What’s the best way to overcome depression? Antidepressant drugs, or Buddhist meditation?

A new trial has examined this question. The short answer is that 8 weeks of mindfulness mediation training was just as good as prolonged antidepressant treatment over 18 months. But like all clinical trials, there are some catches.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { David Stewart }

Assuming you’re in a heterosexual relationship, which is worse: for your partner to be unfaithful with a person of the opposite or the same sex?

According to a pair of US psychologists, the answer depends on whether you’re a man or woman. Men, they’ve found, are less likely to continue a relationship with an unfaithful partner who’s had a heterosexual affair, as opposed to a homosexual affair. For women, it’s the other way around - they’re more troubled by their male partner going off with another man.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder.

It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.

{ PubMed }

related { A startling proportion of the population, the existentially indifferent, demonstrates little concern for meaning in their lives. }

photo { Rob Hann }

A new program enables a robot to detect whether another robot is susceptible to lies, and to use its gullibility against it by telling lies, researchers claim.

The robot could be capable of deceiving humans in a similar way, according to the scientists, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Scientists are trying to teach robots to read - so they can understand road signs and shop names to ‘live’ for themselves.

Experts believe developing literate artificial intelligence should be relatively simple because computers are already able to turn scanned books into text.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Mark King }

For most of history, psychologists thought of the study of siblings as backwater: Parenting was important — siblings were not.

Then in the 1980s, a researcher named Robert Plomin published a surprising paper in which he reviewed the three main ways psychologists had studied siblings: physical characteristics, intelligence and personality. According to Plomin, in two of these areas, siblings were really quite similar.

Physically, siblings tended to differ somewhat, but they were a lot more similar on average when compared to children picked at random from the population. That’s also true of cognitive abilities.

“The surprise,” says Plomin, “is when you turn to personality.”

Turns out that on tests that measure personality — stuff like how extroverted you are, how conscientious — siblings are practically like strangers.
In fact, in terms of personality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time. Given the fact that we share genes, homes, routines and parents, this makes no sense. What makes children in the same family so different? (…)

No one knows for sure, but there are three major theories.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

photo { Katie Shapiro }

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

{ ScienceMag }

photo { Cyril Lagel }

When people are anxious they release a chemical signal that’s detectable on a subconscious level by those close to them. That’s the implication of a new study that collected sweat from people as they completed a high-rope obstacle course, and then tested the effect of that sweat on study participants as they played a gambling game.

Katrin Haegler’s team placed the sweat samples inside odourless tea bags which were attached with an elastic band to the underside of the gambling participants’ noses. For comparison, the participants were also exposed to sweat collected from non-anxious riders of an exercise bike.

When exposed to the anxious sweat, the participants took longer to decide over, but were more likely to bet on the highest risk scenarios. (…) In other words, the detection of another person’s anxiety made them more willing to take risks. Quite why this should be remains unclear.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Gary Lee Boas }

Blue space: The importance of water for preference, affect, and restorativeness ratings of natural and built scenes

Although theorists have suggested that aquatic environments or “blue space” might have particular restorative potential, to date there is little systematic empirical research on this issue. (…)

Whereas aquatic features (rivers, lakes, coasts) are frequently present in visual stimuli representing natural environments they are rarely incorporated in stimuli portraying built environments. (…)

The current research collated a set of 120 photographs of natural and built scenes, half of which contained “aquatic” elements. Proportions of “aquatic”/“green”/“built” environments in each scene (e.g. 1/3rd, 2/3rds) were also standardised. (…)

As predicted, both natural and built scenes containing water were associated with higher preferences, greater positive affect and higher perceived restorativeness than those without water.

{ Science Direct }

photo { Harri Peccinotti, Pirelli Calendar, 1969 }

The taste of the food and drinks that you serve your guests may impact their moral judgments of you in more ways than one. (…)

The results showed that taste perception significantly affected the study participants’ moral judgments — physical disgust, induced by a bitter taste, elicited feelings of moral disgust. This effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with liberal views. Taken together, these findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may impact moral processing more than previously thought.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Genie was a pseudonym for a girl who was found in extremely poor conditions. Not only were her surroundings incredibly unstimulating, they were also very dirty and horrid. The author of Philo-Psych (2009) states that “After it was revealed by a doctor that Genie’s language was slightly delayed, her father considered her retarded. Presumably to shelter her from a life of shame and embarrassment, he kept her in a room, strapped to a baby toilet, and only occasionally fed her baby food for 13 years.”

Although she was 13, she had the appearance of a 7 year old, and had extremely underdeveloped linguistic skills. Rather than talking, she made noises or yelps. The case of Genie presented psychologists with various questions over social, developmental and linguistic aspects of human development.

In the following video from the BBC’s Genie: A Deprived Child, we see what the story of Genie is all about, with those who worked with her.

{ John Wayland | Continue reading | video }

illustration { Ana Bagayan }

After examining studies of gender differences in such areas as cognitive abilities, communication, social behavior, personality, and psychological well-being, she concluded that for such commonly supposed gender-specific attributes as indirect aggression, leadership style, self-disclosure, moral reasoning, and delay of gratification, within-gender variability was much greater than between-gender variability. Men do throw harder, masturbate more, exhibit slightly more direct aggression, and endorse casual sex more strongly, but that’s about it.

Expectations often color objectivity, and the fact that some therapists buy into the common myths about gender differences may help explain why men often feel at a disadvantage in couples therapy, where women are supposedly so much better able to talk about feelings. Expecting less input from their male clients, therapists may miss the input when it happens, or reinforce spouses’ views that their men are biologically indifferent or incapable of being emotional.

{ Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

artwork { Louise Bourgeois, Paddle Woman, 1947 | bronze }

The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test is a psychological test first developed by child neuropsychiatrist Lauretta Bender. The test is used to evaluate “visual-motor maturity”, to screen for developmental disorders, or to assess neurological function or brain damage.

The original test consists of nine figures, each on its own 3 × 5 card. The subject is shown each figure and asked to copy it onto a piece of blank paper. The test typically takes 7-10 minutes, after which the results are scored based on accuracy and other characteristics.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Innovative Features of the Bender-Gestalt II and Expanded Guidelines for the Use of the Global Scoring System | PDF }

Healy tells the story of the launch of bipolar disorder at the end of the 1990s. A specialised journal, Bipolar Disorder, was established, along with the International Society for Bipolar Disorders and the European Bipolar Forum; conferences were inundated with papers commissioned by the industry; a swarm of publications appeared, many of them signed by important names in the psychiatric field but actually ghost-written by PR agencies. Once the medical elites were bought and sold on the new disease, armies of industry representatives descended on clinicians, to ‘educate’ them and teach them how to recognise the symptoms of bipolar disorder.

{ London Review of Books via Phil Gyford | Continue reading }

images { 1. Picasso, Sleeping woman, gray symphony, 1943 | Gagosian Gallery, until December 23, 2010 | 2. Thomas Dworzak }

Talking out our differences on controversial scientific and technological issues may be just the wrong way to reach agreement, new research suggests. (…)

The more people discussed the topic, the researchers found, the more wedded they became to their initial positions, either in support of or in opposition to the facility. The finding mirrors earlier research by Binder and some of the same co-authors around the topic of stem cell research. The more like-minded people in a homogenous group discussed the controversial science, the researchers found, the more extreme their positions became.

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a study involving mice… and circadian rhythms: too much low light (day or night) or insufficient bright light (during the day) can mess with circadian rhythms and cause bodily fatigue, jet lag, seasonal effective disorder, whatever you want to call it. It made me glad I walk to work in the bright sunshine every day and sad that my bedroom wall has big floor-to-ceiling windows.

This week, I read another study involving hamsters… and circadian rhythms: too much low light at night causes specific changes in the brain AND symptoms of depression (i don’t know how precise you can get at judging whether a hamster is depressed.)

{ Noticing/Science | Continue reading }

photo { Tom Hayes }

What do you do when you’re stressed out?

Talk to friends? Listen to music? Have a drink, or eat some ice cream? Or maybe practice yoga? These things are all pleasant options, and they’re obvious, effective ways to deal with stress. Chances are that you would not even think about doing something like, say, cutting your arm with a knife until you draw blood. Yet inflicting pain is exactly what millions of Americans – particularly adolescents and young adults – do to themselves when they’re stressed.

This is called nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), and it most commonly takes the form of cutting or burning the skin. Traditionally, many doctors, therapists, and family members have believed that people engage in NSSI primarily to manipulate others.

However, recent research has found that such social factors only motivate a minority of cases. Although there are many reasons why people engage in this kind of self-injury, the most commonly reported reason is simple, if seemingly odd: to feel better. Several studies support the claim that self-inflicted pain can lead to feeling better.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Edward Weston }

Women are generally thought to be less willing to take risks than men, so he speculated that the banks could balance out risky men by employing more women. Stereotypes like this about women actually influence how women make financial decisions, making them more wary of risk, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Anecdotally, many people believe that women are more risk averse and loss averse than men—that women make safer and more cautious financial decisions. And some research has supported this, suggesting that the gender differences may be biologically rooted or evolutionarily programmed.

But Priyanka B. Carr of Stanford University and Claude M. Steele of Columbia University thought that these differences might be the result of negative stereotypes—stereotypes about women being irrational and illogical. So they designed experiments to study how women make financial decisions, when faced with negative stereotypes and when not.

{ APS | Continue reading }

What makes people psychopaths is not an idle question. Prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms. The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main characteristics of psychopathy) may lead, according to circumstances, to a criminal career or a business one. That has provoked a debate about whether the phenomenon is an aberration, or whether natural selection favours it, at least when it is rare in a population. (…)

Despite psychopaths’ ability to give the appropriate answer when confronted with a moral problem, they are not arriving at this answer by normal psychological processes. In particular, the two researchers thought that psychopaths might not possess the instinctive grasp of social contracts—the rules that govern obligations—that other people have.

Most people understand social contracts intuitively. They do not have to reason them out.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

illustration { Scott Hunt }

He’s back in Iraq, on foot patrol, nervously walking down a street that suggests Basra, when it happens again—an explosion right across the street. The sidewalk shakes, he smells the acrid smoke, and as the panic starts to take over, his therapist says, “Turn right and walk up those stairs over there.” He goes up a stone stairway to the roof of a building and then watches the blast again, safely removed.

Only the client isn’t back in Iraq—he’s watching the scene unfold on a computer screen.

Therapists are making increasing use of virtual reality (VR) therapy, which, several studies suggest, increases the effectiveness of exposure therapy, the most empirically supported treatment for anxiety disorders such as PTSD and phobias.

A metanalysis in the April 2008 Journal of Anxiety Disorders found that VR is more effective than recalling memories exclusively through narrative, and just as effective as in vivo exposure for a wide range of anxiety disorders.

{ Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

The concept of trust is in many ways the connective tissue of society—governing everything from our personal relationships to our common use of currency.

Most, if not all, of the decisions we make every day rely on one form or another of trust. But what if our capacity for faith is simply the result of brain chemistry?

Economic researchers are uncovering the chemical triggers in our brains that spark feelings of trust—and using their findings to better understand how markets work.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

installation { Francesco Fonassi }