An elusive illusion

Human identity

A scientific exhibition examines what makes human beings individuals

WITH the construction of the railways in the 19th century, a new sociological phenomenon was born: the travelling criminal. Until then, police had relied on local communities to recognise a bad apple in their midst, but now the felons were on the move, wreaking havoc in communities which had no knowledge of their past and hence no reason to be wary. For law enforcers trying to contain the problem by sharing descriptions of known recidivists, it became imperative to answer one question: what is it that identifies someone as a particular person?

This question has long troubled humanity, of course, and it is explored in all its facets in a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. One practical application lies in the forensic arena. The first solution offered, branding, was simple and effective. But even in a society that preferred to believe that criminals were born and not made, this was soon deemed unacceptable. So there was a need to find something innate to human beings that remains constant from the cradle to the grave, and that is sufficiently differentiated in the population to make it useful in identifying individuals.

Alphonse Bertillon, who appears in one of the identity cards he invented, came up with a system that combined photography (the profile and face-on photos that police still use today) with a range of bodily measurements. His system was widely taken up until Sir Francis Galton, a colleague, rival and inveterate classifier, realised the individualising potential of fingerprints. These held sway for a century until, in 1984, Sir Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University stumbled on an even more powerful personal barcode: DNA.

Embedded in this short history is all the elusiveness of human identity; each new advance reveals the flaws in earlier systems. Go to the website of the New York-based Innocence Project to see the latest tally of exonerations that have taken place in America, after DNA evidence showed those convictions to be unsafe. At the time of writing, the figure comes to 246. Mistaken eyewitness identification is a major culprit, but fingerprint misidentification is cited too.

Ironically, our facility for recognising faces may be to blame. The brain has evolved to look for patterns, and when one is incomplete it will fill in the gaps, sometimes leaping to the wrong conclusion, as Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, discovered when he was wrongly implicated in the 2004 Madrid bombings on the basis of a single, poor-quality fingerprint.

So what of DNA? Within hours of reaching a crime scene, police may now have information that helps identify suspects. In the courtroom, DNA trumps all other identifiers. But it has its limitations. With ever more minute quantities becoming detectable, contamination is a serious issue. The Phantom of Heilbronn murdered her way across Europe until, last March, she was discovered not to exist. The DNA found at each crime scene actually came from a female worker in the factory that manufactured the cotton swabs used to collect evidence.

There is another problem with DNA. When the technology allows for a person’s entire genome to be read from a single drop of blood, it may well constitute a gold standard for identification. But for now analysts work with a snapshot of that genome, represented by an arbitrary number of markers spaced along it. If there are gaps to be filled, the brain will fill them, which could make it vulnerable to the same kind of errors as its predecessors.

From the very real travelling criminal, via the Phantom of Heilbronn, the Wellcome exhibition returns to the central question. Perhaps identity, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, and if people want to see one and not the other, they need to invent a new way of looking.

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Full article: http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15124990&source=hptextfeature

Photo: http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/identity.aspx

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Uncommon Knowledge

I suddenly feel so…religious

AS THE SAYING goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. Yet, according to a new study, that’s not the only place where being surrounded by the enemy makes people into believers. Psychologists at Arizona State University showed dating profi les of attractive men and women to students. Men who viewed profi les of other men — and women who viewed profiles of other women — subsequently reported that they were more religious, agreeing with statements like “I believe in God” “We’d be better off if religion played a bigger role in people’s lives,” and “Religious beliefs are important to me in my everyday decisions.” It’s not clear whether this effect is due to a sincere (albeit transient) infusion of religious sentiment, or whether people are simply trying to make a good impression in the face of competition for mates.

Li, Y. et al.,”Mating Competitors Increase Religious Beliefs,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).

Living in crazy times

YOU DON’T HAVE to be Dr. Phil to know that a lot of people these days suffer from psychological problems. But is this state of affairs “normal”? Or is this a growing trend? A team of researchers across the country analyzed data from psychological tests on high school and college students over many decades and found an upward trend in various pathologies. The trend does not correlate with economic cycles, but is instead correlated with cultural factors like materialism, philosophy of life, and the divorce rate. The authors also note that their findings may underestimate the trend, given that so many people are now on medication.

Twenge, J. et al., “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology among Young Americans, 1938-2007: A Cross- Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI”, Clinical Psychology Review (forthcoming).

How low wages make us fatter

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IN THE FIGHT against obesity, one of the main culprits is (cheap) fast food. Therefore, it stands to reason that reducing the cost of fast food — for example, by keeping the wages of fast-food workers low — makes it easier to eat more. Researchers tested this hypothesis using government data on minimum wages (adjusted for inflation) and health. They found that a lower minimum wage is indeed associated with a higher body mass index, especially among the heaviest people, and may explain 10 percent of the increase in body mass index since 1970. While it’s possible that the effect of a lower minimum wage is due to reduced spending power of minimum-wage workers — making it harder for them to afford healthier food — the data suggest that the effect is more pronounced among higher-income people, which supports the cheap-food hypothesis, especially since higher-income people are more likely to eat out and have experienced the greatest gains in obesity in recent years.

Meltzer, D. & Chen, Z., “The Impact of Minimum Wage Rates on Body Weight in the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research (November 2009).

Luxury ate my morals

IF POWER corrupts, then what does luxury do? In a new study, business school researchers fi nd that it doesn’t take much for luxury to do its thing. Students reviewed pictures of either luxury or nonluxury shoes and watches. Later, they were asked to evaluate several business scenarios from the perspective of a CEO. Students who had been exposed to the luxury items were significantly more willing to produce a polluting car, sell buggy software, and sell a violence-inducing video game. In addition, these students were also less likely to identify prosocial words in a letter scramble. In other words, priming people with luxury makes them more selfish. The authors wonder if managers make different decisions “at a luxury resort as opposed to a modest conference room.”Chua, R. & Zou, X., “The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making,” Harvard University (November 2009).

The shifting landscape of college

THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom is that it has become a lot harder to get into college. But an analysis by a leading education economist finds that “only the top 10 percent of colleges are more selective now than they were in 1962,” while the bottom half are actually less selective. It turns out that the number of spaces has grown faster than the number of high school graduates, and, meanwhile, the sorting of students into colleges has been transformed by the same forces driving globalization. In the old days, students rarely ventured far from home, but nowadays the college market is much less sensitive to location, thanks to falling communication and transportation costs, and much more sensitive to competitiveness, thanks to test scores and college rankings. And, for those who complain about rising tuition, it’s worth noting that tuition usually doesn’t cover the total cost of student-oriented resources. At top schools, the annual growth rate of tuition has been 6 percent, but the annual growth rate in subsidies for students has been 25 percent; at those schools, tuition now covers only one-fifth of the cost of college.Hoxby, C., “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2009).Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist.

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/uncommon_knowledge/

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The mystery of Zomia

In the lawless mountain realms of Asia, a Yale professor finds a case against civilization

Picture a map of the world color-coded to represent not countries, but altitude. In North America, Appalachia would be a long, topographical peninsula between the densely settled Eastern Seaboard and the fertile plains of the Midwest. In South America, the western population centers would be an elevated archipelago above malarial lowlands; in Northern Europe, the Benelux plains and polders would be difficult to discern from the North Sea.

And in southern Asia, stretching from the Vietnamese highlands up into the Tibetan plateau and as far west as Afghanistan, would be a single sprawling mountain realm that is home to more than 100 million people. This is Zomia.

Zomia is a rugged swath of Asia that for 2,000 years has remained culturally aloof from the traditional centers of power and the pull of empires. Its inhabitants, Asia’s “hill people,” have earned a reputation for egalitarianism, insurrection, and independence. Up until the second half of the 20th century, many of the societies there remained nonliterate and supported themselves through trade, smuggling, and Iron-Age practices like slash-and-burn agriculture.

Though never seeing itself as a country apart, this distinctive zone has recently begun to gain broader attention. The historian Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam coined the name Zomia in 2002, as a way of challenging the continent’s traditional geographical boundaries. And this fall, the Yale political scientist James Scott has published a book making a far more ambitious argument: Zomia, he says, offers a sort of counter-history of the evolution of human civilization.

In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry.

What Zomia presents, Scott argues in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,” is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace.

“The reason why some people didn’t become civilized, why some people didn’t ‘develop,’ may not be a question of them not having the talent, or being backward and so on, but may be historically produced by their desire to avoid what they saw as the inconveniences of states,” says Scott.

Scott’s anarchist history of Zomia is controversial, both in its claims about the predatory nature of the state and in its portrait of Zomia’s past. Other scholars of Asia – and Southeast Asia in particular – charge him with overgeneralizing about the region, and with seeing political motives in decisions and traditions that in fact have their roots in ecological necessity, happenstance, or even the profit motive.

But Scott, and other scholars of Zomia, are also pressing for a change in how we see the political world. In looking beyond national borders, or politically defined regions like East Asia or Southeast Asia, and in applying different kinds of organizational logic – in other words, in thinking of areas like Zomia as places in themselves – they see a chance not only to paint a more coherent portrait of history, but also to better address the troublesome and sometimes violent politics that can erupt in what are traditionally seen as the world’s marginal border regions.

“There are all kinds of ways of cutting up the world,” says Scott, “and it partly depends on what you want to understand.”

The image of Asia has been shaped by its great empires: the Han and Tang dynasties of China, the Gupta Empire and the Mughals in South Asia, the Thai and Malay city-states. These civilizations grew up on coasts or in fertile river valleys, the largest engulfing vast stretches of territory and leaving behind rich historical records in everything from tombs and temples to treatises and household goods. Their cultures still dominate the identities of the countries where their descendents live.

All this, however, is lowland history. Zomia is an alternate world, a realm of mutable, outlaw cultures, creating almost no empires and resisting being incorporated into those that originated elsewhere. Its people include the Hmong, the Wa, the Karen, the Lahu, and the PaO. Its exact borders are up for debate: Scott’s definition of Zomia is smaller than some, stretching from Vietnam up into China, but west only as far as northeast India, covering a region traditionally known as the Southeast Asian massif.

The defining characteristic of this expanse of thickly wooded hills and mountains is what Scott calls “friction of terrain.” Travel is arduous and inhabitants are difficult to dislodge or discipline from below. In Zomia, elevation not only compounds distance but supersedes it, so that people living several hundred miles apart but at the same altitude can have nearly identical cultures – but little in common with neighbors who live lower or higher in the hills.

All of which makes Zomia a place where state power has made itself felt only weakly, if at all. As Scott writes, Zomia “represents one of the world’s longest-standing and largest refuges of populations who live in the shadow of states but who have not yet been fully incorporated.”

The 20th century, with its arsenal of distance-devouring technologies from the airplane to the Internet, has made it easier for states to smooth the friction of landscape, and recent decades have also seen a determined campaign among Asian states to bring their highland regions into the fold, often by settling them with lowland people more loyal to the national government. As a result, since World War II, Zomia has lost much of its distinctive wildness.

But there are still pockets of fierce resistance. In the mountains along the Myanmar-China border, for example, the Wa have carved out what is essentially their own unofficial narco-state, funded by poppy production and heroin smuggling and protected by a well-equipped 20,000-strong army.

The best known of the Zomian populations, at least in the United States, is the Hmong, many of whom fought alongside the United States against the North Vietnamese and Laotian communists in the Vietnam War. More than any other highland people, the Hmong define themselves in opposition to the ethnic Han of China, against whom they have risen up in rebellion, on a regular basis, for millennia. The crackdowns that follow these sometimes massive rebellions – and, most recently, the crackdown that followed the communist victory in the Vietnam War – have driven the Hmong farther and farther into the hills, and today several million live in the massif, mostly in China and often at elevations above 3,000 feet.

Other peoples, like the Karen on the Myanmar-Thailand border, have a similar history of revolt against lowland governments – inspired, in many instances, by charismatic prophets – followed by suppression and retreat into the highlands.

The cultures that have emerged have tended to be fiercely nonhierarchical. The Wa, for example, limit ostentatious feast-throwing and forbid the wealthy from conducting sacrifices that might be seen as giving them chief-like status. The Kachin have a long tradition of killing chiefs who are seen as overreaching. The Lahu, of China’s Yunnan province, have no level of political organization above the hamlet. All of these traditions actively prevent a larger, more complex society from emerging.

The antistate orientation of these societies extends, in Scott’s description, even into the sort of agriculture they practice. Slash-and-burn, or “swidden,” agriculture – clearing patches of woodland for crops and moving on after each harvest to allow the soil to replenish itself – is usually seen as a crude antecedent to the more intensive farming practiced in the lowlands and most of the developed world. But swiddening and other forms of itinerant agriculture, Scott argues (borrowing from the work of the mid-20th-century French anthropologist Pierre Clastres), are often adopted in preference to fixed agriculture, by people who know how to do both. The reason, Scott says, is that swiddening provides a freedom that fixed agriculture does not. Not being tied down to one laboriously cultivated piece of land, farmers can pick up and move on if they find political conditions onerous.

In his most speculative and contested claim, Scott argues that even the lack of a written language in many Zomian societies is an adaptive measure and a conscious societal choice. For peasants, writing was, first and foremost, a tool of state control – it was the instrument the elite used to extract money, labor, and military service from them. As a result, Scott argues, when those peasants escaped into the hills they discarded writing in an attempt to ensure that similar coercive hierarchies didn’t arise in the new societies they formed.

“I’ve studied peasant rebellions, and one of first things that early peasant rebellions always do is to attack the records office,” says Scott. “They associate writing with their oppression.”

Scott’s book has the potential to gain a readership far beyond the world of Southeast Asian studies. But among others with an intimate knowledge of the part of the world he writes about, he has come in for criticisms for intellectual overreach.

Scott’s anarchist-tinged view of the state’s relationship to outlying populations, for example, has been contested by anthropologists who study the people of the Southeast Asian highlands. In reality, several scholars argue, the relationship isn’t simply one of appropriation, but a more complex mix of mutual suspicion and reliance. For many Zomians, the lowland state is not just an oppressor, but a source – often capricious – of goods and services and even protection.

“I’ve done field research in highland communities that have had longstanding relations with the state,” says Hjorleifur Jonsson, an anthropologist at Arizona State University. “From their perspective, it wasn’t about being controlled or not, it was about access to very unevenly distributed benefits.”

And where Scott sees splintering and flight, anthropologists see the same sort of motivation that lured settlers into the American West: the prospect of available land and economic improvement. And that, more than political rebellion and evasion, also shapes the sort of crops they grow and how they grow them.

“Certainly there are instances of what he’s talking about, there’s no question,” says Charles Keyes, an anthropologist and emeritus professor at the University of Washington. “But they’re the exception rather than the rule.”

Scott offers rebuttals to the specific critiques leveled against him – for example, he argues that, since profitable fixed agriculture is possible in the highlands, then other, more political factors must be driving so many people there to swidden agriculture. And the beneficent welfare state that Johnsson describes, Scott points out, is a relatively recent invention.

Scott cheerfully concedes, though, the possibility that he may have overgeneralized in the pursuit of a cohesive argument.

“Uncle,” he said, smiling, when asked about it in an interview in his Yale office. “But the question is whether I am basically right.”

What the inhabitants of Zomia, in all their diversity, broadly show, he argues, is that given sanctuary by geography, people can prove as eager to reject the basic tenets of civilization as to embrace them, and that the communities that result aren’t necessarily caldrons of savagery and chaos.

“I would be tickled pink if people wanted to work this out and say where it fit and where it didn’t fit,” he says, not only in Southeast Asia, but all over the world.

In history and political science, much recent scholarship has sought out new vantage points from which to see modern society and its roots – looking at politics from the point of view of the disenfranchised, for example, rather than generals and political leaders. But what Scott is doing is something more radical. He’s arguing that we need to look past our notion that civilization itself represents a desirable goal, and realize that for centuries, people living in a huge part of the world took a look at what civilized society had to offer and passed.

“If I had my way,” he says, “you’d never think about civilization in the same way again.”

Scott is not suggesting that we chuck society and head for the hills. He believes there’s much that the modern welfare state offers that makes our lives demonstrably better. Asked whether he considers himself an anarchist, he says it’s something he hasn’t entirely figured out – his next book will be a collection of essays on the question.

Still, for the majority of the world’s inhabitants who will never know life outside of a large organized state, it’s important to keep in mind, he says, that there’s nothing inherently natural about the way the modern state emerged or the shape it took. And it’s not just starry-eyed hippies and kibbutzim who have asserted otherwise.

Nor are national boundaries always the most helpful way of framing the world. Zomia offers a fresh and, Scott would argue, more logical way of looking at much of Asia – a part of the world that, despite its importance on the global stage, remains politically and culturally opaque to many in the West. The seeming lawlessness along the borders of Southeast Asia, the restiveness in Tibet and other Chinese provinces aren’t isolated disturbances, he suggests, but rather part of the larger, centuries-long clash between Zomia and its many neighbors.

And through that contentious history, Zomia has exerted its own influence. Scott asks whether we can fully comprehend China’s magnificent cultural history or its patriarchal Confucian traditions without an understanding of the highland “barbarians” long at its borders, doggedly refusing the blandishments of civilization. Just as the anti-authoritarianism of the Hmong and the Wa only makes sense in the context of their long struggle with lowland power, so it is hard to understand the Asian giants of today without acknowledging the fugitive spirit of Zomia lurking in their hills.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.

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Full article and photo (1): http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/

Photo (2):http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300152289

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The Science of Success

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.

At the outset of their study, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleagues had screened 2,408 children via parental questionnaire, and they were now focusing on the 25 percent rated highest by their parents in externalizing behaviors. Lab observations had confirmed these parental ratings. 

Bakermans-Kranenburg meant to change the kids’ behavior. In an intervention her lab had developed, she or another researcher visited each of 120 families six times over eight months; filmed the mother and child in everyday activities, including some requiring obedience or cooperation; and then edited the film into teachable moments to show to the mothers. A similar group of high-externalizing children received no intervention. 

To the researchers’ delight, the intervention worked. The moms, watching the videos, learned to spot cues they’d missed before, or to respond differently to cues they’d seen but had reacted to poorly. Quite a few mothers, for instance, had agreed only reluctantly to read picture books to their fidgety, difficult kids, saying they wouldn’t sit still for it. But according to Bakermans-Kranenburg, when these mothers viewed the playback they were “surprised to see how much pleasure it was for the child—and for them.” Most mothers began reading to their children regularly, producing what Bakermans-Kranenburg describes as “a peaceful time that they had dismissed as impossible.” 

And the bad behaviors dropped. A year after the intervention ended, the toddlers who’d received it had reduced their externalizing scores by more than 16 percent, while a nonintervention control group improved only about 10 percent (as expected, due to modest gains in self-control with age). And the mothers’ responses to their children became more positive and constructive. 

Few programs change parent-child dynamics so successfully. But gauging the efficacy of the intervention wasn’t the Leiden team’s only goal, or even its main one. The team was also testing a radical new hypothesis about how genes shape behavior—a hypothesis that stands to revise our view of not only mental illness and behavioral dysfunction but also human evolution. 

Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life. 

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them. 

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience. 

The evidence for this view is mounting. Much of it has existed for years, in fact, but the focus on dysfunction in behavioral genetics has led most researchers to overlook it. This tunnel vision is easy to explain, according to Jay Belsky, a child-development psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. “Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability,” he told me recently. “They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet.” 

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care. 

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids. 

In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements. 

This orchid hypothesis also answers a fundamental evolutionary question that the vulnerability hypothesis cannot. If variants of certain genes create mainly dysfunction and trouble, how have they survived natural selection? Genes so maladaptive should have been selected out. Yet about a quarter of all human beings carry the best-documented gene variant for depression, while more than a fifth carry the variant that Bakermans-Kranenburg studied, which is associated with externalizing, antisocial, and violent behaviors, as well as ADHD, anxiety, and depression. The vulnerability hypothesis can’t account for this. The orchid hypothesis can. 

This is a transformative, even startling view of human frailty and strength. For more than a decade, proponents of the vulnerability hypothesis have argued that certain gene variants underlie some of humankind’s most grievous problems: despair, alienation, cruelties both petty and epic. The orchid hypothesis accepts that proposition. But it adds, tantalizingly, that these same troublesome genes play a critical role in our species’ astounding success. 

The orchid hypothesis—sometimes called the plasticity hypothesis, the sensitivity hypothesis, or the differential-susceptibility hypothesis—is too new to have been tested widely. Many researchers, even those in behavioral science, know little or nothing of the idea. A few—chiefly those with broad reservations about ever tying specific genes to specific behaviors—express concerns. But as more supporting evidence emerges, the most common reaction to the idea among researchers and clinicians is excitement. A growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists, child-development experts, geneticists, ethologists, and others are beginning to believe that, as Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it, “It’s time to take this seriously.” 

With the data gathered in the video intervention, the Leiden team began to test the orchid hypothesis. Could it be, they wondered, that the children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones? To find out, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleague Marinus van Ijzendoorn began to study the genetic makeup of the children in their experiment. Specifically, they focused on one particular “risk allele” associated with ADHD and externalizing behavior. (An allele is any of the variants of a gene that takes more than one form; such genes are known as polymorphisms. A risk allele, then, is simply a gene variant that increases your likelihood of developing a problem.) 

Bakermans-Kranenburg and van Ijzendoorn wanted to see whether kids with a risk allele for ADHD and externalizing behaviors (a variant of a dopamine-processing gene known as DRD4) would respond as much to positive environments as to negative. A third of the kids in the study had this risk allele; the other two-thirds had a version considered a “protective allele,” meaning it made them less vulnerable to bad environments. The control group, who did not receive the intervention, had a similar distribution. 

Both the vulnerability hypothesis and the orchid hypothesis predict that in the control group the kids with a risk allele should do worse than those with a protective one. And so they did—though only slightly. Over the course of 18 months, the genetically “protected” kids reduced their externalizing scores by 11 percent, while the “at-risk” kids cut theirs by 7 percent. Both gains were modest ones that the researchers expected would come with increasing age. Although statistically significant, the difference between the two groups was probably unnoticeable otherwise. 

The real test, of course, came in the group that got the intervention. How would the kids with the risk allele respond? According to the vulnerability model, they should improve less than their counterparts with the protective allele; the modest upgrade that the video intervention created in their environment wouldn’t offset their general vulnerability. 

As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles, the Leiden team concluded, really can create not just risk but possibility. 

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers. “Are there any enduring human frailties that don’t have this other, redemptive side to them?” 

As I researched this story, I thought about such questions a lot, including how they pertained to my own temperament and genetic makeup. Having felt the black dog’s teeth a few times over the years, I’d considered many times having one of my own genes assayed—specifically, the serotonin-transporter gene, also called the SERT gene, or 5-HTTLPR. This gene helps regulate the processing of serotonin, a chemical messenger crucial to mood, among other things. The two shorter, less efficient versions of the gene’s three forms, known as short/short and short/long (or S/S and S/L), greatly magnify your risk of serious depression—if you hit enough rough road. The gene’s long/long form, on the other hand, appears to be protective. 

In the end, I’d always backed away from having my SERT gene assayed. Who wants to know his risk of collapsing under pressure? Given my family and personal history, I figured I probably carried the short/long allele, which would make me at least moderately depression-prone. If I had it tested I might get the encouraging news that I had the long/long allele. Then again, I might find I had the dreaded, riskier short/short allele. This was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. 

But as I looked into the orchid hypothesis and began to think in terms of plasticity rather than risk, I decided maybe I did want to find out. So I called a researcher I know in New York who does depression research involving the serotonin-transporter gene. The next day, FedEx left a package on my front porch containing a specimen cup. I spat into it, examined what I’d produced, and spat again. Then I screwed the cap tight, slid the vial into its little shipping tube, and put it back on the porch. An hour later, the FedEx guy took it away. 

Of all the evidence supporting the orchid-gene hypothesis, perhaps the most compelling comes from the work of Stephen Suomi, a rhesus-monkey researcher who heads a sprawling complex of labs and monkey habitats in the Maryland countryside—the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology. For 41 years, first at the University of Wisconsin and then, beginning in 1983, in the Maryland lab the NIH built specifically for him, Suomi has been studying the roots of temperament and behavior in rhesus monkeys—which share about 95 percent of our DNA, a number exceeded only in apes. Rhesus monkeys differ from humans in obvious and fundamental ways. But their close resemblance to us in crucial social and genetic respects reveals much about the roots of our own behavior—and has helped give rise to the orchid hypothesis. 

Suomi learned his trade as a student and protégé of, and then a direct successor to, Harry Harlow, one of the 20th century’s most influential and problematic behavioral scientists. When Harlow started his work, in the 1930s, the study of childhood development was dominated by a ruthlessly mechanistic behavioralism. The movement’s leading figure in the United States, John Watson, considered mother love “a dangerous instrument.” He urged parents to leave crying babies alone; to never hold them to give pleasure or comfort; and to kiss them only occasionally, on the forehead. Mothers were important less for their affection than as conditioners of behavior. 

With a series of ingenious but sometimes disturbingly cruel experiments on monkeys, Harlow broke with this cool behavioralism. His most famous experiment showed that baby rhesus monkeys, raised alone or with same-age peers, preferred a foodless but fuzzy terrycloth surrogate “mother” over a wire-mesh version that freely dispensed meals. He showed that these infants desperately wanted to bond, and that depriving them of physical, emotional, and social attachment could create a near-paralyzing dysfunction. In the 1950s this work provided critical evidence for the emerging theory of infant attachment: a theory that, with its emphasis on rich, warm parent-child bonds and happy early experiences, still dominates child-development theory (and parenting books) today. 

In the years since Suomi took over Harlow’s Wisconsin lab as a 28-year-old wunderkind, he has both broadened and sharpened the inquiry Harlow started. New tools now let Suomi examine not just his monkeys’ temperaments but also the physiological and genetic underpinnings of their behavior. His lab’s naturalistic environment allows him to focus not just on mother-child interactions but also on the family and social environments that shape and respond to the monkeys’ behavior. “Life in a rhesus-monkey colony is very, very complicated,” Suomi says. The monkeys must learn to navigate a social system that is highly nuanced and hierarchical. “Those who can manage this, do well,” Suomi told me. “Those who don’t, don’t.” 

Rhesus monkeys typically mature at about four or five years and live to about 20 in the wild. Their development parallels our own at a fairly neat 1-to-4 ratio: a 1-year-old monkey is much like a 4-year-old human being, a 4-year-old monkey is like a 16-year-old human being, and so on. A mother typically gives birth annually, starting at around age 4. Though the monkeys copulate all year, the females’ fertility seasons are only a couple of months long. Since they tend to occur together, a troop usually produces crops of babies that have same-age peers. 

For the first month, the mother keeps the baby attached to her or within arm’s reach. At about two weeks, the baby starts to explore, at first within only a few feet of its mother. These forays grow in frequency, duration, and distance over the next six to seven months, but rarely do the babies pass out of the mother’s sight line or earshot. If the young monkey gets frightened, it scampers back to the mother. Often she’ll see trouble coming and pull the infant close. 

When the monkey is about eight months old—a rhesus preschooler—its mother’s mating time arrives. Anticipating another child, the mother allows the youngster to spend more and more time with its cousins, with older siblings in the maternal line, and with occasional visitors from other families or troops. The youngster’s family group, friends, and allies still provide protection when necessary. 

A maturing female will stay with this group all her life. A male, however, will leave—often under pressure from the females as he gets rowdier and rougher—when he’s 4 or 5, or roughly the equivalent of a 16-to-20-year-old person. At first he’ll join an all-male gang that lives more or less separately. After a few months to a year, he’ll leave the gang and try to charm, push, or sidle his way into a new family or troop. If he succeeds, he becomes one of several adult males to serve as mate, companion, and muscle for the several females. But only about half the males make it that far. Their transition period exposes them to attacks from other young males, attacks from rival gangs, attacks from new troop members if they play their cards wrong, and predation during any time they lack a gang’s or troop’s protection. Many die in the transition. 

Very early in his work, Suomi identified two types of monkeys that had trouble managing these relations. One type, which Suomi calls a “depressed” or “neurotic” monkey, accounted for about 20 percent of each generation. These monkeys are slow to leave their mothers’ sides when young. As adults they remain tentative, withdrawn, and anxious. They form fewer bonds and alliances than other monkeys do. 

The other type, generally male, is what Suomi calls a “bully”: an unusually and indiscriminately aggressive monkey. These monkeys accounted for 5 to 10 percent of each generation. “Rhesus monkeys are fairly aggressive in general, even when young,” Suomi says, “and their play involves a lot of rough-and-tumble. But usually no one gets hurt—except with these guys. They do stupid things most other monkeys know not to. They repeatedly confront dominant monkeys. They get between moms and their kids. They don’t know how to calibrate their aggression, and they don’t know how to read signs they should back off. Their conflicts tend to always escalate.” These bullies also score poorly in tests of monkey self-control. For instance, in a “cocktail hour” test that Suomi sometimes uses, monkeys get unrestricted access to a neutral-tasting alcoholic drink for an hour. Most monkeys have three or four drinks and then stop. The bullies, Suomi says, “drink until they drop.” 

The neurotics and the bullies meet quite different fates. The neurotics mature late but do okay. The females become jumpy mothers, but how their children turn out depends on the environment in which the mothers raise them. If it’s secure, they become more or less normal; if it’s insecure, they become jumpy too. The males, meanwhile, stay within their mothers’ family circles an unusually long time—up to eight years. They’re allowed to do so because they don’t make trouble. And their longer stay lets them acquire enough social savvy and diplomatic deference so that when they leave, they usually work their way into new troops more successfully than do males who break away younger. They don’t get to mate as prolifically as more confident, more assertive males do; they seldom rise high in their new troops; and their low status can put them at risk in conflicts. But they’re less likely to die trying to get in the door. They usually survive and pass on their genes. 

The bullies fare much worse. Even as babies and youths, they seldom make friends. And by the time they’re 2 or 3, their extreme aggression leads the troop’s females to simply run them out, by group force if necessary. Then the male gangs reject them, as do other troops. Isolated, most of them die before reaching adulthood. Few mate. 

Suomi saw early on that each of these monkey types tended to come from a particular type of mother. Bullies came from harsh, censorious mothers who restrained their children from socializing. Anxious monkeys came from anxious, withdrawn, distracted mothers. The heritages were pretty clear-cut. But how much of these different personality types passed through genes, and how much derived from the manner in which the monkeys were raised? 

To find out, Suomi split the variables. He took nervous infants of nervous mothers—babies who in standardized newborn testing were already jumpy themselves—and gave them to especially nurturing “supermoms.” These babies turned out very close to normal. Meanwhile, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago took secure, high-scoring infants from secure, nurturing mothers and had them raised by abusive mothers. This setting produced nervous monkeys. 

The lesson seemed clear. Genes played a role—but environment played an equally important one. 

When tools for the study of genes first became available, in the late 1990s, Suomi was quick to use them to more directly examine the balance between genes and environment in shaping his monkeys’ development. He almost immediately struck gold, with a project he started in 1997 with Klaus-Peter Lesch, a psychiatrist from the University of Würzburg. The year before, Lesch had published data revealing, for the first time, that the human serotonin-transporter gene had three variants (the previously mentioned short/short, short/long, and long/long alleles) and that the two shorter versions magnified risk for depression, anxiety, and other problems. Asked to genotype Suomi’s monkeys, Lesch did so. He found that they had the same three variants, though the short/short form was rare. 

Suomi, Lesch, and NIH colleague J. Dee Higley set about doing a type of study now recognized as a classic “gene-by-environment” study. First they took cerebral spinal fluid from 132 juvenile rhesus monkeys and analyzed it for a serotonin metabolite, called 5-HIAA, that’s considered a reliable indicator of how much serotonin the nervous system is processing. Lesch’s studies had already shown that depressed people with the short/long serotonin-transporter allele had lower 5-HIAA levels, reflecting less-efficient serotonin processing. He and Suomi wanted to see if the finding would hold true in monkeys. If it did, it would provide more evidence for the genetic dynamic shown in Lesch’s studies. And finding such a dynamic in rhesus monkeys would confirm their value as genetic and behavioral models for studying human behavior. 

After Suomi, Lesch, and Higley had grouped the monkeys’ 5-HIAA levels according to their serotonin genotype (short/long or long/long, but not short/short, which was too rare to be of use), they also sorted the results by whether the monkeys had been raised by their mothers or as orphans with only same-aged peers. When their colleague Allison Bennett charted the results on a bar graph showing 5-HIAA levels, all of the mother-reared monkeys, no matter which allele they had, showed serotonin processing in the normal range. The metabolite levels of the peer-raised monkeys, however, diverged sharply by genotype: the short/long monkeys in that group processed serotonin highly inefficiently (a risk factor for depression and anxiety), whereas the long/long monkeys processed it robustly. When Suomi saw the results, he realized that he finally had proof of a behaviorally relevant gene-by-environment interaction in his monkeys. “I took one look at that graph,” he told me, “and said, ‘Let’s go pop some champagne.’” 

Suomi and Lesch published their results in 2002 in Molecular Psychiatry, a relatively new journal about behavioral genetics. The paper formed part of a surge of gene-by-environment studies of mood and behavioral disorders. That same year, two psychologists at King’s College, London, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, published the first of two large longitudinal studies (both drawing on life histories of hundreds of New Zealanders) that would prove particularly influential. The first, published in Science, showed that the short allele of another major neurotransmitter-processing gene (known as the MAOA gene) sharply increased the chance of antisocial behavior in human adults who’d been abused as children. The second, in 2003 and also in Science, showed that people with short/short or short/long serotonin-transporter alleles, if exposed to stress, faced a higher-than-normal risk of depression. 

These and dozens of similar studies were critical to establishing the vulnerability hypothesis over the last few years. Yet many of these studies also contained data that supported the orchid hypothesis—but went unnoticed or unremarked at the time. (Jay Belsky, the child-development psychologist, has recently documented more than two dozen such studies.) Both of Caspi and Moffitt’s seminal papers in Science, for example, contain raw data and graphs showing that for people who did not face severe or repeated stress, the risk alleles in question heightened resistance to aggression or depression. And the data in Suomi and Lesch’s 2002 Molecular Psychiatry paper, in which peer-reared monkeys with the risky serotonin-transporter allele appeared to process serotonin inefficiently, also showed that mother-reared infants with that same allele processed serotonin 10 percent more efficiently than even mother-raised infants who had the supposedly protective allele. 

It’s fascinating to examine these studies with the orchid hypothesis in mind. Focus on just the bad-environment results, and you see only vulnerability. Focus on the good-environment results, and you see that the risk alleles usually produce better results than the protective ones. Securely raised 7-year-old boys with the DRD4 risk allele for ADHD, for instance, show fewer symptoms than their securely raised protective-allele peers. Non-abused teenagers with that same risk allele show lower rates of conduct disorder. Non-abused teens with the risky serotonin-transporter allele suffer less depression than do non-abused teens with the protective allele. Other examples abound—even though, as Jay Belsky points out, the studies were designed and analyzed primarily to spot negative vulnerabilities. Belsky suspects that as researchers start to design studies that test for gene sensitivity rather than just risk amplification, and as they increasingly train their sights on positive environments and traits, the evidence for the orchid hypothesis will only grow. 

Suomi gathered plenty of that evidence himself in the years after his 2002 study. He found, for example, that monkeys who carried the supposedly risky serotonin-transporter allele, and who had nurturing mothers and secure social positions, did better at many key tasks—creating playmates as youths, making and drawing on alliances later on, and sensing and responding to conflicts and other dangerous situations—than similarly blessed monkeys who held the supposedly protective allele. They also rose higher in their respective dominance hierarchies. They were more successful. 

Suomi made another remarkable discovery. He and others assayed the serotonin-transporter genes of seven of the 22 species of macaque, the primate genus to which the rhesus monkey belongs. None of these species had the serotonin-transporter polymorphism that Suomi was beginning to see as a key to rhesus monkeys’ flexibility. Studies of other key behavioral genes in primates produced similar results; according to Suomi, assays of the SERT gene in other primates studied to date, including chimps, baboons, and gorillas, turned up “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The science is young, and not all the data is in. But so far, among all primates, only rhesus monkeys and human beings seem to have multiple polymorphisms in genes heavily associated with behavior. “It’s just us and the rhesus,” Suomi says. 

This discovery got Suomi thinking about another distinction we share with rhesus monkeys. Most primates can thrive only in their specific environments. Move them and they perish. But two kinds, often called “weed” species, are able to live almost anywhere and to readily adapt to new, changing, or disturbed environments: human beings and rhesus monkeys. The key to our success may be our weediness. And the key to our weediness may be the many ways in which our behavioral genes can vary. 

One morning this past May, Elizabeth Mallott, a researcher working at Suomi’s lab, arrived to start her day at the main rhesus enclosure and found a half-dozen monkeys in her parking spot. They were huddling close together, bedraggled and nervous. As Mallott got out of her car and moved closer, she saw that some had bite wounds and scratches. Most monkeys who jump the enclosure’s double electrified fences (it happens now and then) soon want to get back in. These monkeys did not. Neither did several others that Mallott found between the two fences. 

After caging the escapees in an adjacent building, Mallott, now joined by Matthew Novak, another researcher who knew the colony well, entered through the double gates. The colony, numbering about 100-odd monkeys, had been together for about 30 years. Changes in its hierarchy usually came slowly and subtly. But when Novak and Mallott started looking around, they realized that something big had happened. “Animals were in places they weren’t supposed to be,” Novak would later tell me. “Animals who don’t hang out together were sitting together. Social rules were suspended.” 

It soon became apparent that the family group called Family 3, which for decades had ranked second to a group called Family 1, had staged a coup. Family 3 had grown larger than Family 1 several years before. But Family 1, headed by a savvy matriarch named Cocobean, had retained incumbency through authority, diplomacy, and momentum. A week or so before the coup, however, one of Cocobean’s daughters, Pearl, had been moved from the enclosure to the veterinary facility because her kidneys seemed to be failing. Family 1’s most formidable male, meanwhile, had grown old and arthritic. Pearl was especially close to Cocobean and, as the only daughter without children of her own, was particularly likely to defend her. Her absence, along with the male’s infirmity, created a vulnerable moment for Family 1. 

“This may have been in the works for a couple weeks,” Novak says. “But as far as we can reconstruct, the actual event, the night before we found the monkeys in the parking lot, started when a young female named Fiona”—a 3-year-old Family 1 member, a borderline bully known to have initiated many a scuffle—“started something with someone in Family 3. It escalated. Family 3 saw its chance. And they just started to take Family 1 out. You could see it from who was wounded and who wasn’t, and who was sitting in preferred places, and who was run out of the colony, and who was suddenly extremely deferential. One other female in Family 1, Quark, was killed; another, Josie, was hurt so badly we had to put her down. They’d gone after all of Cocobean’s other daughters, too. Somebody had bitten the big male in Family 1 so badly he couldn’t use his arm. Fiona got roughed up pretty bad. It was a very systematic scuffle. They went right at the head of the group and worked their way down.” 

Soon after Novak described all this to me, he and I walked around the enclosure. Though it was the middle of a broiling July day, downtime for the monkeys, you could see hints of the new order. Family 3 calmly occupied what seemed to be the new center of power, a corncrib near the pond (one of several corncribs set out for shelter). They groomed one another, napped, and evenly stared at us as we stared at them. A more nervous bunch clustered in another crib down the hill. When we got within 30 feet, the largest monkey in the group shot up onto the cage bars. From 10 feet up it screamed at me, rattled the bars, and showed some nasty teeth. 

From there I went to Suomi’s office and asked him what he thought had happened. Suomi has thought a lot about this coup, and it’s easy to see why. All of the important threads he’d been weaving together in his research were on display in this revolt: the importance of early experience; the interplay of environment, parenting, and genetic inheritance; the maddening primacy of family and social bonds; the repercussions of different traits in different circumstances. And now, in light of the orchid hypothesis, he was beginning to see that the threads might be woven together in a new way. 

“About 15 years ago,” he said, “Carol Berman, a monkey researcher at SUNY-Buffalo, spent a lot of time watching a large rhesus-monkey colony that lives on an island in Puerto Rico. She wanted to see what happened as the groups changed size over time. They’d start at about 30 or 40 individuals—a group that had split off from another—and then expand. At a certain point, often somewhere near a hundred, the group would reach its limit, and it, too, would split into smaller troops.” 

Such size limits, which vary among social species, are sometimes called “Dunbar numbers,” after Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who argues that a species’ group limit reflects how many social relationships its individuals can manage cognitively. Berman’s observations suggested that the Dunbar number of a species reflects not just its cognitive powers but its temperamental and behavioral range as well. 

Berman saw that when rhesus troops are small, the mothers can let their young play freely, because strangers rarely approach. But as a troop grows and the number of family groups rises, strangers or semi-strangers more often come near. The adult females become more vigilant, defensive, and aggressive. The kids and adult males follow suit. More and more monkeys receive upbringings that draw out the less sociable sides of their behavioral potentials; fights grow more common; rivalries grow more tense. Things finally get so bad that the troop must split. “And that’s what happened here,” Suomi said. “It’s a very extensive feedback system. What happens at the dyadic level, between mother and infant, ultimately affects the very nature and survival of the larger social group.” 

Studies by Suomi and others show that such differences in early experience can wildly alter how genes express themselves—that is, whether, when, and how strongly the genes switch themselves on and off. Suomi suspects that early experiences may affect later patterns of gene expression and behavior as well, including how flexible and reactive an animal is, by helping to set the sensitivity level of key alleles. A tense upbringing, he says, will produce watchful caution or vigilant aggression in any monkey (the parents’ way of preparing the offspring for tough times)—but this effect may be especially pronounced in monkeys with particularly plastic behavioral alleles. 

That’s what Suomi thinks may have happened in the run-up to what he calls the Palace Revolt. Fiona’s injudicious aggression proved disastrous for her and Family 1. But Family 3, a group that had been diplomatically deferring to Family 1 for years, dramatically improved its fortunes by mounting an uncharacteristically aggressive and sustained counterattack. Suomi speculates that in the tenser, more crowded conditions of the large colony, gene-environment interactions had made some of the monkeys in Family 3, particularly those with more-reactive “orchid” alleles, not more aggressive but more potentially aggressive. During the period when they could not afford to challenge the hierarchy—the period before Pearl’s departure—aggressiveness would have led them into unwinnable, possibly fatal conflicts. But in Pearl’s absence the odds changed—and the Family 3 monkeys exploited a rare and decisive opportunity by unleashing their aggressive potential. 

The coup also showed something more straightforward: that a genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another. We needn’t look far to see this in human behavior. To survive and evolve, every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant—and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent—than the norm. 

All of this helps answer that fundamental evolutionary question about how risk alleles have endured. We have survived not despite these alleles but becauseof them. And those alleles haven’t merely managed to slip through the selection process; they have been actively selected for. Recent analyses, in fact, suggest that many orchid-gene alleles, including those mentioned in this story, have emerged in humans only during the past 50,000 or so years. Each of these alleles, it seems, arose via chance mutation in one person or a few people, and began rapidly proliferating. Rhesus monkeys and human beings split from their common lineage about 25 million to 30 million years ago, so these polymorphisms must have mutated and spread on separate tracks in the two species. Yet in both species, these new alleles proved so valuable that they spread far and wide. 

As the evolutionary anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have pointed out, in The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009), the past 50,000 years—the period in which orchid genes seem to have emerged and expanded—is also the period during which Homo sapiens started to get seriously human, and during which sparse populations in Africa expanded to cover the globe in great numbers. Though Cochran and Harpending don’t explicitly incorporate the orchid-gene hypothesis into their argument, they make the case that human beings have come to dominate the planet because certain key mutations allowed human evolution to accelerate—a process that the orchid-dandelion hypothesis certainly helps explain. 

How this happened must have varied from context to context. If you have too many aggressive people, for example, conflict runs rampant, and aggression is selected out, because it becomes costly; when aggression decreases enough to be less risky, it becomes more valuable, and its prevalence again rises. Changes in environment or culture would likewise affect an allele’s prevalence. The orchid variant of the DRD4 gene, for instance, increases risk of ADHD (a syndrome best characterized, Cochran and Harpending write, “by actions that annoy elementary-school teachers”). Yet attentional restlessness can serve people well in environments that reward sensitivity to new stimuli. The current growth of multitasking, for instance, may help select for just such attentional agility. Complain all you want that it’s an increasingly ADHD world these days—but to judge by the spread of DRD4’s risk allele, it’s been an increasingly ADHD world for about 50,000 years. 

Even if you accept that orchid genes may grant us flexibility crucial to our success, it can be startling to ponder their dynamics up close and personal. After I FedExed away my vial of saliva for genotyping, I told myself more or less to forget it. To my surprise, I managed to. The e-mail that eventually arrived with the results, promised for a Monday, turned up three days early, during a Friday evening when I was simultaneously half-watching Monsters, Inc. with my kids and distractedly scanning the messages on my iPhone. At first I didn’t really register what I was reading. 

“David,” the message began. “I ran the assay on the DNA from your saliva sample today. The assay ran well and your genotype is S/S. Good thing neither of us think of these things as deterministic or even having a fixed valence. Let me know if you want to talk about your result or genetic issues.” 

When I finished reading the message, the house seemed quieter, though it was not. As I looked out the window at our pear tree, its blossoms fallen but its fruit only nubbins, I felt a chill spread through my torso. 

I hadn’t thought it would matter. 

Yet as I sat absorbing this information, the chill came to seem less the coldness of fear than a shiver of abrupt and inverted self-knowledge—of suddenly knowing with certainty something I had long suspected, and finding that it meant something other than I thought it would. The orchid hypothesis suggested that this particular allele, the rarest and riskiest of the serotonin-transporter gene’s three variants, made me not just more vulnerable but more plastic. And that new way of thinking changed things. I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience—every intervention I ran on myself, as it were—would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard—slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same. 

I don’t plan to have any of my other key behavioral genes assayed. I don’t plan on having my kids’ genes done, either. What would it tell me? That I shape them in every encounter? I know this. Yet I do like thinking that when I take my son trolling for salmon, or listen to his younger brother’s labyrinthine elaborations of his dreams, or sing “Sweet Betsy of Pike” with my 5-year-old daughter as we drive home from the lake, I’m flipping little switches that can help light them up. I don’t know what all those switches are—and I don’t need to. It’s enough to know that together we can turn them on. 

David Dobbs, The Atlantic

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Full article and photo: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene

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Feeling lonely? Chances are you’re not alone.

Loneliness is transmittable, researchers say

Loneliness is like a disease — and what’s worse, it’s contagious.

Although it may sound counterintuitive, loneliness can spread from one person to another, according to research being released Tuesday that underscores the power of one person’s emotions to affect friends, family and neighbors.

The federally funded analysis of data collected from more than 4,000 people over 10 years found that lonely people increase the chances that someone they know will start to feel alone, and that the solitary feeling can spread one more degree of separation, causing a friend of a friend or even the sibling of a friend to feel desolate.

“Loneliness can be transmitted,” said John T. Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who led the study being published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Loneliness is not just the property of an individual. It can be transmitted across people — even people you don’t have direct contact with.”

Moreover, people who become lonely eventually move to the periphery of their social networks, becoming increasingly isolated, which can exacerbate their loneliness and affect social connectedness, the researchers found.

“No man is an island,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School who helped conduct the research. “Something so personal as a person’s emotions can have a collective existence and affect the vast fabric of humanity.”

The seemingly paradoxical finding is far more than a psychological curiosity. Loneliness has been linked to a variety of medical problems, including depression, sleep problems and generally poorer physical health. Identifying some of the causes could help reduce the emotion and improve health, experts said.

“Loneliness is more than just feeling bad,” said Chris Segrin, a professor of communication and health at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the research. “It really does have consequences.”

But some researchers expressed skepticism about the findings, saying the study had the same shortcoming as the earlier work and could not necessarily rule out other explanations for the apparent association.

“It is unclear whether their statistical model will ‘find’ social contagion in every outcome they examine because of the limitations,” Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University wrote in an e-mail. He and a colleague conducted a similar analysis using data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to be spread through social networks if not analyzed properly.

Christakis and Cacioppo defended their work, saying their statistical methods accounted for other explanations. And others hailed the work.

“I think it’s an incredible piece of research,” said Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “I don’t think we anticipated that something like loneliness would cluster like this in a population. It’s surprising.”

Although the study did not examine how loneliness spreads, Cacioppo said other research has provided clues. People who feel lonely tend to act in negative ways toward those they do have contact with, perpetuating the behavior and the emotion, he said.

“Let’s say for whatever reason — the loss of a spouse, a divorce — you get lonely. You then interact with other people in a more negative fashion. That puts them in a negative mood and makes them more likely to interact with other people in a negative fashion and they minimize their social ties and become lonely,” Cacioppo said.

For the study, Cacioppo teamed up with Christakis and James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who have published a series of papers and the book “Connected,” based on data originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running government-funded project that has explored a host of health issues.

The researchers used information gathered from the participants over decades, including their friendships, identities of their neighbors, co-workers and family members, and information about their emotional state. Previous studies by Christakis and Fowler concluded that obesity, the likelihood of quitting smoking, and even happiness could spread from one person to another.

Similarly, the new analysis, involving 4,793 people who were interviewed every two years between 1991 and 2001, showed that having a social connection to a lonely person increased the chances of developing feelings of loneliness. A friend of a lonely person was 52 percent more likely to develop feelings of loneliness by the time of the next interview, the analysis showed. A friend of that person was 25 percent more likely, and a friend of a friend of a friend was 15 percent more likely.

The effect was most powerful for a friend, followed by a neighbor, and was much weaker on spouses and siblings, the researchers found. Loneliness spread more easily among women than men, perhaps because women were more likely to articulate emotions, Cacioppo said.

The researchers said the effect could not be the result of lonely people being more likely to associate with other lonely people because they showed the effect over time. “It’s not a birds-of-a-feather-flock-together effect,” Christakis said.

The findings underscore the importance of social networks, several experts said.

“For years, physicians and researchers thought about individuals as isolated creatures,” said Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University. “We now know that the people you surround yourself with can have a tremendous impact on your well-being, whether it’s physical or psychological.”

The findings suggest that if you help “the people on the margins of the network, you help not only them but help stabilize the whole network ,” Christakis said.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003846.html

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We May Be Born With an Urge to Help

LENDING A HAND In research, a child helps an adult find an object dropped through a hole in a box. The evolutionary roots of altruism are complex.

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.

For parents who may think their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home, which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he said.

As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”

Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.

Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.

Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little interest in what may be their companions’ minds.

If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not really share their catch.

An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.

“Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.

A similar conclusion has been reached independently by Hillard S. Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers, so much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr. Kaplan has found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.

The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.

The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.

Much the same conclusion is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of Empathy.” Dr. de Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is often overrated as a human motivation.

“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths.

Indeed, it is in our biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed. “In fact,” Dr. de Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”

The basic sociability of human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive nothing.

“Humans clearly evolved the ability to detect inequities, control immediate desires, foresee the virtues of norm following and gain the personal, emotional rewards that come from seeing another punished,” write three Harvard biologists, Marc Hauser, Katherine McAuliffe and Peter R. Blake, in reviewing their experiments with tamarin monkeys and young children.

If people do bad things to others in their group, they can behave even worse to those outside it. Indeed the human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” Dr. Tomasello writes.

Sociality, the binding together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”

The roots of human cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also follow rules requiring us to be nice to others.

“That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”

Nicholas Wade, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html

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Shifting Blame Is Socially Contagious

Merely observing someone publicly blame an individual in an organization for a problem — even when the target is innocent — greatly increases the odds that the practice of blaming others will spread with the tenacity of the H1N1 flu, according to new research from the USC Marshall School of Business and Stanford University.

Nathanael J. Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and Larissa Tiedens, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, conducted four different experiments and found that publicly blaming others dramatically increases the likelihood that the practice will become viral. The reason: blame spreads quickly because it triggers the perception that one’s self-image is under assault and must be protected.

The study called “Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions” is believed to be the first to examine whether shifting blame to others is socially contagious. The results will be published in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“When we see others protecting their egos, we become defensive too,” says Fast, the study’s lead author. “We then try to protect our own self-image by blaming others for our mistakes, which may feel good in the moment.” He adds that in the long run, such behavior could hurt one’s reputation and be destructive to an organization and further to our society as a whole.

Tiedens said the study didn’t specifically look at the impact of hard economic times, but it undoubtedly makes the problem worse. “Blaming becomes common when people are worried about their safety in an organization,” she said. “There is likely to be more blaming going on when people feel their jobs are threatened.”

Fast says that when public blaming becomes common practice — especially by leaders — its effects on an organization can be insidious and withering: Individuals who are fearful of being blamed for something become less willing to take risks, are less innovative or creative, and are less likely to learn from their mistakes.

“Blame creates a culture of fear,” Fast said, “and this leads to a host of negative consequences for individuals and for groups.”

A manager can keep a lid on the behavior by rewarding employees who learn from their mistakes and by making a point to acknowledge publicly his or her own mistakes, Fast says. Managers may also want to assign blame, when necessary, in private and offer praise in public to create a positive attitude in the workplace.

Or, managers could follow the lead of companies such as Intuit, which implemented a “When Learning Hurts” session where they celebrated and learned from mistakes, rather than pointing fingers and assigning blame. The blame contagion research provides empirical evidence that such a practice can avoid negative effects in the culture of the organization.

Anyone can become a blamer, Fast says, but there are some common traits. Typically, they are more ego defensive, have a higher likelihood of being narcissistic, and tend to feel chronically insecure.

President Richard Nixon is one example the authors point to in the study. Nixon harbored an intense need to enhance and protect his self-image and, as a result, made a practice of blaming others for his shortcomings. His former aides reported that that this ego-defensiveness pervaded his administration. It was the culture of fear and blame that ultimately led to Nixon’s political downfall.

The experiments showed that individuals who watched someone blame another for mistakes went on to do the same with others. In one experiment, half of the participants were asked to read a newspaper article about a failure by Governor Schwarzenegger who blamed special interest groups for the controversial special election that failed in 2005, costing the state $250 million. A second group read an article in which the governor took full responsibility for the failure.

Those who read about the governor blaming special interest groups were more likely to blame others for their own, unrelated shortcomings, compared with those who read about Schwarzenegger shouldering the responsibility.

Another experiment found that self-affirmation inoculated participants from blame. The tendency for blame to spread was completely eliminated in a group of participants who had the opportunity to affirm their self-worth.

“By giving participants the chance to bolster their self-worth we removed their need to self protect though subsequent blaming,” says Fast.

The results have particularly important implications for CEOs. Executives and leaders would be wise to learn from such examples, Fast suggests, and instead display behaviors that help to foster a culture of psychological safety, learning, and innovation.

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Full article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091119194124.htm

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Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.

Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

Professor Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University, whose latest book is rekindling an old debate.

The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory.

Consider, for instance, Professor Sand’s assertion that Palestinian Arab villagers are descended from the original Jewish farmers. Nearly a century ago, early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s longest-serving president, made this very argument in a book they wrote together in 1918. The next year, Emir Feisal, who organized the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire and tried to create a united Arab nation, signed a cooperation agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that declared the two were “mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.”

Both sides later dropped the subject when they realized it was not furthering their political goals.

(Though no final consensus has emerged on the ancestral link between Palestinians and Jews, Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University Langone Medical Center, who has been studying the genetic organization of Jews, said, “The assumption of lineal descent seems reasonable.”)

Books challenging biblical and conventional history continually pop up, but what distinguishes the dispute over origins from debates about, say, the reality of the exodus from Egypt or the historical Jesus, is that it is so enmeshed in geopolitics. The Israeli Declaration of Independence states: “After being forcibly exiled from their Land, the People kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it.” The idea of unjust exile and rightful return undergirds both the Jews’ and the Palestinians’ conviction that each is entitled to the land.

Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.

That does not negate that conversion played a critical role in Jewish history — a proposition that many find surprising given that today’s Jews tend to discourage conversion and make it a difficult process. Lawrence H. Schiffman, chairman of the Skirball department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, said most historians agree that over a period of centuries, Middle Eastern Jews — merchants, slaves and captives, religious and economic refugees — spread around the world. Many intermarried with people from local populations, who then converted.

There is also evidence that in antiquity and the first millennium Judaism was a proselytizing religion that even used force on occasion. From the genetic research so far, Dr. Ostrer said, “It’s pretty clear that most Jewish groups have Semitic ancestry, that they originated in the Middle East, and that they’re more closely related to each other than to non-Jewish groups.” But he added that it was also clear that many Jews are of mixed descent.

“The ancient admixed ancestry explains the blond hair and blue eyes of Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents and great-grandparents all lived in shtetls two and three generations ago,” Dr. Ostrer said. They brought the genes for coloration with them to Eastern Europe. These genes were probably not contributed by their Cossack neighbors.”

What accounts for the grasp that some misconceptions maintain on popular consciousness, or the inability of historical truths to gain acceptance? Sometimes myths persist despite clear contradictory evidence because people feel the story embodies a deeper truth than the facts. Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” but the fictional statement captured the sense of a regime that showed disdain for the public’s welfare.

A mingling of myth, memory, truth and aspiration similarly envelopes Jewish history, which is, to begin with, based on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records.

Experts dismiss the popular notion that the Jews were expelled from Palestine in one fell swoop in A.D. 70. Yet while the destruction of Jerusalem and Second Temple by the Romans did not create the Diaspora, it caused a momentous change in the Jews’ sense of themselves and their position in the world. For later generations it encapsulates the essential truth about the Jews being an exiled and persecuted people for much of their history.

Professor Sand accuses Zionist historians from the 19th century onward — the very same scholars on whose work he bases his case — of hiding the truth and creating a myth of shared roots to strengthen their nationalist agenda. He explains that he has uncovered no new information, but has “organized the knowledge differently.” In other words, he is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of — shaping the material to fit a narrative.

In that sense, Professor Sand is operating within a long established tradition. As “The Illustrated History of the Jewish People,” edited by Nicholas Lange (Harcourt, 1997), notes, “Every generation of Jewish historians has faced the same task: to retell and adapt the story to meet the needs of its own situation.” The same could be said of all nations and religions.

Perhaps that is why — on both sides of the argument — some myths stubbornly persist no matter how often they are debunked while other indubitable facts continually fail to gain traction.

Patricia Cohen, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/books/24jews.html

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Becoming the Alpha Dog in Your Own Home

SIT. STAY. Jenny Hope and Simon Cote with their son, Rowan, 3, and Heidi. Ms. Hope applies lessons from the Dog Whisperer to raising Rowan.

AS far back as “Father Knows Best,” television has been an unintentional teaching aid for parents. To watch Mike and Carol Brady labor tirelessly to boost Jan’s wobbly self-esteem, or Cliff and Clair Huxtable corral Denise’s rebellious impulses with affection and wisdom, was to learn how to raise happy, healthy children. After all those hours in front of the set, you couldn’t help but absorb the lessons.

Today’s network lineup provides fewer idealized families and no shortage of questionable child-rearing role models (see “Gosselin, Jon”). For every take-charge SuperNanny, there’s a Homer Simpson, and who wants to raise a Bart?

It’s little wonder, then, that some parents, and even a few child therapists, have found themselves taking mental notes from a television personality known for inspiring discipline, order and devotion: Cesar Millan, otherwise known as the Dog Whisperer.

The suggestion that the Dog Whisperer is also a Child Whisperer of sorts has popped up — sometimes couched as a joke, but, well, not really — in parents’ forums like blogs, online discussion boards, magazines, Twitter feeds and podcasts. Some parents are starting to take notice.

“When we started watching his shows, we had intended to apply his advice toward our dogs,” said Amy Twomey, a blogger on parenthood for The Dallas Morning News who is raising three children under 10 with her husband, Matt. “But we realized a lot of ideas can be used on our kids.”

Indeed, Mr. Millan’s advice has replaced a shelf full of books on how to tame an unruly child. “It’s all the same simple concept: how to be the pack leader in your own house,” she said.

Certainly, an army, or at least a few divisions, of credentialed experts on human parenthood long ago stumbled on Mr. Millan’s philosophical holy trinity — exercise, discipline and affection equals happiness. And Mr. Millan does not hold himself up as a new Dr. Spock; he has never opined on how one should raise a creature with two legs in his show on the National Geographic Channel, or in his four books.

But some parents — particularly those weary of never-say-no techniques and child-rearing books suggesting that children should call the shots — say they find inspiration, and even practical advice, in Mr. Millan’s approach, which teaches pet owners how to become the alpha dogs by projecting his trademark “calm-assertive energy.”

DaddyCast, a series of podcasts published online by a father of two who identifies himself only as P.D., devoted an episode last year to discussing how he applied Dog Whisperer philosophies to raising children. In the episode, he recalled exchanging Twitter messages with a father who wrote: “Pampering and never punishing will make a child crazy and unlikable, never self-competent.”

MASTER Cesar Millan, aka the Dog Whisperer, uses discipline.

“That goes along with the philosophy of the Dog Whisperer,” the host added. Brenna Hicks, a child therapist in Palm Harbor, Fla., who writes an advice blog, The Kid Counselor, adapted Mr. Millan’s central idea, that dogs take their cues from their masters, and misbehave only when the masters fail to carry themselves, in body language and tone of voice, like pack leaders. In a post, “Raising Kids: Wisdom From the Dog Whisperer,” she wrote, “When we present nervous, angry or scared energy in front of our kids, they pick up on those emotions.”

Allison Pearson, author of the novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” which explored the stresses of modern motherhood, explained how parents would naturally envy the authority of dog trainers. “My generation got itself in a muddle about parenting,” she wrote by e-mail. “We thought that obedience was the enemy of love. We didn’t want the kids to be afraid of us, but after a while we found ourselves wondering: do we have to do what they say the whole time?”

“Unlike modern parents,” she added, “dog trainers don’t think discipline equals being mean. They understand that dogs are happiest when they know their position in the hierarchy.”

So is it “spare the rolled-up newspaper, spoil the child?” Not exactly. Many Dog Whisperer techniques — say, the push on the neck to get a dog’s attention — are best left to the kennel, unless you welcome a visit from Child Protective Services.

But other measures may yield an obedient child. Matthew Hranek, a photographer in New York, has a daughter, Clara, who is 6, and a Patterdale terrier, Charlie, who is a handful. Lately, Mr. Hranek said, he finds himself adopting Mr. Millan’s trademark “sshht!” sound — meant to snap dogs out of unconstructive patterns of thought or behavior — not just when Charlie jumps up on the kitchen counter, but also when Clara does. A bit of a joke? Sure. But it’s efficient. With none of the usual red-in-the-face parental haranguing, it reminds her who is boss in a syllable.

Mr. Hranek said that some parents he knows “do not allow the word ‘no’ to be said around the house. How absurd is that?”

“When you’re wishy-washy with dogs, they take advantage — ‘He didn’t mean don’t eat that biscuit,’ ” Mr. Hranek said. “Kids think the same way.”

In that spirit, Jenny Hope, a television producer in Los Angeles, not connected to the Millan show, applies Dog Whisperer lessons not just to the family dog, Heidi, but also to her son, Rowan, 3. On the show, she said, Mr. Millan lets the dogs know that he decides when they can run off to sniff a juniper bush, and when to heel.

When Ms. Hope’s husband, Simon Cote, recently installed a sprinkler system in the backyard, Rowan wanted to play in the mud. She relented. Fun is crucial, after all. But so is an end to the fun. She let him make his resplendent mess, then brought him in after a set period of time.

“It’s finite, and it’s what they crave,” Ms. Hope explained. “Children love structure, the same as animals love structure.”

Mr. Millan says parents question him all the time. “I’m going to give them my point of view — I’m a father myself,” he said.

As a native of Mexico, he said, he adheres to a more traditional, hierarchical child-rearing philosophy, which he considers effective in both the pack and the family. There, “for thousands of years, the elder has always been the pack leader, it’s never the child,” Mr. Millan said. “In America, kids have too many options when they only need one: ‘Just do it, because.’ ”

To some parents, however, moving Dog Whisperer theories into the human realm is not so much about changing their child’s attitude as it is about changing their own.

Take Elizabeth Meyer, in Columbus Township, Mich. She and her husband adopted a strong-willed 2-year-old boy from South Korea last year.

“Given that all of us were still adjusting, bonding and getting to know one another, there were times when my husband and I really struggled with parenting,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

Then one night she was watching the Dog Whisperer. Squaring off against a particularly difficult dog, he took its intransigence as an opportunity to teach proper behavior. “This is good,” he said.

For Ms. Meyer, it was a moment of epiphany.

“This is good?” she wrote. “Did I have that attitude as a parent? Was I focusing on the positives, the opportunities? Did I remember to take a deep breath, to be calm and assertive when dealing with a frustrating situation? I realized this was something I really needed to work on. And once I did, I saw a difference right away. Our son was calmer and more responsive. During those times when he did act up, being calm and assertive helped me deal with the misbehavior in a positive way.”

It also, she added, “left me feeling a lot less stressed out.”

Alex Williams, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/fashion/22dog.html

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Is your therapist a little behind the times?

A young woman enters a physician’s office seeking help for diabetes. She assumes that the physician has been trained to understand, value and use the latest science related to her disorder. Down the hall, a young man enters a clinical psychologist’s office seeking help for depression. He similarly assumes that the psychologist has been trained to understand, value and use current research on his disorder.

The first patient would be justified in her beliefs; the second, often, would not.

This is the overarching conclusion of a two-year analysis that we recently published on the views and practices of hundreds of clinical psychologists.

The practice of clinical psychology — which includes psychotherapy — is akin to medicine as it was practiced a century ago. For at least 2,000-years, medicine was locked in a struggle between those who viewed it as an art and those who saw it as a science. Until the last century, most medical practitioners were guided by intuition and tradition, not by science. Healers commonly used ineffective and often injurious practices such as blistering, purging and bleeding. Such techniques were used year after year, and century after century, with physicians firmly convinced that they were helping their patients.

While psychologists certainly do not use such harmful practices, a similar dynamic appears to be at work in clinical psychology today. Many psychotherapists openly state that scientific research is largely irrelevant to their practice. Most say that their clinical techniques largely reflect their own insights and experience; they tend not to use the most effective types of treatments available; and they admit to little in the way of scientific training.

For instance, very few clinical psychologists — about 15 percent — use what’s called exposure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. This is an intervention in which individuals with PTSD are trained to imagine or experience feared situations and stimuli (such as memories of a traumatic event) until their fear subsides. There is strong evidence that this treatment is highly effective, but seven in 10 clinicians, according to a recent report in the journal Behaviour Research & Therapy, have not been trained to use it.

This sort of disconnect exists in other areas of treatment as well: for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism. Clinicians continue to use treatments that have less research support.

We believe that graduate education is largely to blame for this dismal situation. Graduate programs in psychology do not select science-oriented students to begin with and do not train students to understand and use science once they are enrolled.

But we can change this situation, and a new accreditation system will help. The Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System is designed to recognize only graduate programs that deliver high-quality, science-based, doctoral clinical training. This system, which we are all working with, is intended to “brand” clinical psychologists so that the public, licensing boards and others can identify those who have been trained to use scientifically validated treatments.

This new system, which began reviewing applications this month, may not seem sufficient to tackle a problem of this size. But accreditation systems can lead the way for change — the history of medicine shows us that. Prior to the early 1900s, most physicians in the United States were not trained in any way that resembles today’s rigorous course of medical study. Many got their “credentials” from for-profit diploma mills, a number of which lacked libraries, laboratories and scientifically trained faculty.

But medicine reformed itself; reputable, scientifically trained physicians were outraged at the shoddy state of medical education. They saw that it meant patients were denied effective treatment and suffered needlessly. These reformists were almost all on university faculties, and under the auspices of the American Medical Association, they launched a campaign to transform medical education into an applied science. They created a commission, which in 1906 scrutinized the 162 existing medical schools — and concluded that only 82 were acceptable.

Based on these findings, the AMA commissioned a more thorough analysis by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which reiterated the results in its famous Flexner Report of 1910. That report forced the proprietary schools, where students essentially paid for their degrees, into a take-it-or-leave-it choice: They could either raise their standards, which meant fewer paying students and less profit; or they had to face public stigma, which also meant fewer paying students and less profit. Many closed as a result, and others merged with universities. By 1915, 95 medical schools remained in the United States, but these were meeting increasingly rigorous standards.

There are now about 160 medical schools in this country, including schools that grant M.D. and D.O. degrees. They meet rigorous standards of evaluation through relevant professional organizations, such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which considers a wide range of criteria such as student-faculty ratios and clear training objectives.

But about half of clinical psychologists are trained today in for-profit schools that are not associated with universities, and many such programs explicitly play down science. Relative to university-based programs, these schools have very large class sizes, faculty with marginal scientific credentials and low admission standards.

These schools typically train students to receive a Psy.D., or doctor of psychology, degree rather than a Ph.D. Not all Psy.D. programs are weak, of course, and not all Ph.D. programs are strong. But Psy.D. programs are usually much less selective, accepting doctoral candidates at about four times the rate of Ph.D. programs. Moreover, Psy.D. students tend not to do as well on graduate admissions exams or on the national licensing exam. Both students and faculty in Psy.D. programs are much less likely to engage in productive research activities, such as publishing in scholarly journals, than students and faculty in Ph.D. programs.

In essence, many of the students being trained by graduate schools are not prepared to understand or use research evidence, let alone contribute their own. Nevertheless, the number of Psy.D.s has burgeoned in recent years. One analysis of clinical doctorates awarded from 1988 to 2001 shows little or no increase in the award of Ph.D.s but an increase of almost 170 percent in Psy.D.s being granted.

Our report and prescription is an attempt to serve as the equivalent of the Flexner Report for clinical psychology. We hope it leads to increased scrutiny of the programs that train psychotherapists. This is our field, one we trained in and care deeply about. We know that these suggestions may make us a few enemies. But we see no other choice.

There are many highly effective treatments for mental health disorders. Psychology can be reformed so that more psychotherapists use these treatments and help their patients live healthier, happier lives. A new science-based accreditation system will mean that, eventually, patients entering a psychologist’s office can expect to receive the best care that psychological science has to offer.

Timothy Baker, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin school of medicine and public health, Richard McFall, professor emeritus of psychology at Indiana University-Bloomington, and Varda Shoham, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, are the authors of a new report on clinical psychology published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

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See also: 

Connecting Clinical Practice to Scientific Progress

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/pspi_9-2_editorial.pdf

Current Status and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/pspi_9-2.pdf

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/13/AR2009111302221.html

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A Discipline in Denial

Earlier this month, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma swooped in on the National Science Foundation budget, offering an amendment that would ban the organization from “wasting any federal research funding on political-science projects.” The assumption that the money was better spent on “real science,” seemed to cause the entire quarrelsome field of political scientists to rise as one in righteous opposition.

Querulous academics often are their own worst enemies in these funding battles. They quickly wax hysterical, unaware that platitudes about supporting “free inquiry” do not cut much with the general public. Should NSF be spending $188,206 to support a study of “candidate ambiguity and voter choice,” designed to ascertain how politicians benefit from being vague?

Still, the political scientists have a point. The program has been going since the early 1960s, and the dollar amounts have always been relatively small—the money for political science projects have amounted to $112 million over a 10-year period, compared to NSF’s budget request for 2010 of more than $7 billion. While it is true that, as one of Mr. Coburn’s aides wisecracked to the Washington Times, “professors across America will hardly be thrown on the streets with only their tweed jackets to keep them warm,” the tininess of the dollar amounts cuts both ways and suggests that budget hawks may be wasting their time.

 

There are other reasons to think that this battle may be ill-chosen. The very program under fire supported the work of Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize in economics this year for her work advancing the role of free institutions, rather than governments, in managing natural resources—an analysis Mr. Coburn might find valuable.

Yet there is a deeper question raised by this quarrel, and that is the Faustian bargain by which the study of politics is joined to “science.” As Indiana political scientist Jeffrey C. Isaac has observed: “We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.”

True enough. And Mr. Isaac might have added that political science could benefit from embracing “science” less intently and instead seek to recover its identity as a discipline rooted in canonical works, such as Aristotle’s “Politics,” that combine empirical observation with moral and philosophical reflection.

Modern political “science,” however, beginning with such figures as Machiavelli and Hobbes, set out to make the subject of politics more “scientific” precisely by freeing it from its moorings in moral philosophy and abandoning such formative goals as the cultivation of moral virtue in the citizenry. Instead, it focused on the value-neutral, quantitative study of observable political behavior. The definition of politics offered in 1953 by University of Chicago political scientist David Easton—”the behaviors or set of interactions through which authoritative allocations (or binding decisions) are made and implemented for a society”—can be taken to typify the behavioralist, functionalist and “scientistic” outlook that came to dominate American political science for most of the 20th century. That dominance reached a pinnacle of sorts in the “rational choice” approach, which exceeds all its predecessors in setting the production of precise (and experimentally testable) mathematical models for political behavior as the only goal worthy of political science.

That a higher status is routinely accorded to the “harder” sciences is nothing new in American history. Alexis de Tocqueville claimed in 1840 that Americans were “addicted” to “practical science” while indifferent to any “theoretical science” that could not promise a concrete payoff. The historian Daniel Boorstin went even further in 1953, asserting that the U.S. was “one of the most spectacularly lopsided cultures in all of history” because the amazing vitality of its political institutions was equaled by “the amazing poverty and inarticulateness of [its] theorizing about politics.” Boorstin seemed to think that this unreflectiveness was a virtue, a built-in protection against such revolutionary ideologies as Nazism and communism.

Perhaps so, but in putting it this way Boorstin was selling short the very American political tradition whose principles have underwritten the nation’s political vitality and longevity. True, it is not a tradition upheld by massive tomes. In fact, it more closely resembles a patchwork of occasional pieces, composed in response to particular circumstances—Tom Paine’s “Common Sense,” the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” The Federalist Papers, the writings of John C. Calhoun, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and much more. Most were produced in the white heat of political exigency; none was the product of systematic and detached reflection on a par with the great treatises of European political thought. It is a rich tradition of reflection and intelligent debate on certain recurrent themes, a political midrash devoted to the endless reconsideration of such matters as sovereignty, the separation and division of powers, the meaning of federalism, the sources of political authority, the proper place of religion in public life, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals. None of this is reducible to “science” in the National Science Foundation’s sense of the word. Whatever his intentions, Sen. Coburn may be doing political scientists a favor by reminding them of that fact.

Mr. McClay is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University this year.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363704574503430193821264.html

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Can You Believe How Mean Office Gossip Can Be?

Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”?

If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back.

These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.

But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school.

The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.

Consider, for instance, the cascade of insults recorded in the earlier study of middle-school gossip by Donna Eder and Janet Lynne Enke of Indiana University. In this cafeteria conversation, a group of eighth-grade girls in the cafeteria were discussing an overweight classmate whose breasts they considered too large for her age:

Penny: In choir that girl was sitting in front of us and we kept going, “Moo.”

Karen: We were going, “Come here, cow; come here, cow.”

Bonnie: I know. She is one.

Penny: She looks like a big fat cow.

Julie: Who is that?

Bonnie: That girl on the basketball team.

Penny: That big red-headed cow.

Julie: Oh, yeah. I know. She is a cow.

The new study found that gossip in the workplace also tended to be overwhelmingly negative, but the insults were more subtle and the conversations less predictable, says Tim Hallett, a sociologist at Indiana University. Dr. Hallett conducted the study along with Dr. Eder and Brent Harger of Albright College.

“Office gossip can be a form of reputational warfare,” Dr. Hallett says. “It’s like informal gossip, but it’s richer and more elaborate. There are more layers to it because people practice indirectness and avoidance. People are more cautious because they know they can lose not just a friendship but a job.”

During his two years studying the group dynamics at a Midwestern elementary school, which allowed him access on condition of anonymity, Dr. Hallett found that the teachers became so comfortable with him and his camera that they would freely insult their bosses during one-on-one interviews. But at the teachers’ formal group meetings, where they knew that another teacher might report their insults to the principal, they were more discreet.

Instead of making direct criticisms, they sometimes offered obliquely sarcastic comments to test the waters. They used another indirect tactic categorized as praise the predecessor, as in the meeting when a teacher fondly recalled a previous administration: “It was so calm, and you could teach. No one was constantly looking over your shoulder.” The other teachers quickly agreed. No one explicitly called the current principal an authoritarian busybody, but that was the obvious implication.

Some teachers were especially adept at managing gossip. At one meeting, after someone complained about a student walking around with his hair shaped into horns (“Tell me, how is that part of the uniform dress code?”), the group began blaming the lapse in discipline on the assistant principal. The gossip seemed to be going down the same nasty track as the teenagers’ she’s-such-a-cow episode until another teacher, an ally of the assistant principal, smoothly intervened.

First, the teacher interrupted the attack by asking the name of the student with the horns. That deflected the group’s gossip on to the student’s academic difficulties and weird behavior (“He’s gotta frighten the little kids”). Then the teacher masterfully completed the rescue of the assistant principal by changing the topic entirely, reminding everyone of a different disciplinary issue that was the fault of a less popular administrator — the principal, who promptly became the new focus of the groups’ anger.

The teachers’ gossip never got as blatantly mean as the teenage girls’ — no one was ever called a cow — but in some ways the effects were more widely felt.

As teachers mocked the principal and complained about her being “stifling” and “hyper,” the atmosphere got more poisonous. The principal felt that her authority was being undermined by gossip and retaliated against teachers she suspected (correctly) of criticizing her. Teachers and administrators fled the school, and the students’ test scores declined.

“The gossip did serve to reinforce the teachers’ group solidarity, but in this case it was also a form of warfare that brought everyone down,” Dr. Hallett says. “It was reminiscent of the old saying that gossip is a three-pronged tongue: it can hurt the speaker and the listener, as well as the target.”

Some bosses have tried turning the office into a “no-gossip zone,” but Dr. Hallett says it is more realistic to try managing it.

If, say, an office rival seems poised to trash one of your absent allies, Dr. Hallett suggests you make a “pre-emptive positive evaluation.” A quick “Isn’t she doing a great job?” might be enough to stop the attack.

If your rival tries persisting with indirect sarcasm — “Oh, real great job” — you can force the issue by calmly asking what that means. That simple question, a dare made in a pleasant voice, often silenced the sarcastic gossips observed by Dr. Hallett.

And if that doesn’t work, Dr. Hallett suggests you try an even simpler tactic that was used successfully at the teachers’ meetings — and that is available in any workplace anytime. In fact, it’s one of the tactics that distinguishes office gossip from nonoffice gossip. When the going gets tough, when the gossip gets mean, you always have one reliable escape line: “Don’t we have some work to do here?”

John Tierney, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/science/03tier.html

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Infants Able To Identify Humans As Source Of Speech, Monkeys As Source Of Monkey Calls

New research shows that infants as young as five months old are able to correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls.

Infants as young as five months old are able to correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls, psychology researchers have found. Their finding, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides the first evidence that human infants are able to correctly match different kinds of vocalizations to different species.

The study’s co-authors were: Athena Vouloumanos, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology; Madelynn Druhen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Marc Hauser, a professor in Harvard University’s Departments of Psychology and Human Evolutionary Biology; and Anouk Huizink, a researcher in McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The research was conducted at the McGill Infant Development Centre and the NYU Infant Cognition and Communication Lab, under the direction of Vouloumanos.

While young children know that humans speak, monkeys grunt, and ducks quack, it’s not clear when we come to know which vocalizations each of these animals produce. Although much is known about infants’ abilities to match properties of human voices to faces, such as emotion, it is unknown whether infants are able to match vocalizations to the specific species that produces them. In the PNAS study, the team of psychologists explored this question by asking whether young infants expect humans, but not other animals, to produce speech, and also, whether infants can identify the sources of vocalizations produced by other species.

To do so, the researchers showed five-month-old infants from English- and French-speaking homes a sequence of individually presented pictures of human faces and rhesus monkey faces paired either with human speech or with rhesus vocalizations. They then examined whether infants preferentially attended to the human faces when human vocalizations were presented (two Japanese single words “nasu” and “haiiro”), and whether infants preferentially attended to the rhesus faces when rhesus vocalizations (a coo and a gekker call) were presented. Previous research has revealed that when presented with audiovisual stimuli, infants tend to look longer at sounds and images that correctly match, so the researchers predicted that if infants identified the sources of vocalizations, they would look longer when the vocalizations and faces matched.

As the researchers had predicted, the results showed that the infants looked longer at the pictures of human faces when human speech was presented and looked longer at pictures of rhesus monkey faces when rhesus vocalizations were presented. Surprisingly, however, infants weren’t able to match human-produced non-speech vocalizations, like laughter, to humans, suggesting that infants are especially tuned at an early age to some of the functional properties of speech. The fact infants were able to correctly attribute even unfamiliar Japanese speech to humans bolstered the significance of the results.

However, a subsequent experiment designed to test infants’ ability to identity non-human vocalizations revealed the limits of their recognition. The infants were given three acoustic stimuli–human speech, rhesus monkey calls, or duck calls–in tandem with the faces of humans and ducks. Unlike the initial experiment on human and rhesus monkey images and sounds, the infants did not look systematically longer at the duck face when it was presented with a duck vocalization, suggesting an inability to match ducks’ faces with their sounds.

Infants’ expectations about the sources of vocalizations seem not to be based on a simple association between faces and voices and extend beyond their specific experiences, the researchers concluded. This ability may help infants identify their conspecifics even when they are out of view and allow them to identify the human-produced speech sounds that are relevant for language acquisition.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091019162919.htm

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Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds

People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study.

The key is that the extremists have to believe that more people share their views than actually do, the research found.

The results may offer one possible explanation for our fractured political climate in the United States, where extreme liberal and conservative opinions often seem to dominate.

“When people with extreme views have this false sense that they are in the majority, they are more willing to express themselves,” said Kimberly Rios Morrison, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

How do people with extreme views believe they are in the majority? This can happen in groups that tend to lean moderately in one direction on an issue. Those that take the extreme version of their group’s viewpoint may believe that they actually represent the true views of their group, Morrison said.

One example is views about alcohol use among college students.

In a series of studies, Morrison and her co-author found that college students who were extremely pro-alcohol were more likely to express their opinions than others, even though most students surveyed were moderate in their views about alcohol use.

“Students who were stridently pro-alcohol tended to think that their opinion was much more popular than it actually was,” she said. “They seemed to buy into the stereotype that college students are very comfortable with alcohol use.”

Morrison conducted the study with Dale Miller of Stanford University. Their research appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The studies were done at Stanford University, which had a policy of prohibiting alcohol usage in common areas of all freshman dorms. In the first study, 37 students were asked to rate their own views about this policy on a scale from 1 (very strongly opposed) to 9 (very strongly in favor).

The average student’s views were near the mid-point of the scale — but most rated the typical Stanford student as more pro-alcohol than themselves.

“There’s this stereotype that college students are very pro-alcohol, and even most college students believe it,” Morrison said. “Most students think of themselves as less pro-alcohol than average.”

In the next two studies, students again rated themselves on similar scales that revealed how pro-alcohol they were. They were then asked how willing they would be to discuss their views on alcohol use with other Stanford students.

In general, students who were the most pro-alcohol were the most likely to say they wanted to express their views, compared to those with moderate or anti-alcohol views.

However, in one study the researchers added a twist: they gave participants fake data which indicated that other Stanford students held relatively conservative, anti-alcohol views.

When extremely pro-alcohol students viewed this data, they were less likely to say they were willing to discuss alcohol usage with their fellow students.

“It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue,” Morrison said.

However, students who had more extreme anti-alcohol views were not more likely to want to express their views, even when they saw the data that suggested a majority of their fellow students agreed with them.

“Their views that they are in the minority may be so deeply entrenched that it is difficult to change just based on our one experiment,” she said. “In addition, they don’t have the experience expressing their opinions on the subject like the pro-alcohol extremists do, so they may not feel as comfortable.”

This finding shows that not all extremists are more willing to share their opinions — only those who hold more extreme versions of the group’s actual views.

These results have implications for how Americans view the political opinions of their communities and their political parties, Morrison said.

Take as an example a community that tends to be moderate politically, but leans slightly liberal.

People with more extreme liberal views in the community may be more likely than others to attend publicly visible protests and display bumper stickers espousing their liberal views, because they think the community supports them.

“Everyone else sees these extreme opinions being expressed on a regular basis and they may eventually come to believe their community is more liberal than it actually is,” Morrison said. “The same process could occur in moderately conservative communities.

“You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.”

A similar process may occur in groups such as political parties. Moderately conservative people who belong to the Republican Party, for example, may believe that people with extremely conservative views represent their party, because those are the opinions they hear most often. However, that may not be true.

Morrison said when she and her colleagues were thinking about doing this study, they had in mind the phrase about the “silent majority” in the United States, which was popularized by President Richard Nixon and his vice-president, Spiro Agnew. They referred to the silent majority as the people who supported the war in Vietnam, but who were overshadowed by the “vocal minority” against the war.

While there may not be one monolithic silent majority in the United States, Morrison said this study suggests that the minority may indeed be more vocal in some cases.

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Full article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091021115151.htm

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Bosses Who Feel Inadequate Are More Likely To Bully

New research finds that bosses who feel incompetent are more likely to bully their employees.

Bosses who are in over their heads are more likely to bully subordinates. That’s because feelings of inadequacy trigger them to lash out at those around them, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

In a new twist on the adage “power corrupts,” researchers at UC Berkeley and USC have found a direct link among supervisors and upper management between self-perceived incompetence and aggression. The findings, gleaned from four separate studies, are published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science.

With more than one-third of American workers reporting that their bosses have sabotaged, yelled at or belittled them, the new study challenges previous assumptions that abusive bosses are solely driven by ambition and the need to hold onto their power.

“By showing when and why power leads to aggression, these findings are highly relevant as abusive supervision is such a pervasive problem in society,” said Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of management and organization at USC and lead author of the study.

During role-playing sessions, study participants who felt their egos were under threat would go so far as to needlessly sabotage an underling’s chances of winning money. In another test, participants who felt inadequate would request that a subordinate who gave a wrong answer to a test be notified by a loud obnoxious horn, even though they had the option of choosing silence or a quiet sound.

Researchers did not rate participants by an objective measure of competency, but by their self-reported level of competency. This allowed them to investigate how feelings of self-worth are tied to workplace behavior.

“Incompetence alone doesn’t lead to aggression,” said Serena Chen, associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study. “It’s the combination of having a high-power role and fearing that one is not up to the task that causes power holders to lash out. And our data suggest it’s ultimately about self-worth.”

Alternately, Chen said, participants who got ego boosts by scoring high in a leadership aptitude test or who recalled an incident or principle that made them feel good about themselves did not react with aggression.

That said, flattery may not be the best way to soothe a savage boss, the study points out: “It is both interesting and ironic to note that such flattery, although perhaps affirming to the ego, may contribute to the incompetent power holder’s ultimate demise — by causing the power holder to lose touch with reality,” the study concludes.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091014102209.htm

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200,000-year-old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The Delicatessen

A bone from the Qesem Cave showing irregular cutmarks.

Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinized by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.

Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they’re changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.

Presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, new finds unearthed at Qesem Cave in Israel suggest that during the late Lower Paleolithic period (between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago), people hunted and shared meat differently than they did in later times. Instead of a prey’s carcass being prepared by just one or two persons resulting in clear and repeated cutting marks — the forefathers of the modern butcher — cut marks on ancient animal bones suggest something else.

Different rules of the game

“The cut marks we are finding are both more abundant and more randomly oriented than those observed in later times, such as the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods,” says Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU’s Department of Archaeology. “What this could mean is that either one person from the clan butchered the group’s meat in a few episodes over time, or multiple persons hacked away at it in tandem,” he interprets. This finding provides clues as to social organization and structures in these early groups of hunters and gatherers, he adds.

Among human hunters in the past 200,000 years, from southern Africa to upstate New York or sub-arctic Canada, “there are distinctive patterns of how people hunt, who owns the products of the hunt, how carcasses are butchered and shared,” Prof. Gopher says. “The rules of sharing are one of the basic organizing principles of hunter-gatherer cultures. From 200,000 years ago to the present day, the patterns of meat-sharing and butchering run in a long clear line. But in the Qesem Cave, something different was happening. There was a distinct shift about 200,000 years ago, and archaeologists and anthropologists may have to reinterpret hunting and meat-sharing rituals.”

Meat-sharing practices, Prof. Gopher says, can tell present-day archaeologists about who was in a camp, how people dealt with danger and how societies were organized. “The basic logic of butchering large animals has not changed for a long time. Everyone knows how to deal with the cuts of meat, and we see cut marks on bones that are very distinctive and similar, matching even those of modern butchers. It’s the more random slash marks on the bones in Qesem that suggests something new.”

Where’s the beef?

The Qesem Cave finds demonstrate that man was at the top of the food chain during this period, but that they shared the meat differently than their later cousins. The TAU excavators and Prof. Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona (Tucson) hypothesize that the Qesem Cave people hunted cooperatively. After the hunt, they carried the highest-quality body parts of their prey back to the cave, where the meat was cut using stone-blade tools and then cooked on the fire.

“We believe this reflects a different way of butchering and sharing. More than one person was doing the job, and it fits our expectations of a less formal structure of cooperation,” says Prof. Gopher. “The major point here is that around 200,000 years ago or before, there was a change in behavior. What does it mean? Time and further excavations may tell.”

Qesem, which means “magic” in Hebrew, was discovered seven miles east of Tel Aviv about nine years ago during highway construction. It is being excavated on behalf of TAU’s Department of Archaeology by Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai in collaboration with an international group of experts. The cave contains the remains of animal bones dating back to 400,000 years ago. Most of the remains are from fallow deer, others from wild ancestors of horse, cattle, pig, and even some tortoise. The data that this dig provides has been invaluable: Until now there was considerable speculation as to whether or not people from the late Lower Paleolithic era were able to hunt at all, or whether they were reduced to scavenging, the researchers say.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091014111547.htm

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Managers’ Hiring Practices Vary By Race And Ethnicity, Study Finds

White, Asian and Hispanic managers tend to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers do, according to a new study out of the University of Miami School of Business Administration.

Using more than two years of personnel data from a large U.S. retail chain, the study found that when a black manager in a typical store is replaced by a white, Asian or Hispanic manager, the share of newly hired blacks falls from 21 to 17 percent, and the share of whites hired rises from 60 to 64 percent. The effect is even stronger for stores located in the South, where the replacement of a black manager causes the share of newly hired blacks to fall from 29 to 21 percent. In locations with large Hispanic populations, Hispanics hire more Hispanics and fewer whites than white managers.

The study is out this month in the Journal of Labor Economics.

The finding is clear evidence that the race or ethnicity of those who make hiring decisions can have a strong impact in the racial makeup of a company’s workforce, says Laura Giuliano, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami School of Business, who authored the study with David Levine and Jonathan Leonard from the University of California, Berkeley.

How strong is the impact? Consider a typical store with 40 employees located in the Southern U.S. According to the data, replacing a black manager with a non-black manager would result in the replacement of three to four black workers with white workers over the course of one year.

The effect in a non-Southern store would also be significant, if a bit more subtle. Replacing a black manager in a non-Southern store would result in one black worker being replaced by a white worker over a year.

“From the viewpoint of a district manager who is observing just a small sample of stores, this change might go unnoticed or appear insignificant,” Giuliano said. “However, the change may appear more significant from the point of view of job seekers — and especially black job seekers. In fact, the change in non-Southern stores amounts to a proportional decline of 15 percent in the number of blacks employed.”

The data used by Giuliano and her colleagues were especially well suited to sorting out the role race plays in hiring. While previous studies have also suggested that manager race plays a role, those studies have been unable to distinguish that role from other factors such as the demographic makeup of the local labor pool. Giuliano and her colleagues were able to isolate the race factor by tracking individual stores that experienced a change of manager.

“This means we can compare the hiring patterns of consecutive managers of different races in the same store,” she said. “Hence we can isolate the effect of a manager’s race by comparing the hiring patterns of managers when they hire from similar labor pools under similar conditions.”

The researchers were also able to use their data to offer some partial explanations for why these differences in hiring patterns exist.

They found that both black and non-black managers tend to hire people who live close to them. So if black managers live in predominantly black neighborhoods, their hiring network is also likely to be predominantly black.

The research also suggests that black managers hire fewer whites because whites may be less willing to work for black managers. The study found that when a white manager is replaced with a black manager, the rate at which white workers quit their jobs increases by 15 percent.

“We interpret this increase in the white quit rate as evidence of discriminatory sorting by white job seekers,” the authors write. “It implies that whites who dislike working for black managers often avoid working for black managers in the first place.”

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Full article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015163601.htm

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Sight Unseen: People Blinded by Brain Damage Can Respond to Emotive Expressions

A new study of people with “blindsight,” who can only see on an unconscious level, suggests that empathy rather than simple mimicry causes us to mirror the emotions of others.

GUT REACTIONS: Subjects in a recent study responded to these images of happy or fearful body postures and facial expressions even though they were not aware of what they were seeing.

Seeing is believing when it comes to emotions. We smile, we gasp, we yawn when we see others do the same—a phenomenon called emotional contagion.

A new study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that emotional contagion occurs even if the “seeing” step is bypassed. The blind patients in the study could not consciously see images of the faces of happy or fearful people that they were shown. Although their eyes and optic nerves were functional, the region of their brains involved in visual processing had been damaged. Instead, other parts of the brain took over, allowing the subjects to still respond normally with their own happy or scared facial expressions. These patients also made the appropriate happy or fearful face in response to emotions that were communicated through bodily expressions, suggesting that blind empathy can happen even without a facial template to imitate.

“We’re actually infected by the emotions of others. [This study shows] this phenomenon can be carried out in the absence of visual awareness,” says Marco Tamietto, a neuroscience researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. “We can say that emotional contagion cannot be reduced to a simple mimicry.”

To tease apart the mechanism underlying emotional contagion, Tamietto and his colleagues took advantage of what is known in neuroscience as “blindsight”. Starting a few decades ago, researchers found that patients who have damage to the part of the brain called the visual cortex, which processes visual information, retain a sort of sixth sense of sight. Although they are not aware of information in their visual fields, that input, whether it is a color, shape or facial expression, is still entering their eyes and being sent to and processed by other regions of their brains. One area known to receive visual information independently of the visual cortex is the amygdala, the brain’s emotional control center.

“With these patients, they feel they’re blind…. If you flash them [an image of] something, they claim they don’t see anything, but they guess reliably above chance” what the image is, says Marco Iacoboni, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.) and author of the book Mirroring People. Iacoboni was not involved in the recent PNAS study.

Tamietto and his colleagues studied two adult patients whose visual cortices had been damaged—one because of surgical removal at age 33, the other by a traumatic brain injury at age seven. As a result, each was blind in either the right or left side of the visual field. Even though both of their eyes was sending information from both sides of the visual field to the visual cortex, damage to the left side of the visual cortex, for example, made the patient effectively blind in the right side of the visual field.

The authors showed them pictures of faces of people with happy or fearful expressions on either the right or left side of a computer screen while the patients kept their eyes fixed on the center of the screen, and measured the spontaneous change in their facial muscles via electromyography (EMG). The patients responded by smiling at happy faces and frowning at faces showing fright that were shown to both their sighted and blind visual fields.

As Tamietto says, these facial responses could still be the result of the patients automatically mimicking the expressions that they see, even if they are seeing them on an unconscious level. The alternative is that the expressions on the screen are actually eliciting the same mood in the subjects. To distinguish between these two possibilities, Tamietto and his colleagues showed the patients images of happy or fearful body postures that would be emotional cues but not provide the information needed for facial imitation. The response was the same: In both visual fields, the patients responded by smiling at happy bodies and frowning at fearful bodily postures.

These results suggest, “you are really into the same emotional mood, so you are not simply imitating but you are unknowingly driven to the same emotional mood,” Tamietto says.

Iacoboni at U.C.L.A., however, is not convinced that mimicry is not involved. Because the study did not look at muscle movement in the body, only the face, it remains possible that the patients adjusted their bodily positions to imitate those on the screen, and then that emotion spread to their faces. One way to examine the role of imitation, he says, would be to look if the parts of the brain where there are mirror neurons are active in these studies.

In addition to suggesting that we can empathize with others’ emotions on an unconscious level, the authors also noticed that this reaction was faster than the one that involved the visual cortex. Whereas patients took about 1.2 seconds to respond to images
on their functional side, they reacted in 0.9 second to images in the blind visual field, according to the EMG recordings.

When the visual cortex is working, most of the visual information is routed through this part of the brain, says Alan Pegna, director of the Laboratory of Experimental Neuropsychology at Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland who was not involved in the current study. He has studied patients with blindsight, or the type of seeing that does not involve the visual cortex. “The idea is the information is reaching the amygdala in a kind of direct, quick and dirty route,” he says. When the visual cortex is out of commission, more of the visual information could be fast-tracked to the reflexive regions of the brain.

Tamietto says the unconscious route could also process visual information for other basic human emotions, including anger and sadness. “Those were events relevant for survival of our ancestors that required a rapid reaction to the environment mediated by phylogenetically ancient pathways that bypass the visual cortex,” he says. But lest we forget the importance of the visual cortex, he adds: “To really understand the intentions of others, we have to be conscious.” For that, we need the awareness that arises from those perceptions derived from the visual cortex.

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Full article and photo: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=emotional-contagion-blindsight-mimcry-imitation-visual-cortex&sc=DD_20091014

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Rhesus Macaque Monkey Moms ‘Go Gaga’ For Baby, Too

Baby rhesus macaque.

The intense exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants may have some pretty deep roots, suggests a study of rhesus macaques reported online on October 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

The new findings show that mother macaques and their infants have interactions in the first month of life that the researchers say look a lot like what humans tend to do.

“What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?” asked Pier Francesco Ferrari of the Università di Parma in Italy. “They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called “motherese”—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, “kiss” their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze.”

In humans, those communicative interactions go both ways, research in the last three decades has shown. Newborns are sensitive to their mother’s expressions, movements, and voice, and they also mutually engage their mothers and are capable of emotional exchange.

“For years, these capacities were considered to be basically unique to humans,” the researchers said, “although perhaps shared to some extent with chimpanzees.” The new findings extend those social skills to macaques, suggesting that the infant monkeys may “have a rich internal world” that we are only now beginning to see.

The researchers closely observed 14 mother-infant pairs for the first two months of the infants’ lives. They found that mother macaques and their babies spent more time gazing at each other than at other monkeys. Mothers also more often smacked their lips at their infants, a gesture that the infants often imitated back to their mothers.

The researchers also saw mothers holding their infant and actively searching for the infant’s gaze, sometimes holding the infant’s head and gently pulling it towards her face. In other instances, when infants were physically separated from their mothers, the parent moved her face very close to that of the infant, sometimes lowering her head and bouncing it in front of the youngster. Interestingly, those exchanges virtually disappeared when infants turned about one month old.

Why so soon, you might ask?

“It’s quite puzzling,” Ferrari said, “but we should consider that macaque development is much faster that of humans. Motor competences of a two-week-old macaque could be compared to an eight- to twelve-month-old human infant. Thus, independence from the mother occurs very early… what happens next in the first and second month of life is that infants become more interested in interacting with their same-age peers.”

The findings offer new insight into the origins of such mother-infant behavior. “Our results demonstrate that humans are not unique in showing emotional communication between mother and infant,” the researchers wrote. “Instead, we can trace the evolutionary foundation of those behaviors, which are considered crucial for the establishment of social exchange with others, to macaques. Mutual gaze, neonatal imitation, infant gestures, and exaggerated facial gesturing by mothers are distinctive signs in macaques, as well as in humans, of interpersonal communication and perhaps even a mutual appreciation of others’ intentions and emotions.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008123224.htm

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A Neuron’s Obsession Hints at Biology of Thought

Brain Cells Are Discovered That Only Respond to Certain Celebrities; One May Worship Homer Simpson but Ignore Madonna.

Researchers have discovered that in the vast neural network of the brain, some cells are, to use a technical term, celebrity groupies.

Probing deep into human brains, a team of scientists discovered a neuron roused only by Ronald Reagan, another cell smitten by the actress Halle Berry and a third devoted solely to Mother Teresa. Testing other single human neurons, they located a brain cell that would rather watch an episode of “The Simpsons” than Madonna.

In one sense, these findings are merely noise. They arise from rare recordings of electrical activity in brain cells, collected by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a decade of experiments with patients awaiting brain surgery for severe epilepsy. These tingles of electricity, however, gave the researchers the opportunity to locate neurons that help link our perceptions, memories and self-awareness.

In their most recent work this year, the research team reported that a single human neuron could recognize a personality through pictures, text or the sound of a name — no matter how that person was presented. In tests, one brain cell reacted only to Oprah Winfrey; another just to Luke Skywalker; a third singled out Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona.

Each neuron appeared to join together pieces of sensory information into a single mental impression. The researchers believe these cells are evidence that it only takes a simple circuit of neurons to encode an idea, perception or memory.

“These neurons will fire to the person no matter how you present them,” says bioengineer Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at the U.K.’s University of Leicester who studied the neurons with colleagues at UCLA and the California Institute of Technology. “All that we do, all that we think, all that we see is encoded by neurons. How do the neurons in our brain create all our perceptions of the world, all our emotions, all our thinking?”

At its simplest, a neuron is a nerve cell, one of the myriads that make up our central nervous system. Each cell can send and receive the electro-chemical signals that charge our thoughts and emotions.

On average, there are more neurons in the human brain than there are galaxies in the known universe — about 100 billion in all, arranged on a scaffold of one trillion or so supporting, thread-like glial cells. Our inspirations race through thousands of miles of nerve fibers and axons so compacted that our entire neural network is no larger than a coconut. No two brains are alike, not even those of identical twins.

To these researchers, neurons are the Lego bricks of the brain — a construction kit that can self-assemble into a cathedral of thought. “The idea of justice is probably generated by a small set of neurons firing,” says Caltech biophysicist Christof Koch, who studies the biological basis of consciousness. “It must be true of all the things that we think about … the number pi …God.”

In some ways, each neuron does act as if it has a mind of its own. Some fire only when they perceive a straight line; others just when they detect a right angle. New neurons form every day. No one knows how the cells can encode a complex thought or how so many neurons can make a mind.

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Recommended Reading

In the August edition of Current Biology, researchers at UCLA, Caltech and the University of Leicester reported on celebrity watching among human neurons in “Explicit Encoding of Multimodal Percepts by Single Neurons in the Human Brain.”

Researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science reported that these neurons were crucial to our recollections of people, places and things in “Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons in Human Hippocampus During Free Recall,” published in Science.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers showed how neurons reflect our conscious recognition of familiar people, places and things in “Human single-neuron responses at the threshold of conscious recognition.”

Reporting in Nature, the researchers identified neurons responding to celebrities and landmarks in “Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain.”

In Psychological Review, researchers recently explored the role of single cells in memory in “On the Biological Plausibility of Grandmother Cells: Implications for Neural Network Theories in Psychology and Neuroscience.”

Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch explores the research challenge posed by the biology of conscious thought in “The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach.”

Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi ponder biology and awareness in “A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination.”

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Most of what we have learned about their neurobiology comes through imaging studies, post-mortem analysis or animal experiments. Under normal circumstances, researchers can’t directly probe the cells of an awake, living human brain for ethical reasons.

In 1997, though, UCLA neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried and his colleagues started studying epilepsy patients who, as part of normal preparation for surgery, have electrodes implanted deep in their brain tissue. These electrodes are used to record neural activity that could identify the source of the patients’ intractable seizures. They also detect the activity of healthy cells around the electrodes, which gives the scientists an opportunity to study the biology of perception and memory. “This really offers us a glimpse into the human mind,” says Dr. Fried.

In five provocative experiments since 2005, the researchers used pictures of famous faces and places to screen neurons in brain areas that gather information from all our senses about a person or place we know and blend them into a long-term memory.

To start, Dr. Fried and his colleagues showed eight epilepsy patients 80 images of celebrities, animals, common objects and landmarks while recording the electrical activity of neurons wired to electrodes. They flashed each image for a second, shuffled the sequence into random order and then repeated it. They did that six times.

“You would present hundreds of stimuli — faces or celebrities or famous landmarks — and the neuron would respond to only one or two,” Dr. Fried says. “The incredible specificity was striking.”

In the magazine rack of the mind, some cover girls have a neuron all their own. Testing one patient, the researchers found a neuron that reacted instantly when shown almost any picture of Jennifer Aniston. This cell ignored other celebrities. It gave the cold shoulder to pictures of the actress with her former husband Brad Pitt. “The cells seemed to respond to the idea of Jennifer Aniston,” says Dr. Koch.

Testing a second patient, the researchers found a neuron that responded only to Halle Berry. The cell’s electrical activity jumped no matter how the actress was posed or how she was dressed. Again, this neuron showed no interest in other celebrities or to any other images of common objects or places.

Subsequent tests turned up single neurons in patients that fired selectively to pictures of former President Bill Clinton, The Beatles, or basketball player Michael Jordan. Each of these individual neurons behaved in a way that made the researchers believe that the cell was responding to a distillation of experience. “The neuron is responding to a concept, not a picture,” says Dr. Quian Quiroga. Moreover, each neuron acted as a trigger for recalling the concept they helped encode.

During a follow-up study at UCLA last year, the researchers showed 13 new volunteers wired to neural electrodes a set of 48 short video segments. In part, they wanted to see if neurons attuned any differently to moving pictures and changing scenery.

In fact, some cells did respond strongly to one video clip but not to others. In one patient, the researchers found a neuron that acted up only to The Simpsons cartoon series. “The neuron would spring to life when you showed the video of The Simpsons,” says Dr. Fried.

To be sure, few of us likely have a special brain cell devoted to Jennifer Aniston or Homer Simpson. Our cells are sensitive to more than brand names. They can attune themselves quickly to new people or places, often within a day. While monitoring one new patient’s brain, Dr. Quian Quiroga was surprised to encounter a neuron that already had him in mind.

“Suddenly,” he says, “I find a neuron firing in response to me.”

Robert Lee Hotz, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125503611739074321.html

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How Often Do Women Falsely Cry Rape?

The question the Hofstra disaster left dangling.

How often do women falsely cry rape? Because of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who recanted after telling police that five men had tricked her into a bathroom and then gang raped her two weeks ago, that question has been flying around the Internet. As Cathy Young notes in Newsday, the answers often fall into one of two camps. “Many feminists argue that the problem of false accusations is so minuscule that to discuss it extensively is a harmful distraction from the far more serious problem of rape. On the other side are men’s-rights activists, claiming that false accusations are as much of a scourge as rape itself.”

But isn’t the rate of false rape charges an empirical question, with a specific answer that isn’t vulnerable to ideological twisting? Yes and no. There has been a burst of research on this subject. Some of it is careful, but much of it is questionable. While most of the good studies converge at a rate of about 8 percent to 10 percent for false rape charges, the literature isn’t quite definitive enough to stamp out the far higher estimates. And even if we go by the lower numbers, there’s the question of interpretation. If one in 10 charges of rape is made up, is that a dangerously high rate or an acceptably low one? To put this in perspective, if we use the Bureau of Justice Statistics that show about 200,000 rapes in 2008, we could be looking at as many as 20,000 false accusations.

Legal scholars used to be routinely suspicious of rape victims. “Surely the simplest, and perhaps the most important, reason not to permit conviction for rape on the uncorroborated word of the prosecutrix is that the word is very often false,” a Yale Law Journal article opined in 1952, echoing a view voiced since at least the 17^th century. These views remained mainstream into the 1970s, if not later. As Marcia Clark said yesterday recalling the 1977 rape charges against Roman Polanski, “Those were the days when folks still believed rape was ‘easy to charge and hard to disprove.’ ” And that old adage couldn’t have been further from the truth. Prosecutors well knew that unless the victim was Snow White, the case was toast.”

You can see what Susan Brownmiller was up against when she wrote her path-breaking feminist tract, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, in 1975.

In her book, Brownmiller said that only 2 percent of rape allegations are false, citing findings by the female police in a New York City rape squad. The problem is that while this statistic has been widely repeated, with dutiful mentions of New York-based “research,” no one has ever tracked down its source. This we learned from a comprehensive review of the literature on false rape charges published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2006. The author, Philip Rumney, finds a couple of small studies that back up the 2 percent claim but isn’t confident of their methodology.

Rumney’s survey of the terrain is the best we found. He also takes aim at the findings on the other end of the spectrum—the research that purports to show that the rate of false allegations of rape is in the range of 40 percent, as well as the flawed (but often cited) work that makes a crazy high jump to as high as 90 percent. The 40 percent figure is usually attributed to a 1994 article by E.J. Kanin in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Kanin looked at 109 reports of rape to police in one small Midwestern metropolitan area over nine years. His pool was small. The police he studied always offered the victim a polygraph—perhaps signaling they doubted her veracity. And Kanin himself “warns against generalising from his findings” and points to reasons for questioning them, as Rumney explains.

The hugely high 90 percent false rate is several degrees more suspect. The citation for it is usually a study in Scotland by police surgeon N.M. MacLean of only 34 rape complaints made from 1969-74. Complaints were labeled false if they were made after a delay. Or if the victim didn’t look “disheveled” or upset or seriously injured. But those factors don’t necessarily indicate that a rape charge is trumped up. When police use stereotypes about rape to sort real allegations from false ones, they can do victims a real disservice, as this model paper from the Oregon Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force explains. In a 1981 study of 16 reports that claimed the victim admitted to making it up in 14 of them, one case was disproved because the police decided the woman was too large for the alleged rapist to have taken off her “extremely tight undergarments” against her will. Need we say that this not the critical eye we want from the cops?

Rumney’s smart debunkings leave us with a group of American, British, Canadian, and New Zealand studies that converge around a rate of 8 percent to 10 percent for false reports of rape. Not all of these studies are flawless, but together they’re better than the rest of the lot. They include a massive 1997 report on sexual assault by the U.S. Department of Justice, which includes data from 16,000 local, county, and state law enforcement agencies. The DoJ found that “in 1995, 87% of recorded forcible rapes were completed crimes and the remainder were classified as attempts. Law enforcement agencies indicated that about 8% of forcible rapes reported to them were determined to be unfounded and were excluded from the count of crimes.”

If 8 percent to 10 percent is about right for false reporting of rape, based on what we know so far, how should we think about that number? Rumney says he’s not sure whether crying wolf is more or less likely over rape than over other crimes, because the comparative research is even less conclusive. So that’s a question that appears to have no answer at the moment. (A 2001 Department of Justice report says that the rate of false reports is similar for other crimes, but it also gives the 2 percent figure without a source, so we’re skeptical.)

What is clear, however, are two problems that are the flip side of the same coin. False charges of rape are an absolute nightmare for the men caught in their net. And the specter of made-up allegations is a real problem for law enforcement—which means they are also a problem for women who are telling the truth. Let’s take the men first. We’ve heard from many of them in e-mails and comments since the Hofstra incident. Here is one story, equal parts heartbreaking and thoughtful:

My girlfriend was raped several years ago. I was falsely accused of rape less than a year ago. I contacted her (I had known her before her incident) because I was desperate for someone to talk to who would understand what I was going through. To my great relief, it turned out that we understood each other very well. From the initial stages of suicidal thoughts and not being able to function to the long-term fear, mistrust, and guilt that are facts of our lives, it turns out that her experience of being raped and mine of being falsely accused of rape were very similar. … One important difference, though, is that when she was violated, she received a great deal of help (medical, legal, psychological). Apart from family and friends, I was on my own. My legal and psychological problems had to be dealt with by me at a time when I couldn’t eat, sleep, or think (except, of course, about killing myself).

On the law enforcement end, we heard from Steve Cullen, an Army attorney who’s worked extensively as a prosecutor. He offered this cogent—and dire—explanation of the reverberations when women cry wolf about rape:

False reports have an incredibly corrosive impact on how sexual assault accusations are policed. Police treat sexual assault accusers badly—much worse than the lawyers do—much worse than the courtroom does. Forget what you see on “Law and Order SVU,” the police end absolutely discourages victims from reporting. Why is this so? Because cops suspect just about every victim is another false accuser, because either he/she has personally dealt with such a problem, or has heard stories from his or her cop buddies to this effect (and yes, in my experience female cops can be even worse offenders). This police behavior is bad, and counterproductive—but it’s real. Putting a real stigma on false reports might combat this a bit—and make it a little easier for actual victims at the police station.

False reports also have a disproportionate impact on juries. How I’d hate to be prosecuting a sexual assault right now. Often in sexual assault prosecutions there’s no debate as to the sex, but everything falls on proving lack of consent—and can only be proven through a convincing and persuasive victim’s testimony. Often, that victim’s testimony has to overcome some less than ideal circumstances—she was drinking, people observed her flirting with the perpetrator etc. That’s something she can own up to, and overcome on her own. What she can’t do on her own is extinguish jury members’ memory of reading of some spectacular false accusation case in the newspaper last month. Every false accusation that makes it into the news makes it that much harder for the real victims to receive justice.

If police and juries are influenced by false reports, especially high-profile instances of false charges, like the Duke lacrosse case or the Hofstra case, why wouldn’t those reports influence victims, too? Up to 60 percent of rapes go unreported. The Hofstra story will only make more women wonder if the police will believe them.

This is sobering. As, of course, is the whole topic. We’re left to draw the following conclusion: False allegations of rape aren’t rampant. But they don’t have to be to cause terrible trouble. This is a problem that a men’s rights movement shouldn’t trump up. And also one that feminists can’t dismiss.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.
Rachael Larimore is Slate‘s copy chief and deputy managing editor.

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Full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2231012/

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Key To Subliminal Messaging Is To Keep It Negative, Study Shows

‘Kill your speed’ road sign, an example of ‘negative’ messaging.

Subliminal messaging is most effective when the message being conveyed is negative, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Subliminal images – in other words, images shown so briefly that the viewer does not consciously ‘see’ them – have long been the subject of controversy, particularly in the area of advertising. Previous studies have already hinted that people can unconsciously pick up on subliminal information intended to provoke an emotional response, but limitations in the design of the studies have meant that the conclusions were ambiguous.

Today, the journal Emotion publishes a study by a UCL team led by Professor Nilli Lavie, which provides evidence that people are able to process emotional information from subliminal images and demonstrates conclusively that even under such conditions, information of negative value is better detected than information of positive value.

In the study, Professor Lavie and colleagues showed fifty participants a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared on-screen for only a fraction of second – at times only a fiftieth of a second, much too fast for the participants to consciously read the word. The words were either positive (e.g. cheerful, flower and peace), negative (e.g. agony, despair and murder) or neutral (e.g. box, ear or kettle). After each word, participants were asked to choose whether the word was neutral or ‘emotional’ (i.e. positive or negative), and how confident they were of their decision.

The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words – even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer.

“There has been much speculation about whether people can process emotional information unconsciously, for example pictures, faces and words,” says Professor Lavie. “We have shown that people can perceive the emotional value of subliminal messages and have demonstrated conclusively that people are much more attuned to negative words.

“Clearly, there are evolutionary advantages to responding rapidly to emotional information. We can’t wait for our consciousness to kick in if we see someone running towards us with a knife or if we drive under rainy or foggy weather conditions and see a sign warning ‘danger’.”

Professor Lavie believes the research may have implications for the use of subliminal marketing to convey messages, both for advertising and public service announcements such as safety campaigns.

“Negative words may have more of a rapid impact,” she explains. “‘Kill your speed’ should be more noticeable than ‘Slow down’. More controversially, highlighting a competitor’s negative qualities may work on a subliminal level much more effectively than shouting about your own selling points.”

Subliminal advertising is not permitted on TV in the UK, according the broadcasting regulator Ofcom*. However, there have been a number of cases where the rules been stretched. In one particularly infamous case in 1997, comedian Chris Morris used a half-frame caption at the end of the satirical show Brass Eye to criticise the chief executive of Channel 4, Michael Grade, for heavily editing the controversial programme. The description of his boss – “Grade is a ****” – would certainly have fallen into the category of negative words as described in Professor Lavie’s research.

*Ofcom states: “Broadcasters must not use techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred.” 

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090928095343.htm

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Understanding the Anxious Mind

Jerome Kagan’s “Aha!” moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.

No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty — new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells — and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.

Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard’s William James Hall — a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as “a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach … a sense of the insecurity of life.” Kagan is elfin and spry, balding and bespectacled. He neither looks nor acts his age, which is 80. He is one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the 20th century.

On the monitor, Baby 19 is a plain-looking teenager, hiding behind her long, dark hair. The interview, the same one given to all 15-year-olds in the longitudinal study, begins with questions about school. She has very few extracurricular activities, she says in a small voice, but she does like writing and playing the violin. She fidgets almost constantly as she speaks, twirling her hair, touching her ear, jiggling her knee. “This is the overflow of her high-reactive nature,” Kagan told me, standing near the monitor so he could fast-forward to the good parts.

Here was a good part: The interviewer asks Baby 19 what she worries about.

“I don’t know,” Baby 19 says after a long pause, twirling her hair faster, touching her face, her knee. She smiles a little, shrugs. Another pause. And then the list of troubles spills out: “When I don’t quite know what to do and it’s really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they’re doing. I’m always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way? … I worry about things like getting projects done… I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? … If I’m going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I’m going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say.” Baby 19 is wringing her hands now. “How I’m going to deal with the world when I’m grown. Or if I’m going to sort of do anything that really means anything.”

Her voice trails off. She wants to make a difference, she says, and worries about whether she will. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”

Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry. He went on to find many more such children, and would watch a big chunk of them run into trouble with anxiety or other problems as they grew up.

The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in — thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming — it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.

These psychologists have put the assumptions about innate temperament on firmer footing, and they have also demonstrated that some of us, like Baby 19, are born anxious — or, more accurately, born predisposed to be anxious. Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.

They have also shown that while temperament persists, the behavior associated with it doesn’t always. Kagan often talks about the three ways to identify an emotion: the physiological brain state, the way an individual describes the feeling and the behavior the feeling leads to. Not every brain state sparks the same subjective experience; one person might describe a hyperaroused brain in a negative way, as feeling anxious or tense, while another might enjoy the sensation and instead uses a positive word like “alert.” Nor does every brain state spark the same behavior: some might repress the bad feelings and act normally; others might withdraw. But while the behavior and the subjective experience associated with an emotion like anxiety might be in a person’s conscious control, physiology usually is not. This is what Kagan calls “the long shadow of temperament.” The oldest high-reactive subjects in Kagan’s and Fox’s studies, like Baby 19, are in their 20s now, and for many of them, no matter how much they manage to avoid looking anxious to an outsider, fears still rattle in their skulls at 3 o’clock in the morning. They remain anxious just below the surface, their subconscious brains still twitchy, still hypervigilant, still unable to shift attention away from perceived threats that aren’t really there.

ANXIETY IS NOT fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger. It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.

“I was flesh bereft of spirit,” wrote the journalist Patricia Pearson in “A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine),” in a pitch-perfect description of this emotional morass, “a friable self, grotesque… I got an AIDS test. I had my moles checked. I grew suspicious of pains in my back. If I was nauseous, I worried about cancer and started reading up obsessively on symptoms. I lay in bed whenever I could, trying to shut up the clamor of terror with sleep.”

When the “clamor of terror” starts to interfere with functioning, as it did for Pearson when she was a crime reporter in her early 30s, worrying turns into a clinical anxiety disorder, of which there are several forms: panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and a catch-all called generalized anxiety disorder. Taken together, they make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And that figure doesn’t even count the far greater swath who are garden-variety worriers, people who fret when a child is late, who worry when they hear a siren headed toward home, who are sure that a phone call in the middle of the night means someone is dead.

In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to overreactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight. But in people born with a particular brain circuitry, the kind seen in Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects, the amygdala is hyperreactive, prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain. Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.

But having all the earmarks of anxiety in the brain does not always translate into a subjective experience of anxiety. “The brain state does not make it a disorder,” Kagan told me. “The brain state exists, and the statement ‘I’m anxious,’ exists, and the correlation is imperfect.” Two people can experience the same level of anxiety, he said, but one who has interesting work to distract her from the jittery feelings might do fine, while another who has just lost his job spends all day at home fretting and might be quicker to reach a point where the thrum becomes overwhelming. It’s all in the context, the interpretation, the ability to divert your attention from the knot in your gut. These variations also happen when someone grows up from an anxious infant to someone either fretful or tranquil. One aim of Kagan’s and Fox’s longitudinal studies is to watch how the life stories of these high-strung babies unfold.

The quintessential longitudinal study, the one often mentioned because it set the standard, is the Framingham Heart Study, which enshrined the idea of risk factors. It was through Framingham, for instance, that scientists learned that high blood pressure was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, since it followed its subjects for long enough to detect that those who had high blood pressure in their 30s and 40s were more likely to have heart disease later in life.

But such studies draw conclusions about trends, not destinies. If someone with high blood pressure treats it early, the risk of heart disease can be reduced significantly. Similarly, if someone with an anxiety-prone temperament grows up in the right surroundings, he or she might never develop a full-blown anxiety disorder.

Kagan’s first exposure to longitudinal studies came shortly after he received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1954. He was working at the Fels Research Institute on the campus of Antioch College in Ohio, where a longitudinal study of middle-class children had been going on for nearly 30 years. He stumbled upon a gigantic room “loaded with prose summaries of what these children were like from the age of 1 month on,” he told me recently. He knew a treasure trove when he saw one.

Among these prose summaries, which ultimately Kagan and a colleague, Howard Moss, turned into the book “Birth to Maturity,” were descriptions indicating that babies had different innate temperaments. Kagan studiously ignored this finding; it didn’t fit with his left-leaning politics, which saw all individuals as born inherently the same — blank slates, to use the old terminology — and capable of achieving anything if afforded the right social, economic and educational opportunities. “I was so resistant to awarding biology much influence, I didn’t follow up on the inhibited temperaments I was seeing,” he told me. It took another 20 years of listening to arguments about nature versus nurture for Kagan finally to entertain the possibility that some behavior might be attributed to genes.

BY THE TIME Kagan moved to Harvard in 1964, the notion of an inborn temperament was on the ascent, in part because of the findings of Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas of New York University, who divided children into three categories: easy children, difficult children and those who were slow to warm up. Remembering the Fels data, Kagan embarked on his own longitudinal study of temperament. In 1979, he screened about 400 preschoolers, exposing them to new toys and new people in a laboratory playroom, videotaping them and coding their behavior. About 15 percent ended up in the group Kagan called “behaviorally inhibited”: wary, subdued, tending to hover near their mothers. Another 15 percent were “behaviorally uninhibited.” They were the fearless ones, who ran around trying to play with every new toy and chatting happily with the examiner. When Kagan talks about such children, he uses one of his favorite words: “ebullient.”

Over the next five years, 107 of these children — half of them timid, half bold — came back to the lab for more testing. (To keep environmental differences to a minimum, Kagan restricted his sample to children who were white, middle class and healthy at birth.) Their behavior was again recorded and again coded. Temperament, it turned out, tended to be stable over those five years, at least in children who started out at the extremes. There was a shift toward the middle between ages 2 and 7, but only 3 of the 107 changed categories completely from uninhibited to inhibited or vice versa. In addition, the most inhibited 7-year-olds showed some physiological differences that indicated an exaggerated response to stress.

Kagan and his colleagues, Nancy Snidman and J. Steven Reznick, published their results in Science in 1988. The physiological measurements led them to believe something biological was at work. Their hypothesis: the inhibited children were “born with a lower threshold” for arousal of various brain regions, in particular the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the circuit responsible for the stress hormone cortisol.

Though its findings seem almost self-evident today, the Science paper made a splash at the time. “There are two kinds of great research,” Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams College, told me when I discussed Kagan’s study with her. “There’s research that is counterintuitive, that shows you something you’d never guess on your own, and there’s research that shows you irrefutably what you had an intuition about, something you thought was true but didn’t have evidence to support.” Kagan’s research was of the second type, she says: “a beautiful, elegant experimental demonstration of an old intuition.”

But these subjects were preschoolers when Kagan first met them, already too old for him to know how much to attribute to nature rather than nurture. Couldn’t the inhibited children somehow have been raised to be wary instead of born that way? So the following year, Kagan began a new study he said he hoped would minimize the effects of the environment. He recruited infants who were just 4 months old, planning to categorize them according to temperament and to follow them as they grew to see whether temperament in infancy predicted anything about subsequent personality.

How to measure temperament in babies so young, at an age when some parents are still wondering whether a smile means happiness or gas? Kagan couldn’t measure the amygdala directly, so he looked for signs of its rampant firing that would be meaningful — and measurable — in infants. Since projections from the amygdala connect it to brain regions that control motor activity and the autonomic nervous system (heartbeat, breathing and other involuntary actions), he reasoned that if the amygdala was highly reactive, it would show up as increased motor activity, fretting and crying, as well as increases in heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.

Showing that a few physical measurements could offer insight into a baby’s psyche was one of Kagan’s real contributions. “Where his work had so much depth was not only in the longitudinal follow-up,” says Joan Kaufman, a Yale psychologist who was a research assistant at Harvard when the study began, “but in thinking about the behavioral phenotype of an inborn temperament and really assessing it with such rigor.”

Kagan brought about 500 babies — as before, all white, middle class and healthy — into the laboratory, placed them in infant seats in front of a video camera and exposed them to a series of novel stimuli. He showed them a schematic face that emitted words in a synthetic voice designed to be what he called “discrepant but not terrifying.” He dangled a dancing mobile with plastic Winnie the Pooh characters — again, nothing scary, but something new. He brought to their noses a cotton swab that had been dipped in diluted alcohol. The battery of novel stimuli took 45 minutes. Some of the babies gazed contentedly throughout. Others were in constant motion, kicking and moving their arms fitfully, furrowing their brows, arching their backs or crying if they were really upset.

Kagan and his research assistants again looked at videotapes and coded movements and cries. Based on the final tally, each infant was categorized as either low-reactive, high-reactive or somewhere in between. The low-reactives were the classic easy babies, the ones who take unfamiliarity in stride. The high-reactives, among them Baby 19, thrashed and whimpered when exposed to the same unfamiliar things. It was clear, as they twisted about in their infant seats, that these babies were high-maintenance, difficult to comfort.

About 40 percent were low-reactive, and about 20 percent were high-reactive. Kagan brought most of them, as well as those with intermediate temperament, back for testing at ages 1 and 2. About half of them — primarily those at each extreme — returned for further testing at ages 4, 7, 11 and 15. That pattern continues to this day, even after Kagan retired in 2000 and handed over his records to a collaborator, Carl Schwartz, an adolescent psychiatrist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, who tested some of Kagan’s subjects when they were 18 or 21.

By the earliest assessments, certain patterns had already emerged. At age 4, children who had been high-reactive were four times as likely to be behaviorally inhibited as those who had been low-reactive. By age 7, almost half of the jittery babies had developed symptoms of anxiety — fear of thunder or dogs or darkness, extreme shyness in the classroom or playground — compared with just 10 percent of the more easygoing ones. About one in five of the high-reactive babies were consistently inhibited and fearful at every visit up to the age of 7.

“Fear is an incredibly heterogeneous construct,” says Daniel Pine, a child psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Pine collaborates on the two longitudinal studies at the University of Maryland, conducting psychiatric interviews and functional M.R.I. scans on subjects at several stages. “Fear of social things is different from fear of physical things.” The same brain circuitry is probably involved in both, he said, but different fears tend to show up at different points in development: fear of things like clowns, balloons or spiders emerging early in life; fear of things like social situations with peers emerging later. In addition, it’s relatively easy to avoid the physical things that frighten you; if you’re afraid of dogs, you can just take a different route to school to keep from passing that bull terrier down the street. It’s much harder to avoid social fears — you can avoid the dog on the way to school, but you still have to go to school.

The children tended to get a better grip on their fearfulness as they got older. By adolescence, the rate of anxiety in Kagan’s study subjects declined overall, including in the high-risk group. At 15, about two-thirds of those who had been high-reactors in infancy behaved pretty much like everybody else.

One such person was Mary, now a 21-year-old junior at Harvard, who was in the high-reactive group as a baby and was moderately fearful at ages 1 and 2. She didn’t think of herself as anxious, just dutiful. “I don’t stray from the rules too much,” she said when we spoke by telephone not long ago. “But it’s natural for me — I never felt troubled about it. I was definitely the kid who worked really hard to get good grades, who got all my homework done before I watched TV.” Mary also was an accomplished ballet dancer as a child, which gave her a way to work off energy and to find a niche in which she excelled. That talent, plus being raised in what Kagan called a “benevolent home environment,” might have helped shift Mary’s innate inhibition to something more constructive. If Mary’s high-reactive temperament is evident now, it comes out in the form of conscientiousness and self-control.

PEOPLE WITH A nervous temperament don’t usually get off so easily, Kagan and his colleagues have found. There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.

Most of the high-reactive kids in Kagan’s study did well in adolescence, getting good grades, going to parties, making friends. Scratch the surface, though, and many of them — probably most of them — were buckets of nerves. “It’s only the high-reactives who say, ‘I’m tense in school,’ ‘I vomit before examinations,’ ‘If we’re going on a class trip to D.C., I can’t sleep the night before,’ ” Kagan told me. “They don’t like it, but they’ve accepted the fact that they’re just tense people.” Invoking Jungian terminology, he called it the difference between persona (the outer-directed personality) and anima (the inner-directed thoughts and feelings). The persona can be controlled, but the anima often cannot.

Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland says that when the anima erupts in high-risk children, it often takes the form of excessive vigilance and misdirected attention. In the first of his two longitudinal studies of temperament, begun in 1989, he followed 180 children from the age of 4 months and gave them a set of neuropsychological tests when they were between 13 and 15. One test, called the spatial-cuing task, measures vigilance and the ability to disengage attention from a perceived threat. It shows two faces briefly on a computer screen, one on each side — the same face looking threatening on one side and pleasant on the other. The faces fade away, and an arrow appears on one side of the screen, sometimes on the side the threatening face had been on, sometimes on the other. The subject must notice the arrow and press a button to indicate whether the arrow points up or down.

Adults with clinical anxiety consistently are faster at pressing the correct button if the arrow is on the side of the screen where the threatening face had been, and slower if the arrow is on the other side. (Non-anxious adults show no such subconscious preference.) In the kids in Fox’s study, those who were born anxiety-prone — even the outwardly calm, well-adjusted ones — tended to perform this task like anxious adults, paying more attention to the threatening face whether or not they meant to.

A similar result came from another test Fox gave his subjects, called the potentiated startle response. In this test, teenagers are placed in front of a screen and told that when the screen is blue, there is a chance a puff of air will be blasted at their throats — a sensation that, Fox assured me, is surprising and uncomfortable but not painful. When the screen is green, they’re safe; they are told that no puff of air will ever come when the green screen is on. Then, to evoke a startle, the experimenter plays a loud noise and measures the teenager’s response (an involuntary eye blink). All subjects have a robust startle response when the blue screen is on, which reflects the fact that they are tensing up in anticipation of that uncomfortable air puff. But anxiety-prone kids startle just as much with the green, supposedly safe screen. They stay on guard, anxious and wired, even when the situation is not threatening. Again, this finding held no matter how the subjects behaved in real life — and no matter how they were feeling while the test was taking place.

Fox’s collaborator, Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H., conducted functional M.R.I. scans on 27 of these study subjects when they were adolescents. While they were in the scanner, Pine showed them pictures of fearful faces. Sometimes he told them to try to measure how wide the nose was — in other words, to focus on a detail that is emotionally neutral. Other times he told them to think about how afraid they felt looking at the person in the picture.

Teenagers who were in the group at low risk for anxiety showed no increase in activity in the amygdala when they looked at the face, even if they had been told to focus on their own fear. But those in the high-risk group showed increased activity in the amygdala when they were thinking about their own feelings (though not when they were thinking about the nose). Once again, this pattern was seen in anxiety-prone youngsters quite apart from whether they had problems with anxiety in their daily lives. In the high-risk kids, even those who were apparently calm in most settings, their amygdalas lighted up more than the others’ did.

Temperamental type tends to reveal itself not only in functional M.R.I. scans but also in structural M.R.I.’s, which look at brain anatomy rather than activity. In 2007 Carl Schwartz, the Harvard psychiatrist who has taken over the follow-up work on Kagan’s two longitudinal studies, put 76 of Kagan’s study subjects in an M.R.I. machine. At the time, they were 18 years old. (Baby 19 was part of the sample; Mary was asked to participate, but she declined.) He found that the subjects who were high-reactors at 4 months tended to show significant thickening in the prefrontal cortex compared to those who were low-reactors. “This was amazing,” Schwartz told me. “The temperament they exhibited as infants still seemed to leave a fingerprint in the brain 18 years later.”

He is still trying to work out the exact meaning of this fingerprint; he cannot yet tell, for instance, whether a thicker cortex is a cause of a high-reactive temperament, or an effect, or something else entirely. One job of the prefrontal cortex is inhibitory, putting a damper on signals that come from the amygdala. Could it be that the cortex thickens more in the anxiety-prone as it is busy tamping down the overactive amygdala and growing new neural connections? Or does a thicker cortex come first, and contribute to a tendency to be anxious in the first place?

One way Schwartz tried to untangle his uncertainties was by winnowing from his sample the 14 subjects who had ever been given a diagnosis of social-anxiety disorder. What was left, presumably, were 62 young people who all functioned just fine, at least in the sense of never having suffered from social anxiety. Schwartz reviewed their brain images, and the difference between the cortical thickening in the high-reactive group and the low-reactives not only remained; it also became more pronounced. One explanation of this could be that a thicker cortex is protective in the anxiety-prone. He surmises that those 14 subjects who developed problems did so in part because their cortex was thinner, and the high-reactives who had avoided social anxiety had the thickest cortexes of all.

So what do these brain-anxious young people report about their state of mind? Anxiety, remember, can occur at three levels: brain, behavior and subjective experience. Were the ones whose brains looked anxious on the M.R.I. scans actually experiencing the sensation of being anxious?

This is a question the scientists struggle with, hampered as they are by peoples’ inability to report their own feelings accurately. Pine told me that his subjects often admit, after the fact, that they had been more afraid during the experiment than they said at the time — leaving him unsure what conclusions to draw. According to Kagan, the high-reactive temperament is characterized by a tendency to be supersensitive to your own body’s signals. Wouldn’t you expect, then, that anxiety-prone kids would have some insight into their own brains? Yet even in the high-risk subjects, objective brain state and subjective experience of anxiety still don’t always track.

It is also difficult to say whether high-reactive people are aware, more generally, that their brains are more tightly coiled than other people’s. “What people say about what they’re feeling is significant, but it is hardly the whole story,” Schwartz says. “Some of those kids probably do have a subjective awareness of their brain state; others who have equally large amygdala signals — depending on how they have adapted, how they’ve been brought up and supported — might have little awareness of it.” In some cases, he says, people might even have “reframed” certain physical sensations that could be considered symptoms of anxiety — like feeling jazzed up or having your pulse quicken — as “vaguely exhilarating or exciting.”

Studies like Pine’s and Schwartz’s might actually be revealing not an anxious brain at all but an experimental artifact, says the developmental psychologist Robert Plomin. Plomin, who runs a longitudinal twin study of genes and behavior at King’s College, London, agrees that anxiety does have a neurological fingerprint, but he worries about a disconnect between anxiety in the lab and anxiety as a quotidian experience. “Let’s say that in your real life you learn to manage your temperamental dispositions so you don’t freak out,” he said. “Let’s say you learn to take a deep breath, learn tricks to make yourself function better in life. But in the lab you’re not dealing with social situations you’ve learned to control. You’re just shown — boom! — some horrible picture of a bloody accident.” If your response to a brutal image is milliseconds faster than the response of someone who is more sanguine, Plomin asked, what does that really tell you about how your brain would respond in the real world to a worrisome situation?

To make the anxiety-provoking lab challenge more authentic and emotionally charged, Pine and his colleagues at the N.I.M.H., Eric Nelson and Amanda Guyer, concocted an elaborate experimental setup to persuade teenagers in a functional M.R.I. machine that their social status really is on the line: a fake Internet chat room. They created a set of potential chat-room partners for their subjects: smiley, fictitious teenagers, complete with sham MySpace pages. The setup was that the other kids would eventually tell the subjects in the scanner whether they did or did not want to chat with them. The scans were taken, then, while the subjects were lying still, awaiting the verdict. In a handful of pilot experiments, this has proved to be an emotionally significant challenge for teenagers with social anxiety. The anxious youngsters, while waiting to hear from one of the pretend teenagers they wanted to avoid, showed more reactivity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Pine has conducted this same experiment on 40 of Fox’s longitudinal-study subjects and is currently analyzing the results.

Still, tracking the anxious mind, even with a more realistic experimental setup, means having the subject lie in an M.R.I. scanner, which is inherently not only artificial but also stressful. So Plomin’s point is interesting. Brain scans and other lab findings might reflect something deep and persistent going on in the anxious mind. But if you have learned to control your behavior, to structure your life so you can limit triggers and cope with your emotional skittishness, how much does it really matter?

THE BEHAVIORAL STRAND of the brain-behavior-experience triad is the one that seems most amenable to intervention, and scientists are now investigating how it is that two-thirds of those with a high-reactive temperament manage to avoid trouble. Many environmental factors no doubt come into play — some of them malleable, some less so. In Kagan’s first study, for instance, he found that birth order seemed relevant. Behaviorally inhibited children were much more likely to have older siblings: two-thirds of them did, compared with just one-third of the uninhibited children. Could having older siblings, he and his co-authors wondered, mean being teased and pushed, which becomes a source of chronic stress, which in turn amplifies a biological predisposition to inhibition? Kagan never replicated this finding, as intriguing as it was — which shows how difficult it can be to tease out which environmental factors are relevant, and which turn out to be incidental. Fox, meanwhile, noted that the high-reactive babies who went to day care when they were young were significantly less fearful at age 4 than were the high-reactives who stayed home with their mothers.

Attempts to see what kind of parenting works best with an anxiety-prone temperament leave almost as many questions asked as answered. Which is better for a fearful, high-strung child — a parent who coddles the child and says everything will be all right, or a parent who sets firm, strict limits and has no tolerance for skittishness? You could picture it as going either way, really. On the one hand, it might be good to shield children from the things that worry them. On the other hand, it might be better to urge them, maybe even force them, to confront the things they dread.

Scientists from both Kagan’s and Fox’s labs have looked at this question in a systematic way, and they have come up with two somewhat different findings. Both studies involved a series of home visits and hours of videotapes of mother-baby interactions. But one study, by Kagan’s graduate student Doreen Arcus in the early 1990s, found that what seemed to be best for high-reactive babies were mothers who set firm limits and did not rush too quickly to comfort them when they cried. And the other, by Fox’s postdoctoral fellow Amie Ashley Hane a decade later, found something slightly different: that the best fit for high-strung babies were sensitive mothers, who met their fearful children on their own terms and interacted with them in a way that was accepting and supportive without being intrusive. Sometimes, of course, there’s a fine line between firm and hardhearted, and a fine line between supportive and intrusive. This makes it especially tough to turn research findings like Arcus’s and Hane’s into clear guidance on how best to care for a fretful child.

The best outcome, however it happens, is to rear a child who learns to wrestle his demons on his own. Some children figure out themselves what works best. “Inner struggles pulled at me for years until I was able to just let go and calm myself,” wrote one of Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects in an essay, revealing a wisdom far beyond his 13 years. “For example, when I first heard about the anthrax in Washington, I began to have an upset stomach. I realized it was simply because of my anxiety that I was feeling sick. As soon as I realized that, the stomachache went away. Because I now understand my predisposition toward anxiety, I can talk myself out of simple fears.” There are many adults, anxious or not, who can’t control their own interior monologues as well as this boy can.

For the children who need help grappling with their fears, some psychologists try to intervene early, with programs that give worried children tools for quieting the scary thoughts in their heads. Kids are often taught the same skills that anxious adults are, a variation on cognitive behavior therapy, designed to stop the endless recursive loop of rumination, replacing it with a smart, rational interior voice. In a way, it’s teaching anxious people to do what non-anxious people do naturally.

“I joke a lot about my anxiety,” wrote a young woman named Brittany on the group blog We Worry, part of a thriving community of anxiety blogs. “And there are times I do find it funny. I can do this because there is that voice in my head that tells me what I’m worrying about is irrational. But then I worry about worrying about irrational things. It is a never-ending cycle.” She might laugh at herself, she wrote, but life can get “overwhelming to me sometimes. Things that don’t even register to most people are uphill battles for me.”

Even those with normal, run-of-the-mill fretfulness — not a clinical anxiety disorder like Brittany’s — struggle to outsmart their brooding. “I have a friend who’s a clinical psychologist, and we talk about this a lot — what people do on their own to make themselves less anxious,” said Engel of Williams College, who is writing a book about temperament called “Red Flags and Red Herrings.” Engel said she is by nature very anxious, as is the eldest of her three sons. “The way we deal with it is that we both get everything done in lots of time. We can’t stand the anxiety of a looming deadline; we’re so worried about being late that we do it five days early.” This is one way to alleviate anxiety, she said. “There are other things we could do. We could drink, we could procrastinate, we could pretend we don’t have the deadline. I guess we both happen to be lucky that our method is adaptive.”

This kind of adapting might have something to do with intelligence, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and author of “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.” He says he believes, based on pure conjecture, that people with higher intelligence are better at overcoming their anxious temperament and more likely to “see their own worry list as a problem to be solved, minimizing unnecessary anxiety while still being anxious enough to get things done.” At least one study lends support to Pinker’s impression. In a 2004 article called “Can Worriers Be Winners?” two British scientists gave personality questionnaires to a group of financial services managers and found that those who reported themselves as scoring high on anxiety traits, like being nervous about performing well on the job, turned out to be better employees, but only if their worrying was accompanied by high cognitive ability.

Fox said that what distinguishes the high-reactives who learn to adapt from those who don’t often comes down to something simple, like finding one or two supportive friends — or, like Mary and her ballet, finding something they’re good at and can feel self-confident about. But there could be some physiological differences between the adapters and the nonadapters, too. Baby 19, for instance, ran into some problems as she grew up. At a year old, she was one of the most fearful children in Kagan’s study, and she had an episode of depression in middle school and a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder as a teenager. While these could have been related to any of a number of environmental factors, including a broken home, they could be related too to something curious that turned up in the brain scan Schwartz did on Baby 19 when she was 18 years old.

When Baby 19 was in the functional M.R.I. scanner and shown a series of unfamiliar faces, Schwartz said, her amygdala was highly reactive — about three times as much as that of a typical low-reactor. This was what Schwartz expected in someone with her temperament and psychiatric history. More surprising, though, was how her prefrontal cortex appeared on the structural M.R.I. scan. Rather than the thickened cortex that so many young adults with her temperament had, Baby 19’s was relatively thin.

“This is the brain area implicated in emotional regulation,” Schwartz told me. Could it be that in her case, her thin cortex was unable to regulate excessive activity in the amygdala, leading to more problems than someone with a thicker cortex would encounter? “At the level of an individual, it’s always a bit dangerous to draw conclusions,” he said. “In fact, it’s pretty much impossible. But maybe one thing that affects outcome is whether the genes that contribute to these two areas, the amygdala and the cortex, travel together or separately.” Maybe a high-reactive person with a jumpy amygdala can manage to avoid the behavioral and subjective experience of anxiety because of a strong cortex that can quiet the overactive brain. But in Baby 19’s case, the jumpy amygdala might instead have been accompanied by a cortex less able to mount an inhibitory response. “Maybe when those things occur together,” Schwartz said, “your outcome is that you have a little bit more trouble.”

LOOKING AT THE neurology of anxiety raises the inevitable question of why a trait that causes so much mental anguish would have evolved in the first place. For the species as a whole, it is most likely an advantage to have some group members who are hypervigilant and who see everything as a threat, always ready to sound an alarm and leap into action. For the individual, though, being inhibited can mean having fewer mating opportunities, not to mention the psychic burden, wearing yourself ragged with a brain that’s always on high alert.

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities. Kagan has observed that the high-reactives in his sample tend to avoid the traditional hazards of adolescence. Because they are more restrained than their wilder peers, he says, high-reactive kids are less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly. They grow up to be the Felix Ungers of the world, he says, clearing a safe, neat path for the Oscar Madisons.

People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.

Kagan told me that in the 40 years he worked at Harvard, he hired at least 200 research assistants, “and I always looked for high-reactives. They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors, they’re careful when they’re coding data.” He said he would bet that when the United States sends people up in space, the steely, brave astronauts were low-reactive as infants, and the mission-control people down on the ground, doing the detail work that keeps the craft aloft, were high-reactive.

An anxious temperament might serve a more exalted function too. “Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

These are overgeneralizations, of course. And they’re easy to shoot down with exceptions. But all the exceptions mean, really, is that the link between neurology and behavior is complicated. There may well be hundreds of different temperaments, and these studies have investigated only two — the most stable and most amenable to measurement, but still just two. If it were as simple as saying that a high-reactive infant will become a behaviorally inhibited child who will become an anxious adult, all the scientific work on temperament would amount to little more than charting horoscopes.

The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold. Still, while a Sylvia Plath almost certainly won’t grow up to be a Bill Clinton, she can either grow up to be anxious and suicidal, or simply a poet. Temperament is important, but life intervenes.

As for Baby 19, she has not yet gone against type, and odds are she never will. She is in college and doing pretty well, Kagan told me. But her temperament still comes through in her personality. Kagan said Baby 19 tends to be “dour” and “melancholy.” And she is still, and probably always will be, a worrier.

Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about the federal effort to diagnose mysterious diseases.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html

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Pulling Together Increases Your Pain Threshold

A study of Oxford rowers has shown that members of a team who exercised together were able to tolerate twice as much pain as when they trained on their own.

In the study, published September 16 in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, researchers from the University of Oxford’s Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology found the pain threshold of 12 rowers from the Oxford Boat Race squad was greater after group training than after individual training.

They conclude that acting as a group and in close synchrony seems to ‘ramp up’ pain thresholds. The underlying endorphin release may be the mechanism that underpins communal-bonding effects that emerge from activities like religious rituals and dancing.

Each of the 12 rowers participated in four separate tests. They were asked to row continuously for 45 minutes in a virtual boat in the gym (as in normal training), in an exercise carried out in two teams of six and then in a separate session as individuals, unobserved by other team members. After each of the sessions, the researchers measured their pain threshold by how long they could stand an inflated blood pressure cuff on the arm.

The study found there was a significant increase in the rowers’ pain threshold following exercise in both individual and group sessions (a well established response to exercise of any kind). However, after the group training there was a significantly larger increase as compared with training carried out individually.

Since close synchrony is the key to successful competition-class racing, these results suggest that doing a synchronised activity as a group increases the endorphin rush that we get from physical exertion. The study says that since endorphins help to create a sense of bonhomie and positive effect, this effect may underlie the experience of warmth and belonging that we have when we do activities like dancing, sports, religious rituals and other forms of communal exercise together.

Professor Robin Dunbar, Head of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, said: ‘Previous research suggests that synchronised physical activity such as laughter, music and many religious activities makes people happier and is part of the bonding process. We also know that physical exercise creates a natural high through the release of endorphins. What this study shows us is that synchrony alone seems to ramp up the production of endorphins so as to heighten the effect when we do these activities in groups.’

Lead author Dr Emma Cohen, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, said: ‘The results suggest that endorphin release is significantly greater in group training than in individual training even when power output, or physical exertion, remains constant. The exact features of group activity that generate this effect are unknown, but this study contributes to a growing body of evidence suggesting that synchronised, coordinated physical activity may be responsible.’

One of the researchers involved in this study was Robin Ejsmond-Frey, a double Blue in rowing and former President of the Oxford University Boat Club.

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Full article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090927150348.htm

Photo: http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/gallery_image/72/11/rowing_team.html

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Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?

A new study demonstrates that thinking about love–but not about sex–causes us to think more “globally,” making it easier to come up with new ideas.

Love has inspired countless works of art, from immortal plays such as Romeo and Juliet, to architectural masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal, to classic pop songs, like Queen’s “Love of My Life”. This raises the obvious question: why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity?

One possibility is that when we’re in love we actually think differently. This romantic hypothesis was recently tested by the psychologists Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel at the University of Amsterdam. The researchers found that love really does alter our thoughts, and that this profound emotion affects us in a way that is different than simply thinking about sex.

The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the “here and now”. Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex.

According to construal level theory (CLT), thinking about events that are farther into the future or past – or any kind psychological distancing (such as considering things or people that are physically farther away, or considering remote, unlikely alternatives to reality) triggers a more global processing style. In other words, psychological distancing makes us see the forest rather than the individual trees.

A global processing style promotes creative thinking because it helps raise remote and uncommon associations. Consider, for example, the act of finding a gift for your partner. If we think about a gift while in a local mindset, then we’ll probably focus on more literal and concrete options, most of which involve a tangible object wrapped in colorful paper. We’ll probably consider the usual suspects, such as a watch, a book, or perfume. However, thinking about a gift more globally might inspire us to consider a gift as “anything that will make him/her happy”. This may, in turn, bring to mind more diverse and original ideas, such as going on a joint vacation, writing a song, or cleaning and remodeling the house. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should always think globally. While local processing might interfere with creativity, it also promotes analytic thinking, which requires us to apply logical rules. For example, if you are looking for a piece of furniture in a big display according to a pre-defined list of criteria (e.g., size, color, price), a local mindset may help you find a match, by preventing you from being side-tracked by attractive but irrelevant options and by making you pay more attention to relevant details.

In sum, the authors suggest that, because love activates a long-term perspective that elicits global processing, it should also promote creativity and impede analytic thinking. In contrast, inasmuch as sex activates a short-term perspective that elicits local processing, it should also promote analytic thinking and impede creative thinking.

The authors present two studies to support this model. Participants in the first study first imagined one of three situations: a long walk with their beloved one (the love condition), casual sex with a person to whom they were attracted but not in love with (the sex condition), or a nice walk on their own (the control condition). Participants then attempted to solve three creative insight problems and four problems that assess analytic thinking, which were logic problems from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) (e.g., if A < B and C > B then ?) As predicted, participants in the love condition solved more creativity problems and less analytic problems than those in the control condition. Participants in the sex condition, on the other hand, solved less creativity problems and more analytic problems compared to participants in the control condition.

The second study examined whether more subtle reminders of love and sex can also elicit similar effects. First, as part of an alleged attention task, participants were subliminally presented with words related to love (e.g. “loving”), words related to sex (e.g., “eroticism”), or a non-word letter string (control condition; “XQFBZ”). Next, analytic thinking was measured using the same GRE problems as in the first study. Creative thinking was measured this time using a generation task, in which participants had limited time to generate as many uses for a brick as possible. Replicating the findings of the first study, participants in the love condition generated more creative uses and solved less analytic problems than those in the control condition, whereas participants in the sex condition displayed the opposite pattern.

One of the most noteworthy implications of these experiments is that love and sex don’t simply influence the way we think about the people we love or desire. Instead, they influence the way we think about everything. The same researchers demonstrate this tendency in yet another experiment. When in love, it seems, we struggle to distinguish between the different qualities of the beloved person (e.g., “If he is so handsome, he must also be kind!”), a phenomenon that is often labeled the halo effect. Does love also promote halo effects for other objects? It seems that the answer is yes. The same group of researchers reasoned that the halo effect reflects global processing, and therefore it should increase when people think of love and decrease when they think of sex. They found the predicted pattern of evaluations (that is, less differentiation between distinct qualities after thinking about love and more differentiation after thinking about sex), not only in evaluations of a romantic partner, but also in evaluating different aspects of a chair!   The takeaway lesson is that thinking about love, or anything that promotes a distal perspective or global processing, can make us more creative. Perhaps love is an especially potent way to induce in us a sense of transcendence – being in the here and now yet also contemplating the distant future and maybe even eternity.

Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira, Scientific American

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Full article and photo: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-falling-in-love-make&sc=WR_20090929

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The plight of the Pinocchio parent

Keeping kids in the dark

Researcher Kang Lee acknowledges he fibs to his own son: To stop Nathan from fidgeting, Mr. Lee tells him the hazard button is an ‘eject’ tool.

Lying children will not be tolerated in Kelli Catana’s house.

But each time her mother-in-law steps out for a cigarette, she hears the same inquisitive chorus from her four kids: “Where’s Nanny going?”

She’ll tell them Nanny went out to the car. Or that she had to go get something. An honest answer would involve a frank chat about the perils of smoking. Heavy stuff for children aged 7 to 2.

“If I tell them, then my mother-in-law’s going to walk in and they’re going to say, ‘You’re killing yourself and you’re going to die,’ ” says the 37-year-old Ottawa mom . “There’s a limit. I mean, do I tell serious lies to my children? It depends.”

While most mothers and fathers try to walk their talk, many are Pinocchio parenting – teaching their kids that lying is bad while regularly feeding them fibs, a new study has found.

In a report published in the current issue of the Journal of Moral Education, researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California found that parents who stress the importance of truth-telling to their little ones quite often tell lies to influence the children’s behaviour or emotions, whether it’s an idle threat to make them eat their peas or boost their confidence by praising their ear-splitting saxophone solo.

“Because it’s easy, we just do it,” says study co-author Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Studies at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “Some parents may have been doing it for years and they really have no idea they are actually telling lies.”

Prof. Lee and Gail Heyman, a psychology professor at the University of California San Diego, conducted two studies to find out whether parents lie to their kids to influence behaviour or emotions. The first asked 127 American undergraduate students to recall lies their parents told them. They were then read anecdotes involving a mother and a six-year-old daughter and judged the intent of the lie: Was it told to make the child behave or to make them feel better about themselves? Finally, the students were asked whether their parents emphasized the importance of honesty to them as kids. The second study quizzed 127 parents in a similar style on whether they lie to their kids and if they teach honesty in their homes.

Both studies found parents regularly lie to their kids while sending the overall message that lying is wrong.

The consequences of parenting-by-lying will be the basis of his next study, which Prof. Lee expects will reveal both positive and negative effects.

“If your child discovers that mom and dad has lied, they may realize not every single word we say is true and that would allow them to develop a healthy sense of skepticism,” he says. “But on the other hand they might lose trust.”

While Prof. Lee encourages parents to try more honest tactics instead of telling a lie, he’s quick to own up to a little Pinocchio-parenting of his own.

To quell his son’s habit of fidgeting in his car-seat, the savvy dad renamed the hazard button on his dashboard the “eject” button. If dad presses the button, six-year-old Nathan thinks he’ll be catapulted from the vehicle.

“I just put my hand over it” and Nathan behaves, Dr. Lee says.

Parents tell good lies and bad lies, says Daniel Lagacé-Séguin, an associate professor of psychology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax who researches parenting and social development.

“Often when parents lie, it’s not the same type of lying they’re trying to discourage their kids from doing,” he says. But if the child catches mom and dad in a fib, parents should be ready with a solid justification, he says.

Most parents lie to shield their children from knowing too much too soon.

In early July, Scott Fortnum’s kids discovered baby mice in the garage of their Innisfil, Ont., home. Fascinated by the tiny creatures, Marshall, 11, and Tessa, 8 committed themselves to the rodents’ care, vowing to rise every two hours to feed them. When they weren’t looking, the 44-year-old dad moved the rodents to the field behind their house where their chance of survival was slim. He told the kids he’d taken them to the Humane Society where professionals could care for them.

“It was a lie to save us huge amounts of time that we didn’t have and to save them from being very upset,” he says.

The “lies” he tells his kids are meant to protect them from damaging information or from hurt feelings. Others are clearly told in jest, such as the grandiose claim that he went to high school with the tooth fairy.

Parents shouldn’t feel badly about the lies they tell their kids, especially if they’re told to teach them how to be polite, respectful citizens, says Paul Ekman, a psychologist and director of the Paul Ekman group, which counsels organizations on emotional skills and lying.

“You need to talk to your kids about what kind of lies matter,” he says. Teaching social graces involves modelling a few white lies. If your kid catches you lying to your neighbour, ask them how you could have handled the situation without lying, he suggests.

Kids naturally learn the acceptable untruths as they get older, says Terry Carson, a certified parenting coach in Toronto.

“Children in that pre-school and toddler group don’t always understand the difference between lying and fantasy,” she says. “And so when parents get on this high horse and say, ‘There’s no lying in this house,’ they have to be clear that the child understands the difference.”

Ms. Catana, for one, stands behind the lies she tells. The paradox of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ doesn’t keep her up at night either.

“I would never lie to hurt them, anything would always be for the preservation of their innocence,” she says. “I would hope that by the time they’re old enough, to make that differentiation and understand the reasoning behind it.”

Harmless?

The White Lie: “Doesn’t Aunt Molly’s new perm look great?”

Intended effect: Teaching children to be polite. Kids also often overhear white lies parents tell to other adults, such as telling the telemarketer that dad isn’t home.

Actual effect: Kids will usually start telling white lies themselves, believing it’s the nice thing to do.

The ‘Do What I Say or Else’ Lie, aka ‘the idle threat’: “If you don’t brush your teeth, all of your molars will fall out.”

Intended effect: Making the kids believe something undesirable will happen so they’ll behave.

Actual effect: They’ll usually believe the parent and comply, though might become unreasonably afraid of the threatened consequence.

The Confidence Boosting Lie: “You’re such a good writer!”

Intended effect: Making the child feel good, without having to discuss how they can improve.

Actual effect: Kids might take it as encouragement and an unspoken cue to keep improving. Or they’ll think they’re great and hold false beliefs about their abilities which will set them up for disappointment in the long run.

The Protective Lie: “The cat must’ve run away.”

Intended Effect: Instead of revealing that kitty was hit by a car, this lie protects the child’s feelings, innocence and allows parents to save the tough conversations for another time, such as when the child is old enough to understand.

Actual Effect: Child usually perks up, but might have more follow-up questions which would force the parent to make the lie even more elaborate.

Sarah Boesveld, Globe and Mail

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Full article and photo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-plight-of-the-pinocchio-parent/article1303268/

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New Take On Why Social Cues Confuse Babies And Dogs In Classic Hiding Game

A new study suggests that both babies and dogs are distracted by social cues — they focus on adults’ faces and gestures rather than paying attention to where an object is hidden.

A study by developmental scientists at the University of Iowa and Indiana University challenges the conclusions of two recent studies on how babies and dogs respond to certain social cues. The new findings, published in this Friday’s edition of the journal Science, indicate that babies and dogs may not be as clever as the other studies suggest.

Last year, a surprising study led by József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences showed cues from adults — like nodding, speaking and pointing — cause babies to perform worse in a classic toy-hiding game. The September 2008 report in Science suggested that babies have a unique ability to “read” social cues in a way that misled them in this particular task. Then, in a follow-up paper published earlier this month, the same research team reported that dogs, like babies, are confused by social cues — but wolves aren’t. The authors concluded that dogs have become sensitive to social cues from humans due to our shared evolutionary past.

The latest UI and Indiana study used a 10-year-old theory based on how the brain works to provide another explanation for these hiding-and-finding mistakes. Led by John Spencer, professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the UI Delta Center, the work indicates that babies age 10 months or younger are distracted by social cues — they focus on adults’ faces and gestures rather than paying attention to where the object is hidden and do not have a unique ability, as the earlier study suggested.

Because dogs show a similar pattern of behavior with social cues present, the computer model used by Spencer’s team can explain their behavior, too. Spencer and his colleagues suspect that wolves succeed in this task for the same reasons older babies do — they can form a robust memory for the hiding location. They say this makes particular sense given that the experimenters hid bits of food in the study with wolves.

“You don’t often see cases in which the same data are interpreted in such fundamentally different ways,” he said. “We say the infants and the dogs are easily distracted by social cues and the wolves are the clever ones; they say the infants and the dogs have a special ability to process social cues, and the wolves are inferior. It’s exactly the opposite. It will be interesting to see where that tension takes us.”

The studies in question examine a classic error made by babies up to 10 months old. When they repeatedly see an object hidden in one spot, they look for it there. Even when they witness it being hidden somewhere else, they continue to search in the original hiding location. By age 1, babies figure it out. This odd “A-not-B” error is the subject of five decades of research. Discovered by child psychologist Jean Piaget, it’s a staple topic in developmental psychology courses and covered in parenting books.

Topál and his team are among the first to investigate how social cues influence babies’ and other animals’ performance on the task. Spencer considers the studies provocative but has concerns.

“It’s against our intuition that social cues seem to hurt the infants’ performance — you’d think encouragement from adults would be helpful. And it shows that social cues make a difference,” he said. “But we disagree with the explanations put forth that are not grounded in what we know about infants’ perceptual and cognitive abilities. This is, after all, a hiding and finding game — attention and memory should matter.”

To show how attention and memory matter in this task, Spencer and colleagues ran computer simulations of a theory that was originally published in 1999 by co-author Linda Smith and her colleagues from Indiana University. This theory has explained infants’ performance in many different versions of the A-not-B task. In the paper published this Friday in Science, Spencer and colleagues show that when the computer model fails to focus on the hiding event because distracting social cues are present, it shows the same behavior as infants.

“Research indicating that infants or dogs are extraordinary in some way tends to make a splash. We like to think our kids and pets are special, and in many ways they are,” he said. “But in our view, there is no special ability at play here. Using neural network models, we demonstrated that other mundane things underlie infants’ behavior. Infants and dogs are simply being distracted by social cues in this hiding game.”

Spencer and his co-authors, UI postdoctoral researcher Evelina Dineva and Linda B. Smith, a chancellor’s professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, propose a particular lesson from the debate. They want to see a move away from explanations that only explain a specific result — how infants interpret social cues in a hide-and-seek game — toward more comprehensive explanations that bring a host of findings together.

“This has been one of the really powerful aspects of our theory — it has unified a diverse array of findings with infants in this task and with older children in related memory tasks. Our paper nicely illustrates a new extension into the social domain,” Spencer said. “In our view, this is something to celebrate — that we can bring social cognition together with basic cognitive processes. The downside, of course, is that infants, and by analogy dogs, don’t have a special mind-reading ability. For some people, that’s an unpleasant pill to swallow.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090924141744.htm

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Do you speak criminal?

Why mobsters don’t talk like you and me

CRIMINALS, MORE OFTEN than not, do not have resumes. They generally can’t peddle their services on billboards, hire advertising agencies to develop their brands, find new hires on Monster.com, or discuss their problems at trade shows. And yet, just like normal, everyday law-abiding citizens, criminals are often businesspeople, seeking the one thing that every good company needs most: good, reliable help.

The dilemma of whom to trust is not one that’s exclusive to criminals–we make such decisions every day–but it’s a problem that’s especially prickly for those who live in a world shrouded in secrecy, a world where even a man’s name may not be his actual name. In his new book, ”Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate” (Princeton University Press), sociologist and Mafia expert Diego Gambetta explores this subculture and unearths an unspoken language among bad men. He offers insight on how mobsters, pedophiles, prisoners, and other shady characters earn one another’s trust and prove their mettle. And what he documents is both disturbing and, sometimes, hilarious.

It turns out–according to Gambetta, a native Italian and a sociology professor at the University of Oxford–that there are really practical reasons why Sicilian mobsters like to use nicknames, why pedophiles might out themselves to others online, why prison inmates fight (or don’t fight), and why mobsters from Japan to Russia might be out there, right now, reciting lines from ”The Godfather,” such as, ”Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

No, seriously.

IDEAS: Based on your research, what would people find most surprising about how people communicate in the criminal underworld?

GAMBETTA: I would say doing things that would seem irrational to us. Like revealing bad things that you’ve done. Or hurting yourself. Or hurting innocent people. I have a chapter on self-harm, which is probably the most unexpected thing you find.

IDEAS: What are some examples of ways criminals compromise themselves to prove their toughness or trustworthiness to another criminal?

GAMBETTA: One thing you can look at is how pedophile rings on the Internet work. Some of them work by asking new members to contribute previously unknown photographs to their website. In that sense, they contribute to the website of pedophile photographs, but at the same time they’re also giving information that they themselves have done that. So they are unlikely to be undercover agents. And with respect to physical harm, the best domain in which criminals have to prove their toughness, day in and day out, is prison. You find a lot of self-harm in prison.

IDEAS: What will prisoners do to themselves?

GAMBETTA: They will cut themselves, bang their head against a wall, swallow dangerous objects.

IDEAS: And that proves what?

GAMBETTA: It proves that you are tough enough and mad enough for them not to easily consider the option of coercing through physical violence.

IDEAS: In every prison movie you see, prisoners are fighting. Are prisoners really fighting all the time?

GAMBETTA: Yes, they certainly do fight a lot. And from a social science point of view, the interesting thing is when do they fight rather than not fight?

You see, for instance, that younger people and women tend to fight more than older prisoners, longer-sentenced prisoners, hardened criminals, because they are under a greater threat. They don’t have a violence capital to display.

IDEAS: You dedicate a chapter of the book to nicknames that criminals, namely mobsters, use, including The Accountant, Joe Baloney, Mozzarella, and–my favorite–Nino the Fool. Why do mobsters use nicknames so often?

GAMBETTA: The more dangerous the job you do as a mobster, the more it seems nicknames are used. For those that were convicted of homicide, they were referred to by others much more frequently by nicknames than by their real names. One hypothesis is they use it to make it harder for law enforcement to identify them. And there’s a simple reason–at least in Sicily. Namely, that a lot of people have the same name.

IDEAS: In the Mafia underworld, how celebrated is the movie ”The Godfather”?

GAMBETTA: It is very celebrated. Not just by the Sicilian Mafia and by the Italian-American Mafia, but oddly enough by people in the same line of business in Russia, in China, and in Japan. We have evidence that they understood that that was the sector of the economy in which they themselves moved, and there’s lots of evidence that they liked the film, that they could recite, by heart, bits of the film, in countries which you would think would have nothing to do with it.

IDEAS: We’ve got criminals out there in China and Japan who are modeling themselves after Michael and Sonny Corleone?

GAMBETTA: We do have evidence of that. Yes.

IDEAS: What are some other ways that criminals are modeling themselves on film portrayals?

GAMBETTA: Well, I guess ”The Godfather” is the big example because, for example, they don’t like movies like ”Donnie Brasco.”

IDEAS: Why not?

GAMBETTA: ”Donnie Brasco” is a very good movie, but it shows them as losers, as being taken in by this extremely skillful FBI agent, Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco. Several of them landed in jail, thanks to his undercover operation. And so, the movie portrays them at the losing end, and they don’t like that. Movies for them are a way of advertising, a way of gaining legitimacy.

IDEAS: Do you watch mob movies? ”The Godfather”? Did you watch ”The Sopranos”?

GAMBETTA: I did.

IDEAS: Did you enjoy it?

GAMBETTA: I did enjoy it, yes. Although I don’t think very many of them would go and see a psychiatrist. I don’t think there’s any record of anyone doing such a thing.

IDEAS: What about that great American movie ”Analyze This,” starring Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro?

GAMBETTA: I didn’t see that one.

IDEAS: You’re probably better off, actually.

GAMBETTA: I suspect I was.

Freelance writer Keith O’Brien, winner of the 2009 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, is a former staff writer for the Globe.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/do_you_speak_criminal/

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Willpower is a muscle: Use it or lose it

Didn’t feel like working out today? A new study suggests that doing one task that depletes your self-control can make it difficult to sum up the willpower to do another – such as exercise.

You resisted yelling at your son when he refused to eat his breakfast. You avoided checking Facebook on your BlackBerry during a board meeting. And you opted for an apple instead of a chocolate bar at lunch. You may not be physically tired at the end of the day, but you just don’t feel like working out.

A new study published yesterday in Psychology & Health suggests it may be because you’ve used up all your willpower.

Researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton found doing one task that depletes your self-control can make it difficult to sum up the willpower to do another – such as exercise.

A group of 61 study participants between the ages of 18 and 30 were asked to ride a stationary bike and researchers measured how much energy they exerted. They later asked 31 of the participants to ride the bike again, but first administered a Stroop test – in which participants had to read a list of colours (such as “red”) that were printed in a different colour (such as blue ink). The participants who did the test exerted less energy in the bike ride the second time around than the 30 members of the control group did.

Researchers also found that participants who had done the willpower-busting Stroop test were more likely to skip workouts they had previously scheduled.

Doing the dishes or avoiding biting your nails may require a lot of willpower, but that shouldn’t be an excuse not to work out, said Kathleen Martin Ginis, an associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster and lead author of the study.

She said if you plan a regular exercise routine and don’t have to think about details such as duration, you’re more likely to follow through.

You can also build up willpower by regularly challenging yourself to tasks that test your self-control.

“[Willpower] is like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets,” Dr. Martin Ginis said. “Try to resist having that extra piece of cake.”

And if you still don’t feel like exercising, try listening to your favourite song or watching a video of kittens on YouTube.

“People in good moods have more willpower,” she said.

Dakshana Bascaramurty, Globe and Mail

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Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/willpower-is-a-muscle-use-it-or-lose-it/article1300277/

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The elusive orgasm

Size matters, according to a new study that is stirring age-old anxieties about the female orgasm, including claims that vaginal orgasms give women better satisfaction about life in general. Sex experts are not pleased.

Women who experience vaginal (rather than clitoral) orgasm have “greater satisfaction with their sex life, mental health, relationships with both partners and friends, and life in general,” according to a new study that is stirring longstanding anxieties about the nature of the female orgasm.

And women could have more of them if they received better sex education in their youth, were more focused in bed, and in some cases, had lovers with bigger penises, according to the report.

The study, conducted by Stuart Brody, psychology professor at University of the West of Scotland, and co-author Petr Weiss, asked 917 Czech women to recollect their experiences with vaginal orgasm.

The findings, which will appear in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, have provoked controversy among sex researchers.

Unlike the large-scale studies performed by researchers such as Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and Shere Hite – which concluded that most women cannot climax without clitoral stimulation – this study found that just 21.9 per cent of the Czech participants could not achieve vaginal orgasm. (The researchers defined it as “orgasm produced simply from movements of the penis in your vagina, without any additional stimulation such as fingers for the orgasm after foreplay.”) More controversially, in their discussion the authors accuse feminists of pushing “clitorocentric” sex ed and denying the existence of the vaginal orgasm. It’s a denial that has divided the sexes by fragmenting lovers’ intimacy, and compromised women’s psychological and sexual health in the process, they say.

“Educators, practitioners, feminists and others who are interested in the goal of elevating women (as opposed to diminishing men), would be supportive of vaginal orgasm as an aspect of women’s psychosexual health,” Prof. Brody wrote in an e-mail.

Sexologists have reacted strongly to the study, with one critic accusing the authors of “clitoral envy” in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation Science Online article published earlier this month.

“It’s not a new phenomena that most female orgasms are triggered by clitoral stimulation. Women’s studies professors didn’t invent that,” said Alexander McKay, Toronto-based research co-ordinator of Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.

Mr. McKay and other critics have accused the researchers of holding antiquated – and potentially destructive – Freudian views. Freud contended that the clitoral orgasm was adolescent, while the vaginal orgasm was psychologically mature – the one women have with men after reaching puberty.

“To suggest that a vaginally induced orgasm is somehow superior from a mental-health perspective certainly seems to harken back to the ideas of Freud,” Mr. McKay said.

The views can be damaging to a woman’s confidence, said Lori Brotto, assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of British Columbia.

“By stating that you should be reaching orgasm through vaginal stimulation, it leads to a pathologizing of probably the vast majority of women who don’t reach orgasm in that way. That has clinical implications for diagnosing an orgasm disorder, it has relational implications, it has psychological implications for the woman herself,” said Prof. Brotto, who is also director of the school’s Sexual Health Laboratory.

But just as his critics have questioned his motivations, Prof. Brody questions what he views as the clitoris-biased sex ed movement: “What is the effect of telling women that they cannot feel a penis in their vagina, or at least not saliently enough to orgasm from it?” he asked in an e-mail.

Toronto-based certified sex educator Cory Silverberg countered that Prof. Brody is “mischaracterizing” people in his field: “Sex educators don’t go out there and say, ‘The clitoris, the clitoris, the clitoris.’ We talk about the clitoris mostly because nobody knows about it, and everyone knows about the vagina.”

Despite the authors’ assertion that women have been “inculcated” to believe vaginal orgasms don’t exist, experts say it’s the opposite: pop culture often depicts women climaxing upon penetration.

“When you read a romance novel, inevitably when it comes to the sex scene, when the guy’s rock-hard python enters her steaming love lava or whatever, she instantaneously orgasms,” said Trina Read, a Calgary-based author and sex coach.

Dr. Read said the men and women she counsels are often insecure about vaginal orgasm, namely why can’t they give or get one, and what might be wrong with them.

The study’s findings about penis size could stir unnecessary insecurity in men as well. The researchers told the Czech women to assume that the average erect penis is the length of a 200 Crown banknote (14.5-centimetres long). A third admitted a bigger penis helped them orgasm vaginally, but two thirds said size made little difference.

Still, many of the critics agree with Prof. Brody’s prescription that women could benefit from being more aware of vaginal sensations during sex.

“Most of us, when we have sex, are so pre-occupied with other thoughts: the work we have to do, or the kids hearing us in the next room, or thoughts about whether your partner finds you attractive, or even pornography. It’s hard for us to really tune into our bodies. This is one major cause of sexual dissatisfaction,” Mr. Silverberg said.

Prof. Brotto said awareness-based approaches are making headway in the treatment groups she runs at UBC’s sexual-health lab.

“[They're] showing a lot of promise: treatments that teach women how to be present, mindfulness-based approaches.”

“But again,” she added, “that’s not specific to vaginal orgasm. We find that you to teach any woman to attend to her sensations and she’ll report better sexual functioning.”

Zosia Bielski, Globe and Mail

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Full article and photo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/the-elusive-orgasm/article1300640/

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