paranoiaandotherfears

Navigating Love and Autism

2012-01-06T19:41:00.000-08:00

Navigating Love and Autism
By AMY HARMON

GREENFIELD, Mass. — The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as “not like the other humans,” regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.

She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.

So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.

“I don’t really like kissing,” he said.

Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign.

On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum.

But she found comfort in Jack’s forthrightness. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e-mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision.

“Is this what love is, Kirsten?” he had asked.

Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.

Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back.

The recent recognition that their social missteps arise from a neurological condition has lifted their romantic prospects, they say, allowing them to explain behavior once attributed to rudeness or a failure of character — and to ask for help. So has the recent proliferation of Web sites and forums where self-described “Aspies,” or “Aspergians,” trade dating tips and sometimes find actual dates. Lessons learned with the advent of social skills classes and therapies, typically intended to help them get jobs, are now being applied to the more treacherous work of forging intimacy.

The months that followed Jack and Kirsten’s first night together show how daunting it can be for the mindblind to achieve the kind of mutual understanding that so often eludes even nonautistic couples. But if the tendency to fixate on a narrow area of interest is sometimes considered a drawback, it may also explain one couple’s single-minded determination to keep trying.

A Meeting

Kirsten was first introduced to Jack in the fall of 2008 by her boyfriend at the time, who jumped up from their table at Rao’s Coffee in Amherst, Mass., to greet his friend, who was dressed uncharacteristically in a suit that hung from his lean frame.

Jack, it turned out, was on his way to court. A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion.

By the following spring, he would be cleared of all the charges and recruited by the director of the undergraduate chemistry program at the University of Massachusetts, who was impressed by a newspaper account of Jack’s home-built laboratory. Kirsten’s boyfriend, a popular Amherst High senior, had offered to serve as a character witness for his former classmate, and the three spent much time together that year.

The boyfriend told Kirsten that Jack had Asperger syndrome: his condition may have blinded him to the possibility that the explosions, which he recorded and posted on YouTube, could well be viewed by law enforcement authorities as anything other than the ambitious chemistry experiments he saw them.

But if Kirsten noticed that Jack held himself stiffly, spoke with an unusual formality and rarely made eye contact, she gave little thought to his condition, other than to note that it ran in families: his father, John Elder Robison, is the author of “Look Me in the Eye,” a best-selling 2007 memoir about his own diagnosis of Asperger’s at age 39.

After reading of the intense interests that often come with the condition — the elder Mr. Robison’s passion for Land Rovers, he had written, was the basis for his successful business servicing luxury vehicles — Kirsten and her boyfriend made light: “I have Asperger’s for McDonald’s,” she would joke. But Jack was all too familiar with the book’s more sobering stories, too: about the despair his father felt in his youth as he looked at happy couples around him and his rocky marriage to Jack’s mother, which ended in divorce.

“All these young Aspergians want to know how to succeed at dating,” John Robison told his son after his speaking engagements. And as a high school girlfriend broke up with Jack over the course of that year, Jack began to wonder more urgently about the same question.

Kirsten’s two previous boyfriends had broken up with her, too, and her current boyfriend was an unlikely match — a charismatic extrovert with soulful blue eyes who thrived on meeting new people. But when she admitted at the outset of their senior year in high school that she envied his social ease, he had embraced the role of social coach.

Years of social rejection had made her, in his view, overly eager to please. “People will take advantage of you if you act that way,” he warned. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll be a natural doormat.”

Noting her tendency to speak in a monotone, he urged her to be more expressive. He sought to quiet her hand movements, gave her personal hygiene tips (“You can’t do that,” he told her flatly when she used her fingers to scoop up food she had dropped on a table at Taco Bell and ate it) and pointed out the unspoken social cues she often missed. He elbowed her as she spoke for long minutes to an acquaintance about her interest in animal physiology. “When people look away,” he explained, “it means they’re not interested.”

And sometimes, he was plainly upset by what he perceived as her rudeness. “I can’t believe you did that,” he huffed when his mother asked Kirsten how she was and she did not reciprocate.

Much of the time, Kirsten embraced the tutoring, which he punctuated with unabashed displays of affection. “I love this girl!” the boyfriend once proclaimed, tackling her on his mother’s couch. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at age 11, she never heard the word autism. They were convinced that with some effort she could become as socially adept as he was.

But she also chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey. And she despaired of ever living up to his most urgent request: that she share her innermost feelings with him.

“Just don’t filter,” he said one night, lying in bed with her.

“It’s like the blue screen of death,” she said, describing her difficulty conveying her emotion with a widely used term for a Windows computer crash. “There are no words there.”

“You’re not a robot,” he insisted, intending to comfort her. “I know you can do this. You’re a human being.”

But not, she thought, the kind he wanted her to be.

In contrast to her boyfriend’s emotional probing, Jack’s enthusiasm for facts — like how far his green laser pointer could reach across the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst — came as a relief. So, too, did his apparent lack of concern for fitting in. A supporter of President Obama, she found herself admiring Jack’s anti-Obama bumper sticker, which almost invariably elicited angry honks in left-leaning Amherst but once got him out of a ticket.

If Jack had trouble reading Kirsten’s expressions and body language, he also noticed that she had what he considered a perfect smile. On his laptop, he showed her bootleg episodes of his favorite TV show, “Breaking Bad,” about a chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine producer. And on the evenings when he argued libertarian positions with Kirsten’s boyfriend, a liberal Democrat, he often found himself disappointed when she went to bed early.

One afternoon in the fall of 2009 he asked if she was free to meet between classes at UMass, where she was enrolled as a freshman and he was studying chemistry for an associate’s degree. They talked about their childhoods in Amherst, both social outcasts even among their geeky classmates, offspring of academics. Jack’s poor grades reflected the hours he spent reading chemistry Web sites rather than doing homework; one teacher had suggested to Kirsten’s mother, an administrator at UMass, that she would be “a perfect candidate for home-schooling.”

Kirsten told Jack, at some length, of her desire to be a medical examiner. He replied, at even greater length, about chemistry, his interest having shifted from explosives to designing new compounds for medical use. Sometimes, as they circled the campus, she broke in with questions “What’s that?” she wanted to know when his descriptions grew technical, or “Why?” Accustomed to being treated with something more akin to polite fascination when he held forth on his favorite subjects — he often felt, he said, like a zoo animal — he checked to be sure her interest was genuine before providing detailed answers.

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soulmate.

Road Bumps

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

She moved out of her dorm and into his apartment that fall. Despite his distaste for her habit of scavenging, he did not complain when she decorated his bare living room with a plastic orange, magnetic trains and a Wolverine action figure rescued from the sidewalk. And when he rejected her suggestion that a cat would make the apartment cozier, she did not push it.

She liked his large hands, with their long, tapered fingers and wide knuckles, and thought he was the most interesting person she had ever met.

“You’re very pretty,” he told her frequently, looking up from his computer on their kitchen table to appreciate her tall, slender frame, her big eyes bright under her dark bangs.

For his part, Jack rejoiced to find that Kirsten did not hold certain social expectations that had caused him anxiety with a high school girlfriend. He apologized, for instance, that he failed to get her a Christmas present because he had not been able to think of what she would like.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said with a shrug. “I can tell you what to get me next time.”

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

It was the disagreements that spiraled into serious conflicts when they could not understand and, then, find a way to comfort each other that threatened to break them apart. One might start over Kirsten’s request that Jack hug her when she came home from school, or his perception that she was already angry at him when she came through the door.

“The more we argue, the worse it gets,” Jack said once, close to despair.

One night as Kirsten cooked dinner, he peered into the pan where she was sautéing vegetables to comment on the way she had cut the cauliflower.

“It’s too big,” he explained. “It won’t cook through.”

“It’s better when it’s not all mushy,” she insisted.

“No,” he said. “You’re just doing it wrong.”

Eventually, Kirsten, unable to contain her tears, fled to the living room.

“What I want,” she told him when they analyzed their clashes in less-fraught moments, “is to be held and rocked and comforted.”

But Jack, believing himself accused of a slight he had not made, could not bring himself to touch her.

He needed to be apart, to cool down.

Once, he had tried to do as she requested, stiffly wrapping his arms around her, against all that seemed natural to him. But when it only seemed to elicit more tears, he did not try again.

Instead, he hovered near her. “Stop crying,” he would say, pacing the perimeter of the small apartment and returning to where she sat.

He could not distract himself at those moments, even with the chemistry entries on Wikipedia, or an old episode of “Breaking Bad.”

The Diagnosis

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

In one chapter about the repetitive behavior and thought-process “ruts” that are common among autistic people, she saw her own difficulty climbing out of her black moods. Many children of her generation who probably had Asperger’s, she read, were misdiagnosed with A.D.H.D. because autism carried more of a stigma. Girls with the condition, one theory went, were overlooked because their shyness was tolerated more and “mother hen” friends might shield them from the worst social isolation, as had happened to Kirsten.

And then there was the characteristic of autism — focusing on a detail rather than the whole — that seemed to define the nitpicky arguments she and Jack had daily, even hourly, it sometimes seemed. There was the one, for example, when they were trying to recount something that had happened at a particular hotel, but could not advance past the semantics of its size.

“The hotel was miles wide,” Kirsten had started. “And — ”

“It was not ‘miles’ wide,” Jack had broken in. “It was maybe an acre, but not a mile wide, I can guarantee it.”

“I don’t think you can guarantee it,” she had retorted — and so on.

These fights, which Jack had dubbed “Aspie arguments,” were not soul-sapping, like the ones where he could not comprehend her need for a certain kind of comfort and she could not abide his inability to give it. But the cumulative effect was exhausting. It had been Jack’s similar escalation of arguments with his father that had prompted John Robison to send him to the therapist who gave him the Asperger’s diagnosis at age 15.

No prescription would come with a diagnosis, Kirsten knew. The only drugs for autism treated side effects, like depression or anxiety; she already had medication for A.D.H.D. It might help her get more time for assignments at school, where the constant effort of social interaction sometimes left her drained and struggling even with tasks that should be easy for her. But mostly, she wanted to know if there was an explanation for the awkwardness that had plagued her for so long.

Her answer came in the fall of 2010, the result of a six-hour battery of questionnaires and puzzles and a visit with a psychologist. “Lack of awareness of self-impact,” the report read. “Diminished expression of ordinary social graces.” She had left, the doctor wrote, “without a parting word.”

Many others with the same diagnosis, she knew, were more impaired than she. In online forums, she encountered skeptics who saw Asperger’s as an excuse for rudeness — or, worse, a means of pathologizing essentially normal behavior and diverting resources from those who were truly challenged. Her ex-boyfriend, she suspected, felt similarly about her own diagnosis when she reported the news.

But Kirsten took heart in the official acknowledgment and the community it made her a part of. She changed her account setting at WrongPlanet.net from “undiagnosed” to “Asperger syndrome” and persuaded her mother to pay for a therapist who specialized in treating people on the autism spectrum.

And between classes one day in the library that fall, she read the first chapters of “Thinking in Pictures,” the autobiography of Temple Grandin, the autistic animal scientist whose life story was made into an HBO movie. Kirsten, too, had always thought in pictures.

People with autism, Dr. Grandin suggested, can more easily put themselves in the shoes of an animal than in those of another person because of their sensory-oriented and visual thought process. Suddenly, Kirsten yearned for the kind of uncomplicated comfort and affection that came with a small furry animal.

She would talk to Jack again about a cat, she thought, closing the book.

A Meltdown

Kirsten’s diagnosis brought her closer to Jack.

Alex Plank, 25, the founder of the WrongPlanet Web site, also had Asperger’s and had enlisted Jack in the production of Autism Talk TV, featuring video interviews with autism experts.

Kirsten now joined them, and as they traveled to conferences, Alex’s tales of his own romantic ups and downs — echoed by many on his Web site — gave them perspective on their own dramas. “It’s easy for me to get a girl’s number,” he told them. “I can build attraction. But attraction isn’t enough.”

Still, Kirsten’s wish for more physical affection from Jack was proving harder to manage. Once, during a family gathering at his father’s house, she saw Mr. Robison put his arms around the woman he had been dating and would soon marry. That, she thought with a pang, was more than Jack would do unprompted even if there was no one around.

If she didn’t ask him so much, he would do it more, Jack countered. Didn’t she understand how fake it felt when he knew he was “supposed” to do it?

Yet when the opportunity arose to date other people, they did not take it. This past spring, a male student sitting next to Kirsten in anthropology class passed her a tic-tac-toe board he had drawn during a lecture. She played along, but when he asked her, “Do you have a boyfriend?” she replied, “Yes,” and that was the end of it. Nor did Jack, asked to lunch by his female lab partner, show any interest.

But at Fox Lane Middle School in Bedford, N.Y., where Jack and Kirsten, now Internet mini-celebrities, were invited to speak about autism, the staff asked them, “Have you ever thought about dating each other?”

“We’re so platonic,” Kirsten complained to Jack later. “They didn’t even know.”

Nor was she the only one now craving affection. “Why do you pet Tybalt more than me?” he asked after a visit to her mother’s house, referring to the family dog named for the Shakespeare character.

The talk about the cat, when she raised the issue again last spring, was not much of a talk. He was allergic, Jack told her. And the apartment already felt too small. It was obvious to him that it made no sense.

Yet he had grown up with a cat, Kirsten pointed out. His allergies were not so bad. She could keep him supplied with Zyrtec. If he wouldn’t hold her when she was sad, at least she could cuddle a cat.

It was obvious to her, too.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Jack told her.

They could both see the meltdown coming. This time, as she huddled, sobbing, in a chair in the living room, he stretched out next to her on the couch.

“Go in the other room,” she told him. “You don’t have to be here.”

But he wouldn’t leave.

Exploring Therapies

Jack and Kirsten considered autism a part of who they are, and fundamental to what drew them to each other.

But for a time this past summer, Jack became captivated by the idea of designing an empathy drug. On the nights when he was not manipulating the virtual economy of the computer game Eve Online, which he often played late into the night after Kirsten had gone to bed, he read all he could find on the hormone oxytocin, which has been linked to trust and social interaction.

A small study suggesting that some of the social difficulties associated with Asperger syndrome could be relieved temporarily by inhaling an oxytocin nasal spray had generated media interest the year before.

But to Jack, the more interesting possibility was a drug that worked on the same principle as the popular antidepressants called S.S.R.I.’s, whose effect could last considerably longer than a spray.

“I’m sure people are working on it,” he told Kirsten, showing her an obscure Wikipedia entry he had found on the subject one night. “But no one’s published anything so far as I could tell.”

He explained, in his animated way, why the chemistry should work, and also, why it might not.

Then he paused.

“I wonder if I took it, whether I would be better at being affectionate,” he said.

“I wonder,” she said, “what effect it would have on me.”

They had both undergone a different experimental treatment, for a study at Harvard Medical School. Jack’s father believed that earlier studies with that procedure, which delivered current to areas of the brain, had given him a temporary insight into other people he had not had previously. But they had noticed no such effect on themselves.

And Kirsten had been working hard with her own therapist to develop strategies for soothing herself. When she found herself in a bad-mood rut, she had agreed with her therapist, she would visualize Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual character in the animated children’s show “My Little Pony” — of which her knowledge bordered on encyclopedic and whose goofiness made her laugh. She also kept a list of “twisted thoughts” that she sought to resist when they came, like her tendency to presume Jack was angry when he was making a neutral observation.

“I think it’s helping,” he told her.

A cat, she thought, would help more. In recent weeks, she had been showing him irresistibly cute pictures of kittens from a forum on Reddit.com called “aww.” But she did not mention the cat that night. Instead, she asked if he would come to bed with her rather than staying up to play Eve.

“Will you pet me if I come to bed?” he asked.

She agreed.

Giving Ground

Around Thanksgiving, Jack began to think that he should let Kirsten get a cat. Maybe he would keep the idea a secret, he thought, and make it a Christmas gift. He wasn’t sure.

But Kirsten, taking matters into her own hands, stopped by the animal shelter one day to see if it was possible to get a hypoallergenic cat.

There is no such thing, she told him on arriving home, but females, the shelter staff had told her, are less allergenic — so perhaps that was an option.

“Forget it, then,” Jack said absently.

He had not meant it as a final word. But Kirsten, feeling tears welling up, employed one of the new strategies she had discussed in therapy: going out for a drive, rather than wallowing.

Jack called on her cellphone almost as soon as she pulled out of their street.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Are you — leaving?”

Trying to control her voice, she said nothing. And then, she managed, “No.”

She was driving into Amherst, hoping to see a friend.

In the apartment alone, he paced, the phone to his ear.

“Kirsten,” he said. “Just come back. We’ll get the cat.”

He did have one requirement: it had to be able to chase a laser pointer.

Dating Advisers

On a day early this month, before their planned trip to the animal shelter, Kirsten and Jack stood before a group of young adults with autism at the Kinney Center for Autism Education and Support in Philadelphia, answering their questions while Jack’s father addressed their parents in a different room. “Did you ever think you would be alone?” one teenager wanted to know.

Kirsten answered first. “I thought I was going to be alone forever,” she said. “Kids who picked on me said I was so ugly I’m going to die alone.”

Her blunt tip on dating success: “A lot of it is how you dress. I found people don’t flirt with me if I wear big man pants and a rainbow sweatshirt.”

Then it was Jack’s turn to answer, in classic Aspie style. “I think I sort of lucked out,” he said. “I have no doubt if I wasn’t dating Kirsten I would have a very hard time acquiring a girlfriend that was worthwhile.”

A mother who had slipped into the room put up her hand.

“Where do you guys see your relationship going in the future?” she asked. “No pressure.”

Kirsten looked at Jack. “You go first,” she said.

“I see it going along the way it is for the foreseeable future,” Jack said.

One of the teenagers hummed the Wedding March.

“So I guess you’re saying, there is hope in the future for longer relationships,” the mother pressed.

Kirsten gazed around the room. A few other adults had crowded in.

“Parents always ask, ‘Who would like to marry my kid? They’re so weird,’ ” she said. “But, like, another weird person, that’s who.”

The Cat

The next morning, Kirsten woke up from a nightmare: they were late to get the cat, and she couldn’t reach Jack. She was riding a motorbike with pedals in weird places, and she couldn’t find the animal shelter.

In fact, they would have just enough time to reach the shelter before it closed after getting breakfast and buying a laser pointer with a lower-intensity red beam than his green one to test the prospective adoptees. In the car, Kirsten noticed a blinking “E” on the gas gauge, and the couple had the following exchange:

Kirsten: Oh, we need to get gas. Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven?

Jack: No, we’ll stop on the way back.

Kirsten: How can you not get stressed when that thing is blinking?

Jack: I’m not intimidated by liquid crystal displays.

Kirsten: You know what I mean, you get anxious about everything.

Jack: I know we have at least 20 miles of gas.

Kirsten: We have to drive seven miles there, and then seven back.

Jack: No, we have three miles back.

Kirsten: Should we just stop at 7-Eleven?

Both of them breathed a sigh of relief when the only female kitten at the shelter pounced without hesitation on the red laser beam Jack shined into her cage. At home, however, she ran straight under the old-fashioned bathtub.

Jack bent down and scooped up the kitten, holding her up to the mirror above the sink. Kirsten stroked her black fur in his arms, their hands touching briefly across the kitten’s back, and in the reflection.

“Are you looking at yourself in the mirror?” Jack asked the kitten. “Are you smart enough to recognize yourself?”

They stood for a moment together, awaiting the reaction.

Brain Cell Malfunction in Schizophrenia Identified

2011-12-31T15:45:00.000-08:00

(Dec. 28, 2011) — Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have discovered that DNA stays too tightly wound in certain brain cells of schizophrenic subjects. The findings suggest that drugs already in development for other diseases might eventually offer hope as a treatment for schizophrenia and related conditions in the elderly.

The research, now available online in the new Nature journal, Translational Psychiatry, shows the deficit is especially pronounced in younger people, meaning treatment might be most effective early on at minimizing or even reversing symptoms of schizophrenia, a potentially devastating mental disorder associated with hallucinations, delusions, and emotional difficulties, among other problems.

"We're excited by the findings," said Scripps Research Associate Professor Elizabeth Thomas, a neuroscientist who led the study, "and there's a tie to other drug development work, which could mean a faster track to clinical trials to exploit what we've found."

A Promising New Field

Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly recognized that cellular-level changes not tied to genetic defects play important roles in causing disease. There is a range of such so-called epigenetic effects that change the way DNA functions without changing a person's DNA code.

One critical area of epigenetic research is tied to histones. These are the structural proteins that DNA has to wrap around. "There's so much DNA in each cell of your body that it could never fit in your cells unless it was tightly and efficiently packed," said Thomas. Histone "tails" regularly undergo chemical modifications to either relax the DNA or repack it. When histones are acetylated, portions of DNA are exposed so that the genes can be used. The histone-DNA complexes, known as chromatin, are constantly relaxing and condensing to expose different genes, so there is no single right or wrong configuration. But the balance can shift in ways that can cause or exacerbate disease.

DNA is the guide that cellular machinery uses to construct the countless proteins essential to life. If portions of that guide remain closed when they shouldn't because histones are not acetylated properly, then genes can be effectively turned off when they shouldn't be with any number of detrimental effects. Numerous research groups have found that altered acetylation may be a key factor in other conditions, from neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease to drug addiction.

A Good Idea

Thomas had been studying the roles of histone acetylation in Huntington's disease and began to wonder whether similar mechanisms of gene regulation might also be important in schizophrenia. In both diseases, past research in the Thomas lab had shown that certain genes in sufferers were much less active than in healthy people. "It occurred to me that we see the same gene alterations, so I thought, 'Hey, let's just try it,'" she said.

Working with lead author Bin Tang, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab, and Brian Dean, an Australian colleague at the University of Melbourne, Thomas obtained post-mortem brain samples from schizophrenic and healthy brains held at medical "Brain Banks" in the United States and Australia. The brains come from either patients who themselves agreed to donate some or all of their bodies for scientific research after death, or from patients whose families agreed to such donations.

A great deal of epigenetic research has focused on chemical alterations to DNA itself. Histone alterations have been much more difficult to study because such research requires that the histones and DNA remain chemically intact. Many researchers feared that these bonds were disrupted in the brain after death. However, Thomas's group was able to develop a technique for maintaining the histone-DNA interactions. "While many people thought this was lost, we were able to show that indeed these interactions are preserved in post-mortem brain, allowing us to carry out these studies," said Thomas.

Compared to healthy brains, the brain samples from subjects with schizophrenia showed lower levels of acetylation in certain histone portions that would block gene expression. Another critical finding was that in younger subjects with schizophrenia, the problem was much more pronounced.

Need for New Treatment Options

Just what causes the acetylation defects among schizophrenic subjects -- what keeps certain pages of the DNA guide closed -- isn't clear, but from a medical perspective it doesn't matter. If researchers can reliably show that acetylation is a cause of the problem, they can look for ways to open the closed guide pages and hopefully cure or improve the condition in patients.

Thomas sees great potential. Based on the more pronounced results in younger brains, she believes that treatment with histone deacetylase inhibitors might well prove helpful in reversing or preventing the progression of the condition, especially in younger patients. Current drugs for schizophrenia tend to treat only certain symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and the drugs have major side effects including movement problems, weight gain, and diabetes. If deacetylase inhibitors effectively treat a root cause of the disease and prove sufficiently non-toxic, they might improve additional symptoms and provide a major expansion of treatment options.

Interestingly, some of the cognitive deficits that plague elderly people look quite similar biologically to schizophrenia, and the two conditions share at least some brain abnormalities. So deacetylase inhibitors might also work as a treatment for age-related problems, and might even prove an effective preventive measure for people at high risk of cognitive decline based on family history or other indicators.

Creative people are just high functioning schizophrenics

2010-06-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=7511
New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institute have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

"We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," says associate professor Fredrik Ullen from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health, co-author of the study that appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

Just which brain mechanisms are responsible for this correlation is still something of a mystery, but Dr Ullen conjectures that the function of systems in the brain that use dopamine is significant; for example, studies have shown that dopamine receptor genes are linked to ability for divergent thought. Dr Ullen's study measured the creativity of healthy individuals using divergent psychological tests, in which the task was to find many different solutions to a problem.

"The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullen. "Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity."
The thalamus serves as a kind of relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," says Dr Ullen, and explains that this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

Record Labels and Human Psychology

2010-05-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

Record Labels Waged War On Human Psychology…And Lost
he major record labels and the RIAA could have averted a PR nightmare and saved themselves millions of dollars by hiring a few behavioral economists instead of lawyers to advise them. The basis of all human economic transactions are psychological. Our animal spirits animate markets. The lawsuits the RIAA waged against consumers several years ago were designed to prevent people from downloading free, illegal music. They largely had the opposite effect. The obvious stupidity of the strategy is that you’re beating people over the head, then saying “Now, buy my product!”

The more profound aspect of that is that the RIAA could spend every last penny they’re worth and they still wouldn’t stop the inevitable death of the CD . Not because people don’t want to pay $17 for a CD, but because $17 doesn’t make sense anymore in the context of how human beings make rational choices. The whole file sharing phenomenon (and legal music downloading) is largely driven by a powerful psychological aversion to being cheated.

It turns out that free is so powerful not because it’s free, but because it allows us to minimize the risk of being cheated. Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted an interesting experiment to understand “free”, which he writes about in his book Predictably Irrational. First, he and his colleagues sold random college students two kinds of chocolates. One was Lindt Truffles from Switzerland. The second was Hersheys Kisses. The truffles were 15 cents and the Kisses were 1 cent. The students reasoned that the difference in price between the two chocolates was due to quality. 73% chose the truffles and 27% chose the Kisses.

Then Ariely did something interesting. He introduced free into the experiment. He lowered the price of each chocolate by 1 cent, so the truffles were now 14 cents and the Kisses were free. All of a sudden, preference for the Kisses skyrocketed.

Ariely concluded that free is so enticing because it eliminates the risk of buyer’s remorse, or what I like to call the “Oh, crap!” factor. Nobody wants to buy something and then discover that it’s not what they expected. Even if the price of that thing is just a few cents, the psychological aversion still exists. When something is free, that risk is eliminated entirely. It may still not be what you expected, but at least you didn’t lose anything by paying for it.

The world of marketing is largely based on the concept of convincing people to overcome their natural aversion to being cheated. Companies hire high-priced consultants and agencies to help them craft brands that people will trust. Money-back guarantees are another popular tactic to get people to buy risk-free.

You can see examples of the “Oh, crap!” factor in everyday life. In his spectacular book Free, Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson gives the example of zappos.com. Most people still prefer to buy shoes in stores because they want to try them on and make sure they fit and look good on their feet before buying . Zappos became a multi-billion dollar company by eliminating the psychological barrier to buying shoes online by letting people try out and return shoes as many times as they want. So it’s even better than buying shoes in the real world because some of the other costs associated with buying shoes like getting in your car, dealing with traffic, talking to a rude cashier, etc are eliminated.

The record industry has fared so poorly largely because it sells a high risk product that competes with copies of the product that carry far fewer risks. Everybody knows that labels fill CD albums with fluff. And everybody hates it. Sites like Amazon that let you sample albums for free before buying them take some of the risk out of buying. But why would you buy the entire album if you only like a few songs on it? That’s where the whole buy-one-song iTunes model has become a powerful force. Buy what you want, ignore the rest. Or even better, download it for free on some file sharing site.

But free isn’t completely free. Just because something doesn’t cost money doesn’t mean there aren’t other hidden costs. If you download a free mp3, you could be dealing with poor quality, viruses, problematic file formats or maybe the wrong song. And then finding a good version takes time. That’s a cost too.

The reason Steve Jobs and Apple have been so spectacularly successful at reinventing the music business is because they’re the only ones who’ve managed to invent a hardware and software platform that mitigates the risk factors involved in owning music. And they made it sexy and stylish. Apple didn’t win on technology. Nobody does, ultimately. They won on business smarts. And business is based largely on manipulating psychology.

Many younger people get all their music from free file sharing sites. Part of the reason is that they have less money and more time than older people, who’s busier lives encourage them to pay for things that save them time. Younger people are willing to spend time to understand technology and deal with the costs that come with free music. I think free music has also become an expectation for younger people. There’s an entire group of people under the age of about 30 who believe that music should be free because that’s the world they’ve grown up in. So that’s where the future lies.

The labels lost because they waged war on human psychology. Apple won because it adapted to human psychology.

Why We Lie So Well

2010-05-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Survival of the Fibbest: Why We Lie So Well

*
By SHIRLEY S. WANG

Your child tells you he didn't eat a cookie despite the tell-tale crumbs all over his mouth. You call your boss to say you're taking "a sick day," feigning a cough while on the phone. You're both lying, but is it the same?

Whether we're 2 years old or 62, our reasons for lying are mostly the same: to get out of trouble, for personal gain and to make ourselves look better in the eyes of others. But a growing body of research is raising questions about how a child's lie is different from an adult's lie, and how the way we deceive changes as we grow.
The Lying Life

Research suggests we begin lying as toddlers and keep on as adults, but how we deceive changes as we age. View chart
[LAB] Getty Images

Developmental psychologists are trying to understand lying through behavior. Neuroscientists are tracking which regions of the brain are activated when we spin lies. Their results could shed light on issues from why a tween lies to your face about breaking a vase to whether young children can be trusted to give eye-witness testimony in court. One intriguing new study suggests that lying may spring from a completely different part of the brain in children compared with adults.

What has become clear from studies including the work of Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study, is that lying is a sign of normal maturation.

Parents and teachers who catch their children lying "should not be alarmed—and their children are not going to turn out to be pathological liars," says Dr. Lee, who has spent the last 15 years studying how lying changes as kids get older, why some people lie more than others as well as which factors can reduce lying. "The fact that their children tell lies is a sign that they have reached a new developmental milestone."

Dr. Lee and Victoria Talwar, a colleague he often collaborates with at McGill University, conducted a series of studies in which they bring children into a lab with hidden cameras. Children and young adults age 2 to 17 are enticed to lie by being told not to peek at a toy—often a plush purple Barney dinosaur—that is put behind the child's back. The test giver then leaves the room for one minute, ostensibly to answer a phone call, giving the child ample time to peek at the toy. Whether or not the child sneaks a look is caught on tape.
For Parents: the Truth About Lying

* Lying is normal and isn't a problem unless kids lie frequently and consistently.
* Ask a child to promise to tell the truth. Children who promise are much more likely to tell the truth than kids who aren't asked to promise.
* Lying shouldn't be ignored. When a lie comes to light, be explicit with children that it is wrong to lie.

* Don't set up children to lie. If you know they committed a transgression, don't ask if they did it. Instead, ask why they did it.
* If a child confesses, thank them for telling you the truth. If kids are only punished for lying, they will be more likely to lie in the future, according to studies.

* Stories with an ending that show truth-telling as a good thing appear more effective at damping lying than fear- or punishmentbased stories (e.g., Pinocchio's nose grows longer when he lies).

Source: American Pain Foundation

For young kids, the temptation to cheat is "tremendous" and 90% peek in these experiments. Even adolescents and adults are tempted in similar situations, says Dr. Lee.

When the test giver returns to the room, the child is asked if he or she peeked. At age 2, about a quarter of children will lie and say they didn't. By 3, half of kids will lie, and by 4, that figure is 90%, studies show.

This trend continues until kids are about 15. By that age, nearly everyone who cheated in the experiment will lie about it. The good news: The number of liars begins to decline beyond this age. By 17, the percentage that lies drops to about 70%.

Researchers have also examined why some kids lie more than others, and have found that it isn't related to better moral values or religious upbringing. Rather, it's kids with better cognitive abilities who lie more. That's because to lie you also have to keep the truth in mind, which involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating several sources of information and manipulating that information, according to Shawn Christ, a neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The ability to lie—and lie successfully—is thought to be related to development of brain regions that allow so-called "executive functioning," or higher order thinking and reasoning abilities. Kids who perform better on tests that involve executive functioning also lie more.

To get a clearer picture of potential differences between adult and child lying, recently Markus Kruesi and colleagues at the Medical University of South Carolina scanned the brains of a couple dozen children ages 10 to 16 and adults ages 19 to 40 while they were telling the lies and telling the truth.

As the children and adults lied, the researchers expected to see increased blood flow due to neural activity in the frontal regions of the brain, where executive functioning is thought to be carried out. That happened in adult scans, but none of the frontal regions in the children's brains showed the activity.

While it is too early to know why these differences exist, Dr. Kruesi is looking into whether other areas of the brain, such as those tied to emotion, might be more active when children lie.

When it comes to covering up their lies up, studies show that kids learn quite young that they need to disguise their lying, and very quickly adopt truthful-looking behaviors—like not looking away when questioned. Dr. Talwar's work has shown that it's hard even for a young child's own parent to detect when the child is lying just by looking at the child's behaviors.

But young kids often give themselves away verbally, according to recent research by Drs. Lee and Talwar. Kids may say they didn't peek at the Barney doll, but when the experimenter asks, "What do you think the toy is?" the children blurt out, "Barney." When asked how they knew, many children then confess.

Starting around five, children begin to understand that such an answer gives their deception away, so they pretend to guess or come up with better reasons for why they knew the answer. Even so, the logic may be flawed. Dr. Lee recounted how one little girl asked to place her hand underneath a blanket that was over the toy before she answered the question. After feeling the toy but not seeing it, she said, "It feels purple, so it's Barney!"

By seven, the majority of kids can conceal their lying and cheating very well. "The time to catch a liar is before eight years of age," says Dr. Lee.

So what's a parent to do after that? Some studies suggest there is no long-term effect of parenting on lying behavior, but the work of Dr. Talwar and her colleague Angela Crossman at the John Jay College at the City College of New York shows that a certain type of parenting style seems to discourage lying. They suggest parents discuss why there are rules against lying. Also, parents who point out when kids lie—and also acknowledge when children come clean—can foster more truth-telling, says Dr. Talwar.

The Moral Life of Babies

2010-05-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

The Moral Life of Babies
By PAUL BLOOM

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

Smart Babies
Babies seem spastic in their actions, undisciplined in their attention. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot,” and in 1890 William James famously described a baby’s mental life as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves. Many developmental psychologists will tell you that the ignorance of human babies extends well into childhood. For many years the conventional view was that young humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world (like that objects continue to exist once they are out of sight) and basic facts about people (like that they have beliefs and desires and goals) — let alone how long it takes them to learn about morality.

I am admittedly biased, but I think one of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken.

A reason this view has persisted is that, for many years, scientists weren’t sure how to go about studying the mental life of babies. It’s a challenge to study the cognitive abilities of any creature that lacks language, but human babies present an additional difficulty, because, even compared to rats or birds, they are behaviorally limited: they can’t run mazes or peck at levers. In the 1980s, however, psychologists interested in exploring how much babies know began making use of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes. The eyes are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing. You can use “looking time,” then, as a rough but reliable proxy for what captures babies’ attention: what babies are surprised by or what babies like.

The studies in the 1980s that made use of this methodology were able to discover surprising things about what babies know about the nature and workings of physical objects — a baby’s “naïve physics.” Psychologists — most notably Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon — conducted studies that essentially involved showing babies magic tricks, events that seemed to violate some law of the universe: you remove the supports from beneath a block and it floats in midair, unsupported; an object disappears and then reappears in another location; a box is placed behind a screen, the screen falls backward into empty space. Like adults, babies tend to linger on such scenes — they look longer at them than at scenes that are identical in all regards except that they don’t violate physical laws. This suggests that babies have expectations about how objects should behave. A vast body of research now suggests that — contrary to what was taught for decades to legions of psychology undergraduates — babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time.

Other studies, starting with a 1992 paper by my wife, Karen, have found that babies can do rudimentary math with objects. The demonstration is simple. Show a baby an empty stage. Raise a screen to obscure part of the stage. In view of the baby, put a Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Then put another Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Now drop the screen. Adults expect two dolls — and so do 5-month-olds: if the screen drops to reveal one or three dolls, the babies look longer, in surprise, than they do if the screen drops to reveal two.

A second wave of studies used looking-time methods to explore what babies know about the minds of others — a baby’s “naïve psychology.” Psychologists had known for a while that even the youngest of babies treat people different from inanimate objects. Babies like to look at faces; they mimic them, they smile at them. They expect engagement: if a moving object becomes still, they merely lose interest; if a person’s face becomes still, however, they become distressed.

But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: babies show surprise when someone takes a roundabout path to something he wants. They expect someone who reaches for an object to reach for the same object later, even if its location has changed. And well before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false beliefs. The psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon have found that 15-month-olds expect that if a person sees an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box when the person isn’t looking, the person will later reach into the box where he first saw the object, not the box where it actually is. That is, toddlers have a mental model not merely of the world but of the world as understood by someone else.

These discoveries inevitably raise a question: If babies have such a rich understanding of objects and people so early in life, why do they seem so ignorant and helpless? Why don’t they put their knowledge to more active use? One possible answer is that these capacities are the psychological equivalent of physical traits like testicles or ovaries, which are formed in infancy and then sit around, useless, for years and years. Another possibility is that babies do, in fact, use their knowledge from Day 1, not for action but for learning. One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make. Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter.

Nice Babies
Psychologists like myself who are interested in the cognitive capacities of babies and toddlers are now turning our attention to whether babies have a “naïve morality.” But there is reason to proceed with caution. Morality, after all, is a different sort of affair than physics or psychology. The truths of physics and psychology are universal: objects obey the same physical laws everywhere; and people everywhere have minds, goals, desires and beliefs. But the existence of a universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide variation from society to society.

In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works, at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.

In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they seem closely related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others. In his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin, a keen observer of human nature, tells the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing sympathy at a very young age: “When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.”

There seems to be something evolutionarily ancient to this empathetic response. If you want to cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all. (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)

Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense — like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task. The psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have put toddlers in situations in which an adult is struggling to get something done, like opening a cabinet door with his hands full or trying to get to an object out of reach. The toddlers tend to spontaneously help, even without any prompting, encouragement or reward.

Is any of the above behavior recognizable as moral conduct? Not obviously so. Moral ideas seem to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality — if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. (Even a 4-year-old knows not only that unprovoked hitting is wrong but also that it would continue to be wrong even if a teacher said that it was O.K.) And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.

Babies and toddlers might not know or exhibit any of these moral subtleties. Their sympathetic reactions and motivations — including their desire to alleviate the pain of others — may not be much different in kind from purely nonmoral reactions and motivations like growing hungry or wanting to void a full bladder. Even if that is true, though, it is hard to conceive of a moral system that didn’t have, as a starting point, these empathetic capacities. As David Hume argued, mere rationality can’t be the foundation of morality, since our most basic desires are neither rational nor irrational. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason,” he wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To have a genuinely moral system, in other words, some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.

Moral-Baby Experiments
So what do babies really understand about morality? Our first experiments exploring this question were done in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher named Valerie Kuhlmeier (who is now an associate professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Ontario). Building on previous work by the psychologists David and Ann Premack, we began by investigating what babies think about two particular kinds of action: helping and hindering.

Our experiments involved having children watch animated movies of geometrical characters with faces. In one, a red ball would try to go up a hill. On some attempts, a yellow square got behind the ball and gently nudged it upward; in others, a green triangle got in front of it and pushed it down. We were interested in babies’ expectations about the ball’s attitudes — what would the baby expect the ball to make of the character who helped it and the one who hindered it? To find out, we then showed the babies additional movies in which the ball either approached the square or the triangle. When the ball approached the triangle (the hinderer), both 9- and 12-month-olds looked longer than they did when the ball approached the square (the helper). This was consistent with the interpretation that the former action surprised them; they expected the ball to approach the helper. A later study, using somewhat different stimuli, replicated the finding with 10-month-olds, but found that 6-month-olds seem to have no expectations at all. (This effect is robust only when the animated characters have faces; when they are simple faceless figures, it is apparently harder for babies to interpret what they are seeing as a social interaction.)

This experiment was designed to explore babies’ expectations about social interactions, not their moral capacities per se. But if you look at the movies, it’s clear that, at least to adult eyes, there is some latent moral content to the situation: the triangle is kind of a jerk; the square is a sweetheart. So we set out to investigate whether babies make the same judgments about the characters that adults do. Forget about how babies expect the ball to act toward the other characters; what do babies themselves think about the square and the triangle? Do they prefer the good guy and dislike the bad guy?

Here we began our more focused investigations into baby morality. For these studies, parents took their babies to the Infant Cognition Center, which is within one of the Yale psychology buildings. (The center is just a couple of blocks away from where Stanley Milgram did his famous experiments on obedience in the early 1960s, tricking New Haven residents into believing that they had severely harmed or even killed strangers with electrical shocks.) The parents were told about what was going to happen and filled out consent forms, which described the study, the risks to the baby (minimal) and the benefits to the baby (minimal, though it is a nice-enough experience). Parents often asked, reasonably enough, if they would learn how their baby does, and the answer was no. This sort of study provides no clinical or educational feedback about individual babies; the findings make sense only when computed as a group.

For the experiment proper, a parent will carry his or her baby into a small testing room. A typical experiment takes about 15 minutes. Usually, the parent sits on a chair, with the baby on his or her lap, though for some studies, the baby is strapped into a high chair with the parent standing behind. At this point, some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; there will then be a short break for the baby to wake up or calm down, but on average this kind of study ends up losing about a quarter of the subjects. Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants to make some extra money or needs to fulfill an Intro Psych requirement, there’s some truth to the claim that this developmental work is a science of the interested and alert baby.

In one of our first studies of moral evaluation, we decided not to use two-dimensional animated movies but rather a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow square would help the circle up the hill; a red triangle would push it down. After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we opted to record not the babies’ looking time but rather which character they reached for, on the theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what a baby wants. In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy.

(Experimental minutiae: What if babies simply like the color red or prefer squares or something like that? To control for this, half the babies got the yellow square as the helper; half got it as the hinderer. What about problems of unconscious cueing and unconscious bias? To avoid this, at the moment when the two characters were offered on the tray, the parent had his or her eyes closed, and the experimenter holding out the characters and recording the responses hadn’t seen the puppet show, so he or she didn’t know who was the good guy and who the bad guy.)

One question that arose with these experiments was how to understand the babies’ preference: did they act as they did because they were attracted to the helpful individual or because they were repelled by the hinderer or was it both? We explored this question in a further series of studies that introduced a neutral character, one that neither helps nor hinders. We found that, given a choice, infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one; and prefer a neutral character to one who hinders. This finding indicates that both inclinations are at work — babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.

Does our research show that babies believe that the helpful character is good and the hindering character is bad? Not necessarily. All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean. When we showed these scenes to much older kids — 18-month-olds — and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as adults would, identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.

To increase our confidence that the babies we studied were really responding to niceness and naughtiness, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin, in a separate series of studies, created different sets of one-act morality plays to show the babies. In one, an individual struggled to open a box; the lid would be partly opened but then fall back down. Then, on alternating trials, one puppet would grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut. In another study (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article), a puppet would play with a ball. The puppet would roll the ball to another puppet, who would roll it back, and the first puppet would roll the ball to a different puppet who would run away with it. In both studies, 5-month-olds preferred the good guy — the one who helped to open the box; the one who rolled the ball back — to the bad guy. This all suggests that the babies we studied have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of actions.

A further question that arises is whether babies possess more subtle moral capacities than preferring good and avoiding bad. Part and parcel of adult morality, for instance, is the idea that good acts should meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative response — justice demands the good be rewarded and the bad punished. For our next studies, we turned our attention back to the older babies and toddlers and tried to explore whether the preferences that we were finding had anything to do with moral judgment in this mature sense. In collaboration with Neha Mahajan, a psychology graduate student at Yale, Hamlin, Wynn and I exposed 21-month-olds to the good guy/bad guy situations described above, and we gave them the opportunity to reward or punish either by giving a treat to, or taking a treat from, one of the characters. We found that when asked to give, they tended to chose the positive character; when asked to take, they tended to choose the negative one.

Dispensing justice like this is a more elaborate conceptual operation than merely preferring good to bad, but there are still-more-elaborate moral calculations that adults, at least, can easily make. For example: Which individual would you prefer — someone who rewarded good guys and punished bad guys or someone who punished good guys and rewarded bad guys? The same amount of rewarding and punishing is going on in both cases, but by adult lights, one individual is acting justly and the other isn’t. Can babies see this, too?

To find out, we tested 8-month-olds by first showing them a character who acted as a helper (for instance, helping a puppet trying to open a box) and then presenting a scene in which this helper was the target of a good action by one puppet and a bad action by another puppet. Then we got the babies to choose between these two puppets. That is, they had to choose between a puppet who rewarded a good guy versus a puppet who punished a good guy. Likewise, we showed them a character who acted as a hinderer (for example, keeping a puppet from opening a box) and then had them choose between a puppet who rewarded the bad guy versus one who punished the bad guy.

The results were striking. When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires. But this shouldn’t strike you as an altogether alien experience: while we adults possess the additional critical capacity of being able to consciously reason about morality, we’re not otherwise that different from babies — our moral feelings are often instinctive. In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.

Is This the Morality We’re Looking For?
What do these findings about babies’ moral notions tell us about adult morality? Some scholars think that the very existence of an innate moral sense has profound implications. In 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin discovered natural selection, wrote that certain human capacities — including “the higher moral faculties” — are richer than what you could expect from a product of biological evolution. He concluded that some sort of godly force must intervene to create these capacities. (Darwin was horrified at this suggestion, writing to Wallace, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”)

A few years ago, in his book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” the social and cultural critic Dinesh D’Souza revived this argument. He conceded that evolution can explain our niceness in instances like kindness to kin, where the niceness has a clear genetic payoff, but he drew the line at “high altruism,” acts of entirely disinterested kindness. For D’Souza, “there is no Darwinian rationale” for why you would give up your seat for an old lady on a bus, an act of nice-guyness that does nothing for your genes. And what about those who donate blood to strangers or sacrifice their lives for a worthy cause? D’Souza reasoned that these stirrings of conscience are best explained not by evolution or psychology but by “the voice of God within our souls.”

The evolutionary psychologist has a quick response to this: To say that a biological trait evolves for a purpose doesn’t mean that it always functions, in the here and now, for that purpose. Sexual arousal, for instance, presumably evolved because of its connection to making babies; but of course we can get aroused in all sorts of situations in which baby-making just isn’t an option — for instance, while looking at pornography. Similarly, our impulse to help others has likely evolved because of the reproductive benefit that it gives us in certain contexts — and it’s not a problem for this argument that some acts of niceness that people perform don’t provide this sort of benefit. (And for what it’s worth, giving up a bus seat for an old lady, although the motives might be psychologically pure, turns out to be a coldbloodedly smart move from a Darwinian standpoint, an easy way to show off yourself as an attractively good person.)

The general argument that critics like Wallace and D’Souza put forward, however, still needs to be taken seriously. The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with; moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible relation to our reproductive success and don’t appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved adaptations. Many of us care about strangers in faraway lands, sometimes to the extent that we give up resources that could be used for our friends and family; many of us care about the fates of nonhuman animals, so much so that we deprive ourselves of pleasures like rib-eye steak and veal scaloppine. We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all; we see racism and sexism as evil; we reject slavery and genocide; we try to love our enemies. Of course, our actions typically fall short, often far short, of our moral principles, but these principles do shape, in a substantial way, the world that we live in. It makes sense then to marvel at the extent of our moral insight and to reject the notion that it can be explained in the language of natural selection. If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger.

But it is not present in babies. In fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind. There’s plenty of research showing that babies have within-group preferences: 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions.

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify your actions, and you say, “Because I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire. But explanations like “It was my turn” or “It’s my fair share” are potentially moral, because they imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same. This is the sort of argument that could be convincing to a neutral observer and is at the foundation of standards of justice and law. The philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out that this notion of impartiality can be found in religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls’s landmark theory of justice. This is an insight that emerges within communities of intelligent, deliberating and negotiating beings, and it can override our parochial impulses.

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish Gene,” “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” Or as a character in the Kingsley Amis novel “One Fat Englishman” puts it, “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.”

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works,” will be published next month.

Psychopaths’ brains wired to seek rewards no matter what

2010-03-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

Psychopaths’ brains wired to seek rewards no matter what, researchers say
March 15, 2010
Courtesy Vanderbilt University
and World Science staff
“Psycho.” The very word conjures images of cold, remorseless criminality. But scientists don’t fully understand how the brains of psychopaths—people with antisocial, empathy-short and sometimes criminal personalities—work.

A study has now found that the brains of psychopaths seem to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost. Scientists say the research clarifies the role of the brain’s reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these twisted minds.

The study from from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. is published in the March 14 issue of the research journal Nature Neuroscience.

Abnormalities in how a brain structure called the nucleus accumbens, highlighted here, processes dopamine have been found in people with psychopathic traits, scientists say. (Credit: Gregory R.Samanez-Larkin and Joshua W. Buckholtz )
“Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences,” Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in psychology and lead author of the new study, said. “We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse.”

Dopamine is the brain chemical most closely associated with pleasure and excitement.

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these people lack—fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance—impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking, said Buckholtz and his co-authors. Importantly, the latter traits are those most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy, researchers said.

“There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy that has focused on the lack of sensitivity to punishment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not particularly good predictors of violence or criminal behavior,” said Vanderbilt psychologist David Zald, co-author of the study.

“Our data is suggesting that something might be happening on the other side of things. These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick.”

The researchers used a brain imaging technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, to measure dopamine release, in concert with a probe of the brain’s reward system using functional magnetic imaging, or fMRI. “The really striking thing is with these two very different techniques we saw a very similar pattern—both were heightened in individuals with psychopathic traits,” Zald said.

Volunteers for the study took a personality test to gauge their level of psychopathic traits. These traits lie on a spectrum: violent criminals fall at its extreme end, but a normally functioning person can also have psychopathic traits to some degree. These traits include manipulativeness, egocentricity, aggression and risk taking.

The researchers gave the volunteers a dose of amphetamine, or speed, and then scanned their brains using PET to view dopamine release in response to the stimulant. Substance abuse has been shown in the past to be associated with alterations in dopamine responses. Psychopathy is strongly associated with substance abuse.

“Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry,” Buckholtz said. “Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine.”

The research subjects were later told they would receive some money for completing a simple task. Their brains were scanned with fMRI while they were performing the task. The researchers found in those participants with more psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating the reward.

“It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after,” Buckholtz said. Added Zald, “It’s not just that they don’t appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns.”

Miryachit, the Mysterious Siberian Mental Disorder

2010-02-11T06:05:00.001-08:00

You know how kids will “copy” one another just to be annoying? This usually leads to whines of protestation: “Mom! Tell Jimmy to quit copying me!” Well, if Jimmy were a Siberian Russian around the turn of the last century, chances are he would’ve been diagnosed with Miryachit — a bizarre condition the description of which I recently stumbled across.

The only definitive article on the subject of miryachit seems to have been written by a 19th century surgeon named William Hammond, who based his theories on a report written by the captain of a Navy ship sailing past Siberia to Europe in the summer of 1882. I’ve heard about some strange psychological disorders, but I’ve never heard of anything like miryachit. What follows is a pitiful account of a Siberian ship’s steward being tormented by his crewmates in what amounts to the opposite of the “make him quit copying me!” scenario:

It seemed that he was afflicted with a peculiar mental or nervous disease, which forced him to imitate everything suddenly presented to his senses. Thus, when the captain slapped the paddle-box suddenly in the presence of the steward, the latter instantly gave it a similar thump; or, if any noise were made suddenly, he seemed compelled against his will to imitate it instantly, and with remarkable accuracy. To annoy him, some of the passengers imitated pigs grunting, or called out absurd names; others clapped their hands and shouted, jumped, or threw their hats on the deck suddenly, and the poor steward, suddenly startled, would echo them all precisely, and sometimes several consecutively. Frequently he would expostulate, begging people not to startle him, and again would grow furiously angry, but even in the midst of his passion he would helplessly imitate some ridiculous shout or motion directed at him by his pitiless tormenters. Frequently he shut himself up in his pantry, which was without windows, and locked the door, but even there he could be heard answering the grunts, shouts, or pounds on the bulkhead outside. He was a man of middle age, fair physique, rather intelligent in facial expression, and without the slightest indication in appearance of his disability.

“We afterward witnessed an incident which illustrated the extent of his disability. The captain of the steamer, running up to him, suddenly clapping his hands at the same time, accidentally slipped and fell hard on the deck; without having been touched by the captain, the steward instantly clapped his bands and shouted, and then, in powerless imitation, he too fell as hard and almost precisely in the same manner and position as the captain.

More fascinating still, it seems that this particular condition is (or was) widely known in Siberia, and yet had rarely if ever been seen outside of it.

In speaking of the steward’s disorder, the captain of the general staff stated that it was not uncommon in Siberia; that he had seen a number of cases of it, and that it was commonest about Yakutsk, where the winter cold is extreme. Both sexes were subject to it, but men much less than women. It was known to Russians by the name of ‘miryachit.’”

Other reports of the era compare miryachit to a similar condition noted in Java, called “Lata,” and to a condition peculiar to a group known as “The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine,” which “was characterized by a marked and violent jump in response to sudden noise or startle.” But I can’t find anything debunking or really expanding on the condition — or very much written about it at all after the turn of the 20th century — and it makes me wonder, A) how many other “regional” diseases/disorders might be out there, and B) how many other bizarre conditions were described a century or more ago without anyone ever bothering to follow up?

In any case, the mind is a strange place, and the science of the mind is — I think it goes without saying — far from settled.

Pregorexia, the Pregnant Woman’s Eating Disorder

2009-06-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

By Sari Shepphird on Culture

Perhaps you have heard of it. It’s the new “buzz word” surrounding eating disorders. Reports are that it has been inspired by images of thin, yet pregnant, celebrities along with famous figures who lose their baby weight within a matter of a few weeks (Samantha Harris, anyone?).

Pregorexia is actually not new. And it’s not really a medical term, but more of a pop-psychology look at eating disorders. An anorexic woman may still be anorexic, even when pregnant; a woman with bulimia may continue to have symptoms while she is expecting.

Although “pregorexia” is used by the entertainment world to catagorize women who have a “baby bump” yet watch their weight to an extreme degree, there is nothing remotely entertaining about starving oneself, over-exercising or purging while pregnant. As a matter of fact, an eating disorder like this can put both the mother and baby at risk. Hypertension, anxiety, depression, insomnia, vaginal bleeding, chronic pain, hospitalization and intraveneous feeding are partial risks for the expectant mom with an eating disorder, and here is a sobering look at what could result for her child:

Higher rates of miscarriage; infant mortality; premature birth; low birth-weight; low APGAR scores; malformations (including cleft lip and palate); smaller head circumference; respiratory problems; failure to thrive; delayed development; cognitive, sensory, and physical defects; disturbed feeding behaviors; depression.

So although some might say that “thin” is the new “pregnancy fit,” birth defects and women’s health risks say differently. Plan on gaining at least 25-35 pounds when you are pregnant, more if you are underweight when you become pregnant (Newly released weight gain guidelines can be found here).

Thin and pregnant is not the new “normal” for expectant mothers. “Mommy makeovers” (surgery right after pregnancy to restore a women’s pre-baby figure) are not the new “spa day.”

Having a healthy baby far outweighs the importance of being a haute-coture-clad mom-to-be. I’ll take the inspiration of a beautifully healthy baby over “thin-spiration” anyday.

Barack Obama - Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?

2009-05-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/71124

Barack Obama - Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?
Sam Vaknin Ph.D.
August 11, 2008
Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Scroll down for a detailed treatment.

Granted, only a qualified mental health diagnostician can determine whether someone suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and this, following lengthy tests and personal interviews. But, in the absence of access to Barack Obama, one has to rely on his overt performance and on testimonies by his closest, nearest and dearest.

Narcissistic leaders are nefarious and their effects pernicious. They are subtle, refined, socially-adept, manipulative, possessed of thespian skills, and convincing. Both types equally lack empathy and are ruthless and relentless or driven.

Perhaps it is time to require each candidate to high office in the USA to submit to a rigorous physical and mental checkup with the results made public.

I. Upbringing and Childhood

Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then, his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia: a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995.

Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers.

II. Behavior Patterns

The narcissist:

Feels grandiose and self-important (e.g., exaggerates accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits to the point of lying, demands to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements);

Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist), bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion;

Firmly convinced that he or she is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people (or institutions);

Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious (Narcissistic Supply);

Feels entitled. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her unreasonable expectations for special and favourable priority treatment;

Is "interpersonally exploitative", i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends;

Devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with, acknowledge, or accept the feelings, needs, preferences, priorities, and choices of others;

Constantly envious of others and seeks to hurt or destroy the objects of his or her frustration. Suffers from persecutory (paranoid) delusions as he or she believes that they feel the same about him or her and are likely to act similarly;

Behaves arrogantly and haughtily. Feels superior, omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, immune, "above the law", and omnipresent (magical thinking). Rages when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted by people he or she considers inferior to him or her and unworthy.

Narcissism is a defense mechanism whose role is to deflect hurt and trauma from the victim's "True Self" into a "False Self" which is omnipotent, invulnerable, and omniscient. This False Self is then used by the narcissist to garner narcissistic supply from his human environment. Narcissistic supply is any form of attention, both positive and negative and it is instrumental in the regulation of the narcissist's labile sense of self-worth.

Perhaps the most immediately evident trait of patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is their vulnerability to criticism and disagreement. Subject to negative input, real or imagined, even to a mild rebuke, a constructive suggestion, or an offer to help, they feel injured, humiliated and empty and they react with disdain (devaluation), rage, and defiance.

From my book "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited":

"To avoid such intolerable pain, some patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) socially withdraw and feign false modesty and humility to mask their underlying grandiosity. Dysthymic and depressive disorders are common reactions to isolation and feelings of shame and inadequacy."

Due to their lack of empathy, disregard for others, exploitativeness, sense of entitlement, and constant need for attention (narcissistic supply), narcissists are rarely able to maintain functional and healthy interpersonal relationships.

Many narcissists are over-achievers and ambitious. Some of them are even talented and skilled. But they are incapable of team work because they cannot tolerate setbacks. They are easily frustrated and demoralized and are unable to cope with disagreement and criticism. Though some narcissists have meteoric and inspiring careers, in the long-run, all of them find it difficult to maintain long-term professional achievements and the respect and appreciation of their peers. The narcissist's fantastic grandiosity, frequently coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically incommensurate with his or her real accomplishments (the "grandiosity gap").

An important distinction is between cerebral and somatic narcissists. The cerebrals derive their Narcissistic Supply from their intelligence or academic achievements and the somatics derive their Narcissistic Supply from their physique, exercise, physical or sexual prowess and romantic or physical "conquests".

Another crucial division within the ranks of patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is between the classic variety (those who meet five of the nine diagnostic criteria included in the DSM), and the compensatory kind (their narcissism compensates for deep-set feelings of inferiority and lack of self-worth).

Obama displays the following behaviors, which are among the hallmarks of pathological narcissism:

Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and "ideals" (e.g., about campaign finance, re-districting). These flip-flops do not cause him overt distress and are ego-syntonic (he feels justified in acting this way). Alternatively, reuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy.

Ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, or with his inflated and grandiose self-image. This has to do with magical thinking. Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality. Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he hasn't published a single scholarly paper or book).

Feels that he is above the law, incl. and especially his own laws.

Talks about himself in the 3rd person singluar or uses the regal "we" and craves to be the exclsuive center of attention, even adulation

Have a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his "mission".

Sets ever more complex rules in a convoluted world of grandiose fantasies with its own language (jargon)

Displays false modesty and unctuous "folksiness" but unable to sustain these behaviors (the persona, or mask) for long. It slips and the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives.

Sublimates aggression and holds grudges.

Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects, demands indulgence and feels entitled to special treatment, even though his objective accomplishments do not justify it).

III. Body Language

Many complain of the incredible deceptive powers of the narcissist. They find themselves involved with narcissists (emotionally, in business, or otherwise) before they have a chance to discover their true character. Shocked by the later revelation, they mourn their inability to separate from the narcissist and their gullibility.

Narcissists are an elusive breed, hard to spot, harder to pinpoint, impossible to capture. Even an experienced mental health diagnostician with unmitigated access to the record and to the person examined would find it fiendishly difficult to determine with any degree of certainty whether someone suffers from a full fledged Narcissistic Personality Disorder – or merely possesses narcissistic traits, a narcissistic style, a personality structure ("character"), or a narcissistic "overlay" superimposed on another mental health problem.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between traits and behavior patterns that are independent of the patient's cultural-social context (i.e., which are inherent, or idiosyncratic) – and reactive patterns, or conformity to cultural and social morals and norms. Reactions to severe life crises or circumstances are also often characterized by transient pathological narcissism, for instance (Ronningstam and Gunderson, 1996). But such reactions do not a narcissist make.

When a person belongs to a society or culture that has often been described as narcissistic by scholars (such as Theodore Millon) and social thinkers (e.g., Christopher Lasch) – how much of his behavior can be attributed to his milieu and which of his traits are really his?

The Narcissistic Personality Disorder is rigorously defined in the DSM IV-TR with a set of strict criteria and differential diagnoses.

Narcissism is regarded by many scholars to be an adaptative strategy ("healthy narcissism"). It is considered pathological in the clinical sense only when it becomes a rigid personality structure replete with a series of primitive defence mechanisms (such as splitting, projection, projective identification, or intellectualization) – and when it leads to dysfunctions in one or more areas of the patient's life.

Pathological narcissism is the art of deception. The narcissist projects a False Self and manages all his social interactions through this concocted fictional construct.

When the narcissist reveals his true colors, it is usually far too late. His victims are unable to separate from him. They are frustrated by this acquired helplessness and angry at themselves for having they failed to see through the narcissist earlier on.

But the narcissist does emit subtle, almost subliminal, signals ("presenting symptoms") even in a first or casual encounter. Compare the following list to Barack Obama's body language during his paublic appearances.

These are:

"Haughty" body language – The narcissist adopts a physical posture which implies and exudes an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. Though the narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, he often refrains from physical proximity (he is "territorial").

The narcissist takes part in social interactions – even mere banter – condescendingly, from a position of supremacy and faux "magnanimity and largesse". But he rarely mingles socially and prefers to remain the "observer", or the "lone wolf".

Entitlement markers – The narcissist immediately asks for "special treatment" of some kind. Not to wait his turn, to have a longer or a shorter therapeutic session, to talk directly to authority figures (and not to their assistants or secretaries), to be granted special payment terms, to enjoy custom tailored arrangements - or to get served first.

The narcissist is the one who – vocally and demonstratively – demands the undivided attention of the head waiter in a restaurant, or monopolizes the hostess, or latches on to celebrities in a party. The narcissist reacts with rage and indignantly when denied his wishes and if treated equally with others whom he deems inferior.

Idealization or devaluation – The narcissist instantly idealizes or devalues his interlocutor. This depends on how the narcissist appraises the potential his converser has as a Narcissistic Supply Source. The narcissist flatters, adores, admires and applauds the "target" in an embarrassingly exaggerated and profuse manner – or sulks, abuses, and humiliates her.

Narcissists are polite only in the presence of a potential Supply Source. But they are unable to sustain even perfunctory civility and fast deteriorate to barbs and thinly-veiled hostility, to verbal or other violent displays of abuse, rage attacks, or cold detachment.

The "membership" posture – The narcissist always tries to "belong". Yet, at the very same time, he maintains his stance as an outsider. The narcissist seeks to be admired for his ability to integrate and ingratiate himself without investing the efforts commensurate with such an undertaking.

For instance: if the narcissist talks to a psychologist, the narcissist first states emphatically that he never studied psychology. He then proceeds to make seemingly effortless use of obscure professional terms, thus demonstrating that he mastered the discipline all the same, as an autodidact – which proves that he is exceptionally intelligent or introspective.

In general, the narcissist always prefers show-off to substance. One of the most effective methods of exposing a narcissist is by trying to delve deeper. The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean. He likes to think of himself as a Renaissance man, a Jack of all trades. The narcissist never admits to ignorance in any field – yet, typically, he is ignorant of them all. It is surprisingly easy to penetrate the gloss and the veneer of the narcissist's self-proclaimed omniscience.

Bragging and false autobiography – The narcissist brags incessantly. His speech is peppered with "I", "my", "myself", and "mine". He describes himself as intelligent, or rich, or modest, or intuitive, or creative – but always excessively, implausibly, and extraordinarily so.

The narcissist's biography sounds unusually rich and complex. His achievements – incommensurate with his age, education, or renown. Yet, his actual condition is evidently and demonstrably incompatible with his claims. Very often, the narcissist lies or his fantasies are easily discernible. He always name-drops and appropriates other people's experiences and accomplishments.

Emotion-free language – The narcissist likes to talk about himself and only about himself. He is not interested in others or what they have to say, unless they constitute potential Sources of Supply and in order to obtain said supply. He acts bored, disdainful, even angry, if he feels that they are intruding on his precious time and, thus, abusing him.

In general, the narcissist is very impatient, easily bored, with strong attention deficits – unless and until he is the topic of discussion. One can publicly dissect all aspects of the intimate life of a narcissist without repercussions, providing the discourse is not "emotionally tinted".

If asked to relate directly to his emotions, the narcissist intellectualizes, rationalizes, speaks about himself in the third person and in a detached "scientific" tone or composes a narrative with a fictitious character in it, suspiciously autobiographical. Narcissists like to refer to themselves in mechanical terms, as efficient automata or machines.

Seriousness and sense of intrusion and coercion – The narcissist is dead serious about himself. He may possess a subtle, wry, and riotous sense of humor, scathing and cynical, but rarely is he self-deprecating. The narcissist regards himself as being on a constant mission, whose importance is cosmic and whose consequences are global. If a scientist – he is always in the throes of revolutionizing science. If a journalist – he is in the middle of the greatest story ever. If a novelist - he is on his way to a Booker or Nobel prize.

This self-misperception is not amenable to light-headedness or self-effacement. The narcissist is easily hurt and insulted (narcissistic injury). Even the most innocuous remarks or acts are interpreted by him as belittling, intruding, or coercive. His time is more valuable than others' – therefore, it cannot be wasted on unimportant matters such as mere banter or going out for a walk.

Any suggested help, advice, or concerned inquiry are immediately cast by the narcissist as intentional humiliation, implying that the narcissist is in need of help and counsel and, thus, imperfect and less than omnipotent. Any attempt to set an agenda is, to the narcissist, an intimidating act of enslavement. In this sense, the narcissist is both schizoid and paranoid and often entertains ideas of reference.

These – the lack of empathy, the aloofness, the disdain, the sense of entitlement, the constricted sense of humor, the unequal treatment and the paranoia – render the narcissist a social misfit. The narcissist is able to provoke in his milieu, in his casual acquaintances, even in his psychotherapist, the strongest, most avid and furious hatred and revulsion. To his shock, indignation and consternation, he invariably induces in others unbridled aggression.

He is perceived to be asocial at best and, often, antisocial. This, perhaps, is the strongest presenting symptom. One feels ill at ease in the presence of a narcissist for no apparent reason. No matter how charming, intelligent, thought provoking, outgoing, easy going and social the narcissist is – he fails to secure the sympathy of others, a sympathy he is never ready, willing, or able to reciprocate.

IV. Narcissistic and psychopathic Leaders

The narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture, and civilization. He is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies.

The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a false, fictitious, self for the world to fear, or to admire. He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with and this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power. The narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real life authority and the narcissist's predilection to surround himself with obsequious sycophants.

The narcissist's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and suffer from ideas of reference (the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not). Thus, narcissists often regard themselves as "victims of persecution".

The narcissistic leader fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, mythology. The leader is this religion's ascetic saint. He monastically denies himself earthly pleasures (or so he claims) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.

The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people - or humanity at large - should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, the narcissistic leader became a distorted version of Nietzsche's "superman".

But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral.

In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are post-modernist and moral relativists. They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things "natural" - or by strongly repressing these feelings. But what they refer to as "nature" is not natural at all.

The narcissistic leader invariably proffers an aesthetic of decadence and evil carefully orchestrated and artificial - though it is not perceived this way by him or by his followers. Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.

In short: narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), the leader demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis is tantamount, in this narcissistic dramaturgy, to self-annulment.

Narcissism is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism - and the cult's leader serves as a role model, annihilating the Man, only to re-appear as a pre-ordained and irresistible force of nature.

Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the "old ways" - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the corrupt order. Narcissistic movements are puerile, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon a narcissistic (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state, or group, or upon the leader.

Minorities or "others" - often arbitrarily selected - constitute a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that is "wrong". They are accused of being old, they are eerily disembodied, they are cosmopolitan, they are part of the establishment, they are "decadent", they are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin ... They are different, they are narcissistic (feel and act as morally superior), they are everywhere, they are defenceless, they are credulous, they are adaptable (and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.

This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm - together with Stalin - as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.

The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - the narcissistic leader having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely-held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. "Earth shattering" and "revolutionary" scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem.

It is important to understand that the use of violence must be ego-syntonic. It must accord with the self-image of the narcissist. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform with the narcissistic narrative.

Thus, a narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first.

The pacific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. "The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)", "they don't really know what they are doing", "following a rude awakening, they will revert to form", etc.

When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail - the narcissist is injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred.

This primitive defense mechanism is called "splitting". To the narcissist, things and people are either entirely bad (evil) or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. A narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to kill him, undo the revolution, devastate the economy, or the country, etc.

The "small people", the "rank and file", the "loyal soldiers" of the narcissist - his flock, his nation, his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ego Boom

2009-05-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

The ego balances our pleasure-seeking Id and community-minded Super-ego. But when that balance is off, bad things can happen. Egotistical, narcissistic things.

Psycho Classifieds

2009-04-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

“Home, sweet home”
Agoraphobe seeks agoraphobe for long-distance relationship.

“Touchy, but in a good way”
Obsessive-compulsive with need to tap exactly four times any lampshade he passes seeks woman with similar interests for frequent checks of stoves and doors. If you’re the one, let’s get together for a romantic walk without stepping on any cracks.

“Waiting, with heart wide open”
Claustrophobic female seeks male (age not an issue) with empty 50,000-square-foot warehouse with high ceilings.

“Needed: perfect foil for my fiery personality”
Pyromaniac seeks pyrophobe for possible sitcom.

"What, me worry? You betcha!"

Woman with generalized anxiety disorder looking for someone to share evenings catastrophizing about possible reasons why my mother hasn't returned my voicemail, which I left almost an hour ago. If your mind goes straight to car accident, fell down a well, or mistook her car for a time machine, traveled to the late 1600s, and became a victim of the Salem witch trials, then you and I need to talk. Talk ourselves into a panic, that is!

"Fuck you"

Good-looking guy with Tourette's looking for—fucking asshole bitch motherfucker—soul mate with passion for fine wine—douchebag shit fuck—and antiquing.

"Don't sweat the small stuff—keep it!"

Recently divorced compulsive hoarder seeks male with a lot of love—and even more stuff. Must be willing to move in with me immediately. Interests include shopping for unnecessary items, refusing to throw away outdated newspapers, and keeping receipts from the 1950s.

"Don't mock me"

Love to laugh? Then you're not my type. Female katagelophobe seeks female geliophobe for serious, no-nonsense relationship.

"The more the merrier"

Male frotteur in search of tightly packed crowd of women.

"Come on, Daddy needs a new friend!"

Easygoing compulsive gambler in search of male or female for friendship. Must be financially independent and have an excellent line of credit. Desire to travel a must—specifically, to places like Macau, Las Vegas, A.C., and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Roll the dice and find a true friend. Age doesn't matter, but if you're 21, that could be good luck.

"What is this for again?"

Female with adult attention-deficit disorder seeks male for—look at that bird! What is that? An egret? I love their long necks.

"I'm not worthy"

Guy with self-defeating personality disorder thinks he's funny but isn't. Seeking alcohol-free/drug-free female. Must be willing to treat me poorly, undermine any happiness I may experience, and stop me if I'm about to accomplish something I could potentially be proud of.

"Drink me in"

Alcoholic male has thirst for female enabler for long-term co-dependent relationship.

"Nothing to hide"

Disinhibited 48-year-old, 142-pound woman with hemorrhoids, herpes, a penchant for one-night stands with random men, and a history of cheating on her taxes seeks equally overly self-disclosing male to co-host dinner parties with. Together we can make our guests excruciatingly uncomfortable with our unfiltered conversation. Last two hubbies died. Mysteriously.

"Night and day, day and night"

Nyctophobe seeks photophobe for fun battles over the light switch.

"R-E-S-P-E-C-T"

Dominant woman seeking Stockholm-syndrome-prone male. Contact me and I'll capture your heart.

"We're connected"

Person with dissociative identity disorder seeks you, you, and you. Or is it me, me, and me? Doesn't matter. We're meant for each other. Call me. I just did. Great, let's set up a date. Sounds good. Must be Jewish. I am. Great, this is going well.

"Oh, you're going to wear that?
No, no, that looks nice. Really, it does"

Passive-aggressive woman seeks marriage-ready male. I enjoy purposely taking too long to get ready and making us late for reservations. I'm great at "forgetting" to do important tasks, such as mailing in mortgage payments, thus damaging our credit scores just because I won't come out and tell you that I don't like the long hours you work.

"You're not the one for me"

Lonely lady with avoidant personality disorder seeks no one to interact with, share love with, or grow old with.

- - - -

Ludo - Love Me Dead

2009-03-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

KNITTING FOR PSYCHOS

2008-12-12T05:44:00.000-08:00

More Couples Find Marriage Leaves Them Alone Together

2008-07-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

If you and your spouse seem to be speeding through life on parallel tracks that never meet, you're not alone. Couples seem to be doing almost everything apart these days -- from dining and hobbies to friendships and having fun.

The trend, first documented last year in a major long-term study of marriage, is drawing attention to the need to shore up emotional ties between spouses. "For marriage to work, we have to realize how important a secure attachment is," says Diane Sollee of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, sponsor of a conference of more than 2,000 marriage researchers and trainers this week in San Francisco. The growing separateness of couples' lives, and techniques to keep it from driving them apart, will be hot topics at the conference.In one of the most comprehensive studies of marriage, Penn State sociology professor Paul Amato and others compared two separate random samples of more than 2,000 married people each in 1980 and in 2000. They found that the likelihood of couples spending lots of time together visiting friends, pursuing recreational activities, dining or shopping together, or teaming up on projects around the house, fell 28%. Spouses also are less likely to get along well with their partners' friends. "People may be bowling alone these days," the study says, referring to a bestselling book about the breakdown of social ties, "but married couples are also eating alone."

The separateness has become so prevalent that researchers are altering the traditional structure of marriage-education programs. These seminars, which have gotten a boost in recent years from federal funding, teach couples communication and problem-solving skills and have always required both partners to be present. But the University of Denver's Scott Stanley and Howard Markman, founders of PREP, one of the biggest marriage-education programs, are testing a new seminar that allows spouses to attend solo; they'll release research at the San Francisco conference showing the new approach can be helpful. "Sometimes," Dr. Stanley says, because of conflicting work schedules and other factors, "you can only get one of the two people" to take part.For some couples, leading separate lives isn't a problem. Dave Hookham, a Houston engineer, says he and his wife, do fine vacationing separately sometimes and having different friends. For other couples, though, it's troubling. Advertising consultant Bryan Chaffe, Seattle, says he and his wife were content following separate paths when both were in graduate school and working full-time. But over 11 years of marriage, their habit of having separate lives and hobbies has caused strain, he says.One therapeutic remedy, "emotionally focused therapy," is gaining favor. The method rests on British psychiatrist John Bowlby's research on the emotional bonding, or attachment, that is essential to normal development in infants. The technique guides couples to recognize they're emotionally attached to their partners in much the same way a child is to a parent, and to learn to be more responsive, open and forgiving. For example, a couple fighting often over, say, one partner's long work hours, would be guided to look beneath the anger to what they may be feeling at a deeper level -- often a fear of losing each other or being cut off emotionally.

Psychologist Sue Johnson, a speaker at the conference, who developed the technique in the mid-1980s and has written several books about it, says more than 1,100 therapists have been trained in the method. Published studies show it can help couples resolve old hurts.

One couple I interviewed says emotionally focused therapy pulled them from the brink of divorce. By the time they entered therapy 2½ years ago, they'd led separate lives for more than 20 years, with the husband immersed in work, the wife in raising their five children. With separate hobbies and friendships, "we were like ships passing in the night," the husband says.

Even at their worst, though, both still sensed "a thread" of connection between them. In therapy, they gradually tore down barriers to openly talk about emotions and learned to express their need for each other in more intimate, loving ways. Although they still hit rough spots, the husband says, "we have the tools now to do whatever it takes" to stay together.

Why Men Cheat: Is It Really All About Sex?

2008-07-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

By Norman Fried
The recent attention and controversy surrounding same-sex marriages in California have caused many of us to focus on our own definition of ”family values” and have forced others to look more closely at the marital bond in particular. The question of fidelity in marriage has now become forefront in the minds and writings of many journalists, clergymen, and psychologists alike.

In his May 18 column (appearing in the May 26 issue of New York Magazine entitled “The Secret Lives Of Married Men”) Philip Weiss attempts an answer to the question of infidelity and the “affairs” of men, many of them in the public eye. Citing the “outings” of Eliot Spitzer, Governor David Paterson, and New York Congressman Vito Fosella (who recently admitted to having two families), and after collecting opinions from anonymous men that he questioned for his article, Weiss deduces that men’s hunger for sexual variety is a “basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse.”

Weiss’ qualitative findings provide us with an interesting socio-biological, but limited, interpretation for the controversy of male infidelity, and they beg the question:

Is sexual impulse really the driving force behind men who have extramarital affairs?

Researchers in the fields of clinical psychology argue differently, as they assert that the wounding actions of an affair are often rooted in deeper, more unconscious origins. Marriage therapists suggest that people often choose a spouse based on their own (sometimes negative) parental role models; and they re-enact in the marriage the “dramas” which they experienced in their original families. The recapitulation of these earlier themes often renders each member of the couple vulnerable to ”acting out” behaviors; ultimately reaching their apogee in an extramarital affair.

When a marriage is predicated on the unconscious contract of rescuing a couple from an “unjust” history, and offers them each a second chance to “make it right,” married men may find themselves trapped in a web of fear and confusion that grows with time. The result is the gradual replacement of feelings of promise and positivity with despair and negativity.

Thus, we ask: Were the actions that caused political figures such as Eliot Spitzer to exchange his public identity as governor with that of “Client #9″ the result of unresolved conflicts from his family of origin, or were they more about sexual impulse?

We on the outside will never know.

But it is prudent for us to consider that marital discord subsumes a complex network of emotional states, including the breakdown of communication, conflicting values, financial stressors, unreal expectations and projections from each spouse’s past. Considering these contributing factors places “irresistible impulses and the need for sexual variety” quite low on the proverbial list.

What the Dating Rules You Set For Your Kids Say About You

2008-06-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

Researchers have known for a while that closeness to parents is linked to less risky sexual behavior by teenagers.

Now, they're turning their microscopes on the dating rules parents set, with some surprising results: The limits you place on your teenager's dating may say more about your own love life than your teen's needs. Also, parents' satisfaction with their own life roles shapes the kind of rules they set.
Parents who are involved in stable romantic relationships with spouses or partners tend more than other parents to set rules limiting teen dating behavior, such as curfews, minimum ages for dating, limits on places teens can go and explicit rules against sexual activity, says a new study of 169 parents and 102 teens by Stephanie Madsen, an associate professor of psychology at Maryland's McDaniel College. While the reason isn't clear, the author suggests these parents may hold more conservative beliefs in general; many of the rules involved sexuality.

Ironically, in what other researchers have called the "Romeo and Juliet" effect, such rules may tend to drive teenage lovers closer; teens of these parents reported closer, more positive relationships.

Parents who are unhappy, dissatisfied or insecure in love, however, go beyond limits and try to dictate or control how their teens treat their dates, the study found. These parents try to influence their kids to value certain things and act in specific ways. Parents would tell teens to open doors for dates, "act like a gentleman" (or a lady), or resist letting a date "walk all over" them. The goal may be to launch their teens on a romantic path happier than their own, Dr. Madsen says. But kids often regard this advice as intrusive, and again, it tended to have the opposite effect. The teens affected weren't particularly content with their dating relationships.

The research rings true to me. As a single working parent of two, my love life is near the bottom of my list of priorities. Like the parents in the study, I find myself prescribing behaviors to my teenage son, like "be a gentleman" -- advice he listens to respectfully. But, I suspect, he keeps his own counsel.

A better way for parents to expend their energy, Dr. Madsen says, is to emphasize constant, warm oversight over just setting rules. She calls this setting "supervisory" rules, or keeping up a free flow of communication without intruding too much. This means asking teens to disclose plans, check in by phone and inform parents when plans change. In such cases, the adults were focusing on their roles as parents rather than their own love lives. These parents also had the healthiest relationships with their children.

Debby Shulman and her husband, Allen, fall into this category. When their 16-year-old son dates, says the Northbrook, Ill., mother, "he can't leave one place without calling and letting me know where he's going." She knows his friends' parents and checks in with them now and then. "It's a great way to keep tabs on the kids without making them feel you're breathing down their necks." Dr. Madsen says supervisory parents also may arrange to meet their teen's dates and sometimes the date's parents.

Some 64% of parents in Dr. Madsen's study had dating rules for their 17-to-19-year-olds, the age of the teens in the study. The rest generally either had teens who weren't dating or gave their teens autonomy in dating. Marni Kan of the research group RTI International says many parents may be setting rules in response to research showing parental supervision and communication with teens protects against risky sexual behavior.

More recent studies have fine-tuned those findings by drawing a line between supervision and meddling: Parental oversight seems to have positive effects mainly when teens volunteer information about themselves -- suggesting a trusting, respectful relationship is the real foundation for the gains.

Targets of Spying Get Smart

2008-06-20T06:01:00.000-07:00

Tiny electronic-surveillance gadgets that James Bond could only dream of are increasingly turning up in boardrooms, bedrooms and bathrooms.

Crooks are parking vans outside people's homes to steal bank-account passwords and credit-card numbers, using programs that tap into Wi-Fi connections. Paparazzi hide cameras and microphones in private jets, hoping to record embarrassing celebrity video. Corporate spies plant keystroke-recording software in executives' laptops and listen in on phone conversations as they travel.

Now, people are deploying counter-spy technology to fight back. Some celebrities and corporate executives get regular sweeps of their offices, limos and private jets in search of hidden devices. Others hire security experts to safeguard their phones and home computers. And corporate security experts are advising businesspeople on how to keep company secrets safe while traveling abroad.

Demand for counterspy services has been heightened by a series of recent snooping incidents. Last month, Hollywood sleuth Anthony Pellicano, 64 years old, was convicted in federal court in Los Angeles of multiple counts of racketeering and illegal wiretapping. He worked on behalf of celebrities and moguls who were involved in personal or business disputes, including Bertram Fields, one of Hollywood's top entertainment lawyers; Brad Grey, now head of Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures movie studio; and talent agent Michael Ovitz, according to the indictment. The three have denied any wrongdoing and haven't been charged with any crimes.

Actors Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine were among those who were wiretapped. Mr. Pellicano paid off phone-company workers and used a computer-software program to intercept the actors' phone calls, according to his indictment.

In April, car maker Porsche AG disclosed it had found a baby-monitoring device concealed behind the hotel sofa of its president and chief executive, Wendelin Wiedeking, last fall during his trip to Wolfsburg, Germany, for meetings with executives at Volkswagen AG. An investigation is continuing, said a company spokesman.

Kevin D. Murray, an Oldwick, N.J., counter-surveillance expert, said he received several calls from worried executives asking for sweeps of their offices and homes as soon as the Porsche incident surfaced. Mr. Murray said he handles 130 snooping investigations per year, generally charging between $4,600 and $24,000, depending on the scope of the case. His five-person operation finds devices in about 10% of the cases, a similar percentage to other firms.

Available, Affordable

The growing availability and affordability of digital surveillance equipment -- even primitive stuff such as baby monitors -- has caused mounting worries about spying, Mr. Murray says. Devices "that used to be super-duper a few years ago are ordinary now," he says. "There was a time when you had to know somebody or pay a lot of money to get the equipment. Now you can get a wireless camera for under $100 -- tiny ones, too."

Indeed, for less than $350 at spy shops and over the Internet, snoops can purchase a GPS-tracking device that is smaller than a pack of matches and includes a microphone. But because many telephones and computers are tied into network servers these days, some of the greatest threats come from malicious software and hacker attacks that reroute phone calls and steal computer passwords. Snoops install the software by sending messages with spyware attachments. Or they may steal sensitive data using programs or hardware to copy keystrokes entered onto a keyboard.

While there's anecdotal evidence that casual and malicious snooping is becoming more widespread, solid statistics are hard to come by. Many high-net-worth individuals and publicly traded companies try to keep incidents under wraps and don't report them to authorities, security experts say. The U.S. Department of Justice prosecutes only a handful of illegal-wiretapping cases annually.

Still, private-security companies say business is growing. Risk Control Strategies Inc., based in New York City, says sweeps have increased 25% in each of the past two years. It attributes the growth to a recent wave of mergers and plant closings that sometimes prompt attempts at insider trading and spying by anxious employees.

Companies also are increasingly worried about economic and industrial espionage by foreign governments and companies. Kroll Inc., a risk-control consulting company that is a unit of insurance brokerage Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., says inquiries in Japan have doubled in the past year. Associate Managing Director David Nagata, who is based in Tokyo, counsels visitors to have their hotel rooms swept for listening devices prior to check-in and make sure they're secured from unauthorized entry. For super-secret matters, he suggests closed-circuit cameras to monitor hallway traffic and an alarm that beeps when someone approaches the room.

Recorder in the Closet

Clyde Widrig, senior managing director for technical surveillance counter-measures at Risk Control Strategies, says his firm was hired recently by a Southern California law firm to sweep for stealth recording devices. In this case, an attorney had modified a conference-call telephone in the boardroom to pick up conversations and transmit them to a tape recorder hidden in a utility closet. Mr. Widrig, a former Los Angeles police detective, says the attorney was trying to discredit a rival in competition to become partner. Instead, the firm fired him after the recording device was discovered.

Security experts say there are some simple precautions that can be taken to prevent snooping. The easiest, of course, is to look for hidden cameras, which may be disguised as ordinary objects, such as fire sprinklers or smoke detectors. Also, don't leave cell phones and laptops where someone can take them to avoid tampering. Avoid using hotel telephones and wireless computer connections for sensitive communications. Finally, use the proper network firewalls and upgrade computers with the latest encryption and security software.

High-profile executives and celebrities may opt for counter-surveillance sweeps, but the service isn't cheap. Prices begin at about $3,000 to $5,000 for a private residence or small business, based on the complexity of the job.

During the sweeps, technicians inspect areas using thermal imaging cameras to search for hot spots that indicate concealed electronic circuits, such as transmitters hidden inside walls. They use spectrum analyzers to pick up video, voice and data transmissions. And they find eavesdropping equipment by using devices that flood an area with a high-frequency radio signal and listen for reflected signals from electronic components within the intercept device.

But sometimes, these elaborate measures are undone by executives chatting on unsecured cellphones with Bluetooth headsets and tapping on unencrypted laptops. Fred Burton, a counter-espionage expert at Stratfor Inc., suggests that companies tell executives, "You have to quit yakking on the cellphone because we're able to pick up what you're saying."

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/05/27/eight-famous-ocd-sufferers/

2008-05-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows Howard Hughes was obsessive-compulsive (among other things) and I bet lots of us who grew up on Double Dare shudder to think of the OCD Marc Summers dealing with all of the goo and muck as the host of the messy game show.

Although these celebrities have shared their battles rather publicly, there are a few out there who suffer from OCD quietly. Like who? Read on to find out…
Cameron Diaz

Despite her memorable “hair gel” scene in There’s Something About Mary, Cameron Diaz can’t stand germs and other people’s “fluids”, as she puts it. She says she rubs doorknobs so hard to get them clean before opening them that the paint wears off. She washes her hands and floors “many times” every day and uses her elbows to open doors so she won’t get germs on her hands.
Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob Thornton became good friends with neighbor Warren Zevon when Warren saw Billy Bob return to the mailbox three times in the span of a couple of minutes. Warren identified Billy Bob as a fellow obsessive-compulsive and the two of them bonded over their phobias. Among Billy Bob’s is a phobia of antique furniture, which he wrote into a character in Sling Blade. He also fears some kinds of silverware, which shows up in his Monster’s Ball character.
David Beckham

Sure, he’s good looking, talented, funny, has great hair and lots of money, but David Beckham has his struggles, too. He hates odd numbers and is obsessed with symmetry - if there’s three of something, he has to hide the third somewhere out of sight. If something’s slightly askew, he can’t rest until the row has been straightened. Before he can settle into a hotel room, he says he puts all of the books and pamphlets together in a drawer. You have to wonder, though, if his odd number phobia means he and Posh will be adding to their brood – currently three boys – soon.
Leonardo DiCaprio

You know the old saying, “Step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back”? Leonardo DiCaprio used to take that little rhyme very seriously. As a kid, he could not step on cracks or other designated spots. He overcame this particular disorder until he played Howard Hughes in The Aviator. He revisited his old ways to try to get into Hughes’ famously phobic character and ended up falling back into the habit – he was frequently late for filming because he had a specific way he had to walk to get to the set and would have to retrace his steps if anything went awry.
Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin says he has developed quite the fixation on cleanliness over the years. He says he can come home and immediately tell if a book is out of place and insists on doing household chores before his housekeeper does, even to the point that he will miss a plane if it means getting his dishes done.
Jennifer Love Hewitt

I can relate to this one – Jennifer Love Hewitt says she can’t go to sleep if there are any doors open in the house – including cabinet doors and closet doors. She thinks she inherited her OCD from her mother, who counts steps. I do that, too.
Charles Darwin

It’s not just contemporary celebrities who suffer from OCD – evidence shows that Darwin may have suffered from OCD, among a laundry list of other possible disorders, including panic disorder, agoraphobia and hypochondria. This may be one of the causes of his detailed accounts of things – he even recorded how loud and strong the ringing in his ears was on a daily basis.
Nikola Tesla

No doubt Nikola Tesla was a genius – he was an inventor, physicist, mechanical and electrical engineer.
He was also an extreme germophobe – he hated hair unless it was his own and found jewelry disgusting. He did things in three or numbers divisible by three; he always used 18 napkins, estimated the mass of everything he was going to eat and would not eat with a woman if it was just the two of them.

Of course, this is by no means an inclusive list - in addition to the previously mentioned Howard Hughes and Marc Summers, there’s also Delta Burke, Zach Braff, Howie Mandel, David Sedaris, Joey Ramone and more.

I Don't Find This Particularly Funny

2008-05-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) in the vicinity of the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania near the border of Kenya. Due to its nature the incident has been confused with positive humorous or infectious laughter as seen in phenomena like the holy laughter movement. The nature of MPI, however, is quite dissimilar to these euphoric experiences.

Records of this occurrence, as so often with cases of MPI, are sparse, and have been embellished and misquoted. The epidemic seems to have started within a small group of students in a boarding school, possibly triggered by a joke. Laughter, as is commonly known, is in some sense contagious, and for whatever reason in this case the laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause. Since it is physiologically impossible to laugh for much more than a few minutes at a time, the laughter must have made itself known sporadically, though reportedly it was incapacitating when it struck. The school from which the epidemic sprang was shut down; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off.

Though the epidemic may have started in humor, the oft-noted laughter became significant in an entirely different way. Other more worrisome symptoms were reported on a similarly massive scale; pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes, and attacks of crying all appeared to some extent. This laughter epidemic is often misunderstood as implying that thousands of people were continuously laughing for months. As noted above, this is impossible; the true nature of the epidemic was occasional attacks of laughter among groups of people, occurring throughout the noted region at irregular intervals.

No one knows what sparked this incident, but scientists can make reasonable guesses as to why mass hysteria may have affected this part of the world. Independence from Great Britain had been achieved recently, on December 9, 1961, and Kashasha was at the time part of the nation of Tanganyika (Tanganyika would merge with Zanzibar in 1964, creating the modern nation of Tanzania). Students felt that expectations from their teachers and parents had risen markedly, and said they felt stressed as a result. This could explain the epidemic's genesis in a boarding school; one cure for MPI is removing sufferers from their current surroundings, impossible without shutting the school down, something which the administrators were surely reluctant to do. The spread of the epidemic, laughter, crying, rashes, and all, among the adult population may signify widespread uncertainty about the future among Tanganyikans. Situated in the northwestern corner of Tanganyika, the region may have been too isolated and insular to allow for a change of location, which allowed the epidemic to spread and last for a great amount of time. The unique characteristics of the Kashasha area, namely its isolation, a significant population, stress among the entire population and especially the boarding school component, combined perhaps with pure chance, probably best explain why the epidemic occurred and how it lasted so long.

Bizarre Mental Disorders

2008-05-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Phantom Limb Disorder

A person suffering from this disorder experiences the sensation that a missing limb (or even organ, such as the appendix) is still present on the body. 50 - 80% of people who have had an amputation experience this disorder. The sufferer will very often feel pain and discomfort in the phantom limb. Some sufferers can feel their phantom limbs gesticulating while they talk, and others believe that the limb is acting independently of their will. This disorder is often treated with Virtual Reality therapy (as pictured above).

Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Also known as Amputee Identity Disorder, this illness causes a person to wish to have a healthy part of their body amputated. In some cases, the sufferer has gone so far as to amputate their own limbs. Some sufferers also have sexual fetishes involving amputees. Some surgeons have actually amputated a limb for a person suffering this disorder, but it is a highly controversial move and most doctors use similar treatments to those used for phantom limb disorders.

Mythomania

Mythomania is a condition involving compulsive lying by a person with no obvious motivation. The affected person might believe their lies to be truth, and may have to create elaborate myths to reconcile them with other facts. A “pathological liar” is someone who often embellishes his or her stories in a way that he or she believes will impress people. It may be that a pathological liar is different from a normal liar in that a pathological liar believes the lie he or she is telling to be true at least in public and is “playing” the role.

Somatoparaphrenia

Somatoparaphrenia is a type of monothematic delusion where one suddenly denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of ones body. For example, a patient might believe that his own arm would belong to the doctor, or that another patient left it behind. It can sometimes be treated by vestibular caloric stimulation (squirting warm water into the patient’s ear in a specific way), although most sufferers will not be aware of this and may request amputation, which is almost always denied as amputating a healthy limb would be a basic violation of the Hippocratic Oath. In the image above we see a series of drawings made by a sufferer of this disorder.

Munchausen Syndrome

Munchausen syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which those affected fake disease, illness, or psychological trauma in order to draw attention or sympathy to themselves. It is in a class of disorders known as factitious disorders which involve “illnesses” whose symptoms are either self-induced or falsified by the patient. It is also sometimes known as hospital addiction syndrome. A related illness is Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy in which the person feigns the illness in another person - usually going so far to cause them harm to perpetuate the myth in order to gain sympathy for themselves.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

This may sound familiar to drug users: AIWS or Micropsia is a condition in which a patient’s sense of time, space and body image are distorted. People may appear tiny or patients may feel that part of their body shape or size has been altered. A sufferer may perceive humans, parts of humans, animals, and inanimate objects as substantially smaller than in reality. Another name for the condition is Lilliput sight or Lilliputian hallucinations. The image above illustrates the illusion suffered by patients of this disorder.

Neglect Syndrome

In Neglect Syndrome, a person loses the ability to give equal attention to both sides of a space. For example, a patient in a rehabilitation hospital may wake up in the morning and proceeds to shave his face - only to be told later that he has only shaved half of his face. A person with this disorder, when drawing a person, will often leave off the arm and leg from one side, and when questioned, will state that it looks perfectly fine to them. When drawing a clock, the sufferer will often draw a circle and stuff all of the numbers in to one side (as in the image above). Neglect Syndrome is most often caused by damage to one hemisphere of the brain, as in the case of a stroke.

Kleptomania

Kleptomania is the disease in which a person has great difficulty resisting the impulse to steal something. Despite this being a disorder, the US and UK courts do not consider it a defense against stealing. Kleptomania usually begins in puberty and continues until late adulthood. It is considered to be a part of the obsessive compulsive range of disorders. Kleptomaniacs usually steal items of little value, and some will tend to steal the same types of items repeatedly.

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a very rare disorder which usually occurs after some kind of brain injury (such as a stroke or head injury). When a person suffers from this syndrome they speak their native language with a foreign accent. There have been 50 recorded cases of this syndrome between 1941 and 2006. According to Wikipedia, a well-known case of foreign accent syndrome occurred in Norway in 1941 after a young woman, Astrid L., suffered a head injury from shrapnel during an air-raid. After apparently recovering from the injury she was left with what sounded like a strong German accent and was shunned by her fellow Norwegians. You can read about one case on the BBC.

Genital Retraction Syndrome

Genital Retraction Syndrome is a strange disorder in which the sufferer believes that his genitals (or breasts in the case of women sufferers) are shrinking, retracting in to the body, or may be removed entirely. Even more strangely, there have been cases of this occurring amongst many people at the same time; this is called penis panic. The phenomenon is often associated with occult beliefs or witchcraft. Outbreaks of penis panic occurred in China in 1948, 1955, 1966, 1974 and 1984/85. It is worth reading the Wikipedia article on this very bizarre syndrome.

Paging Dr. Freud: 8 Unusual Mental Illnesses

2008-05-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

There are only a certain number of ways to go crazy, and you can find most of them listed in the psychologist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fourth edition and commonly referred to as DSM-IV. But along with psych-ward greatest hits like schizophrenia and depression, the DSM lists some less-than-common conditions.
1. Trichotillomania

Trichotillomania is a compulsion to pluck one’s hair and often starts around age 12. A triichotillomaniac in Michigan says that she first started plucking her eyelashes in first grade. By fifth grade she had started pulling hair in earnest. She still does it today, although she over the years she has learned to manage the illness. “I now am a sales manager managing ten account executives and 30 of the largest accounts in the state of Michigan,” she writes. “I have not made less then six figures since I was 24. Oh [yeah]. I also suffer from trich[otillomania] and have bald spots and no eyelashes!”

In rare cases, trichotillomaniacs accumulate hairballs in the intestinal tract by chewing and swallowing the hair they pluck. You can see an extreme example at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.—a huge hairball molded to the shape of a girl’s stomach. It took six years to form.

2. Othello Syndrome

Othello syndrome is also known as delusional or morbid jealousy—a conviction that your husband/wife/partner is cheating on you. It often leads sufferers to threaten to attack their spouses or to stalk the imagined lovers of their spouses. In one case, a woman accused her husband of fathering 10,000 children with a 70-year-old mistress.
3. Pyromania

Def Leppard’s breakthrough album is named after this rare fixation with fire. Pyromaniacs don’t set fires to destroy property, collect insurance, or draw attention; they are attracted to fire itself and may feel tense, aggressive, or piqued before lighting up. They may even hang out at fire departments or become firefighters so they can focus on fire all the time. Pyros tend to be men and tend to drink. Some experts argue that pyromania is a myth, a sexy label attached to mentally ill people who happen to set a fire. One infamous arsonist who had many characteristics of a pyromaniac was Paul Keller of Seattle, now serving a 99-year prison sentence. Keller started setting fires as a child and later tried join the fire department. An alcoholic, he set over 70 fires in his career, including one at a nursing home.
4. Folie a deux

Folie a deux is a delusion or psychosis shared by several people. One individual has a genuine mental illness, often schizophrenia, and their otherwise healthy friends or family members take on some of their neuroses. Psychologists have described families that believe they are infested with invisible parasites, includes Matrix-style robotic bugs. In one case, a French woman and her husband tried to kill her doctor, presumably for giving her the parasites. In a similar case, a woman began to see insects crawling her husband. Then the husband began to see them, too—but when doctors told the two to collect the bugs, they brought in a jar containing hair, thread, and bread crumbs. Once the husband was separated from his wife, he stopped seeing the bugs.
5. Caffeine Intoxication

The DSM contains a diagnosis for caffeine intoxication, which occurs when you ingest more than 250 milligrams of the stuff, about the amount in two cups of coffee. Not surprisingly, caffeine intoxication can contribute to panic and anxiety disorders.
6. Internet Addiction

Researchers in Israel have proposed a new diagnosis: internet addition. “The Internet provides inexpensive, interesting and comfortable recreation, but sometimes users get hooked. Thus, the computer-internet addiction concept has been proposed as an explanation for uncontrollable and damaging use.” Sound familiar?

The DSM also lists several mental syndromes unique to certain cultures and circumstances.
7. Brain fag

Brain fag is a common complaint among West African students. It’s sort of like “Teacher, my brain hurts,” accompanied by blurred vision and actual pain in the head or neck.
8. Koro

Koro, says the DSM, is a “sudden and intense anxiety that the penis (or, in females, the vulva and nipples) will recede into the body and possibly cause death.” Koro doesn’t just strike one unlucky person; it hits southeast Asia in waves of a mass hysteria in which everybody becomes terrified of death via genital retraction.

The House(s) That Spite Built

2008-04-28T19:47:00.000-07:00

Human emotion is a crazy thing. It can lead people to do irrational, silly and even spiteful things. So spiteful, in fact, they would erect an entire house just to irritate someone.

A spite house is exactly what it sounds like – a building that was built or altered for the sole purpose of exacting revenge. A person would have to be pretty seriously spiteful to spend the time, effort and money to construct a whole building in the name of anger. Let’s look at a few edifices that were born out of those emotions.
The Hollensbury Spite House

I can imagine that in 1830, having horses constantly trod near your house would get pretty irritating. The noise, for one thing, but all of those road apples being dropped wouldn’t be too pleasant, either. And that’s exactly how John Hollensbury of Alexandria, Va., felt about the alley next to his house that constantly received horse and foot traffic. So, to prevent people from using the alley, he built a seven-foot wide, 25-foot deep, two-story house. He actually used one wall of the existing house to construct the new house, so as a result the living room of the Spite House has deep gouges in the brick wall from the wheels of carriages brushing up against it.
The Richardson Spite House

In Manhattan, at Lexington and 82nd, imagine a tiny apartment building created just to tick someone off. In 1882, two neighbors each owned a small plot of adjacent land. Each plot was only about 104 feet long and five feet wide. One of the men, Hyman Sarner, offered to purchase the land from his neighbor, Joseph Richardson, for $1,000. Richardson countered that the land was worth at least $5,000. When they failed to reach an agreement, Richardson built a rather impractical four-story apartment building on his tiny rectangle of land. It was demolished in 1915, unfortunately – I’d love to see that tiny little apartment building dwarfed by the huge buildings and museums near 82nd and Lex today. I bet the rent would be outrageous.
The Skinny House

The Skinny House in Boston is pretty well-known, at least in the area. The story goes that in 1874, a couple of brothers had a fight over the land they had jointly inherited from their father. Instead of properly settling the fight, one brother built a large home on the land while the other brother was away in the military. When the traveling brother returned home, he decided to spite his greedy brother and build a small house on what was left of the land they both owned, blocking his brother’s nice view.
It still stands today and is occupied. At its widest point, the Skinny House is just over 10 feet wide. The narrowest point in the house is only 6.2 feet wide.
The Edleston Spite House

Spiteful construction might seem like an American phenomenon, but it’s really not. England has seen its share of spite as well. In 1904, the Edleston family owned a plot of land next to the church yard of St. Mary’s in Gainford, England, where they attended church. When Joseph died, the family asked to build a monument in the churchyard in Joseph’s memory – he was a very active member of the church and had been for 41 years. The church said that the churchyard was already too full, but that the family could donate their land to the church and build something on that. Irked, the family built a house on the land next to the church, complete with a 40 foot column that pointed a V-sign (victory?) toward the church. The house is still there today, although I unfortunately couldn’t find any pictures of it.
The Tyler Spite House

You’ve been reading these and thinking “That’s great, but what I would really like to do is spend the night in a spite house,” haven’t you? Well, you’re in luck. The Tyler Spite House in Frederick, Md., is now a bed and breakfast. In 1814, Dr. John Tyler was the first American physician to perform a cataract operation. When the city made plans to extend a street directly through Tyler’s land, he did a little research and found that a local law prohibited building a road if work was under way on a “substantial” building in the path of the new road. He found this law just in time – he immediately had a building foundation poured on the small piece of his property that the new road would run through and effectively stopped the road from being built.

Annie Ross: Twisted (1959)

2008-04-19T06:52:00.001-07:00

Lee Evans: Suicide Song

2008-03-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

Lee Evans encore performance which is based around the fact that he wants to kill himself but alwayts fails. RT 7:36 and NSFW (language).

Bulletproof "anti-terrorist" bed with air-supply, toilet

2008-03-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

This appears not to be a joke: the Quantum Sleeper is a bed that hermetically seals itself as you sleep to protect you from "Bio-Chemical terrorist attack," "natural disaster," "kidnappers/stalkers" (only those who don't possess a forklift, surely) and affords "Bulletproof 'Saferoom' protection."

1.25" Polycarbonate Bulletproof Plating/Shielding
Bio-Chemical Filtered Ventilation
Rebreather
Control Panel Mode Selection (i.e., Basic System Ops., Intruder Setting, Energy Status, Lock Down, etc.)
Cover & Door Actuators w/ Emergency Release
One way see through head cover (reflective mirror on 2 sides and front)
Safety Features (Proximity Sensor, O2 Sensor, Smoke Det., Motion Det. Ect,)
Emergency Communication system (Cellular, Short-wave Radio, CB ect.)
Audio Amplifier (Amplify sound from out side unit)

Air/Water Tight Sealing
External Override Key Pad & Remote Control
Battery Backup Power
Toiletry system

Excessive emails and text are a mental illness

2008-03-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

PEOPLE who send excessive texts and emails may have a mental illness, according to an article in a leading psychiatric journal.

As more people leave the office computer, only to log on as soon as they get home, the American Journal of Psychiatry has found addiction to text messaging and emailing could be another form of mental illness.

The article, by Dr Jerald Block, said there were four symptoms: suffering from feelings of withdrawal when a computer cannot be accessed; an increased need for better equipment; need for more time to use it; and experiencing the negative repercussions of their addiction.

Dr Block said that although text messaging was not directly linked to the Internet, it was a form of instant messaging and needed to be included among the criteria.

"The chief reasons I see to consider it are motor vehicle accidents that are caused by cell phone instant messaging, stalking and harassment via instant messaging, and instant messaging at social, educational, (and) work functions where it creates problems," he said.

"It should be a pervasive and problematic pattern, though, not isolated incidents."

Leanne Battaglia, 21, said she would not classify herself as being clinically addicted to online communication, but could see how quickly the problem could develop.

"It's become a way of life now, but I don't think it's at that stage yet," Ms Battaglia said.

Despite sitting at a computer all day, the sales consultant admits she will often log on again when she gets home.

"I use it almost every night and during the day. I'm pretty much always on Facebook, eBay, ninemsn and gossip sites."

Ms Battaglia also sends about 20 text messages a day.

"I swear by my mobile, it's like a security blanket. I just feel really bare without it," she said.

Dr Robert Kaplan, a forensic psychiatrist at the Graduate School of Medicine, University of Wollongong, said he first saw a case of internet addiction in 1998.

Since that time, he has noticed a steady increase in the disorder among Australians.

According to a report titled Media And Communications In Australian Families 2007, the average child spends about one hour and 17 minutes on the internet each day, with teenagers aged 15 to 17 spending an average of 30 minutes sending text messages and another 25 minutes playing online games.

"I think in general it's escalating," Dr Kaplan said. "We now all live in an internet world, and it brings with it a range of problems."

Writers Who Suffered From the Sylvia Plath Effect

2008-03-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

Writers Who Suffered From the Sylvia Plath Effect

By StacyBee on writers

I’m in a book club (we’re looking for a quirky-yet-clever name for ourselves if anyone has any suggestions) and last week we discussed The Bell Jar. It’s one of those books we all felt we should have read at some point during our high school careers and never did, so it was long overdue. In my research about the similarities between the book’s main character and the book’s author I came across something called Sylvia Plath effect.

It’s a relatively new theory in the world of psychology – in 2001, James Kaufman conducted a study that showed creative writers, especially female poets, are more susceptible to mental illness than other types of professions.

Being a female writer (not a poet, though), I was understandably interested in this theory. There really is a disproportionate amount of writers who have committed suicide over the years, so to brighten your day I thought I’d look at a few of them here.

Sylvia Plath
Sylvia
photo from A.J. Marik via Find a Grave

It makes sense to start with the theory’s namesake, I think. For those of you who haven’t read The Bell Jar, it’s a thinly disguised autobiography about one girl’s spiral into depression including suicide attempts, hospital stays and shock treatment therapy.

The bell jar is used as a metaphor for the feeling the main character has when she’s going through her depression – she feels like she’s trapped under a bell jar, stifled and numb. Sylvia predicted her own future when she wrote from the perspective of her protagonist – “How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

Despite marriage, children, a successful career as a poet and a promising one as a novelist, Sylvia’s own bell jar did descend again. On February 11, 1963, she killed herself by putting her head in the oven with the gas on.

Virginia Woolf
vw

Poor Virginia Woolf seemed doomed from the start. She suffered a nervous breakdown when her mother died when Virginia was just 13. Her father died just nine years later, causing another breakdown which resulted in a brief period of institutionalization. She and her sister were subjected to sexual abuse by their half brothers, which certainly did not help her state of mind.

On March 28, 1941, Virginia decided she had had enough, loaded up her pockets with heavy rocks and walked into the River Ouse near her home. Judging by her symptoms and behavior, modern-day doctors think she probably suffered from bipolar disorder.

Sara Teasdale
sARA
photo from quebecoise via Find a Grave

Sara Teasdale was a talented poet, which, according to James Kaufman, put her at a serious disadvantage when it came to battling depression. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, which was the precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Toward the end of the 1920s, though, things headed downhill for Sara. The Great Depression hit the same year she decided to divorce her husband.
Plagued by financial problems, her close friend and former suitor Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol in 1931. Vachel was a poet, so you could say his suicide contributes to Kaufman’s theory that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness.
In 1933, Sara reunited with Vachel when she took an overdose of sleeping pills in her apartment in New York City, drew herself a warm bath and never got out of it.

Anne Sexton
anne

Anne was never shy about admitting to her mental health problems and openly talked about her lifelong battle with bipolar disorder. She was somewhat of an instant success in her poetic career – after attending a workshop taught by poet John Holmes, she immediately had poems published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and the Saturday Review. By attending workshops and adopting a writing mentor, Anne became friends with poets such as Maxine Kumin, W.D. Snodgrass and none other than Sylvia Plath. She was such close friends with Sylvia, in fact, that she wrote a poem entitled Sylvia’s Death about, well, Sylvia’s death. She outlived Sylvia by 11 years, though – on October 4, 1974, Anne had lunch with Maxine, returned home and killed herself by sitting in her garage with the door down and the gas running.

Sarah Kane
sarah
Photo from IainFisher.com

Kaufman’s theory holds up even with contemporary writers. Sarah Kane was a playwright and screenwriter who suffered from severe depression. She was voluntarily admitted twice to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London. She channeled her depression into plays which were performed by the Royal Court. Critics weren’t too impressed when the plays debuted which may have lead to her suicide in 1999. After an overdose of prescription medication landed her in King’s College Hospital but failed to kill her, she ended up hanging herself in a hospital bathroom.

So, that was morbid. But it does provide some supporting evidence for Kaufman’s Sylvia Plath effect. What do you think? Does the Sylvia Plath effect make sense? The other side of the coin is that there are a number of suicides with any occupation and these are just more public given the public nature of the work.

Moises Alou pees on his hands before games.

2008-02-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

http://copyranter.blogspot.com/2006/08/moises-alou-pees-on-his-hands-before.html

Moises Alou pees on his hands before games.

A short feature in this month's GQ (not available online) details unusual things pro athletes do to heal injuries. This is a scan of a photo-illustration for the article representing steaming pee on the hands of the San Francisco Giants outfielder. Along with New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posado, Alou swears by this, um, treatment to toughen his hands and prevent blisters. Said Posada, "You don't want to shake my hand during spring training."
Questions come to mind:
1. Do Alou/Posada wash their hands after peeing on them?
2. If a teammate is on a "hot streak", do the two stick their hands under the other player's pissing penis?
3. Has Alou ever asked pee-shy teammate Barry Bonds if he could have some of his #1?
4. We must think—what about the poor bat boys?

I have imaginary lovers

2008-02-01T20:45:00.000-08:00

2008-02-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me!

2008-01-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

Paint Your Wagon - Clint Eastwood - I Talk to the Trees

I'm really twisted!

2008-01-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

Actress and singer Annie Ross set some hipster jive to a Wardell Grey sax solo and Twisted became a jazz classic. Along with fellow singers Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks (who sit this one out) the trio Lambert Hendricks and Ross recorded a number of hit albums in the early 60s and is generally regarded as the greatest Jazz vocal group of all time. (less)

I've been talking out of my head

2008-01-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

From her new CD "Destination Moon" which is a tribute to Dinah Washington, Deborah performs a free set opening for Bruce Hornsby at City Hall Park on August 25th 2007. You can probably tell that it was the hottest day of the year

I've completely lost it! I think I'm Going Out of My Head

2008-01-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

Little Antony-Going Out of My Head

I have spent many a moment in The Rubber Room

2008-01-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

Porter Wagoner & Marty Stuart - The Rubber Room Live at Joe's Pub 4/07

I Hear Voices

2008-01-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

I Hear Voices by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, on album Portrait of a Man and His Woman

I'm afraid that they're coming to get me!

2008-01-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

I have a thing for body parts

2008-01-15T08:10:00.001-08:00

I see visions

2008-01-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today

Gee I wish he'd go away!

Somebody's Watching Me

2008-01-15T08:01:00.000-08:00