Police shooting differs by age, race, sex, education

A study on police officers from Riverside County in California has found that the likelihood of the officer using deadly force is linked to their age, race, sex and experience of previous shootings.

Male officers were more likely to shoot than females. White officers were more likely to shoot than other ethnic groups. Shooting was most common in young officers, and in those who did not have a college education.

Police Officer Characteristics and the Likelihood of Using Deadly Force

Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 4, 505-521

James P. McElvain, Augustine J. Kposowa

Past research on police shootings, when examining officer characteristics, has focused on the officer’s race, particularly when it is not the same as the race of the person shot. Data from 186 officer-involved shootings were used to examine whether race effects existed and, if so, would be eliminated or attenuated by controlling for officer gender, education, age, and history of shooting. Male officers were more likely to shoot than female officers, and college-educated officers were less likely to be involved in shootings than officers with no college education. Risk of officer-involved shooting was reduced as the officer aged. White, non-Hispanic officers were more likely to shoot than Hispanic officers; however, there was no significant difference between Hispanic and Black officers. Officers with a previous history of shooting were more than 51% as likely to shoot during the follow-up period as officers without a history of shootings.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

Drug adverts full of unsupported claims

We’re so used to drug companies burying data, spinning their results, ghostwriting papers, ‘financially incentivising’ doctors and designing biased studies, you’d just assume that if drug advert cited a research it would back up the claim being made for the medication. According to a new study, you’d often be wrong.

The Royal Society of Chemistry’s magazine ‘Chemistry World’ has an article on a new study of psychiatric drug ads in medical journals that found that over a third of the total claims made by drug ads are not actually supported by the studies they reference as evidence.

Taken on an advert by advert basis, the results are even more shocking:

42 out of the 53 ads (nearly 80 per cent) the researchers examined made at least one claim the team couldn’t substantiate. 27 made a claim that was not supported by the data source cited by the ad. A further 15 contained claims that couldn’t be verified by the team – usually because the ads provided no sources of data to back up their claims, or made claims that could not be verified because drug firms either failed to respond to the researchers’ requests for trial data, or refused to supply it.

Six out of nine pharmaceutical companies – including GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Shire – did not reply to the researchers, while Wyeth refused to send trial data.

‘In these cases, we have to take their word [that their claims were supported by scientific evidence], which, personally, I would think is not a wise idea,’ says Spielmans. Only Janssen Pharmaceutica – makers of schizophrenia drug Risperdal (risperidone) – and medical device firm Cyberonics sent relevant studies to back up their claims.

You’d think after spending all that time and effort to design and run trials which consistently support the manufacturer’s product you could just reference your own studies, but apparently even that seems too excruciatingly transparent for the spin-happy industry.

Like the Fast Show Geezer, it seems they can’t even be polite enough to deceive us honestly.

Link to Chemistry World article (via Furious Seasons).
Link to abstract of scientific paper.

2008-04-18 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The economics of MILF! Slate explores how economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men in the 30s and beyond.

Has a selection bias found in the ‘Monty Hall problem’ affected findings in certain types of cognitive dissonance research? NYT’s TierneyLab blog investigates.

Some old school video footage of B.F. Skinner is discovered by Channel N.

PsychCentral looks at a new study on farm animal therapy. No, really.

I don’t smoke that heavy shit. Terra Sigillata on recent poisoning caused by dealers adulterating marijuana with lead.

While we’re on the subject of strange trips, Neurophilosophy celebrates the 65th anniversary of LSD.

MIT’s TechReview on how new genetic mapping tools are helping understand the neuroscience of autism.

BBC News reports on a nice two way interaction as the anaesthetic sevoflurane gas selectively reduces memory for high-emotion images.

The ‘I know I know it but can’t bring it to mind’ tip-of-the-tongue state gives an insight into the psychology of language, as detailed in an article from American Scientist.

The NYT considers the possibility of having silicon memory chips implanted into our brain to boost our memory capacity.

To the bunkers! The Guardian discusses the future of robots with personalities for everyday tasks. Call-Me-Kenneth is that you?

Treatment Online looks at recent research linking brain size to the chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Forensic psychology or medicalisation of a super-villain? You decide as psychologist Tim Stevens looks into the mind of the Green Goblin for Marvel News.

The Boston Herald looks at the behavioural economics of banking and long-term finance.

Better living through neurological self-tampering. The NYT looks at the history of altering our brain chemistry.

The Guardian has a first-person account of one writer’s experience of group therapy for depression.

This is your brain on free choice. Mixing Memory has a good retrospective on studies that use brain scanning to ‘mind read’.

A couple more good articles on emerging technologies from MIT’s Tech Review: one on modelling surprise and another on connectomics.

The BPS Research Digest has a piece on a fascinating but difficult-to-explain finding: fold your arms to boost your performance.

To the bunkers! The Washington Post on artificial intelligence technology being deployed for population monitoring and control.

The Neurocritic has a great roundup of studies that have looked at the effect of sexy pictures of male reasoning.

Insomnia, mirror neurons and the recanting of bluster

This week’s Nature has a couple of interesting books reviews: one on insomnia, and another on mirror neurons. The review of the mirror neuron book is by V.S. Ramachandran who also recants one of his famous and more outlandish statements made almost a decade ago.

Insomniac is a book on the trials, tribulations and scientific investigations of insomnia which is reviewed by sleep psychologist Jim Horne.

I nearly took Prof Horne’s course on sleep psychology as an undergraduate but decided against it (rather ironically) as I thought it started too early in the morning.

My early bird housemate decided to take the plunge and many years later he is now a sleep psychologist living on the beach in Australia. There’s a moral in that story somewhere, but I’ve never thought it very wise to think too hard about it.

However, the book review does contain a few gems, most notably some wonderfully succinct descriptions of sleep problems and their treatment:

This tiredness can be linked to insomnia, but both are usually symptoms of something more deep-seated. Treating the insomnia alone (by hypnotic drugs, for example) makes little difference and can be an expensive, frustrating and fruitless course of action, especially in the United States, where sleep induction is a billion-dollar industry. Many, like Green, then seek the solace and sympathies of alternative therapies.

Insomnia comes in many forms: difficulty in falling asleep, too many fitful awakenings or waking up too early. Although there may be obvious physical causes, such as pain and physical illness, for most other sufferers (especially [the author] Green) insomnia is more a problem of wakefulness intruding into sleep, rather than just bad sleep. To be more explicit, it is a 24-hour disorder in which persistent anxiety, anger or miserable notions, sitting constantly at the back of a person’s mind, ruin the expectations of their next sleep. Clearly, the eventual cure must address this state of waking mind. It is pointless going to bed with these stresses.

In the other review, V.S. Ramachandran tackles a book on mirror neurons by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia.

Ramachandran famously made the rather overblown statement that “mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology”.

I always assumed that this meant they would annoy creationists, but, rather predictably, neither my interpretation nor Ramachandran’s have come to pass.

However, in the last sentence of the review he recants his decade-old bluster with the slightly more realistic “It remains to be seen whether they will turn out to be anything as important as that, but as Sherlock Holmes said to Watson: ‘The game is afoot.'”

Link to review of ‘Insomniac’.
Link to review of ‘Reflecting on the mind’.

Does Freudian repression exist?

Psychologist Yacov Rofé has written a damning article in the Review of General Psychology summarising the evidence from studies on the cognitive science of memory and arguing that the repression of memory, as described by Freud, doesn’t exist.

Rofé is careful to point out that Freud’s ideas about the repression of memory were not that we can deliberately forget or ignore traumatic experiences (as is often assumed by both professionals and lay people), but that process is supposedly unconscious (and so not deliberate) and that it was ‘pathogenic’ – in other words, a cause of mental distress and mental illness.

Rofé also notes that psychoanalysis was assumed to make people better by uncovering and lifting repression to make people better adjusted (although this has largely been rejected by modern therapists).

In contrast to these theories, Rofé cites evidence that people tend to remember rather than repress traumatic experiences, that banishing unpleasant memories tends to be a useful way of coping for many people (although interestingly, probably bad for physical health), that there is no evidence for unconsciously motivated forgetting, and that psychoanalytic therapy doesn’t seem to work by ‘lifting repression’.

In the article, Rofé has a bit of a tendency to suggest that supporting evidence that can be equally explained with a non-Freudian theory is evidence against Freud, when it fact it’s likely to support both explanations equally.

Nevertheless, he makes a strong case, largely based on the limited amount of supporting evidence that does actually exist.

However, I suspect this won’t be the end of the argument, as most debates concerning Freud centre as much around agreeing on what the terms mean, as applying data to their truth.

 
Link to abstract of scientific article.
pdf of full-text article.

Growing up on antidepressants

The New York Times has an article on the increasing number of people who have been on antidepressants drugs since their childhood years and have experienced ‘growing up’ while medicated.

Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.

The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.

So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. The longest maintenance study to date of one of the newer antidepressants, Effexor, lasted only two years and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.

In fact, there are no reliable long-term studies even of drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin) that are widely used in children.

One of the most interesting things is the huge amount of comments the article has attracted, with many people sharing their own experiences of a medicated adolescence.

Link to NYT article ‘Coming of Age on Antidepressants’.
Link to ‘editors choice’ of comments.

Cognitive biases as public policy

The LA Times has an interesting article on whether the sorts of decision-making biases identified by behavioural economists should be used to promote public policy objectives.

The idea is based on the fact that we are more likely to choose certain options depending on how they’re presented. In fact, supermarkets take advantage of this in how they lay out their products to maximise the chances of us buying the premium brands.

The LA Times piece argues that this could be used for government objectives, such as increasing the number of people who take out pensions, while still maintaining the freedom to choose and without using explicit incentives.

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

Private and public institutions have many opportunities to provide free choice while also taking real steps to improve people’s lives.

* If we want to increase savings by workers, we could ask employers to adopt this simple strategy: Instead of asking workers to elect to participate in a 401(k) plan, assume they want to participate and enroll them automatically unless they specifically choose otherwise.

The article gives several more examples and defends its use of the term ‘libertarian paternalism’ for the idea.

I’m left wondering whether governments shouldn’t be adopting exactly what the commercial sector have been doing for years, or whether we’re naive to think political choice engineering isn’t being used already.

Link to LA Times article ‘Designing better choices’.

Encephalon 43 lands on the virtual doormat

A beautiful new edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published on GNIF Brain Blogger and contains the best of last fortnight’s online mind and brain writing.

A couple of my favourites include an article on how the brain encodes sound and another one on Alzheimer’s disease, and there’s plenty more to enjoy in the latest edition.

Link to Encephalon 43 at GNIF Brain Blogger.

The yin and yang of cannabis and psychosis

It is now quite widely known that cannabis use is linked to a small but significant increase in the chance of developing psychosis, but it is less widely known that one of the ingredients in cannabis actually has antipsychotic effects.

Unlike THC, it’s lesser known cousin cannabidiol is not responsible for the cannabis ‘high’ but it is naturally present in the plant.

There is accumulating evidence that cannabidiol has an antipsychotic effect, potentially damping down the psychosis-promoting effects of THC.

The amount of this substance varies in street cannabis, with some strains having more cannabidiol than others, and ‘skunk’ having the least of all – it being mostly eliminated by selective breeding for high THC content.

An ingenious new study looked at levels of cannabidiol consumption in groups of cannabis smokers by testing hair samples, and found that the groups who had the lowest cannabidiol levels had the most psychosis-like experiences.

In contrast, those with the most cannabidiol levels had the least psychosis-like experiences – equal to a comparison group with no detectable cannabis compounds who were presumably non-smokers.

One caveat is that the participants were all recruited from a study on ketamine users (a substance known to raise the risk of psychosis), so the study will have to be repeated on people who solely use cannabis to be sure the effect isn’t a specific interaction between the two drugs.

However, the results seem to tie up with what we already know about how THC and cannabidiol work, so may reflect a genuine effect.

As any visitor to Amsterdam will tell you, cannabis breeders often try to maximise THC content to grow a plant with more ‘bang for the gram’.

As cannabidiol seems to have no effect on the high itself, perhaps we might see breeders also trying to maximise the cannabidiol content in future, potentially reducing the risk to smokers’ mental health.

UPDATE: A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent in the following interesting comment:

Cannabidiol is in fact bred for in cannabis product, but is mainly done for taste. There are mentions within the cannabis breeding literature (i.e. seed catalogues) on breeds which lack psychosis (often defined as “low paranoid strains”), and these correspond to the “tasty” breeds to a great extent.

Probably ‘lacking psychosis’ would be considered controversial by the scientific community, but it’s interesting that the growing and smoking community make the distinction between high and low ‘paranoid strains’. It’d be interested to see whether these stand up to scientific investigation.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

Neuroweapons, war crimes and the preconscious brain

A new generation of military technology interfaces directly with the brain to target and trigger weapons before our conscious mind is fully engaged.

In a new article in the Cornell International Law Journal, lawyer Stephen White asks whether the concept of a ‘war crime’ becomes irrelevant if the unconscious mind is pulling the trigger.

In most jurisdictions, the legal system makes a crucial distinction between two elements of a crime: the intent (mens rea) and the action (actus rea).

Causing something dreadful to happen without any intent or knowledge is considered an accident and not a crime. Hence, a successful prosecution demands that the accused is shown to have intended to violate the law in some way.

This concept is based on the theory that the conscious mind forms an intention, and an actions follows. Unfortunately, we now know that this idea is outdated.

In the 1980s, pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet demonstrated that activity in the brain’s action areas can be reliably detected up to 200ms before we experience the conscious decision to act. In other words, consciousness seems to lag behind action.

Although with only limited reliability (just 60%), a recent fMRI study found that areas in the frontal lobes were starting to become more active up to seven seconds before the conscious intention to act.

While these sorts of study raise interesting questions about free will, their effect on the courts has been minimal, because it is assumed that, at least for healthy individuals, we have as much control over stopping our own actions as starting them.

The US government’s defence research agency, DARPA, is currently developing new military technologies, dubbed ‘neuroweapons’, that may throw these assumptions into disarray.

The webpage of DARPA’s Human Assisted Neural Devices Program only mentions the use of brain-machine interfaces in terms of helping injured veterans, but p11 of the US Dept of Defense budget justification [pdf] explicitly states that “This program will develop the scientific foundation for novel concepts that will improve warfighter performance on the battlefield as well as technologies for enhancing the quality of life of paralyzed veterans”.

In other words, the same technology that allows humans to control computer cursors, robot arms or wheelchairs by thought alone, could be used to target and trigger weapons.

Even if only part of the process, such as selecting possible targets, is delegated to technology that reads the unconscious orienting response from the brain, that still means that part of the thought process has automatically become part of the action.

Notably, international law outlaws indiscriminate weapons and aggression, but if the unconscious thought becomes the weapon, how can we possibly prosecute a war crime?

White reviews the current state of the technology from the unclassified evidence and carefully examines the ethical and legal issues, ultimately arguing that we need a new legal framework for 21st century ‘neurowarfare’.

The first preconsious war may soon be upon us.

pdf of ‘Brave New World: Neurowarfare and the Limits of International Humanitarian Law’.

The shifting sands of the ‘autism epidemic’

The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called ‘autism epidemic’, occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.

It covers a new study that did something really simple – it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.

They used the ADOS (an activity and observation schedule) and the ADI (an interview for parents). This combination is often considered the ‘gold standard’ for a reliable and comprehensive diagnosis.

All the people were originally diagnosed with a problem in the development of language, so it was clear they weren’t without difficulties. Language delay is part of the autism diagnosis, so the researchers wondered whether we’d just classify them differently now.

Despite the fact that none were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders when they were first assessed, when re-assessed using modern methods, a third were classified as on the spectrum.

It’s only a small study, but matches with the findings of previous research that found that while the narrow diagnosis of autism is at less than 0.4% in the UK, the newer, wider definition of the less severe ‘autism spectrum’ diagnoses, unsurprisingly, is much more prevalent (just over 1%).

In other words, the looser the diagnosis becomes the more people get the diagnosis and more good evidence that the increase in cases of autism is due to wider classification rather than new ‘narrow definition’ cases.

Link to Economist article ‘Not more, just different’.
Link to Ben Goldacre on last autism epidemic media scare.

It’s not where we’ve been, it’s where we’re at

The New York Times Freakanomics blog just had a great discussion questioning how much progress psychology and psychiatry have really made during the last century, with contributions from psychologists, psychiatrists, economists and a woman who lost her son to suicide.

The responses obviously come from quite differing perspectives but are largely positive and seem mostly to cite a scientific approach to understanding the mind and brain as the most important factor (danke schön Willhelm Wundt).

Dan Ariely’s comments are particularly interesting as he suggests that one of our greatest advances is the discovery that our own experience isn’t necessarily a good guide to how our own mind works.

Anyway, a good collection of short commentaries that are worth reading in full.

Link to NYT Freakanomics psychology and psychiatry discussion.

Lacan attack!

I’ve just found this wonderful video clip of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at his delightfully expressive and incomprehensible best.

Lacan managed to combine the circular reasoning of Freudian psychoanalysis with the non-sequiturs of French post-structuralism to create, well, I’m not really sure. I doubt many other people are either.

In the video he mentions love, Freud, sex and psychosis, and that’s probably the nearest you’re going to get to understanding what he’s talking about.

But who cares? Just look at the man in action! He’s a legend!

Link to a video of Jacques Lacan in full effect.

Reality trails by mobile phone

MIT’s Technology Review magazine has an interesting article on ‘reality mining’ – using mobile phone call and positioning data to build advanced models of social networks.

The article is part of their 2008 emerging technology series and looks at how data gathered from the mobile phone network can tell us about human behaviour.

The core technology is hardly new. The police have been generating social networks from phone records since the early to mid 90s in an attempt to solve cases.

What is new, however, is MIT’s Sandy Pentland has been using positioning data from mobile phones to look at how close people are to each other over time, to make the social networks much more accurate and information rich.

To create an accurate model of a person’s social network, for example, Pentland’s team combines a phone’s call logs with information about its proximity to other people’s devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships.

Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings–for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network.

In a paper published last May [pdf], ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

This may strike you as equally terrifying and exciting. Obviously, it has huge potential for abuse by authorities, but the possibility of doing research on fully consenting participants who agree to be tracked for short periods for scientific research is huge.

There’s also a great short video where Pentland discusses the technology in a bit more detail, and mentions the possibility of using the data for informing how diseases spread through social networks,

While we’re on a social / mobile network tip, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the work of a Nokia anthropologist. He works largely in the developing world to try and understanding how phones are used and what effects they have on the social fabric and economic potential of the area.

Neuroanthropology also has a commentary on the article, pulling out some of the key social concepts it touches on.

Link to TechReview article on ‘reality mining’.
Link to video of Pentland discussing the technology.
pdf of full-text scientific paper.
Link to NYT article ‘Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?’
Link to Neuroanthropology commentary.

The psychology of magical thoughts

Psychology Today has a great article that covers the length and breadth of magical thinking – the tendency to see patterns and causality where none exists.

Magical thinking is described in a number of ways. Superstition is the most common, where we assume rituals will somehow affect the future despite having no causal connection to what we want to change.

Apophenia or pareidolia describe the effect where we see meaningful information where none was intended. The Fortean Times has a wonderful collection of photographs that depict ‘faces’ or other forms in clouds, trees, rock formations or even food.

Superstition and apophenia are an interesting contrast, because superstition can be more easily rejected than apophenia. Our perceptual systems are just set up to detect patterns, and so the perception of ‘faces’ is unavoidable.

Often we don’t even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. “Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out,” observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale’s Perception and Cognition Laboratory. “You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences.” Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby’s photo on a dartboard. On some level they’re equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The article looks at seven types of magical thinking, and discusses some of the key psychology experiments that have shown us how magical thinking is influenced.

One of my favourites is an experiment by psychologist Emily Pronin who found that people would readily attribute another person’s headaches to sticking pins in a ‘voodoo doll’.

Interestingly, the effect was much stronger when the other person (actually a stooge) was deliberately annoying. The irritating actor increased the likelihood of participants’ wishing them harm, and so increased the perceived connection between their ‘voodoo doll’ pin-sticking and the actor’s feigned headache.

Link to Psychology Today article on magical thinking.

Neuroaesthetics my arse

Physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis has written a scorching article in The Times berating art critics for using poorly understood ideas from neuroscience when reviewing or interpreting literature, art or film.

He particularly focuses on an article by famed novelist A.S. Byatt where she suggests that the reason John Donne’s poetry is so compelling is because it engages particular brain processes.

Byatt is an interesting focus for criticism because she is probably one of the modern writers who is most engaged with cognitive and neuroscience.

She often does talks with psychologists and neuroscientists and has contributed to a Cambridge University Press book with a number of distinguished memory researchers and has just released a new jointly edited book charting similar territory.

However, Tallis takes Byatt to task for using neuroscience as little more than window dressing, and suggests the whole field of literary criticism is simply jumping on the brain science bandwagon to make up for the declining popularity of Freudian, Marxist, and postmodern theories that it used to be based on.

Implicitly, Tallis is suggesting that if Byatt can’t get it right, what hope is there for the rest of the critics:

A. S. Byatt’s neural approach to literary criticism is not only unhelpful but actually undermines the calling of a humanist intellectual, for whom literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state.

At any rate, attempting to find an explanation of a sophisticated twentieth-century reader’s response to a sophisticated seventeenth-century poet in brain activity that is shared between humans and animals, and has been around for many millions of years, rather than in communities of minds that are unique to humans, seems perverse. Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

Ouch!

It’s also notable that Tallis reserves some of his criticism for neuroscientists who oversell their work in the media, perhaps leading the public to justifiably think that they have explained some central human attribute when they’ve really done an interesting but limited lab experiment.

Link to Times article ‘The neuroscience delusion’ (via 3QD).