Category: Theory

I’ve just discovered the excellent This Week in the History of Psychology podcast series which has a particularly good episode on the ‘psycograph’, an automated phrenology device created in 1905.

The idea is that it would ‘read’ the bumps on your head by the use of mechanical plungers and it would then print a profile of your ‘character’ in a matter of seconds.

There’s a remarkable amount of information about this device on the web (and yes, “psycograph” is the correct spelling) including a fantastic page of original advertising.

You can download the relevant podcast as an mp3 and the others are also well worth checking out.

They are written and presented by mind and brain historian Christopher Green, who you may know from the Classics in the History of Psychology website, or his involvement with Advances in the History of Psychology blog.

Don’t be put off by the headache-inducing website, unlike many other special podcasts, is very well produced with high quality audio and an impressive line-up of researchers.

Link to This Week in the History of Psychology podcasts.

If you suddenly find your web filter is blocking Mind Hacks, it’s because this post is about necrophilia. A paper just published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine has proposed the first classification of sexual attraction to death and the dead.

I maintain an amateur interest in the forensic psychology literature because there is nothing that lays out the full range of human behaviour in such stark contrast and nothing which will challenge your assumptions about the things society feels least comfortable talking about.

This paper is a good example. You can probably think of nothing more revolting than necrophilia but the review makes clear that the link between sexual arousal and death can include consenting adults acting out B-movie fantasies to people who are unable to get aroused except by anything corpses, with almost everything in between.

Apparently, there was previously too little research in the area to allow a coherent classification of the different types and this is the first paper that attempts to map the range of sexual attraction to death.

There is nothing gratuitous in the article and it is a seriously scholarly piece, but if you’re not comfortable with some of the darker corners of human existence you may find it hard going.

Link to paper on the classification of necrophilia.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Wired has an excellent article on how the placebo effect is increasing in drug trials and how drug companies are trying to understand why. It’s an intriguing article but it conflates two distinct concepts of ‘placebo’ that need to be separated to fully understand the effect.

The term ‘placebo effect’ is used to refer to two things in the medical literature. The first is a statistical concept and it refers to the improvement in patients given an inactive treatment in a drug trial in comparison to those given the actual drug. The second is a psychological concept and it refers to improvement due to expectancy and belief.

If you’re not sure how these are different, you may be surprised to learn that you don’t need a mind to demonstrate the placebo effect – in fact, even rocks can show it.

Let’s say an oil tanker has sunk, the local beach is covered in oil, and you want to compare how effective two cleaning products are – the first, liquid soap, our active treatment, and the second water, our placebo.

So we randomly assign oily stones to a bucket of soapy water or to a bucket of water. It turns out that while stones in the soap condition become less oily, so do stones in the placebo condition, although, perhaps, the effect is weaker. Oil breaks down on its own, water movement disperses it, oxygenation happens. There’s a whole bunch of stuff which means our placebo ‘treats’ the stones.

Statistically we have a placebo effect, because in a trial anything which causes improvement not to do with the active treatment is chalked up to the placebo effect.

In humans, similar effects are at work. Most illnesses improve on their own, when we catch anything at its worst typically it will return to its normal state (an effect known as regression to the mean), people change their behaviour to become more healthy when they’re ill, and so on. None of these are to do with expectancy or beliefs about taking a pill.

But here’s the other thing. Because the statistical concept of placebo is drawn from the study data, the study itself has an effect.

For example, the strength of the placebo effect is measured relative to the active treatment. The Wired article says that placebo is getting stronger, which is another way of saying that the difference between placebo and the drug is getting smaller.

It turns out that the more rigorous the study the less strong the drug effect is, or, in other words, the stronger the placebo effect.

For example, we know that better designed and higher quality studies show smaller drug effects. This includes things as simple as randomisation. If your method for randomly allocating people to groups is more susceptible to bias, it’s more likely to produced biased results. Better randomisation improves the placebo effect, again, nothing to do with expectancy or belief.

So one reason why the placebo effect might be increasing is that studies are just more rigorous these days.

Of course, on top of all of these things, individual psychology plays a part as it adds improvement, and anything which leads to improvement gets captured by the statistical placebo effect.

However, the lab-based studies which investigate placebo look almost exclusively at the psychological placebo effect. They examine the effects of beliefs and expectations but usually carefully control the presence of the unpleasant thing, like pain, so it doesn’t naturally improve and you can’t change your behaviour like you would in real life.

You can’t explain the statistical placebo effect just with psychology. It’s part of it, but not the whole story.

So when I read the article which said that drug companies are busily doing lab studies to understand why the placebo effect is increasing I became a bit suspicious.

The first thing you’d do is look at how your studies have been run, not look at the psychology of belief. Drug companies undoubtedly know this. They’re masters of drug trial sleight-of-hand and know research methods inside out.

The article touches on a likely explanation – marketing. They would like to influence your beliefs so the drug works better for you, because once it’s on the market, it’s the customers’ experience that brings them back for more.

In an industry where genuinely new drugs are rare and most are just no-better copies of rival medications, your beliefs could make all the difference.

Link to Wired on the increasing placebo effect.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on the psychology of placebo.

Originally an academic project to study the science of happiness, positive psychology has spawned a hippy fringe of life coaching and self-help. In a thoughtful review of the field, The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the state of the elation after its first decade in existence.

Positive psychology maintains a core of rigorous empirical science but it is clear from the article that there is considerable tension between those who simply want to investigate the building blocks of the good living and those who want to extend (and sometimes over-extend) the work into life guidance.

Although it has gained considerable respectability, the field is still treated with suspicion in some corners of mainstream psychology, not least because of the tendency for academia to privilege austere seriousness and to treat anything with mass appeal with elitist disdain.

But still there is a slightly evangelical feel to positive psychology which make some people uncomfortable.

Two of the field’s founders and most enthusiastic proponents became famous for some of the darkest and bleakest studies in psychology: Martin Seligman’s work on depression and learned helplessness was based on how some dogs give up trying to escape when repeatedly tortured with inescapable electric shocks and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment showed that respectable people can be turned into brutal abusers when the context encourages it.

Whether Seligman and Zimbardo feel they’re repenting for their dark past or not, many who associate with the field have the zeal of those reborn from a science previously obsessed with human misery.

The Chronicle article is a insightful look into both the science and culture of positive psychology, taking a particularly close look at the tensions which are shaping how we understand human growth and potential.

Link to Chronicle on 10 years of positive psychology (via @researchdigest).

ABC Radio National’s excellent All in the Mind has just broadcast a two part programme on robots, morality and the edges of human well-being from the bedroom to the battlefield.

The first programme focuses mainly on domestic robots while the second tackles military AI systems, which, as we discussed recently, are so common as to be almost standard in many combat situations.

One of the most interesting points is raised during a discussion with AI researcher Noel Sharkey on the use of robots as ‘digital companions’ for children

While most media panics focus on the effect of technology on cognitive functions (memory, attention, reasoning and so on), history and even current research have shown us that technology has a minimal effect on the development of our cognition.

Nevertheless, we know that emotional development is considerably more sensitive to childhood experience and differences tend to have clearer longer-term effects into adulthood.

This is pertinent because, apparently, child minding robots are already in development:

Natasha Mitchell: And you have to ask what sort of attachment, or what sort of a relationship might a child form with their robotic supervisor over a long period of time?

Noel Sharkey: Yes, this is the worry. If you leave them with them for a very short time it’s very motivating for them, inspire them and get them into engineering or science, they’ll ask questions about it. But if you start leaving them with them for longer and longer periods and there are signs of this already, actually, you’ll find the child will have to form an attachment with them. We’re talking now about very young children, say pre-speech, little toddlers to about four years old, three years old.

There is currently no research in this area, but it’s not an angle I’d heard of before and raises the important but largely ignored point about our emotional reactions to technology.

Link to Part 1 of AITM on machine morality.
Link to Part 2 on military machine morality.

New Scientist has as article arguing that the expansion in hominid brain size that occurred about two million years ago was due to the ice age which allowed an energy burning, heat generating brain to develop with sufficient environmental cooling.

Actually, it’s worth a read as it’s not as odd as it sounds, but it joins an ever growing list of theories that attempt to explain how our forebears ‘suddenly’ seemed to experience evolutionary brain expansion.

These include:

A diet high in meat.

A diet high in starch.

Social competition.

The development of cooking.

Essential fatty acids and schizophrenia.

An unspecified “special event”.

The trouble with some of these theories is that they typically assume that brain size is always related to greater intelligence, which is not necessarily the case, and they don’t always take into account the ratio of brain to body size, which seems to be more important than just brain size alone.

Interestingly, almost all the interest is on brain expansion and no-one seems particularly interested in the fact that the brain has shrunk about 10% since the Late Pleistocene, about 30,000 years ago.

You can have a great deal of fun coming up with evolutionary theories for that one. Just pick a key human activity that emerged around the same time.

Personally, I blame language, religion and karaoke.

Link to NewSci on brain science and the ice age.

A new series of the excellent BBC Radio 4 Mind Changers series has just started with a fantastic edition on the Rosenhan experiment – a study that sent seismic waves of controversy through 1970s psychiatry.

Titled ‘On being sane in insane places’ when published in a 1972 edition of Science, the experiment reported on how Rosenhan and his associates had presented to psychiatric hospitals faking a single psychiatric symptom – a hallucinated voice.

All of the pseudopatients were admitted to hospital and diagnosed with mental illness. They then stopped faking only to find that their normal behaviour was pathologised as a sign of a disturbed mind.

Later, when word got out and the hospitals were accused of being ‘bad apples’, Rosenhan promised to send more fake patients but, in reality sent none. The hospitals subsequently branded 41 real patients as fakes.

The Mind Changers programme throws much fresh light on this study by examining never-before-seen documents from Rosenhan’s own archive.

While the study has often been framed as an attack on psychiatric diagnosis, according to Rosenhan, it was never intended to be. He started out wanting to conduct an anthropological study of psychiatric wards.

There’s an interesting bit where the hospital admission notes are read out concerning Rosenhan’s admission to hospital under a fake name:

Admission note 6th February 1969

The patient, David Lurie, is a 39 year-old married father of two… Three to four months ago he started hearing noises, then voices, recently he has been able to discern that the voices say “It’s empty, nothing inside, it’s hollow, it makes an empty noise.”

Compare this with the description from the original text of the study:

After calling the hospital for an appointment, the pseudopatient arrived at the admissions office complaining that he had been hearing voices. Asked what the voices said, he replied that they were often unclear, but as far as he could tell they said ‚Äúempty,‚Äù ‚Äúhollow,‚Äù and ‚Äúthud.‚Äù…

The choice of these symptoms was occasioned by their apparent similarity to existential symptoms. Such symptoms are alleged to arise from painful concerns about the perceived meaninglessness of one’s life. It is as if the hallucinating person were saying, “My life is empty and hollow.”

I’m intrigued that while the paper suggests that the pseudopatients were told to report single word hallucinations, the medical records suggest whole sentences were heard.

I wonder whether the pseudopatients were tempted to embellish their single words or whether the psychiatrists genuinely did weave narratives around the sparse information presented to them.

Either way, as many people have countered, the study is not in itself a very good critique of psychiatric diagnosis. If I go to my doctor and say I’m distressed by hallucinated voices, this is a legitimate symptom of mental illness as far as the doctor is concerned.

However, as psychologist Richard Bentall notes in the programme, much more damning is the fact that once seen as patients, almost everything the fakers did was interpreted as abnormal or pathological in some way.

The fact that diagnosis or clinical opinion is swayed by personal, cultural or professional beliefs is now a well established research finding and this part of Rosenhan’s study remains as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.

Link to crap BBC Radio 4 page with audio archive (via @researchdigest)
Link to full text of Rosenhan’s study.

The New Atlantis magazine has an in-depth article discussing the difficulty in defining death and why arguments about the brain have become central to understanding the final curtain.

The article is a little bit wordy in places but does a great job of exploring the philosophy of death definitions and why these have direct practical applications in medicine.

Not least in ‘pulling the plug’ decisions and the removal of organs from people who have been declared brain dead even while their body is still functioning on life support.

Another way forward is to confess that all this time the real reason why the neurological standard seemed palatable was that the patient with total brain failure has lost consciousness and will never regain it.

All the talk about the body no longer being a whole was just a distraction. The pulsing heartbeat, the warm skin, all the integrated work of the body—these are indicators that the body is alive but not the person.

And it is the life of the person that demands protection, in this case from being made into a source for organs. This kind of dualism opens the door, of course, to the possibility that there are more “personless” bodies—that, for instance, some patients with severe dementia or PVS [persistent vegetative state] might meet the description.

Link to article ‘What and When Is Death?’

Prospect Magazine has a gently philosophical article on legendary England cricket captain and now, psychoanalyst, Mike Brearley. It weaves the philosophies of cricket and psychotherapy into a wonderful article that muses on the similarities between the test match and psychoanalysis, the Twenty20 and CBT.

[Americans: skip this paragraph] Brearley captained England during the legendary 1981 Ashes series and is often cited as channelling Botham’s uneven temperament into a focused performance that won the seemingly doomed series.

After retiring from first class cricket, Brearley trained to become a psychoanalyst and is now president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

The article is both delightful to read and remarkably balanced, giving many such gems on the links between therapy and cricket:

Cricket, particularly in its five-day form, requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts — not unlike psychoanalysis itself.

Link to Prospect article ‘Freud in the slips’.

Petra’s written up her barnstorming talk she gave last night at the Troublemaker’s Fringe where she discussed ‘eight problems with science/health journalism and what we can do about it’ from her perspective as a social psychologist specialising in sex and relationships.

It’s a fantastic guide to how health stories get badly spun and why sexual health material is most likely to be misrepresented as it is considered ‘light’ and so not worthy of serious attention.

One of the main culprits seem to be the reliance on PR surveys which are intuitively easy to understand but are specifically designed to push a certain angle.

I was interested to hear that they are often designed not with journalists so much in mind, but the picture editor – see Clairol’s recent ‘survey’ finding that women are happiest at 28. Women like 28-year-old Jessica Alba and Gisele Bundchen by any chance? Bingo. Free celebrity tie-in reported as science in the national press.

Petra has plenty more media gems and it makes for a great insight into the thinking behind the sex and relationship stories that makes the media.

Link to Petra on science and health reporting.

In the latest of his excellent columns for Scientific American psychologist Jesse Berring reviews the current theories that try and explain why we’ve evolved to have dreams.

One of the most interesting is the ‘Threat Simulation Theory’ which argues dreams are a form of night-time survival training, based on research that found that dreams often put us in scenarios of personal danger:

In a 2006 study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, Zadra, Desjardins, and Marcotte performed a content analysis on a set of 212 recurrent dreams reported by participants ranging from 18-81 years of age.

Among their findings, escape and pursuit themes were the most frequent type of threat found in their sample (25.9 percent), followed by accidents and misfortunes (19.7 percent), aggression and violence (19.0 percent), physical difficulties (17.0 percent), emotional difficulties (7.5 percent), and disasters (3.4 percent).

Furthermore, in nearly all cases the dreamer him- or herself (rather than a stranger or loved one) was the specific target of the threat and usually the dreamers actively participated in some way to resolve, escape, or combat the threat.

The article covers a whole stack of alternatives and is written in Berrings’ usual engaging style.

Link to ‘Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content’.

Newsweek has an interesting critique of evolutionary psychology that tackles some of the main areas of contention.

The article claims to question the whole field of evolutionary psychology but really only deals with specific studies, largely because has quite a limited view of the approach and is strangely wed to biological determinism.

From the biological determinism angle, contrary to what the article implies, even if specific antisocial traits have evolved this doesn’t excuse the behaviour or suggest that it is inevitable, as the history of violence tells us.

The article is clearly influenced by the work of philosopher David Buller, who has been a long-time critic of the field.

But what the article also doesn’t mention is that it is largely addressing a certain form of thinking on evolutionary psychology – namely an approach chiefly promoted by Buss, Tooby and Cosmides, sometimes called the ‘Santa Barbara’ approach.

This view is characterised by the idea that we have evolved specific mental modules (like individual ‘units’ of behaviour or thought) that have been shaped by selection pressures to address problems most important for survival over the time span of human existence – typically characterised as the ‘stone age’.

This is only one form of thinking however. In its weaker form, evolutionary psychology is much less controversial in that we know that genetics, and even single genes, can influence cognition and behaviour, and that selection pressures are equally likely to have been exerted on these genes.

The difficulty is deciding in what cases selection pressure is working through mind and behaviour and at what psychological level the selection pressure manifests itself.

For example, is it best to think of selection pressure as operating on low level cognitive mechanisms such as speed of processing, visual perception and working memory, or on more complex processes such as perception of beauty, relationship style or emotional range.

The critics of evolutionary psychology usually focus on the latter. David Buller clearly specifies this in a recent and recommended article that he wrote for Scientific American but this is not clear in the Newsweek piece.

Buller himself has his critics and there is an excellent page with rebuttals of his claims from the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, many of which focus on his use of evidence to support his arguments.

Recently, a new twist in the tale has come from a study just published in Science that used computational modelling to suggest that major changes in human behaviour during the stone age could be entirely accounted for by cultural changes and there is no need to suggest a fundamental change in the structure of our minds.

The Newsweek article is definitely worth reading, but it’s not the whole story and is best supplemented with responses from some of Buller’s critics.

Link to Newsweek article ‘Don’t blame the caveman’.
Link to Buller’s article for SciAm.
Link to Buller rebuttals.
Link to Science paper on culture and cognitive changes.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

A new edition of the beautifully produced RadioLab has just hit the airwires with an excellent programme on the science of randomness.

The hour long science trip largely focusses on how we make sense of random or unpredictable events, from coincidences to statistical white noise.

There’s a wonderful part where the presenters visit statistician Deborah Nolan who has a neat party trick to demonstrate the properties of random sequences to her students.

She asks one group of students to write down the results of 100 coin flips, and another to write a list of imaginary coin flips. She then leaves the room, waits while each sequence is written down, returns, and tells the students which sequence was imaginary.

It works because humans are bad random number generators. Nolan looks for longer runs of heads or tails which are not included in imaginary sequences because we underestimate the variation in randomness.

In fact, there’s been quite a bit of research on how we generate ‘random’ number sequences, and it turns out that far from being a messy and effortless function of the brain, it requires some heavyweight intervention of the frontal lobes.

Brains are very good at stereotyped routines but it’s breaking these learned patterns which takes the real effort. To generate ‘random’ sequences, we need to check we’re not repeating ourselves and match the sequence against a model of randomness in our heads.

In fact, asking people to generate a sequence of random numbers is a good test of frontal lobe function, the more mathematically random it is, the better functioning the frontal cortex. And if we dampen down frontal cortex function using electromagnets, we see a drop in actual randomness of the numbers.

There are plenty more fantastic insights into the science of the unpredictable in the programme with the constantly surprising RadioLab team.

Link to RadioLab on randomness.

The BBC World Service broadcast an interesting programme on the effect of Portugal’s 2001 policy to decriminalise all illicit drugs, from cannabis to heroin. Far from what you might expect from your local politician, the effect was rather positive. As also recounted in a recent article for Time magazine, drug use has actually dropped.

Recreational drugs are a fascinating area precisely because the political view and the health view are so completely out of whack in most countries.

As we have reported several times in the past, the UK has a regular public ritual where the government commissions a panel of scientists to report on the health dangers of drugs, and then completely ignores them when they point out that the current policies make no sense and don’t reflect the actual impact of the substances.

This week’s Bad Science column has another example, where a now leaked 1991 World Health Organisation report [pdf] on the impact of cocaine was suppressed by the US government because it pointed out that it’s not as intrinsically poisonous to health or society as it’s made out by drug war propaganda.

This political double book-keeping is probably why the severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

I’m morbidly curious about how we’ve arrived at this odd situation where one of the culturally universal human activities, modifying our consciousness with drugs, must be looked down on publicly to the point where our politicians are free to ignore evidence when it suits them.

It’s a conspiracy of ignorance that would be unthinkable if it was applied to swine flu but perfectly acceptable for something that already kills thousands upon thousands of people every year.

Link to BBC World Service on Portugal drug decriminalisation.
Link to Time ‘Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?’
Link to Bad Science on suppressed WHO cocaine report.

A sardonic paragraph from Lt Col Dave Grossman’s excellent book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. It discusses the psychology of ending another’s life, the history of how the military have dealt with the natural reluctance to kill and the personal impact of doing so.

From p36:

Even among the psychological and psychiatric literature on war, “there is”, writes Marin, “a kind of madness at work.” He notes, “Repugnance toward killing and the refusal to kill” are referred to as “acute combat reaction.” And psychological trauma resulting from “slaughter and atrocity are called ‘stress,’ as if the clinicians… are talking about an executive’s overwork.” As a psychologist I believe that Marin is quite correct when he observes, “Nowhere in the [psychiatric and psychological] literature is one allowed to glimpse what is actually occurring: the real horror of war and its effect on those who fought it.”

Link to more info on the book.

We live our lives in fragments, but make sense of them as stories. Scattered islands of experience are drawn together in personal travelogues that attempt explain how our erratic journeys brought us to the present moment.

This is perhaps our most natural and chaotic form of self-understanding but also one of the most vexing for psychology. We know our life stories are mostly fiction, despite their personal force, and much modern psychology has demonstrated how we tend to unknowingly self-justify rather than critically self-appraise.

But it is also the area where personal meaning is its strongest, and where our our lab studies fail most obviously in bridging the chasm between evidence and experience.

Nevertheless, some psychologists are trying to make the leap, and Jesse Bering unravels the yarn in a thought-provoking article for Scientific American.

Traditionally, the psychology of life history has a bad reputation. Known as psychobiography, it was originally created by the neurologist Paul Möbius who wrote biographies that not only described the events in the lives of great people, but also attempted to explain their psychological drives and motivations.

It was quickly picked up by Freud, who wrote a series of psychoanalytic biographies, on Moses, da Vinci, Dostoyevsky and Woodrow Wilson, that are widely regarded as his poorest works.

Replete with factual errors and implausible interpretations, he nevertheless spawned a tradition of indulgent psychobiography that sullied the practice for years to come.

In recent years, attempts at psychological biographies have re-emerged in more measured and more successful forms. Alan Elms’ 1993 book Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology carefully coaxed the practice into the light, and contains some wonderfully sensitive biographies, including, ironically, of Freud himself.

Bering’s article is interesting because he touches on psychologists who are attempting to understand how personality influences our personal storytelling styles, and how our knowledge of autobiographical memory integrates into this process.

In a wonderfully recursive twist, researchers are now trying to integrate the fragments of lab-based knowledge into the fabric of personal narrative, because everything, ultimately, is a story.

Link to Bering on ‘The Psychological Science of Life History Research’.
Link to details of Elms’ awesome book Uncovering Lives.