Who would have guessed the Iraq war would be so uplifting to the children of Baghdad? According to research funded by the US Military, the invasion boosted the self-esteem of Iraqi teenagers.
The BPS Research Digest covers the study which took place in the summer of 2004, a year after the invasion.
With this new found benefit of invasion, the next target seems obvious – those self-deprecating Canadians!
Link to BPS Research Digest write-up of the study.
Psychology Today is a bimonthly US magazine that’s traditionally been thought of as a ‘pop psychology’ publication but has made efforts in recent years to be more scientific. They’ve just launched a blog network and have attracted some big names in academic psychology to contribute.
Authors include psychiatrist Peter Kramer, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and MIT media lab cognitive scientist Dan Ariely, as well as the regular editorial staff from the magazine.
Some of the authors aren’t due to start in earnest until the beginning of March, but there’s some good material on there already and looks very promising.
Link to Psychology Today blogs.
A poster on Metafilter has collected together news reports on the growing number of psychologists leaving the American Psychological Association in protest at their failure to condemn members who take part in the ‘War on Terror’ interrogations.
One of the most surprising aspects is from a contributor who suggests that the APA released a different text to the one approved by a 2006 committee vote that was intended to condemn abusive practices by psychologists.
The campaign group Coalition for an Ethical Psychology released a report [pdf] claiming that the original statement reviewed by the committee defined torture in terms of the United Nations criteria, but the published resolution had been changed to refer to the US Constitution, providing a definition of torture that is being used to allow abusive interrogations.
Strong public protests over the PENS Report [which condoned psychologists participating in interrogations, without mentioning torture or other abuse] prompted the APA Divisions for Social Justice and others to craft a new resolution prohibiting psychologists from participating in abusive detainee interrogations. In August 2006, after much discussion and debate, the APA’S Council of Representatives passed a Resolution Against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.
However, the version published by the APA differed from the version discussed and passed by the Council, in at least one significant respect: in the document reviewed by Council, psychologists were instructed to look to the United Nations Principles of Medical Ethics and international instruments for definitions of unethical behavior and “torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” In the published document, the definition of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment instead was taken from the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution, precisely the same definitions that had been used by the CIA, the DoD and the Bush Administration to assert that the abusive interrogation techniques in use at Guant√°namo, CIA black sites, and elsewhere were not “torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
The more recent August 2007 resolution refers to both the United Nations and the US Constitution criteria, presumably making for a much stricter definition, although still fails to define some key definitions concerning distress.
However, the fact that an earlier version was ‘switched’ is quite concerning as it has become clear that psychologists are an incredibly valuable part of interrogation or ‘Behavioral Science Consultation Teams’ (aka ‘biscuit teams’).
In contrast, psychologists’ colleagues in both the American medical and psychiatric associations have outright banned their members from participation.
In practice, this hasn’t stopped some physicians becoming complicit in these interrogations, but many US psychologists are embarrassed by their parent organisations unwillingness to take the equivalent ethical line when the profession is increasingly seeking equal status to doctors.
Link to MeFi on psychologists leaving the APA (via BoingBoing).
Mark Gurrieri was diagnosed with a brain tumour after shaking a doctor’s hand. BBC News has an interesting piece on the incident, where the doctor noticed that Gurrieri’s hand was spongy and swollen, suggesting a growth hormone problem that can be caused by a tumour on the brain’s pituitary gland.
Mr Gurrieri underwent tests and was found to have acromegaly – caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland which leads to excess growth hormone.
The condition is seen in just three people per million, and can have serious effects if left undiagnosed.
It causes problems with vision and can lead to diabetes and blood pressure problems.
If untreated acromegaly can also cause premature death.
Mr Gurrieri thought his hands were getting bigger because of too much DIY and working in his restaurant kitchen.
Link to BBC News article ‘Handshake diagnosed brain tumour’.
You can promote almost anything with a few words about the brain because it sounds like science. This week’s Bad Science column takes a close look at ‘Brain Gym’, a scheme introduced into large numbers of UK schools that attempts to boost brain function by getting the kids to do, well, complete nonsense.
For example, a “back and forward movement of the head” apparently “increases the circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking”. According to this wisdom, a good clip around the ear has remarkable brain boosting properties.
One of my favourite examples of nonsense neuroscience is the use of the ‘explanation’ that an activity is pleasurable because it ‘boosts endorphins’ or ‘releases opioids’ in the brain.
Here’s a great example from the widely distributed and widely discarded London newspaper The Metro which managed to give a cod brain science explanation in a (NSFW but remarkably dull) article on bondage and whipping.
Apparently:
The person getting the flogging (the bottom) gets pleasure from natural opiates generated in the brain and the person doing the flogging (the top) gets pleasure watching their partner… Even a runner’s high after exercise is nothing compared with the boost of natural opiates that can be released in a flogging.
Apart from the fact that they don’t know the difference between opiates (derivatives of the opium poppy) and opioids (any substance that binds to opioid receptors, including the brain’s naturally produced chemicals) this really explains nothing about why being flogged is supposed to be pleasurable.
Opioids are definitely part of the experience of pleasure, but they’re also part of the experience of pretty much everything else.
Experiencing pain is one thing that definitely causes increased opioid activity, but if pleasure were that simple, we’d find fighting so much fun that Planet Earth would be be like Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a laugh track.
These attempts at an explanation are really nothing more than placebos that still don’t tell us how we experience pleasure as a result of the activity, or what role opioids play in this process.
Even if pleasure was purely opioid release, the trick with an explanation is to explain how and why this occurs, not just say that it does.
It’s not that these simple links aren’t important, but they’re not explanations in themselves, even though they’re often presented as such.
My other pet hate is when something pleasurable is described as having the same effect on the brain as one of the four dopamen of the neurocalypse: ‘drugs’, ‘sex’, ‘gambling’ and ‘chocolate’.
Almost any one is used to explain the effect of the others, and if you’re really lucky, all four will be invoked to make for an exciting-sounding but often scientifically empty article.
This is another example where the crucial information is how these activities have their effect on the dopamine system, not the fact that they do.
So, as with the faux science that supposedly supports ‘Brain Gym’, always ask yourself how it occurs, rather than relying on the illusion of brain magic.
Link to Bad Science article on why we fall for brain-based promotions.
Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror.
It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services.
He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
By contrast when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example, that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows not the sadism of a few ‘creeps’, but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA’s psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.
McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 ‘Manipulation of Human Behavior’ research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 ‘Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual‘.
He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.
Interestingly, he suggests that Guantanamo is both being used as a centre for gathering intelligence, as well as a sort of ‘lab’ for testing and developing new methods.
McCoy is the author of the recent book ‘A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror’ on which this talk is based, in which he also argues that the work on Donald Hebb and Stanley Milgram were partly funded by the CIA to help understand how to break through people’s psychological defences.
The lecture has a long introduction by one of the University’s dignitaries, so you can skip to 11:30 when it really starts in earnest.
Advances in the History of psychology has also been keeping track of recent discussion about the book and recent findings about the role of the CIA in funding American psychology research in the 50s and 60s.
Link to YouTube video of McCoy lecture.
In light of the unusual behaviour displayed by some of NASA’s astronauts in recent times, the American space agency is aiming to use increased psychological screening for its potential space travellers.
They say there is nothing new orbiting the sun and, as testament to this, the exact same issue was discussed way back in 1959, in a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry on ‘space psychiatry’.
It’s a rather curious discussion to say the least, showing a mix of 1950s prejudice, naive awe, and some rather charming if not slightly potty Freudian analysis.
An article by A.J Silverman and colleagues discusses the possibilities of using psychological selection techniques for space crew and notes that it should exclude “the person with a history of constantly fighting and rebelling both against peers and authority figures, as well as those with pressing homosexual or other major neurotic conflicts.”
Silverman was writing at a time when homosexuality was still 15 years away from being de-listed as a mental illness but the issue of whether to send an openly gay person into space is still a hot topic. Apparently, Lance Bass, ex-‘N Sync singer and commercial astronaut, might be the first.
Despite a few throwaway comments, the authors of the ‘space psychiatry’ articles actually spend much more time discussing the terrors of outer space, and how they relate to the terrors of inner space, rather than how to screen crews.
Air Force Captain George Ruff notes two serious sources of space anxiety: one is “the possibility that equipment failure or operator error may cause death within a few seconds”. The other, is “the subject’s infantile fantasies” (Houston, we have an unresolved Oedipus complex).
In contrast, Eugene Brody sees ‘separation anxiety’ as the most likely source of psychological disturbance. This is what young children suffer when they are taken, even temporarily, from their mothers.
Brody thought this would be equally as stressful when astronauts were separated from ‘mother earth’ and suggested that the consequences could be dire:
These factors plus the sensory input patterns which may be encountered in space flight, and such apparently basic fears as that of impenetrable darkness might in theory at least be expected in time to produce-even in a well-selected and trained pilot-something akin to the panic of schizophrenia. The regressive defense may be revealed in symptom formations such as hallucinations or delusions…”
In other words, Brody is arguing that the existential loneliness of space may break down the usual defences of astronauts causing them to experience their innermost conflicts as delusions and hallucinations, imposed upon reality.
What’s remarkable, is this is strikingly similar to the main themes in Stanislaw Lem’s influential novel Solaris which was published in 1961, two years after the American Journal of Psychiatry special issue.
It’s interesting to speculate that Lem may have been inspired to explore these concepts after they were discussed by American psychiatrists and disseminated by starry-eyed futurists.
Link to AJP ‘Symposium of Space Psychiatry’ (sadly, closed access).
Link to USA Today article on astronaut selection.
Link to Wired article on hopes for gay astronauts.
The new Scientific American Mind has just arrived online with its customary couple of feature articles freely available online. The issue also has a review of psychology and neuroscience blogs, which kindly features Mind Hacks.
According to the review SciAmMind “offers up a hearty helping of science” whereas blogs offer “extra crumbs of brain candy”. Nothing like getting patronised by the best I guess.
Apart from that though, they actually say some pretty complementary things about a number of online mind and brain blogs, so it can’t be all that bad.
One of their freely available feature articles is on the psychology and neuroscience of kissing.
Human lips enjoy the slimmest layer of skin on the human body, and the lips are among the most densely populated with sensory neurons of any body region. When we kiss, these neurons, along with those in the tongue and mouth, rocket messages to the brain and body, setting off delightful sensations, intense emotions and physical reactions.
Of the 12 or 13 cranial nerves that affect cerebral function, five are at work when we kiss, shuttling messages from our lips, tongue, cheeks and nose to a brain that snatches information about the temperature, taste, smell and movements of the entire affair. Some of that information arrives in the somatosensory cortex, a swath of tissue on the surface of the brain that represents tactile information in a map of the body. In that map, the lips loom large because the size of each represented body region is proportional to the density of its nerve endings.
The other freely available article apparently discusses what capitalism and the corporate world can tell us about the psychology of competition and altruism, but seems largely an enthusiastic description of Google’s business practices – novel as they may be.
Link to article ‘Affairs of the Lips’.
Link to article ‘Do All Companies Have to be Evil?’.
You know it’s a bad day when it starts raining penises during a media interview. Wired has an article on the ‘griefer’ subculture, sociopaths of the virtual world.
Essentially, they are virtual world vandals, or online versions of those local kids on the street who love shouting abuse and messing the place up.
Like most other aspects of human behaviour, antisocial behaviour transfers from the offline to the online world.
But like many subcultures on the internet, it is a new phenomenon in that people who would never normally get a chance to meet many others who share their socially unpopular beliefs, suddenly have access to a huge, distributed community of such people.
One of the most notorious ‘griefer’ attacks, before the term was even conceived, was described in the landmark article ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’, and describes an antisocial user taking over a text-based environment
It was one of the first pieces to convince people that internet interactions could have serious emotional effects, and is widely cited in the internet psychology literature.
The Wired article discusses the motivations (and even, the ‘philosophy’) behind these groups, as well as their impact on the increasingly commercial virtual worlds.
Link to Wired article on ‘griefer subculture’.
The New England Journal of Medicine has just published a study that found the effectiveness of 12 of the most popular antidepressants has been exaggerated because pharmaceutical companies have been ‘hiding’ data from negative drug trials.
Known as the ‘file drawer effect‘, it involves submitting only positive results to be published in scientific journals.
This type of selective publishing was recognised as a pervasive problem in medicine, and to try and combat this, a rule was introduced that required all clinical trials to be registered before they began.
This means no-one could claim that a negative study didn’t occur and others could try and track down the data if needed.
The researchers in this new study decide to do exactly this. They examined the American Food and Drug Admistration (FDA) register and requested data from all 74 trials of the most commonly used antidepressant drugs.
They then compared the results from all the trials, to just the trials that had been published in the medical literature.
The findings are quite shocking:
A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published.
Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies).
According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive.
In other words, when all the studies are examined, there’s only about 50-50 chance that a scientific study of an antidepressant drug will find it more effective than placebo in treating depression.
The Wall Street Journal has a good write-up of the study, from which I’ve also taken the graph below. It describes which antidepressant drugs have their apparent effect most boosted by the hiding of negative findings.
As we live in the age of ‘evidence based medicine’, doctors will used the available evidence to decide which drugs to prescribe.
Needless to say, distortions in the published results can affect individual patients owing to the effect on doctors decision-making.
Link to abstract of study.
Link to good write-up from the Wall Street Journal.
Pay close attention. The New York Times has an article on the Boltzmann brain theory that argues that random fluctuations in the universe could create self-aware entities. In other words, brains, being spontaneously created by the universe.
It turns out, the theory isn’t solely about brains. It argues that matter could be created from fluctuations in the universe and it is mathematically conceivable that one of these fluctuations could create matter configured as a conscious creature.
Like Nick Bostrom’s ‘we could be living in a computer simulation’ argument, it takes mathematically possibilities to their most astonishing extreme.
Regardless of the infinitesimally small probability of this actually happening, it does lead to some wonderful language in the article.
Where else are you going to read the sentence: “The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite.”
Link to NYT article ‘Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?’
Nature Neuroscience’s NeuroPod podcast has a special on the recent Society for Neuroscience annual megaconference that picks up on some of the more interesting new developments.
There’s loads of fascinating new findings in there, but don’t miss the last few minutes of the podcast where Prof Eleanor Maguire talks about ongoing work with London Taxi drivers.
Maguire’s team famously discovered in 2000 that London Taxi drivers have bigger than average hippocampi, a brain structure known to be heavily involved in learning routes and spatial representations.
The study found that the size of the hippocampus correlated with the length of time being a taxi driver, suggesting that the extensive training and navigational experience may change and develop the hippocampus.
The study won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for research “that cannot, or should not, be reproduced” but was actually one of the first studies to show likely experience-related changes to the structure of the human brain.
In the podcast Maguire discusses a new study which updates the findings and suggests that the taxi drivers’ pumped hippocampi come at a cost.
While their navigational abilities were increased, their ability to learn new associations between things (another function of the hippocampus) was poor, and the size of the anterior hippocampi (a more forward area) was actually smaller.
This suggests that overdevelopment in one area of the hippocampus may actually reduce development in another.
mp3 of NeuroPod special at SfN 2007 conference.
Link to NeuroPod index page.
pdf of Eleanor Maguire’s Taxi driver update study.
Newsweek has a fantastic article on the psychology and neuroscience behind the politics of fear which draws directly on examples from the current and past US elections.
American politics in particular it seems, has, in recent years, used fear as a way of trying to motivate voters and support particular candidates.
The Newsweek article looks at why fear is such a potent force in decision-making and what psychology research has shown us about how invoking concepts of death or threat actually affects our reasoning and desires.
“When we’re insecure, we want our leaders to have what’s called an ‘unconflicted personality’,” says political psychologist Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. “Bush was very clear in his beliefs and had no doubts, but Kerry was painted as a flip-flopper…
That real-world observation has been replicated in lab studies. In one experiment Greenberg and colleagues ran during the 2004 campaign, volunteers who completed a questionnaire that reminded them about their own inevitable death (how thoughts of their own death made them feel and what they thought would happen to them physically after they died) expressed greater support for Bush than voters of similar leanings who were not reminded of mortality. The researchers also found that subliminal reminders of death increased support for Bush (and decreased support for Kerry) even among liberals. It’s not clear if such responses in the lab would endure in an actual voting booth. So perhaps one should not be too cynical about the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to raise the terror-threat level on Election Day 2004. “Political use of fear is not something new,” says NYU’s LeDoux. “But certainly the ante has been upped. We’ve gone from ‘vote for me or you’ll end up poor’ to ‘vote for me or you’ll end up dead’.”
Documentary maker Adam Curtis argued in his three-part series The Power of Nightmares (video: parts one, two, three) that since the cold war politicians across the globe have been attempting to promote the idea of foreign threats so they can then promise to deliver us from them.
Curtis is by no means a neutral commentator, but as he’s demonstrated with a number of his documentaries, his analysis of politics as an essentially psychological process is an interesting take on world affairs.
My only reservation about the Newsweek piece is that it takes the somewhat simplistic line that the amygdala equals fear in the brain.
The amygdala must have the worst PR of all of the brain structures, but to set the record straight, there’s more to the amygdala than fear, and more to fear than the amygdala.
Neurophilosophy has a guide to the neurobiology of fear if you want an overview of the wider fear circuits in the brain, and Current Biology has a freely available article which is a primer on the amygdala.
You may be interested to know that this almond shaped brain area is also involved in a range of positive emotional states, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
Link to Newsweek article ‘The Roots of Fear’ (via Schneier).
Mick Grierson has been hacking some applications for a brain-computer interface that uses EEG to convert the brain’s electrical signals into a thought-driven synthesizer control mechanism.
The kit is just in a test stage at the moment, but there’s a YouTube video of him being able to trigger specific notes from his EEG signals.
OK. So I’ve had my EEG for about a month now. Within a few days, I’d successfully run a project that allowed me to spell words with my thoughts. This took some practice, and the algorithms are really elementary at the moment. However, it’s nice to be on the edge of what is possible. I’ve just spent a few days integrating a fairly obvious matching algorithm Рbasically an algorithm that detects unconscious responses to stimuli on a simple level Рinto a synthesiser built in max/msp. This took quite a lot of effort. Anyhow, this system is a variation of those which you may have been hearing about on and off….my system now allows me (with a bit of work) to control the pitch of the synthesiser with my thoughts in real-time. This reliably allows me to play tunes Рslowly. I often ‘hit’ wrong notes, but it sort of works. Has anyone else done this yet?
Can’t wait to see how the project advances. The first jam session will be quite a sight (and sound!), I’m sure.
Link to video of BCI synthesiser (via DevIntel).
Link to Grierson’s blog.
A reader of neuroscience blog Retrospectacle wrote in to say they’d created a video simulation of how a 17th century brain surgery tool would work, and it’s a wonderfully vivid, if not somewhat gruesome, animation of the tool in action.
The tool was the elevatorium biploidum and was described by the pioneering Dutch surgeon Cornelius Solingen in his book Manuale Operatien der Chirurgie.
Boerhaave Museum describes the use of the tool:
Bullets from seventeenth-century guns had slightly less velocity than the bullets of today. The damage they caused, particularly if you were hit in the head, was consequently sometimes less serious than might have been expected. Not every bullet penetrated the skull, but they often left a sizeable dent. Under the dent there might be haemorrhaging, because of the rupturing of local blood vessel as a result of the impact. In order to treat that bleeding and the associated pressure on the brain the Hague surgeon Cornelis Solingen (1641-1687) has developed a sort of ‘corkscrew’, with which you could raise the dented cranium again.
The tool obviously had (if you’ll excuse the pun) quite an impact at the time as it is featured on the front page of the museum’s website. Indeed, similar surgical techniques are still in use today.
Link to video animation of the elevatorium biploidum.
Link to Retrospectacle post.
Link to Boerhaave Museum page on the tool.
ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind recently broadcast a beautifully produced edition on the cultural history of panic.
Curiously, it inspired a student of one of the sociologists interviewed on the programme to create their own retro video mashup using some of the audio.
It’s a wonderfully atmospheric, dreamily paranoid and a striking accompaniment to the programme.
Whoever thought panic could feel so ambient?
Link to AITM on a cultural history of panic.
Link to video of dreamy panic video (via AITM blog).
Mind Hacks 