Category: Togetherness

During the 1960s, a sudden upsurge in anti-consumerist rebellion threatened the profits of the world’s big corporations. The solution to the problem turned out to be packaging the counter-culture and selling the concept of rebellion back to a receptive youth audience.

How has this become possible? Salon has an excellent book review that discusses how brands are no longer simple trade marks but have become socially meaningful to the point where consumers know enough about the symbolism to be able to communicate complex messages through what we buy.

The book under review is Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker which aims to uncover the psychology and anthropology of social consumerism.

This only makes sense if you argue, as Walker does, that commodities can have real significance. Some objects — trophies, wedding rings, souvenirs from trips — patently do stand for important aspects of our lives. (They have what Walker calls “authentic” meaning.) Most people, however, don’t want to admit that they believe meaning can also be bought, that Converse sneakers make you a cool outsider or that a MacBook demonstrates one’s creativity and unconventionality. Walker thinks we should acknowledge that the things we buy do carry meaning, as long as we also recognize that we’re the ones who gave it to them. A wedding ring, for example, only represents the relationship between two people because those two people (along with the society around them) agree that it does. We are the ones who invest these objects with symbolic power, and, furthermore, to do so is a universal human activity. Kidding ourselves that we relate to the objects and products in our lives in a purely rational way (something scientists have disproved over and over again) leaves us open to unconscious manipulation by advertisers.

In other words, advertising is not solely about selling products but is concerned with constructing meaning around a product so it can be used in the language of social communication.

I was fascinated by a recent psychology study that found that one crucial aspect of ‘communication’ in the language of social consumerism is to avoid symbolism associated with social groups that are perceived as particularly contrary to a person’s self-image.

This is from the Science Blog write-up:

“Although past research has confirmed that consumers often choose products and brands that represent who they are, the current research suggests that consumers also choose products in ways that demonstrate who they are not,” explain Katherine White (University of Calgary) and Darren W. Dahl (University of British Columbia).

Through a series of studies, the researchers found that people are only motivated to avoid products related to “disassociative reference groups” – that is, groups with which the consumer seeks to avoid association. However, this avoidance tendency did not occur in response to products associated with an “outgroup,” or, a group in which the consumer does not belong, but is also not particularly motivated to avoid. For example, the baby boomer who avoids geriatric shoes might not be a basketball fan, but may be neutral about basketball in general and gladly wear basketball shoes.

The Salon book review is well-worth reading on its own and contains many fascinating points, but I’ll be interesting to track down a copy of the book myself as if it’s supported by good research it could be a fascinating look into one of our most implicit but pressurised methods of social communication.

Link to Salon book review.
Link to abstract of study on avoiding negative brand associations.
Link to ScienceBlog write-up.

Albert Bandura’s 1961 ‘Bobo doll experiment‘ examined whether watching aggressive behaviour could trigger violence in children and is one of the most famous studies in in psychology. The video from the experiment is now available online so you can hear Bandura narrating the study as various children knock ten bells out of a plastic doll.

The study has been widely cited in debates about whether TV violence makes children more aggressive, but Bandura never referred to television at all in the article that described the study.

Undoubtedly, the study came at a time of peak concern about the effect of TV on children and so was highly topical, but it also caught the changing mood in psychology as a science.

In 1961 psychology was moving away from behaviourism toward a cognitive approach. Behaviourism suggested that all thought and behaviour arose from stimulus-response or paired-stimulus learning.

In contrast, cognitive psychology argues that the mind is more like a computer, and so processes information and builds internal models of the world.

The Bobo doll experiment was designed as a study of social learning theory, an approach Bandura innovated which attempts to explain how we can learn from others simply by observing them.

While individuals might get rewarded for successfully learning by observation, there are many other instances when this doesn’t happen even though learning still successfully occurs.

Therefore, social learning theory implies that we have internal models, internal motivations and non-conditioned learning – all of which are incompatible with a purely behaviourist approach.

The study could be applied to social concerns about TV and caught the spirit of the new psychology, making it popular with the public and psychologists alike.

Link to video of Bandura’s ‘Bobo doll experiment’ (via MeFi).
Link to full text of the original paper.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry reprints a poignant poem from the late English physician and poet Edward Lowbury:

To the Madhouse

What she has told us all a hundred times –
That old, unwanted women can again
Be hunted down, accused of pointless crimes
And burned in the public square; that it is vain
To plead ‚Äì or prove ‚Äì one’s innocence; that men
With solemn looks will come into the house,
And say, fearing a scene, `You’ll feel no pain;’
`It’s for your good;’ `We’re not ungenerous;’
What she foretold, when we dismissed her fear
Saying `You dreamed such things’ ‚Äì it now comes true:
The door is open, and the men are here.
Calmly they question her, and with a new
Smiling indifference drag her from the room
And through the streets to the expected doom.

The poem is apparently from one of his collections, entitled New Poems 1935–1989.

The image of the ‘mad woman’ is a recurrent theme in poetry and literature, particularly of times past, and was famously discussed in the 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic.

One of the Wordworth’s most famous poems, The Mad Mother, is, perhaps, the best known example and recounts the words of a young lady who is experiencing what we would now call postpartum psychosis.

On the surface, it has a more cheerful outlook than Lowbury’s poem, although the content of the mother’s words belie the situation of the subject, rending the piece considerably more disturbing in many ways.

The picture on the right is by the 18th century French painter Th√©odore G√©ricault and is entitled Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy and is from his series of ten ‘portraits of the insane’.

At the time it was believed that madness could be seen in the face, and Géricault wanted to capture how different forms of insanity expressed themselves Рa project that preceded later attempts to do the same with photography.

Sadly, only five of the portraits survive, but they remain some of the most important works in the history of portraiture.

Link to short BJP article on the poem.
Link to Wordworth’s poem The Mad Mother.
Link to piece on G√©ricault’s ‘portraits of the insane’.

The Boston Globe has a provocative article that sheds some new light on the old debate over why there are so few women in maths and physical science subjects. One important factor seems to be that they simply choose other professions, but if you think this answer is too simplistic, there may be more to it than meets the eye.

It no longer seems to be the case that women are being explicitly blocked from maths, physics and engineering jobs, although the number of women in these professions is still very small.

One strong argument for why women are in the minority is that they suffer from the effects of implicit sexism, a system designed to take advantage of male attributes and life choices.

Some argue that the lack of support and consideration for women’s lives puts them off, and so they decide against what seems like a bad option.

However, the article presents an interesting piece of evidence against this as being the major influence.

In her controversial new book, “The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap,” [Susan] Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.

The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

“It’s the opposite of what we’d expect,” says Pinker. “You’d think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it’s the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom.”

If the gender gap in many fields has its roots in women’s own preferences, that raises a new line of questions, including the most obvious: Why do women make these choices? Why do they prefer different kinds of work? And what does “freedom of choice” really mean in a world that is still structured very differently for men and women?

Of course, this doesn’t deny that there are still other reasons why women might be put off these careers (lack of female role models, perception / effect of a ‘boys club’ etc) but it’s interesting that support for female physical scientists seems not to correlate with their numbers.

The article also mentions an interesting point that women with high maths ability tend to have good verbal ability (meaning they have a much wider potential choice of careers) whereas this is less often the case with men. In essence, the article argues that women would rather select jobs with more human contact.

It’s probably worth saying that in the life sciences, females predominate. In fact, in psychology, men are typically outnumbered 10-1. Clinical psychology tends to be even more extreme.

Despite the vanishingly small number of male psychology undergraduates, I’ve never heard of any effort to recruit or attract more males to the subject.

I’m always curious as to why having few males in life sciences doesn’t seem to bother people but having few females in maths or physics does.

Can’t we have some equality in our equality?

Link to Boston Globe article on women in science and engineering.

Sociologist Harry Collins is interviewed in American Scientist on his fascinating mission to find out what we need to do to be considered an expert and what different types of expertise exist.

Collins has spent many years studying how science works. Not how it is supposed to work, through experiments and falsification and gradual knowledge building, but how it actually works, through social networks, economics and traditions.

He studied physicists who research gravitational waves and realised he was able to have in-depth conversation with gravitational wave theorists even though he couldn’t run the equipments or do the maths. As most expertise plays out in conversation, how much of an expert was he?

Collins and his colleagues wanted to test the difference between tacit knowledge, what we can do without being able to explain, and explicit knowledge, so they devised some fascinating experiments to see if people could tell the difference.

One ingenious experiment involved testing whether people could tell the difference between a colour blind person and normally sighted version from just talking to them about colour. It turns out, they can’t.

Technical decision-making is often a matter of debating in committees and the like, so the way expertise works itself out in conversation was always going to be a central concern. We decided to use the forerunner of the “Turing test”‚Äîthe “imitation game”‚Äîto see whether one kind of expert could be distinguished from another in conversational tests. In the imitation game, a judge asks open-ended questions of, say, a full-blown expert and someone with interactional expertise only, without knowing who is who. The judge tries to tell the difference. In the best-known of the experiments we did in Cardiff, color-blind people were found to be indistinguishable from color perceivers, and we argued this was because the former had been immersed in the language of the latter all their lives.

As a result of this project, the research team have created a ‘periodic table’ of different types of expertise and how they manifest themselves.

Collins’ research is also discussed in an interview for this month’s Scientific American and many of his publications on expertise are available on his website.

Link to American Scientist interview.
Link to Scientific American interview.
Link to Collins’ expertise publications.

Below is an excerpt from psychologist John Kihlstrom’s ¬≠2005 review article on dissociative disorders where he talks about the sudden ‘epidemic’ of multiple personality disorder, now know as DID, in the 1960s and 70s.

Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID is a diagnosis that describes where someone manifests various personalities, often of a diverse range of people – from children to adults of either sex.

It is controversial partly because diagnoses seemed to massively increase when two famous films on the disorder were popular.

Kihlstrom makes the interesting point that the increase in the number of people diagnosed with the disorder was also matched by an increase in the number of personalities each person seemed to have.

An interesting feature of the DID “epidemic” is an increase not just in the number of cases but also in the number of alter egos reported per case. In the classic literature, the vast majority of cases were of dual personality (Sutcliffe & Jones 1962, Taylor & Martin 1944). By contrast, most of the new cases compiled by Greaves (1980) presented at least three personalities; in two other series, the average number of alter egos was more than 13 (Kluft 1984, Putnam et al. 1986).

As Kenny (1986) noted, it was almost as if there were some kind of contest to determine who could have (or be) the patient with the most alter egos. The famous Eve, of course, appeared to have three personalities (Osgood & Luria 1954, Thigpen & Cleckley 1954). But when popular and professional interest in MPD was stimulated by the case of Sibyl, who was reported to possess 16 different personalities (Schreiber 1973), Eve replied with her own account of her illness, eventually claiming 22 (Sizemore & Huber 1988).

Despite the almost-infinite number of possible synaptic connections in the brain, one might say that the mind simply is not big enough to hold so many personalities. The proliferation of alter egos within cases, as well as the proliferation of cases, has been one of the factors leading to skepticism about the disorder itself.

In general, dissociative disorders are where one part of consciousness seems to be ‘split off’ or inaccessible to another.

For example, psychogenic amnesia or conversion disorder (‘hysteria’) are more common examples and hypnosis seems to reliably induce the phenomena in some people.

These are still some of the most mysterious processes in psychology and are fraught with controversy, particularly as they’re often linked to repressed memories from abuse or trauma.

This is one of the more difficult areas to study scientifically because it largely relies on self-report, and Kihlstrom notes there is still no convincing evidence that trauma or abuse leads to amnesia for the event.

Link to PubMed abstract of Kihlstrom’s review.
Link to full-text of pre-print.

Continuing yesterday’s virtual reality theme, The New Yorker has an in-depth article about how US Iraq veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder are being treated in a VR simulation of battle situations.

The VR simulation is actually a modified version of Full Spectrum Warrior, a military tactics video game that was first developed to train US army soldiers before being released as a commercial product.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can be diagnosed if a person has experienced a potentially life threatening experience, and has intrusive traumatic memories, persistently increased arousal, and avoids reminders of the event.

Helping someone re-visit aspects of the original experience is an important part of the psychological therapy. This is relatively easy for someone who was traumatised in a traffic accident, but is considerably more difficult for a soldier who was traumatised in a distant and still-active war zone.

Virtual reality aims to safely simulate the environment and features of combat. The idea is that the intensity can be controlled by the therapist to manage exposure and to make sure the patient is never challenged with more anxiety than they can manage.

“This shows you why you need a trained therapist,” Rizzo said, turning off the machine and watching Aristone, who was bent over, with his hands on his knees, taking deep breaths. “Someone who knows exposure therapy, who knows how little things can set people off. You have to understand the patient. You have to know which stimuli to select. You’d never do what I just did—you’d never flood them. You have to know when to ramp up the challenges. Someone comes in and all they can do is sit in the Humvee, maybe with the sound of wind, and may have to spend a session or two just in that position. For P.T.S.D., it’s really intuitive. We provide a lot of options and put them into the hands of the clinician.”

One of these is Karen Perlman, a civilian psychologist who uses Virtual Iraq with patients at the Naval Medical Center San Diego. Perlman is an apple-cheeked, middle-aged native Californian with cascading brown hair, who, when I met her, was wearing an elegant short black dress with a pink-blue-and-purple tie-dyed silk scarf. At first glance, Perlman does not seem to be the sort of person a young marine would cotton to, but Rizzo says that she has a gift, and so far eight of the nine patients she has treated no longer meet the criteria for P.T.S.D. (This number does not account for those who dropped out.) “It’s a very collaborative relationship,” she told me in February, when Skip Rizzo and I drove down to San Diego. “I know which stimuli I’m going to add as the therapy progresses. I’m not going to overwhelm them. There are no surprises. I say, ‘I think you’re ready for the I.E.D. blast or for more airplanes.’ I’m not only adding more, but increasing the duration of each one. It’s intensive, but for P.T.S.D. you need a treatment that is intensive.”

The team have published some published some initial studies from the treatment which looks promising.

The project joins a growing number of studies that have found VR a promising method for treating trauma.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Virtual Iraq’.

The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover was an influential article by Lindsy Van Gelder that examined how a case of gender-bending identity faking from the early days of online chatrooms impacted on a virtual community.

I’d read it many years ago when it was published in the book, Computerization and Controversy, but have just found a scanned copy on the net as a <a href="
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/classes/cyberspace/resources/Van%20Gelder%201991%20-%20The%20Strange%20Case%20of%20the%20Electronic%20Lover.pdf”>pdf.

It’s entirely anecdotal but it’s a fascinating read (although has been scanned in sideways, so you’ll have to print it, or rotate it on screen – Acrobat users, you can right click to rotate documents).

What I hadn’t remembered was the identities of the person and the alter-ego:

I soon learned that [Talkin’ Lady’s] real name was Joan Sue Green, and that she was a New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, who had been severely disfigured in a car accident that was the fault of a drunken driver. The accident had killed her boyfriend.

Joan had spent a year in hospital being treated for brain damage, which affected both her speech and her ability to walk. Mute, confined to a wheelchair, and frequently suffering from intense back and leg pain, Joan had been at first so embittered about her disabilities that she literally didn’t want to live.

Then her mentor, a former professor at John Hopkins, presented her with a computer, a modem, and a year’s subscription to CompuServe to be used specifically doing what Joan was doing – making friends online…

Over the next two years, she became a monumental on-line presence who served as both a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and (in some cases) her on-line romances, she changed the lives of dozens of women.

Thus it was a huge shock early this year when, through a complicated series of events, Joan was revealed as being not disabled at all. More to the point, Joan, in fact, was not a woman. She was really a man we’ll call Alex – a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be a female, and to experience the intimacy of female friendship.

I first came across the case in Sherry Turkle’s book on the psychology of online identity, Life on the Screen, where she described the story as already having “near-legendary status” in 1995 cyberculture.

There is now a growing body of scholarly work on the psychology of the internet but several episodes seem to have become part of the mythos of the subject, partly because they were used to illustrate psychological points before rigorous empirical work had been started.

Incidentally, I tried to look up the author, Lindsy Van Gelder, on the net but found few details. However, I did find this article from the 1980s where she defends her counter-culture credentials against the fact she owned an IBM PC! (a 5150 if I’m not mistaken).

pdf of Van Gelder’s ‘The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover’.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has a fascinating interview with psychologist Daniel Freeman who discusses his recent study that used virtual reality to study paranoid thinking.

Freeman has pioneered the use of VR in studying paranoia to try and understand how individual psychological differences contribute to suspiciousness and fear.

Of course, it’s possible to use real life environments to see how exposure relates to paranoid thinking. In fact, the same research group has studied how patients with paranoid delusions react to urban environments.

Those familiar with South East London might be interested to know that stressful urban stimulus in this experiment was a walk down Camberwell High Street (as a resident of Camberwell it is disconcerting, although not entirely surprising, to find out I’m living in an experimental condition used to induce paranoid reactions).

For a scientific point of view, one difficulty with using real-life environments to study paranoia is that they are constantly changing and reactive.

This latter point is important because people who are very paranoid might, for instance, behave in a manner that other people find strange and that attracts attention, or in a way that sparks hostility in others.

One way of getting round this is to expose all participants to a virtual reality environment programmed to be identical, so any differences in paranoid thinking between individuals are almost certainly related to how they interpret the situation and not how the environment reacts to them.

In this latest VR study, the environment was programmed to be neutral (a simulation of the London Underground carriage) but about a third of participants from the general population reported paranoid thoughts.

Some of the paranoid thoughts reported in the paper are really quite striking: “There was an aggressive person ‚Äì his intention was to intimidate me and make me feel uneasy” and “One guy looked pissed off and maybe one guy flicked the finger at me”.

I’ve actually been in the simulation, having taken part in a pilot study for a related project, and although it’s a bit clunky (as you can see from the picture) it’s remarkable how its difficult not to have human reactions to the ‘people’ on the train.

Interestingly, the study found that anxiety, worry and the tendency to have anomalous perceptual experiences were associated with paranoid thoughts, as was ‘cognitive inflexibility’ – the tendency to be unable to see alternative explanations for ideas or beliefs.

In the audio interview, Freeman discusses this latest study in more detail and how it relates to what we know about the psychology of paranoia.

UPDATE: Thanks to PsyBlog for alerting me to the fact that a streamed video from the Wellcome Trust has an interview with Dan Freeman and footage from the experiment itself.

Link to RCPsych to podcast on VR and paranoia study.
Link to abstract of study.

The St Petersburg Times has an article on the new generation of rescue robots that search for survivors after disasters. Their creator, engineer Robin Murphy, is designing robots that will aim to provide psychological comfort to trapped victims until the rescuers can reach them.

Murphy has been designing and deploying rescue robots for many years, assisting the rescue teams after the World Trade Centre attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the Utah mine disaster to name but a few.

Recognising the need to alleviate the psychological suffering of trapped survivors, she’s just won a $500,000 grant from Microsoft to develop robots that attempt to comfort the people they reach.

The Survivor Buddy would act as an emergency companion to people stuck in the crossfire of snipers or under the rubble of an earthquake-ravaged building like the ones now littering China.

She envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a victim’s vital signs to doctors. And it should be friendly, she said.

Link to The St Petersburg Times on Survivor Buddy (via AI&Robots).

The most recent edition of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone discussed the philosophy of suicide, looking at how our concepts of self-killing have changed throughout history and whether there is any such thing as a rational reason for ending our own lives.

The philosopher Albert Camus famously stated that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”, something that surely struck Socrates as he killed himself by drinking hemlock.

Suicide in its many forms has inspired everything from condemnation to romanticisation, most focusing on the morality of taking one’s own life and whether it can be justified as a reasonable option.

The programme touches on many of these issues and I was also interested to see a link from the page to an entry on suicide from the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Link to Philosopher’s Zone on suicide with audio and transcript.
Link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on suicide.

A forthcoming study from the Journal of Affective Disorders looked at people who seem to have the ‘ups’ of manic depression but none of the ‘downs’. While people with pure hypomania were more likely to have had legal troubles and be impulsive, they were also more likely to earn more and be married.

The study looked at people who had never been diagnosed with a mood disorder but, during a general population survey, seem to have experiences akin to hypomania – an upswing in activity and energy that falls short of the extremes that can lead to psychosis in full blown mania.

This is normally only classified when it accompanies depression, which could lead to one of the bipolar disorder diagnoses.

In contrast, the study found ‘pure hypomania’ was generally not distressing, had its benefits, but could lead to complications.

Pure hypomanics were characterised by physical and social overactivity, elevated and irritable mood, as well as increases in extraversion, sexual interest, and risk-taking behaviors.

They had higher monthly incomes and were more often married than controls. Subjective distress due to hypomanic symptoms was virtually absent.

Quality of life and treatment rates for mood and anxiety were not different from controls, although sleep disturbances, substance abuse and binge eating were more frequent.

The absence of subjective distress is interesting, as it is part of a realisation that psychiatry has traditionally based its ideas about psychopathology on a sample bias – it’s only studied people who are treated by psychiatrists.

This means that classifications have often based on people who are either distressed or impaired. People who experience similar symptoms but who didn’t become significantly disabled by them were not considered.

In the last 20 years, efforts have been made to survey the community and discover who has benign ‘symptoms’. For example, a ground breaking study by Romme and Escher found that only one third of people who hear voices had ever needed psychiatric help, despite the fact is traditionally considered a tell-tale sign of mental illness.

Link to abstract of ‘pure hypomania’ study.

NPR Radio’s All Things Considered just had an interesting feature on two six-year old boys who identify with and want to be girls. It’s something that might be diagnosed as gender identity disorder or GID and the programme looks at how the two psychologists dealt with the issue in very different ways.

One psychologist, Ken Zucker, suggested that the family encourage their son to only associate with traditionally male toys and activities to encourage him to be more comfortable with his born sex, while the other, Diane Ehrensaft encouraged the family to allow their son to explore his cross-gender interests.

Whatever your immediate reaction to these approaches the psychologists in the programme make interesting points on both sides of the debate:

Ehrensaft sees transgenderism as akin to homosexuality, she says, she thinks Zucker’s therapy ‚Äî which seeks to condition children out of a transgender identity ‚Äî is unethical.

But that isn’t how Zucker sees it. Zucker says the homosexuality metaphor is wrong. He proposes another metaphor: racial identity disorder.

“Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? … I don’t think we would,” Zucker says.

If a black kid walked into a therapist’s office saying he was really white, the goal of pretty much any therapist out there would be to make him try to feel more comfortable being black.

Gender identity disorder is a controversial area. The diagnosis requires “a strong and persistent cross-gender identification” and significant distress related to the birth gender.

Some cross-gender people feel they are being labelled as mentally ill for having atypical gender desires and suggest that any associated distress is because they have to live in a society that marginalises their life choices.

There are some proponents that maintain that any cross-gender identification is an illness, although these are often the same people that think that being gay is a disorder and run ‘treatment centres’ for homosexuality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems Zucker’s work is quoted rather favourably by many of these organisations – something that has given him a bad name amongst some parts of the the LGBT community. Although, from what I can make out, he’s never associated himself with any of these views or organisations.

The mainstream professionals who defend the GID diagnosis usually suggest that the distress, rather than the desire itself, is key and this legitimises its classification and treatment. From this point of view, happy and adjusted transgender people would not be considered to have a disorder.

The program is well worth listening to as it tackles many of these thorny issues of gender politics.

Incidentally, the producer is Alix Spiegel, who produced 81 words, one of the finest documentaries on the history of psychiatry I’ve ever heard.

It looks at the how homosexuality was de-listed as a mental illness, but is more than that, it’s also a moving story from Spiegel’s family. The remarkable thing was that the the two were inextricably linked.

I’ve mentioned it before on Mind Hacks, but I highly recommend it if you’ve not encountered it before.

Link to NPR programme on cross-gender desires in children.
Link to audio archive of 81 words (click ‘Full Episode’ for free stream).

An article in today’s New York Times looks at the ‘mad pride’ movement and meets many of the people who aim to destigmatise mental illness by being upfront about their experience of altered states of mind.

The article features journalist Liz Spikol, who we interviewed back in 2006, and professor of law Elyn Saks, who we featured last year, among a host of others who are associated with what might loosely be termed as ‘mad pride’.

‘Loosely’ is certainly an apt description, because, apart from fighting stigma, views within the mad pride movement vary widely.

There are a few lingering Marxists who see all psychiatry as part of the capitalist system to oppress the working class, but most simply want better care for mental distress and society to be more accepting of differing states of mind.

Mad Pride is often rather clumsily related to ‘antipsychiatry’ but they are often at the forefront of campaigns when essential services are threatened.

In London, the campaign against the shutting of the Maudsley Hospital psychiatric emergency clinic was spearheaded by several ‘mad pride’ organisations – who had a mischievous and witty banner at one demo saying “We must be mad! We want the emergency clinic kept open!”.

I do share Phil Dawdy’s bemusement at being overlooked, as he’s surely one of the most thorough and effective of campaigning writers, but good to see the NYT continue its tradition of high quality mental health journalism.

Link to NYT article ‘Mad Pride Fights a Stigma’.

The link between attractiveness and facial symmetry seems to hold across both black and white faces, but also in non-human primates, according to a study just published in the open-access science journal PLoS One.

One of the most striking studies in sex and symmetry research isn’t mentioned, however. A 1995 study found that the likelihood of female orgasm during sex was related to the extent of bodily symmetry in the male partner.

The study was led by biologist Randy Thornhill and recruited 86 young couples who completed a number of relationship questionnaires, including one on how often the female partner orgasmed during sex. The males then had their bodies measured and assessed for how much one side differed compared to the other – a measure of bodily asymmetry.

In the final analysis neither the male’s age, wealth, social skills, physical attractiveness or relationship style predicted the frequency of female orgasm. Only male bodily symmetry was statistically associated with the chance of the women climaxing during sex.

The researchers thought that maybe women who have more orgasms, or who are just more sexual, simply get the more symmetrical (maybe hotter) guys. But when they looked at frequency of orgasm outside copulation (such as during oral sex or masturbation), the relationship to male symmetry disappeared, suggesting that this wasn’t the case.

This study, and the new study published in PLoS One, also suggested that symmetry was associated with more masculine features generally – a bigger body in the orgasm study, and a more typically male face in the PLoS research.

The evolutionary explanation suggested by the authors is that female orgasm during copulation may make pregnancy more likely, so it’s an adaptive strategy to increase fertility when making love to males with genes more likely to lead to healthy children.

How orgasm increases with body symmetry is not clearly understood, though. The authors speculate that female perception of a highly symmetrical male might psychologically prime sexual arousal, but the mechanism is left largely to guesswork.

Link to PLoS One study on attractiveness and symmetry (via Anthro).
Link to abstract of orgasm and symmetry study.