Category: News

This time last week Marjorie Kisner Mira was leaving home to make one of her regular community visits. She never returned, and after several days of frantic searching her barely recognisable body was found in a deserted area of Medell√≠n, Colombia’s second city.

A recently qualified clinical psychologist, Kisner worked for the city’s Peace and Reconciliation programme, a project to help ex-paramilitaries reintegrate into society as part of the solution to the ongoing civil war.

Only 34, she lived only a few blocks away from my current home, in the mid-scale barrio of Laureles, and was last seen alive in Villa Hermosa, a more troubled neighbourhood to the north of the city.

Unfortunately, this is not the only tragedy to befall Colombian psychology this week. While writing this post, news of the the murder of the 25-year-old psychologist Yamid Correa has emerged, a victim of the FARC left wing guerilla group.

Correa worked in the rural south of Colombia for the mobile medical unit of the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, a humanitarian organisation that helps families in crisis. He was travelling with colleagues when their vehicle was attacked, killing Correa and the driver and injuring a social worker, nutritionist and child specialist.

To understand why psychologists are at risk, you need to understand a little about the role of psychology in Colombian society.

Unless you work privately for well-off clients, clinical psychologists are not well paid here, making only 2-3 times the minimum wage. They are, however, well respected. Colombia has an official ‘day of the psychologist’ in November and psychology is considered key to solving some of the country’s social problems.

Some weeks ago I was in one of Medell√≠n’s poorest barrios, famous for a Spanish-built library that is imposing and inspiring in equal measure and I was surprised to see that the top floor of the library was dedicated to courses in communication and body language for the local children.

The idea being that if kids are better able to know when trouble is about to kick off, or are better able to resolve conflicts when they do occur, it will lead to a reduction in violence.

Unlike in Europe and the US, where social psychology is largely a topic for research, here it is a vibrant, active and applied discipline that is considered one of the principal methods for dealing with social problems.

It follows that psychologists often working in some of the most dangerous areas, attempting to diminish the cycle of violence by working within the most affected communities. But more than this, they are often working against the people who use violence to maintain control.

It’s difficult writing about the problems of Colombia because it a country cursed by the stereotypes of drugs and violence, when it is so much more than the clich√©s.

It is not that these problems don’t exist, it is simply that they are too frequently used to define the country when they are only part of the Colombia’s warm and vibrant human fabric.

Marjorie Kisner and Yamid Correa were two examples of how this fabric is woven through society and their deaths are an unfortunate tribute to their dedication to their work and their faith in a better future.

Link to a tribute to Marjorie Kisner from El Colombiano.
Link to news of Yamid Correa’s death from El Tiempo.

The editor of the The Psychologist magazine has just made the full issue of the January 2009 edition available online for free. It’s been uploaded to a service called issuu, so you can see every page as it appears in print, something that is usually only available to subscribers.

The Psychologist is the monthly magazine of The British Psychological Society, the professional body for UK psychologists, and aims to tackle current scientific and professional issues.

After a long time of it being, well, a bit dull, it has transformed in recent years and now looks sharp, has a dedicated journalist (friend of Mind Hacks, Christian), and is reaching out to a wider audience.

In the service of full disclosure, I’m an unpaid member of the editorial board, and am now a semi-regular columnist for the magazine discussing cross-cultural and interdisciplinary issues.

You can read my first column on page four where I discuss civil war, Jesuit priests and what psychologists can learn from Latin America.

The magazine also has feature articles on the psychology of gossip, testosterone and male behaviour, stigma and help-seeking, psychology and obesity and an interview with Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Link to January 2009 issue of The Psychologist.

Nature has just published an article arguing that the use cognition enhancing drugs by healthy individuals should be by accepted by society and appropriately regulated.

The authors are an interesting mix. They consist of several cognitive neuroscientists, a lawyer, an ethicist and the Nature editor-in-chief.

The piece follows a survey and discussion pieces published earlier this year by the magazine to try and kick-start the debate on these widely but often illicitly obtained substances.

It’s a thoughtful piece covering both practical and ethical issues which argues seven main points:

Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.

We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.

We call for enforceable policies concerning the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimize enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities.

We call for a programme of research into the use and impacts of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

We call for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

We call for information to be broadly disseminated concerning the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement.

We call for careful and limited legislative action to channel cognitive-enhancement technologies into useful paths.

However, I can’t help but thinking that the piece has the feel of trying to move the use of these drugs from the ‘bad’ to the ‘good’ category, where I tend towards thinking that we need to be less concerned about classifying drugs types and more about distinguishing between responsible and irresponsible drug use, which, of course, can differ between situation, purpose, and the specific drug being discussed.

For example, I wonder how easy it is to define ‘cognitive enhancers’. If someone has a drink before public speaking to help them relax and so make fewer mistakes – are they using a cognitive enhancer?

Link to ‘Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy’.

Neurotech analyst Zack Lynch has an interesting post on his Brain Waves blog about trying out the EyeSeeCam, a wearable camera that tracks eye movements so it can film exactly where the person is looking, allowing others to literally see the world through somebody else’s eyes.

Lynch wore the device while at the recent Society for Neuroscience conference and describes how it works:

EyeSeeCam is based on the combination of two technologies: an eye tracking and a camera motion device that operates as an artificial eye. The challenges in designing such a system are mobility, high bandwidth, and low total latency. These challenges are met by a newly developed lightweight eye tracker that is able to synchronously measure binocular eye positions at up to 600 Hertz. The camera motion device consists of a parallel kinematics setup with a backlash-free gimbal joint that is driven by piezo actuators with no reduction gears. As a result, the latency between eye rotations and the camera is as low as 10 milliseconds.

EyeSeeCam provides a new tool for fundamental studies in vision research, particularly, on human gaze behavior in the real world. This prototype is a first attempt to combine free user mobility with biological image stabilization and unrestricted exploration of the visual surround in a man-made technical vision system.

Does this remind anyone else of Strange Days?

Link to Zack Lynch on wearing the EyeSeeCam.
Link to scientific paper with cool video.

The densely amnesic Patient HM, one of the most famous and important patients in the history of neuroscience, has passed away.

HM, now revealed as Henry G. Molaison, suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy that was not helped by existing drugs and so was referred to neurosurgeon William Scoville in 1953.

Scoville attempted a new type of operation to remove the parts of the brain which triggered the seizures, cutting out the majority of the hippocampus on both sides of the brain, along with the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus.

This left HM with a dense antereograde amnesia, meaning that while his memory for pre-surgery events was generally very good, he was unable to create new conscious long-term memories.

His ability to learn new skills and obtain conditioned associations remained intact, however, and the differences in his memory abilities and the precise knowledge of which parts of the brain were missing allowed some of the first insights into the neuropsychology of memory.

The initial study on HM and his dense amnesia was first published in 1957 by Scoville and the young psychologist Brenda Milner. It has since become one of the most widely cited and widely taught of all neuropsychology case studies.

However, HM continued to participate in research studies since his initial appearance in the scientific literature and was known among researchers for his warm and easy going personality.

The most recent study on HM was published only this year and examined the linguistic content of his crossword puzzles, of which he’d been a fan of for the whole of his adult life. The study examined whether his language skills had been affected by years of dense amnesia.

They hadn’t, suggesting that once acquired, the maintenance of written language skills doesn’t seem to require intact medial temporal lobes.

Much of the later work with HM was completed in partnership with neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin, who wrote an article [pdf] for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2002 that was part tribute and part research summary, detailing his massive contribution to our understanding of memory.

UPDATE: The New York Times has an excellent obituary for HM.

Link to announcement of HM’s death (via MeFi).
Link to classic case study.
pdf of 2002 review article.

The new Scientific American Mind has just arrived and has a number of fantastic freely available features articles online.

One of the most interesting articles is about post-accident brain treatments, used in the hours and minutes following severe injury, to protect the brain and minimize the chances of long-term cognitive problems.

The best hope for improved healing lies neither in new medications, which have been disappointing so far, nor in exotic fixes involving stem cells and neural regeneration, which are at least a decade away, researchers say. Rather the biggest gains will likely result from advances in emergency room and intensive care practices that curtail the secondary damage from TBI. The methods include slowing the brain’s metabolism with cooling techniques, removing part of the skull to relieve intracranial pressure and injecting an experimental polymer “glue” to repair damaged brain cells.

Other articles discuss mild traumatic brain injury and the role of emotional disturbance in the following impairments, deep brain stimulation, the difficulty of making life changing decisions after our 20s, and intelligence throughout the animal kingdom.

Link to latest SciAmMind.

New York Magazine has an extensive and interesting piece arguing that ‘urban loneliness’ – the idea that people in densely populated cities are more lonely than people in the country, may be a myth.

The article looks at recent concerns, partly driven by popular books, that single living and hence loneliness is massively increasing in America.

However, the article also examines more recent research that has suggested that this may not be the case, and that while single living is increasing, social isolation is not, owing to the fact that earlier studies used measures of social participation based on the norms of society a generation ago.

The article covers research suggesting that the structure of urban society is changing, so city-dwellers make connections in different ways and at different stages in life. There is little evidence, however, for a great social crisis or that we’re simply becoming less social.

It’s a fascinating article that explores some intriguing social research that rarely gets widely discussed.

The writer largely riffs on a new book by neuroscientist John Cacioppo and writer William Patrick on the science of loneliness which also has a rather spiffy website.

Link to NYMag article ‘Alone Together’.
Link to Loneliness book website.

Life magazine have recently put their entire photo archive on Google Images and the Too Many Interests blog has picked out some of the most surprising psychology images.

The image on the right is my favourite, and probably results from psychologists trying to answer the question ‘how many babies does it take to change a lightbulb?’

The answer is, of course, just one, but as long as the baby has the appropriate scaffolding.

Yes, I’m making Jerome Bruner jokes.

Yes, I really should get out more.

Yes, I know I’ve promised that before.

Link to selection of psychology images from Life (via AHP).
Link to all Life psychology images on Google.

The excellent RadioLab has returned with a new series and the first is a programme on the psychology of how we make choices, and what can go wrong when brain damage prevents us from making decisions.

The RadioLab team talk to psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the ‘Paradox of Choice’ on why more choice means people tend to be less happy with their decision, to neuropsychologist Antoine Bechara on how a famous case of frontal lobe damage helped us understand why emotion plays a role in even the most mundane of choices, and to the ubiquitous Malcom Gladwell on the role of the unconscious.

As usual, it sounds beautiful and discusses some great research (the cake and working memory study is one of my favourites).

Interestingly, the programme lets slip that science-writer Jonah Lehrer’s fortchoming book is on choice and perhaps it’s no accident that Lehrer is a contributor to the programme so perhaps we can consider this a preview of some of the material he’ll cover.

Let’s hope so as it’s another great edition of RadioLab.

Link to programme webpage with streaming audio and mp3.

Cognition and Culture is a fantastic new group blog by a distinguished group of writers who include some of the leading figures in neuroscience, psychology and anthropology.

It’s from the International Cognition and Culture Institute and contains articles on everything from whether ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ are universal metaphors for relationships to the unexpected impact of pop-cognitive science on British schoolgirls (isn’t that just a Carry On film waiting to happen?).

There’s also plenty of great neuroscience coverage and it’s updated regularly. Good stuff.

Link to Cognition and Culture blog.

The New York Times takes a look at the ongoing controversy over one of the newest and most popular tests in psychology that claims to be able to detect hidden ‘implicit’ biases.

The test is the Implicit Association Test or IAT and we’ve discussed in it more detail before but it essentially relies on the fact that if you have a pre-existing association between two concepts, say, the concepts ‘blonde’ and ‘stupid’, making similar associations, by categorising words or pictures for example, will be faster than associating ‘blonde’ and ‘clever’ – because you’re going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

The test has famously found that automatic negative associations with minority groups are rife in society, even among people of those groups themselves.

However, a recent study looked at the real world effect of this and found something quite curious:

The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

This has been one part of an ongoing debate that has suggested that the IAT is not all it’s cracked up to be, while the originators of the test have fired back with the heavyweight review [pdf] of over 100 studies, defending their position and the IAT’s credentials.

The debate is important because the IAT has become one of psychology’s central tools for separating conscious and unconscious associations and has been applied to pretty much everything from racism to diagnosing psychopaths.

Link to NYT article ‘In Bias Test, Shades of Gray’.

Psychiatric News has a thought-provoking article criticising the current definition of major depression, suggesting that it has lead to normal sadness being diagnosed as a serious mental illness.

The authors give an abbreviated version of the argument they make in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder.

They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person’s life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship break up or other forms of personal tragedy are considered equally as ‘mentally ill’ as people who have similar mood disturbances but without a specific trigger.

Ample scientific evidence—ranging from infant and primate studies to cross-cultural studies of emotion—suggests that intense sadness in response to a variety of situations is a normal, biologically designed human response. Recent epidemiological analysis suggests that the consequences of stressors can be either normal or abnormal, similar to those for bereavement.1 In its quest for reliability via symptom-based definitions that minimized concern with the context in which the symptoms appeared, DSM unintentionally abandoned the well-recognized, scientifically supported, indeed commonsensical distinction between normal sadness and depressive disorder.

The blurring of the distinction between normal intense sadness and depressive disorder has arguably had some salutary effects. For example, it has reduced the stigma of depression and created a cultural climate that is more accepting of seeking treatment for mental illness. Many people with normal sadness might benefit from medication that ameliorates their symptoms. However, the usefulness of medication for normal sadness, and especially the trade-off between symptom reduction and adverse effects, has not been carefully studied—partly because the necessary distinctions do not exist within the current diagnostic system.

One of the most worrying effects of this trend has been a boom in the prescription of antidepressant medication and quotes the worrying figures that “Roughly 10% of women and 4% of men in the United States take antidepressant medication at any time. By 2000, antidepressants were the best-selling prescription drugs of any type”.

The debate over whether depression is being over-diagnosed hit the pages of the British Medical Journal last year with the both pro and anti positions being argued with full force.

Link to PsychiatricTimes article ‘An epidemic of depression’.

The cognitive science journal Cortex has just released a special issue on the neuropsychology of paranormal experiences and belief, and contains a fantastic article on hallucinations induced by the Ganzfeld procedure.

The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to ‘unstructured’ sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones.

It is probably best known for its uses in parapsychology experiments, but it is also used to induce hallucinations and sensory distortions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sensory experiences.

The article reviews the sorts of hallucinations reported in during these experiments and discusses what electrophysiology (EEG or ‘brain wave’) studies tell us about what happens in the cortex when these perceptual distortions kick off.

Some of the descriptions of hallucinations are really quite striking:

“For quite a long time, there was nothing except a green-greyish fog. It was really boring, I thought, ‘ah, what a non-sense experiment!’ Then, for an indefinite period of time, I was ‘off’, like completely absent-minded. Then, all of sudden, I saw a hand holding a piece of chalk and writing on a black-board something like a mathematical formula. The vision was very clear, but it stayed only for few seconds and disappeared again. The image did not fill up the entire visual field, it was just like a ‘window’ into that foggy stuff.”

“an urban scenery, like an empty avenue after a rain, large areas covered with water, and the city sky-line reflected in the water surface like in a mirror.”

“a clearing in a forest [Lichtung], a place bathed in bright sun-shine, and the trunks of trees around. A feeling of a tranquile summer afternoon in a forest, so quiet, so peaceful. And then, suddenly, a young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her blond long hair waving in the air. The image of the entire scene was very clear, with many details, and yes, the colours were very vivid.”

“I can see his face, still, it’s very expressive… [I could see] only the horse that comes as if out of clouds. A white horse that jumped over me.”

“A friend of mine and I, we were inside a cave. We made a fire. There was a creek flowing under our feet, and we were on a stone. She had fallen into the creek, and she had to wait to have her things dried. Then she said to me: ‘Hey, move on, we should go now’.”

“It was like running a bob sleigh on an uneven runway right down… [There] was snow or maybe water running down… I could hear music, there was music coming from the left side below.”

“In the right side of the visual field, a manikin suddenly appeared. He was all in black, had a long narrow head, fairly broad shoulders, very long arms and a relatively small trunk…. He approached me, stretching out his hands, very long, very big, like a bowl, and he stayed so for a while, and then he went back to where he came from, slowly.”

You can simulate the Ganzfeld procedure in your own home by taping two half ping-pong balls over your eyes and listing to the radio tuned to static in an evenly lighted room.

The other articles in the special issue are also fascinating, and range from a study finding greater body asymmetry is related to higher levels of unusual beliefs – likely reflecting asymmetrical brain development, to an experiment looking at the cognitive psychology of people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

Needless to say, there’s many more fascinating studies and Cortex has the advantage of not only being a leading neuropsychology journal but also making its material freely available as open-access articles. Enjoy!

 
Link to Cortex special issue.

The LA Times has an op-ed piece on the current arguments over whether the new version of the DSM, the influential diagnostic manual of mental illness, should be developed transparently or whether decisions should continue to be made in secret as is currently the case.

The DSM-V is due out in May 2012, and all mental illness and proposals for the classifications of new mental illness are currently under review by the DSM-V committee.

While the manual tends only to be used clinically in North and South America (Europe uses the World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 manual), it has a far greater reach because psychiatric research all over the world has a tendency to use DSM diagnoses for consistency.

However, it will have a particularly strong impact in the United States, owing to the health insurance-based health care system that tends only to recognise ‘official’ diagnoses as worthy of funding.

Needless to say, both the pharmaceutical industry and pressure groups have a vested interest in getting specific disorders recognised and there is apparently a great pressure on the committees to include certain concepts.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

Spitzer, a key figure in the development of the current diagnostic system, is pushing for transparency so everyone can see the minutes and correspondence to keep an eye on the potential pressures brought to bear on the members.

Indeed, one of the criticisms of the past committees has been that large numbers of the central decision-makers have had financial ties to the drug industry, a trend which is apparently not much different for the DSM-V committee.

There’s also a good commentary over at Furious Seasons if you’re interested in some more background to the controversy.

Link to LA Times article.
Link to Furious Seasons follow-up.

The New York Times has an article about the interaction between the internet and psychosis that explored online communities that may be focused on delusional beliefs or comprised almost entirely of people who are having psychotic experiences.

If this seems slightly familiar, it’s because it’s partly based on a social network analysis study I did in 2006 with some UK colleagues (which we covered previously).

In a nutshell, the study specifically selected a set of websites describing personal experiences of mind control that were independently assessed by three psychiatrists as describing delusional experiences. Using social network analysis, the study demonstrated that these people were part of a social network just like other online and offline communities.

This is interesting because the diagnostic criteria for a delusion excludes any belief that is “not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture”, whereas these individuals have formed an online community based around their delusional belief, creating a paradox.

Perhaps the most sensible comment in the article in the closing paragraph which quotes psychiatrist Ken Duckworth:

Psychiatrists and researchers say it is too soon to say whether communication on the Internet among people who may be psychotic will negatively effect their illnesses.” This is a very complex little corner,” said Dr. Ken Duckworth, the medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group. “Some people may find it’s healing, but these are really hard questions. The Internet isn’t a cause of mental illness, it’s a complicating new variable.”

Actually, I’m misquoted in a very minor way at the end, where I’m described as saying that research on ‘alien abductees’ has suggested they have severe memory problems.

In fact, we know from the work of psychologist Susan Clancy that the memory problems are definitely there but are actually quite subtle.

Link to NYT article.
Link to text of social network analysis study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

A new season of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind has just started and begins with a discussion of a fantastic study that used a version of the popular children’s game Guess Who? to investigate the social niceties of discussing race.

The programme also tackles the UK’s new mental health act and the alarmingly high rate of suicide in older women in Britain’s South Asian communities.

Despite being presented by the brilliant Claudia Hammond, it’s still not quite as good as its Australian namesake and still has a slightly parochial feel to it.

However, it is also known for flashes of brilliance and there should be a few of those in the coming weeks as the new season progresses.

Link to first in the new season of BBC All in the Mind.
Link to programme webpage.