Category: Togetherness

The Boston Globe covers several recent studies that have been able to work out sensitive personal details from information made public on social networking sites, possibly including your sexual orientation.

As we discussed earlier this week, huge amounts of information can be gleaned about your life through social network analysis simply from the patterns in your interactions.

In computer security and counter intelligence this is part of a technique called traffic analysis which has a long history in law enforcement. For example, before the days of the internet the UK police would use the Harlequin system to work out social networks from phone call patterns as these were much easier to obtain than court orders allowing phone taps.

Now, we put much of this information online ourselves but are unaware of how much the explicit personal information that we deliberately keep private is still available implicitly in the public data trail.

Sociologists have known this for years but the rapid spread of electronic communication has spurred the development of analysis tools as well as providing the real world data on which it can be applied.

Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public.

Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

Link to Globe article on social networks and personal info (via MeFi).

The Fortean Times has an article and some fantastic excerpts from a new encyclopaedia on mass hysteria, social panics and fast moving fads called Outbreak: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behaviour.

The book tackles some of the most curious and surprising outbreaks from medieval times to the present day, covering everything from medieval dancing plagues to modern day penis theft panics to the worldwide hula-hoop craze of 1958.

It’s by sociologists Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew both of whom are well known for their work on how unusual beliefs and experiences are shaped by culture. However, mass hysterias and the like and still one of the most mysterious aspects of human psychology.

There have been many attempts to account for the kinds of outlandish collect­ive behaviour that so fascinate forteans – the book provides entries on many of these related theories and explan­ations, from Altered States of Consciousness and Anxiety to False Memory Syndrome, Hysteria and Psychosomatic Phenomena. Many once-favoured ideas don’t really stand up to much scrutiny: consider the fad among 19th-century physicians for ‘curing’ masturbators with bizarre surgical ‘intervention’ and for terrifying their hapless patients with the prospect of bodily ruin and eternal damnation. It could be argued that none of the theories that have been put forward – even the more promising ones – actually applies in all cases.

Ultimately, it’s clear there is no consensus on just why human behaviour should include such anomalies, or how and why they occur. Just possibly, they may be pathological forms of the more healthy processes that cement our personal and social lives and which are only noticed when they go wrong. In many cases, the best that can be done is to understand the local social, political and cultural dynamics, but even so the causes of many such outbreaks remain obscure. This is important, because such erratic collective behaviour casts an awful shadow over human history, and we are no closer to understanding it now than Mackay was in 1841.

In fact, Bartholomew wrote one of my favourite books of all time. Called Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion (ISBN 0786409975) it was the first book that made me wake up to the power of social influence on individual psychology.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I was sent a PDF of the new encyclopaedia some months ago in the hopes that I would write some blurb for the back, which I was more than happy to do as it is a wonderfully complete collection of social curiosities.

The Fortean Times article has some great excerpts covering an outbreak of feinting in a marching band in 1973 Alabama (a classic case of mass hysteria), an outbreak of cat-like meowing in India in 2004, the 1958 hula-hoop craze, a goblin scare that affect Zimbabwe in 2002, a ‘culture bound syndrome’ with the unusual name of the jumping Frenchmen of Maine from the 18th and 19th centuries, various outbreaks of fears about chemtrails, a giant earthworm hoax that panicked a Texas town in 1993, and a version of Orson Well’s War of the Worlds that caused widespread rioting in Ecuador in 1949.

And if you want more on ‘mass hysteria’, I highly recommend a 2002 article from the British Journal of Psychiatry by Bartholomew and psychiatrist Simon Wessely.

Link to Fortean Times article ‘Outbreak!’
Link to more details on the book.
Link to BJP article on mass psychogenic illness.

I always assumed the question of whether people deaf from birth could hear hallucinated voices was similar to the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no-one is there, but it turns out that there have been several studies on auditory hallucinations in deaf people.

In fact, I’ve just read a remarkable paper that reports ten case studies of people who became deaf before they learnt language and who report hearing voices as part of a psychotic mental illness. And this isn’t the only study, PubMed has several more.

I always assumed that a born-deaf person would hallucinate signs instead (and apparently, this has also been reported) but this study carefully asked the people concerned about and they seemed to be clear that they were ‘hearing’ the voices.

In one of the most interesting bits in the study they asked the deaf patients how they could ‘hear’ voices when they were deaf:

Although the patients were only rated as having auditory hallucinations if they were emphatic that they heard voices rather than received information in some other way, and several gave the sign for talking, questioning about how they were able to hear, being deaf, was typically uninformative. Most commonly the patients merely shrugged, gave a ‘don’t know’ reply, or indicated that they could not understand the question.

Others made attempts at explanation which were superficial, facile or otherwise unsatisfactory, such as ‘maybe talking in my brain,’ or ‘sometimes I’m deaf, sometimes I hear’. One patient argued that he could hear music if he turned it up loud (which probably represented perception of vibration), and implied that the same was true for speech. Still others made untrue or delusional claims that they could hear or used to be able to hear.

Such patients made statements like ‘I’m not deaf‘, or ‘I can hear on one side, on the right’, or ‘I used to be able to hear a little, a year ago’. One patient, who was diagnosed as deaf at the age of 2 years, stated that she could hear before the age of 5 years, but then she hit a brick wall and became deaf. One patient believed that his hearing had been restored by God.

These sorts of seemingly half-hearted explanations are not uncommon in patients with delusional syndromes. For example, if you ask a patient who is paralysed after brain damage but is unaware of it (something called anosognosia) to lift their hand they can often give answers like “it’s fine where it is” or “I can’t be bothered right now” while continuing to claim that they could move it if they wanted.

I notice a recent article criticises the idea that deaf people can hear voices saying that the interpretation of these hallucinatory experiences relies on hearing people imposing their ideas onto what they’ve been told. In the case studies above some of the deaf people clearing and unambiguously signed that they ‘heard’ the voices but sadly I don’t have access to this critical article so can’t say quite how convincing this argument is.

On a related note, I’ve heard several people discuss whether blind people could experience ‘visual’ hallucinations (usually in reference to LSD) but I’ve had no luck finding any reports of this.

Link to study of hallucinated voices in deaf people.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The New York Times has a brilliant article on how human traits and behaviours, including everything from happiness to obesity, can spread through social networks.

It discusses the findings of the Framington Heart Study. Originally designed to be a study of heart disease in a small American town, it recorded each participant’s family and friends in case the researchers lost touch with anyone.

This data allowed sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler to reconstruct the social networks of the participants and test how family, work and friendship connections affected the spread of things like happiness, obesity and smoking. Their data suggests that even quite nebulous experiences like happiness ‘travel’ through our web of relationships, as we discussed when they released this study last year.

Coincidentally Wired has also just published an article on the same topic which has some of the stunning network maps from the study, but I really recommend reading the New York Times in full as it is not solely on this one study, it also serves as a nuanced discussion about the usefulness and limitations of social network analysis.

Not least is the difficulty of judging to what extent these effects ‘travel’ through relationships or how much the ‘birds of a feather’ effect means similar people just flock together.

You need to understand social network analysis because it is becoming one of the most powerful method to understand human behaviour. As we’ve discussed before, the fact that digital communications technology is so common means that we’re constantly creating data trails that can reveal surprising amounts of intimate information with relatively simple methods.

For example, the BPS Research Digest just covered a study that could infer about 95% of friendships just from looking at location data from mobile phones – something that is one of the most basic information trails in the rich data stream automatically produced by social media.

This approach to understanding human networks is also likely to be increasingly important for human science. The last few decades have seen a massive increase in understanding on how genetics influences our minds and behaviour and social network analysis will see us increasingly linking individual discoveries from biology and cognitive science to the role of our relationships in our lives.

Link to NYT piece ‘Is Happiness Catching?’
Link to Wired piece ‘The Buddy System’.
Link to Mind Hacks on ‘The distant sound of well-armed sociologists’.

Carl Zimmer has an interesting article in Discover Magazine on brain function and sex, one of the most neglected areas in contemporary neuroscience.

We know scandalously little about the neuroscience of sex. For example, we know more about the what the brain does during hiccups than during orgasm and yet very little sex research is completed in comparison to studies on other areas of human life.

Zimmer focuses on several recent neuroimaging studies on sexual desire and contrasts it with some case studies of altered sexuality after brain damage, particularly one of the first from 1945 – a patient named CW who showed a sharp increase in sexual desire associated with epileptic seizures.

Curiously though, the article implies that, in sex research, brain imaging is the way forward while case studies of brain damaged patients are a thing of the past, when this couldn’t be further from the truth.

We have learnt far more about the link between brain circuits and human behaviour through studying patterns in what people can and cannot do after brain injury than we ever have through brain scans.

This is because scans can only tell us that activity is associated with a behaviour whereas studies of brain injury tell us whether the affected part of the brain is necessary for the function we’re studying.

Think of it like this: if you didn’t know how a car worked and wanted to work it out from scanning from the outside, seeing what parts were active when it moved would likely also identify the radio along with the engine.

But if we looked at a bunch of differently damaged cars we would be able to quickly work out that the radio was non-essential for driving because when it was damaged, the car could still move, whereas damage to the engine stopped it dead.

The same goes for sex research and as described in a recent scientific article on what altered sexual function after brain damage tells us about sexuality, ‘lesion studies’ have taught us a great deal, whereas the relatively few brain scanning studies are still just scratching the surface.

Both are important, of course, and there are advantages to each. Zimmer gives the example of an EEG study showing the progression of activity through the brain during sexual desire, something not possible just from studies of damage.

Nevertheless, researching brain dysfunction is still our most useful tool and one that has taught us the most about the neuroscience of human sexuality.

Link to Discover article ‘Where Does Sex Live in the Brain?’
Link to article on what brain damage tell us about sex.

Science News has a fascinating article on research suggesting that the desire for autonomy is a universal feature of human psychology that can be seen in children around the world and is not something solely prominent in Western children.

The stereotype is that Western society is individualistic and Eastern is collectivist, but as we’ve discussed before, this broad stereotype often doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Not without some scepticism, this new research suggests that children begin to develop concepts of autonomy from about the age of 10, regardless of which culture they grow up in.

[Psychologist Charles Helwig of the University of Toronto says] his new findings support the idea that universal concerns among children — such as a need to feel in control of one’s behavior and disapproval of harming others — shape moral development far more than cultural values do.

“It’s remarkable how little cultural variation we have found in developmental patterns of moral reasoning,” says Helwig, who presented his results in Park City, Utah, at the recent annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society.

Helwig and like-minded researchers don’t assume that kids’ universal responses spring from a biologically innate moral-reasoning capacity. Instead, they say, children gradually devise ways of evaluating core family relationships in different situations. Kids judge the fairness and effectiveness of their parents’ approaches to punishing misbehavior, for example. These kinds of relationship issues are much the same across all cultures, from Helwig’s perspective.

Link to Science News article ‘Morality Play’.

Latah is a curious mental state seemingly localised to Malaysia and Indonesia where a person gets wound-up to such a degree that they show an exaggerated startle response, are highly suggestible, and may produce unintentional tic-like behaviour sequences when prompted by others.

It has been discussed as rare exotica in the medical literature but owing to the wonders of the internet, there are now many videos of it on YouTube (welcome to the age of armchair anthropology).

The name is also used to refer to people who have a tendency to get into latah states, and other people may deliberately trigger latah behaviours in the person as a sort of usually good natured social teasing.

For example, this video has some friends indulging in some good natured joshing by getting one of their latah companions to do a whole range of daft actions through demonstration or suggestion. The latah seems compelled to comply, occasionally snapping out of it to implore them to ‘stop it!’.

There are many other examples online. Although the specific triggered behaviours vary, almost all have the element of good-natured group teasing.

The condition is described by Western psychiatry as a culture-bound syndrome as it is typically thought only to occur in Malaysian and Indonesian people although the medical literature has had an ongoing debate about whether other cultures have the same phenomenon under a different name.

This is from an article on culture bound syndromes from The Psychiatric Times:

This same physiology has been elaborated in a variety of societies that are unrelated either historically or culturally. Among the Ainu in Japan, the syndrome is called imu, and in a French-Canadian population in Maine it is called jumping. Thus, these syndromes are similar, but not identical, from society to society. This, of course, is true of the diagnostic entities described in DSM-IV as well. Like hyperstartling, sleep paralysis (a feeling of paralysis when either just falling asleep or waking up, sometimes accompanied by visual or audio hallucinations) has been elaborated into a culture-bound syndrome in a number of unrelated geographic locations. It is known as uqamairineq among the Yupik Eskimos and as old hag in parts of Newfoundland, Canada.

Anthropologists, who are much better at dealing with cultural variation without trying to shoehorn it into their familiar categories, have often loudly scoffed at the psychiatric definition of latah as a syndrome, suggesting it is just a defined social role of the local culture that has its own limits and and ‘rules’.

The latah can break social convention by swearing or acting the fool, but violence or sexual indecency rarely occur and would be frowned upon.

In other words, it allows for socially sanctioned rule breaking while giving the person the justification of not being in control of their behaviour.

This is a common theme in society. Think about our ideas of a ‘wild night out’. Someone gets really drunk and flashes their arse at a passing bus – craaazy! Someone gets really drunk and flashes their cock at a bus – sex offender.

The ‘drunk’ reason doesn’t seem to excuse the latter quite so well, showing that there are limits to being ‘out of control’.

This doesn’t mean that we are fully in control either, it just means that all societies have established ways of allowing us to live on the boundaries (the liminal if you want the jargon).

From this perspective, Latah is a local example of a common human tendency.

Link to video of a latah (more here – thanks Ivan!)
Link to Psychiatric Times on culture-bound syndromes.

The New York Times has a fascinating piece on the historical tendency for societies to find scapegoats for outbreaks of disease.

The article gives examples from modern epidemics of how specific groups have been singled out as responsible for a disease as a simple explanation for complex situations.

One of the most interesting parts is where it tackles why certain groups may have been targeted.

In some cases, the author hypothesises that certain cultural practices may have meant some subcultures were less affected by outbreaks, making it easier for more affected population to point the finger of suspicion:

It is not uncommon for ethnic groups to have religious or cultural customs that protect against disease — but whether it was originally intended to do that or not is often lost in time.

Manchurian nomads, Dr. McNeill said, avoided plague because they believed marmots harbored the souls of their ancestors, so it was taboo to trap them, although shooting them was permitted. Butin the early 20th century, trapping by immigrants from China contributed to plague outbreaks.

And Tamils from India working as plantation laborers in Malaysia may have had less malaria and dengue than their Malay and Chinese co-workers did because they never stored water near their houses, leaving mosquitoes no place to breed.

The article reminded me of Jared Diamond’s influential book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond argues that it is impossible to separate the history of human culture from the influence of disease because disease has been one of the most powerful, if not unintentional, influences in competition between social groups.

Link to NYT ‘Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike’.

Medical journal Epilepsy and Behavior has a curious case study of a female patient who had the experience of changing sex when she had a seizure.

The patient in question had a small tumour near the right amygdala and showed abnormal right temporal lobe activity on an EEG. Interestingly, when she had the experience of changing sex, she also experienced other females in the vicinity as also transforming into males.

She experienced a sensation of dull nausea rising from the epigastrium [abdomen] with concomitant fear, sometimes also accompanied by déjà vu, in isolation, several times per week. Occasionally this developed into a complex alteration of perception, which she explained as follows: ”I’m no longer feeling to be a female. I have the impression to transform into a male. My voice, for example, sounds like a male voice that moment. One time, when I looked down to my arms during this episode, these looked like male arms including male hair growth.”

This particular kind of perceptual disturbance was not restricted to herself, but also characterized her perception of female persons nearby during the episode: “One time another woman, a friend of mine, was in the same room, I perceived also her as becoming a male person including changing sound of her voice.” After introduction of anticonvulsive treatment with carbamazepine, only the elementary simple-partial phenomena of epigastric aura and déjà vu persisted. Secondary generalized tonic–clonic seizures never occurred.

Sex change delusions have been reported in the medical literature before, but usually in longer-term psychoses in people with diagnoses like schizophrenia, rather than occurring as a short-term effect of a seizure.

In fact, sex change delusions were reported by one of the most famous psychiatric patients in history: Daniel Schreber, a 19th century German judge who wrote about his experience of insanity in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.

Among other experiences he describes how he believed that his mind was attracting ‘rays’ from God causing him feminising sensations of ‘voluptuousness’ which he noticed as female body changes.

Temporary sex change ‘delusions’ have also been created using hypnosis in highly hypnotisable people in two remarkable studies that attempt to understand how the mind justifies a belief clearly contrary to reality.

Link to DOI entry and summary of case study.

There is probably no more hostile environment to mental health treatment than the military. Recently, a new treatment method has been widely adopted by the UK Armed Forces and, perhaps for the first time in history, officers are requesting it in droves.

In major wars since the 20th century more fighters have been lost to psychiatric casualties than bodily injuries but psychiatrists and psychologists are still mistrusted by the corps.

It was explained to me rather tactfully that “soldiers are not necessarily the most psychologically minded of individuals” and it is likely a combination of the macho culture and conditioning to deal with discomfort by sheer grit that casts mental strain as weakness in the military.

This has made both mental health problems and their treatment a source of significant stigma in one of the professions most likely to cause trauma and breakdown in its employees.

Trauma Risk Management or TRiM was first developed by the Royal Marines, one of the UK’s most hardened battle corps, and trains key members to recognise signs of mental strain in their comrades and provides support at the level of the unit.

It’s a wonderfully conceived approach as it takes advantage of the esprit de corps, the intense group bond that forms between fellow soldiers, but which also makes them wary of accepting help from ‘outsiders’.

But it also avoids the practice of sending in outsiders to provide ‘debriefings’ after traumatic incidents which have been found, in many cases, to make the trauma worse.

A recent paper [pdf] published in Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps outlines the TRiM approach. Non-medical mid-level soldiers are trained to assess their colleagues after a potentially traumatic event and look for risk factors for poor-coping, provide information on which psychological reactions to expect, give informal support and know when to refer to specialist medical staff.

More widely the approach aims to change attitudes to mental distress by making it both an acceptable topic and another form of operational training.

And it is clear that there is a currently a need for a different approach, particularly it seems, in the US military.

A recent review of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers deployed to Iraq found that, seemingly uniquely, US soldiers show increased levels of the disorder one year after returning from the war zone. This is exactly the opposite pattern to that which is typically seen in other soldiers and civilians.

Science writer David Dobbs has received a lot of flak for suggesting that the system that provides mental health treatment to US veterans is unintentionally encouraging long-term disability but the figures suggest he may be right.

TRiM could be an effective counter-measure to mental illness in the military and it is certainly popular. It is also being adopted widely in the civilian emergency services, but it remains under-researched.

The recent paper on TRiM notes that a trial is currently being run by the UK Ministry of Defence and preliminary results suggest cautious optimism although we still await the first published study its effectiveness when deployed on the ground.

In light of the lack of evidence, it’s perhaps a little worrying that TRiM is being increasingly flashed around as a PR-friendly talisman of good practice whenever the military’s mental health credentials are questioned and it has also now become the basis of a minor training industry.

Nevertheless, the simple fact that it has been accepted and requested by the armed forces themselves is a significant advance for military psychiatry.

pdf of ‘Trauma risk management (TRiM) in the UK Armed Forces’

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on how bad we are at judging our friends’ beliefs, opinions and values but why we tend to assume they match with our own.

The article covers various examples of this effect, but it mentions a finding from a shortly to be published study finding that the most socially connected people are typically the least accurate at judging their friends’ attitudes:

A similar effect arises when people are asked questions about right and wrong rather than politics. Recent research by Francis Flynn, a psychology professor at Stanford, and Scott Wiltermuth, a doctoral student there, looked at people in tight-knit workplace and graduate-school settings.

The researchers found that people assumed, often unquestioningly, that their responses to a series of ethical dilemmas were shared by the majority of their close colleagues. In reality they often were not. More strikingly, it was the more socially connected among the test subjects who were more likely to be wrong.

The article has a bit of a quirk, however, by supposedly explaining “Psychologists call this projection: in situations where there‚Äôs any ambiguity, people tend to simply project their feelings and thoughts onto others”.

Except, they don’t. The effect discussed by the article, where we over-estimate the extent to which people share our own mindset, is called the false consensus effect.

Projection is a unverified psychological defence mechanism where people supposedly misperceive psychological states in other people that, in reality, they have themselves but unconsciously want to hide from their conscious mind.

This was a concept originally developed by Sigmund Freud and systematised, along with a range of other ‘defences mechanisms’, by Anna Freud in her landmark book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.

However, as with the majority of defences proposed in psychoanalysis, the basic process has been experimentally verified but the defence aspect (it’s the unconscious hiding the unthinkable from us) has not.

Link to Globe article ‘What you don‚Äôt know about your friends’.

The latest edition of the journal Emotion has a fascinating study comparing common concepts of happiness and unhappiness between Americans and Japanese people. While we tend to think that ‘happiness’ is a universal concept, it turns out that we think of it in quite culturally specific ways.

Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes and variations.

Emotion. 2009 Aug;9(4):441-56.

Uchida Y, Kitayama S.

Cultural folk models of happiness and unhappiness are likely to have important bearings on social cognition and social behavior. At present, however, little is known about the nature of these models. Here, the authors systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of the two emotions and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans associated positive hedonic experience of happiness with personal achievement, Japanese associated it with social harmony.

Furthermore, Japanese were more likely than Americans to mention both social disruption and transcendental reappraisal as features of happiness. As also predicted, unlike happiness, descriptions of unhappiness included various culture-specific coping actions: Whereas Americans focused on externalizing behavior (e.g., anger and aggression), Japanese highlighted transcendental reappraisal and self-improvement. Implications for research on culture and emotion are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for the study.

The Hawthorne Effect is famous for showing that people will change their behaviour when observed, or that any change increases productivity, or perhaps that experimenters always influence their participants. It has become one of those legends of psychology that turns out to be not quite what we believe.

It’s the subject of the second edition of BBC Radio 4’s excellent Mind Changers series which discovers that the original studies, their interpretations and the effect itself have become somewhat mythical.

The studies were conducted on employees of the Hawthorne works in Chicago, a factory that built relays switches for the telephone industry.

The research, conducted between the 1920s and 30s, was not always as systematic as it could have been and was mostly close observations of five women, giving rise to fascinating experimenters’ reports, some of which are read out on the programme.

Unlike studies today, the researchers carefully noted their opinion of the personality of the workers, their conversations, what was happening in their lives and how this affected their productivity.

The actual findings that give rise to the ‘Hawthorne effect’ are in doubt and are still debated (there was some fascinating news on the Advances in the History of Psychology blog about this just recently) but the study was hugely influential in that it was the first to connect the personal to the commercial.

Workers were no longer just cogs in the industrial machine who were lost from sight as soon as they left the factory, but people whose work was intimately connected to their home and social lives.

This is now the basis of modern management techniques and the Hawthorne studies, regardless of the debates over the evidence, were the inspiration.

Anyway, another brilliant documentary from the Mind Changers series put together by the ever-excellent Claudia Hammond.

Link to Mind Changers on the Hawthorne Effect.

Oxytocin is usually described as the ‘trust hormone’ owing to its involvement in social bonding but a new study covered by Scientific American suggests it may have a wider role in human interaction as it has been found it increase feelings of envy and gloating.

The study, led by psychologist Simone Shamay-Tsoory, used a familiar format in oxytocin research. It asked participants to play a competitive game while half were given a nasal spray containing the hormone and half were given a placebo spray.

Although they thought they were playing another participant, in reality, they were playing a computer programmed to act in a certain way to elicit competitive emotions:

The computer was programmed to either win more money than the players to trigger feelings of envy, lose more money to elicit a form of gloating known as schadenfreude (delight over another’s misfortune) or to win or lose equal amounts of money. To encourage these negative emotions, the researchers gave the computer player an arrogant “personality”. They did this by asking the volunteers to appraise their chances of winning more money than the other player; although nearly all volunteers predicted 50-50 odds, they were told their opponents gave themselves an 80 percent chance of winning.

When compared with a placebo, volunteers who inhaled oxytocin said they felt greater levels of envy or gloating when they lost or won more money than the computer, respectively‚ findings the researchers detailed online July 29 in Biological Psychiatry. On the other hand, when the volunteers were questioned after the game, inhaling oxytocin apparently had no effect either following gains of equal amounts of money or on mood in general.

The researchers also measured mood in general and found no change, suggesting the increase in negative feelings toward others couldn’t be explained as a general intensifying of emotions.

In their paper, they note several exceptions to the media stereotype that oxytocin is a ‘hug hormone’, citing studies that it increases aggression and territorial defence in some species. Also contrary to the cliché, a recent study [pdf] found it had no effect on empathy for other people’s pain.

They conclude that, rather than being a something that promotes trust and bonding, oxytocin enhances all social emotions, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

Link to SciAm on oxytocin and envy study.
Link to abstract of study.

I’ve just found a remarkable paper with several cases of epilepsy that were interpreted as voodoo possession. They were all people with roots in Haiti, where voodoo is the predominant religion, and where spirit possession is considered a common spiritual event.

For thousands of years epilepsy has been explained as spirit possession in religions around the world. Epilepsy is also known to trigger intense religious or spiritual experiences in some people but the majority of cases are from the West and so have a distinctly Christian theme.

This 36-year-old woman had several years of recurrent complex partial seizures that manifested as a strong sense of fear and epigastric coldness, followed by loss of awareness, utterances of nonsensical phrases, and complex motor automatisms. The local mambo attributed the events to her being taken by “Melle Charlotte,” a french loa [spirit], with the nonsensical speech being interpreted as a foreign language.

It is said that during the possession by this spirit, a person will speak perfect French or other languages, even though in life, the person has no knowledge of that language. She continued to have seizures despite the mambo’s attempts to conjure the spirit. He explained his failure to the fact that Melle Charlotte is a very particular loa who makes only sporadic appearances. She was not treated with AEDs [anti-epileptic drugs] until she left Haiti at the age of 34.

An EEG revealed a right anterior temporal focus, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed right hippocampal atrophy. Seizures improved with carbamazepine (CBZ), although compliance with medication was a problem, largely because of family interference.

The cases are interesting as they highlight how easily the ‘possession’ theory fits with the unpredictable course of epilepsy and its effects when it seems to briefly ‘take over’ the body and mind of the affected person.

It raises the question of how much observations of epilepsy, a condition that affects approximately 1% of the population, have contributed to the idea of possession throughout the world.

Link to paper on epilepsy and Voodoo experiences.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has a poignant poem by Canadian poet and psychiatrist Ron Charach who muses on ‘Psychiatrists on the Subway’:

Apparently the poem is from his collection Selected Portraits that contains a number of other poems on psychiatry and mental illness.

Psychiatrists on the Subway

One rarely spots psychiatrists on the subway
rubbing the haze of a long day’s sessions
from their lean temples,
or thumbing through paperbacks that deal
with anything-but.

Wouldn’t they like an update on who’s
In the world and how they’re doing?
Or would the ridership be wary of men and women
whose briefcases rattle with the tic tac
of pills, whose ears perk
like armadillos’ at conversations
two seats over?

More likely we locate them in a bad joke,
in a wing-chair beside a firm couch,
a suicide statistic, a product seminar
with deli sandwiches courtesy of Pfizer or Roche
or Eli Lilly;
perhaps on the beach of a convention hotel
with a panorama of thong-clad beauties
who seldom talk revealingly

Before bed a psychiatrist sets his ears
on the night-table
and prays for a night of long silence
from a god who prefers
to listen.

You can hear Charach himself reading poems from the collection, including ‘Psychiatrists on the Subway’ at this page. He reads in a calm deliberate manner which really suits the material.

Link to poem in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Link to Charach reading his poetry.