Psychology and Neuroscience in the News

More good stuff this week (already) in the areas of psychology and neuroscience. Everything from the value of stereotypes to the psychopathology of liberal politics made it onto the blogs and news sites in the last couple of days.

First up, a look at how stereotypes can actually be positive, from Science Daily.

How Stereotypes Can Lead To Success, Psychologists Explain

Stereotypes can boost as well as hinder our chances of success, according to psychologists from the University of Exeter and St Andrews University. They argue that the power of stereotypes to affect our performance should not be underestimated.

Drawing on a large body of research, the authors argue that success or failure at work, at school or in sport cannot always be attributed solely to ability or incompetence. Studies suggesting that gender or race can play a part in performance have proved controversial.

The researchers argue that the roots of such handicaps lie partly in the preconceptions that other people hold about these groups. For example, a woman who has been led to believe that women generally do worse than men at mathematics, will perform less well in a maths test as a result. Following a similar logic, in the sporting domain, one reason why the England football team performs badly in penalty shoot-outs (winning only 1 of 7 in major tournaments) is that performance is impeded by knowledge of stereotypes associated with a history of failure.

However, the researchers also point out that stereotypes can have positive dimensions that are able to boost individual or group's performance. For example, research has shown that Asian women do better on math tests if they identify themselves as Asian rather than as women. Another study has shown that white golfers tend to perform better against black opponents if they are told that they are being judged on their "sport strategic intelligence" than if they are told they are being tested on their "natural athletic ability."

The article also points out a major misconception about stereotypes -- that they are fixed. In reality, stereotypes are fluid and can be changed through intention or by the forces of cultural selection.

The article highlights the flexibility of stereotypes and argues that rather than being fixed, they are very sensitive to change. Professor Stephen Reicher of St Andrews University commented: "In many ways our stereotype of the stereotype is wrong. Stereotypes are neither fixed, nor necessarily harmful. Indeed, in our own hands, they can be tools of progress".

Next up, in no particular order, an article on how the brain responds to "fairness" much in the same way it responds to chocolate, meaning that reward centers fire in ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

From Physorg.com:

Brain reacts to fairness as it does to money and chocolate

"We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward," said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.

"Receiving a fair offer activates the same brain circuitry as when we eat craved food, win money or see a beautiful face," said Golnaz Tabibnia, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and lead author of the study, which appears in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The activated brain regions include the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Humans share the ventral striatum with rats, mice and monkeys, Tabibnia said.

"Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats," she said. This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need, she added.

In the study, subjects were asked whether they would accept or decline another person's offer to divide money in a particular way. If they declined, neither they nor the person making the offer would receive anything. Some of the offers were fair, such as receiving $5 out of $10 or $12, while others were unfair, such as receiving $5 out of $23.

"In both cases, they were being offered the same amount of money, but in one case it's fair and in the other case it's not," Tabibnia said.

Almost half the time, people agreed to accept offers of just 20 to 30 percent of the total money, but when they accepted these unfair offers, most of the brain's reward circuitry was not activated; those brain regions were activated only for the fair offers. Less than 2 percent accepted offers of 10 percent of the total money.

One could argue that this is an evolutionary adaptation that increased survival chances. If we have a sense of when we are being treated fairly, and being treated fairly fires up the reward centers in the brain, then we are more prepared to make good decisions that can lead to survival when dealing with others. Just thinking out loud.

Another article from Physorg looks at the idea that dumbass busywork really does numb the brain. After all my years in marketing, I could have told them that and saved a lot of money in research costs.

Brain patterns predict mistakes: study

It turns out that dull tasks really do numb the brain. Researchers have discovered that as people perform monotonous tasks, their brain shifts towards an at-rest mode whether they like it or not.

And by monitoring that area of the brain, they were able to predict when someone was about to make a mistake before they made it, a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.

"There's this thing that's probably intrinsic where your brain says I do need to take a little break here and there's nothing you can do about it," said study author Tom Eichele of Norway's University of Bergen.

"Probably everyone knows that feeling that sometimes your brain is not as receptive or as well performing and you didn't do anything to actually induce that."

When that happens, blood flows into the part of the brain which is more active in states of rest.

And since this state begins about 30 seconds prior to a mistake being made, it could be possible to design an early-warning system which could alert people to be more focused or more careful, Eichele said.

This phenomena isn't just in the brain, it also happens in the body. Our entire organism prefers to remain in a state of equilibrium. Thinking or moving disrupts that balance and the body wants to get back there as soon as possible. On mundane tasks -- as in the study above -- it appears the mind returns to a state of "rest" after a period of time. In exercise, when we have done the same thing for too long, the body stops responding because it has grown accustomed to the stimulus.

And now to something totally different, and which I present solely in the interest of balance (since I think this is a load of crap).

From Corpus Callosum, a review of The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, by Lyle Rossiter (s0meone I have never heard of). It's worth noting that the reviewer hadn't read it either and is working off of quotes.

The book was published by Free World Books, LLC, which is not exactly a marketing powerhouse. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is the only book put out by that particular publisher. So I am guessing that I won't get any corrections from people who read it, because hardly anyone even knows about it.

Someone pointed it out to me, though, based upon a link to a post on 15 February, 2008, at World Net Daily. I searched a bit and found some excerpts from the book.

There are excerpts at Townhall.com, such as this one:

His neurosis is evident in his ideals and fantasies; in his self-righteousness, arrogance and grandiosity; in his self-pity; in his demands for indulgence and exemption from accountability; in his claims to entitlements; in what he gives and withholds; and in his protests that nothing done voluntarily is enough to satisfy him. Most notably, the radical liberal's neurosis is evident in his extravagant political demands, in his furious protests against economic freedom, in his arrogant contempt for morality, in his angry defiance of civility, in his bitter attacks on freedom of association, in his aggressive assault on individual liberty. And in the final analysis, the irrationality of the radical liberal is most apparent in his ruthless use of force to control the lives of others.

He goes on, at great length. His argument starts with a straw man: he takes everything he doesn't like about some liberals, and weaves these together to create a caricature, then criticizes the caricature as though it fairly represents all liberals.

In doing so, he manages to conflate the concept of liberalism with that of authoritarianism.

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking.

They are hardly the same: there are authoritarian liberals, such as Stalin (who, by the way, made of point of calling his opponents mentally ill), and libertarian liberals, such as the Dalai Lama.

After constructing the straw man, he forges his argument with bad psychology. From his own site:

The Liberal Mind reveals the madness of the modern liberal for what it is: a massive transference neurosis acted out in the world's political arenas, with devastating effects on the institutions of liberty.

Rossiter is a Forensic Psychiatrist. His CV makes no mention of analytic training, so I suppose I won't fault him to badly for not really understanding what transference is. What I will fault him for is his use of a concept that he clearly does not understand.

Transference is a psychological process in which a person takes characteristics of one person, and attributes those characteristics to another person. Transference takes place in the context of a relationship between two people. The term usually is understood to refer to a process that takes place within the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship. It does not make sense to say that all liberals, collectively, have a transference to a set of social institutions.

I suppose he could refer to this as a "transference-like phenomenon," but that is not what he said.

He concludes that liberals are, collectively, mentally ill. My biggest objection to this is that it is completely pointless. Even if his arguments were valid, they would serve no purpose.

For fun, you can read the rest. I guess I am one of the crazies, but at least I'm in the good company of the Dalai Lama in being a libertarian liberal.

In more uplifting news, happiness has been all the rage in recent years. The New York Times ran an interview today with Harvard social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who is becoming well-known as Professor Happiness. His book, Stumbling on Happiness, was a New York Times paperback best seller for 23 weeks and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. (Review here.)

Here are the first two questions and answers.

Q. HOW DID YOU STUMBLE ONTO YOUR AREA OF STUDY?

A. It was something that happened to me roughly 13 years ago. I spent the first decade of my career studying what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error,” which is about how people have the tendency to ignore the power of external situations to determine human behavior.

Why do many people, for instance, believe the uneducated are stupid?

I’d have been content to work on this for many more years, but some things happened in my own life.

Within a short period of time, my mentor passed away, my mother died, my marriage fell apart and my teenage son developed problems in school. What I soon found was that as bad as my situation was, it wasn’t devastating. I went on.

One day, I had lunch with a friend who was also going through difficult times. I told him: “If you’d have asked me a year ago how I’d deal with all this, I’d have predicted that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”

He nodded and added, “Are we the only people who could be so wrong in predicting how we’d respond to extreme stress?”

That got me thinking. I wondered: How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events?

Q. HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO UNDERSTANDING HAPPINESS?

A. Because if we can’t predict how we’d react in the future, we can’t set realistic goals for ourselves or figure out how to reach to them.

What we’ve been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy — or unhappy. If you can’t tell which futures are better than others, it’s hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.

So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.

Moving on to a little personal growth, here is a good post from Gabriella Kortsch at Psychology, Transformation & Freedom Papers. Note that she advocates a good, classic education as a way to familiarize oneself with the symbols of our culture and those of other cultures.

This is a good post -- one of the better psychological tools that anyone can use is the life narrative -- writing one's life story as a narrative, hitting the highs and lows and looking for symbolic meaning in the events. This post points in that direction.

Have You Recognized the Symbols in Your Life?

The symbolism of a lifetime can be filled with riches, but if you are incapable of seeing it, or if you don't understand what the symbols might be, or what they could mean, not only will your life be that much poorer, but it will lack a meaning and significance it might otherwise weave and stitch together gradually over the years, the same way ancient carpet and tapestry weavers spent a lifetime creating one or two masterpieces.

Symbols in an individual's life speak to a part that goes far beyond the ego. Symbols commune with the eternal self. Symbols are the language of the soul and can show the individual who is open to them and their significance, a richness of purpose and meaning, where another individual, blind to symbolic implications, would only see hardship, pain, and suffering.

While symbols are not only related to hardship and suffering, it is nevertheless true that it is precisely in those sectors where symbols can make the greatest difference to the way an individual is able to perceive the events of a lifetime ... not only in hindsight, but also at the time those events are occurring.

Symbolism is not only an arcane and obscure field of knowledge that went out of fashion in our instant everything world and that is found in fairy tales, fables, religion, and mythology, but symbolism is also the richness and core essence of an inner life well lived that concerns itself with meaning and purpose rather than with actual events.

The tools we can use for this are easily found in a multitude of sources. Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist, who was steeped in Jungian symbolism as well, was once asked why there are so many stories of the hero in mythology. He replied: Because that's what's worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Evidently since this applies to anyone's life, not just to Parsifal in The Holy Grail, or other mythic and epic heroes, this tool of knowledge of the symbolism of the hero's journey is useful to the individual interested in understanding what the events of his or her lifetime might symbolize. In that sense, a classic education is highly useful, as it prepares one - should one be so inclined - to this manner of symbolic introspection.

I'm going to wrap this up with some quick links and a very cool video of Eric Kandel talking about drugs, neurobiology, and the unconscious. Dig the bow tie.

~ Lev Semenovich Vygotsky: Thought, Language, and Children at Play -- The summation of that work appeared in 1934 as a book titled Thought and Language, published only after the author’s death and first translated into English in 1962. It examines in depth the nexus between thought and language. That author was Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934) who arrived independently at the same seminal Vichian insight in The New Science that while it is true that man makes language, it is equally true that language makes man, that the poetic and imaginative precedes rational thought in human development, and that in fact thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Like Vico before him, Vygotsky arrived at these insights by simply observing children at play and how they develop linguistically. What attracted attention to his work, however, was not so much its Vichian roots, with which Vygotsky might or might not have been familiar, but its affinities with the later work of the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

~ Poverty may impair growth of brain -- "With our recent capacity to look at brain development through scans and really look at what's happening within our children, we're realizing how much more impactful growing up in poverty is," said Margaret Arbuckle, executive director of the nonprofit Guilford Education Alliance and an Action for Children board member.

"The brain doesn't just form; it forms over time," she said. "Environmental factors impact the development of the synapses and the architecture of the brain, so that as the brain is constructed, if there's not appropriate nutrition and there (are) stress and other health factors, that can impact the way the child's brain actually grows and develops."

The results, Arbuckle said, can be seen in children's complex thinking and reasoning skills, impulse control, and their ability to create relationships and discern social cues.

Two articles from The New Atlantis:

~ The Limits of Neuro-Talk -- In this nascent age of “neurolaw,” “neuromarketing,” “neuropolicy,” “neuroethics,” “neurophilosophy,” “neuroeconomics,” and even “neurotheology,” it becomes necessary to disentangle the science from the scientism. There is a host of cultural entrepreneurs currently grasping at various forms of authority through appropriations of neuroscience, presented to us in the corresponding dialects of neuro-talk. Such talk is often accompanied by a picture of a brain scan, that fast-acting solvent of critical faculties.

Elsewhere in this issue, O. Carter Snead offers a critique of the use of brain scans in the courtroom in which he alludes to, but ultimately brackets, questions about the scientific rigor of such use. For the sake of argument, he proceeds on the assumption that neuroimaging is competent to do what it is often claimed to do, namely, provide a picture of human cognition.

But there are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the interpretation of brain scans as pictures of mentation. In parsing these problems, it becomes apparent that the current “neuro” enthusiasm should be understood in the larger context of scientism, a pervasive cultural tendency with its own logic. A prominent feature of this logic is the overextension of some mode of scientific explanation, or model, to domains in which it has little predictive or explanatory power. Such a lack of intrinsic fit is often no barrier to the model nonetheless achieving great authority in those domains, through a kind of histrionics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in another context (that of social science), all that is required is a certain kind of performance by those who foist the model upon us, a dramatic imitation of explanatory competence that wows us and cows us with its self-confidence. At such junctures, the heckler performs an important public service.

~ Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment -- Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person is inclined toward criminality or violent behavior?”

This question, asked by Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware at the hearing considering the nomination of John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the United States, illustrates the extent to which cognitive neuroscience—increasingly augmented by the growing powers of neuroimaging, the use of various technologies to directly or indirectly observe the structure and function of the brain—has captured the imagination of those who make, enforce, interpret, and study the law. Judges, both state and federal, have convened conferences to discuss the legal ramifications of developments in cognitive neuroscience. Numerous scholarly volumes have been devoted to the subject. The President’s Council on Bioethics convened several sessions to discuss cognitive neuroscience and its potential impact on theories of moral and legal responsibility. Civil libertarians have expressed suspicion and concern that the United States government is using various neuroimaging techniques in the war on terrorism. Personal injury lawyers have urged the use of functional neuroimaging to make “mild to moderate brain [and nervous] injuries ... visible [to] jurors”—and members of the civil defense bar have, not surprisingly, published articles criticizing the reliability of such evidence and arguing that it should be inadmissible. Criminal defense attorneys have likewise expressed a strong interest in using neuroimaging evidence to help their clients.

The attraction of the legal community to cognitive neuroscience is by no means unreciprocated. Cognitive neuroscientists have expressed profound interest in how their work might impact the law. Michael Gazzaniga, one of the field’s leading lights—and in fact the man who coined the term “cognitive neuroscience”—predicted in his 2005 book The Ethical Brain that advances in neuroscience will someday “dominate the entire legal system.”

Finally, the Eric Kandel video.

Tags: Psychology, Neuroscience, consciousness, brain, culture, personal growth, stereotypes, fairness, mistakes, The Liberal Mind, psychopathology, happiness, Daniel Gilbert, symbols, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, poverty, neuro-talk, Neuroimaging, Capital Punishment, Eric Kandel