Month: June 2010

The Journal of ECT has a case report of patient who endured the terrifying delusion that her body was rotting away and being replaced by parts of a pig.

The lady concerned was admitted to hospital for surgery but later developed psychosis:

Approximately 4 weeks after the surgery, she started expressing somatic delusions that her entire body was slowly rotting away. She claimed that the bones in her body were replaced by those of a pig and her own body parts were decomposing. She expressed that she deserved the ‘punishment’ by God in this way (decomposing her body) because she did not perform certain religious rituals and did not take a promised pilgrimage. Over the next few days, she also voiced delusions referring to her children‚Äôs body parts being replaced by those with pig‚Äôs body parts.

The disturbing false belief is described as a simultaneous case of both Cotard delusion, where someone believes they are dead or their body is decomposing, and lycanthropy, where someone believes they are transforming or have transformed into an animal.

The patient was apparently successfully treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) although the authors, who like their patient, are based in India, give an interesting cultural interpretation of the delusion:

Interestingly, no reports of metamorphosis into pig/swine have been reported earlier. The metamorphosis into pig in our case can be understood from the Indian culture and mythological importance of the same. According to the Bhagavad Gita, Indra, king of the Hindu gods, was once transformed into a pig for lack of respect to guru Brihaspati. The index case also had strong guilt of not being able to perform certain religious rituals and a promised pilgrimage, which is similar to lack of respect to god and being punished for the same.

However, this is not the first case of a patient with simultaneous Cotard and lycanthropy delusions in the medical literature. In 2005, two Iranian psychiatrists reported on a patient who believed he had died and had also been transformed into a dog.

Link to latest combined Cotard and lycanthropy case report.

If you’ve ever wondered whether romantic music will enhance your chances of getting a date with the girl you fancy, wonder no more – science has the answer (and it turns out to be yes).

‘Love is in the air’: Effects of songs with romantic lyrics on compliance with a courtship request

Psychology of Music, Vol. 38, No. 3, 303-307 (2010)

Nicolas Guéguen, Céline Jacob, Lubomir Lamy

Previous research has shown that exposure to various media is correlated to variations in human behaviour. Exposure to aggressive song lyrics increases aggressive action whereas exposure to songs with prosocial lyrics is associated with prosocial behaviour. An experiment was carried out where 18—20-year-old single female participants were exposed to romantic lyrics or to neutral ones while waiting for the experiment to start. Five minutes later, the participant interacted with a young male confederate in a marketing survey. During a break, the male confederate asked the participant for her phone number. It was found that women previously exposed to romantic lyrics complied with the request more readily than women exposed to the neutral ones. The theoretical implication of our results for the General Learning Model is discussed.

There’s a great write-up of the study on Nou Stuff if you want more details.

Link to study abstract and DOI entry (via @danlevitin).
Link to write-up on Nou Stuff.

A completely fascinating study published on the Social Science Research Network looked at how likely a marriage was to survive depending on who else in the social network was getting divorced.

The study used data from the famous Framington Heart Study and found that while we tend to think of marriage as a ‘couple thing’ is turns out that even our most intimate bonds are deeply embedded into the social webs we weave.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Rose McDermott, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

Link to full text of study (via The Situationist).

Over-the-counter headache pill paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, reduces the pain of social rejection according to a new study just published in Psychological Science.

Based on past findings of an overlap between the brain circuits involved in physical pain and those involved in feeling rejected, the researchers wondered whether painkillers would also ease emotional distress stemming from exclusion.

Not all painkillers work the same though: some work by numbing the local nerves – like benzocaine-based sort throat lozenges that make your mouth go numb, while others affect the brain systems that process pain no matter where it originates from in the body.

Paracetamol is largely of the second type meaning if social rejection and physical pain really do share some of the same brain circuits, the drug should dull the hurt from both.

To test this out, the researchers recruited a group of healthy students and asked them to take a pill every day for three weeks: half got placebo while the other half were given paracetamol, although they didn’t know which they were taking.

Each evening the participants were asked to complete a standard questionnaire that asked about if they’d experienced hurt feelings or social exclusion during the day. While both groups started out reporting the same levels of hurt feelings, by the end of the three weeks, those taking paracetamol reported significantly less.

The second experiment of the study was similar but instead of filling in questionnaires the participants were asked to take part in a brain scanning experiment at the end of the three weeks.

Inside the scanner, they were asked to take part in a video game that involved tossing a virtual ball between players who they thought were human opponents. In reality, all the other moves were controlled by a computer programme that was preset to start excluding them from the game by not passing the ball to them.

The game was used in previous research and helped establish that brain activity in social rejection and physical pain overlapped.

The same overlap occurred in this new study, but the brain areas most linked to both physical and social pain – the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula – were less active in those who had been taking paracetamol for three weeks.

Those same participants also rated themselves as feeling less rejected on a brief post-game questionnaire than participants who had been taking placebo.

It’s an intriguing finding because it suggests that a common and cheap painkiller might be useful in reducing feelings of social rejection which can feature prominently in conditions like depression and borderline personality disorder.

If this was a brand new drug, you can bet the pharmaceutical industry would be jumping up and down with glee at these findings and would already be planning trials to see if it works as a useful treatment.

But because paracetamol is so old it can’t be patented and so there is virtually no profit to be made from it. Unfortunately, paracetemol can be toxic if taken too often, but it would be interesting to see if anyone does take up the baton to see if it might be a useful psychiatric treatment in appropriate doses.

Link to summary of study in PubMed.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom has just released a new document entitled ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’ which aims to educate therapists about people in consenting non-monogamous relationships.

The document reviews research on the well-being of people in open relationships and the emotional challenges that they can face, although, I’m afraid I don’t have the knowledge to judge how balanced the analysis actually is (where’s Meg Barker when you need her?)

However, I am reminded of a paragraph in the fantastic book Freud: A Very Short Introduction that discusses how the Freudian view of the traditional paired-off relationship runs into the wall of cultural differences:

Freud once thought of the Oedipus complex as universal; but it can be argued that it is very much a Western concept, which particularly applies to the small, ‘nuclear’ family. Do children brought up in extended families, in which polyagmy is the norm, experience the jealousy, possessiveness, and fear which Freud found in his patients? We do now know; but anecdotal evidence suggests the contrary. A Nigerian analyst told me that, during his training analysis, it took him over a year to make his analyst understand the entirely different emotional climate which obtains in a family in which the father has several wives.

Link to ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’.