Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) was an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist.

He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) [book cover], a notable series of case studies of the varieties of human sexual behaviour. The book remains well known for his coinage of the terms sadism (from Marquis de Sade whose fictional writings often include brutal sexual practices) and masochism (from writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partly autobiographical novel Venus in Furs tells of the protagonist’s desire to be whipped and enslaved by a beautiful woman). (…)

In the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing divided “cerebral neuroses” into four categories:

• paradoxia: Sexual desire at the wrong time of life, i.e. childhood or old age

• anesthesia: Insufficient sexual desire

• hyperesthesia: Excessive sexual desire

• paraesthesia: Sexual desire for the wrong goal or object, including homosexuality (”contrary sexual desire”), sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, paedophilia , etc.

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and that any form of desire that did not go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, because pregnancy could result.

He saw women as sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized in women as “sexual bondage,” which, because it did not interfere with procreation, was not a perversion.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Body odors are important cues used for social and sexual discrimination. As was shown many times, animals can easily smell age-, health- and genetics-related  differences.  Recent study of our large-eyed relatives, ring-tailed lemurs, demonstrate that drugs can alter body scents and change behavior.

Researchers examined changes in endocrine and  semiochemical profiles of sexually mature female lemurs treated with hormonal contraceptives during their breeding season. (…) The conclusion? Contraceptives change chemical ‘signature’, minimizing distinctiveness and genetic fitness cues. No more can the males determine which females are genetically and physically beautiful. All contracepted females lost their individuality and started to smell funny.

{ Olfactics and Olfactory Diagnostics | Continue reading }

In the 55 years since Albert Einstein’s death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.

But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein’s genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.

The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.

“It was like the death of the prophet,” Paterniti says. “And so it got a little bit crazy.”

Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.

But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.

“And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances,” Paterniti says.

Harvey later said Einstein’s older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.

In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science. (…)

Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein’s brain to various neuroscientists. (…) One scientist who’d asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein’s brain. (…)

At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein’s brain that he didn’t have a lot of extra neurons.

But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.

Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein’s brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking. (…)

Discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.

“Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes,” Fields says. “And now it’s not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein’s brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing.”

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Body Image Distortion

In their study, Longo and his colleagues asked volunteers to place their left hand palm-side-down underneath a board and to then estimate the size of their hand. (…) As it turns out, volunteers consistently overestimated the width of their hand—sometimes by up to 80%.

{ Current Protocols | Continue reading }

artwork { Geneviève Gauckler }

What does your poker face look like? If it’s the traditional, stern, emotionless expression, you may want to consider practising a new one. (…)

‘Contrary to the popular belief that the optimal face is neutral in appearance,’ the researchers said, ‘poker players who bluff frequently may actually benefit from appearing [friendly,] trustworthy, since the natural tendency seems to be inferring that a trustworthy-looking player bluffs less.’ Before you try this out at your local poker den, remember the findings apply when you’re up against new opposition and there’s little other information to go on.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Corman }

It’s hot outside.

But there is hot and then, to use the scientific term, there is hot. There is also hot as we experience it today, of course, in our super-chilled buildings and ventilated apartments, and hot as it was felt a century ago when an indoor breeze meant your cousin was blowing on your belly.

Take, for example, July 3, 1901, when 200 deaths and 300 cases of heat prostration were caused in New York City as the temperatures reached — and one could be excused for adding “only” here — 99 degrees.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Fort Tilden State Park feels like the city’s best-kept secret—an unspoiled island oasis, tantalizingly close to Manhattan. Even on a weekend at the height of summer, you’ll get a 50-yard stretch of beach to yourself. }

Is The Child The Father of the Man?

One of the fundamental themes (and a continuing debate) in developmental psychology concerns the continuity or discontinuity of temperament and personality from infancy through the rest of a child’s life and into adulthood.

Some researchers believe that they have found evidence for the continuity of relatively stable personality traits through development. Despite the clear importance of environmental stressors and other random events, the evidence seems fairly clear that the personality traits that dictate the response pattern to such life events in adulthood is fairly predictable based on early childhood temperament.

{ Scientopia | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

{ Laurent Nivalle }

Are most people nice, happy, trustworthy and interesting? Or do people usually strike you as cold, grumpy and not to be trusted? How you answer can tell us something about you. In a recent psychology article, Wood et al. explore “perceiver effects”, or in other words how your own personality affects your perception of others.

They show that our personality affects perceptions of others with respect to one major factor: how positively we view other people. If we see others as relatively happy, we are also likely to think that they are more trustworthy, nice, interesting and have fewer anti-social tendencies. Seeing others in a more positive light is related to being happy, satisfied with life and emotionally stable yourself.

{ Kris-Stella Trump | Continue reading }

photo { Marc Van Dalen }

We can see each other, but we can never know exactly what’s going on in the other’s head.

It’s partly why psychological science is so hard and it’s why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.

Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an ‘egocentric bias’: because we’re locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement. (…) People trying to put themselves in the other person’s shoes were awful at the task. (…) But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people’s accuracy shot up.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Discoveries by scientists over the past 10 years have elucidated biological sex differences in brain structure, chemistry and function. “These variations occur throughout the brain, in regions involved in language, memory, emotion, vision, hearing and navigation,” explains Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

While women and men struggle to communicate with each other and ponder why they don’t think and react to things in similar ways, science is proving that the differences in our brains may have more serious implications beyond our everyday social interactions. (…)

To better understand the implications of sex differences in the brain, it is important to examine disease entities in depth. Take Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Significant differences exist between men and women who suffer from the disease. (…)

Schizophrenia is another disease that affects men and women differently. Differences include age of onset, symptoms and the time course of the disease. In addition, structural brain differences are apparent. According to Cahill, “men with schizophrenia show significantly larger ventricles than do healthy men, whereas no such enlargement is seen in women with schizophrenia.”

Researchers do not understand the implications of these differences yet, but the study of sex differences in the brain is advancing quickly.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover. (…)

It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. (…)

When the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) tested Prempro, a combination of Premarin [estrogen made from horse urine] and Provera [a synthetic progestin], all it really did was to show that that’s not a very good combination.

{ Bruce McEwen interview/The Dana Foundation | Continue reading }

In his book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today’s Pressures,” Stephen Hinshaw, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that sexualizing little girls — whether through images, music or play — actually undermines healthy sexuality rather than promoting it. Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but, precisely because of that, they don’t connect — and may never learn to connect — sexy attitude to erotic feelings.

That ongoing confusion between desirability and desire may help explain another trend giving parents agita: the number of teenage girls — 22 percent according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy — who have electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

How to maxmize your happiness from a vacation

1. Enjoy the planning process

2. Do your best to make your trip very relaxing (a trip that is just ‘relaxed’ doesn’t quite cut it)

3. Multiple short trips are better than one long trip

{ Psychothalamus | Continue reading }

We’re happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing - an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Astrophysicists think they know how to destroy a black hole. The puzzle is what such destruction would leave behind.

The idea of a body so massive that its escape velocity exceeds the speed of light dates back to the English geologist John Michell who first considered it in 1783. In his scenario, a beam of light would travel away from the massive body until it reached a certain height and then returned to the surface.

Modern thinking about black holes is somewhat different, not least because special relativity tells us that the speed of light is a universal constant. The critical concept that physicists focus on today is the event horizon: a theoretical boundary in space through which light and other objects can pass in one direction but not in the other. Since light cannot escape, the event horizon is what makes a black hole black.

The event horizon is somewhat of a disappointment to many astrophysicists because the interesting physics, the stuff beyond the known laws of the universe, all occurs inside it and is therefore hidden from us.

What physicists would like, therefore, is way to get rid of the event horizon and expose the inner workings to proper scrutiny. Doing this would destroy the black hole but reveal something far more bizarre and exotic.

Today, Ted Jacobson at the University of Maryland and Thomas Sotiriou and the University of Cambridge explain how this might be done in an entertaining and remarkably accessible account of the challenge.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Forms, 1955 | ink, graphite and collage on paper }

Sizing Up the Nightlife. A study of status distinction.

Sociologist Lauren Rivera knows what it takes to get behind the velvet rope. She recommends, “Know someone. Or know someone who knows someone. If you’re a guy, bring attractive women—ideally younger women in designer clothes. Don’t go with other dudes. And doormen are well versed in trendiness, so wear Coach, Prada, Gucci—but don’t show up in a nice suit with DSW shoes.”

No, Rivera doesn’t write an advice column for the rich and the restless. But the Kellogg School of Management professor did go undercover to expose how people evaluate status in a glimpse. Specifically, she wanted to know how the meaty doormen positioned outside exclusive clubs—bouncers in nightlife language—determine who enters.

Sociologists have been studying the dynamics of power relations in social life for decades. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu saw that society was not only stratified by wealth, but also by symbols of status—the valued estimation of one’s honor and worth. Status distinctions between people can create sustaining inequalities by excluding those deemed as lower status from positions of prestige. Through surveys and experiments, sociologists have identified cues people use to evaluate status. The cues include one’s social class, social circles, displays of wealth, gender, race, accent, and taste in food and art. (…)

Yet the qualities people think they look for may not be what they actually react to at the office, at dinner parties, or on the street. Therefore, answers to a sociologist’s interview questions may not reflect real life. Furthermore, when a job, date, or club access is at stake, the terms one uses to judge competence or worthiness may change. “The laboratory is a great place to parse out variables, but in real life, status is complex and the way people draw distinctions is different in a natural setting,” says Rivera.

{ Kellogg Insight | Continue reading }

image { Bela Borsodi, Cat flaps }

Q: You’ve devoted your career to studying hormonal effects on the brain, including sex differences. What surprises you most about how male and female brains differ?

McEwen: There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ­ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover.

Q: Has science done enough to take into account sex differences in basic and clinical research?

McEwen: Science has not done enough to take into account sex differences in either basic or clinical research. It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ­ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. The NIH now has an office of Women’s Health Research and there are a number of private and university-sponsored programs in women’s health research. This has revitalized the study of sex differences, meaning, in large part, the study of whole animals and how they differ behaviorally and physiologically. You can’t just assume that what works in the male is going to work the same way in the female.

{ Sex Differences in the Brain, Inetrview with Bruce McEwen | The DANA Foundation | Continue reading }

unrelated bonus:

Few studies have examined the differences between spirituality and religion in adolescents. Now, a University of Missouri researcher is exploring these differences by determining how youth define and practice spirituality separate from religion. Defining spirituality can help reveal its impact on adolescent development. (…)

Anthony James, a graduate student in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS), examined adolescents’ responses to the question, “What does it mean to be a spiritual young person?” The responses reveal that youth describe their spiritual behavior in terms of seven categories related to personal and social development, including:

• To have purpose
• To have the bond of connections, including those to a higher power (typically God), people and nature.
• To have a foundation of well-being, including joy and fulfillment, energy and peace
• To have conviction
• To have self-confidence
• To have an impetus for virtue; for example, having motivation to do the right thing and tell the truth

{ University of Missouri | Continue reading }

Lithium has been established for more than 50 years as one of the most effective treatments for manic depression, clinically termed bipolar disorder.

However, scientists have never been entirely sure exactly why it is beneficial.

Now, new research from Cardiff University scientists suggests a possible mechanism for why Lithium works, opening the door for better understanding of the illness and potentially more effective treatments.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }

{ The causes of logistics uncertainty | Full story }

For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook­haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.

Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.

Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.

Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions.

The team created something called a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of “soup” that results when energies reach high enough levels to break up protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter.

{ Suzanne Taylor Muzzin/Yale Bulletin | Continue reading | Thanks John-Anthony! }

photo { Isabelle Pateer }