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

Ritalin, The Ultimate Crimefighter?

There's been lots of interest in the idea that ADHD meds reduce crime rates.

No doubt that, even as we speak, worried pundits are writing of how this is a worrying Orwellian scenario and yadda yadda. But what's really going on?

The research is from Sweden and published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Medication for Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder and Criminality. The first thing to note is that the study is not about giving medication in order to prevent crime; it was purely looking at what happened to people given ADHD treatment for their ADHD.

In a nutshell, the authors found that people diagnosed with ADHD were about 10% less likely to be convicted of a crime during periods when they were on medication for the disorder. This was true of both men and women, and the effect was greater for the more serious offences.

It was a huge study with over 25,000 ADHD patients and the data comprise pretty much everyone in Sweden over the relevant period so in that respect it's a very good study - although speaking of Orwellian, these studies are only possible because of the Scandinavian tendency to make national registers of everything.

Now the big criticism here is that it's just a correlation, it doesn't prove that the meds were what prevented crime. It might be that ADHD meds have no effect on crime, but that people are less likely to commit crimes at periods when they have their lives sorted out (when they're 'on the rails'), one marker of which is that they're seeking treatment for their ADHD.

However, the authors found that periods of use of SSRI antidepressants were not associated with changes in conviction rates. This is quite good evidence against the 'on the rails' critique, assuming that being prescribed SSRIs is as much a marker of being on the rails as being prescribed Ritalin is.

So, in my view, this is pretty good work, as good as any observational non-randomized study. However, remember: this is just about treating ADHD. Not drugging criminals to stop crime.

Lichtenstein P, Halldner L, Zetterqvist J, Sjölander A, Serlachius E, Fazel S, Långström N, and Larsson H (2012). Medication for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and criminality. The New England journal of medicine, 367 (21), 2006-14 PMID: 23171097

Best. Experiment. Ever.

Studies have shown that men's testosterone levels increase after sexual stimulation. However, other research shows that merely briefly chatting to a woman also causes testosterone release, making it unclear whether sex, per se, is associated with testosterone changes.

So an intrepid band of researchers decided to find out using a unique methodology. Their paper's called Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club and it's about... that.

They first set the scene:

Subjects were recruited from an internationally known "adult social club" in Las Vegas, Nevada, also referred to as a "sex club"... patrons pay a membership fee (akin to an entrance fee) to enter the 18,000 square foot, 2-story club. The first floor is open to all paying customers. The second VIP floor is available for an additional fee and includes a variety of rooms, including fetish rooms...

All are not created equal in this Garden of Eden, however:

Personal observation and communication with staff and members revealed to the investigators that there is a semi-structured hierarchy of patrons in the club. Single men (also referred to as ‘‘sharks’’) are easily identified by an orange wristband. Single women also wear an orange wrist band. Couples are identified by a green colored wristband. Single men are often considered to be a nuisance, as reported by many patrons, and are avoided in certain circumstances. Single women, moderately rare, do not share the stigma.

Anyway, the authors went there and recruited 44 men, of whom 18 ended up having sex, while 26 only looked at other patrons doing so. Saliva samples were taken before and afterwards, and levels of testosterone were measured. The results showed that testosterone increases were much larger in the do-ers than the watchers (see above).

This is an important result, the authors say, because

it runs against the grain of previous human testosterone and sexual stimuli studies in which testosterone increases in response to erotic videos and "courtship"’ behavioral interactions appeared more reliably induced than those related to active sexual behavior... We suggest that the reason for our findings, in contrast to the overarching pattern of previous work, is that lab-based paradigms may quell men’s testosterone responses... engaging in sexual behavior while wired up to machines in a sterile lab may put a damper on men’s arousal and physiological responses.

A good point.

In general, lab studies can be misleading when the behaviors under investigation are the kind of thing you can't really do in a lab. For research on fairly 'basic' memory, perception and cognitive tasks, a lab is probably as good an environment as any but for more complex behaviours it may be systematically misleading. And if a lab is bad, an MRI scanner is even less realistic.

Now, I thought the neuroscientists who threw a cocktail party on their grant money had it good, but these authors really hit a home run by using theirs to get into a sex club. It would be hard to top that but I note that surprisingly little is known about the, er, physiological correlates of lying on a beach in the Bahamas atop a pile of gold bars and bottles of Dom Pérignon. Someone needs to find out and I for one would be willing to undertake this challenge.

 Escasa, M., Casey, J., and Gray, P. (2010). Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40 (5), 921-926 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-010-9711-3

The Small World of Words

I've been asked to encourage people to take part in an online psychology study called The Small World of Words

I get a lot of this, and I usually don't respond to such requests, but this one looks pretty interesting.

The project aims to collect the world's biggest word association database. You see a series of words and you just have to type in the first three words that pop into your head.

Here's some more about it:

On average, an adult knows about 40,000 words. Researchers in psychology and linguistics are interested in how these words are represented mentally. In this large-scale study we aim to build a network that captures this knowledge by playing the game of word associations. You can help us with this project by participating in this short and fun study.

The study consists of giving the first three words that come to mind for a list of 14 items.
All ages and nationalities are welcome, but please note that we do require all participants to be fluent English speakers.

It's the sheer scale of this that makes it cool. They've got some 60,000 participants, and over a million associations already, but they're aiming for almost 300,000 people - which would make it not just the biggest word association study ever, but the biggest psychology study of all time, as far as I know.

It only takes about 2 minutes to complete and it's actually quite revealing. Out of 14 words I managed to associate a full 3 of them with 'pain', which disturbed me somewhat.

So take a look and spread the word (associations)...

Am I Attacking Neuroscience?

A New York Times article just out says:

Neuroscience: Under Attack

Under attack by who?

Er... me. And the rest of the usual suspects:

A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers - including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks - now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. 

I had promised not to do any more self-referential posts, but this one wasn't my fault. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how Neuroskeptic's presented in the article, but not entirely.

The headline is sensationalist - I don't see myself as attacking neuroscience and I don't think any of the others do either. We are trying to defend neuroscience against errors and misrepresentations. My ideal is The Sceptical Chymist, where skepticism helped, rather than undermined, chemistry.

But the job of a headline is to be sensationalist so that's OK. Most of the piece is very good. I'm all on board with this:

Meet the "neuro doubters". The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.

Yet I can't quite go along with this:

A number of the neuro doubters are also humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines, creating phenomena like neuro law, which, in part, uses the evidence of damaged brains as the basis for legal defense of people accused of heinous crimes, or neuroaesthetics, a trendy blend of art history and neuroscience.

Admittedly this wasn't directly aimed at me because I'm not a humanities scholar, but I believe that neuroaesthetics and neurolaw are absolutely valid - in theory.

I'm not defending any particular manifestation of those, and I've criticized quite a few. But in the abstract, I see nothing wrong with neuroscience helping to explain those things. It will be difficult in practice, but it's fine to try.