Author: vaughanbell

The ever excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has a special edition on the psychology of stalking, investigating the drives and motivations of persistent stalkers as well as the impact on their victims.

In order to better understand stalking, Paul Mullen’s group have categorised people who stalk according to what motivates them. There’s the rejected stalker, usually ex-partners trying to reinstate a relationship. The intimacy seeker, who professes love but is oblivious to their victim’s feelings – people who stalk celebrities usually fall into this category and are the most persistent. There’s the incompetent suitor, who lacks the social skills necessary to establish an intimate relationship; the resentful stalker, who’s motivated by anger and a desire for revenge – they can be very frightening but rarely physically violent. And lastly, and thankfully the most rare, is the predatory stalker – they are driven by sadistic pleasure, their stalking is sexual in nature and often leads to attack.

The British Psychological Society magazine The Psychologist published an article on stalking a few years ago (pdf) also examining this intriguing yet disturbing phenomenon.

Link to audio and transcript of AITM on stalking.
pdf of article on stalking from The Psychologist.

After attending April’s “Who’s the greatest? Minds that changed our minds” debate, and last night’s “From bad to worse: the worst ideas on the mind” debate – both hosted by the Royal Institution, I thought I’d give a quick summary of the results.

In winning order:

Who’s the greatest
1) Aaron T. Beck inventor of CBT
2) Freud
3) Hans Eysenck
4) Karl Jaspers

Worst ideas on the mind
1) Lobotomy
2) Drug company advertising
3) Post-trauma counselling
4) Freudian theory of hysteria

The BBC kicks off a season on memory in a few days that aims to explore the impact of memory on our everyday lives as well as encouraging people to improve their memory to keep it sharp.

The Memory Experience includes a series of TV programmes, radio programmes and web resources that will also attempt to explain the psychology and neuroscience of memory to viewers and listeners.

You can even test your memory online and take part in a national survey of autobiographical memories of people in the UK.

Link to ‘Memory Experience’ TV website.
Link to ‘Memory Experience’ website with links to radio programmes.

I’m a bit skeptical about this story, but I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s on AOL’s news service (not known for their cutting edge journalism) or whether it’s because it has a cutesy video of the boy ‘connecting’ with dolphins. If accurate though, it’s quite an amazing talent.

Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes (he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him. About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben’s clicks tell him what’s ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense (wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has learned to gauge distances.

Link to article ‘The Boy Who Sees with Sound’.

Research has been published in today’s Lancet on the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in the population of UK children, suggesting that these disorders are more common than previously thought.

The paper reported that the prevalence of ASDs in the population is 116·1 per 10,000 of the population Рmeaning just over 1% of the population are likely to qualify for one of these diagnoses.

“One of these diagnoses” is the crucial phrase here, as Baird and colleagues were not looking just for ‘classic’ or ‘narrowly defined’ autism (diagnosed as childhood autism in the ICD-10), but at the whole of the autism spectrum disorders – also known as pervasive developmental disorders.

BBC News has a good write-up on the study including a crucial quote from the Lancet article’s main author Professor Gillian Baird:

Whether the increase is due to better ascertainment, broadening diagnostic criteria, or increased incidence is unclear.

In fact, the reported prevalence of the narrow form of autism was only 38.9 in 10,000 of the population, less than 0.4%.

In contrast, autism spectrum or pervasive developmental disorders have a much broader scope, and can include both a 10 year-old child with no language, severe learning disabilities, lack of social interest and restricted interests (‘narrow’ autism) to a bright articulate 10 year-old child who is socially awkward and bit inflexible in his thinking.

This is largely because of fairly recently included diagnoses such as ‘Asperger syndrome’, ‘Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specificed’ (PDD-NOS) and ‘Atypical Autism’ which, particularly for the latter two, have much wider criteria.

Although Baird and colleagues used systematic methods for making their diagnoses, it’s interesting that there’s quite a pressure on everyday clinicians to make these sort of diagnoses for children who are having emotional or behavioural problems.

Having one of these diagnoses entitles children to special educational support or even a place in an expensive yet well-supported special school in many areas of the UK.

Who wouldn’t want special support for their child who is doing badly in education and is constantly distressed by school life? This in turn puts pressure on local clinicians, and on the medical establishment, to recognise these difficulties by widening the diagnostic criteria.

I sometimes smile to myself when I see news stories about science and medicine being out of touch with society, since the history of medicine suggests that there is an intimate connection between medical decisions and social needs.

Link to abstract of Lancet study on ASD prevalence.
Link to BBC News story on research.