Mind Hacks

The BPS Research Digest covers an intriguing study that found that imagining friends, parents, and romantic partners differently affected how we rate ourselves on personality measures.

The study suggests that being primed with certain sorts of relationship seems to alter either our personality, or how we perceive our personal characteristics.

Dozens of female university students were led to believe they were participating in an investigation into the effect of visualisation on heart rate, with the appropriate medical paraphernalia in place to make the story more convincing.

The students were asked to visualise a range of fairly mundane items or experiences and then at the end they were asked to visualise in detail either one of their parents, a recent romantic partner, or a friend. Afterwards they completed a range of personality and self-esteem tests. Post-experimental debriefing confirmed they hadn’t guessed the true purpose of the study.

Students who visualised a parent subsequently rated themselves as less sensual, adventurous, dominant, extraverted and industrious, than did students asked to visualise a friend or romantic partner, consistent with the idea that people revert to a more submissive “child role” with their parents.

The paper itself doesn’t mention it, but the study has some striking relevance to rather confusingly named ‘object relations theory‘, which could be much more clearly named ‘human relations theory’.

It’s a development of a Freudian idea, but instead of suggesting that sex and aggression are the core drives which shape our psychological landscape, it suggests, rather more sensibly, that relationships are the main factor that influence who we are.

In fact, it suggests that the ‘self’ is malleable and tends to be defined in terms of the people we interact with.

One of the genuinely useful legacies of psychoanalytically-inspired psychology has been the focus on the emotional interaction between people as an important shaping force in how we think and behave.

Most of Freud’s original (lets be polite and say) ‘kookiness’ has been stripped away, which leaves us with an approach that is often both empirically testable and supported by scientific studies.

For example, psychologist Susan Anderson has done a huge amount of experimental research on ‘transference’, where feelings from one relationship affect another because the two people are perceived as similar in some way.

Link to BPSRD article ‘Mind who you think of’.

One of the myths of suicide is that if a person wants to kill themselves, they’ll always find a way. While this can occur in some cases, evidence that making methods of self-harm less accessible can reduce the suicide rate suggests that deaths can be prevented with simple safety measures.

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article on exactly this topic looking at how, particularly impulsive suicides, can be prevented.

What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

The NYT article focuses on jumping and firearms and how erecting barriers and storing guns in locked boxes are effective preventative measures.

However, if you want a flavour of really how simple the safety measures need to be to make a difference to suicide rate, research has found that putting pills in blister packs reduces lethal overdoses.

It’s amazing if you think about it, simply making it necessary to pop each pill out of its plastic packaging rather than tipping them out of a bottle means less people kill themselves.

The difference is likely a matter of minutes, but it gives time for brief impulsive urges to pass, and every popped pill requires a single deliberate action towards suicide that gives a chance for the distressed person to reconsider. Obviously, many do.

The article merits a read in full, and Liz Spikol has an interesting video commentary on the piece that’s also well-worth checking out.

Link to NYT article ‘The Urge to End It All’.
Link to Liz Spikol on ‘Is Suicide Preventable?’.

BBC Ouch! magazine has a completely fascinating article on sign names in the deaf community. They are like mandatory formal nicknames decided by a consensus of your peers that reflect something distinctive about you.

The article describes how assigning and accepting one can be a tricky social negotiation with some having to mount campaigns against unwanted sign names.

Sign names are a weird and wonderful thing, where your average hearing names like Matt, Jack or Jane look positively plain.

But before you get too excited about the possibility of throwing your dull, former identity away, let me point something out: you don’t get to choose your sign name. You don’t even get power of veto on it. It is given to you.

It makes sense. If deaf people could choose their name, you’d get loads of guys wandering around calling themselves Stud, Beer Belly or Jackie Chan’s Lovechild. Women would probably call themselves Lip Gloss, Model or Soft Hair. I’m generalising, and stereotyping, but you get my point.

When a sign name is given to you, it’s special. A bit like losing your deaf virginity. It‚Äôs thought up after an intense period of observation, when people have worked out firstly whether they like you enough to give you one (a sign name, that is), and they’ve taken all your habits and mannerisms into account to find a name that best sums you up.

I have to say, I find watching sign language completely enthralling. It always seems like a wonderful form of cognitive ballet to me.

Obviously, it has its practical uses to, as demonstrated by this video tutorial on how to flirt using sign language.

Link to article on the social complexities of sign names (via MeFi).

R.A. Radford was an economist taken prisoner during World War Two who later wrote about the complex cigarette-based economy that thrived in the POW camps in a fascinating 1945 article.

You can also read it online as a pdf if you want to see it in its original type-print glory, which I have to say, does rather add to the atmosphere it so wonderfully evokes.

It’s a vivid insight into the social organisation of the camps, and just the descriptions of the market pressures are quite interesting in themselves.

For example, the standard currency was a cigarette, but heavy air raids meant people would smoke more, presumably owing to stress, thereby altering the value of the currency through scarcity.

The camp residents imposed trade regulations, had trading areas, and some even developed businesses:

Around D-Day, food and cigarettes were plentiful, business was brisk and the camp in an optimistic mood. Consequently the Entertainments Committee felt the moment opportune to launch a restaurant, where food and hot drinks were sold while a band and variety turns performed. Earlier experiments, both public and private, had pointed the way, and the scheme was a great success.

Food was bought at market prices to provide the meals and the small profits were devoted to a reserve fund and used to bribe Germans to provide grease-paints and other necessities for the camp theatre. Originally meals were sold for cigarettes but this meant that the whole scheme was vulnerable to the deflationary waves, and furthermore heavy smokers were unlikely to attend much. The whole success of the scheme depended on an adequate amount of food being offered for sale in the normal manner.

To increase and facilitate trade, and to stimulate supplies and customers therefore and secondarily to avoid the worst effects of deflation when it should come, a paper currency was organised by the Restaurant and the Shop.

It’s completely readable even if you’re not familiar with economics and is a captivating window into POW camp society as seen through the eyes of a monetary expert.

Link to article (via MeFi).
pdf of article.

Slate has just finished an excellent five-part series on two recent books which have attempted to paint men and women as vastly different in mind, brain and behaviour by exaggerating the science of sex difference.

The books in question are Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain and Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox.

Both have been influential because the authors write from an explicitly feminist angle, and both claim to be drawing on the latest neuroscience, suggesting that they’re overthrowing the mushy political correctness of “everyone is the same”.

The Slate series pulls no punches though, saying “Ultimately, the evangelists aren’t really daring to be politically incorrect. They’re peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole.”

Of course, there are cognitive differences between men and women, but the punchline of almost all sex difference research is that the extent of the difference between any two individuals, be they male or female, tends to vastly outweigh the average difference between the sexes.

Furthermore, while some of these books suggest the differences are innate many studies have found the differences change markedly over time and are influenced by cultural or social factors.

The series is well-researched, easy to digest and looks at the areas of communication, empathy, maths ability and development during childhood. It’s also accompanied by a three-part video discussion, which tackles similar issues.

Slate have been doing a great job of getting some accessible, level-headed neuroscience out there recently, and this is another great example. Good work science writer Amanda Schaffer.

Link to Slate series on ‘The Sex Difference Evangelists’.