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Sexuality, Intimacy and the Masculine/Feminine Archetype

February 7, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

A great deal of couples work focuses on intimacy and sexuality or, more to the point, the lack and loss of it. In a recent post , I mentioned the differences in the way that men and women approach emotional connection and sexuality. A bit of reflection upon that model begs an exploration of the role of masculine and feminine archetypes in this, and how those constructs complement and conflict with socially defined gender roles. It’s no secret that there is what we might call a cycle of declination when it comes to sex in relationships. We typically start out hot and heavy; we can’t keep our hands off each other, grabbing a quicky, being adventurous, and trying new things, exploring each other and our limits. Fifteen years, a house, a dog, a mortgage, and a few kids in, most couples I talk with aren’t even sleeping in the same room. There are all sorts of reasons for this, questions often better left to experts on the subject , but the psychodynamics of this change tend to be expressed by couples in a fairly consistent fashion. Plainly put, women point to the emotionally unavailability of their partner, while men point to the sexual unavailability of theirs. Thumbnailing the content of the previous article : Men are, as a general rule, physical creatures. We are hunters and typically associate availability with proximity. There is no real magic or mystery in this; it is something that is hardwired into our DNA. Men are physical first — which in this case includes the sexual — and emotional second. The physical availability of a man’s partner for him points to emotional and sexual availability and, because this is in some ways assumed, it is something that men (quite mistakenly and often to our disadvantage) do not necessarily feel the need to communicate. Women, on the other hand, are contemplative creatures. They are the thread that holds the fabric of society together and, by nature, tend to think about the whole cloth, not just the part that they can see or touch. For women, physicality grows out of emotionality in that it is emotional availability that activates their physical, and by association sexual, natures. The bottom line is that women are more apt to show up physically and sexually when their partner is emotionally present, while men tend more to just show up, with their emotional presence being something of an afterthought. If we peel away the gender roles here and look at the manifestation of the masculine and feminine archetypes in terms of personality and social presentation, something interesting happens. We get a grey area. It is no longer that men are linear and women global or women are contemplative and men physical. What arises is an awareness of the delicate balance of social roles, gender roles and archetypal tendencies. To personalize it, my social presentation is very much what might be termed, for lack of a better idiom, androgynous. While on the one hand very much a "man’s man" – rugged, athletic, physical, good with power tools – I also possess a number of qualities that would typically be ascribed to the feminine archetype. Those qualities – compassion, creativity, sensitivity, a manner that is both gentle and gentile – are what allow me to be good at what I do, as a professional, as a partner and as a human being. Back to our point, for me a lack of emotional investment on the part of my partner is going to translate into a lack – or at least a diminution — of sexual investment on my part. I’m the "girl"! Seriously, the fragile balance evidenced here between overt personality and meta-personality makes the "I’m a guy – let’s have sex and I’ll love you later" dynamic a bit more subtle than it may first appear. On the other side of things, I have a very close friend who is quite the opposite. In our conversations, she expresses her frustration with her partners in that – while we are not, nor were we ever, partners – she tends to chose men like myself. She does this in a psycho-energetic attempt to balance her own personality/meta-personality structure (a different conversation/post) and then doesn’t understand what they are asking for or what they need from her. Very much a woman, the depth and breadth of her masculine archetype – and its evidence and manifestation – prompts her to be the "man" in a relationship. She is roundly emotionally unavailable, greatly lacks an understanding of intimacy and intimate expression, generally unexpressive and her sex play is very "male" – fast, genitally focused and narcissistic. Consequently, she will maintain a relationship long after the relationship itself – and her investment in that relationship – is over because the sex is good and despite her frustration with what she perceives to be her partner’s "neediness". There are two "take away" points here. The first is that there is a distinct and demonstrable difference in the way that men and women approach issues of intimacy, sexuality and emotionality that is clearly the engine for much of the conflict and tension we find in transgender interpersonal relationship. The second is that it’s not so cut and dried as it seems on the surface, and that warrants attention. Just because you encounter a man with a "big-tough-biker-dude" persona or, conversely, a woman with a soft, sophisticated "Upper-East-Side-debutante" persona don’t make assumptions about their interior landscape. You might find that, in their heart of hearts, your biker dude writes poetry and your debutante throws beer nuts at Monday Night Football. © 2009 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved My Psychology Today Therapists Profile My Website Email Me Directly Telephone Consultations   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Are There More Shopaholics Who Want to Confess?

February 7, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

To Buy or Not To Buy – it’s a question we ask and answer almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day. For many people, it doesn’t cause a lot of inner turmoil, but for compulsive buyers, it’s a high stakes question, and an affirmative answer can be devastating. Long trivialized as the "smiled-upon" addiction, thankfully, compulsive buying is coming farther and farther out of the closet, and the release next Friday of Confessions of a Shopaholic is bringing the problem into the limelight. We have reason to believe it’s becoming more prevalent. A study reported in the October 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry suggested that about 5.8% of the U.S. population- more than fifteen million Americans -are compulsive buyers. A more recent study, published in the December, 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the number may be closer to 8.9%, more than 25 million Americans. And now with the economic crisis, compulsive shoppers are feeling squeezed. Some are unable to resist prices which have been slashed to the bone in the hope of luring reluctant consumers. Others, fearing for their long term job stability, are using the recession as the boost they needed to become more mindful about their spending. And between these two poles, there are a multitude of other responses that overshoppers are having to the current economic downturn, ranging from denial to absolute panic. When we think "addiction," what first comes to mind is most likely alcohol or drugs or eating disorders. Even though we know that shopping, when done to excess, can spin dangerously out of control, shopping is still seen by many as superficial, light fare. Strongly reinforced by society, shopping has become the classic mixed-message behavior. On the one hand, it’s promoted endlessly (and to the ends of the earth) by those who profit from it. On the other hand, it’s regularly the stuff of jokes. Shoppers are portrayed as self-involved, materialistic, and empty. As a result, compulsive shopping may be an even greater source of guilt and shame than alcoholism or drug abuse, which are seen as bona fide disorders, requiring treatment. So why the mixed-messages? Given the fact that consumption fuels our economy, in order to promote the ceaseless stoking of economic engines, every one of us is targeted as a consumer. We are pushed, prodded, programmed to purchase. In 2006, 9.2 billion credit card offers went out to America’s three hundred million people- more than thirty offers to every man, woman, and child! Shopping itself has become a leisure and lifestyle activity; malls are the new town centers. We’re immersed, cradle to grave, in "buy messages" that, with greater and greater psychological sophistication, misleadingly associate products we don’t need with feelings we deeply desire . Just check out the bumper stickers. "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Shopping," trumpets an SUV in front of me. For those who enjoyed high school Latin, there’s "Veni, Vidi, Visa!" A largely female version is "New Shoes Chase the Blues," while men weigh in with "He Who Has the Most Toys When He Dies, Wins." What I’ve learned from a decade and a half of knowing, studying, working with, and writing about overshoppers-and from having been one myself-is that to change your behavior, you’ve got to change the way you feel about yourself and the way you go about meeting your authentic needs. It’s about understanding who you are, what you want, and what you really need. In general, having more things means enjoying life less. Acquiring and maintaining objects can so fill up our lives and environment that there’s little time or space to use what’s been acquired. What we consume ends up consuming us. In this blog, I’ll share what I know about why we overshop, how we can prevent it, and what tools, techniques and strategies are useful for eliminating it. I’ll also keep you updated on current research findings, relevant books, and other timely information for overshoppers and the people who love them. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish [A Blog Around The Clock]

February 1, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog

Long-time readers of this blog remember that, some years ago, I did a nifty little study on the Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish . The department has moved to a new building, the crayfish lab is gone, I am out of science, so chances of following up on that study are very low. And what we did was too small even for a Least Publishable Unit, so, in order to have the scientific community aware of our results, I posted them (with agreement from my co-authors) on my blog. So, although I myself am unlikely to continue studying the relationship between the circadian system and the aggressive behavior in crayfish, I am hoping others will. And a paper just came out on exactly this topic – Circadian Regulation of Agonistic Behavior in Groups of Parthenogenetic Marbled Crayfish, Procambarus sp. by Abud J. Farca Luna, Joaquin I. Hurtado-Zavala, Thomas Reischig and Ralf Heinrich from the Institute for Zoology, University of Gottingen, Germany: Crustaceans have frequently been used to study the neuroethology of both agonistic behavior and circadian rhythms, but whether their highly stereotyped and quantifiable agonistic activity is controlled by circadian pacemakers has, so far, not been investigated. Isolated marbled crayfish (Procambarus spec.) displayed rhythmic locomotor activity under 12-h light:12-h darkness (LD12:12) and rhythmicity persisted after switching to constant darkness (DD) for 8 days, suggesting the presence of endogenous circadian pacemakers. Isogenetic females of parthenogenetic marbled crayfish displayed all behavioral elements known from agonistic interactions of previously studied decapod species including the formation of hierarchies. Groups of marbled crafish displayed high frequencies of agonistic encounters during the 1st hour of their cohabitation, but with the formation of hierarchies agonistic activities were subsequently reduced to low levels. Group agonistic activity was entrained to periods of exactly 24 h under LD12:12, and peaks of agonistic activity coincided with light-to-dark and dark-to-light transitions. After switching to DD, enhanced agonistic activity was dispersed over periods of 8-to 10-h duration that were centered around the times corresponding with light-to-dark transitions during the preceding 3 days in LD12:12. During 4 days under DD agonistic activity remained rhythmic with an average circadian period of 24.83 ± 1.22 h in all crayfish groups tested. Only the most dominant crayfish that participated in more than half of all agonistic encounters within the group revealed clear endogenous rhythmicity in their agonistic behavior, whereas subordinate individuals, depending on their social rank, initiated only between 19.4% and 0.03% of all encounters in constant darkness and displayed no statistically significant rhythmicity. The results indicate that both locomotion and agonistic social interactions are rhythmic behaviors of marbled crayfish that are controlled by light-entrained endogenous pacemakers. I think the best way for me to explain what they did in this study is to do a head-to-head comparison between our study and their study – it is striking how the two are complementary! On one hand, there is no overlap in methods at all (so no instance of scooping for sure), yet on the other, both studies came up with similar results, thus strengthening each other’s findings. You may want to read my post for the introduction to the topic, as I explain there why studying aggression in crayfish is important and insightful, what was done to date, and what it all means, as well as the standard methodology in the field. So, let’s see how the two studies are similar and how the two differ: 1) We were sure we used the Procambarus clarkii species. They are probably not exactly sure what species they had, so they denoted it as Procambarus sp. , noting in the Discussion that it was certainly NOT the Procambarus clarkii , which makes sense as our animals were wild-caught in the USA and theirs in Germany. As both studies got similar results, this indicates that this is not a single-species phenomenon, but can be generalizable at least to other crayfish, if not broader to other crustaceans, arhtropods or all invertebrates. 2) We used only males in our study. They used only females. In crayfish, both sexes fight. It is nice, thus, to note that other aspects of the behavior are similar between sexes. 3) We used the term ‘aggression’. They use the term ‘agonistic behavior’, which is scientese for ‘aggression’, invented to erase any hints of anthropomorphism. Not a bad strategy, generally, as assumed aggression in some other species has been later shown to be something else (e.g., homosexual behavior), but in crayfish it is most certainly aggression: they meet, they display, they fight, and if there is no place to escape, one often kills the other – there is no ‘loving’ going on there, for sure. 4) The sizes of animals were an order of magnitude different between the two studies. Their crayfish weighed around 1-2g while ours were 20-40g in body mass. This may be due to species differences, but is more likely due to age – they used juveniles while we used adults. Again, it is nice to see that results in different age groups are comparable. 5) We did not measure general locomotor activity of our animals in isolation. We, with proper caveats, used aggressive behavior of paired animals as a proxy for general locomotor activity, and were straightforward about it – we measured aggressive behavior alone in a highly un-natural setup. As Page and Larimer (1972) have done these studies before, we did not feel the need to replicate those with our animals. The new study, however, did monitor gross locomotor activity of isolated crayfish. Their results, confirming what Page and Larimer found out, demonstrate once again that activity rhythms are a poor marker of the underlying circadian pacemaker (which is why Terry Page later focused on the rhythm of electrical activity of the eye, electroretinogram – ERR – in subsequent studies) in crayfish. Powerful statistics tease out rhythmicity in most individuals, but this is not a rhythm I would use if I wanted to do more complex studies, e.g., analysis of entrainment to exotic LD cycles or to build and interpret a Phase – Response Curve . Just look at their representative example (and you know this is their best): You can barely make out the rhythm even in the light-dark cycle (white-gray portion of the actograph) and the rhythms in constant darkness (solid gray) are even less well defined – thus only statistical analysis (bottom) can discover rhythms in such records. The stats reveal a peak of activity in the early night and a smaller peak of activity at dawn, similarly to what Page and Larimer found in their study, and similar to what we saw during our experiments. 6) They used an arena of a much larger size than ours. We did it on purpose – we wanted to ‘force’ the animals to fight as much as possible by putting them in tight quarters where they cannot avoid each other, as we were interested in physiology and wanted it intensified so we could get clearly measurable (if exaggerated) results. Their study is, thus, more ecologically relevant, but one always has to deal with pros and cons in such decisions: more realistic vs. more powerful. They chose realism, we chose power. Together, the two approaches reinforce and complement each other. 7) As I explained in my old post – there are two methodological approaches in this line of research: Two standard experimental practices are used in the study of aggression in crustaceans. In one, two or more individuals are placed together in an aquarium and left there for a long period of time (days to weeks). After the initial aggressive encounters, the social status of an individual can be deduced from its control of resources, like food, shelter and mates. In the other paradigm, two individuals are allowed to fight for a brief period of time (less than an hour), after which they are isolated again and re-tested the next day at the same time of day. They used the first method. We modified the second one (testing repeatedly, every 3 hours over 24 hours, instead of just once a day). What they did was place 6 individuals in the aquarium, a couple of hours before lights-off, then monitor their aggressive behavior over several days. What they found, similar to us, is that the most intense fights resulting in a stable social hierarchy occur in the early portion of the night: Once the social hierarchy is established on that first night, the levels of aggression drop significantly, and occasional bouts of fights happen at all times, with perhaps a slight increase at the times of light switches: both off and on. Released into constant darkness, the pattern continues, with the most dominant individual initiating aggressive encounters a little more often during light-transitions then between them. The other five animals had no remaining rhythm of agonistic behavior: they just responded to attacks by the Numero Uno when necessary. In our study we tried to artificially elevate the levels of aggression by repeatedly re-isolating and re-meeting two animals at a time. And even with that protocol, we saw the most intense fights at early night, and most conclusive fights, i.e., those that resulted in stable social hierarchy, also occuring at early nights, while the activity at other time of the day or night were much lower. 8) The goals of two studies differed as well, i.e., we asked somewhat different questions. Our study was designed to provide some background answers that would tell us if a particular hypothesis is worth testing: winning a fight elevates serotonin in the nervous system; elevated serotonin correlated with the hightened aggression in subsequent fights, more likely leading to subsequent victories; crayfish signal dominance status to each other via urine; melatonin is a metabolic product of serotonin; melatonin is produced only during the night with a very sharp and high peak at the beginning of the night; if there is more serotonin in the nervous system, there should be more melatonin in the urine; perhaps melatonin may be the signature molecule in the urine indicating social status. In order to see if this line of thinking is worth pursuing, we needed to see, first, if the most aggressive bouts happen in the early night and if the most decisive fights (those that lead to stable hiararchy) happen in the early night. This is what we found, indicating that our hypothesis is worth testing in the future. They asked a different set of questions: Is there a circadian rhythm of locomotor activity? They found: Yes. Is there a circadian rhythm of aggression? They found: Yes. Do the patterns of general activity and aggressive activity correlate with each other? They found: Yes. Does the aggression rhythm persist in constant darkness conditions? They found: Yes. Do all individuals show circadian rhythm of aggression? They found: No. Only the most dominant individual does. The others just defend themselves when attacked. Is there social entrainment in crayfish, i.e., do they entrain their rhythms to each other in constant conditions? They found: No. All of them just keep following their own inherent circadian periods and drift apart after a while. Is there a pattern of temporal competitive exclusion, i.e., do submissive individuals shift their activity patterns so as not to have to meet The Badassest One? They found: No. All of them just keep following their own inherent circadian periods. So, a nice study overall, the first publication I know of that attempts to connect the literature on circadian rhythms in crayfish to the literature on aggressive behavior in crayfish. Except…. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Denis Dutton on Colbert Show (video) [A Blog Around The Clock]

February 1, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Denis Dutton Colbert Report Full Episodes Paul McCartney Appearance Funny Political Videos More Funny Videos Read the comments on this post…

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Denis Dutton on Colbert Show (video) [A Blog Around The Clock]

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Complete Genomics to release sequencing data on Thursday [Genetic Future]

February 1, 2009 in Blogs, Developing Intelligence by ScienceBlog

Complete Genomics is a DNA sequencing company that launched back in October , and has been creating a buzz in the genomics community ever since. The company’s business model is based around a novel technology for rapidly generating DNA sequence data; but rather than make its money by selling its platform to genomics facilities and biotech companies (as do its competitors, such as Illumina and ABI), Complete will be offering its technology only through its own purpose-built service facilities. The buzz has focused on whether Complete’s technology will be accurate and powerful enough to meet the company’s stated goal of offering a $5,000 whole human genome sequence by mid-2009, let alone its far more ambitious long-term goals : [Complete Genomics] is now building the world’s largest commercial human-genome-sequencing center. It expects to sequence 200 genomes per day by the end of 2010, he says. Over the next five years, the company plans to build 10 more centers with a goal of sequencing 1 million complete human genomes. It’s been hard to judge how close the company is to making these lofty dreams a reality, because it has kept any data about the performance of its platform a secret. That will change on Thursday: the company has announced that it will be releasing its sequencing data publicly for the first time at the AGBT meeting this week . I’ll be attending , so I’m looking forward to seeing whether the data meet with the high expectations that Complete Genomics has been generating. Subscribe to Genetic Future . Read the comments on this post…

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Complete Genomics to release sequencing data on Thursday [Genetic Future]

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More Voodoo [The Frontal Cortex]

January 29, 2009 in Blogs, Brain & Behaviour by BrainAndBehaviour

I’ve got an interview with Ed Vul, the lead author of the recent paper on ” Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience ,” over at Scientific American. Since the paper hit the web, it has provoked a flurry of rebuttals and responses. If you’d like a balanced perspective on the issue – and it’s worth pointing out that this issue isn’t unique to social neuroscience, but has implications for fMRI research in general – I’d suggest reading the interview and then perusing this eloquent and fiery response by Matthew Lieberman, Elliot Berkman and Tor Wager. LEHRER: Your paper has prompted a great deal of debate among social neuroscientists, and some of the scientists have issued a rebuttal of your paper. (You have since rebutted this rebuttal.) What do you hope this debate leads to? What methodological changes would you like to see adopted by social neuroscientists using fMRI? VUL: The debate we have spurred is quite interesting to watch. At first some of the authors whose papers we criticized challenged our statistical point, but–for good reason–that line of argument doesn’t seem to have caught on. Right now, so far as I know, everyone seems to concede that the analysis used in these studies was not kosher, in the sense of providing correlation numbers that can be taken seriously. Instead, we are mostly hearing a couple of other arguments at this point. One is that the correlation values themselves don’t really matter–it’s just the fact there is a correlation in a certain spot in the head that matters. I don’t agree with this observation at all, and we think the fact that many of these papers appeared in such high profile places is because editors were (justifiably) impressed with big effects. If one can account for, say, three quarters of individual differences in something important such as anxiety or empathy–obviously, that’s a real breakthrough, and it tells you not only where future research ought to look, but also where it shouldn’t. On the other hand, if it’s just 3 percent of the variance, that’s a whole lot less impressive, and may reflect much more indirect kinds of associations. I have also heard some people complain that even if we are right on the mathematical point, we presented our argument in a bit of a rough-mannered way–criticizing particular articles and drawing unfavorable outside attention to the field, and using the humorous term “voodoo.” We were as surprised as anyone by how much interest our paper sparked. Evidently it spread sort of “virally”–one neuroscientist we know said he got seven copies sent to him (none of them by us). The good side is that people are thinking harder now about how they do their analyses. The bad side is that all this publicity has left some authors feeling embarrassed and picked on. In our view, the statistical issues of independence and multiple comparisons are full of tricky pitfalls–we do not suggest that these were stupid mistakes people were making, and we regret hurting anyone’s feelings. I don’t think, however, that it would have made sense to write an article that did not “name names,” because if the scientific literature is to guide future research decisions, people have to know which results can be relied upon, and which cannot. (In fact, we suspect we only flagged a small fraction of the papers that have these problems, and some are in other fields, such as neurogenetics, cognitive neuroscience more broadly, and others.) Read the comments on this post…

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Do You Believe in Free Will?

January 23, 2009 in Blogs, PsyBlog by PsyBlog

Does one thing inevitably lead to another? New experiments show that disbelief in free will decreases helping behaviours and increases aggression. Chances are you believe in free will – I do too. To me it seems that one moment I want cereal and soon I have it. Next I want to ride my bicycle and soon I am. Later I have an itchy nose, and, in no time at all, it is scratched. But, say some scientists and philosophers, this sense of agency is an illusion: you were hungry and that’s why you ‘wanted’ cereal; you were bored and fed up of being inside so you ‘decided’ to get some exercise; and as for itchy noses, well there is a biological cause for that as well. From a determinist viewpoint each of these actions, and their causes, as well as their causes and their causes can be traced right back to my birth, then back through my parents’ lives, then right back, like clockwork, to the beginning of the universe. The strong determinist view – that we’re locked in an unchanging web of cause and effect going right back to the big bang – is repulsive to many. And quite naturally so, as free will forms the backbone of so many of society’s structures. The criminal justice system is built on the idea that people can choose whether to obey the law or not, therefore people who don’t obey should be punished. Similarly many religious and/or philosophical systems of thought have the notion of free will at their heart. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emphasised the connection between freedom and responsibility. He thought we must take responsibility for our choices, and that taking responsibility was at the heart of a life well lived. This debate about free will is so interesting – and knotted – that philosophers can’t keep away from it; but psychologists, on the other hand, perhaps sensing no end to the argument, can’t help their minds wandering away to more practical points. They have focused more on how beliefs in free will might affect our behaviour and whether, more generally, there might be some reason why we seem predisposed to think we have it. In new research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , Baumeister, Masicampo and DeWall (2009) theorise that a belief in free will may be partly what oils the wheels of society, what encourages us to treat each other respectfully. They explore this theory with three studies, two on helping behaviours and one on aggression. Free will and helping behaviours In the first experiment Baumeister and colleagues wanted to see how a belief in free will affected how much people were willing to help others. To manipulate their belief in free will participants read statements that either supported free will, supported determinism or had no bearing on the debate. A separate study confirmed that this really was enough to shift people’s thoughts towards determinism or towards free will. Participants then read scenarios in which helping behaviours were explored, for example by asking about giving money to a homeless person. They were asked to rate how much help they would provide to the people in these scenarios. The results showed that, as Baumeister and colleagues predicted, people whose thoughts had been pushed more towards free will were more likely to be helpful than those whose thoughts were pushed towards determinism. So it seems that people really are more helpful when they think they are free to choose as compared to when they believe their actions are pre-determined. Baumeister and colleagues argue that the belief that behaviour is pre-determined encourages people to behave automatically, and often automatic behaviour is selfish. Interestingly there was no difference seen between the free will condition and the neutral condition. What this suggests is that most people do already believe in free and don’t require extra encouragement. Of course we each differ in the amount we believe in free will and this may well affect how much help we are prepared to offer others. A second study by Baumeister and colleagues examined individual differences looking for an association between believing in free will and helping behaviours. Consistent with the previous experiment they found that people who had a ‘chronic disbelief’ in free will were less likely to be helpful to others. Free will and aggression The final experiment flipped the question around: instead of looking at prosocial behaviours they looked at antisocial behaviours. If a disbelief in free will makes people less helpful, perhaps it also makes them more likely to behave aggressively. As before participant’s thoughts were experimentally shifted towards free will or determinism and then their aggressive tendencies were measured. Instead of having people beating each other up in the lab, they chose a more indirect expression of aggression: putting spicy sauce on another person’s food. Participants were introduced to a study about food preferences which, with some complicated manoeuvring, they were encouraged to think had nothing to do with previous statements they read out about free will or determinism. Then they were told to prepare a plate of food for someone else to taste. One of the ingredients they could choose was a hot salsa sauce. The experimenters were interested in whether a belief in free will affected the amount of sauce participants put on the plate. When the participants left, the experimenters measured how much hot sauce they put on the plate. Those who had been primed to think more deterministically had spiced up the food, on average, twice as much as those who were primed to think in terms of free will. This seemed to have nothing to do with being more generous as they didn’t add more of other non-spicy foods, like cheese, to the plate. Believers in free will cheat less These experiments aren’t the first to examine how a belief in free will (or otherwise) affects our behaviour. In a recent study Vohs and Schooler (2008) also found that a belief in free will seems to have a positive effect on people’s behaviour. In that experiment (covered by Cognitive Daily ) participants whose disbelief in free will was encouraged were more likely to cheat on a test. These studies, then, point out the positive effect of free will on a variety of behaviours that most people would consider beneficial. Indeed it seems that most of us already have a firm belief in free will and so we’re already benefiting. Practically the danger is that our thoughts take a more deterministic turn and we move towards more aggression and cheating and away from helping behaviours. Compatibilism: reconciling determinism with free will This leaves us with a serious problem. If we think scientifically about the world then we have to accept that one thing really does lead to another; the reason I ‘decide’ to eat cereal is that I’m hungry, so in some sense the determinist is right. But a disbelief in free will is not only repugnant, it’s also dangerous for society. If we don’t have free will, a perverse kind of anarchism emerges, one which seems to encourage us to act any way we choose. After all if we don’t have free will then we’re not to blame for anything we do. One way some philosophers have tried to resolve this conflict is by pointing out that determinism and free will are not necessarily incompatible. Using everyday notions of free will philosophers have put forward a viewpoint that tries to integrate the two (see philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett’s book ‘ Freedom Evolves ‘ for a cognitive perspective). Classical compatiblists argue that we have free will if we have the power and ability to do things that we want to do. For example, say I want to go and buy a pint of milk for my cereal, and the shop is open, and I can get there, and I have money. For a compatibilist I have free will if I can choose to go, or, alternatively, not go. The fact that I do actually go (mainly because I’m hungry and want to eat cereal) doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t have the choice not to go. Compatibilists emphasise this idea that we have free will because we could have chosen to do otherwise, even if we didn’t. This idea that we ‘could have done otherwise’ is a powerful one, and one that appeals to our everyday experience. It doesn’t solve the dilemma of determinism but at least it provides a stick with which to fend it off. So when one person chooses not to help another, or chooses to behave aggressively, there must be reasons for that behaviour, many of which might appear to deny their responsibility. Ultimately, though, the proponent of free will has to argue this person could always have chosen to do otherwise. We have to cling to this belief, don’t we? [Image credit: evoo73 ]

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The Explosive Side of Judging Personality

January 5, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

Judging someone’s personality can be explosive.  A positive judgment can propel a person forward in life, like fuel can propel a rocket.  A negative judgment can explode a person’s plans, leaving behind only shattered hopes and dreams.  Examples of judgments that can propel a person forward include when: voters judge a candidate as capable of leading, and elect her to office. a career counselor perceives an employee to be bright and conscientious and helps him to find high-level employment. an awards committee judges a candidate’s character and achievements  as worthy of a a prize, bestows that prize, and in that way helps her to attain her goals over time. community members discover that one of their own is from a well-respected family, which raises his status among those who know him. Although positive judgments abound, negative judgments like these can take their toll: voters judge a candidate’s personality as lacking in moral fiber; the description "sticks" and the candidate’s political future is over. a jury determines that the defendant’s nature is to deceive others, lie, and cheat; the jury convicts the man and the judge sends him to jail. a psychiatrist assesses a person’s mental status and concludes that she is out of touch with reality, psychologically incompetent, and therefore must be institutionalized. At other times, an individual may react so powerfully to a negative judgment as to destroy him or herself: a murderer may kill his victim because (he perceived) the victim had demeaned his personality – insulted him. The murderer’s only remaining future is in jail. a man in a jealous state seeks evidence of his wife’s infidelity, concludes, "My wife is a slut," and kills her. He, too, spends the rest of his life in jail. another husband learns that other people believe his wife slept with another man. Some judge the husband as "less of a man" to put up with her. The only way to reclaim his reputation, he may decide, is to harm his wife, still further jeopardizng his own future — and hers. Organizations render judgments that steer some people off-course while pushing others further toward their goals: when a manager judges someone as lazy and careless, that person’s career may be sidetracked or ended.  When a teacher judges a student as gifted, the student’s future in the school and in getting a job may be assured.  Self-judgments affect us too: judge yourself as unable to succeed and you may be less likely to even try. judge yourself as able to carry out a task and you will be more likely to do well. There are numerous lesser judgments which we engage in every day: judging who is on time, who to trust with one’s house key, who left the lights on. We judge who can be trusted with our investments , or who can borrow our car. We make judgments we hope never to test: which relatives might care for us (or our children) in case disaster strikes and we are unable to do so ourselves. Judgments of character can provoke an explosion among groups who hold a stake in the assessment and are dismayed by the process.  Court-room trials can trigger riots if people believe someone was wrongly convicted. Accusations of slander are leveled against people who criticize those we admire.  A potentially-stigmatizing psychiatric diagnosis may be criticized, and outraged commentary may be posted on the web if it appears biased in some ways. When a member of a rich and powerful family is treated as "better than others" members of the public are sure to point it out. Judgments, like explosives, can detonate in a controllled fashion, or unpredictably. My hypothesis is that both those who judge personality and those who criticize such judgments often lose sight of the explosive territory they enter. Even professional psychologists are limited in understanding why, for example, when they interpret a client’s behavior (a form of judgment) the client so often resists. By understanding personality judgment in the broad sweep of our cultural history, it will be possible to better come to grips with judgments of ourselves and others, and to better inform ourselves as to when and how it makes sense to judge.  Making judgments is never easy. It has never been easy. It has never been done perfectly. Yet it always has been done because it must be done. This post and those to follow continue what I began in November 2008 , illuminating the natural history of judging personality that takes place around us, and has (I have argued) taken place throughout history. In the coming weeks, I will continue with my examination of judging personality, including the earliest evidence of such practices.   *** Welcome back to readers of the "Judging Personality" series of posts… Click here for more information about the Personality Analyst posts, including schedules, coverage, key terminology, etc.. Click here for previous posts in the series. Notes: Berg, I. A. & Fox, V. (1947). Factors in homicides committed by 200 males. Journal of Social Psychology , 26, 109-119. 200 males convicted of 1st or 2nd degree murder, murdered their wives for reasons of infidelity or arguments over money; males murdered other males for perceived insults. "A man whose wife is unfaithful…will be judged" Vandello, J. A., & Cohen, D. (2003). Male honor and female fidelity: Implicit cultural scripts that perpetuate domestic violence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 997-1010. © Copyright 2009, John D. Mayer © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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Lies Addiction Experts Tell, #2 — alcoholics are addiction experts

January 5, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

Addiction differs from such DSM-IV disorders as, say, schizophrenia, in that having the condition qualifies a person as an expert. "What alcohol does to me is reality," alcoholics believe, "and so I know all about alcoholism." Susan Cheever, who added her not especially insightful 1999 book, Note Found in a Bottle , to the massive first-person literature on alcoholism, is considered an alcoholism expert. In truth, Ms. Cheevers’ condition actually expresses her, and our cultural, confusion about alcoholism. On a broader scale, Americans believe that the drinking they see around them is how all humans experience alcohol. Human beings are social animals pluperfect. What they and the people they know do is the way the world is. And this myopia is nowhere more apparent than with alcohol. The three major determinants of people’s drinking experiences are: (1) the people they know (friends and family), (2) their social class and cultural group, (3) their historic era. Cheever seems to recognize the social causes of her problem in the New York Times post, Proof , when she described wanton and destructive drinking at the parties she used to frequent. These experiences represented the impact of all major social factors in Cheever’s life – social group, family, historic era. While she and her friends once drank with abandon, however, Cheever and the United States are now undergoing an anti-alcohol cultural wave. That the Times publishes so many Proof posts by recovering alcoholics and active problem drinkers is actually proof of one thing: we are undergoing a national reaction against drinking. Per our current cultural view of addiction, Cheever considers herself an unavoidable victim of the disease of alcoholism – her heritage MADE her an alcoholic. Reviewing her biographical memoir about her father, novelist John Cheever, Home Before Dark , Goodreads declared, "Anyone not convinced of a genetic trait for alcoholism should read this. Cheever’s father, mother and brother were all heavy drinkers if not frank alcoholics." Obviously, therefore, the Cheever family are genetic alcoholics. But this distinctly American view is not consistent with Cheever’s own descriptions, nor with scientific material she relates. In her post to the Proof blog, Cheever describes Bruce Alexander’s famous Rat Park experiment, where animals were habituated to narcotics in an isolated cage, then placed in a large enclosure with other rats and rodent amusements (e.g., a ferris wheel). The addicted rats totally eschewed morphine solution in favor of plain drinking water in Rat Park. This does not support a disease perspective on addictions, as I made clear in The Meaning of Addiction . If simple-minded animals respond to a rich, socially-engaging setting by quitting narcotics cold rat, then how much more likely is human drinking and drug-taking to reflect people’s social milieus? Cheever feels her book will warn others like her of the dangers of alcohol and enable them to avoid the traps she fell into. But the existence of so many similar volumes before hers (including such best-sellers in recent memory as Jill Robinson’s Bed Time Story and Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story ) without a notable reduction in alcoholism suggests her hopes won’t be realized. Indeed, remarkably, while Americans drink less currently, more of them report having alcoholic symptoms (with which Americans are now well familiar)! How is this paradox possible? The vision of inescapable alcoholism Cheever depicts is not one that is universally shared – in some cultures the whole idea is completely absent. Here’s the rub – cultures without this image have lower alcoholism rates. In his book The Natural History of Alcoholism , George Vaillant found when following the lives of inner-city Boston men from adolescence to seniority that Irish-Americans in his sample were almost ten times as likely to become alcoholic as their Italian, Jewish, and Greek neighbors! The Irish Americans Vaillant studied had an extravagant view of alcohol. According to Vaillant: "It is consistent with Irish culture to see the use of alcohol in terms of black or white, good or evil, drunkenness or complete abstinence." Conveying the idea of alcohol’s irresistible power, and in fact drinking that way, is to convince people their drinking is uncontrollable and to encourage such drinking. Here’s the irony: to the extent that people read and believe views like Cheever’s – make them a part of their internal baggage like they are a part of Cheever’s – they will be susceptible to alcoholism. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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When physicians miss the diagnosis, patients can be stigmatized with psychiatric labels (Neurogical Lyme Disease, Part Two)

January 2, 2009 in Blogs, Psychology Today by Psychology Today

(See part one of "Neurological Lyme" here.) If one were to describe all the terrifying and macabre presentations of neuroborreliosis, they would fill a book. But even added together they are rare compared to the most common neurological problem-the confusional state known as encephalopathy, or, as Lyme patients call it, "brain fog." Patients routinely reported the experience: a disorienting lapse of memory, an inability to concentrate, difficulty in falling asleep, and profound fatigue. Lyme encephalopathy was hardly controversial. John Halperin’s colleagues at Stony Brook objectively measured deficits in spatial orientation, short-term memory, concentration, and mathematical and construction ability. Halperin himself used magnetic resonance imaging to scan patients’brains. In one study he found white-matter lesions, much like those seen in multiple sclerosis, in the brains of seven out of seventeen encephalopathic Lyme disease patients. The lesions represented brain damage. Following treatment he rescanned six patients, and found the lesions resolved in three. Even when the lesions resolved, symptoms sometimes did not. As scary as brain lesions might sound, the academic description of these impairments as "mild" created dissonance between scientists like Halperin and patients on the ground. Sure, Lyme patients were not usually as impaired as those with bullets in their brains, but the brain fog, the deficits in language and organization, the psychiatric leftovers of anxiety, depression, and OCD, could still disrupt lives. Adults lost houses, marriages, and jobs and were compromised as parents. Children lost their childhoods when cognitive or emotional disabilities forced them to be home-schooled, sometimes for years. The impact was major, but mainstream experts continued to characterize such symptoms as "minor," "nonspecific," and "vague." The professionals able, finally, to traverse the space between the dismissive labels and the excruciating patient experience were the psychiatrists. If neurologists and rheumatologists deemed psychiatric symptoms "subjective," the psychiatrists said, it was because, when it came to psychiatry, these physicians were unschooled. One of the first to enter the fray was Brian Fallon, whose interest had been sparked in the late 1980s while helping a close relative overcome a serious case of Lyme disease. He had just finished his psychiatry residency and secured a gig as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health. He was stationed at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, adjacent to the Columbia University Medical Center complex in New York City. The young doctor, whose kempt, longish hair, neat beard, and energetic demeanor made him look like he’d marched off the album cover of Abbey Road, specialized in anxiety disorders, with a focus on hypochondria. But news of his interest in Lyme disease had traveled through the grapevine to Polly Murray. Some of her friends in Old Lyme had developed psychiatric disorders after having Lyme disease. Could Fallon follow up? Fallon and his psychiatrist wife, Jennifer Nields, drove out to Old Lyme and spent the day in Polly Murray’s living room surrounded by her watercolors, talking to her afflicted friends. One of the first things they decided as a result of that meeting was to impose formal discipline on the loosely knit reports of psychiatric symptoms made by neurologists and rheumatologists. Fallon was well aware of the single-case studies and series of anecdotes continually published in medical journals. The German researcher Kohler had even reported a staging of the psychiatric symptoms that paralleled progression in the neurological realm. In the first stage, mild depression could parallel a fibromyalgia-like illness. In the second stage, mood and personality disorders often emerged alongside meningitis or neuropathy. Finally, in stage three, with the onset of encephalomyelitis, the clinical picture might include psychosis or dementia. Fallon felt that when it came to Lyme, none of these reports, even Kohler’s, was solid enough to vest psychiatry with the same objective underpinnings found in rheumatology or neurology. Part of the problem was a misperception about what psychiatrists did and what psychiatry was. Psychiatrists often started their work in the murky, subjective outback of a patient’s psyche. But the scientists among them, like Fallon, were charged with the mission of anchoring thought, feeling, and experience in the firmament of objective data. Neurologists and rheumatologists often dismissed the psychiatric symptoms of Lyme disease as subjective, but they did so without applying the rigorous methodology that psychiatric research entailed. And that’s where Fallon hoped his contribution would matter most. His labor paid off. Conducting structured clinical interviews with people from southeastern Connecticut who had histories of Lyme disease he learned that depression or panic could worsen after the start of antibiotic treatment, suggesting a kind of psychiatric Herxheimer reaction that resulted as infection died off. Speaking to the patients, he found that neuropsychiatric Lyme disease and regular psychiatric disease appeared much the same. This was of particular concern since so many patients failed to notice a rash or register positive on standard tests, making it likely that the true cause of their psychiatric condition-Lyme disease-would be missed. The patients were in psychiatric trouble, to say the least. Surveying 193 patients testing positive for Lyme, Fallon found that 84 percent had mood problems; of those reporting depression, 90 percent had never had an episode prior to Lyme disease, which suggested the two were linked. As for children with Lyme, Fallon showed they resembled accident victims with head injuries. Like adults, they had trouble with short-term memory, word-finding, and concentration. Their performance IQ and spatial reasoning were particularly impaired. The children could still remember and learn-but they processed the information slowly and needed more time for tasks. Though selected for the study because of their cognitive disabilities, the children also suffered anxiety, mood, and behavioral disorders at higher rates than healthy children. Especially notable was the increased risk for depression and suicidal thoughts. The findings were important because children with Lyme disease could be "misdiagnosed as having a primary psychiatric problem," while the root issue-infection with the spirochete B. burgdorferi-might never be addressed. It was a dilemma that transcended Lyme disease. Time and again, Fallon, an expert in hypochondria, had seen frustrated doctors dismiss medically ill patients as psychiatric due to their own inability to diagnose the disease. In Lyme the mistake was especially damaging, he said, "since a delay in treatment could turn a curable, acute infection into a chronic, treatment-refractory disease." The solution, Fallon the scientist knew, was to gather objective evidence of physical damage to the brain. Working with radiologists at Columbia, he found one useful tool was the SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scan, which generated a moving picture of the brain. A radioactive "tracer" solution was delivered intravenously, and was thereafter tracked to measure blood flow through the brain. Even when MRI scans appeared normal in Lyme disease patients, SPECT could show something amiss. In symptomatic Lyme patients, decreased blood flow, known as hypoperfusion, could often be documented in the center of thought and higher functioning, the cerebral cortex. After treatment, many of the patients showed improvement on SPECT. More on Neurological Lyme disease to come   (Follow this link to read my personal story.) Excerpted from Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic , St. Martin’s Press, 2008   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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