DSM-5: A Ruse By Any Other Name...

In psychiatry, "a rose is a rose is a rose" as Gertrude Stein put it. That's according to an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry called: The Initial Field Trials of DSM-5: New Blooms and Old Thorns.

Like the authors, I was searching for some petal-based puns to start this piece off, but then I found this "flower with an uncanny resemblance to a MONKEY" which I think does the job quite nicely:

Anyway, the editorial is about the upcoming, controversial fifth revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

A great deal has been written about the DSM-5 over the past few years, as "the rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born" (see, I can reference early-20th-century poetry too).

But now the talk has moved into a new phase, because the results of the DSM-5 'field trials' are finally out. In these studies, the reliability of the new diagnostic criteria for different psychiatric disorders was measured. The new editorial is a summary and discussion of the field trial data.

Two different psychiatrists assessed each patient, and the agreement between their diagnoses was calculated, as the kappa statistic, where 0 indicates no correlation at all and 1 is perfect.

It turns out that the reliabilities of most DSM-5 disorders were not very good. The majority were around 0.5, which is at best mediocre. These included such pillars of psychiatric diagnosis like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism.

Others were worse. Depression, had a frankly crap kappa of 0.28, and the new 'Mixed Anxiety-Depressive Disorder' came in at -0.004 (sic). It was completely meaningless.

The American Journal editorial was written by a group of senior DSM-5 team members. I'm sure they wanted to write a triumphant presentation of their work, but in fact the tone is subdued, even apologetic in places:

As for most new endeavours, the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings...Experienced clinicians have severe reservations about the proposed research diagnostic scheme for personality disorder...like its predecessors, DSM-5 does not accomplish all that it intended, but it marks continued progress for many patients for whom the benefits of diagnoses and treatment were previously unrealized.

Remember: this is the journal published by the organization responsible for the DSM and even they don't much like it.

But the real story is even worse. The previous editions of the DSM also conducted field trials. These trials had a system to describe different kappa values: for example, 0.6-0.8 was 'satisfactory'.

However, the new DSM-5 studies used a different, lower threshold. They simply moved the goalposts, deeming lower kappa values to be good. At one point, they wrote that values of above 0.8 would be 'miraculous' and above 0.6 a 'cause for celebration', yet this wasn't the view of previous DSM developers.

The indispensable 1boringoldman blog has a nice graphic showing the results of the DSM-5 trials, with the kappas graded according to the old vs. the new criteria. As you can see, the grass is greener on the new side.

The fact is that the DSM-5 field trial results are worse than the results from DSM-III, the 1980 version that's served mostly unchanged for 30 years (DSM-IV made fairly modest changes.) The reliabilities have got worse - despite the editorial's claims of 'continued progress'. It's true that the DSM-5 field trials were a lot bigger and conducted rather differently, but still, it's a serious warning sign.

Finally, there was great variability in the results between different hospitals - in other words the reliability scores were not, themselves, reliable. Some institutions achieved much higher kappa values than others, but it's anyone's guess how they managed to do so.

Still, there's great news: the DSM-5 is just a piece of paper (well, a big stack of them). Any psychiatrist is free to ignore it - as the creator of the more reliable DSM-IV (not III, oops) is now urging them to do.

Freedman R, Lewis DA, Michels R, Pine DS, Schultz SK, Tamminga CA, Gabbard GO, Gau SS, Javitt DC, Oquendo MA, Shrout PE, Vieta E, and Yager J (2013). The Initial Field Trials of DSM-5: New Blooms and Old Thorns. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 170 (1), 1-5 PMID: 23288382

Did Boys Use To Wear Pink?

There's a belief that the colours we associate with the genders - pink for girls and blue for boys - used to be the other way around.

About 100 years ago, we're told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. This is often used as an example of how arbitrary gender stereotypes are.

However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole "pink-blue reversal" is an 'urban legend'. He argues that there's really only anecdotal evidence for the existence of the previous blue-girls pink-boys association.

The exceptions are four magazine articles - quoted in the paper that started the whole debate - which seem to provide documentary evidence. These associate girls with blue, but Giudice says that two of these might have been accidental typos, that swapped 'pink' with 'blue', while the other two may have represented a sneaky campaign by early feminists to subvert the blue-pink patriarchy.

Hmm. I don't really buy that. However Giudice has a stronger argument, which is that according to Google NGram, a searchable database of over 5 million books, there are lots of instances of the terms "blue for boys" and "pink for girls" going back to 1890, but none for the reverse at any time point:

Fair enough. However it's a big step from that to the idea that

the pink-blue convention may ultimately depend on innate perceptual biases toward different regions of the color spectrum in the two sexes (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007)

Del Giudice, M. (2012). The Twentieth Century Reversal of Pink-Blue Gender Coding: A Scientific Urban Legend? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41 (6), 1321-1323 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-012-0002-z

We're Probably Not Getting Dumber

There's been buzz over the past few days in the idea that humans have been getting stupider for the past few millennia. That's according to Stanford's Gerald R. Crabtree -

I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues.

OK. How so?

Crabtree's argument in a nutshell:

In Part I, he outlines the latest evidence showing that many thousands of genes contribute to human cognitive ability, and that because mutation rates are high (higher than previously believed), any given individual probably carries harmful variants of many of these genes. This is quite possibly true ,and interesting, but by itself it's nothing to do with declining IQ.

In Part II, Crabtree says that during human evolution, all of these genes were under strong selection pressure because any human or proto-human who wasn't smart enough to hunt, fight and survive in the stone age environment, would get eaten by a predator or starve. However, after these hunter-gatherer tribes became settled farming communities (in say 6000 BC), they were no longer so vulnerable, so the less intellectually able could live... and breed... leading to ever-more unintelligence genes.

Now, there's a lot of problems here. Many have said that this is all a bit like eugenics, and indeed it is, but that doesn't necessary mean it's wrong... no, it's wrong because the argument is flawed.

For instance, it's already been pointed out that, even if it recently got easier to stay alive, that doesn't mean it's got easier to get laid lots and have lots of kids; and sexual selection is a powerful force in evolution, perhaps even stronger than survival, and it probably favours higher intelligence.

However, there are other issues.

The idea that hunter-gatherers have especially hard lives is dubious. There's good evidence that life expectancy and health fell when hunter-gatherer societies settled down and got agriculture. Today, survival doesn't exert much of a selective pressure in most parts of the world but life stayed pretty precarious (by modern standards) until at least the 19th century.  You could indeed argue that 8,000-odd years of agriculture made us smarter than ever before, and that we're enjoying the benefits . In which case we'd be smarter than someone from 1000 BC, who only had 5,000 years or so.

Crabtree does acknowledge that agriculture changed selection pressures. He suggests that it would have made it more important to be immune to the various diseases that emerged when our population density rose. But this isn't enough - for his argument to work, intelligence would also have needed to become less important with agriculture, and whether that's true is really not clear at all. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. There's a prejudice in modern culture against 'ignorant peasants' and 'dumb hicks', but farming is not easy.

Even if we do grant that cognitive evolutionary pressures have eased since 1000 BC, it's not clear that this would make us 'less intelligent'. 'Intelligence' is not one thing. To simplify, it might be that there's a trade-off between 'book smarts' and 'street smarts', and that you used to need the latter to survive. A society in which everyone survives would then allow more people the luxury of being book-smart. Would Einstein or Newton would have made good peasants?

Crabtree's arguments are interesting, but they're entirely speculative. There's just no hard evidence for the decline of intelligence over recent millennia. Since we can't go back in time and do IQ tests, there never will be, although he does suggest an experiment, using genetics, that might be able to check whether there's been a build-up of harmful mutations.

But until then, as he puts it,

in the meantime I’m going to have another beer and watch my favorite rerun of ‘Miami CSI’ (if I can figure out how to work the remote control).

Crabtree, G. (2012). Our fragile intellect. Part II Trends in Genetics DOI: 10.1016/j.tig.2012.10.003 

Crabtree, G. (2012). Our fragile intellect. Part I Trends in Genetics DOI: 10.1016/j.tig.2012.10.002

The Changing Face of British Suicide

Which jobs are at the highest risk of suicide?

In a fascinating new study, British researchers Roberts, Jaremin and Lloyd show dramatic changes over time. 30 years ago, the worst occupations for suicide were the medical professions. Now, it's blue-collar workers, with coal miners topping the list.

They used official records of UK suicides, comparing 1979-1983 and 2000-2005. Here's the key data (their graphs, my colours)

In the 80s, veterinarians were the most suicidal of all jobs; by 2005, they'd dropped off the Top 30 list entirely. Other healthcare professions, like pharmacists and dentists, likewise disappeared after being high on the rankings.

On the other hand, the most dramatic rise in suicide was among coal miners. They went from #29 to #1, and their rates rose about fourfold. This is not that surprising considering what happened to British coal mining during the 80s...

In general the Top 30 in the 1980s had plenty of white collar workers like engineers, chemical scientists and photographers.

Twenty years later, all of the collars had turned blue. Coal miners were joined by labourers, builders, gardeners, butchers, and others. Strikingly there are no 'professionals' on the modern list, with the interesting exception of musicians and artists (a reflection of the mental illness-creativity link?)

What's more, the correlation between socioeconomic status and suicide rates increased sharply over time. Suicide is now much more of a class issue than it was in the past.

The only constant in this sad picture was the sea: merchant sailors had the #2 spot in 1980, and they kept it in 2005, with the rates almost unchanged. However, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, because the way British suicides at sea are recorded is a bit unusual.

Roberts SE, Jaremin B, and Lloyd K (2012). High-risk occupations for suicide. Psychological medicine, 1-10 PMID: 23098158

The Psychology of Edgar Allan Poe

A paper by psychology undergrad Erica Giammarco offers a look at the mind that gave us The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death: Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychological Profile

Poe lost his mother to tuberculosis at the age of 2; he was then adopted, but his foster mother died young as well. He enrolled at the University of Virginia but became involved in gambling and had to ask his foster father for money; they argued and at the age of 20, Poe was cut off from his family. He married, but his wife suffered frequent illnesses, and died at the age of 25 in 1847; by this time Poe was drinking heavily and he died after collapsing 'drunk and delirious' in 1849.

According to Giammarco:

Poe was described as a mischievous child, playing practical jokes on classmates and teachers... One teacher was quoted as saying that Poe had an "...excitable temperament with a great deal of self-esteem." This grandiose self view would remain consistent throughout Poe’s life; however, Poe was defensive and threatened by negative comments. This is consistent with a narcissistic self-view rather than healthy self-esteem.

Although successful in his studies, he did not have many friends and wrote that school was a "miserable" experience. Classmates stated that he was incredibly defensive and did not allow others to get close...

As Poe aged his health deteriorated and he continued to drink heavily. He was described by coworkers and family as chronically melancholic, acquiring the nickname ‘the man who never smiles’... Poe had a great deal of pride, evident in his refusal to accept money when he and his wife were both sick and unable to work...

An examination of the letters Poe wrote to family reveals that he was a dramatic individual. He often used excessive, theatrical language, poignantly captured in his statement, "I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but He quenched it in misery"

When describing Poe in terms of the Five-Factor Model of personality we can conclude that he would be high on Neuroticism – evident by the constant nervous anxiety he was said to have, as well as his melancholy and irritability. Poe would also be described as being low in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness since he was argumentative, untrusting, and lacked self-control (i.e. his drinking, his failure to pursue education).

Poe actually crops up several times in the medical literature. Other examples of scientific anthropoelogy include...

• Seizures in the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe
• The earliest description of the frontal lobe syndrome in an Edgar Allan Poe tale.
• Informed consent in an Edgar Allen Poe tale

Giammarco, E. (2013). Edgar Allan Poe: A psychological profile Personality and Individual Differences, 54 (1), 3-6 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.07.027

Science: Growing Too Fast?

There's a widespread perception among scientists that we're living in an era of relentless growth in terms of the number of scientific papers being published.

Many say that quantity has increased at the expense of quality: people are publishing "any old rubbish" or splitting their work into as many papers as possible, driven by the publish-or-perish culture of modern academia.

But is this true? To try and find out, I looked at the number of papers published each year, in English, on PubMed, for the past 30 years.

Here's the data: it shows an increase in the number of papers coming out each year, except for a small negative blip around the year 1997:

Now, when I first eyeballed this curve, I got the impression that growth has accelerated recently, consistent with the "recent pressure to publish" idea.

But here's the same data with each year's publications expressed as a ratio to the previous year's:

This reveals that the relative annual growth in the number of papers published has actually been pretty constant over the past 30 years. It's generally been around 4% (ratio of 1.04), and almost always within the range 2% to 6%. In other words, every year, scientists publish the same number of papers they did last year, plus about 4%.

The past few years have not seen especially strong growth, relatively speaking. At most we can say that year-on-year growth has been at the upper end of the historical range, 4 to 6%, but that's no faster than in the 1980s.

Still, this is a lot of growth. Assuming that it stays at 5% year on year, we'd expect a million new papers published in 2016, and two million in 2030.

But is that really feasible? Is there any good reason that science should grow exponentially in this way? Can that continue, or will we reach "peak science" or at least a plateau?

Where Have All The Cults Gone?

Why have there been no new religious movements founded in the West for the past 20 years?

That's how it seems, anyway. I've been trying to think of any notable cults, sects or religions that have sprung up in the past 20 years, and I can't think of any.

Contrast this to the period from say 1945 to 1990. New groups were springing up all over the place. Scientology; the Hare Krishnas; Transcendental Meditation; the Moonies; Jesus Freaks; the Manson Family; Heaven's Gate; Jonestown; the Kaballah Centre; the Nation of Islam; the New Age; Neopaganism, Wicca...

These are all household names. But they all date to, at latest, about 1990. Why haven't there been any more since? The Waco siege was in 1993, but the Branch Davidian group was much older. Was Waco the end of an era? It does seem that way...

If so, what happened? I find this really interesting.

First off though, am I right? Maybe there's a boring explanation. Is it just that religious groups take time to become well known, so today's cults are out there, just below the radar? Seems unlikely. Many of the groups I mentioned above were famous within a decade of being founded. Even if this were true, you'd expect us to have a steady stream of newly famous groups, but where are they?

Of course, I may just be ignorant. If you think I'm overlooking some newer groups do let me know.

To be clear, I'm thinking of Western Europe and the USA here; I don't know about the rest of the world.

But if I'm right, what does it mean? What happened in the early 1990s? Here's a few ideas I had; I'm not sure I believe any of them, but they seem plausible -

• The rise of the Internet created new substitutes for religion - such as? Otherkin? World of Warcraft? Blogger.com?
• Secularization means less religion in general, and that includes less new religion
• What we have now is normal, it was the previous few decades that were abnormally rich in new religions and that's what needs to be explained. The 1960s gave us rock and roll, drugs, hippies, feminism, Civil Rights, etc. Have things generally been quieting down since then?
• The Internet / the 24 hour news cycle / Rupert Murdoch etc. has led to increasing homogenization of opinion - towards one pole in Europe, two poles red/blue states in USA... so there's less room for outliers.
• Cults have always been a social club for lonely people. But now we have OKCupid.
• The rise of psychiatry, psychiatric medication, and the increasing readiness to diagnose of mental illness means potential cult leaders and followers end up on Prozac, not
• Religious groups have declined, because all social groups, clubs, parties have declined - the Bowling Alone theory
• It's the decline of Western culture - we have lost the capacity to dream, to invent, to believe.
  
• It's the golden age of western culture - we have so much entertainment, culture, freedoms etc. compared to the past, so less motivation to drop out and create your own culture.

I really don't know what to think, so please do leave a comment. However, please avoid comedy along the lines of "We have cults now - like global warming!!!"...

Love Truth? Wait.

Britain may be hosting the Olympics, but that hasn't stopped us indulging in our own national sport of complaining. Many of the complaints in the past 24 hours or so have been about this chap:

Rileyy_69 attacked a celebrity on Twitter, who called him out on it, rileyy_69 attacked him more, thousands of fans of said celebrity attacked him, he attacked some of them back, then he apologized, but then attacked again, and eventually someone reported him to the police, and he was arrested on Tuesday morning for malicious communications or something.

All very exciting, but so what?

Should we pity this guy, or did it he bring it on himself? Were the thousands who attacked him jumping on the bandwagon, or justifiably outraged? Should he have been arrested, and if not, why? Because the law in question ought to be repealed, or because it's a fine law but was wrongly applied in this case?

Good questions. We don't know enough yet to answer them. We don't know this person, his life story, his mental health situation, etc. Some details have now started to emerge, but generally the early, fragmentary reports in cases like this only add to the confusion.

It's too early to tell. I don't think anyone can dispute this. Unless you i) know Rileyy69 in real life and ii) are an expert in the relevant areas of law and iii) have read all his Tweets, not just the ones that made it into the newspapers, you are probably not in a position to judge.

It's too early to say, but that's never stopped anyone.

Newspapers and blogs are full of definitive, final judgements on these questions. Both those broadly in favor of the arrest of Rileyy_69, and those opposed, are equally premature. If there is a difference, it's that the latter group also include hypocrites, who swiftly took to Twitter to criticize the knee jerk mob mentality of the Twitterati.

One who really cared about Rileyy_69, the law, the media, or whatever else they claimed to, would above all want to establish the facts before commenting. The truth will out; we can but wait, or try to help it along. But we should not try to outrun it.

The truth is slow.

And that's fine. There's rarely, and certainly not in this case, a need to form your opinions within minutes and to nail your theses to the door of the cathedral within a day of the event. Just wait! You'll be in good company; few of the great minds of history measured time in hours.

"Ah", you might say, "but those who attacked Rileyy_69 on Twitter were, themselves, doing what you're criticizing!". They were, actually, but that's what Twitter is for. Tweets are about speed and in its place, that's fine. The human brain responds to stimuli within about 100 milliseconds; you give people the chance to type that response, and they will. To criticize that is to criticize human nature.

No, the problem is not those who use an avowedly instant communication service as intended. It's those who try to export that mode of thought into the ancient and higher medium of prose longer than 140 characters.

For everything there is a time, a time to Tweet and a time to think. Just don't mix them up.

B. F. Skinner vs. the Rorschach Test

What happened when the world's most no-nonsense psychologist took a Rorschach test?

A fun little paper reports on B. F. Skinner's Rorschach results. He agreed to be tested as part of a 1953 project psychoanalysing various eminent scientists. The scientists were anonymous at the time but now Norwegians Cato Grønnerød et al have dug them out of the archives (Skinner has been dead since 1990).

Skinner was the world's leading exponent of behaviourism, a school of thought that held roughly that it's impossible to know anything about "inner" mental states or thoughts, and that they might not even exist, so all we could do was look at and try to predict behaviour (edit: see comments for clarification).

It was never an especially convincing idea to be honest and behaviourism is now pretty much dead although many of the techniques pioneered by Skinner live on in the form of tests on lab animals to determine the addictiveness of drugs and so forth.

But in the mid-20th century it was very popular and Skinner was a well-known figure, the Jonah Lehrer of his day in many ways although rather more controversial.

Anyway. Grønnerød et al report that when Skinner was asked to describe those famous inkblots -

The most evident feature of the protocol is the huge number of responses, showing a highly productive and creative person. But complexity is sacrificed for quantity... No perceptual distortions are evident, and reality testing and ability to function neutrally are in place. We found no signs of cognitive distortions, although some responses have an idiosyncratic twist... He might be an assertive person with a tendency to view relations as generally competitive and an area for the expression of his own needs, rather than an area of mutual support and belonging.

Although he shows an interest in others, the balance between real and whole humans and other human representation suggests that perception of self and others is based more on fantasies and wishes than on real-life perceptions... “Necrotic looking,” “wounded animal,” and “sheep pushing the two wolves away” might reflect projected aggression. These processes point to more primitive defense mechanisms...

Which is exactly the kind of speculation that Skinner spent his career trying to put a stop to. Still, it's an interesting paper, although I think it tells you more about the Rorschach than about Skinner.

Grønnerød C, Overskeid G, and Hartmann E (2012). Under Skinner's Skin: Gauging a Behaviorist From His Rorschach Protocol. Journal of personality assessment PMID: 22731841

The PR Crisis of Democracy

What will "democracy" mean, for the next generation?

At the moment, Western democracy has a pretty good image. It’s associated with things like: freedom, prosperity, wealth, justice, progress. I'm not saying that democracy actually causes those things; I'm not saying it doesn't. What I mean is that when most people think of democracy, those are what springs to mind, I think. Democracy today has a pretty good image.

Many people assume that democracy will always be attractive, although only a few have been bold enough to say it. But this wasn't always true, and maybe it won't be. 10 years from now, what will people think of when they hear the word “democracy”?

That all depends what happens. Suppose things get worse in:

 

Egypt, Libya: Democracy (at least in theory)… violence, extremists, civil war.

Europe: Democracy… riots, poverty, panic.

America: Democracy… deadlock, paralysis, decline.

I'm not saying democracy really caused those problems or would be responsible if they get worse. Correlation isn't really causation, but psychologically, it feels like it is (that's why we need reminding so often that it isn't.) I'm just summarizing the news headlines from the past couple of years and assuming they continue.

I'm not saying those headlines are justified, either; the media exaggerate, but this is all about perception, and like it or not, people see headlines. And of course there are other old and new democracies around the world that are doing fine - but good news doesn't make the front page.

Put it all together and it doesn’t look so attractive.

This matters. The USSR ended because the people of the USSR looked West and saw a better life. Now there's an assumption that something similar is bound to happen eventually in those countries that are 'still' not democratic. We assume that they will look at democracy and think: me too! For that matter, we assume that most people in a democracy would not vote to end democracy.

But what if democracy loses face?

This hasn't happened yet. It has only just begun, and hopefully can be prevented. Europe today, even Greece today, is surely more attractive than the USSR 1989... but things could get worse, and then where will democracy be?

Kids Today Are Not Inattentive

There's no evidence that children today are less attentive or more distractible than kids in the past, according to research just published by a team of Pennsylvania psychologists: Long-Term Temporal Stability of Measured Inattention and Impulsivity in Typical and Referred Children.

The study gave a large sample of kids the "Gordon Diagnostic System" GDS test of sustained concentration ability. This dates to the 80s and it consists of a box, with a button, and a display with three digits. There are three different tasks but the main one is a sustained attention test. The goal is to watch a series of numbers and quickly press the button whenever a "1" is followed by a "9". Easy... but it takes concentration to do well.

Over the period of 2000-2006, the researchers gave the GDS to 445 healthy American kids, not diagnosed with any learning or behavioural disorder and not taking medication. They compared their scores to the standardized norms - which were based on a sample of American kids back in 1983.

The results showed that today's kids scored pretty much the same, on average, as the 1983 kids. The average age-standardized scores were extremely close to the 1983 means, across the board. Children diagnosed with ADHD, as expected, scored much worse. Oddly, kids with an Autism Spectrum Disorder did just as badly as the ADHD ones.

One of the researchers on this study is none other than Michael Gordon, who invented the GDS and, one assumes, makes money selling it. (Each GDS kit costs $1595, so someone is making a killing here.) So perhaps we should take this paper with a pinch of salt, because it's kind of an advertisement for the reliability of the GDS.

Still, these results seem pretty solid. That's good news for American children... but bad news for people like Professor Susan Greenfield, who thinks that the internet and videogames are causing an epidemic of ADHD, and all kinds of other problems.

These data suggest rather that, while ADHD diagnoses are certainly rising, children as a whole are not getting less attentive, suggesting that the rise of ADHD is more of a cultural shift.

Mayes, S., Gordon, M., Calhoun, S., and Bixler, E. (2012). Long-Term Temporal Stability of Measured Inattention and Impulsivity in Typical and Referred Children Journal of Attention Disorders DOI: 10.1177/1087054712448961

Politics: A Dialogue

"There's no point in voting. All the parties are the same."

"Hang on. Are you saying the Communists are the same as the conservatives? And that they're both the same as the Nazis?"

"Well, I meant all the main parties are the same."
"OK. But what's a main party?"

"A party that gets most of the votes, of course."

"Right. So by saying the main parties are the same, you're saying that most people broadly agree about politics."

"Erm... yes, but when you put it that way it seems much less fun. Anyway, I for one reject the discredited status quo and support..."

"...the Nazis."

"No! How dare you call me a Nazi?"

"You effectively are behaving as one. You're not voting against them. Which has the effect of helping them."

"That's ridiculous. I like Schindler's List as much as the next guy. I hate Nazis!"

"Just not enough to do the one thing they don't want, to vote against them."

"Erm... look, don't blame me. Blame mainstream politicians. They're the ones who've made people disillusioned. They're out of touch, and don't understand everyday people like me."

"They understand you well enough to convince you to vote for them, or at least not against them. Well enough to make you believe that they'll always be in power, that they are the natural leaders. I think they understand you all too well."

"That's not what I mean. I want people like me to be in power."

"Well, run for office then."

"Ha! I'd lose."

"Why?"

"Because..."

"Because people like you, wouldn't vote for you."

"That's crazy. Of course I'd vote for me."

"Would you? Someone like you was probably on the ballot, as an Independent or a minor party candidate, but I bet you didn't check. You just decided there was no point, because he would never win."

"And I was right!"

"Don't you see the problem? You're only right, because people like you think you're always going to be right. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you'll lose. That's the problem with your party!"

"My party? I'm not in a party!"

"You are, you just don't know it. A party is a group sharing common interests and beliefs. There are lots of people like you. Everyone is in a party; some of the parties are just badly organized, and don't get any votes or representatives."

"Because we don't want power!...wait...or do we?"

Who Invented Autism?

The concept of "autism" is widely believed to have been first proposed by Leo Kanner in his 1943 article, Autistic Disturbances Of Affective Contact.

But did Kanner steal the idea? That's the question raised in a provocative paper by Nick Chown: ‘History and First Descriptions’ of Autism: A response to Michael Fitzgerald. The piece stems from a debate between Chown and Irish autism expert Michael Fitzgerald, who first made the accusation in a book chapter.

On the evidence presented, I don't think there's good reason to believe that Kanner did "steal" autism, and Chown doesn't seem convinced either. But there's an interesting story here anyway.

Fitzgerald says that in 1938, Hans Asperger - of Asperger's Syndrome fame - gave a series of lectures in Vienna. These were published in a Vienna journal called Wiener Klinischen Wochenzeitschrift as an article called "Das psychisch abnorme kind" ("The mentally abnormal child").

In this article, Asperger put forward the concept of autism. The term was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911 in reference to symptoms seen in 'schizophrenia' (he came up with that word too), but that was nothing to do with children.

In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper, in which he did not mention Asperger. Asperger published his first major description of 'autistic psychopathy' in 1944. The big question, then, is - had Kanner read or heard of Asperger's ideas before 1943?

Asperger was working in Austria while Kanner, although Austrian-born, was in the USA. WW2 would have made it impossible for them to have communicated directly - however, word of Asperger's ideas could have reached Kanner via one of the many European doctors who fled to America, over that period.

There is however no direct evidence that this happened. Fitzgerald makes much of the fact that Kanner opened his 1943 paper by saying "Since 1938, there have come to our attention a number of children..." This could be a reference to Asperger's 1938 work - but Kanner said it referred to his first "diagnosis" of autism, Donald T.

This leaves us with a fluke: two Austrian-born psychiatrists independently discovered the syndrome we now call childhood autism, decided to borrow Bleuler's term "autism" for it, made their first observations in 1938 and first published properly in 1943-1944.

Personally, I think that while that is a remarkable coincidence, such things are not uncommon in science. I see no reason to think that Kanner plagiarized Asperger, although it remains possible. If someone were to discover a copy of Asperger's 1938 article tucked away in one of Kanner's old notebooks, then I'd change my mind, but not before...

Chown, N. (2012). ‘History and First Descriptions’ of Autism: A response to Michael Fitzgerald Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders DOI: 10.1007/s10803-012-1529-5

Facial Expressions of Emotion Still Culturally Universal

Do people from different cultures express emotions differently?

A new paper says yes: Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. But as far as I can see the data show that at least some of them very much are universal.

First some background. The authors, Rachael Jack and colleagues of Glasgow, have published before on this theme. Back in 2009 I blogged about one of their previous papers, which showed that East Asians were less accurate than Westerners at categorizing certain emotions.

But although there were cultural differences in ability to classify some emotions, East Asians still did much better than just guessing. To me, this said that there are fundamental universal emotional expressions, albeit culture can subtly modify them.

That's my verdict on this study as well.

The authors adopted a new (and very clever) method this time. Rather than just showing people photos of actors posing expressions, and asking subjects to label them with an emotion, they generated virtual faces using a 3D modelling software, and made the faces display "expressions", with their 41 virtual facial muscle groups.

Subjects (either white Westerners, or recent East Asian immigrants) saw 4,800 random assortments and had to label each one; the authors could therefore work back to calculate their "mental model" of that emotion based on the set of facial movements that best fit, individually (it reminds me of this method).

What happened? The Westerners mental models clustered into the classic 6 "basic emotions" of happy, sad, disgust, fear, anger, and surprise. The Asians however didn't; although they were pretty much the same on happy and sad, they were less clear about the other 4.

But how much less? Take a look:

Cluster analysis and dissimilarity matrices of the Caucasian and Asian models of facial expressions. In each panel, vertical color coded bars show the k means (k = 6) cluster membership of each model. Each 41-dimensional model (n = 180 per culture) corresponds to the emotion category labelled above (30 models per emotion). The underlying grayscale dissimilarity matrices represent the Euclidean distances between each pair of models, used as inputs to k-means clustering. Note that, in the Caucasian group, the lighter squares along the diagonal indicate higher model similarity within each of the six emotion categories compared with the East Asian models. Correspondingly, k-means cluster analysis shows that the Western Caucasian models form six emotionally homogenous clusters... In contrast, the Asian models show considerable model dissimilarity within each emotion category and overlap between categories.

This shows that yes, Asians "confused" some emotions more than Westerners but the basic emotional distinctions seemed to be intact, with Happy and Sad especially solid.

And look at these examples of the "mental model" for one subject of each group: yes they're different, but not very.

These are fine results, and I think there are real questions over whether the Ekman 6 emotions model really captures the essence of human emotions (especially negative ones.)

But, especially in the context of previous work from the same authors, I don't think these data really justify the paper's title ("Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal"), or the statement that

Our data directly show that across cultures, emotions are expressed using culture-specific facial signals. Although some basic facial expressions such as fear and disgust originally served as an adaptive function... facial expression signals have since evolved and diversified to serve the primary role of emotion communication during social interaction. As a result, these once biologically hardwired and universal signals have been molded by the diverse social ideologies and practices of the cultural groups who use them for social communication.

Overall, (ahem) I'm happy to admit that these data show some surprising cultural differences, but I'm afraid that the authors' overblown rhetoric makes me disgusted, sad and angry.

Jack, R., Garrod, O., Yu, H., Caldara, R., & Schyns, P. (2012). Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200155109

Co-Vary Or Die

I've just come across a striking example of why correcting for confounding variables in statistics might not sound exciting, but can be a matter of life and death.

Imagine you're a doctor or researcher working with HIV/AIDS. You're taking a sample of blood from a HIV+ patient when you slip and, to your horror, jab yourself with a bloodied needle. What do you do?

In a 1997 study, researchers Cardo et al studied hundreds of cases of this kind of accidental HIV exposure ("needlestick injuries") in medical and scientific workers. They wanted to find differences between the people who contracted the virus, and the ones who didn't.

One factor they considered was post-exposure prophylaxis - taking HIV drugs as soon as possible after a suspected exposure. Now these drugs were still pretty new in 1997, and it wasn't clear how well they prevented infection, as opposed to just delaying symptoms. Many people with needlestick injuries were offered a course of drugs - but did they work?

Cardo et al's raw data found no significant benefit

By univariate analysis, there was no significant difference between case patients and controls in the use of zidovudine [AZT, the first HIV drug] after exposure.

But it turned out that this was due to confounding variables. When they corrected for other factors...

Infected case patients were significantly less likely to have taken zidovudine than uninfected controls (odds ratio 0.19, P=0.003). This is a classic example of confounding, since the adjusted odds ratio differed from the crude odds ratio (0.7) because zidovudine use was more likely among both case patients and controls after exposure characterized by one or more of the four risk factors in the model.

So while people who took zidovudine were just as likely to catch HIV than ones who didn't, they were also more severely exposed to the virus i.e. by being exposed to a greater quantity of blood, or a deeper wound. People were more likely to decide to take it after severe exposures. Zidovudine actually dramatically reduced the risk.

Post-exposure prophylaxis has since become standard procedure and it has undoubtedly saved many lives since. Without statistical correction, it might have taken longer for people to see the benefits.

In summary, I guess what I'm saying is, remember to correct for confounds - or die.

Cardo DM, Culver DH, Ciesielski CA, Srivastava PU, Marcus R, Abiteboul D, Heptonstall J, Ippolito G, Lot F, McKibben PS, and Bell DM (1997). A case-control study of HIV seroconversion in health care workers after percutaneous exposure. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Needlestick Surveillance Group. The New England journal of medicine, 337 (21), 1485-90 PMID: 9366579

When Prophecy Failed

I've just been reading the classic psychology book When Prophecy Fails.

Published in 1956, it tells the inside story of a group that believed the world was about to end - and what they did when it didn't. Here's a good summary over at Providentia.

The investigators, led by social psychologist Leon Festinger, infiltrated a small group (too amateurish to be called a 'cult' - see below) surrounding a Chicago woman called Dorothy Martin, or "Marian Keetch" as they dubbed her to protect her identity.

Martin, a classic 50s housewife, had a long-standing interest in the occult and dianetics. One day, she woke up with a strange sensation in her arm, and soon decided that she was receiving messages from spiritually advanced extraterrestrials by 'automatic writing'.

After several months of rather generic religious guidance, the aliens informed her that a flood would destroy Chicago, and much of the US, on the 21st December 1954. This was part of a cosmic plan to "cleanse" the earth. She, and a number of other believers, would be evacuated by UFOs shortly before the calamity.

Festinger and co learned of the group through a newspaper ad warning of impending doom; spying a  chance to field-test his ideas, Festinger assembled a crack team of sociology and psychology students to go undercover. Considering that the group only had perhaps 10 real core members, plus another 20 or so less committed sympathizers, the fact that no fewer than 4 investigators became involved is rather remarkable.

When the 21st dawned and Chicago remained, the core members of the group were upset, but rationalized the failure - the spacemen had called it off, because of the positivity shown by the group. In the days following the non-event, the previously secretive group became eager to spread the word. The media picked up the story a few days before the 21st, but the group refused interviews and actively avoided trying to convert people. Afterwards, that all changed. But the group broke up shortly afterwards.

Festinger et al's slant on this was that it supported their cognitive dissonance theory; essentially, having to face up to the fact that they'd been wrong would have been painful, so instead they chose to believe that they'd been fundamentally right all along, and sought confirmation for this by trying to get more members. They make much of the fact that those individuals who'd made more concrete commitments to the group (e.g. by selling their possessions or losing their jobs) were subsequently more faithful.

I wasn't convinced by this, though. Apart from the fact that it's just an isolated case, the group did, after all, break up, just a few weeks after the prophecy failed. While Martin herself seemed genuinely unfazed (and went on to lead a long life in much the same paranormal vein), there's little evidence that the rest remained believers for more than a few days, even the most committed.

When Prophecy Fails is an amazing human interest story, though. The group is just adorably naive and homely. It's all charmingly 1950s and about as far from the deadly fanaticism of the 1990s Heaven's Gate group as you can imagine.

It's full of details like the spirit of Jesus solemnly telling the group to take a break for coffee; the declaration that some new mountains formed following the rearrangement of North America would be called the "Argone range" (in honour of the fact that the Rockies etc. "are gone"); and the high school pranksters who phoned the group and announced that they have "a flood in their bathroom, do you want to come over and see it?" - they did.

Indeed, I couldn't help feeling that the least savory thing about this group was the investigators themselves.  Festinger et al notably don't discuss the ethics of their study at all, unlike Stanley Milgram in his classic work from the same era.

Was it ethical? At least some of the investigators actively lied to gain entrance to the group, by making up stories of their own 'paranormal' experiences. Other than that, the observers seemed scrupulously careful not to encourage the group in their beliefs - but the very fact that they were there, going along with it, was surely in itself a kind of tacit encouragement. Martin herself sounds like her head was far enough in the clouds that she was impervious to any such social influences but I'm not sure about the other members.

There's also the issue of whether it was unethical to publish the inner secrets of the group just two years after the event; they did disguise the names, but remember, this was all national news when it happened. It would have been easy to work out people's real identities with a bit of digging.

Overall, I found the book's story fascinating; but I'm not sure I agree with the book.