Lisa Loren: Catalysis

From the Washington Post, scientists at NIH have discovered that when volunteers visualize themselves giving a sum of money to charity, the parts of their brains associated with pleasure light up:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

More specifically, giving money to a charitable organization causes activity in similar parts of the brain that light up when people receive money for themselves. Both donating to charitable causes and receiving money activate the VTA–striatum mesolimbic network, the same pathways that control more basic pleasures. Charitable giving also has an additional support - the subgenual area, which influences social attachment and affiliative reward mechanisms.

I’d love to see I’d like to see more research done on this. In the “selfish gene” era, it’s wonderful to see people explore the basic roots of human kindness and out tendency to give.

References:

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souza, R., & Grafman, J. (2006). Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. PNAS, 103(42), 15623-15628.

The New York Times is running an article on narrative psychology, a study a way people find structure and meaning within their experiences.  Generally, people don’t look at the things that happen to them as discrete, isolated events.  We string them together into stories, and the way we construct these stories may influence the way we think about life.

Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner.

It’s difficult to gauge correlation from studies like this - more “generative” people may be more likely to tell positive stories about themselves, or their positive spin on life may make them more energetic and involved.  The New York Times seems to take the former position, but it’s important to not underestimate the value of explanatory styles in functioning.  A great deal of research has shown that people who attribute their failures to unchanging personal attributes (basically, who tell stories in which they caused their own failures) tend to be less motivated and energetic in completing tasks than those who attribute their problems to outside circumstances.

Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, found something similar to this when  studying the narratives of people who had sought psychotherapy.

Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.

They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.

“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.

Again, I’m making a leap here when I assume the peoples’ narrative styles influence their recoveries, rather than the other way around, but this reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy.  Cognitive therapies work by identifying cognitive distortions (see Wikipedia for a pretty good list) and correcting them.  Effectively, cognitive distortions are a problem of faulty self-narration - assuming, for example, that one interpersonal failure means that all successive interpersonal encounters will also fail.  Cognitive restructuring is the process of finding the faulty logic in those stories. By changing our personal narratives, we can change the ways we interact with the world.  In short, we can change who we are.

A few weeks ago, I talked to a friend who was reading a popular evolutionary psychology book. His big complaint with it was that he couldn’t understand the reason for it. Why spend so much time and energy on justifying things that exist? Sure, it’s interesting to know to where our habits might have come from, but he insisted that it would be better to put all that time and energy into something with practical applications.

Now, I’m not a big fan of evolutionary psych. My first brush with it was in an Intro to Psychology class taught by a Harvard professor who chose all his examples from the realms of sex differences. He was a good teacher, overall, but my inner feminist bristles whenever someone tells me that male jealousy is purely a product of evolutionary drives. I haven’t had a lot to do with evolutionary psych in the intervening time, because it doesn’t really hold any appeal to me.

I found myself trying to defend this book. I don’t like the subject matter, but I could empathize with it, somehow. The best I could come up with at the time was that the author had a right to pursue whatever interested him, but I realized later that it wasn’t really about interest at all. Evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary studies in general, are about finding meaning in a world built on chance.

As someone who doesn’t believe in even the faintest trace of “intelligent design”, there’s something terrifying about the idea of having random features. I mean, I don’t stay up late at night wondering how my life would be if I happened to have a nose above my eyes, instead of below them, but the larger patterns of our existence sometimes look meaningless. Psychology and science are great at picking out the fact that, say, we tend like attractive people more than ugly people, but they don’t tell us why. Could it just be a coincidence that we find symmetrical faces more attractive than lopsided ones? An accident of our genetic wiring?

Evolutionary psychology provides meaning for things like this. Of _course_ we prefer symmetry, because it indicates that the person we’re considering as a potential mate has good genes. This quirk of perception means something. In its own way, evolutionary psych allows us to accept the idea that our minds and culture evolved through random chance, without taking that final step into meaningless and nihilism. It lets up believe that even if our features came to rest in this configuration by chance, they stayed there because they served a purpose.

In 1988, Harold Zullow and Martin Seligman accurately predicted the winners of the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries before they happened.

Pollsters and politicians have been trying to figure out why people vote the way they do for years. There are the honest few who simply want to predict the future, print their newspaper headlines a few days in advance, but most politicos are looking for a way to game the system. Do voters want the intellectual leader or the guy they’d want to sit down for a beer with? How do we make our qualified and competent candidate more appealing to the average voter?

Make him optimistic.

Zullow examined the stump speeches for thirteen presidential hopefuls, and rated them according to Seligman’s CAVE system for optimism. He hypothesized, on the basis of analysis of speeches from previous presidential races, that candidates whose speeches contained the most markers of optimism would win the nominations. Before the national conventions were held, he sent sealed envelopes with his predictions to a reporter at the New York Times. Zullow successfully picked both the winners and pointed out the flops.

In the context of more recent elections, this makes a great deal of sense. George Bush may not have had a plan for ending the war in Iraq, but his we’re-gonna-win-this bravado sounded shaper and more commanding than I-don’t-know-how-we’re-going-to-fix-this-mess Kerry. People want leaders who can promise them that everything will turn out okay.

The irony here is that too much optimism can negatively impact a president’s performance in office. Our situation abroad might be a bit more stable today if the White House had been a bit less self-assured and spent more time setting up contingency plans in Iraq. The Democratic field for 2008 might look a bit different if people valued political experience (link) more and leaned less on candidates who dish out unadulterated hope (link). Look, I like Obama as much as the next guy. I might even vote for him. But in terms of leadership in government, he’s pretty much unproven.

There are positive points to this. The first is that unlike intelligence or qualifications, optimism is very hard to fake. In scripted speaking opportunities, politicians could potentially hire optimistic speech writers, but in debates a natural pessimist usually shines through. Talking optimistically requires such a shift in thinking that most people can’t fake it for an audience.

Does it make a difference, though? Optimists can make overconfident, although a wise leader will surround him- or herself with pessimistic advisors to balance out that tendency. Optimists also tend to be better salespeople, more persistent, and less likely to give up in the face of failure. Whereas pessimists may not see their ideas through in the face of outside disapproval, an optimist is more likely to persevere - an important quality in any visionary statesman.

References:
Zullow, H.M., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1990). Pessimistic Rumination Predicts Defeat of Presidential Candidates, 1900 to 1984. Psychological Inquiry, 1(1), 52-61.
Seligman, M.E. (2006). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Vintage.

According to PsyBlog, Americans show less control over their facial expressions than Russians and Japanese, among others. These researchers also found some significant differences between sexes:

Men are more likely to hide surprise and fear while women control disgust, contempt and anger and many other emotions.

According to conventional, men control everything but their anger well, while women let it all hang out. It’s nice to see research confirm that women are just as repressed - and capable of controlling our feelings - as our male counterparts.

People who want to treat illnesses as complicated as depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia with predetermined algorithms make me a little nervous.  I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be treatment guidelines for these diseases.  I’d love to see every psychiatrist in America with a cheat sheet detailing what meds and doses have been proven to work for which conditions.  I worry, though, that the logical next step is to take psychiatrists out of the prescription process altogether, and pass the burden of psychiatric care onto primary care providers and nurse practitioners.  Both are capable, no doubt, but they don’t really have the expertise to manage the symptoms and side effects of psychiatric medications.

However, that requires highly competent and knowledgeable psychiatrists.  Not always a given.

Take this study of the Texas Medication Algorithm Project.  The study was set up to work in concert with psychiatrists, not without them, but the across-the-board success of the algorithm still worries me.

Compared with patients in usual care, patients in algorithm-based care incurred higher medication costs and had more frequent physician visits, although these differences often became smaller with time. For major depression, algorithm-based care achieved better outcomes sustainable with time but at higher agency and nonagency costs (mixed cost-effective). For bipolar disorder, patients in algorithm-based management achieved better outcomes at lower agency costs (cost-effective). For schizophrenia, patients in algorithm-based care achieved better outcomes that diminished with time, with no detectable difference in health care costs (cost-effective).

When an algorithm can do a better job of picking medications than a trained psychiatrist, that says some terrible things about the state of psychiatry today.  It’s bad enough to be taking “donations” from pharmaceutical companies when properly treating patients, but if that could be delaying the recovery of patients, it’s criminal.

This article from 2000 has a fascinating take on suicide in China. I don’t really believe its conclusions, but it opens up a window into Chinese mental health seven years ago. A team of psychologists from Canada and the Chinese Academy of preventative Medicine interviewed the families, friends, and neighbors of people who had killed themselves in an attempt to diagnose mental illness after the fact.

Preliminary findings suggest that between 50% and 60% of Chinese people who commit suicide have some form of mental illness. [...] In fact, the importance of mental illness as an explanatory factor in Chinese suicides is not as great as in other countries, which typically report mental illness in over 90% of people who kill themselves. It is therefore a significant finding that up to 50% of young Chinese women who commit suicide may be suffering from no mental illness at all.

In the US, a suicide attempt is (in my non-expert experience) pretty much a de facto diagnosis of some sort of mental illness. Basically, in our current system, a person cannot want to end her own life unless she suffers from some sort of mental problem.

In a complementary research project, the team has interviewed people who attempted suicide but were taken to hospital and saved. Asked when they had first thought of committing suicide, an astonishing 29% reported that they had decided to kill themselves only ten minutes or less before the attempt. Fully 50% reported that they had contemplated suicide for less than two hours.

Tidbits like this made me doubt the methodology of this study. True, impulsivity does play a part in suicide attempts, but there’s quite a difference between “I’ve never contemplated suicide before, and now I’m going to kill myself” and, “I’ve been thinking about this for months, and I’ve decided that today will be the day.” I’d worry that, somewhere in translation, a history of suicidality without immediate intent could be lost. In the process, nearly 50% of suicidal Chinese women might be labeled as stupidly impulsive instead of seriously ill.