Category: Togetherness

Below are a couple of strangely beautiful delusions described in a 1993 paper on ‘The reliability of three definitions of bizarre delusions’ published in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

A 22-year-old woman had the delusion that thoughts and feelings emanating from her mother’s unconscious were being carried in raindrops that fell on her air conditioner. When the raindrops hit the air conditioner they made a noise, and simultaneously these thoughts and feelings merged with her own unconscious. This merging had resulted in her own mental illness.

A 27-year-old man had the delusion that the voice he heard throughout the day was that of an invisible girlfriend. His girlfriend gave him advice and told him to do things. At night she would come to him, although still invisible, and they would make love.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

The BPS Research Digest covers an intriguing study finding that observers can reliably tell within 10 seconds whether a girl and a guy who have just met fancy each other.

The research was based on a speed dating study, which, to be honest, immediately put me off as they typically just correlate features of the individuals with their date choices – but this study is a little different.

The speed dating was used just to record videos of the daters meeting and interacting with each other, and the participants in the study were just asked to watch the videos and rate when they thought the chemistry was flowing between any particular couple.

From the BPS Research Digest write-up:

Skyler Place and colleagues made their finding using footage of couples on speed-dates. Fifty-four students observed dozens of 10-, 20- or 30-second clips of real speed dating interactions and attempted to say in each case whether each person was romantically interested in the other.

The researchers had access to the daters’ real decisions about whether they were interested in any of their speed dates, and were able to compare these with the students’ judgements.

The students performed more accurately than would be expected had they simply been guessing. They judged the interest of the male daters with 61 per cent accuracy and the female daters with 58 per cent accuracy. Their accuracy was unaffected by the length of each clip, but was higher when the clip was taken from the middle or the end of a dating interaction. Students currently in a romantic relationship outperformed those who weren’t.

I was particularly interested in the results described in the last sentence.

In the scientific paper, the researchers suggest that this “could stem in part from learning through relationship experiences. Alternatively, it is possible that the social skills necessary to succeed in finding and maintaining a relationship also support the ability to correctly perceive romantic interest.”

Link to BPSRD on perceiving the hots study.
Link to DOI entry for scientific article.

BBC Radio 4’s eclectic sociology programme Thinking Allowed recently had a fascinating discussion on how drug users learn to experience the effects of a substance and how society has an influence on the personal drug experience.

We tend to assume that drugs have fairly fixed effects but sociology has a long history of studying how users learn to manage and steer the effects of particular drugs.

The programme touches on Becker’s classic study [pdf] ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’ where he charted the informal social initiation into dope smoking in 1960s America.

Importantly, it wasn’t just the rituals that accompanied the smoking that were socially acquired, but also knowledge about what ‘counted’ as the enjoyable aspects of the drug, how to steer the effects and so on.

This is known to be particularly important for psychedelic drugs, with the so-called set and setting having a big influence over the likelihood of having an enjoyable trip.

However, the same applies to drugs such as alcohol, where the effects of having a drink varies between cultures, largely ascribed to the beliefs each culture instils about what are the likely and permissible effects of drunkenness.

This was tackled in another sociological classic, David Mandelbaum’s 1965 paper ‘Alcohol and culture’ where he described the different effects of alcohol in cultures around the world.

However, if you’re looking for a punchy overview of the field, the Social Issues Research Centre has a great page on the social and cultural aspects of drinking which I highly recommend.

These situation or culture specific effects have been tackled on the cognitive and neural level, but unfortunately I can’t access one of the key papers in the field [update: pdf], although the abstract has the main punchline:

In situations involving inter-neuronal events, these processes of adjustment may take the form of learned modifications that can be re-evoked on future occasions by events that co-occurred at the time of the original modifications.

Sensitization, defined as the enhancement of a directly elicited drug effect, though adaptive, appears to represent facilitation within a system, making the effect easier to elicit on future occasions.

Like tolerance, sensitization of a drug effect can become linked to the events that co-occurred when the effect was originally elicited, making it possible for sensitization to come under selective event control.

In other words, the article argues that learned associations have an effect on the overall experience of repeat drug taking. Of course culture can create learned associations, but changing the context can also mean certain associations are no longer triggered, leaving a great deal of room for situation specific effects.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter dangermusic for finding a copy of the ‘key paper’ noted above. I’ve added a link into the text above or you can just grab it here as a pdf.

Link to Thinking Allowed on the sociology of drug effects.
pdf of ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’.
Link to excellent SIRC page on ‘Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking’.

We have a burning instinct for life and yet we know, ultimately, that we will die. We fear the one thing we cannot escape.

The question ‘why live?’ has preoccupied thinkers from the alpha to the omega of human history, but only relatively recently have we considered the question of ‘how’ – how do we live with this fear, this knowledge of our own demise?

We recognise love as our companion and protector and we now think that it may even shield us from death itself, at least while we’re alive.

‘Terror management theory’ sounds oddly militaristic to the modern ear, but it was never intended to makes us think of politics. It was developed by psychologist Sheldon Solomon and his colleagues to help explain how we live with existential angst.

The theory suggests we have various ways of keeping the fear of death out of our conscious mind, and of understanding what makes our life meaningful.

Traditionally, researchers have focused on the effect of a social element – how we feel we fit in to our culture’s ideas about what makes a meaningful life, and a personal element – how we feel about ourselves, but more recently psychologists have been focusing on love as one of the most important ways of managing our existential fears.

Love beyond life is a constant poetic theme, and yet these are not simply poetic theories, they have been drawn from empirical research.

Never afraid to strip the poetry from the profound, cognitive scientists have labelled their most important existential paradigm ‘mortality salience’.

It involves reminding people of death – an experimental memento mori – and numerous studies have found that simply focusing people on their time-limited lives changes how they think and behave.

One of the most reliable effects, is that being reminded of death makes us more socially minded – more likely to want to be physically close to others, more likely to want to have children, but also more likely to support the norms and stereotypes of your own social group.

A group of Israeli psychologists were inspired to wonder whether love might protect us against our fear of death, and whether our anxieties motivate us to seek out love.

In an ingenious 2002 study, they found that reminding people of their demise increased their self-professed romantic commitment, that thinking about a committed relationship reduced the effects of morality salience on harsh social judgements, and that thinking about the end of a relationship increased thoughts of death.

A year later, they reviewed research on love and death and came to the conclusion that close relationships help us manage the anxiety of mortality, partly through the strength of the bond, but partly through the fact that romantic partnerships give us a symbolic way of transcending death – as families provide a way for our contribution to ‘live on’ after the final curtain.

These studies are some of the first on what has been called ‘experimental existential psychology’ that seek to understand how we manage our lives in the face of the unknown.

But the fact remains that we will die, and hopefully, we will love. Perhaps we have no profounder response.

Link to ‘The existential function of close relationships: introducing death into the science of love’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Time magazine reports on an intriguing new study finding that groups select natural leaders on the basis of how much each person contributes to group discussions, even when their contributions have no relation to their actual competence.

Psychologists Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff, asked several groups to complete tasks for a $400 dollar prize.

They found that those who spoke more were rated as more competent and influential. Wondering whether this genuinely reflected their actual competence, they decided to test this out with a similar task where the group had to solve math problems.

But this time, they had the participants’ mathematics exam results and could see exactly how many problems each person had solved.

When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes. What’s more, any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third ‚Äî even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough.

When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants’ work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers ‚Äî period.

The researchers conclude that one way dominant people attain influence is simple through acting in ways that make them appear competent, even when this isn’t the case.

Link to Time article ‘Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?’.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

This week’s New Scientist has an interesting article summarising the current thinking on the psychology of religion.

The research treats religion and belief in God or other supernatural entities as a natural consequence of how the brain works.

This has taken two main strands in the research literature: the first is that these tendencies to believe in supernatural forces have evolutionary benefits for social cohesion and kinship, which is why they have been selected for.

The other is that these beliefs are a side-effect of the actions of other useful cognitive processes we have developed. In other words, we have certain mental abilities, typically attributing intention and desire, which we unwittingly over-apply and hence attribute random uncontrollable events to mysterious but intelligent beings.

The article is not particularly in-depth but is notable for its breadth of coverage and will give you a taste for the direction in which the cognitive science of religion is heading.

Link to NewSci article ‘How your brain creates God’.

The New York Times has a great short article on the science of crying, covering recent studies that have investigated the common idea that it is a useful way of releasing pent-up emotion.

The idea that crying is cathartic has been researched more than I realised with numerous large scale studies tackling in what situations people cry, as well what impact it has on our emotional state.

Now, some researchers say that the common psychological wisdom about crying ‚Äî crying as a healthy catharsis ‚Äî is incomplete and misleading. Having a ‚Äúgood cry‚Äù can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone, argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Placing such high expectation on a tearful breakdown most likely sets some people up for emotional confusion afterward…

In a study published in the December issue of The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Dr. Rottenberg, along with Lauren M. Bylsma of the University of South Florida and Ad Vingerhoets of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, asked 5,096 people in 35 countries to detail the circumstances of their most recent crying episode. About 70 percent said that others’ reactions to their breakdown were positive, comforting. But about 16 percent cited nasty or angry reactions that, no surprise, generally made them feel worse.

The science of crying was also covered in a recent BPS Research Digest post that discussed another one of Rottenberg’s studies that focused entirely on females.

Link to NYT piece ‘The Muddled Tracks of All Those Tears’.

Time magazine has an interesting article on links between given names and behaviour, with a new study finding children with unpopular names are more likely to be get in trouble with the law.

This doesn’t mean that being called an unusual name causes criminality – the article notes that boys with unpopular names are likelier to live in single-parent households and be poorer, which are also known to be linked to higher levels of offending.

However, it does add to a growing body of research suggests that our names have a curious influence on our life.

A great review article in The Psychologist from last year covered much of findings, including the fact that people tend to buy products they share initials with, those whose names start with C or D are more likely to receive those grades than are other students, and people called Louis are more likely to live in St. Louis, Mary in Marysville and so on.

The same effect also seems to happen with initials, so Marys are also more likely to live in Manchester.

However, the Time article focuses more on how your name affects how others react towards you and perceive you, which may have a reciprocal impact on your own life chances:

The short answer is that our names play an important role in shaping the way we see ourselves — and, more important, how others see us. Abundant academic literature proves these points. A 1993 paper found that most people perceive those with unconventionally spelled names (Patric, Geoffrey) as less likely to be moral, warm and successful.

A 2001 paper found that we have a tendency to judge boys’ trustworthiness and masculinity from their names. (As a guy whose middle name is Ashley, I can attest to the second part.) In a 2007 paper (here’s a PDF), University of Florida economist David Figlio found that boys with names commonly given to girls are likelier to be suspended from school.

And an influential 1998 paper co-authored by psychologist Melvin (a challenging first name if there ever was one) Manis of the University of Michigan reported that “having an unusual name leads to unfavorable reactions in others, which then leads to unfavorable evaluations of the self.”

Link to Time on the effects of names.

I just found this fascinating TED lecture by economist Steven Levitt on the social structure and economics of ghetto crack dealing. What’s surprising is that hustling rocks is a below-minimum-wage occupation with a 7% per annum employee death rate – despite the hype, a very shitty job.

Levitt is famous for being one of the co-authors of the book Freakanomics but is mostly known in the academic world for his research on the economics of crime and the underworld.

His lecture recounts some of the findings of a 10-year research project into the economics of a crack-dealing gang from an inner city US housing project.

Unsurprisingly, being a hustler is incredibly dangerous, but perhaps more of an eye-opener is that the business is run very much like a franchise and that most street dealers had second jobs, moonlighting in the mainstream economy, because dealing crack pays below the minimum wage.

The career prospects are slightly better higher up the ladder, but are still surprisingly modest in the grand scheme of things.

In other crack news, The New York Times recently published an article discussing research on ‘crack babies’, now many children whose mothers were addicted to crack while they were pregnant have grown up to be adolescents.

During the 1990s, a huge fear was that the children of ‘crack moms’ would be neurologically impaired, as when born they tend to be smaller in body and head size.

Although there are detectable differences in the teenage years, these aren’t as bad as expected, and it seems that being a ‘crack baby’ isn’t a life sentence as it was once thought.

Link to Steven Levitt on sociology and economics of crack dealing.
Link to NYT on ‘The Epidemic That Wasn’t’.

Although much of The Telegraph’s science coverage seems to have gone down the pan recently, they’ve just published a remarkably well balanced and informative article on war trauma and how it is associated with measurable changes in brain structure.

Brain imaging studies have found that people with post-traumatic stress disorder tend to have smaller hippocampi, an area known to be key for emotional memory.

But it’s not clear whether this is a direct consequence of PTSD, or simply that people with smaller hippocampi are more likely to develop the disorder after trauma.

The article does a fantastic job of presenting a balanced look at the causality hypnotheses, and quotes psychiatrist Simon Wessely, known for his research on the psychology, neuroscience and history of combat trauma.

But Prof Wessely has found that the very thing that exposes soldiers to PTSD might also help them deal with it: their job. According to his research at King’s, group cohesion and firm leadership are critical in reducing the impact of psychological distress.

“You have to remember we are talking about professional soldiers who have been highly trained,” he says. “Their training is designed to harden them against the unpleasant nature of war. The military is actually very effective at reducing the risk of PTSD with their training, their professionalism, esprit de corps and morale. War is a stressful business and this all prepares soldiers for that.”

The flip side is that the memories that provoke trauma are not necessarily those of gruesome battles or injuries. “The kind of events that affect them are not simply seeing bad things and coming under fire ‚Äì it is when the rules they have come to expect are somehow broken. It is when errors of omission or commission lead to the feeling they have been let down, or that they have let their comrades down, that mental health problems occur. This is why ‘friendly fire’ incidents are so psychologically damaging ‚Äì it violates the soldiers’ rules of who is supposed to be shooting at them. They will feel anger at those responsible.”

The only bizarre bit is the second to last paragraph where it mentions “new treatment is being developed, drawing on neurolinguistic programming, relaxation techniques and even Eye Movement Desensitisation Therapy”.

It mentions EMDR as if it is something unusual, when it is an increasing well researched evidence-based treatment, and NLP as if it is nothing out-of-the-ordinary, when it is largely pseudoscience that lacks even the most basic empirical support.

Link to ‘How brain scans show the trauma of war’.

The New York Times has an interesting and in-depth article on research into female sexuality that looks at the work of some of the most prominent female researchers in the field.

It does a great job of discussing the often surprising results of recent scientific studies but a commentary on Neuroanthropology really nails why it misses the mark.

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired clich√© of sexuality that ‘women are complicated, men are simple’ and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don’t know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.

But this is largely because the scientific studies have looked at specific research questions that don’t relate to ‘what do women want?’ line, as if this is a question that could actually be answered.

Neuroanthropology uses a great analogy that demonstrates why this is just bad spin:

One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs.

One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!

You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical. So many of these experiments seem to be testing a series of different, related, but ultimately distinct questions.

Can they all be glossed as, ‘What do women want?’ Yeah, sort of, but you’re going to get a hopeless answer.

Rather ironically, the NYT article celebrates the complexity of female sexuality but ultimately suggests that it’s the one-dimensional question that’s important when this is nothing but a caricature of human nature.

It’s worth reading for the coverage of the research, but the whole premise of the article is slightly askew. The Neuroanthropology piece is an excellent way of getting a broader vista.

Link to NYT article ‘What Do Women Want?’.
Link to excellent Neuroanthropology commentary.

BBC Radio 4’s wonderfully eclectic and vastly under-rated social science programme Thinking Allowed has had some fascinating programmes lately, covering the concern of ‘cocaine girls’ in 1915 London, the history of the orgasm, moral relativism, gang culture, the social meaning of scents and the culture of detectives, to mention just a few of the topics.

The programme is a mixture of social history and the latest in sociology research on contemporary issues that looks at the most amazingly diverse range of issues.

Although there are no mp3 downloads, you can listen to all of the programmes online as streamed audio.

Some of my recent favourites have included an exploration of the social panic about the cocaine scene in 1915 London, evidence for the existence of ‘gang culture’ in the UK and the psychology of the police interviews but you’ll find discussions on pretty much anything you can think of (and probably plenty you’d never have thought about before) in the archive.

Some of the most interesting points relate to how our concerns of ‘new threats’ to society, for example the influence of popular culture or new technology, are old acquaintances but are presented as new by every generation.

Other interesting programmes often reveal a new angle to something I’d never considered. The programme on the sociology of smell discusses the ‘language’ of scents and perfumes. It asks why we think some scents are ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ and how have we come to associate certain smells with specific social meanings.

Link to Thinking Allowed website and archive.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has an interesting article in Scientific American about dangerous psychology studies where researchers have risked life and limb to carry out some of the more extreme experiments in psychology.

Some of the investigations are quite unethical by today’s standards – two researchers simulating a sexual assault in the street to see how people would react, putting periscopes in public urinals to measure urine flow – but are an interesting insight into studies of by gone years.

Actually, psychologists are wusses in comparison to sociologists and anthropologists who often do ethnographic research in the most extreme of situations.

One of my favourites examples is sociologist Simon Winlow who was in a research group studying violence in the night time economy.

After debating how one could research the sociology of night time violence in all its gory detail, he decided that the only way to fully understand the culture was to get a job as a bouncer and see what transpires.

As it turned out, what transpired was a fair amount of fighting, most of which he wrote up and published as a fascinating insight into the culture of commercial violence.

His paper, ‘Get Ready to Duck. Bouncers and the Realities of Ethnographic Research on Violent Groups’, is fascinating, and full of wonderfully euphemistic academic phrases.

I love: “Before our covert research could begin we debated the safety and ethical issues that would no doubt arise”. Translation: is it ethical to kick nine shades of shit out of your research subjects if they’re fronting up for a scrap?

He wrote the whole lot up as a book, which I’ve not read, but is apparently excellent.

However, he wasn’t the first sociologist to take a beating in the course of his research. In the paper he notes:

Sanchez-Jankowski (1990) in his ten-year study of gangs in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, was the subject of physical attack both as part of initiation rituals, and as a result of being falsely accused of being an informant, while Jacobs (1998) was robbed at gunpoint, and suffered telephone harassment by a crack dealer who was one of his research informants.

To return to Bering’s SciAm piece, it turns out he’s now writing a regular column for the magazine called ‘Bering in Mind’ which is freely available online.

As Bering is one of the most interesting evolutionary psychologists around, it should be a good read.

Link to ‘Dangerous Psychology Experiments from the Past’.
Link to Winlow’s ethnographic study of bouncers and violence.

I’ve just found a curious paper from 1933 on unusual forms of drug addiction that contains some charming old-world views on the diversity of intoxication.

It was apparently presented at the wonderfully named ‘Society for the Study of Inebriety’ and uses the term ‘addiction’ synonymously with general drug use but does describe a number of curious ways of drug taking in different cultures.

…perhaps our author is more to be trusted in his description of the curious method used by the Zulu Kafis when indulging in the drug [cannabis]. It appears that these people place some burning manure on top of a handful of hashish, and, having covered up all with a small mound of earth, they dig air holes in the heap with their fingers.

Each man then lies down in turn and inhales the smoke through these vents. After a few whiffs they retain the vapour in their respiratory organs for a while with the object of inducing a violent attack of coughing and expectoration. It is evident that they like their dope full flavoured and take their pleasures as sadly as an Englishman is reputed to take his!

Full flavoured indeed!

It also notes that the word ‘muggles’ was used as slang for marijuana in ’30s New Orleans. Is there something you aren’t telling us J.K. Rowling?

Link to paper ‘Some Unusual Forms of Drug Addiction’.

Time magazine has an interesting piece on borderline personality disorder (BPD), a sometimes stigmatised diagnosis that implies the patient has unstable impulsive emotional reactions and tumultuous relationships.

In contrast to popular perception, the ‘borderline’ part doesn’t imply the condition is between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ but that the patient is on the borderline between a psychotic and non-psychotic disorder, as low-level distortions of perception (fleeting hallucinated voices for example) and magical or paranoid thinking are not uncommon.

The stigma of the diagnosis comes from the fact that people with the label are widely considered by mental health professionals to be ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’. The fact that self-harm is common in this group often leads to informal negative labels indicating that the patient is a ‘cutter’ or ‘manipulative’.

This has been borne out by various studies. Two studies have found that the label of personality disorder is associated with staff perceiving the person as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts – even when everything else about them is the same.

A study specifically with psychiatric nurses found that they were more likely to offer belittling or contradicting responses to statements from patients with the diagnosis.

Borderline is, perhaps, one of the mythologised conditions in psychiatry.

The fact that many mental health professionals believe that the condition is ‘lifelong’ and ‘untreatable’ is contradicted by studies that have found that the majority of people who have the diagnosis improve drastically. The most comprehensive study has found that 75% of patients with BPD no longer qualify for the diagnosis after six years.

The article also discusses one of the most promising new treatments – a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) – that has been found in early trials to improve the emotional tolerance, self-control and day-to-day functioning of patients with BPD.

It was invented by psychologist Marsha Linehan (who according to the article, used to be a nun), based in part on the Buddhist techniques of mindfulness and emotion regulation.

The Time piece is a little overly-dramatic in places, but is generally well-written and avoids the usual clichés associated with BPD and is well worth a look.

Link to Time on ‘The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder’.

Psychologist Steven Pinker explores the impact of personal genome sequencing services and how this information may help us understand our behaviours and preferences in an article for The New York Times.

Pinker is known for advocating that many psychological traits and cognitive abilities are highly heritable. He’s recently volunteered to have his entire genome sequenced and made freely available on the internet and so he explores what this information can actually tell us about ourselves.

One aspect of this information is that it can indicate the future course of your life – such as the vastly increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease if you’re the carrier of two ApoE Œµ4 alleles.

Like James Watson, Pinker has opted not to find out his ApoE Œµ4 status, preferring to avoid any additional “existential dread” that the knowledge might cause.

However, other genes predict weaker tendencies and ‘cognitive genetics’, the science of how genes interact with our mental functions, is beginning to blossom:

Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with “approach related” personality traits like novelty seeking, sensation seeking and extraversion.

A gene for another kind of receptor, DRD2, comes in a version that makes its dopamine system function less effectively. It has been associated with impulsivity, obesity and substance abuse. Still another gene, COMT, produces an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, the home of higher cognitive functions like reasoning and planning. If your version of the gene produces less COMT, you may have better concentration but might also be more neurotic and jittery.

The article covers a great deal of ground, aiming to educate about some of the basic principles of genetics as well as tackling the implications of knowing more about our own genetic codes.

By the way, if you’re interested in a thorough grounding in the science of behavioural and cognitive genetics, I highly recommend the somewhat expensive but very well written and remarkably comprehensive book Behavioural Genetics.

Link to NYT piece ‘My Genome, My Self’.