Category: Togetherness

The New Yorker magazine has just published an important article questioning whether the widespread use of solitary confinement in the US prison system should be outlawed as a form of torture.

It’s an in-depth piece that piece that looks at numerous cases of people who have experienced solitary confinement first hand, either as hostages or legitimate prisoners, and discusses the psychological impact of this extreme form of social isolation.

I’ve just looked up the research on the effects of solitary confinement and there’s remarkably little, although everything I could find that directly addressed the question found that it had a negative impact on the mind.

In fact, the ‘The Istanbul statement on the use and effects of solitary confinement’ [pdf], an international consensus statement on solitary confinement, notes that it “harms prisoners who are not previously mentally ill and tends to worsen the mental health of those who are” and questions whether it breaches UN Human Rights laws.

It also describes the punishment as being linked to “long list of symptoms ranging from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and psychosis”.

The New Yorker article contrasts the research findings with the fact that the US has a whole ‘supermax‘ prison system dedicated to solitary confinement and the highest population of prisoners kept in these conditions in the world.

It also notes the fact that there is no evidence that solitary confinement actually reduces prison violence, which it is intended to do.

The article is an important and hard-hitting piece that tries to get to convey the impact of extreme social isolation and asks some difficult questions over a common practice in the US justice system.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Hellhole’.

A study ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology sadly supports the stereotype that chicks dig men in flashy cars.

The attractiveness-boosting effect only affects women’s perceptions of men, however. Men were unmoved by chicks in hot rods, and neither sex’s attractiveness ratings for same-sex drivers was affected by the car they were in.

Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings.

Dunn MJ, Searle R.

Br J Psychol. 2009 Mar 19. [Epub ahead of print]

Previous studies have shown that male attractiveness can be enhanced by manipulation of status through, for example, the medium of costume. The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car.

A between-subjects design was used whereby the above photographic images were presented to male and female participants for attractiveness rating. Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

It would appear that despite a noticeable increase in female ownership of prestige/luxury cars over recent years males, unlike females, remain oblivious to such cues in matters pertaining to opposite-sex attraction. These findings support the results of previous status enhancement of attractiveness studies especially those espousing sex differences in mate preferences are due to sex-specific adaptations.

An interesting study testing a well-known stereotype, but what the world really wants to know is whether the cliché about men with flashy cars having small penises is true.

Considering the car industry and scientific psychology were born at about the same time, it’s disgraceful that such a fundamental study in the psychology of social willy waving has yet to be completed.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

I’ve just found a description of some spectacular and fantastical hallucinations from a case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, reported in a review article on the neuroscience of this curious hallucinatory state.

It’s one of the most florid cases I’ve ever come across and the experience seems both wondrous and terrifying in equal measure:

A 73-year-old woman who lived alone presented with anxiety-provoking visual hallucinations. Inch-long black ants scurried across her kitchen floor, walls and windows. In desperation, she began spraying insecticide throughout the house. Her neighbour, whose features were seemingly masked by the insects, called an ambulance. Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department.

A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses’ heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds.

She once caught herself telling them to get off a road at which point they donned diamond coats, jumped into a wooden carriage, and rode up to her bedside. Ants in the mirror were at times replaced by an elephant’s trunk blotting out half her face. Her hair in the reflection flowed with cobwebs and the basin was matted with hair and whiskers.

Cobwebs spilled from her cereal bowl at breakfast. The bathroom floor was covered with water that vanished whenever she tried to mop it up. The carpet in the room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake, and slither out the door. A little girl and boy with a black and white dog stood next to the bed, as did extraterrestrial-like beings with large domed-shaped heads and slitted black eyes.

Twisted heads with grotesque faces and bulbous eyes peered out from the wall, while little red carriages, trains and push bikes disappeared into it. Further history revealed an experience of ‘ant’ hallucinations 4 months previously but the images disappeared after 2 weeks. She did not seek medical advice at that time fearing that she might be considered ‘a bit odd’.

Throughout the hospital admission she was rarely free from hallucinations and would repeatedly ask for reassurance that she was ‘not going mad’. Two months after discharge the hallucinations were still intrusive. She owned a small black dog but would see several dogs resembling oversized greyhounds with unusually long snouts in her daughter’s yard.

A man and a goat, both wearing grey hats and overcoats, often stood beside her before wandering off together down a crooked road. She grew accustomed to seeing a baby seated on the lounge chair wearing grey clothes. It smiled but made no sounds. Caterpillars and tree frogs began joining her for the evening bath.

She began to notice that distractions, such as listening to the radio and attending to household chores, dampened the hallucinations, while solitude, particularly during the evening hours, tended to heighten them.

At follow-up 1 year later, she was experiencing very much the same hallucinations but was more cognisant of their unreality and less anxious as a result. The only new hallucination that had since appeared was that of a bright kaleidoscopic array which would transiently emanate from her central field of vision.

The article has another case study which is also quite spectacular, and, curiously, also features a Roman chariot.

One of the most interestingly things about Charles Bonnet syndrome is that fact that it is typically associated with the most complex hallucinations, but usually due to damage to the retina or early visual pathway.

In other words, damage to the part of the visual system which deals with the most basic aspects of vision (detecting lines, light and dark and so on) can cause the most spectacular visual distortions.

It’s not fully clear why this is, but one of the most popular theories is that visual information gathered by the initial part of the system is used to limit the interpretations made by the perceptual processes later in the stream which are focussed on working out significance and meaning.

We can see this system breaking down a bit when we see momentary ‘pictures’ in TV static or in flames, as the fuzzy input means many interpretations can be made.

However, when we’re looking at more ordered scenes, our interpretation is usually more constrained – it’s more difficult to interpret light patterns from a pencil as something else.

The theory goes that when we can’t process light patterns very successfully, owing to damage to the early visual system, the interpretation processes go wild, so hallucinations are ‘released’ and cavort unconstrained through our conscious mind.

Link to article on the neuroscience of Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The new edition of Scientific American Mind is out an it has an excellent cover article on the psychological effects of humour and laughter.

It’s a remarkably wide-ranging article, covering everything from the effect on the immune system, to laughter’s pain killing properties to its beneficial effect on mental health.

There’s also an interesting aside on the role of humour in attraction:

In 2006 psychologists Eric R. Bressler of Westfield State College and Sigal Balshine of McMaster University in Ontario reported that women are more likely to consider a man in a photograph a desirable relationship partner if the picture is accompanied by a funny quote attributed to the man. In fact, the women preferred the funny men despite rating them, on average, less intelligent and less trustworthy.

Although the men in Bressler and Balshine’s study did not prefer witty women as partners, other research indicates that both men and women value a “sense of humor” when choosing a partner. Either way, males do seem to like ladies who laugh at their jokes. A 1990 study suggests that when women and men chat, the amount of laughing by the woman indicates both her interest in dating the man and her sexual appeal to the man. (The man’s laughter did not relate to attraction in either direction.)

The issue also has freely available online articles on ‘brain training’, the psychological effect of architecture and personality disorder with many more in the print edition.

Link to April’s SciAmMind.

Bad Science has a great article on the ‘copycat suicide’ effect, where media reporting of suicide can increase the chances of suicide in other people.

Copycat suicide is sometimes called the ‘Werther Effect’, after Goethe published his 1774 novel ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ which depicted Werther’s suicide and was reportedly followed by people imitating the same method to end their lives.

It’s an interesting effect because it shows the influence on the media on what people usually think of the most extreme of decisions.

An excellent 2003 review article on the subject found that the effect holds for all media reports of suicides (including fictional ones) but celebrity suicide is most associated with subsequent deaths. Interestingly, it notes that the largest known increase followed the death of Marilyn Monroe.

The review also found found that the greater the coverage of the suicide, and the more details in the reporting, the larger the increase in subsequent deaths.

Because of this, there are now media guidelines for reporting suicide, and the Bad Science article reports on a particularly bad example where the journalist reported exactly the sort of thing most associated with increased risk in a single story – virtually nothing except details of the suicide method.

One of the most interesting bits of the Bad Science piece doesn’t appear in the print version. However, it discusses research that found the majority of people who attempt suicide and survive are pleased they did some years later:

There is a literature which I think is extremely powerful, and yet unanimously ignored by mainstream media, and that is the follow-up data on what happens later in life to people who have felt so suicidal that they have made serious attempts on their own lives.

In extremis Pajonk et al followed up a large number of people who they picked up in intensive care after very serious suicide attempts. Amongst those who survived, and did not have serious psychotic illnesses, six years later, the majority were happy and well, living productive family lives, and were – we might reasonably interpolate Рglad to be alive.

Link to Bad Science article on media reporting of suicide.
Link to review article on media and suicide (with open-access link).

The Journal of Sex Research has a fascinating article on the role of attention in sexual arousal and how we use our mental focus to explore and control excitement during sex.

We can see from our everyday lives that attention is important for sex. We can distract ourselves to avoid sexual arousal when our mind has wandered onto sexual topics and we don’t want to get aroused, or we want to prolong sexual enjoyment without getting over-aroused.

We also can do the reverse and focus strongly on sexual fantasises or our partner to dispel other thoughts and lose ourselves in the sexual moment.

However, the article looks at the scientific research on attention during sex and discusses how this can help us understand and treat sexual problems.

The drug industry has a lot invested in telling people that sexual difficulties are almost entirely due to problems with the genitals.

For example, the website for Viagra promotes the line that erectile dysfunction is a problem with your cock, saying that “It happens when not enough blood flows to the penis”.

Which is a bit like saying poverty is when not enough money gets to poor people. It describes the outcome but not the cause.

The article makes clear that many sexual problems can be best understood in terms of how the mind is working and many sexual problems can be equally well treated with psychological methods.

In other words, it’s often not that the genitals are ‘not working’, but that we’ve got into a situation where it’s hard to achieve the necessary level of sexual arousal because of, for example, distraction, anxiety or low self-confidence which cause a negative feedback loop that takes our focus away from making love and onto other non-arousing things.

Based on such findings, Barlow (1986) posited a model of erectile dysfunction, central to which is the idea that increased autonomic arousal results in a narrowing of attentional focus (Wiegel, Scepkowski, & Barlow, 2007). The model outlines a process whereby a male focuses his attention on either erotic cues or nonerotic, self-evaluative cues (e.g., fears over performance). In both cases, autonomic arousal (due to sexual arousal in functional men and anxiety in dysfunctional men) creates a feedback loop, further narrowing the man’s attentional focus on the information to which he is already attending.

In sexually functional men, attention becomes increasingly focused on erotic information, creating a positive feedback loop. This feedback loop facilitates sexual response and erection, which in turn leads to approach behavior. In the case of sexually dysfunctional men, attention becomes more focused on nonsexual, task-irrelevant material, creating a negative feedback loop.

In clinical psychology, many problems, particularly with anxiety, are understood as malfunctioning feedback loops, where the person’s attempt to control their anxiety actually serve to maintain it in the long-term.

Interestingly, the article touches on the use of mindfulness meditation, known to cause attention changes and anxiety reduction, in the treatment of sexual problems.

For example, some preliminary studies have been completed by psychologist Lori Brotto and colleagues with promising results.

Link to ‘The Role of Attention in Sexual Arousal’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The Psychologist has a counter-intuitive article on research that indicates, contrary to popular belief, that having children tends not to make people happier. In fact, parents reliably report that they feel less happy than in their child free days, and less happy when compared to childless couples.

Over the past few decades, social scientists like me have found consistent evidence that there is an almost zero association between having children and happiness. My analysis in the Journal of Socio-economics (Powdthavee, 2008) is a recent British example of parents and non-parents reporting the same levels of life satisfaction, on average.

But the warnings for prospective parents are even more stark than ‘it’s not going to make you happier’. Using data sets from Europe and America, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al., 2004), life satisfaction (Di Tella et al., 2003), marital satisfaction (Twenge et al., 2003), and mental well-being (Clark & Oswald, 2002) compared with non-parents.

It’s an interesting article as it tackles not only why having children tends not to make us happier, but also why we think it does in cultures across the world.

Link to ‘Think having children will make you happy?’.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist.

NPR has a fascinating segment on psychotherapist Jim Cates, who works with Amish youth who are experiencing the turbulent time of ‘Rumspringa‘ – a period when they get to experience non-Amish life so they can decide whether they want to commit to their parents’ culture and traditions.

The Amish are a community based around Anabaptist Christianity who, to varying degrees, refuse modern technology and the common social practices of North America.

However, during the time of Rumspringa, the youth are free to wear modern clothes, use technology, and may experiment with drink, drugs and sex – on the basis that the Amish want their youth to freely enter their tradition having had the opportunity to experience the alternative.

For some young people, this causes some difficulties, not least with some who encounter difficulties with drink, drugs or emotional adjustment and Jim Cates is a psychotherapist who helps the young people work through the issues.

He describes how he needs to take a radically different approach when conducting psychotherapy with Amish youth, owing to the markedly different way of thinking, particularly about the role of the individual in society.

Cates notes that while traditional American culture is individualist, Amish culture is strongly collectivist, to the point where talking about yourself is seen as prideful and individual work without the involvement of the family is at best uncomfortable and at worst inconceivable.

In the NPR piece, Cates gives some fascinating insights into his take on Amish psychology and discusses the innovative approach he needs when working with the culture.

It’s one of the most interesting and surprising radio pieces I’ve heard in a while, and is by the excellent Alix Spiegel, who also produced the gripping 81 words.

Link to NPR ‘One Man Tackles Psychotherapy For The Amish’.

Scientific American has a knock-out article that questions whether the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is a coherent psychological concept or whether it is actually making the situation worse for soldiers with post-combat mental health problems.

As we’ve noted before, PTSD is a controversial diagnosis for two major reasons. The first is that it is not clear that the diagnosis describes anything different from other forms of anxiety and depression, except for that fact that it is related to a specific traumatic incident.

The second is that the diagnosis was largely introduced after pressure from veterans’ lobbying groups after the Vietnam war. In fact, PTSD was originally called ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ and there are concerns that while it was politically expedient at the time, the concept doesn’t lead to good mental health care.

In fact, combat stress reactions have taken various forms through the years of which PTSD is the latest reincarnation.

The SciAm article tackles research in the US military suggesting that the syndrome is over-diagnosed and that the treatment plan is counter-productive and actually encourages people to remain disabled.

But one of the most interesting things about the article is that it tackles the one of the core features of the diagnosis – that the anxiety symptoms are directly tied to a specific traumatic event.

Many people who are diagnosed with PTSD turn out not to have been traumatised by the event they later attribute the trauma to, or may not have even been traumatised at all.

J. Alexander Bodkin, a psychiatrist at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, screened 90 clinically depressed patients separately for PTSD symptoms and for trauma, then compared the results. First he and a colleague used a standardized screening interview to assess symptoms. Then two other PTSD diagnosticians, ignorant of the symptom reports, used another standard interview to see which patients had ever experienced trauma fitting DSM-IV criteria.

If PTSD arose from trauma, the patients with PTSD symptoms should have histories of trauma, and those with trauma should show more PTSD. It was not so. Although the symptom screens rated 70 of the 90 patients positive for PTSD, the trauma screens found only 54 who had suffered trauma: the diagnosed PTSD “cases” outnumbered those who had experienced traumatic events. Things got worse when Bodkin compared the diagnoses one on one. If PTSD required trauma, then the 54 trauma-exposed patients should account for most of the 70 PTSD-positive patients. But the PTSD-symptomatic patients were equally distributed among the trauma-positive and the trauma-negative groups. The PTSD rate had zero relation to the trauma rate. It was, Bodkin observed, “a scientifically unacceptable situation.”

This does not necessarily mean the people are lying, but may simply be attributing true symptoms to an unlikely source.

It’s a wonderfully thought-provoking article that’s sure to ruffle a few feathers.

The writer, David Dobbs, has also put a load of background material and links to the relevant studies on his blog, so you can get a more in-depth perspective if it sparks your interest in the area.

Link to article ‘Soldiers’ Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD’.
Link to David Dobb’s background material for the article.

The Economist has an excellent piece on crowd psychology and why group behaviour is essential in calming down street confrontations before they turn violent.

Crowds are often associated with senseless aggression, and perhaps the most widely quoted, and most colourful example, is from Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd.

He wrote that crowds showed several special characteristics such as “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides – which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – in women, savages, and children, for instance”.

You can imagine how he went down at parties.

Nevertheless, this association between crowds and violence has remained a research focus for many years. Concepts such as deindividuation – a reduction in the feeling of personal identity and responsibility – are invoked to explain why ‘bad things’ supposedly happen when people congregate in groups. This also typically includes explaining why ‘bad things’ are allowed to happen without people intervening – the so-called bystander effect

The Economist article is interesting because it looks at research which seems to turn these assumptions on their head.

It discusses the work of psychologist Mark Levine, who studies crowd behaviour and has found that crowds actually act to reduce violence in many situations.

He has been analysing CCTV footage of incidents that control room operators thought might turn violent, not all of which did.

His first observation was that bystanders frequently intervene in incipient fights. The number of escalating gestures did not rise significantly as the size of the group increased, contrary to what the bystander effect would predict. Instead, it was the number of de-escalating gestures that grew. A bigger crowd, in other words, was more likely to suppress a fight.

Some incidents did end in violence, of course. To try to work out why, Dr Levine and his colleagues constructed probability trees to help them calculate the likelihood that a violent incident such as a punch being thrown would occur with each successive intervention by a bystander. Using these trees, they were generally able to identify a flashpoint at which the crowd determined which way the fight would go.

Judging the fight to begin with the aggressor’s first pointing gesture towards his target, the researchers found that the first intervention usually involved a bystander trying to calm the protagonist down. Next, another would advise the target not to respond. If a third intervention reinforced crowd solidarity, sending the same peaceful message, then a violent outcome became unlikely. But if it did not—if the third bystander vocally took sides, say—then violence was much more likely.

It’s a really eye-opening piece that’s well worth reading in full as it overturns both some common popular assumptions and some well-worn psychological clich√©s.

Link to Economist on ‘The kindness of crowds’.

There is a small but fascinating medical literature on delusional pregnancy that reports cases of people who, in the context of psychotic mental illness, come to believe they are expecting a child. Interestingly, the cases are not solely women of child bearing age – delusional pregnancy has also been reported in men and the elderly.

In fact, almost as many cases of delusional pregnancy have been reported in men as in women. Unfortunately, no studies have been done on how common this delusion is or what it is associated with, so it’s not clear whether men are equally as likely to have a delusions of pregnancy, or whether it’s just because these cases seem more unusual and is more likely to be published.

Below is one of the cases from a classic 1994 article on delusion of pregnancy from The British Journal of Psychiatry:

B was a 39-year-old, single, female schizophrenic patient with treatment-resistant psychotic symptoms including delusions of pregnancy of 20 years’ duration and amenorrhoea for the previous 18 years. On examination she was convinced that she had a triplet pregnancy – two boys and a girl – of four months gestational age. She reported that they moved about inside her abdomen and also talked to her.

When she was 19, her dancing partner kissed her and she believed that he had been repeatedly impregnating her by means of the same kiss. Regarding her previous pregnancies she believed that their father did not want her to deliver them and hence he ‘withdrew’ them. She did not have any physical symptoms of pregnancy other than amenorrhoea and attributed this to the ‘supernatural nature’ of the pregnancy.

In a curious twist, a recent article reported on a patient who had the delusional denial of pregnancy – where she was clearly heavily pregnant but had the delusion that she was not.

It’s important to note that these cases are not the same as ‘phantom pregnancies’, something medically named pseudocyesis, where a women can show the signs of expecting a child (swollen breasts, enlarged abdomen etc) without actually being pregnant.

This is not a delusion, as the patient can be well aware that they are not actually pregnant or will accept the possibility that they are not when the results of medical tests come though.

Indeed, ‘phantom pregnancy’ can be due to clear disturbance to the hormones – one case was due to a brain tumour that disrupted the endocrine system – but other cases seem to be related to the strong desire to be pregnant.

However, even this has its male equivalent. Couvade syndrome is where men experience some of the physical effects of pregnancy (morning sickness, aches, weight gain) in response to their partner’s pregnancy.

 

Link to classic 1994 paper on delusion of pregnancy.

The Boston Herald has an interesting article on perfectionism – a pathological pursuit of usually unobtainable high standards that is strongly linked to anxiety, depression and eating disorders.

Perfectionism is variously described as a personality trait or a type of dysfunctional assumption where people feel their self-worth is dependent on 100% or perfect success.

It can be quite hard to shift, owing to the fact that some people find it hard to see why doing something perfectly isn’t a useful goal to aim for. However, when a desire for perfection is over-applied it tends to lead to harsh self-criticism and is self-defeating – ironically, people often perform worse as a result.

Psychologists Roz Shafran and Warren Mansell published an influential article on the role of perfectionism in mental illness in 2001, that really opened many people’s eyes to the importance of understanding perfectionist tendencies in psychopathology.

The Boston Globe article is a little more of a gentle introduction, but does a great job of succinctly describing the personal impact of perfectionism, some of the research in the area, and current approaches to treating the problem:

“Perfectionism is a phobia of mistake-making,” said Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation, which is based in Boston. “It is the feeling that ‘If I make a mistake, it will be catastrophic.’ “

Striving for perfection is fine, said Smith College psychology professor Randy Frost, a leading researcher on perfectionism. The issue is how you interpret your own inevitable mistakes and failings. Do they make you feel bad about yourself in a global sense? Does a missed shot in tennis make you slam your racket to the ground? Do you think anything less than 100 percent might as well be zero?

Link to ‘When perfectionism becomes a problem’.
Link to review article on perfectionism and psychopathology.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

There’s a brief but interesting case study in the General Hospital Psychiatry journal of a patient who is described as having ‘extremely grotesque somatic delusions’.

The case was a 54-year-old man. He had no past history or family history of psychiatric disorders. His social and occupational histories were quite normal. In August of 2005, he felt that “something has stuck between under front teeth.” From September, he felt that “there is another lower jaw with teeth between the real upper jaw and real lower jaw, and there is another tongue between the false lower jaw and the real lower jaw”; “the teeth on the false lower jaw are growing steadily”; “I try to cut the false teeth off with the real teeth, but the false teeth do not stop growing”; “the false teeth melt into holes in the false lower jaw, but later grow again from those holes”; “something like spaghetti is coming into and going out from the holes” and “the false lower jaw rolls up and is coming into the throat.” Because of these annoying sensations, he had mild depressive symptoms such as depressed mood, decrease in appetite, restlessness and fatigue. Despite these symptoms, he was able to continue working.

The patient was treated with the antipsychotic drug risperidone and reportedly recovered well.

As part of his assessment he was also given a SPECT brain scan, that found reduced blood flow in the temporal and parietal lobes.

Although still not well studied, various other single case studies have found that delusions concerning body size, shape or transformation correlate with changes in parietal lobe function.

Owing to the role of the parietal lobe in maintaining our ‘body image’, it is thought that problems in this area could lead to unusual experiences of body distortion which could, in part, spark delusional beliefs.

Link to case study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

An article on the psychological characteristic of vicious dog owners has just appeared online in the compelling academic publication, The Journal of Forensic Sciences, finding that those who who own dangerous dogs are more likely to endorse antisocial and psychopathic character traits and more likely to report criminal behaviour.

The study was led by psychologist Laurie Ragatz who collected data from 869 college students who completed an anonymous online questionnaire assessing type of dog owned, criminal behaviors, attitudes towards animal abuse, psychopathy, and personality.

It’s only a correlational study but the introduction has a nice summary of the research findings as well as a previous study on the same topic:

Each year, 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs, of which 386,000 are seriously injured and over 200 die. Several dog breeds have been labeled “vicious” or of “high-risk” for aggression. To date, only one empirical study has examined the characteristics of persons who choose to own their high-risk dogs. Barnes et al. reports that owners of Akitas, Chow-Chows, Dobermans, Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, and Wolf-mixes endorsed approximately 10 times more criminal convictions than owners of nonvicious dogs. Further, vicious dog owners reported more crimes involving aggression, children, alcohol, and domestic violence than owners of nonvicious dogs.

The current research sought to replicate and extend these findings with a college sample. The present study compared nondog owners and owners of vicious, large, and small dogs on engagement in criminal behavior, general personality traits (i.e., impulsive sensation seeking, neuroticism-anxiety, aggression-hostility, activity, and sociability), psychopathy, and attitude towards animal maltreatment.

…As hypothesized, a significant difference in criminal behavior was found based on dog ownership type. Owners of vicious dogs were significantly more likely to admit to violent criminal behavior, compared to large dog owners, small dog owners, and controls. The vicious dog owner sample also engaged in more types (i.e., violent, property, drug, and status) of criminal behavior compared to all other participant groups.

Personality traits were examined and vicious dog owners were significantly higher than controls on impulsive sensation seeking. Examining psychopathic traits, owners of high-risk dogs endorsed significantly more characteristics of primary psychopathy (e.g., carelessness, selfishness, and manipulative tendencies) than small dog owners.

Comparing owners of vicious dogs to other groups, no significant differences were found regarding secondary psychopathy (e.g., impulsiveness or self-defeating behaviors) or attitudes towards animal maltreatment.

Among the college sample, the vicious dogs were predominantly male and weighed 68 pounds. The owners had more self-reported overall criminal behaviors as well as violent criminal behavior. They endorsed significantly more sensation seeking and primary psychopathic traits.

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

The latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the cognitive neuroscience of eye contact, demonstrating how this fleeting social connection has a powerful impact on the mind and brain.

Past research has shown that making eye contact has an impact on social perception and subsequent behaviour.

The article notes that eye contact has been found to increase the likelihood of recognising someone and helps work out whether someone is male or female.

It also seems to increase general arousal and fixes attention – we’re less likely to notice things happening on the periphery of our vision if we’re staring at a face with eye contact than at a face where the eyes are diverted to the side.

In neuroimaging studies eye contact has been found to increase activity in a group of areas (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus) that have often been associated with social interaction across a wide range of studies.

Interestingly, the authors suggest that basic eye contact information might be detected by a specific subcortical mechanism that quickly detects simple light/dark differences, presumably to pick out the direction of the pupil, which then triggers more complex social processing to make sense of its social meaning.

It’s an interesting field, not least because recognising eye contact and following the gaze direction of others are thought to be some of the most fundamental building blocks on which social communication develops in babies.

Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition and gaze direction, and the authors suggest that one cause could be a problem with the these eye contact neural circuits which leads to slow or impaired social understanding.

Link to article on eye contact.
Link to DOI entry for same.

New Scientist has an excellent article on East-West psychological differences and why they may be more to do with local lifestyle than broad cultural generalisations.

Experiments that compare the responses of, for example, Americans and East Asians, are often used to support theories that Westerners have an analytical, individualistic world-view, while Easterners have a holistic, collectivist outlook.

This has been reported in studies that have compared how Westerners and Easterners categorise objects (shared features vs functional relationships), reasoning about causes for people’s behaviour (individual state of mind vs social situation) and, most famously in recent years, how people view visual scenes (focus on objects vs focus on background).

However, the NewSci article discusses a number of studies suggesting that these differences may not be to be with broad cultural definitions but to do with the lifestyle of the local population. In fact, these exact same differences can be found within both Eastern and Western cultures.

So it’s not all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett’s group recently compared three communities living in Turkey’s Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent.

He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 8552). A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the east. “Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan,” says Nisbett. “The citizens are regarded as cowboys – highly independent and individualistic – and sure enough, they’re more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese.”

Even more surprisingly, the article describes how these same cognitive tendencies are malleable – they can be changed in individuals by simply priming them with individualistic or collectivist concepts.

The article is a thought-provoking challenge to the East – West psychological stereotypes common in both the popular press and the scientific literature and discusses some intriguing studies I was completely unaware of.

By the way, the author is Ed Yong, who writes the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog we often link to.

An excellent article that is highly recommended.

Link to ‘Beyond east and west: How the brain unites us all’.