The exceptional mourning of twins

I’ve just found an amazing article that looks at how the death of twins is mourned in cultures around the world.

The journal Twin Research and Human Genetics is usually dedicated to the science of twin studies – a key method for understanding the role of genetics and the environment on the development of human traits.

In 2002 they had a special issue that took a very different look at the subject – examining grief and mourning related to twins.

One of the articles is a stunning look at the anthropology of twin death, exploring the diverse and intriguing beliefs and practices concerning twin death.

This is a short excerpt on funeral practices (I’ve removed references removed for ease of reading) although I could have selected almost any part of the fascinating article:

Mythical attributes, such as animal kinship, inevitably influence twin funerary rites. The Ga (west Africa) presume twins have the wild bushcow’s spirit, and living twins rush about like wild cows when a twin dies. The Nootka and Bella Coola (NW North America) believed salmon and twins had close affinity. The Nootka did not bury a dead twin infant, but laid it on swampy ground. A twin who died after infancy was not interred like a singleton, but placed in a box in a riverside tree until the current swept away tree and box together.

Nuer (NE Africa) twin infants’ bodies were placed in trees due to their purported kinship with birds. Both birds and twins were children of God, gaat kwoth, spirits who dwell in air and clouds. A stillborn twin was left in a reed basket in a tree fork and birds of prey supposedly left them intact. Adult Nuer twins weren’t buried, but were laid on a platform with no ceremonies. Twins did not attend others’ funerals.

The Gilyak (Sakhalin Island, Far east) cremated singletons, but burial was mandated for a twin or his parents. Twins, as offspring of the mountain god, were dressed in white and seated Turkish style in a specially built house surrounded with shavings.

The article is completely open-access and, although an academic paper, is quite readable and completely engrossing.
 

Link to article entry (click through for full text PDF)

The Rough Guide to Psychology

Friend of mindhacks.com and contributor to the original Mind Hacks book, Christian Jarrett has written the “The Rough Guide to Psychology“, published this month, and a right rip roaring read it is too. It’s a whistle-stop tour through all aspects of the science of mind and behaviour, which reveals just how diverse and rich the field of psychology is. From visual perception to intelligence testing, sport psychology and gender differences to developmental disorders – Christian is the consummate guide, introducing the scientific essentials, giving the history of psychological research and highlighting links to the everyday world of our own experiences. The reader gets the benefits of Christian’s unique skills – he’s a fully trained research scientist but also has the jackdaw curiosity of the science journalist, honed by the experience of writing for the BPS Psychologist magazine and Research Digest.

It isn’t possible to download knowledge in the way Keanu does in the Matrix (“I know kung-fu“), but reading the Rough Guide to Psychology feels like the next best thing. Wonderful breadth, impressive depth and fun throughout – the next time someone asks me for an introduction to Psychology I’ll give them this book.

How to jail the innocent

The Innocence Project has used DNA technology to overturn hundreds of wrongful convictions. Slate has an excellent two part series on the two main reasons why these people were falsely jailed: eyewitness misidentifications and false confessions.

The series is by law professor Brandon Garrett who has analysed the first overturned 250 cases to examine the psychology behind distorted justice.

This is from the piece onthe biases that in line-ups that have sent people down for long-stretches after being falsely identified:

Where did this false certainty come from? The trial records I looked at suggest that unsound and suggestive police identification procedures played a large and troubling role. Police used unnecessary show-ups, where they presented the eyewitness with just the defendant. Or stacked lineups to make the defendant stand out.

Or offered suggestive remarks, telling the eyewitness whom to identify or to expect a suspect in a lineup. Or confirmed the witness’s choice as the right one. Even well-intended, encouraging remarks, like “good job, you picked the guy,” can have a dramatic effect on eyewitness memory, as psychologists have shown.

Indeed, more than one-third of the cases I looked at involved multiple eyewitnesses, as many as three or four or five eyewitnesses who all somehow misidentified the same innocent person. Further, almost half of the eyewitness identifications were cross-racial. Psychologists have long shown how eyewitnesses have greater difficulty identifying persons of another race.

Both pieces tackles how biases have warped specific high profile cases, sometimes leading to decades of false imprisonment.
 

Link to Slate piece on eyewitness misidentifications (via @psyDoctor8)
Link to Slate piece on false confessions.

Hearing the voices of colours

A spectacular case of psychosis, rather oddly described as ‘Methamphetamine Induced Synesthesia’, in a case report just published in The American Journal on Addictions.

The report concerns a 30-year-old gentleman from the Iranian city of Shiraz with a long-standing history of drug use who recently started smoking crystal:

Six months PTA [prior to admission] (October 2009), he started smoking methamphetamine once a day, and gradually increased the frequency to three times a day.

Two months PTA (January 2010), he developed symptoms of auditory and visual hallucinations (seeing fairies around him that talked to him and forced him to conduct aggressive behavior), self-injury, and suicidal attempts.

He developed odd behaviors such as boiling animal statues. He was hearing the voices of colors, which were in the carpet. Colors moved around and talked to each other about the patient. He also saw the heads of different kinds of animals gathering on a board, and they talked to him.

Finally, his mother brought him to the emergency room of Ebnecina Psychiatric Hospital in Shiraz.

The authors are using the term ‘synaesthesia‘ very liberally as it usually refers to an experience in one sense automatically triggering sensations in another – such as numbers having specific colours or tastes.

I’m not sure that ‘hearing the voices of colours’ necessarily qualifies as this could as much a delusion (a distorted belief) or a hallucination (that isn’t specifically tied to seeing the colours) rather than a genuine synaesthetic experience.

As the authors didn’t investigate any further and only have the gentleman’s word for his experiences, it’s a little hard to say.

However, it’s also worth noting that our concept of synaesthesia is no longer tied to ‘crossing of the senses’ as synaesthesia for increasingly meaningful things is being discovered.

Only recently, two confirmed and tested cases of ‘swimming-style synesthesia’ were reported in the journal Cortex where different colours were reliably triggered by the sight of people doing different swimming strokes.
 

Link to locked case report of ‘meth-induced synaesthesia’.

Not in your wildest dreams

Scientific American has just started a new series where scientists describe questions which fascinate them but which they don’t think can be answered by science.

The first article is by sleep and dream neuroscientist Robert Stickgold who wonders whether we could ever understand the significance of dreams.

The idea: Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity…

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

 

Link to SciAm ‘Too Hard for Science?: The sense of meaning in dreams’.

Hungry judges less likely to grant parole

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a study that is in equal parts delightful and terrifying: it found that judges are much less likely to grant parole when they’re hungry.

It’s the work of Shai Denzeger from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and summarises the results of 1,112 parole board hearings in Israeli prisons, over a ten month period…

It shows that the odds that prisoners will be successfully paroled start off fairly high at around 65% and quickly plummet to nothing over a few hours… After the judges have returned from their breaks, the odds abruptly climb back up to 65%, before resuming their downward slide. A prisoner’s fate could hinge upon the point in the day when their case is heard.

Twinkie your honour?
 

Link to Not Exactly Rocket Science with the full story.

The Oscar for best neuroscience research goes to…

Both of this year’s lead Oscar winners have published scientific papers on neuroscience. We’ve covered Natalie Portman’s work on frontal lobe development in children before, but it turns out Colin Firth has also just co-authored a study on structural brain differences in people with differing political views.

An excellent post on The Neurocritic tells the intriguing story of how the study came about.

It turns out Firth was a guest editor on the daily BBC Radio 4 news programme Today and commissioned neuroscientist Geraint Rees to scan the brains of two prominent UK politicians – one staunchly liberal and the other a confirmed conservative – to look for differences.

The piece was clearly a piece of news fluff – as you can tell very little from scanning just two people – but it was motivated by a genuine interest in whether political opinions correlate with brain differences.

Rees decided to develop the idea into a more comprehensive study, using scans from 90 people, to see whether the density of the brain’s grey matter differed in line with differences in political views.

The study didn’t look at differences across the whole brain, just the anterior cingulate, a part of the frontal lobes, and the deep brain structure the amygdala.

The areas were chosen because previous studies have found that conservatives are more sensitive to fear-inducing prompts – a response linked to the amygdala, whereas liberals show more brain activity in the anterior cingulate when they have to hold back an automatic response.

It must be said that the link between these functions and brain areas is still quite preliminary, so the study is more of an exploration than a cast-iron test of a well-defined idea.

This new study, published in Current Biology and co-authored by Colin Firth, Geraint Rees along with neuroscientist Ryota Kanai and the producer of the Radio 4 programme, found distinct differences in these areas.

We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala

This doesn’t tell us anything about whether conservatives or liberals are “born or made”. Despite the fact that the whole question is daft and over-simplified, a simple association between beliefs and brain areas doesn’t help us understand anything about cause and effect.

It could be that the brain areas differ because conservatives and liberals differ in how much they ‘practice’ alternative ways of thinking about the world, rather than brain structure ‘determining’ political orientation.

I really recommend the Neurocritic piece for more background, but the fact that the 2011 winners of the best actor and actress Oscar both have their name on neuroscience studies shows how fashionable the science has become.

And if, by chance, a certain Grammy award winning She Wolf would like to join the trend I would be more than willing to help out with the statistical analysis.

Yes, I realise my chat-up lines could do with a bit of work.
 

Link to The Neurocritic on Colin Firth’s neuroscience study.

Adler’s ashes rediscovered

The remains of Alfred Adler, the co-founder of psychoanalysis, have been found 70 years after they were lost in Edinburgh reports The Guardian.

Adler, a core figure with Sigmund Freud in the group that founded the psychoanalytic movement before the pair split in 1911, collapsed after a suspected heart attack in May 1937 while he was in Aberdeen for a three-week-long series of lectures and seminars at the university…

Later this month, however, his ashes will be returned to Vienna for a civic ceremony following a remarkable discovery by the honorary Austrian consul to Scotland, John Clifford.

Asked to trace Adler’s remains by the institute he founded in Vienna, Clifford traced the casket to a crematorium only a few hundred metres behind the consulate in Edinburgh. They had been stored there in a quiet, wood-panelled gallery rarely visited by the public, alongside dozens of other caskets and urns.

Somewhat ironically for someone whose remains were forgotten almost immediately after his death, Adler’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis was the concept of the inferioty complex.
 

Link to Guardian piece on finding Adler’s ashes (via @PsychNews).

Layers of the revolution

Revolutionology is an excellent blog on the uprising in Libya written by a PhD sociology candidate who has embedded himself with the rebel forces.

It’s not an impartial view of the conflict, as it intends to document the views and perceptions of the rebels, but it is full of insightful observations that reflect Libyan society and the fluid culture of the insurgents.

It has both serious analysis and sometimes funny observations, all with the keen eye of a sociologist.

This is a lovely example posted yesterday:

It’s 2:15 pm on March 31. We’re in a car headed toward the front, which is west of Ajdabiyah.

Muhammad, our driver, slips a CD in the car stereo. Arab house music comes on.

Joao, a Portuguese photographer sitting behind me, starts pumping his fist in the air to the beat.

Muhammad (in Arabic, to me): “Tell him not to do that, man.”

Me: “Why not?”

Muhammad, laughing: “The rebels will launch a rocket at us.”

Me: “Huh?”

Muhammad: “The fist-pump in the air — that’s what Gaddafi and his guys do. The rebels do this [he puts two fingers up in a “V”]. Stick with the two fingers.”

(Muhammad changes the CD.)

 

Link to Revolutionology.

Reflecting on a psychopath

A psychologist’s personality may affect whether someone is diagnosed as a psychopath or not.

Forensic psychology blog In the News covers a preliminary study on how evaluators with different personality traits systematically differed in their ratings when using the ‘industry standard’ Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

The checklist is often referred to by the abbreviation PCL-R. It is designed to assess and measure psychopathy, a condition where people lack empathy, are impulsive, manipulative and anti-social.

Needless to say, it now features heavily in many legal cases.

The PCL-R is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in the world. But in real-world forensic settings, scores vary widely depending upon which side [of the legal case] retained the evaluator. This finding is called the “partisan allegiance” effect.

In a new twist, these same researchers that brought you partisan allegiance have found that an evaluator’s personality may impact her judgments of psychopathy. Evaluators low on compassion and thrill-seeking as measured by a widely used personality test, the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, are more likely than others to rate criminals as psychopathic.

That’s ironic, because according to the theory of psychopathy, it’s supposed to be the psychopath — not the psychologist — who has a deficit in empathy.

 

Link to In the News on psychopathy tests and personality.
Link to DOI entry and summary of study.

Kids on speed and the birth of misbehaviour

Dr Charles Bradley first reported the effects of amphetamine on children with behavioural problems in 1937. An article in The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine takes a look at how this early study opened the door to treating ADHD with Ritalin and how it tied in with changing ideas about child misbehaviour.

Bradley was a psychiatrist and director of the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home for children with behavioural problems. In the days where ad-hoc experimentation was not considered out-of-the-ordinary, he decided to try administering Benzedrine sulfate, a type of amphetamine, to his young patients.

After only a week, he observed that “The most striking change in behavior occurred in the school activities of many of these patients. There appeared a definite ‘drive’ to accomplish as much as possible. Fifteen of the 30 children responded to Benzedrine by becoming distinctly subdued in their emotional responses. Clinically in all cases, this was an improvement from the social viewpoint.”

The paper appeared in a top psychiatry journal and echoes the now common idea that amphetamine, which includes Ritalin (known generically as methylphenidate), has the seemingly paradoxical effect of calming over-active or out-of-control children.

It turns out that Bradley’s experiment was carried out as the social significance of childhood was changing, as was the concept of what was considered to be ‘child misbehaviour’:

During the 19th and 20th centuries, a new conceptualization of childhood and how children ought to behave emerged in both popular culture and the medical world. A model child embodied the ideals necessary for the new industrial economy: self-regulated behavior and orderly social relations.

Childhood became the critical period for learning restraint and developing a proper social identity in order to grow up to be a successful adult. This prevailing characterization of a good child generated its opposite: the troublesome child. A broad range of social problems fell into this category of misbehavior and could include difficulty in schoolwork, fighting, and failure to obey authority.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t a concept of a misbehaving child before, but just that a lack of social self-regulation and focus was not considered to be as important in defining ‘doing wrong’.

The article describes how Bradley’s work was forgotten for 25 years, owing to the fact that the drug company who made Benzedrine felt they couldn’t market the drug, because it would be difficult to ‘sell’ the seemingly contradictory effects of a stimulant having a calming effect.

However, it opened the door for the first studies of treating hyperactive kids with Ritalin in the mid-1950s which exploded in the 1980s when the diagnosis of ADHD first emerged.

The article is a fascinating look at how social changes, drug tests and scientific understanding interact to influence our modern-day understanding of psychiatric disorder and even childhood.
 

Link to article on Bradley’s Benzedrine studies.

A history of psychology through objects

This is an early Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) machine, from 1945.

Note the incorporation of the telephone dial for controvoling the duration of the shock.

This is a brass observation hole from St. Audry’s Hospital, Suffolk, England, 1851-1900.

Mounted in a door, this peephole allowed doctors and warders to check on a patient locked in solitary confinement.

These, and hundreds of other fascinating objects from the history of psychology and psychiatry, can be seen at the Science Museum’s Brought To Life website. Scroll down to Themes -> Mental Health and Illness for these examples, but keep yours eyes open throughout the exhibit for artifacts which reflect our changing and complex understanding of the mind and its disorders.

While you’re there, don’t miss the interactive Three Psychiatric tests which gives you a chance to see how psychiatrists from the 1930s, 40s and 50s would have used classic psychometric tests to diagnose mental illnesses such as dementia or schizophrenia.

Thanks to Philip Loring, BPS Curator of Psychology at the Science Museum, who gave a talk about this digital exhibition Sheffield last night

Psychosis keeps up with the times

Delusions in conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have tracked social concerns over the 20th century, according to a wonderful study just published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry.

Psychologists Brooke Cannon and Lorraine Kramer reviewed the patient records of a state psychiatric hospital in the US looking at each decade of the 20th Century in turn.

They recorded the content of the delusions for every patient with psychosis and while they didn’t find that the level of delusions changed, they did find that they tended to relate to the social concerns of the time.

…more patients after 1950 believe they are being spied upon is consistent with the development of related technology and the advent of the Cold War.

Delusional content tended to reflect the culture at the time, with focus on syphilis in the early 1900s, on Germans during World War II, on Communists during the Cold War, and on technology in recent years.

Indeed, delusions now are being reported relating to computers, the internet and computer games.

An earlier study that looked at hospital records from Slovenia found a similar pattern – with madness also reflecting developing social themes.

The researchers of this study noted that “After the spread of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s in Slovenia, there was an obvious increase in delusions of outside influence and control as well as delusions with technical themes.”
 

Link to PubMed entry for study on delusions in 20th Century US.
Link to PubMed entry for study on delusion in in 20th Century Slovenia.

Sonar Voices

Graham March was a drum n’ bass producer who created cutting edge tracks in a teched-up fast-paced version of breakbeat known as neurofunk. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sadly took his own life in 2006, but a friend has created a wonderful tribute site that has all of his tunes online.

Often releasing tracks under the moniker Desimal, March was featured on numerous underground labels, but the website has all of his tunes online and freely downloadable, and there is some classic material there.

If you’re not into drum n’ bass you may find it difficult to get a handle on his work, but I was struck by this description of March’s experience of schizophrenia:

I always tried to get Graham to explain to me what it was like inside his head. This is what he told me: “It’s like, 200 hundred channels of Television all on at once and you can’t turn them off, nothing but unwanted noise and thoughts.”

It struck me because March’s sound is like the noise of 200 hundred channel of television focused and filtered into a rich layered stream of precision dance music.

Some of it is pretty dark, as much of the neurofunk genre is, but if you want a track with a more uplifting feel, I have been listening to ‘Neo Indignation’ (mp3) non-stop all morning.
 

Link to Graham March Tribute Site (thanks Ben!)
Link to mp3 downloads of all his tracks.

Slumber therapy

A delightful moment from a New York Magazine article where a guy who had four psychoanalysts in a row fall asleep on him goes back to each to find out why:

I ask him about falling asleep, and he says, cheerfully, “I have no memory of that whatsoever.” This is surprising, considering he passed out cold, I exited quietly, and we later spoke about it intensively. “What did I say?” he asks. That I had been locking him out with emotionally evasive speech. “What did you say?” he asks. That that was a bullshit answer. He pauses. He smiles. “Good for you.”

The piece is a little heavy on therapy talk but has some great observations of psychoanalytic culture. Oh, and the ending is wonderful.
 

Link to New York Magazine ‘The Sleeping Cure’.