessed and he ends up having to chainsaw it off. There’s a clip of the scene here, which is a bit icky if you’re not into that sort of thing.

Link to ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’ in literature.