Category: Togetherness

A recent Time magazine article on why marriage is viewed so positively despite the divorce statistics, suggested that single people are the subject of negative stereotyping and discrimination.

The conclusions come from the work of psychologist Prof Bella DePaulo who recently summarised her research in a review paper for the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Unfortunately, the full text isn’t available online, but the abstract makes for interesting reading:

A widespread form of bias has slipped under our cultural and academic radar. People who are single are targets of singlism: negative stereotypes and discrimination. Compared to married or coupled people, who are often described in very positive terms, singles are assumed to be immature, maladjusted, and self-centered. Although the perceived differences between people who have and have not married are large, the actual differences are not. Moreover, there is currently scant recognition that singlism exists, and when singlism is acknowledged, it is often accepted as legitimate.

The article itself reviews research which has uncovered these negative stereotypes as well we suggesting why they occur.

DePaulo proposes that the prejudice may arise from an evolutionary tendency to identify unpaired people – making them stand out – and from the fact that happy single people implicitly challenge cultural beliefs about the necessity of marriage.

DePaulo also challenges the assumption that married people are generally happier and healthier than singles, as the effect is seemingly small and is drawn from correlational studies.

In other words, it is not clear whether this small effect exists solely because happier and healthier people are more likely to get married.

DePaulo has also written a book on the subject called Singled Out (ISBN 0312340818) which tackles these issues in more detail and argues that we should recognise and address this form of ‘hidden’ discrimination.

Link to Time article ‘Americans Love Marriage. But Why?’
Link to abstract of DePaulo’s review paper on ‘singlism’.
Link to DePaulo’s website.

The Young@Heart Chorus are a choir of senior citizens from a sheltered housing project. They do awesome covers of classic rock tracks, seemingly chosen to ironically challenge stereotypes of the elderly (e.g. Coldplay’s Fix You).

YouTube has a video of them doing a cover of Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia.

The audience looks a bit taken aback but the choir is gutsy and the version inspired.

They’ve got a live gig on April 17th at Dartmouth College. Don’t miss it if you get the chance.

Link to video of Schizophrenia cover (via FS).
Link to Young@Heart Chorus website.

Brain Ethics has found an intriguing study which suggests that giving people the hormone oxytocin makes them better at reading emotion from other people’s eyes.

Oxytocin is a hormone that also works as a neurotransmitter, and is known to be involved in bonding experiences.

It is released during sex, and also when mothers breast feed their infants.

A 2005 study published in Nature [pdf] suggested that oxytocin increased trustfulness in people playing a co-operative investment game.

This study, published in Biological Psychiatry, is the first to suggest that the a burst of the hormone actually makes us better at perceiving others’ emotions.

The full text of the study is available online as a pdf file if you want to get more details about the research.

Link to Brain Ethics article ‘Oxytocin is the window to the soul’.
pdf of full-text of scientific study.

The New York Times reports on a study that interviewed people who had been either physically or psychologically tortured during the conflict in Yugoslavia and found both groups were equally likely to develop post traumatic stress disorder, otherwise known as PTSD.

The research was led by Dr Metin Basoglu and has just been published in the medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

This is powerful research, not least because the United Nations Convention Against Torture uses the potential for ‘prolonged mental harm’ as a way of distinguishing between physical torture and other coercive interrogation techniques that may be frowned upon but are not considered against international law.

The conclusions appear to contradict a Justice Department memorandum of Dec. 30, 2004. Citing the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the memorandum argued that a broad range of interrogation techniques, among them forced standing, hooding, subjection to loud noises and deprivation of sleep, food and drink, might be inhumane but did not constitute torture unless they resulted in “prolonged mental harm.”

“Until now, both sides of the debate have expressed opinions based on personal impressions,” said Dr. Metin Basoglu, the lead author of the study. “But these data clearly suggest that you cannot make a distinction between physical forms of torture and something else called ‘cruel and degrading treatment.’ “

This is likely to inflame the ongoing debate about the American Psychological Association allowing its members to take part in US Military interrogations while US medical associations have banned physicians and psychiatrists from participating in the same.

Link to NYT article ‘The Line Between Torture and Cruelty’.
Link to abstract of study on PubMed.

Part of the footnote to ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, a chapter from J.G. Ballard’s chaotic and sometimes confusing novel The Atrocity Exhibition.

In Springfield Mental Hospital near London a few years ago, while visiting a psychiatrist friend, I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly serve the afternoon tea. As the thirty or so cups were set out on a large polished table she began to stare at the bobbing liquid, then stepped forward and carefully inverted the brimming cup in her hand.

The hot liquid dripped everywhere in a terrible mess, and the orderly screamed: ‘Doreen, why did you do that?’, to which she replied: ‘Jesus told me to.’ She was right, though I like to think what really compelled her was a sense of the intolerable contrast between the infinitely plastic liquid in her hand and the infinitely hard geometry of the table, followed by the revelation that she could resolve these opposites in a very simple and original way.

She attributed the insight to divine intervention, but the order in fact came from some footloose conceptual area of her brain briefly waking from its heavy sleep of largactil.

The novel also contains a chapter entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ which is a fake psychoanalytic interpretation of experiments that supposedly study the sexual attractiveness of Reagan to potential voters.

Ballard writes in a footnote to this chapter: “At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republication Party, was distributed to delegates. I’m told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.”

Presumably, Ballard was not a fan of the Reagan or the Republican Party.

Link to Wikipedia page on The Atrocity Exhibition.

What do you do with a psychotic astronaut? If you’re not sure, the Houston Chronicle notes that you can look it up in NASA’s manual for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in space.

Despite being surrounded by billions of dollars of high technology, the procedure is pragmatic and definitely low-tech:

The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier’s wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.

There’s actually a project, named Human Interactions in Space, which specifically studies the psychological impact of space travel, headed up by psychiatrist Dr Nick Kansas.

There are further details of NASA’s policies for psychiatric emergencies in the Houston Chronicle article.

Link to story in Houston Chronicle.

NPR has recently broadcast a short interview with anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker who discusses how autism is understood in different cultures and across the world.

Grinker has written a book called Unstrange Minds (ISBN 0465027636) which was inspired both by his daughter, who has been diagnosed with autism, and his travels across the world to discover how people with autism exist within different cultures.

The book’s website is well worth visiting as it has a number of excerpts as well as some additional material and photos.

Link to NPR page with Grinker interview audio.
Link to website of Unstrange Minds.

BBC Radio 4’s medical programme Case Notes recently had a special on Parkinson’s Disease which explored the condition and the work on the latest treatments – including brain surgery and cell transplants.

Parkinson’s Disease is heavily linked to the loss of dopamine neurons in the nigrostriatal pathway in the brain (there’s a good diagram here).

This causes movements difficulties (including slowness of movement, stiffness and tremor) as well as cognitive difficulties which can impair reasoning, concentration and memory.

Because the disorder is linked to the loss of cells in quite a focused area of the brain, it is been the subject of much interest by medical researchers wanting to ‘replace’ these cells by implanting stem cells into affected brain area with the hope that they’ll turn into new dopamine neurons.

So far, the trials have shown mixed results, although the research is still in the early stages.

Because of the use of stem cells, Parkinson’s Disease has become a political battleground, especially in the USA, where stem cell research is considered much more controversial than in other parts of the world.

Link to Case Notes on Parkinson’s Disease (with audio).
Link to NIH information on Parkinson’s Disease.

New Scientist has a fascinating news report on the psychology of polyamory – the practice of having multiple partners with the full consent of everyone involved.

Most Western societies have a focus on exclusively committed couples as the main family unit.

In contrast, people who are polyamorous feel themselves capable of more than one loving relationship and are often a part of a network of intimate lovers.

Crucially, lovers may not simply be sexual partners, and someone may be involved in several long-term committed relationships.

The dynamics of these relationships are bound to be different from traditional couples-based relationships, and psychologists are now starting to research how this affects the individuals and the social group.

Opinion is still divided on how successful these relationships might be in different spheres of life, although the field is really lacking in any systematic long-term studies.

So is poly more sustainable than monogamy? “Infidelity in monogamous relationships is estimated at 60 to 70 per cent, so it seems that attraction to more than one person is normal. The question is how we deal with that,” says Meg Barker, a professor of psychology at London South Bank University who presented her research into poly at the 2005 meeting of The British Psychological Society. “The evidence is overwhelming that monogamy isn’t natural,” says evolutionary biologist David Barash of the University of Washington, Seattle. “Lots of people believe that once they find ‘the one’, they’ll never want anyone else. Then they’re blindsided by their own inclinations to desire other attractive individuals. So it’s useful to know that this behaviour is natural.”

But as a mating strategy, poly may not be any better than monogamy; a person’s reproductive success may diminish if there is less pressure to be exclusive. “Jealousy is probably fitness enhancing,” Barash says. A more jealous male is likely to stick closer to his mate and prevent her from getting impregnated by other males. “A good look at human biology does not support polyamory any more than it supports monogamy,” he says. Biologist Joan Roughgarden, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, goes further. “Polyamory won’t last. The likelihood of being able to successfully raise children in that context is very limited. My guess is that it’s not an evolutionary advance, but a liability.”

Link to NewSci article ‘Love Unlimited: The polyamorists’.

Highlighting the striking parallels between our least understood and most exalted states of mind, Nietzsche commented that “there is always some madness in love”.

Perhaps the reason love has such a good reputation when compared to other forms of madness, is its effect on mood.

Euphoria, arousal, elation, talkativeness and flights of fancy can fill the mind in the most pleasurable way and it’s interesting that these are also core symptoms of mania – one end of the manic-depressive spectrum.

The defining feature of madness is delusion, however, where the affected person holds a fixed, unrealistic belief despite persuasive contrary evidence.

People in love are notorious for their unusual beliefs and, indeed, research has shown that we tend to hold unlikely and overly positive beliefs about our lovers.

Romance doesn’t even need a willing partner in some cases, as people who are diagnosed with de Clerambault’s syndrome hold the delusional belief that another person is in love with them, even if they’ve never met.

The original subject of de Clerambault’s seminal case study was a 53 year old woman who believed that King George V was in love with her and signalled his desires by moving the curtains of Buckingham Palace.

It seems madness and love are, in many ways, soul mates, and perhaps we should be grateful for their shared history.

Indeed, madness is at its most spectacular when shared, and the prospect of falling sanely in love with someone surely seems to miss the point.

There’s a fascinating article in The New York Magazine about the dramatic effects of different types of praise on a child’s success when tackling new challenges.

A team of researchers led by Prof Carole Dweck asked children to complete a series of short tests, and randomly divided into groups. Each child was given a single line of praise.

One group was praised for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”), while the others were praised for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”). This simple difference had a startling effect.

Children who were praised for their effort were more likely to choose a harder test when given a choice, were less likely to become disheartened when given a test they were guaranteed to fail, and when finally given the original tests again, their marks improved.

In contrast, the children praised for their intelligence tended to choose an easier test if asked, were distressed by failure, and actually had worse marks after re-taking the original tests.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized‚Äîit’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure).

The article is fascinating, although it seems the writer has somewhat overused the phrase ‘the inverse power of praise’ and might lead some people to think that praise itself has an ‘inverse effect’.

Praising children is incredibly important. Countless psychological studies have shown that excessive critical comments have a damaging effect on mental health.

This research just suggests that in terms of encouraging children to tackle challenges effectively, praising their effort seems more effective than praising their intelligence.

The article is a thorough look at the issues raised by this research, and how it is being applied in education.

Link to The New York Magazine article.

PsyBlog has just started a series of articles investigating the psychology of relationships by examining recent research looking at how relationships may do our health as much good as a balanced diet and regular exercise.

Another article discusses why music is so commonly talked about when we’re getting to know someone. Partly, it seems, because we tend to see music choice as indicating something about personality.

Research has suggested that this might have some basis to it, as music choice seems to reliably indicate aspects of personality and reveals information not necessarily available through other sources.

Future articles in the series will explore other interesting aspects of relationships studied by psychologists.

Link to article ‘Why Health Benefits of Good Relationships Rival Exercise and Nutrition’.
Link to ‘Personality Secrets in Your Mp3 Player’.

There’s a fascinating case report in the medical journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica about a man who became psychotic and developed the delusional belief that his mother had transformed into a wolf.

Lycanthropy is the name given to the mythical condition that causes someone to turn into a werewolf.

However, it’s also the name given to the psychiatric syndrome where someone becomes psychotic and believes they have tranformed or are transforming into another animal. It’s a fascinating condition as I discussed in a past article.

This case report is the first to describe a case where the person believed someone else was transforming into an animal, in this case a wolf:

He stated that he was captured by devil and sometimes his thoughts or
body were controlled by its power. Sometimes he had auditory hallucinations and heard the sound of drumming.

He said that he had drooling from his mouth for no apparent reason. He also claimed that this feeling caused some other changes in him, for example, he had previously had doubts about his ability to command animals and had now seen cats obey his commands.

He was from a low socioeconomic family and lived with all of his family members in a single room. His parents lay him down between themselves. One night sleeping beside her mother he had a dream. He saw a few undistinguishable creatures which reminded him of animals. He awoke and felt air flow coming out of his nostrils which changed his mother into a wolf. After this event his restlessness and agitation had become worse and finally he was admitted into the psychiatric ward.

Interestingly, the author, Dr Alireza Nejad, is a psychiatrist in Iran, and has written a number of fascinating papers on rare delusional syndromes.

Link to PubMed entry for case report.

Amanda Baggs is a young woman with autism and she’s created a powerful and articulate video that ‘translates’ from her world of environmental interaction to the neurotypical form of speech and perception.

As well as a stunning view into how she experiences and makes sense of the world, it’s also a forceful philosophical argument concerning how the mainstream understands people who don’t think or communicate in a conventional way.

Presumably speech-less (either through choice or development), Baggs communicates to the viewer using a voice synthesiser and on-screen text.

She has also put many of her medical notes online, sharpening the contrast between our assumptions about autism, and the message she deftly communicates.

Well worth watching to the end. A profound and exciting insight into an alternative humanity.

Link to YouTube video ‘In My Language’ (via Joy of Autism).

Film-maker Louis Theroux has written an insightful article for the BBC website about society’s view of weirdness and his experience of meeting out-of-the-ordinary people.

He suggests that ‘weirdness’ is in the eye of the beholder as the idea of what makes someone ‘weird’ is just the result of our transient views of what is considered normal, regardless of how common the actual opinion or behaviour is.

Furthermore, he notes that ‘weird’ behaviour is often understandable if you put yourself in the person’s shoes.

Though it’s been helpful as a kind of short-hand for the sort of stories I do, the term “weirdness” actually does a disservice to the people I cover. Looking closer at what seemed – at first hand – the oddest of behaviour and I’ve always found a kind of logic.

I was recently reading a book of neurological essays called Phantoms in the Brain, which had an introduction by neurologist Oliver Sacks. He discussed brain disorders with symptoms that to me seemed very weird indeed – patients who don’t recognise their own limbs as belonging to them, for example, or who sometimes think one side of their body belongs to someone else.

But these are, he says, “quite normal defence mechanisms” which the unconscious uses to make sense of the world. “Such an understanding removes such patients from the realm of the mad or the freakish,” he continues, “and restores them to the realm of discourse and reason – albeit the discourse and reason of the unconscious.”

It’s interesting that Theroux makes a connection between people considered ‘socially weird’ and those considered ‘clinically disordered’.

There’s a been an ongoing debate in psychiatry about the extent to which particular psychiatric diagnoses are influenced by social perceptions of certain behaviour and the wish to classify them as different.

For example, people will regularly talk about “the mentally ill” as if they were a coherent group (e.g ‘these health reforms will affect the mentally ill’) but almost never talk about “the physically ill” in the same way.

We know that mental illness is not a cut-and-dry affair. Psychosis, for example, is found on a continuum with everybody having psychosis-like experiences to some degree.

People diagnosed with psychotic disorders just have very frequent or intense experiences that cause them distress or impairment. The rest of us hardly notice them or aren’t bothered by them if they do occur.

In other words, the odd beliefs and behaviours of the ‘weird’ are just part of life’s rich tapestry.

Theroux ends by saying that “weird beliefs” never stood in the way of him making a human connection, which is another way of saying that we classify people are weird to put unnecessary distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’, when in reality, there is only us.

Link to article ‘Weird, or just in search of meaning?’.

I found this on the wall of a Rehab Unit in a London hospital this morning.

Dancing in the Waiting Room
by Angus Macmillan

All our living
is in waiting.
In these moments
we find our myriad selves
anxious, hopeful, trembling,
wishful, fearful, impatient.
All our dancing shadows
are there
flitting in the half light
of unreason
crowding together
in fevers of movement
never still, never one.

Then a voice says ‘Next’
and a new dance
begins.

I looked up the author on the net, and it turns out he’s a Scottish poet who writes in English and Gaelic, and is also a psychologist!

And luckily, there’s some audio of him reading his poems in both English and Gaelic available online.

Link to info and audio from Angus Macmillan.