Mind Hacks

A completely fascinating study published on the Social Science Research Network looked at how likely a marriage was to survive depending on who else in the social network was getting divorced.

The study used data from the famous Framington Heart Study and found that while we tend to think of marriage as a ‘couple thing’ is turns out that even our most intimate bonds are deeply embedded into the social webs we weave.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Rose McDermott, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

Link to full text of study (via The Situationist).

Over-the-counter headache pill paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, reduces the pain of social rejection according to a new study just published in Psychological Science.

Based on past findings of an overlap between the brain circuits involved in physical pain and those involved in feeling rejected, the researchers wondered whether painkillers would also ease emotional distress stemming from exclusion.

Not all painkillers work the same though: some work by numbing the local nerves – like benzocaine-based sort throat lozenges that make your mouth go numb, while others affect the brain systems that process pain no matter where it originates from in the body.

Paracetamol is largely of the second type meaning if social rejection and physical pain really do share some of the same brain circuits, the drug should dull the hurt from both.

To test this out, the researchers recruited a group of healthy students and asked them to take a pill every day for three weeks: half got placebo while the other half were given paracetamol, although they didn’t know which they were taking.

Each evening the participants were asked to complete a standard questionnaire that asked about if they’d experienced hurt feelings or social exclusion during the day. While both groups started out reporting the same levels of hurt feelings, by the end of the three weeks, those taking paracetamol reported significantly less.

The second experiment of the study was similar but instead of filling in questionnaires the participants were asked to take part in a brain scanning experiment at the end of the three weeks.

Inside the scanner, they were asked to take part in a video game that involved tossing a virtual ball between players who they thought were human opponents. In reality, all the other moves were controlled by a computer programme that was preset to start excluding them from the game by not passing the ball to them.

The game was used in previous research and helped establish that brain activity in social rejection and physical pain overlapped.

The same overlap occurred in this new study, but the brain areas most linked to both physical and social pain – the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula – were less active in those who had been taking paracetamol for three weeks.

Those same participants also rated themselves as feeling less rejected on a brief post-game questionnaire than participants who had been taking placebo.

It’s an intriguing finding because it suggests that a common and cheap painkiller might be useful in reducing feelings of social rejection which can feature prominently in conditions like depression and borderline personality disorder.

If this was a brand new drug, you can bet the pharmaceutical industry would be jumping up and down with glee at these findings and would already be planning trials to see if it works as a useful treatment.

But because paracetamol is so old it can’t be patented and so there is virtually no profit to be made from it. Unfortunately, paracetemol can be toxic if taken too often, but it would be interesting to see if anyone does take up the baton to see if it might be a useful psychiatric treatment in appropriate doses.

Link to summary of study in PubMed.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom has just released a new document entitled ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’ which aims to educate therapists about people in consenting non-monogamous relationships.

The document reviews research on the well-being of people in open relationships and the emotional challenges that they can face, although, I’m afraid I don’t have the knowledge to judge how balanced the analysis actually is (where’s Meg Barker when you need her?)

However, I am reminded of a paragraph in the fantastic book Freud: A Very Short Introduction that discusses how the Freudian view of the traditional paired-off relationship runs into the wall of cultural differences:

Freud once thought of the Oedipus complex as universal; but it can be argued that it is very much a Western concept, which particularly applies to the small, ‘nuclear’ family. Do children brought up in extended families, in which polyagmy is the norm, experience the jealousy, possessiveness, and fear which Freud found in his patients? We do now know; but anecdotal evidence suggests the contrary. A Nigerian analyst told me that, during his training analysis, it took him over a year to make his analyst understand the entirely different emotional climate which obtains in a family in which the father has several wives.

Link to ‘What Psychology Professionals Should Know About Polyamory’.

The ‘Duchenne smile’ is thought to be a largely unfakeable expression of pleasure that involves a signature ‘crinkling around the eyes’ caused by automatic muscles. A new study covered by PsyBlog pours cold water on this popular idea by reporting that most people can produce undetectable fake smiles that involve these supposedly involuntary movements.

It has been suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don’t have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile…

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, however, Krumhuber and Manstead (2009) question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study could produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn’t help much.

Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

Link to PsyBlog on ‘Duchenne: Key to a Genuine Smile?’