Author: vaughanbell

The New Yorker magazine has just published an important article questioning whether the widespread use of solitary confinement in the US prison system should be outlawed as a form of torture.

It’s an in-depth piece that piece that looks at numerous cases of people who have experienced solitary confinement first hand, either as hostages or legitimate prisoners, and discusses the psychological impact of this extreme form of social isolation.

I’ve just looked up the research on the effects of solitary confinement and there’s remarkably little, although everything I could find that directly addressed the question found that it had a negative impact on the mind.

In fact, the ‘The Istanbul statement on the use and effects of solitary confinement’ [pdf], an international consensus statement on solitary confinement, notes that it “harms prisoners who are not previously mentally ill and tends to worsen the mental health of those who are” and questions whether it breaches UN Human Rights laws.

It also describes the punishment as being linked to “long list of symptoms ranging from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and psychosis”.

The New Yorker article contrasts the research findings with the fact that the US has a whole ‘supermax‘ prison system dedicated to solitary confinement and the highest population of prisoners kept in these conditions in the world.

It also notes the fact that there is no evidence that solitary confinement actually reduces prison violence, which it is intended to do.

The article is an important and hard-hitting piece that tries to get to convey the impact of extreme social isolation and asks some difficult questions over a common practice in the US justice system.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Hellhole’.

A study ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology sadly supports the stereotype that chicks dig men in flashy cars.

The attractiveness-boosting effect only affects women’s perceptions of men, however. Men were unmoved by chicks in hot rods, and neither sex’s attractiveness ratings for same-sex drivers was affected by the car they were in.

Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings.

Dunn MJ, Searle R.

Br J Psychol. 2009 Mar 19. [Epub ahead of print]

Previous studies have shown that male attractiveness can be enhanced by manipulation of status through, for example, the medium of costume. The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car.

A between-subjects design was used whereby the above photographic images were presented to male and female participants for attractiveness rating. Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

It would appear that despite a noticeable increase in female ownership of prestige/luxury cars over recent years males, unlike females, remain oblivious to such cues in matters pertaining to opposite-sex attraction. These findings support the results of previous status enhancement of attractiveness studies especially those espousing sex differences in mate preferences are due to sex-specific adaptations.

An interesting study testing a well-known stereotype, but what the world really wants to know is whether the cliché about men with flashy cars having small penises is true.

Considering the car industry and scientific psychology were born at about the same time, it’s disgraceful that such a fundamental study in the psychology of social willy waving has yet to be completed.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

I’ve just found a description of some spectacular and fantastical hallucinations from a case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, reported in a review article on the neuroscience of this curious hallucinatory state.

It’s one of the most florid cases I’ve ever come across and the experience seems both wondrous and terrifying in equal measure:

A 73-year-old woman who lived alone presented with anxiety-provoking visual hallucinations. Inch-long black ants scurried across her kitchen floor, walls and windows. In desperation, she began spraying insecticide throughout the house. Her neighbour, whose features were seemingly masked by the insects, called an ambulance. Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department.

A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses’ heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds.

She once caught herself telling them to get off a road at which point they donned diamond coats, jumped into a wooden carriage, and rode up to her bedside. Ants in the mirror were at times replaced by an elephant’s trunk blotting out half her face. Her hair in the reflection flowed with cobwebs and the basin was matted with hair and whiskers.

Cobwebs spilled from her cereal bowl at breakfast. The bathroom floor was covered with water that vanished whenever she tried to mop it up. The carpet in the room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake, and slither out the door. A little girl and boy with a black and white dog stood next to the bed, as did extraterrestrial-like beings with large domed-shaped heads and slitted black eyes.

Twisted heads with grotesque faces and bulbous eyes peered out from the wall, while little red carriages, trains and push bikes disappeared into it. Further history revealed an experience of ‘ant’ hallucinations 4 months previously but the images disappeared after 2 weeks. She did not seek medical advice at that time fearing that she might be considered ‘a bit odd’.

Throughout the hospital admission she was rarely free from hallucinations and would repeatedly ask for reassurance that she was ‘not going mad’. Two months after discharge the hallucinations were still intrusive. She owned a small black dog but would see several dogs resembling oversized greyhounds with unusually long snouts in her daughter’s yard.

A man and a goat, both wearing grey hats and overcoats, often stood beside her before wandering off together down a crooked road. She grew accustomed to seeing a baby seated on the lounge chair wearing grey clothes. It smiled but made no sounds. Caterpillars and tree frogs began joining her for the evening bath.

She began to notice that distractions, such as listening to the radio and attending to household chores, dampened the hallucinations, while solitude, particularly during the evening hours, tended to heighten them.

At follow-up 1 year later, she was experiencing very much the same hallucinations but was more cognisant of their unreality and less anxious as a result. The only new hallucination that had since appeared was that of a bright kaleidoscopic array which would transiently emanate from her central field of vision.

The article has another case study which is also quite spectacular, and, curiously, also features a Roman chariot.

One of the most interestingly things about Charles Bonnet syndrome is that fact that it is typically associated with the most complex hallucinations, but usually due to damage to the retina or early visual pathway.

In other words, damage to the part of the visual system which deals with the most basic aspects of vision (detecting lines, light and dark and so on) can cause the most spectacular visual distortions.

It’s not fully clear why this is, but one of the most popular theories is that visual information gathered by the initial part of the system is used to limit the interpretations made by the perceptual processes later in the stream which are focussed on working out significance and meaning.

We can see this system breaking down a bit when we see momentary ‘pictures’ in TV static or in flames, as the fuzzy input means many interpretations can be made.

However, when we’re looking at more ordered scenes, our interpretation is usually more constrained – it’s more difficult to interpret light patterns from a pencil as something else.

The theory goes that when we can’t process light patterns very successfully, owing to damage to the early visual system, the interpretation processes go wild, so hallucinations are ‘released’ and cavort unconstrained through our conscious mind.

Link to article on the neuroscience of Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The new edition of Scientific American Mind is out an it has an excellent cover article on the psychological effects of humour and laughter.

It’s a remarkably wide-ranging article, covering everything from the effect on the immune system, to laughter’s pain killing properties to its beneficial effect on mental health.

There’s also an interesting aside on the role of humour in attraction:

In 2006 psychologists Eric R. Bressler of Westfield State College and Sigal Balshine of McMaster University in Ontario reported that women are more likely to consider a man in a photograph a desirable relationship partner if the picture is accompanied by a funny quote attributed to the man. In fact, the women preferred the funny men despite rating them, on average, less intelligent and less trustworthy.

Although the men in Bressler and Balshine’s study did not prefer witty women as partners, other research indicates that both men and women value a “sense of humor” when choosing a partner. Either way, males do seem to like ladies who laugh at their jokes. A 1990 study suggests that when women and men chat, the amount of laughing by the woman indicates both her interest in dating the man and her sexual appeal to the man. (The man’s laughter did not relate to attraction in either direction.)

The issue also has freely available online articles on ‘brain training’, the psychological effect of architecture and personality disorder with many more in the print edition.

Link to April’s SciAmMind.