Category: Togetherness

Slate has a wonderful article on the science of city walking that examines how pedestrians behave when moving through the city and how our behaviour is being captured to model the flow of people through the urban landscape.

The piece is full of subtle observations of city psychology:

Block by block, they emerge: The way people drift toward the shady side of the street on hot days; the way women (in particular) avoid subway grating on the sidewalk; the way walking speeds are slower at midday than before or after work; the way people don’t like to maintain the same walking speed as a stranger next to them; the way tourists walk in inappropriately spread out groups (a phenomenon captured by this satirical call for “tourist lanes”); the way sidewalk planters, parking meters, and other obstacles reduce the “effective width” of sidewalks, which have been under slow and steady spatial assault since the early 20th century…

Since Zupan’s research, a few new behaviors have come on the scene. One behavior pointed out to me by traffic engineer Sam Schwartz is people pausing before they enter the stairs of a subway station to check their mobile device one last time. Who knows what this social hiccup does to the overall efficiency? Recent research by the New York City Department of Transportation has found that when walkers talk on the phone, they walk more slowly, and when they wear headphones, they actually walk faster. As Zupan told me, “There are a lot of really microscopic dynamics—as Yogi Berra said, ‘You can see a lot just by observing.’ ”

It also discusses how these behaviours are now being included in statistical models to help town planning and architecture.

It’s an interesting problem that has a parallel with thermodyanmics. While we need to understand the interaction of single particles it is the macro level and how it excerpts pressure on the system which allows us design better mechanisms.

By the way, the science of pedestrian dynamics is becoming increasingly important and if you want to read more, a recent Economist article comes highly recommended.
 

Link to Slate article ‘Sidewalk Science’.

Two cases of hallucinated fairy tales from the medical literature.

In this case [pdf] from The Bulletin of the Yamaguchi Medical School, a ballerina presents with magical hallucinations during an episode of psychosis:

…she felt as if she had become the heroine of “The Sleeping Beauty” and this feeling started manifesting itself in her daily behaviour.

She began to hear a voice coming from nowhere telling her that she was Cinderella. She had an experience in which upon seeing a pumpkin she ordered it to become a carriage and then saw a vivid image of a carriage like the one pictured in an illustration in the book.

She claimed that while practicing ballet, she did not feel that she was dancing by her own will, but instead felt as if she was a puppet controlled and manipulated by an unknown force.

In this case from Epilepsy and Behavior a 33-year-old woman experiences a magical cat when her visual cortex is stimulated during brain surgery:

At one parieto-occipital electrode, stimulation with a current of 15 mA elicited the hallucination of a colored creature, spontaneously identified as the leading character of the fairy tale the patient was reading aloud at that moment—a cat (Puss in Boots, by Charles Perrault; the text did not include pictures)…

According to her description, the cat emerged from the script she was holding in front of her, and then moved to the right side of her bed, that is, to her lower right visual hemifield. The cat was 10–20 cm high and flat, two-dimensional like a sheet of paper. It then rotated itself 90° so that its feet pointed toward her and its head was toward the right. When she tried to look at it more closely, it quickly moved to the right and behind her back—the faster she turned her head, the quicker…

Reading picture books depicting different characters while being stimulated (e.g., a penguin, a miller), she again hallucinated a cat at her right forearm, similar to the one she had seen before. “It is only a feeling of what I see. For me it looks like Puss in Boots because of the large hat…, for me it is just a…. It is difficult to explain.”

 

pdf of Cinderella case.
Link to locked article of Puss in Boots case.

A fascinating article in the journal Crime and Delinquency tracks the evolution of London gangs from their ‘boys on the street’ beginnings to organised crime syndicates.

Sociologist James Densley has clearly spent a lot of time talking to gang members of the streets of London and has gained an intimate insight into how the organisations function and develop.

The article is full of quotes and is equally frightening and tragic. Not tragic, however, in the death and destruction sense, but sometimes just sad, as the bottom of the pile gang members struggle to live the high rolling life style they aspire to.

Gang members were eager to pull thick rolls of banknotes out of their trouser pockets to illustrate a typical “night’s work,” but amounts quoted often refer to revenue rather than income. They also struggled to transform cash into wealth. Only inner circle gang members had the human and social capital to launder profits through casinos, pawnbro- kers, money couriers, small bank deposits, and remittances transferred using money service businesses such as Western Union.

One interviewee resorted to depositing cash into the bank account of a wealthy private school girl he had known since primary school. In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in- transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.” In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties.

It’s a brilliant study into the social organisation of London gangs that merits reading in full. Sadly, the full piece is locked behind a paywall but it seems a version has found its way online on this page.
 

Link to journal article online (via @crimepsychblog)
Link to page with pdf.

If you ask the average person in the street why some people cut themselves you’ll get the answer that they’re trying to ‘get attention’ which is a common but unhelpful stereotype.

The reality is that motivations for self-harming are complex. Some people find it helps control their intense moods by externalising the pain, other are punishing themselves, others are responding to psychosis, others self-harm for a combination of reasons.

A new study in the Journal of Adolescence looks at motivations in online accounts of self-harm and gives an insight into the various ways young people describe their actions.

The research aims to examine ‘magical thinking’ in explanations of self-harm but this doesn’t necesarilly mean magical thinking in the sense associated with psychosis (i.e. unknown forces and jumping to conclusions) but in terms of how metaphors and symbolism and woven into young people’s explanations.

Part of the article gives examples of various forms of symbolic ‘magical thinking’. It’s a bit wordy but it illustrates some of the psychological complexity of self-harm.

1. Magic substitutions. This term refers to the magic belief in the transformation of one category of phenomena into another, e.g. emotional pain into physical, bad self into blood. For example, “I can’t handle mental or emotional pain, so I turn it into something I can handle, which is physical pain.”

2. Transanimation of objects. Scored if an inanimate object, such as the blood, body or cutting instrument, is described as an active subject independent of the self. For example, “the blade is always so nice, like with every cut it lets the pain flow out; it lets it flood like a river of blood.” This example would also be scored as a magical substitution, where blood magically substitutes for emotional pain.

3. Transanimation of processes. Scored as present if a behaviour or phenomenon is seen as having autonomous agency. For example, “I still cut myself. Because to me that is my only true friend.”

4. Auto-relatedness. Scored if the narrator wrote about himself or herself as a separate person or a poorly integrated part. For example, “Don’t worry me, me will take care of you. It’s okay me, me is here now.”

5. Split between inside and outside. Scored if the narrator describes a metaphysical difference between the inside and outside of the body. For example, “I feel so ugly inside, so dark and cold, on the outside I’m not exactly warm, but I’m not as cold.”

6. Scars reminding and communicating. Scored if scars or cuts communicate with or remind the narrator or others. For example, “I feel better when I see the cuts on my arms, I don’t know why, I mean I hate them. But they seem to make me feel like I guess someone gets it, gets why I do this to myself.”

Unfortunately, the ‘doing it to get attention’ stereotype is also maintained by lots of health professionals as self-harm is also stigmatised by the people who treat these young people.

It’s a complex and frustrating behaviour and, therefore, one that needs some of the most careful consideration in psychiatry.
 

Link to locked study on magical thinking in self-harm.

BBC Radio 4’s documentary series Analysis has a fascinating programme that explores the little-asked question ‘What is Money?’ – and the answer turns out to be scarily psychological.

In fact, the definition is very close to William Gibson’s description of cyberspace as a “mass consensual hallucination” because money relies on us to believe in it for it to work.

In other words, it’s largely a social concept we all sign up to and this episode of Analysis looks at the economics of how (or rather how not) money is tied to actual goods and services in the world and what this means in times of financial crisis.

It also turns out that the BBC are now linking to podcasts directly from the programme pages so even though we live our lives in the grip of a self-imposed imaginary power at least the Radio 4 website is now easier to use.
 

Link to Analysis episode ‘What is Money?’

Nature has an important article on why virtually no-one is trying to develop treatments to prevent suicide because research with such high-risk patients is almost impossible to get approved.

Most psychiatric drug trials today—the majority of which are industry sponsored—exclude anyone expressing thoughts of suicide. This is for ethical as well as practical reasons: physicians consider it taboo to give people on the brink of suicide an experimental drug, let alone a placebo, if other options are available, and many additional safety precautions are required to run trials in this vulnerable population. To complicate matters, few mental health experts are trained in how to conduct suicide research, and those who do are often afraid of lawsuits.

As a result, institutional review boards aren’t always so amenable to this kind of high-risk research. “It takes forever to get anything approved to do suicide prevention research, and it’s incredibly frustrating,” says Marjan Holloway, a clinical psychologist who is running clinical trials with suicidal military personnel at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Kate Comtois, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has run psychotherapy trials in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), expresses a similar concern. “I hear many stories from other institutions where people have basically given up recruiting high-risk patients because their institutional review boards are so cautious that they throw up roadblocks,” she says.

Suicide research also suffers from a practical problem related to the development of risk-assessments.

Normally, if I want to develop a way of predicting who will develop depression or not, I can assess a group of people and I can return later and see whether my predictions were right or not.

If I do the same with a suicide assessment and it suggests that several people are at high-risk of suicide, I have a moral duty to intervene and help them.

What complicates the issue is that this often applies regardless of the quality of my assessment. In other words, imagine that my suicide assessment is useless but I don’t know it – I will still intervene.

This means it’s often hard to get the assessment ‘off the ground’ in terms of its testing and development and this is why most scales are based on research looking at less serious outcomes, like having suicidal thoughts, that aren’t a very good predictor of whether someone will actually try to kill themselves or not.

This is also one reason why ethical review boards, and indeed researchers, are reluctant to get involved in this research.

Who wants to be known as someone who had several patients kill themselves during a trial to test an experimental form of suicide prediction? Despite the fact that, actually, virtually all the established scales are equally as ‘experimental’ due to lack of data.

The Nature article does a fantastic job of tackling these delicate issues and highlighting the need for better research on a crucial issue.
 

Link to Nature article ‘The Ultimate Endpoint’ (via @Neuro_Skeptic)

The New York Times has an extended article that uncritically dicusses a $125 million US Military programme currently designed to increase resilience against mental illness.

If you’re interested in the effects and treatment of psychological trauma, it’s always worth keeping tabs on what the military are doing. The concept of trauma has largely been driven by the military and they are usually pioneers in developing treatments and interventions.

The Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme is a US Army programme based on positive psychology and was developed with the help of the field’s guru Martin Seligman.

Rather than aim to treat mental health problems, it aims to prevent them by improving the psychological strength of individual soldiers. Owing to the fact that the US Military has surprisingly high levels of PTSD, it is clearly designed with this in mind.

It involves completing a 110 item questionnaire called the ‘Global Assessment Tool’ that gives scores based on the four domains of programme: emotional fitness, social fitness, family fitness and spiritual fitness (it would be interesting to see how atheists score on this last part).

The idea is that the programme can then be tailored to the GAT profile of each soldier to strengthen vulnerabilities and build on existing strengths.

If you were going to base your programme on a psychometric assessment, most importantly, you would want to know that your assessment predicted problems or coping in particular soldiers.

For example, if a particular soldier had a low score on, let’s say, the emotional fitness part of the scale, it would be important to know that tells us about what sort of problems the soldier is likely to have in real life and during his or her service.

You would also want to know that the assessment told us about the likelihood of the solider getting mental illness. It makes sense, right? If you’ve designed a programme intended to prevent mental illness based on an assessment, the assessment should tell us which soldiers are at higher risk for psychiatric difficulties so we can help with skills and abilities that mitigate the risk.

In psychological jargon, this is known as predictive validity and it can be tested statistically.

It is not known whether the Global Assessment Tool does actually predicts anything useful about US soldiers’ problems because this was never tested.

We know this because the GAT and the other aspects of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Programme were the subject of the special issue of American Psychologist that had numerous articles on the development and evidence for the programme by the programme’s creators, including an article on the GAT.

As a whole, it seems the Army implemented the programme wholesale and has since been evaluating it in retrospect, which seems a little bit of an odd way of going about it.

By the way, the New York Times article is really focused on ‘posttraumatic growth’ – the psychological benefits that surviving trauma can bring. In places it seems to imply a sort of split view of the phenomenon where you either are traumatised or experience growth – when in reality, it’s possible to be both disabled in some aspects of life while growing in others.

One of the best things I read on this recently was Stephen Joseph’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Post-Traumatic Growth (note: I’m blurbed on the back but I don’t make any money from it) that, as a level-headed look at the concept, comes highly recommended.
 

Link to NYT article on post-traumatic growth.

Slate has an article covering the growing research on post-sex behaviour – what we do after we’ve got it on and what it might mean.

To be honest, I had no idea that anyone was studying what people do after sex but it sounds like the science is well underway.

Counter to popular opinion, a dated study, and the great wisdom of many lady mags, researchers have not found that men fall asleep faster than women after sex. In fact, according to a recent study [pdf] of heterosexual pairings by Kruger and Hughes, a woman is just as likely as a man to be out first. But — and here’s the interesting part — regardless of gender, the partner who stayed awake longer reported that they weren’t getting enough post-sex hugging, kissing or talking – what evolutionary psychologists call “pair bonding” activities…

And what about the other activities people move on to after sex, like hanging out in bed, ordering Chinese food, or smoking a cigarette? Earlier in 2011 Kruger and Hughes published a report in the Journal of Sex Research, considering a wider range of after-sex impulses. In that case they found that our post-coital behaviors – again considering only heterosexual sex – tend to split along gender lines. Eating, fixing yourself a drink, smoking and asking your partner for favors – all activities that sound pretty good to me – were more likely to be taken on by the men. The women, in this case, placed greater importance on behaviors related to intimacy, like cuddling and “professing their love.”

From reading the article though it’s clearly a fascinating area, even if the research seems only to have looked at heterosexual sex so far.

Apparently though, my preferred behaviour, apologising, seems barely to feature at all.
 

Link to ‘After the Climax’ from Salon (via @QMUPsychology)

I’ve just found a disappointing study from the European Journal of Psychology that found that physically attractive people are more likely to be psychologically balanced and accepting than the rest of us.

The study asked 119 participants to complete the Personal Orientation Inventory, a measure of psychological characteristics such as self-acceptance, spontaneity and self-actualisation, while a photo of each was also rated on physical attractiveness by a six person panel.

The study revealed that participants in the high attractiveness group scored significantly higher on 7 of the 12 POI scales in comparison to the participants in the low attractiveness group: Inner-Directed, Self-Actualising Value, Feeling Reactivity, Spontaneity, Self-Regard, Self-Acceptance, and Capacity for Intimate Contact.

The researchers debate why more attractive people might, on average, end up being more psychologically accepting of themselves and others.

They suggest that it could be due to a self-fulfilling prophecy effect. Previous research has shown that good looking people are stereotyped as being more confident, warm, dominant, stable and socially skilled, among other things, and being treated this way could enourage exactly these sorts of behaviours and attitudes.

Personally, I have been trying to cultivate a shallow and empty persona in the hope that it would make me seem more physically attractive but I now realise I should have been saving to enhance my rack as a form of personal development.
 

Link to study.

My recent Beyond Boundaries column for the latest issue of The Psychologist explores how the idea of the ‘mind’ as a single distinct concept is an assumption that many cultures don’t share.

I’d like to talk about people who don’t have minds. This isn’t going to be one of those ingenious philosophy arguments where I claim that we’re all zombies, nor a smug assertion that we’re just a bunch of neurons, but a brief visit to people who genuinely don’t have minds – at least not as we understand them.

The idea that the self can be split into body and mind is at the root of psychology, but there is no laboratory test, questionnaire or brain scan that tells us this – it is a product of our culture. In fact, we inherited the notion from the Ancient Greeks and it has stuck with us because we find it convenient (presumably, a bit like stuffed vine leaves). If you’re not sure how we can possibly think about ourselves without thinking about the mind, it will be easier, perhaps, to briefly touch upon other forms of psychology where the mind does not exist in the form we understand it.

In traditional Haitian culture, there is no direct equivalent of the mind. The self is made up of a three components. The corps cadavre is the physical body; the ti-bon anj or ‘little good angel’ loosely represents what we would consider as agency, awareness and memory; while the gwo bon anj or the ‘big good angel’ is the animating principle that manages motivation and movement. Incidentally, a traditional Haitian zombie is created when a sorcerer steals the ‘little good angel’ leaving a coordinated body capable of understanding and following instructions but without reflective thought, clearly demonstrating a split where we see a single mental realm.

The traditional Javanese concept of the self, a synthesis of many Eastern influences, is even more complex. Humans consist of the selira or body which is the source of physical desires. The organic structure is kept active and alive by the atma (energy), the kama (sensory desire), and the prana (vital principle). Unlike other beings, humans also have manas (deliberate thinking), manasa (intellect) and jiwa (immortal essence).

We often assume that understanding other cultures is about comprehending how other people ‘think’ about the world, when many other cultures do not even have an equivalent concept of the mind. Consequently, Western psychology is about as culturally neutral as Coca Cola.

Thanks to Jon Sutton, editor of The Psychologist who has kindly agreed for me to publish my column on Mind Hacks as long as I include the following text:

The Psychologist is sent free to all members of the British Psychological Society (you can join here), or you can subscribe as a non-member by going here.
 

Link to column in The Psychologist.