Archive for March, 2010
Psychiatry Is For The Birds (Or: Prozac For Polly)
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Posted in 101 Dalmations (And Chihuahuas…And Cats….And…)
In the New York Times this week we have a story entitled Animal Abuse as Clue to Additional Cruelties. In this article Ian Urbina discusses the problem of people who hoard animals and the connection between animal abuse and violence toward people.
The link between animal cruelty and antisocial behavior is well known and was first studied in the 1960′s by a researcher at Washington University by the name of Lee Robins. Dr. Robins followed the outcomes of children referred to a local mental health center for conduct problems, and learned that about one third of them developed antisocial behavior as adults. This is where we get the current conduct disorder criteria for antisocial personality disorder found in DSM-IV: firesetting, theft, running away, truancy and animal cruelty.
States are passing laws to better identify and track people who hoard or abuse animals, with the idea that people who do this are also likely to be abusing or neglect humans in their households. The laws allow for sharing of information between people who investigate domestic violence or child abuse and people who investigate animal neglect cases. Some states are even passing laws to create registries of animal abusers.
Two parts of this story caught my attention: the registry issue and the idea that neglecting an animal becomes a predicate offense for other investigations. Here in Maryland we’re big on registries. We have a sex offender registry and child abuse and neglect registry. We have a law requiring child welfare agencies to compare recent birth certificate information to the child abuse registry, to see if any known child abusers are having more kids. Now maybe we should also check to see if they’re adopting pets.
The whole idea of registering and tracking people is a bit uncomfortable for me. Registries don’t prevent crime but they can prevent people from getting jobs, buying homes and reintegrating into society after they’ve served their time. Being on a registry (or not being on one) is not truly reflective of the risk that person poses to society. A demented little old lady found with 200 cats in her basement could end up on the Internet, with the implication that she since she has neglected animals she also abuses children. Registries also don’t seem to do much for preventing people from getting access to what makes people truly violent: guns and alcohol. Perhaps we should require liquor stores to check registries before any beer transaction. While we’re at it, violence is associated with mental illness, untreated mood disorders and personality disorders. Maybe a registry of psychiatric patients?
Please. Enough. I doubt Dr. Robins ever expected this kind of outcome to her work. The purpose of studies like hers was to identify people at risk, for intervention and treatment, not for prosecution and public censure. I think we need to get back to that original idea.
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Sandra and Jesse
I know I shouldn’t, don’t have time, but I have to throw my two cents in here.
Every morning, Monday through Friday, although some weeks more than others, I watch the morning news. Local, national, international. I can’t help it. I like seeing people moving on teev while easing into the day with my morning coffee.
And all week long, nothing but talk of Sandra Bullock and Jesse James. Remember that spread in People, had to be over a year ago? How happy they were?
Since her recovery movie, 28 Days, I’ve been a fan of Ms. Bullock. And as a fan, it hurts to hear that Mr. James cheated on her. She deserves better. She didn’t cheat on him.
We hear it’s ego, you know. The spouses of several “best actresses” in recent years have cheated on their starlet wives, seeking to beef up deflated egos. Jesse James (gotta love that name) isn’t the first spouse of an Oscar winner, and he won’t be the last, to feel threatened by a woman’s power, popularity, fame, and beauty. The girl, if she’s the best, will be in demand.
Best actresses have egos, too, which can be a problem. Everyone loves them, they feel their guy does, why wouldn’t he? The doc tells us that stars should worry about this, that their men have egos and these egos will demand attention. If she’s on a shoot for eleven months, someone will fill in the emptiness. This is what it’s about, ego and power, and now we’re hearing, loneliness, chaval (rhymes with duh-doll, Hebrew meaning a shame).
The family therapy take? Cheating is transgenerational, at least it can be. Your dad shows you the notches on his belt, gives you permission. Alternatively, if he says, “That’s not what we do,” you listen, usually. Not always, of course, but some do. The psychological dope on cheating is that it’s some form of passive-aggression, anger, some sense of deserving. The affair is usually never as good, by the way, the sex is not as good, as it is at home.
The most important variable, the one not spoken, is commitment. It’s when the commitment is gone, or when the commitment was never there, that at least one of the two partners is vulnerable to extracurricular activity, regardless of sexual identification. This is why, when you do that initial assessment, commitment is the first thing you talk about with a couple, along with that transgenerational stuff.
And you do it in individual visits, too, not when they’re together all cozy on the sofa.
The good news is that a person can re-commit at any time. Those re-commitment ceremonies are cheaper than divorce and everyone loves them. You get presents.
But yeah, she’ll take that grudge to the grave, honey. You can count on it. Famous or not.
therapydoc
The power of gratitude
Like most parents, I drilled my young kids on the importance of saying “thank you” to others. Nagged them, really. After all, words of gratitude are an important social convention, a way of letting others know you value and appreciate them and their support. Plus saying “thank you” is the right thing to do.
What I didn’t teach them—because I didn’t know it at the time—was how they themselves might benefit from saying “thank you.” An emerging body of research is now showing that genuine expressions of gratitude can be tonic not just for the recipient, but for those who are saying “thank you” as well. Indeed, being grateful—and saying so—can change the very way we think about our closest relationships.
One scientist who has been rigorously deconstructing gratitude is Nathaniel Lambert of Florida State University. In a recent study, he and several colleagues decided to explore whether the simple act of expressing thankfulness might be linked to a deeper sense of commitment and responsibility toward someone else. To find out, the psychologists recruited a large group of young men and women and gathered information on their most intimate relationships, including the frequency and manner in which they expressed their gratitude toward their partner. They also questioned them about the strength of their relationship, focusing especially on feelings of responsibility for their partner’s happiness and welfare.
They wanted to see if there was any connection between thankfulness and the quality of the partnership. And there was, clearly. Those who were more expressive of their gratitude toward their partner saw their commitment as deeper and the relationship as more mutually supportive. They also measured these perceptions six weeks later, to see if gratitude was linked to an increase in relationship quality over time. And, again, it was.
These findings are intriguing—but limited. They don’t say anything about whether expressing thanks actually leads to improved feelings about a relationship. So Lambert and his colleagues decided to run another experiment to sort this out. In this study, they actually manipulated gratitude. They had a group of volunteers deliberately increase their verbal or written expressions of thanks toward a close friend. They were instructed to “go the extra mile” in really demonstrating their feelings of gratitude. For comparison, other volunteers merely thought grateful thoughts—without expressing them—while others focused on positive memories of time together. At the end of the three weeks, they compared the volunteers’ attitudes toward their relationship.
There was no doubt about cause-and-effect this time. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who more frequently spoke or wrote their words of thanks saw their relationship as more mutual and cooperative as a result. Importantly, merely thinking about being grateful did not improve relationships. So words count.
What’s going on here? The scientists believe that saying “thank you” sends a message not only to one’s partner but to oneself as well. It changes our self-perceptions. The very act of saying “thank you” reinforces one’s desire for a mutually supportive relationship and increases dependency, which triggers trust and in turn deepens a relationship. In this way, saying “thank you” initiates a spiral of kindness and appreciation in relationships. And what’s more, it’s not complicated.
For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.
Movie Review: Oasis
He visits the family of the person he killed to make amends, only to find them in the process of moving out of their apartment. They are leaving behind the child of the accident victim, Gong-ju Han, a severely disabled woman with cerebral palsy. Jong-du confronts her brother as they are leaving and demands to know who will take care of her. He is kicked out of the apartment and she is left alone, with physical contortions that horribly distort her limbs. It was painful to watch. Jong-du returns repeatedly to try to visit Gong-ju, to bring her flowers and to check on her. Finally, one day he is let into the apartment. He tries to rape her then flees when she passes out. This is the point where the movie becomes inexplicable to me. Following the attempted rape Gong-ju fantasizes about Jong-du and imagines having a lover, and struggles against her cerebral palsy to put on makeup. Jong-du returns and the two become lovers. Their train-wrecked lives come together in a predictable way. One physically damaged, one psychologically damaged, both without psychological or social support. The result is inevitable and predictable. The Rotten Tomatoes web site gave this film an 89% favorable rating, although I’m not sure why. One of the difficulties of this movie, besides the implication that rape can trigger love, is the fact that Jong-du’s facial contortions made it impossible to read her emotions, and I was left wondering if she was in pain, afraid or ecstatic. When it was crucial to directly tell the audience what she was feeling the director cut to a fantasy mode, and the physically-whole actress acted out Gong-ju’s feelings. We learn she is entranced by this man, that she fancies herself teasing him and playfully flirting with him, that her days are filled with wonder and fulfillment when he is around. The most potent part of the film was the portrayal of how this disabled woman was treated by Korean society—-she was refused service at a restaurant and rejected at a family gathering—overt discrimination highlighted by Jong-du’s naivety. He brings her to his mother’s birthday party only to be confronted by his siblings about his inappropriateness. Gong-ju’s family can’t even imagine that anyone could love her, and they take it for granted that he is abusing her when they finally do make love. Jong-du ultimately goest to prison after a false rape allegation, but personally I think he should have been there quicker after the first, real, attempt.
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Emotions by the roomful
I have a friend who sucks the air out of the room whenever he comes around. He is so blustery and self-absorbed that people don’t interact with him; they capitulate. I also have friends who by their mere presence light up the room, raising the spirits of everyone gathered. I know people who cast a pall over the group and drag it down; others who have a calming effect on gatherings.
These are all caricatures, of course. Nobody can sway the emotions of an entire room, energizing or subduing or infuriating every member of the group. After all, each of us has his or her own emotional make-up, which is surely more powerful than the mere presence of another person. A roomful is not a human entity, with collective emotions.
Or is it? It may be humbling to know, but new research suggests that there may be some truth to these caricatures. Each of us is autonomous, of course, with temperament and personality, but some people may have a powerful emotional presence that can indeed influence the feeling of an entire room.
That’s the idea being explored by two business professors, Noah Eisenkraft of Penn and Hillary Anger Elfenbein of Washington University in St. Louis. The scientists wanted to explore this phenomenon with naturally occurring groups, so they recruited an entire class of first-year MBA students. These 239 students were randomly assigned to work groups, most made up of five students, which were diverse for nationality, gender, and work experience. The group members took all the same classes, worked on group projects, and even socialized frequently outside class. In other words, they spent a lot of time in the same room.
The idea was to track these group members’ emotions—and emotional interactions—over an entire semester. So the scientists gave a personality test to start, then after the groups had worked together for a month, they questioned each member about both positive and negative feelings they experienced for each of the other group members—boredom, stress, anger, enthusiasm, and so forth. They also observed the networks that formed over the semester, to see if any one group member was becoming the emotional center of the group.
The results were mixed and intriguing. The students’ upbeat emotions were largely accounted for by individual emotional make-up—but not entirely. The presence of others also shaped the students’ feelings, with the most dominant group members having the most power to lift others’ spirits. But the big surprise came with negative emotions like sadness and anger. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, downbeat emotions were shaped more by others than by individual temperament, and these effects were traceable to individuals with the most extraverted and disagreeable personalities. Importantly, the scientists ruled out emotional “contagion” as an explanation for the phenomenon: It’s not simply that miserable people were dragging others down with them, but something about them was affecting the entire room in the same way—and not in a good way.
We usually call these people “bad apples.” But if we’re not simply “catching” their bad vibes, what is happening? It’s not entirely clear, the scientists say. It could be that people with an emotional “presence” express themselves differently—with most body-language, for example—or they may convey dominance or warmth or creepiness in very subtle ways.
Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought, will be published by Crown in September.
Is It Malpractice To Lie?
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Suicide and Social Learning
I found an interesting article on the Public Library of Science web site called The Cultural Dynamics of Copycat Suicide. (And thanks to the author for being willing to share his information under a Creative Commons license—this is how medical research should be!)
The author, Alex Mesoudi, used a computer model to study the effects of social learning and mass media influence on suicide clusters. He used a statistical method to see if suicides were clustered in time and space at an unexpectedly high frequency. This method is called an agent-based similiation, and is commonly used to model transmission of infectious disease. I’m not going to pretend to understand the statistics behind this! If you’re curious you can read that part of the article.
He started by explaining the difference between point suicide clusters and mass clusters. Point clusters are suicides that are grouped together in time and space, while mass clusters are suicides that are grouped together in time, but are separated geographically. Suicide clusters have been thought to be due to social learning or mimicry, but it’s also possible that they occur through homophiliy (the tendency for similar people to pool together in groups). Mass suicides are thought to be due to the influence of prestigious individuals (eg. celebrity suicide deaths) combined with coverage by the media. This leads to a one-to-many transmission model.
The computer model was run using three different assumptions: that suicides were totally random and unclustered, that clusters were due to social learning, and that clusters were due to homophily. He used different formulas to generate “suicides” under each model, and looked at the kind of clusters (spatiotemporal versus just temporal) that resulted.
What he found was that social learning caused spatiotemporal point clusters while homophilic clusters were more likely to be spacial rather than temporal. In order to understand this better, imagine the difference between teenage suicide epidemics versus correctional suicides. Teen suicides clusters happen among individuals who know each other, they happen in the same geographic area and within a short time frame of one another. These are the “social learning” clusters. Correctional suicides happen at a rate higher than in free society (in other words, they’re geographically ‘clustered’ in a jail or prison), but are spread out over time. These are the homophilic suicides, in other words deaths by high risk people who happen to be grouped together. Based on this study, the correctional deaths are less likely to be due to social learning or mimicry.
Finally, the author studied the factors influencing mass suicide clusters: deaths that happen at the same time over a broad geographic area. These the kinds of suicides you see when a celebrity commits suicide. They are generally associated with a lot of media coverage. The computer model found that social learning played almost no role in these deaths.
It’s a really complicated paper and I’m sure I didn’t do it justice, but I thought it was pretty fascinating that someone could basically recreate the kind of suicide death patterns we see in the real world based on a theoretical mathematical framework. And I liked the term this author used for this kind of experiment: in silica. If in vivo experiments are done on animals or humans and in vitro experiments are done in test tubes or petri dishes, then “in silica” is a great term for computer model experiments.
And if none of this post made sense, hang on and I’ll resurrect it in one of our podcasts.
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A tool for predicting suicide?
Suicide is both disturbing and perplexing to survivors, in part because it is so unpredictable. People who are intent on killing themselves often conceal their thoughts—or outright deny them—so family and friends are left puzzling over warning signs they might have missed.
Even experienced clinical judgment often misses the mark. As a result, suicide experts have long hoped and searched for a clear behavioral marker of suicide risk. Now they may have found one. Harvard University scientists are reporting that a tool widely used for probing unconscious thoughts might be used to spot suicidal intent—even if the suicidal mind is in denial—and offer new hope for timely intervention to keep people alive.
Psychologist Matthew Nock (working with colleagues at both Harvard and nearby Massachusetts General Hospital) decided to adapt a decade-old test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, to plumb for warning signs of suicide. Specifically, he wanted to see if people who are suicidal might have stronger implicit associations between themselves and death—associations that might point toward self-destructive intentions. To find out, he tested 157 people seeking treatment in a psychiatric emergency room. The patients were all emotionally distressed, but only some were in the hospital because of attempted suicide. The scientists wanted to see if the IAT could distinguish those who had attempted suicide from those who had not.
The IAT is a reaction time test. During their hospital stay, often while sitting in bed, the patients very rapidly classified words on a computer screen, words like: lifeless, thrive, myself, deceased, they, theirs, survive, breathing. And so forth. The idea is to see how rapidly patients connect identity-related words to either life or death words. And the findings were unambiguous. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, patients who had attempted suicide prior to admission had much stronger unconscious associations between self and death.
But the study didn’t end there. Nock followed all the patients for six months to see how they fared, and he found that the patients with a powerful self-death association in the hospital had a six-fold increase in later suicide attempts. Six-fold is a dramatic difference, and what’s more, the unconscious associations were a much better suicide predictor than depression, previous suicide attempts, or the intuition of the attending clinician.
What about the patients’ own predictions? Fourteen of the emergency patients attempted suicide within six months of leaving the hospital. Their self-evaluations were an indicator of their future risk, but an imperfect indicator. The IAT results were a better prognosticator even than the patients’ self-evaluations. This suggests that unconscious thoughts might be a useful detector and predictor of intentions that patients are reluctant to discuss—or intentions of which they themselves are unaware.
Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.
Dinah’s Away, Clink Will Play
So Dinah has gone off on vacation and left Roy and I in charge of the blog. Doesn’t she know what a really really bad idea that is??
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