Category: Togetherness

People in close social groups, such as family and friends, were more likely to agree on the attractiveness of a face, according to an interesting study published in Perception.

It’s a novel take on face perception research, which usually implies that there are some general features of attractiveness which we all can perceive, but rarely looks at how other people can influence this.

Beauty is in the ‘we’ of the beholder: greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations.

Perception. 2007;36(11):1674-81.

Bronstad PM, Russell R.

Scientific research on facial attractiveness has focused primarily on elucidating universal factors to which all raters respond consistently. However, recent work has shown that there is also substantial disagreement between raters, highlighting the importance of determining how attractiveness preferences vary among different individuals. We conducted a typical attractiveness ratings study, but took the unusual step of recruiting pairs of subjects who were spouses, siblings, or close friends. The agreement between pairs of affiliated friends, siblings, and spouses was significantly greater than between pairs of strangers drawn from the same race and culture, providing evidence that facial-attractiveness preferences are socially organized.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

BBC Radio 4 have just finished broadcasting Team Spirit, a great series of five 15-minute programmes on the psychology of group dynamics by taking a look at a diverse range of teams – from paramedics to Morris dancers.

Each programme looks at specific team chosen to reflect different forms of groups dynamics, meets the people and then discusses the social processes with psychologists working in the field.

The teams selected are air-ambulance paramedics, an Antartic research team, a girls football team, a backstage theatre crew and a group of Morris dancers (non-British people: Morris dancing is an excuse for ale drinking and maid chasing thinly disguised as a folk dance tradition).

It’s a fun and informative ‘bite-size’ series presented by the faultless Claudia Hammond. It’s archived online but only as realaudio streams, so no podcasts I’m afraid but definitely worth checking out.

Link to BBC Radio 4 Team Spirit series.

I’ve just got round to listening to ABC Radio National’s two part Health Report special on the drug and alcohol dependence and was pleasantly surprised about how well constructed and informative it was.

These sorts of programmes can be a little dry, if you’ll excuse the pun, but this two-parter in a compelling look into the effects of a number of substances, talks to some addicts in treatment, explores some residential services and discusses the evidence for various treatments.

The interviews are quite revealing and they’re a good demonstration that addiction is not solely about the drug. People who become seriously addicted change their lives to accommodate their addiction, and can live quite precariously as a result.

This often alters people’s behaviour, often in quite an adaptive way considering the unpredictable and dangerous circumstances, but not in a way that is best suited to mainstream life.

For example, one gentleman notes that he had to get out of the habit of lying to people as a short term fix to problems.

This is not a direct effect of the drug, but these sorts of maladaptive behaviours also need to be addressed during treatment for addiction for it to be successful.

Stopping the drug is only a part of the battle – stepping out of an ingrained lifestyle, mindset and pattern of behaviour can be the real challenge.

Addiction is more than just problem with taking too much of a chemical, it’s equally a social and emotional issue and we are often guilty of downplaying this aspect while clumsily trying to avoid the language of blame. The pure ‘disease model’, that says addiction is nothing more than a genetic brain disorder triggered by a particular substance, is a case in point.

It is, of course, possible to highlight individual responsibility without victimising people, but this is a difficult task for many in a society that has many double standards over the issue of drug taking.

The situation was wonderfully described in a 2003 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy that noted that we often accuse addicts of self-deception while pushing our own self-deceptions about addiction as a substitute:

We frequently accuse heavy drinkers and drug users of self-deception if they refuse to admit that they are addicted. However, given the ways in which we usually conceptualize it, acknowledging addiction merely involves swapping one form of self-deception for another. We ask addicts to see themselves as in the grip of an irresistible desire, and to accept that addiction is an essentially physiological process. To the extent this is so, we, as much as the addicts, suffer from self-deception, and the responsibility for their state is in part ours. Conversely, since addicts are compelled to accept a self-deceptive image of themselves, they are at least partially excused from blame for their self-deception.

Parts one and two of ABC Health Report on drug dependence and treatment.
Link to ‘Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction’ article.
Link to DOI identifier for article.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written a witty and informative post on the science of homophobia, evolutionary theories of homosexuality and why some hypotheses just don’t work without large quantities of strong gin.

Bering notes he’s both gay and an evolutionary psychologist, and some people find it surprising that a homosexual male works in a field that might suggest he’s a biological anomaly.

Needless to say, his whistle-stop tour through the field is both informative and funny. The final bit summarises evolutionary theories of homosexuality and the last paragraph made me laugh out loud:

‚Ä¢ E.O. Wilson’s kin altruism theory states that homosexuality was a rare but functional alternative to traditional routes of increasing inclusive fitness because gay people in the ancestral past, who weren’t burdened with their own kids, helped to raise, care for, and provide resources to their other genetic relatives, such as nieces and nephews. (This one doesn’t quite gel, especially when you consider that a gay person’s resources are usually funneled to their same-sex partners. Also, for most people, being gay doesn’t exactly endear you to your relatives.)

‚Ä¢ Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella’s alliance formation theory proposes that, in the ancestral past, homoerotic behaviours by young men with high status older men would have been an effective strategy for climbing up the social ladder. (Think Ancient Greece, or maybe Mark Foley?)

‚Ä¢ John Maynard Smith is often credited with what is colloquially called the “sneaky f*cker theory,” which argues that gay men in the ancestral past had unique access to the reproductive niche because females let their guards down around them and other males didn’t view them as sexual competitors. (I rather like this one: remember, we’re not infertile, we’re just gay. Although in my case, it’d take a lot of gin to work.)
</blockquote

To do it in style, presumably you’d be drinking pink gin.

Bering is one of the most inventive researchers working in evolutionary psychology, and his work on our everyday theories of souls, ghosts and the supernatural is fascinating.

One of my favourites is his study [pdf] finding that simply telling people the lab is haunted improves their honesty in a computer task, whereas another creative study [pdf] investigated which mind and brain functions children think continue after death and how this differs by age and religious schooling.

Link to ‘The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)’.

KQED’s science programme Quest has put some completely fascinating audio and video segments online on the science of emotion and how neurological disorders can lead to almost instant laughing and crying that are not always accompanied by the strong emotions we normally associate with them.

The condition is called ‘pseudobulbar affect‘ by neurologists although virtually the same behaviour in the context of mental illness is usually called ‘labile affect’ by psychiatrists.

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘affect‘ used in this context it refers to anything to do with mood or emotion. Pseudobulbar refers to the fact that the damage can impair the control of ‘bulbar’ cranial nerves VII – XII (although the damage is not to the nerves themselves – hence the pseudo prefix) and labile simply means changeable.

One of the most difficult aspects of pseudobulbar affect is the fact that it can appear inappropriately potentially causing some awkward social situations. For example, the person in the programme, who is affected by the degenerative brain disorder ALS, describes laughing at a funeral and one video shows how easily these reactions can be triggered.

Out of place emotional reactions are not uncommon in neurological disorders. In fact, there is a type of seizure which causes laughter and has the wonderfully evocative name of gelastic epilepsy.

The other video segment is a fantastic introduction to functional neuroimaging studies of emotion. Look out for the explanation of MRI physics using Whirling Dervishes as an example of proton spin!

There’s also a fantastic audio segment specifically on researching emotion in pseudobulbar affect and how the findings might help us understand emotions in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and PTSD.

It’s a wonderfully made piece that shows how affected people experience this rapid form of emotional weather and does a great job of communicating the scientific research. Good job KQED.

Link to video segment ‘Emotions from the Inside and Out’ (thanks Jennifer!).
Link to video segment ‘Watching the Brain at Work’.
Link to audio segment ‘Decoding the Emotional Brain’.
Link to additional online notes.

If you listen carefully you can hear a distant rumble from over the horizon. It’s the sound of sociologists advancing slowly towards our online data trail, about to release the mother of all data analysis campaigns that will rain from the internet like a storm from above.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a fascinating piece about online social networking tools, discussing how different forms of social relationships are being formed through the use of ‘broadcast to subscriber’ tools like Twitter and Facebook.

These articles pop up quite frequently, discussing how young people live in a ‘post-privacy’ world, or how our personal lives become increasingly public to our friends and acquaintances, but they rarely mention the ways in which these social networks can be used to reveal and exploit the dynamics of social power.

Sociology gets a bad rap in science as being ‘wooly’ or ‘vague’, but it’s often not to do with the methods its uses, but with the way of gathering data.

When attempting to understand social networks, traditional studies may ask people to fill in questionnaires about their social contacts and then the researchers draw inferences about who are the most important players in the community.

Two developments have made this much more powerful. The first is social network analysis, or rather, the application of rigorous mathematical methods from graph theory and network theory to social network analysis.

This allows the quantification of the network in important an interesting ways – such as who is most connected, whether the network is tightly integrated or how fragile it is.

One of the most interesting findings from these studies is that the most connected people, or those with the most explicit status (such as being the boss) aren’t always the most important people in a network.

For example, ‘friend collectors’ on Facebook and MySpace may seem to be the most socially connected, but they’re not necessarily the most influential because many of the connections represent very superficial social connections. Similarly, someone who has only a few connections may be connected to people influential in other subgroups, and so might have a huge knock-on influence. Social network analysis can identify these people.

The second development that has made sociology much more powerful is that the ‘wooliness’ in gathering data is increasingly disappearing because services like Facebook and Twitter mean we are creating the data ourselves, in incredible detail.

One use of this data is to sell to advertising space to marketing companies. Targeted advertising is now common, by location, age, sex or whatever explicit data you enter into your profile.

A much more powerful approach is to target advertising so it appears on the profile of the most influential people on the network. Indeed, Google has just registered a patent that describes exactly this process.

One of the advantages is that it can take advantage of the explicit data, and can identify the key people in a group, and is fairly resistant to friend collectors because it doesn’t just rely on totting up friends, it looks at the network as a whole.

So you could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie.

Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity.

Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

These new online social networking tools allow the companies that operate them an insight into the social power structures that run through our lives, and the opportunity to influence them.

Link to NYT piece ‘Brave New World of Digital Intimacy’.

Psychologist Petra Boyton has written a fantastic piece about the increasing medicalisation of our sexual life as behaviours that were considered personal difficulties are now been re-packaged as disease to be treated by the medical establishment.

Petra focuses on ‘sex addiction’ and ‘female sexual dysfunction’, two concepts that get frequently discussed in the media despite them being seriously questioned as valid disorders by researchers in the field.

Because we’re used to hearing about sex addiction nowadays, criticising it can be difficult. After all doctors are telling us we have it, the media talks about it a lot, and it sounds very serious. To question it surely means denying people have problems or perhaps allowing dangerous health problems to run unchecked? Well, no. We do need to question the idea of medicalising sexual behaviour Рparticularly when ‘treatments’ offered are frequently endorsed by people without adequate training, supervision, or awareness of the wider scientific literature on this issue.

Let’s be clear. Some people do behave in sexually risky ways. They don’t practice safer sex, they cheat on partners, they fail to control impulses or experience sex as a form of compulsive behaviour, or they use sex to make themselves feel better while inside they feel sad, lonely or angry. This is a problem and something that therapy can definitely tackle. But it doesn’t mean people who are acting in this way are ’sick’. Rather than slapping an addiction label on them we need to work with them to identify what is driving problems within their lives or relationships. And we need to get away from the idea that looking at porn, masturbating, enjoying (safer and consensual) sex with multiple partners, having pre marital sex, or being homosexual is a sign of sex addiction.

There’s also a link to an mp3 podcast of an interview with psychologist Leonore Tiefer who discusses problems with the concept of sex addiction, despite its place in popular culture.

I’ve been reading about addiction recently and I’m struck at how poorly the ‘behavioural addictions’ (i.e. non-drug compulsions) actually fit into the addiction model.

A review paper in the latest Behavioural and Brain Sciences aims to identify the core problems and breaks down each type of addiction into the various factors involved.

It includes addiction to cocaine and stimulants, opiates, nicotine, alcohol, caffeine and gambling.

What is most striking is that the authors relate gambling to one gambling-specific vulnerability that is not listed as a factor in any of the other addictions.

In other words, they had to create a mini gambling theory to account for it because it just didn’t fit in any of the other drug-based addiction evidence.

Link to Petra Boyton on medicalising sexual behaviour.
mp3 of interview with Prof Tiefer on the sex addiction con.
Link to BBS review paper on addiction.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/09/of_voles_and_men_exploring_the_genetics_of_commitment.php
“>article on the recent finding that the AVPR1A gene is linked to relationship problems in heterosexual men.

Unfortunately, it’s been widely reported in the mainstream media as being a ‘gene for relationship problems’ or a ‘gene for marital bliss’ but it’s really not.

In this case, the gene codes for the receptor of vasopressin, a hormone thought to play a role in bonding in some mammals, but it’s still a long way from the gene to the behaviour.

The media reporting of genetics studies often makes the common mistake of explaining these sorts of findings as ‘a gene for…’ – misdescribing the gene as being specifically for a high-level behaviour and implying a sort of mysterious Gene Genie that magically allows this tiny part of a molecule to influence our lives.

However, these studies only report a statistical association and usually do not tell us about how the gene is linked to behaviour.

This is nicely illustrated in a number of studies that have linked genes to some really quite surprising things.

One of my favourite studies has found that the gene hTAS2R16 is reliably associated with alcoholism. It would be easy to explain this as “a gene for alcoholism” but we know exactly what it codes for: a bitterness receptor on the tongue.

One hypothesis is that people with this version of the gene are less sensitive to bitter things, so they find drinks such as beer more enjoyable, so they tend to drink more, are exposed to more alcohol and so have a higher chance of becoming alcoholic.

From tongue to addiction through the fog of everyday life – maybe. We need to do further studies to test this out and you can see how complex it could get.

Even more counter-intuitive is evidence from a twin study that ‘life events’ are heritable. ‘Life events’ are what psychologists euphemistically called stressful or traumatic things that can happen to us – death of loved-ones, loss of employment, serious injuries. Essentially, they’re the shit in ‘shit happens’.

Unlike molecular genetic studies, twin studies can’t tell us which genes are involved, they just roughly estimate how much of a risk is to do with genetic vs environmental effects, and it turns out that life events are partly inherited.

In other words, we can inherit the chance of ‘shit happening’ from our parents. But in this case, it’s how we explain the ‘happens’ in ‘shit happens’ that matters.

A further study found the risk seems to be related to anxiety and depression so maybe that people with a higher chance of emotional stress might make worse choices in some instances, or maybe more likely to be fired, or keep a relationship going, or maybe have relatives with poorer health (both depression and anxiety are related to physical health problems).

Again, this is a clue, but actually working out a sound scientific explanation that covers the influence of genetics on life events is a massive task.

In other words, genetics studies don’t tell us how the link works, they just tell us it exists, and we need to be careful not to invoke the Gene Genie in our explanation before we’ve done further studies that actually explain the mechanism.

Link to NERS on exploring the genetics of commitment.
Link to study text.

Cognitive scientists should be explorers of the mind, forging a path through the chaotic world of everyday life before even thinking of retreating to the lab, according to a critical article in the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychology.

Cognitive science often works like this: researchers notice something interesting in the world, they create a lab-based experiment in an attempt to control everything except what they think is the core mental process, they then test the data to see if it predicts real-world performance.

A new approach, proposed by psychologist Alan Kingstone and colleagues, suggests this is fundamentally wrong-headed and we need to completely rethink how we study the human mind to make it relevant to the real world.

The authors suggest that the standard approach relies on a flawed assumption – that mental processes are like off-the-shelf tools that do the same job, but are just assembled by the mind in different ways depending on the situation.

But imagine if this isn’t the case and mental processes are, in fact, much more fluid and adapt to fit the environment and situation. Not only would we have to change our psychological theories, we would have to change how we study the mind itself because the assumption that we can isolate and test the same mental process in different environments justifies the whole tradition of lab-based research.

The authors suggest an alternative they call ‘cognitive ethology’ and it focuses the efforts of cognitive scientists on a different part of the research process.

Let’s just revisit our potted example of what most cognitive scientists do: they notice something in the world, they create a lab-based experiment, they test to see if it predicts real-world performance.

The first part of this process (noticing -> lab-experiment) is often based on subjective judgements and rough descriptions and isn’t validated until the lab-based experiment is tested.

Kingston and his colleagues argue that scientists should be applying the techniques of science to the first stage – measuring and describing behaviour as it happens in the real world – and only then taking to the lab to see what happens when conditions change.

They give an example of this approach in an interesting driving study:

A Nature publication by Land and Lee (1994) provides a good illustration of a research approach that is grounded in the principle of first examining performance as it naturally occurs. These investigators were interested in understanding where people look when they are steering a car around a corner. This simple issue had obvious implications for human attention and action, as well as for matters as diverse as human performance modelling, vehicle engineering, and road design.

To study this issue, Land and Lee monitored eye, head, steering wheel position, and car speed, as drivers navigated a particularly tortuous section of road. Their study revealed the new and important finding that drivers rely on a ‘tangent point’ on the inside of each curve, seeking out this point 1–2 seconds before each bend and returning to it reliably.

Later, other researchers used a lab-based driving simulator study to systematically alter how much of this ‘tangent point’ was available to see what caused abnormal driving.

The authors also make the point that this approach is much better at helping us understand why something happens the way it does, because it ties it to the real world and helps us integrate it with the our knowledge of personal meaning.

It’s an interesting approach and meshes nicely with a recent article on cultural cognitive neuroscience in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. It looked at a number of fascinating studies on cultural influences on mind and brain function and discusses how we can go about understanding the interaction between culture and the brain.

If you want to skip the theoretical parts, Box 1 is worth looking at just for a brief summary of some intriguing cultural differences in the way we think.

The piece was also rather expertly covered by Neuroanthropology who cover the main punchlines and discuss some of the claims.

Link to ‘cognitive ethology’ article.
Link to PubMed entry for ‘cognitive ethology’ article.
Link to ‘cultural neuroscience’ article.
Link to PubMed entry for ‘cultural neuroscience’ article.

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on the tug-of-war over the cultural influence on paranoid delusions and whether contemporary-themed psychosis is a new form of mental illness or just a modern colouring of an old disorder.

The article focuses on the recent interest in the ‘Truman Show delusion’, splashed over the media by two Canadian psychiatrists.

It’s quite hard to judge what they’re aiming to do as they’ve not published a scientific paper, and the article suggests they’re writing a book (is that the sounds of alarm bells I hear?), so I’m solely going on secondary sources.

But if they’re saying that delusions specifically about being in the Truman Show are somehow new and interesting, then they’re right in a way. Popular culture often turns up in paranoid beliefs – I worked with a gentleman once who believed he was in The Matrix – but its not earth shattering. It happens all the time.

If they’re saying that the general experience of The Truman Show – feeling that the world is being controlled, is unexplainably altered, or is uncannily mysterious – is somehow new, then they’re wrong by a good 100 years.

This was described by the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers in the early part of the 20th century who called it Wahnstimmung, which is translated in the modern English literature as delusional mood or delusional atmosphere.

This is the description from Andrew Sims’ book on descriptive psychopathology Symptoms in the Mind:

“For the patient experiencing delusional atmosphere, his world has been subtly altered ‘Something funny is going on’; ‘I have been offered a whole new world of meaning’. He experiences everything around him as sinister, portentous, uncanny, peculiar in an undefinable way. He knows that he is personally involved but cannot tell how. He has the feeling of anticipation, sometimes even of excitement, that soon all the separate parts of his experience will to reveal something immensely significant.”

Actually, the article has a quote from me, although miscasts my view a little. I’m quoted as saying:

“Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” said Vaughan Bell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, who has studied Internet delusion.

“We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being mentally ill,” said Dr. Bell, who said he had also treated patients who believed they were part of a reality television show.

Actually, I do think that cultural influences are fundamental in understanding delusions, but not in themselves. [Squiggly sound of tape rewinding] It seems the crucial qualification “in themselves” was missed off the quote.

In fact, in the paper I wrote on delusions about the internet I concluded by saying “The extent of influence may not be equal for all aspects of society and culture, although the fact that there is an influence at all, suggests that psychosis is only fully understandable in light of the wider social context.”

To quote John Donne, “no man is an island” and we can only fully understand or thoughts and behaviour, either everyday or pathological, with reference to the cultures we live in. But this doesn’t mean that each aspect of cultural influences us equally on all levels.

Link to NYT article ‘Look Closely, Doctor: See the Camera?’.

Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their ‘folly’.

Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it’s not clear whether these paintings were documenting widespread practices of medical fakery, or whether they were entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps owing to this element of mystery, and to the striking artworks, the topic is often featured in science and medical journals.

A 1999 article in Trends in Neurosciences is probably the most comprehensive treatment, and makes an excellent complement to the Bioephemera piece.

Link to Bioephemera post ‘The Stone of Madness’.
Link to TINS article ‘Psychosurgery in Renaissance art’.
Link to PubMed entry for article.

Somatosphere is an excellent new blog on medical anthropology, the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine.

While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted ‘things’ that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill.

Culture also shapes what we think of as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and this is one of the main driving forces behind how we express physical or psychological distress and expect it to be treated.

Of course, in the West, drug companies are persistently trying to shape our cultural understanding of what constitutes illness to better promote their product.

The picture is taken from an interesting Somatosphere post on methylphenidate (Ritalin) and ADHD. It’s a 1960s advert for the drug showing it was marketed as an antidepressant before ADHD was ever talked about.

The blog is written by several professional medical anthropologists and let’s hope it continues as it’s started as I’m throughly enjoying reading it.

Link to Somatosphere (via Neuroanthropology).
Link to Somatosphere post on Ritalin.

The Boston Globe has a fantastic article on the psychology of trustworthiness judgements and how they can be taken advantage of by con-men.

The article explores studies which have looked at various influences on our judgements of trust. One of the most interesting parts is where they cover research that has systematically altered pictures until the researchers generated faces that seem the least trustworthy (picture of the left) and most trustworthy (picture of the right).

According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton’s psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone’s trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people’s reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.

In a paper [pdf] published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy – with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths – and an exaggerated “untrustworthy” face looks angry – with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with “trustworthy” faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us.

Just as in other cognitive shorthands, we make these judgments quickly and unconsciously – and as a result, Oosterhof and Todorov point out, we can severely and immediately misjudge people. In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.

There’s plenty more fascinating studies discussed in the article, including an amazing study found that people are more likely to take the advice of someone who has bought the same volume of paint as them compared with someone who buys a different volume of paint!

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Confidence game’.
pdf of study of facial structure and trustworthiness.

Bad Science has an excellent article about the almost unreported news that homicides by people with mental illness have dropped dramatically in England and Wales, despite the fact that murders by people without mental illness have increased.

Right now I’m looking at a press release on a story which seems pretty important to me: people with serious mental illnesses are committing fewer murders than ever before, by a truly enormous margin. Homicides in this group increased from around 40 a year in the 1950s to 100 a year in the 1970s, in line with a similar increase in the general population. But while murders by people like you have continued to increase, and roughly trebled (0.6 per 100,000 of population in the 1950s, and almost 2 per 100,000 now), murders by people with serious mental illnesses, despite the hype and the fear, the public pronouncements and the headlines, have come down massively since the 1970s, to fewer than 20 a year today.

Ben laments the fact that even a hint of a connection between mental illness and murder makes front page news, stigmatising those with mental disorders and unnecessarily increasing prejudice, while news based on thorough research showing that these fears are unreasonable and unfounded barely raises a byline.

Indeed, it’s rare that positive mental illness news is made ‘sexy’ by the media. The nearest we get is when celebrities admit that they’ve suffered depression. Eating and anxiety disorders are occasionally discussed but it’s rare that psychosis is ever discussed in terms of recovery and by celebrities who have experienced it.

By the way, the picture is of bluesman and ex-Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green who spent some tough years in psychiatric hospital, apparently diagnosed with schizophrenia, but is still as rock n’ roll as ever – recording and touring with some of his best material.

Link to Bad Science on ‘The news you didn‚Äôt read’.
Link to full-text of study.

Anthropologist Michael Wesch gave a thoughtful and engaging talk on ‘An anthropological introduction to YouTube’ to the Library of Congress earlier this year and, rather appropriately, it’s available online as a video on the popular video sharing site.

Wesh runs a digital ethnography project which looks at how cultures form and operate on the net.

The project’s blog is also full of fascinating insights and is well worth checking out if you thought anthropology was only ever about people who don’t have electricity.

Link to talk ‘An anthropological introduction to YouTube’.

Photographer Jenn Ackerman has created a stunning and extensive video essay on Kentucky’s correctional facility for prisoners with mental illness, interviewing the inmates, staff and clinicians who form part of America’s biggest provider of residential psychiatry – the prison system.

Of course, the prisons were never designed to be providers of mental health care, but as a recent Time article noted, they have become the default treatment facility for the many people who fall through the cracks.

Ackerman has created a introductory film and also has put several prisoner interviews online, where we meet people in various states of distress and recovery. There’s also a fantastic film on ‘inmate watchers’ who have the responsibility to checking on vulnerable, volatile or suicidal inmates.

The films are sometimes disturbing, bleak in places and occasionally sublime, but are immensely revealing and show remarkable sensitivity in their construction.

From Ackerman’s written essay that accompanies the piece, I suspect that we only get to see the least affected people as those who are most ill are unlikely to be able to consent to being interviewed, meaning that even this bleak portrayal is likely to be a relatively positive depiction.

A man has been singing songs at the top of his lungs for the last two days, while another, hunched on his bed, wails from under a blanket. In a cell across the hall, a man shakes as he yells to his wife he has not seen in five years and to the thug down the street. In reaction to the noise, another man bangs endlessly on his cell door until an officer comes by and asks him to stop. He smiles and says he just wanted someone to talk to.

“We are the surrogate mental hospitals now,” says Larry Chandler, warden at the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange, Ky. With the rising number of mentally ill, the reformatory was forced to rebuild a system that was designed for security. Never intended as mental health facility, treatment has quickly become one of their primary goals.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique to Kentucky. The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the US into the default mental health facilities.

A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that the number of Americans with mental illnesses incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails is disproportionately high. Almost 555,000 people with mental illness are incarcerated while fewer than 55,000 are being treated in designated mental health hospitals.

Ackerman also has a gallery of still photographs and says she intends to make a feature length film which, if it has the impact of her online work, is likely to be profoundly moving.

Link to Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons.