Infowar: strike early, strike often

The Washington Post has a timely article about the psychology of believing news reports, even when they’ve been retracted – suggesting that if false information is presented early, it is more likely to be believed, while subsequent attempts to correct the information may, in fact, strengthen the false impression.

The article starts with results from a study [pdf] by psychologist Norbert Schwarz who looked at the effect of a government flier that attempted to correct myths about the flu vaccine by marking them ‘true’ or ‘false’.

Unfortunately, the flier actually boosted people’s belief in the false information, probably because we tend to think information is more likely to be true the more we hear it.

Negating a statement seems just to emphasise the initial point. The additional correction seems to get lost amid the noise.

One particularly pertinent study [pdf] not mentioned in the article, looked at the effect of retractions of false news reports made during the 2003 Iraq War on American, German and Australian participants.

For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made.

The study found that the American participants’ belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction.

In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.

The researchers note that people are more likely to discount information if they are suspicious of the motives behind its dissemination.

The Americans rated themselves as more likely to agree with the official line that the war was to ‘destroy weapons of mass destruction’, whereas the Australian and German participants rated this as far less convincing.

This suggests that there may have been an element of ‘motivated reasoning’ in evaluating news reports.

Research has shown that this only occurs when there’s sufficient information available to create a justification for the decision, even when the information is irrelevant to the main issue.

There’s a wonderful example of this explained here, in relation to men’s judgements about the safety of sex with HIV+ women of varying degrees of attractiveness.

So, if you want your propaganda to be effective get it in early, repeat it, give people reasons to be believe it (however irrelevant), and make yourself seem trustworthy.

As I’m sure these principles are already widely known among government and commercial PR departments, bear them in mind when evaluating public information.

Link to Washington Post article on the persistence of myths.
pdf of study ‘Memory for Fact, Fiction, and Misinformation’ in the Iraq war.
Link to info on motivated reasoning and example.

Psychiatrist denounces own ghostwritten article as ‘crap’

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog contacted psychiatrist Prof C. Lindsay DeVane about an article on antidepressant drug interactions he apparently co-authored for the medical journal CNS Spectrums. In reply, DeVane noted that the article was ghost-written on behalf of a drug company and denounced it as “piece of commercial crap” and ‘ridiculous’, ‘inaccurate’ and ‘simplistic’.

DeVane was apparently persuaded to take part in a round-table discussion on the interactions between antidepressant drugs, for which attendees could gain ‘CME’ or ‘Continuing Medical Education’ points, needed for doctors to demonstrate that they are keeping their skills and knowledge updated.

After the discussion, the a commercial medical education company i3CME, produced an article based on a video tape of the session with the participants names listed as authors.

Ghostwriting, the practice where drug companies or medical writing agencies create scientific articles to which established researchers add their names, still occurs, despite recent attempts to clamp down on it.

It relies on an academic system where researchers’ careers depend on the number of publications, and on drug companies’ need to boost the profile of their products by adding the names of high-profile scientists to the relevant research.

It’s a big business, and there are a number of agencies that just specialise in writing scientific articles for commercial companies that later get handed to ‘star’ researchers for, at best, checking, and at worst, just signing.

In this case, it seems the article was written without DeVane’s agreement, so it’s refreshing to see someone disown it, rather than simply add it as another gold star to their CV.

Importantly, DeVane notes that his views on the topic had already been accurately and fairly represented in an earlier article [pdf] which he had personally authored.

The Carlat post has more details on the affair, including DeVane’s own description of what occurred.

Link to further details (via Furious Seasons).

Sampling The Stuff of Thought

3 Quarks Daily has an extended review of Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature that highlights one of the many curiosities of the English language.

…what I’d like to try to do here is give you a flavor of the kinds of things the book is about by briefly explaining one of the many fascinating stories that Pinker tells about language and what it entails for “conceptual semantics”–the concepts and schemes that we use to think–indeed, the language of thought itself….

So now, if you heard someone say brush paint onto the fence you might guess that brush the fence with paint is also fine. So far so good. But now consider a different sentence: Hal poured water into the glass. It cannot be transformed in a similar manner: Hal poured the glass with water sounds immediately wrong to a normal speaker of English. Similarly, problems arise in the other direction with other verbs like fill: while the container-locative construction Bobby filled the glass with water is fine, the content-locative Bobby filled water into the glass is not grammatical English. Why?

As Pinker puts it, “How do children succeed in acquiring an infinite language when the rules they are tempted to postulate just get them into trouble by generating constructions that other speakers choke on? How do they figure out that certain verbs can’t appear in perfectly good constructions?”

The review goes through Pinker’s explanations for how we acquire the correct use of these aspects of language.

This example is one among many that raises the question of how children learn irregular parts of the language.

You might think that they just pick it up from hearing examples or from being corrected by parents, but it turns out that the examples too rarely occur for a complete demonstration of all these aspects and parents actually rarely correct every such mistake children make.

This situations are often where Pinker would argue for an innate ‘language instinct’ which can generate working language rules from limited experience.

You’ll have to read the review or the book for a complete explanation of how this particular rule works out, but it seems, at least according to Pinker, that it’s not just a matter of grammar – certain verbs imply certain physical possibilities and these meanings influence what seems grammatical.

And if you want to catch the author in person, Pinker is on tour at the moment, talking about his new book.

Link to review of The Stuff of Thought.
Link to Stuff of Thought lecture tour dates.

Psychiatrists are least religious medical speciality

A just published study that looked at the religious beliefs of different types of medical doctors in the US has found that psychiatrists are the least religious among the medical specialities.

The study also found that non-psychiatrist physicians who were religious, were least likely to refer a patient with symptoms of mental illness to a psychologist or psychiatrist, and were more likely to refer them to a member of the clergy or religious counsellors.

There’s also a few interesting facts about the demographics of US psychiatrists:

Compared with other physicians, psychiatrists were more likely to be Jewish (29% versus 13%) or without a religious affiliation (17% versus 10%), less likely to be Protestant (27% versus 39%) or Catholic (10% versus 22%), less likely to be religious in general, and more likely to consider themselves spiritual but not religious (33% versus 19%).

Perhaps the fact that psychiatrists are least likely to be religious is not surprising since they deal with lots of people who have experiences that they explain as neurological disturbance but which often appear as no different from what would otherwise be considered spiritual experiences.

For example, Joan of Arc had experiences which could be easily classified as auditory hallucinations, as did many saints, visionaries and prophets throughout history.

This is still a pertinent issue. In a classic 1997 paper psychiatrist Bill Fulford and psychologist Mike Jackson examined some written records of (admittedly intense and atypical) contemporary spiritual experiences and noted that they would fulfil the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia – except for the fact that they were of immense benefit to the people concerned.

More recently, psychologist Ryan McKay noted that current neuropsychiatric models of delusions would also include religious beliefs if they were considered under the same criteria [pdf] – although it could be said that this is just as likely to be a criticism of our scientific understanding of delusion as it is a consideration of spiritual belief.

However, it’s probably true to say that spending a great deal of time explaining seemingly mystical experiences as the result of biomedical disturbance probably makes you a little more sceptical of some of the mystical experiences on which many mainstream religions are based.

Link to abstract of scientific study.
Link to write-up from Yahoo! News.

Mystery of Jackson’s missing bust and lost music

John Hughlings Jackson was one of ‘fathers’ of modern neurology and the picture on the right is of his bust, which resides in the Institute of Neurology library in London. However, it’s actually a copy as the original went missing and its location is still something of a mystery.

The original was carved in marble in 1907 and graced the entrance to the Institute before being stolen by unknown thieves.

It was thought it was destroyed during the theft because broken marble was found in its place, but it was later spotted in the window of a North London home.

The home was owned by a neurologist who apparently bought the bust in a local antique shop for next to nothing, but when the Institute attempted to negotiate its return, the person refused all contact and its location is now a mystery.

Later, the legendary Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield, a huge admirer of Jackson, had a bronze bust of Jackson created for the Montreal Neurological Institute which was installed in 1934.

This bust was gifted to London’s Institute of Neurology in 1996 and is the one that now resides in their library.

However, an article commemorating the presentation, made a request that if anyone knows the location of the marble bust to get in touch with the Institute to solve the mystery.

The much loved original is presumably still out there somewhere, so keep a look out for a marble version of the current bronze.

As an aside, while searching the archives for material on John Hughlings Jackson, I found this snippet from a personal tribute printed in a Oct 27, 1934 article for The Lancet:

He had no particular taste for music and art in any form, he often admitted he could not distinguish the National Anthem from ‘Rule Brittania’…

The fact he couldn’t distinguish two common tunes suggests he had amusia, the inability to recognise and understand music.

The condition can be caused by brain damage but it is also known to be inherited, which is the more likely source of Jackson’s misperception of music.

Link to article on Jackon’s bust mystery.

Documentary on 1950s Soviet psychiatry

Channel 4 have been putting a number of classic documentaries online, including an optimistic film by legendary American documentary maker Albert Maysles on Soviet psychiatry in 1950s Russia.

The film is interesting historically for a number of reasons, perhaps, most pertinently, because it presents a counter-example to the known abuses of Soviet psychiatry of the time. It is also a striking contrast to American psychiatry of the same period.

Apart from a few isolated examples, the department at Washington University being the most famous, American psychiatry was dominated by Freudians and a psychoanalytic approach to understanding mental illness.

This meant it was largely led by office-based psychiatrists who mostly eschewed biological and scientific approaches to treatment and who mainly treated depression and anxiety.

In contrast, the Maysles documentary notes that Russian psychiatry was largely based on a Pavlovian (behaviourist) approach to mental illness that put a significant emphasis on neuroscience (e.g. the image is of a Russian psychiatrist checking a child’s Babinski reflex – a test of brain or spinal cord damage).

It was also heavily hospital-based, used drug treatments and was more likely to deal with people with schizophrenia and psychoses.

While the treatments themselves now look outmoded, it’s notable that American psychiatry now much more closely matches the Russian model.

Psychoanalysis is now on the fringes and mainstream orthodox psychiatry is largely drug-based, while most practitioners are likely to think of themselves as, at least in part, ‘applied neuroscientists’.

The film is also notable for being so positive about Soviet psychiatry when it was presumably deeply unfashionable, perhaps even career-limiting, for American film-makers to promote Russian initiatives.

Link to page and video link for Maysles film ‘Psychiatry in Russia’.

RadioLab on the science of morality

I’ve just discovered another episode of the excellent WNYC RadioLab – this one on the psychology and neuroscience of morality. It tackles everything from the development of moral reasoning as a child, to the neuroscience of ethical decision-making, to the psychology of prisons and solitary confinement.

If you’ve never heard RadioLab before, have a listen, not least because of the beautiful production. It often contains some wonderfully illustrative moments – something akin to the radio equivalent of the ‘hip hop montage’ film editing technique.

One segment looks at how researchers are attempting to tackle moral reasoning in the lab, something which is becoming an increasingly important research area – as demonstrated by the popularity of Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds.

This research, as well as observational studies on non-human primates, has suggested that some moral behaviour may inherited.

The idea that pro-social behaviour may be the result of evolution has led to the cover story in this week’s New Scientist to pose the related question “If morality is hard-wired in the brain, what’s the point of religion?’

Sadly, the article isn’t open access (pro-social behaviour not being fully evolved in the NewSci offices) but it’s an interesting review of some recent studies on the psychology of religion, with some speculative commentary on the possible evolutionary roles of spiritual faith:

Psychologists Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that by presenting people first with a word game unscrambling either religious or non-religious phrases, even atheists could be primed to be more generous to an anonymous partner by exposure to the religious words [pdf]…

So why do religious concepts provoke moral behaviour even in non-believers? It’s because both religion and morality are evolutionary adaptations, says Jesse Bering, who heads the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. Morality does not stem from religion, as is often argued, he suggests: they evolved separately, albeit in response to the same forces in our social environment. Once our ancestors acquired language and theory of mind – the ability to understand what others are thinking – news of any individual’s reputation could spread far beyond their immediate group. Anyone with tendencies to behave pro-socially would then have been at an advantage, Bering says: “What we’re concerned about in terms of our moral behaviour is what other people think about us.” So morality became adaptive.

Link to RadioLab on the science of morality.

Law professor on life with schizophrenia

Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. She’s also been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has experienced some intense psychotic episodes.

She’s just published a book about her experiences called ‘The Center Cannot Hold’ (ISBN 140130138X) and was the subject of a recent Newsweek article.

Saks also gave an interview to mental health blog Treatment Online where she recounts some of the insights she has gained through her experiences about herself, the mental health system, and the possibilities of living with a mental disorder.

How do you feel that we as a larger society can mitigate the belief – and we feel a lot of people believe this even though they claim not to or can rationally move beyond it – that mentally ill individuals are somehow broken or incomplete?

I guess one way would be having examples of people who have mental illnesses who are doing well. People hear of schizophrenia and they think someone is never going to be able to live independently and work, and then you have people like me who stand up and say, “No, it doesn’t have to be that way.” Some people say well aren’t you unique, and I’m actually doing a study with folks at USC and UCLA on high-functioning individuals with schizophrenia. We’ve got an MD, we’ve got a Ph.D. psychologist, we’ve got some high-level consumer advocates, full-time students and stay at home parents. Just in LA in the past couple of months we’ve already recruited ten people, and we’re going to try to hear their stories and find out if there are things they do to master their illness that we might teach to other people so other people could become higher functioning.

Link to Newsweek article.
Link to Treatment Online interview.
Link to excerpt from book ‘The Center Cannot Hold’.

Moving time

Please excuse the interruption… I’m doing a little site maintenance today and mindhacks.com is moving over to a new server.

Since you can see this message, you’re looking at the new server which means the maintenance worked. If you notice anything broken around the place, please do let me know (matt at mindhacks dot com). Thanks!

Oxytocin and understanding other minds

The Scientific American’s Mind Matters has a special on whether key bonding hormone oxytocin boosts our ability to understand other people’s beliefs, intentions and desires.

Oxytocin seems to play a role in bonding between mother and child, and between romantic couples.

The article discusses recent research that found that using an oxytocin nasal spray boosted participant’s performance on a task that measured ‘theory of mind‘ – the ability to infer other people’s beliefs from their actions.

Like ‘mirror neurons‘, oxytocin is something which is currently overhyped but still genuinely interesting.

The article is by psychologist Prof Jennifer Bartz and psychiatrist Prof Eric Hollander and discusses this new study, and some of the theories that attempt to explain how oxytocin has its effect:

Both our lab and the Domes lab have found that oxytocin facilitates the processing of social information gathered through at least two different sensory modalities — that is, through both hearing and vision. This raises questions about just how oxytocin actually facilitates social cognition and theory of mind.

Previous research indicates that oxytocin plays a role in regulating stress and fear reactivity. Thus oxytocin may facilitate theory of mind by reducing the social anxiety that is inherent in many social encounters — and which is felt keenly by many individuals with autism.

Another possibility is that oxytocin may increase motivation to attend to social cues by reinforcing social information processing.

Link to article ‘The hormone that helps you read minds’.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

Mind and brain disorder encyclopedia now free online

The Dana Guide to Brain Health is a fantastic book that contains a wealth of practical information about keeping your brain healthy, maintaining mental sharpness, and dealing with problems when they arise. Even better, the section on mind and brain disorders has now been made fully searchable and freely available on Dana’s website.

In fact, the book is incredibly comprehensive, and in addition to discussing health and illness, covers how the brain develops, functions normally, interacts with the body, and supports social interaction, emotion and cognition.

However, its coverage of disorders is excellent. Each one described, and is accompanied by a review of what’s currently known about the causes, diagnosis and treatment, so you know what to expect if you, a friend or relative need professional help.

It’s written in a straightforward jargon-free way and is remarkably comprehensive. It covers everything from hearing problems to schizophrenia to the neurological complications of AIDS.

This is the section has now been made freely available and is searchable by topic or keyword. A truly valuable addition to online mind and brain resources.

Link to Dana brain health database.
Link to book details.

How shops use scent to encourage big spending

New Scientist has just made a popular article freely available online that focuses on how shops use scent to alter our buying behaviour.

The article looks at ‘scent marketing‘ – the practice of selecting an in-shop scent to encourage spending on a particular product line.

In one recent study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when “feminine scents”, like vanilla, were used, sales of women’s clothes doubled; as did men’s clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.

“Men don’t like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don’t linger in a store if it smells masculine,” says Spangenberg, who led the research and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender was used to scent the store atmosphere. “Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider,” says Spangenberg. “But they really need to tailor the scent to the consumer.”

It’s not clear exactly how this works, but we know that smell has a particularly strong effect on emotional memory.

In fact, the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain’s olfactory system that takes information directly from the nose, is linked directly to the amygdala, a key emotion processing area.

Link to New Sci article ‘Recruiting smell for the hard sell’.

Frith free will froth

The letters page of this week’s New Scientist contains a lively debate about the neuroscience of free will, inspired by neuropsychologist Chris Frith’s recent article on the topic.

Frith’s article (sadly, closed-access) was discussing a classic experiment in neuroscience that seems to suggest that our brains generate an action before we’re consciously aware of making the choice to move, suggesting our experience of having complete conscious control over our actions may be mistaken:

Curiously, considering it is over 20 years old, a single experiment dominated our discussions. Reported in 1983 (and replicated variously) by Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco, the experiment is crucial because it seems to show we don’t have free will. Using an electroencephalogram, Libet and his colleagues monitored their subjects’ brains, telling them: “Lift your finger whenever you feel the urge to do so.” This is about as near as we get to free will in the lab.

It was already known that there is a detectable change in brain activity up to a second before you “spontaneously” lift your finger, but when did the urge occur in the mind? Amazingly, Libet found that his subjects’ change in brain activity occurred 300 milliseconds before they reported the urge to lift their fingers. This implies that, by measuring your brain activity, I can predict when you are going to have an urge to act. Apparently this simple but freely chosen decision is determined by the preceding brain activity. It is our brains that cause our actions. Our minds just come along for the ride.

In response, two of the correspondent’s question the appropriateness of the experimental task (is finger lifting a good example of free will?) and whether the result equally applies to the situation where we can stop an intended action.

Another draws parallels between our concept of free will and the influence of peer pressure and conformity, while two letters discuss how compatible free will is with a model of a physical deterministic universe.

In other words, if physics can, in principle, mathematically model the interaction of every atom to predict what will happen, how can we influence this process if we’re nothing more than a collection of atoms?

Finally, two other correspondents highlight some weakness in Frith’s ideas, and indeed many current theories of free will, that arise out of more fundamental problems in understanding fully the best way of linking mind- and brain-level theories.

Just reading the letters gives a good overview of some of the major problems when trying to understand both the concepts and science of conscious control of action.

Link to excellent Wikipedia page on free will.

2007-08-31 Spike activity

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

Fantastic article in The Boston Globe on the neuroscience of gambling by Frontal Cortex author Jonah Lehrer.

PsyBlog has wonderful post on the neglected area of the psychology of courage.

Scientific American reports that ‘perfect pitch‘ – the ability to identify a musical note without reference to other notes on the scale – is partly genetic, and might be accounted for by a single gene. NPR has a radio segment on the same.

Psychiatrist David Olds writes in SciAm Observations and discusses whether ‘bad genes’ can be adaptive, or whether they always raise the risk for mental disorder.

BBC News reports that a clinical trial has found hypnosis to be effective in easing discomfort during breast cancer surgery.

OmniBrain finds sailing-close-to-the-wind humorous video from The Onion: World’s Oldest Neurosurgeon Turns 100.

BBC News reports on an Afghan community drug addiction clinic that treats opium addicted women.

Cognitive Daily recommends some fresh new psychology and neuroscience blogs.

Study tracks brain during different levels of fear, reports SciAm.

Suicide by ball-point pen. Retrospectacle finds a most remarkable brain scan.

Phantom erection after penis amputation. Neurophilosophy discovers a most remarkable case study.

Is Russia entering another dark age of psychiatry?

Recent Western press reports have indicated that the Russian psychiatric system might be experiencing a return to the ‘bad old days’ when it was used in part to suppress political dissidents.

President of the human-rights focused psychiatrists’ organisation the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia (IPA), Dr Yuri Savenko, has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about the current situation.

Continue reading “Is Russia entering another dark age of psychiatry?”

Story time predicts child’s understanding of other minds

The BPS Research Digest has an intriguing post on a study that found that a mother’s use of verbs like ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘remember’ when reading picture books to their children predicted the child’s later ability to understand other people’s mental states.

The researchers recorded mothers reading to their 3-6 year-old children, and tested each child’s ‘theory of mind‘ – the ability to infer other people’s beliefs, intentions and mental states.

A year later, the same procedure was repeated with the same mothers and children.

The researchers discovered that the more mothers used cognitive terms when telling the story (e.g. Mother says: “…this boy sees so many people and thinks, ‘I’ll pretend I don’t know what’s going on and I’ll push to the front of the queue'”) the better the child’s later ‘theory of mind’ abilities.

There’s more on the study over at the BPSRD. Importantly, it raises some compelling questions about how early interaction could affect the development of a child’s mental abilities.

Link to BPSRD post.