Category: Togetherness

YouTube has a fantastic documentary about the work of the pioneering anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard who was one of the first researchers to try and understanding the psychology of people he was studying.

He is most well known for his 1937 book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande where he studied the role of magic and prophecy in the lives of the Sudanese Azande people from their perspective.

This was one of the first times that an anthropologist had attempted to understand other cultural beliefs as a coherent system, rather than simply listing the ‘odd’ or ‘irrational’ practices from a Western perspective.

One of his main conclusions was that the Azande were making rational decisions based on different assumptions, in contrast to the general colonial opinion that the people of Africa were somehow ‘backward’.

Evans-Pritchard became one of the founders of social anthropology and was influential in a change of perspective in understanding other cultures.

He was also a keen photographer and there is a fantastic collection of his photos that attempted to record the people he met at the Oxford University Pitt Rivers museum.

The documentary is a great overview of both the man and his work with the Azande and Nuer people in Africa.

Link to documentary ‘Strange Beliefs: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard’.

Popular sporting occasions have long been associated with violence and it was long assumed that assaults were more likely to be initiated by losing fans taking out their frustration. This has been contradicted by recent research that suggests it is fans of the winning team whom are more likely to be violent.

These studies are from the Violence and Society Research Group at Cardiff University who have an interesting history. The group was started by Jonathan Shepherd who is not a psychologist, sociologist or criminologist but a facial and dental surgeon.

He noticed that many of the injuries that he was treating were due to attacks, as the face is a common target of attack, and wondered if he could go about reducing facial injuries by reducing violent incidents.

The medical school is near Cardiff’s Millenium Stadium, one of the biggest sporting venues in the country, and so the group had the opportunity to study the effect of sporting events on assault and aggression.

In an initial study they found that violent incidents rose when the home team, Wales, won, rather than lost, regardless of the sport being played. A subsequent study evaluated fans on measures of aggressiveness, happiness and intention to drink alcohol before and after the match.

It turned out that aggressiveness was increased in winning fans but not losing fans. A win did not increase happiness but losing or drawing decreased it and intention to drink was not affected by the match result.

This concurs with the results of a somewhat disturbing study on domestic violence that found that assaults against women in the Washington area specifically increased when the Washington Redskins American football team won.

This is interesting in light of one of the main theories of violence, proposed by James Gilligan in his influential book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, that says violence is typically a response to humiliation and serves to restore a perceived loss of status.

We don’t really have a good analysis of what triggers these specific violent incidents and it could be that winning sports fans are more sensitive to self-perceived humiliation, in line with the theory, but these sports violence studies could equally be evidence against this idea – with the rather unpleasant possibility that assaults are partly the result of a form of post-win triumphalism.

Link to Pubmed entry for study on effect of winning on assaults.
Link to Pubmed entry for study on effect of winning on aggression.

The New York Times has an article on an interesting scheme by a Dutch hospital where three ‘mystery shopper’ psychiatric nurses were admitted onto the psychiatric ward pretending to be patients in an attempt to evaluate the care.

The article mentions a similarly to the famous experiment where psychologist David Rosenhan asked several volunteers to report to a psychiatrist that they heard a hallucinated voice say “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. When admitted to hospital, all the ‘pseudopatients’ acted normally but none were suspected as faking. In a subsequent study, staff ‘detected’ a range of genuine patients as ‘fakers’.

The similarity with the mystery shopper scheme is only cursory, however, as in this case the diagnostic systems are quite different, the ‘mystery shoppers’ extensively trained, and the staff were warned but were not deliberately looking out for the ‘impostors’.

The article finishes with an interesting commentary by psychologist Richard Bentall on why the scheme is using ‘mystery shoppers’ at all and what this says about how we regard patients’ own opinions:

“Having covert observation is going to provide you with information you probably wouldn’t get in any other way,” he said.

But Dr. Bentall also sees some irony in using proxy mental patients to illuminate the experiences of real ones. “Their stories are neglected,” he said, “and their understanding of how they got to be in the hospital is not considered important.”

Link to NYT article on mystery shopper patients (via AITHoS).

I’ve just been reading a fascinating study on ‘dysfunctional’ sports fans who over-identify themselves with their team and become abusive and confrontational during matches. There was one incidental finding which was only based on a small sample but has the potential to explain a great deal about radio phone-ins: dysfunctional fans were overwhelmingly more likely to call into sports talk radio shows.

Here’s the bit directly from the article:

Interestingly, although relatively few people are frequent callers to sports talk radio in this sample (n = 25; 5.5%) of predominantly highly identified fans, a disproportionate number of those who frequently call sports talk radio shows are highly dysfunctional (n = 9; 36%) fans and very few could he classified as less dysfunctional fans (n = 3; 12%).

Perhaps at least as interesting, 68% of this overwhelmingly highly identified sample of fans reported never calling into sports talk radio shows. Of these who never call in, 82.8% can be classified as non-dysfunctional fans…. Consequently, these results have intriguing implications regarding the makeup of the individuals who dominate the sports talk radio airwaves as callers.

More research is clearly needed into this important issue, even if it does confirm what we all already suspect.

Link to summary of study on ‘dysfunctional sports fans’.

One of the most regularly recited pieces of popular neuroscience is that women are more likely to use both hemispheres of the brain to process language while men tend only to use one. It turns out, this is a myth – it is simply not supported by the current evidence.

In 2008, a meta-analysis study looked at all the evidence for differences in the balance of language processing in the brains of men and women. It looked at studies on sex differences in handedness, brain structure, on perception of words heard exclusively in the left or right ears, and neural activity recorded by brain scans during language tasks.

When you look at all the studies together, there are no reliable sex differences in word processing or language-related brain activity. Men and women did not differ in how their brains processed language.

I came across this study from a fantastic talk by neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain that tackles many of the sex difference stereotypes.

She notes how an initial study, published in Nature in 1995, did find results in line with the common myth, but that these results were not replicated.

At the time, however, they got widely publicised – making headlines around the world – and they remain the basis for the common claim despite numerous subsequent studies that suggest this is not the case.

This, notes Eliot, is a common pattern in sex difference research. Results that confirm our steroetypes get widely reported, others are largely ignored by the media.

I really recommend her talk over at Fora.tv and I will look forward to reading the book once I get my hands on a copy.

Link to Lise Eliot on Fora.tv (via Channel N).
Link to PubMed abstract for damning meta-analysis.

The latest edition of The Psychologist is a special issue on the psychology of music and it has a great article on how music has a social influence.

One particularly interesting paragraph deals with link between rock music, suicide and self-harm.

There is indeed some evidence that preference for certain types of music is linked to thoughts of self-harm, but the second paragraph is the kicker: there are various reasons why this association is unlikely a reflection of rock causing these thoughts – an in fact, the act of labelling certain music as ‘causing suicide’ may itself strengthen the association.

The rise of heavy rock with supposedly pro-suicide lyrics in the 1970s and 1980s led to legislation (e.g. attempts to ban sales of CDs featuring a ‘parental advisory’ sticker), public protest (e.g. by the Parents’ Music Resource Center), and many apparently bizarre local actions (e.g. the suspension of a Michigan high school pupil for wearing a T-shirt promoting Korn that featured no lyrics or words apart from the band’s name). The assumption on which these were based, namely that the music causes self-injurious thoughts and actions, is not so far-fetched as might seem, as several studies suggest at least a correlation between music and suicide. For example, Stack et al. (1994) found a link between suicide rates among teenage Americans and variations in subscriptions to a heavy rock magazine; and we (North and Hargreaves, 2006) have found that fans of rock and rap were more likely than others to consider suicide and to self-harm.

Other research, though, is less suggestive of a link. We have also found (North & Hargreaves, 2006) that thoughts of suicide and self-harm precede an interest in rock, so that the latter can’t have caused the former. Similarly, merely describing a song as ‘suicide-inducing’ or ‘life-affirming’ leads listeners to perceive it as such (North & Hargreaves, 2005); by labelling music as suicide-inducing, campaigners and legislators may be helping to create the problem they aim to eradicate. Other research (North & Hargreaves, 2006; Scheel & Westefeld, 1999; Schwartz & Fouts, 2003; Stack et al., 1994) shows that the correlation between suicidal tendencies and an interest in rock is mediated by family background and self-esteem, which raises the issue of which of the latter is the better predictor of the former.

The issue also contains a freely available article on mental turmoil in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina if you’re after something a little more literary.

Link to The Psychologist article ‘The Power of Music’.
Link to The Psychologist article on the novel Anna Karenina.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist and for those about to rock, I salute you.

I’ve just read a fascinating study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention (yes ladies, I got it going on) that looked at which characteristics predicted the number of traffic deaths in particular American states.

The single biggest predictor was not statewide alcohol problems, safety belt use, number of older drivers or wealth, but the murder rate.

The researcher, psychologist Michael Sivak, argues that this is not because people are using cars as murder weapons, but because the murder rate is a proxy for aggression and “the same aggressive tendencies that contribute to homicides also demonstrate themselves, to a certain degree, in interpersonal behaviors on the road”.

In other words, driving style is a way of relating to other road users and traffic accidents are as much a social problem as a problem with road layout, driving competence or mechanical safety.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

PsyBlog covers a study that explored the phenomenon of ‘reflected glory’ where sports fans will psychologically associate themselves with their team more closely if they are successful, but will distance themselves if the team loses.

The post discusses a classic 1976 study that looked at the ‘basking in reflected glory’ effect:

In the first of three experiments they compared what people wore when their college football team won with when they lost. On each occasion they went out and counted the number of students that wore shirts with their University’s name on it. Sure enough students were more likely to wear apparel emblazoned with their university’s name if their team had recently won a game.

In the second and third experiments the researchers found that people were much more likely to associate themselves with their team by using the pronoun ‘we’ if their team had won rather than lost. This effect was especially pronounced when people’s public image was threatened. In other words: if people currently feel they look bad to others, perhaps due to some failure, they are even more likely to try and reach for some success from elsewhere and hope that it rubs off on them.

Since then, there has been quite a sizeable literature on the effects on the psychological effects of being a sports fan – something known in the literature as ‘sport teams identification’.

One study found a clear link between team success and mood and a review even found a small effect on suicide attempts when you look at whole populations.

I don’t know a great deal about sports psychology, but there’s a small number of wonderful studies on how fans use pessimism to manage the psychology effects of wins and losses.

For example, one study found that dedicated fans of a team who’d just lost have an altered perception of how pessimistic they were before the game, perceiving their pre-match expectations to be much lower than they actually were.

Link to PsyBlog on the ‘reflected glory’ effect.

Slate has a great article discussing how psychologists have used the subway as a natural laboratory to study the social psychology of humans forced to interact in strange and unusual ways during their travels across the city.

I never knew before, but it turns out there’s been quite a bit of research on the subways, metros and undergrounds of the world.

Spend enough time riding the New York City subway‚Äîor any big-city metro‚Äîand you’ll find yourself on the tenure-track to an honorary degree in transit psychology. The subway‚Äîwhich keeps random people together in a contained, observable setting‚Äîis a perfect rolling laboratory for the study of human behavior. As the sociologists M.L. Fried and V.J. De Fazio once noted, “The subway is one of the few places in a large urban center where all races and religions and most social classes are confronted with one another and the same situation.”

Or situations. The subway presents any number of discrete, and repeatable, moments of interaction, opportunities to test how “situational factors” affect outcomes. A pregnant woman appears: Who will give up his seat first? A blind man slips and falls. Who helps? Someone appears out of the blue and asks you to mail a letter. Will you? In all these scenarios much depends on the parties involved, their location on the train and the location of the train itself, and the number of other people present, among other variables. And rush-hour changes everything.

Link to Slate piece on ‘Underground Psychology’.

A study on male gamblers just published in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that having a girl on your arm does bring ‘luck’ of sorts, as slot machine gamblers had fewer losses when accompanied by a female.

I am tempted to label this the ‘James Bond Effect’ but in gambling, good fortune is relative, so if you think good luck means pissing slightly less of your hard earned cash down the drain than you would have done anyway, may lady luck be your guiding light.

The study also found an interesting effect of slot machine gambling on mood: people feeling low beforehand cheered up, while those who felt happy or neutral felt worse afterwards.

Mood and Audience Effects on Video Lottery Terminal Gambling.

J Gambl Stud. 2009 Nov 17. [Epub ahead of print]

Mishra S, Morgan M, Lalumière ML, Williams RJ.

Little is known about the situational factors associated with gambling behavior. We induced 180 male participants (mean age: 21.6) into a positive, negative, or neutral mood prior to gambling on a video lottery terminal (VLT). While gambling, participants were observed by either a male peer, female peer, or no one. Induced mood had no effect on gambling behavior. Participants induced into a negative mood prior to gambling, however, reported more positive moods after gambling, whereas those with positive and neutral moods reported more negative moods after gambling. Participants observed by either a male or female peer spent less time gambling on the VLT compared to those not observed. Participants observed by a female peer lost less money relative to the other observer conditions. Degree of problem gambling in the last year had little influence on these effects. Some practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Link to summary of study on PubMed.

Science News covers a revealing new study on the Hadza people of Tanzania that has the potential shake up some of the rusty thinking in evolutionary psychology.

A common line of argument in this field is to suggest that sexual preferences for certain body types exist because we’ve evolved these desires to maximise our chances of mating with the most fertile or healthiest partner.

For example, studies have interpreted the fact that taller men are more likely to attract mates and reproduce in terms of evolutionary pressures on sexual desire. But most of these and similar studies have been completed on Western samples, while the authors draw conclusions about the ‘universal’ nature of these ‘evolutionary’ pressures.

To test how universal these body preferences really are, anthropologists Rebecca Sear and Frank Marlowe looked at whether similar preferences existed in the Hadza people, a hunter-gather tribe from Tanzania.

It turns out, these supposedly ‘universal preferences’ don’t exist in the Hadza. You can read the full text of the paper online as a pdf, but this is taken from the Science News write-up:

Hadza marriages don’t tend to consist of individuals with similar heights, weights, body mass indexes, body-fat percentages or grip strengths… Neither do Hadza couples feature a disproportionate percentage of husbands taller than their wives, as has been documented in some Western nations, the researchers report in the Oct. 23 Biology Letters.

Almost no Hadza individuals mention height or size when asked to explain what makes for an attractive mate, Sear and Marlowe add.

People everywhere seek healthy, fertile marriage partners, Sear proposes. “But I suspect there may not be a preference for one particular signal of health in mates across every population,” she says….

Sear and Marlowe criticize evolutionary psychologists who have argued that physical size influences mating decisions in all societies. That argument rests largely on self-reports of Western college students and analyses of personal advertisements in U.S. newspapers for dating partners, they say.

The problems with relying on Western college students as participants in psychology studies is also addressed by a new paper just released by Behavioural and Brain Sciences which you can read online as a pdf.

The article reviews data from psychology experiments and argues that not only are college students a very restricted subset of society, but they are actually wildly atypical in comparison to the rest of the world’s population.

In fact, the authors state that “The findings suggest that members of WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic] societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans”.

Link to Science News on Hadza study.
pdf of scientific paper on mating selection in the Hadza.
pdf of BBS article on WEIRD people and selection bias (thanks Tom!)

There’s a remarkable article on the world’s most popular suicide spot, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, in the latest American Journal of Psychiatry.

The article has several case studies of people who have died from jumping from the bridge and some fascinating quotes from one of the few people who have survived their attempts.

It is full of curious snippets of information, and one of the clearest things to come through from the article is that the bridge has a sort of iconic attraction for those wanting to kill themselves (indeed, in hindsight, the name itself seems darkly ironic).

This is not just a morbidly romantic statement, it seems to be backed up by research:

Evidence that the Golden Gate Bridge serves as a suicide magnet is provided by Seiden and Spence’s study of individuals who jumped from either the Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge, both of which connect to San Francisco. The bridges were built within 1 year of each other, have similar heights, and are similarly lethal to jumpers. Seiden and Spence looked at individuals who drove onto either bridge to kill themselves. (They excluded suicides in which the person walked onto either bridge, as the Golden Gate Bridge has pedestrian access while the Bay Bridge does not.)

They found that between 1937 and 1979, 58 people drove across the Bay Bridge to commit suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. However, no one drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide from the Bay Bridge. This suggests that the Golden Gate Bridge has a powerful association with suicide in the minds of some individuals, to the extent that they would drive over one potentially lethal bridge to die at another.

The article also mentions some other facts: the idea that the death is painless is a myth – jumpers die from massive heart, chest or nervous system injuries or by drowning; jumping from the bridge has a 99% fatality rate; there are only 28 known survivors; the suicide rate is counted solely on recovered bodies, bodies washed out to sea, jumpers witnessed but not found, and unclaimed cars in the parking lot are not counted.

The article reminds me of the uncomfortable 2006 film The Bridge about people who jumped from the bridge.

It’s uncomfortable viewing because it is one of the few documentaries to address the life history, psychological state, motivations and final moments of people who committed suicide (akin to the ‘psychological autopsy‘ used by professionals), but also because it was made in quite an unethical way.

The filmmakers asked permission to place cameras near the bridge to capture the landscape, but instead filmed jumpers. They then contact the families of those who had died and interviewed them about the persons’ life but without informing them that they’d got film of them dying.

The result is a equally fascinating, insightful, tragic and disturbing and I’ve never settled how comfortable I am with the final product.

The American Journal of Psychiatry article finishes by recommending, on the basis of good evidence, that a suicide barrier would prevent deaths at the bridge.

One of the clearest findings in suicide research is that reducing access to lethal methods reduces suicide (going against the myth that ‘if someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll always find a way’).

Apparently, after much discussion a barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge has been agreed, but it is stalled while surveys are carried out and no final completion date has been agreed.

Link to PubMed entry for Golden Gate Bridge article.

I’m just reading a long but gripping study that used social network analysis to look at murder as a social interaction between gangs in Chicago to understand how stable networks of retaliation are sustained over time.

However, I was struck by this bit in the introduction, which really highlights the social nature of murder:

But we know that murder is not in fact such a random matter. It is first and foremost an interaction between two people who more often than not know each other: approximately 75% of all homicides in the United States from 1995 to 2002 occurred between people who knew each other prior to the murder (Federal Bureau of Investigation, selected years).

We also know that the victim and offender tend to resemble each other socially and demographically (e.g., Wolfgang 1958; Luckenbill 1977). Young people kill other young people, poor people kill other poor people, gang members kill other gang members, and so on. Thus, contrary to stratification theories, a particular murder is not so much the outcome of the differential distribution of attributes as it is an interaction governed by patterns of social relations between people similar in stature and status.

It’s an amazing paper which combines a social network analysis drawn from police murder records with field work that involved talking to gang members to understand their perception and use of violence.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Murder by structure’.
Link to DOI entry for same.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has a powerful and moving programme on the experience of ‘hearing voices’ that meets with two young women with quite different experiences of auditory hallucinations.

One of the young women, Kat, has largely positive voices and has come to understand and work with them, while another, Mel, has an abusive and taunting voice that has clearly caused a huge amount of distress and impairment.

Mel’s story is difficult to hear in parts and the programme starkly illustrates the range of experiences that accompany auditory hallucinations.

The piece also tackles current ideas and approaches to ‘hearing voices’, from the medical and scientific to the grassroots and social approach of the Hearing Voices Network.

There’s also an equally powerful video interview on the AITM site at the link below.

Link to AITM on ‘Hearing Voices: stories from the coalface’.

The Scientific American Mind blog Mind Matters has a fantastic article on the links between love and creativity and how just thinking of a romantic relationship can have an immediate effect on creative thinking.

The piece covers several studies which have shown that love or the concept of love promotes a ‘big picture’ thinking style while thinking of a quick shag seems to do the reverse:

The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the “here and now”. Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex…

A global processing style promotes creative thinking because it helps raise remote and uncommon associations.

Clearly there is a happy medium to be found here, and I have to say, “would you like me to balance your processing styles?” has the makings of a great chat-up line.

Link to Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative? (via Frontal Cortex)