Science of the SpiritS


Heart - Black

Understanding Psychopathic and Sadistic Minds

Hannibal Lecter
© Phil Bray / MGM Pictures / Universal Pictures / Getty ImagesThe fictional character Hannibal Lecter
Psychopathic serial killers are a source of infinite public fascination. If best-selling novels, hit TV series and popular films are any indication, you'd think real-life Hannibal Lecters were constantly running amok in the U.S. Thankfully, such offenders are far less prevalent in reality than they are in entertainment - but the disproportionate damage done by violent and even nonviolent psychopaths not surprisingly attracts intense scientific interest as well. On May 11, in fact, the New York Times explored whether psychopaths can be diagnosed as young as age 9.

Another way to figure out what makes the psychopath tick is to contrast him - and they are overwhelmingly male - with other abnormal personalities. In a recent study led by Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, researchers looked at a personality trait often confused with psychopathy: sexual sadism.

Magic Wand

'Blindness may rapidly enhance other senses'

Image
© Thinkstock/Imagebank
While this theory is widely regarded as being true, there are still many questions about the science behind it.


Can blindness or other forms of visual deprivation really enhance our other senses such as hearing or touch? While this theory is widely regarded as being true, there are still many questions about the science behind it.

New findings from a Canadian research team investigating this link suggest that not only is there a real connection between vision and other senses, but that connection is important to better understand the underlying mechanisms that can quickly trigger sensory changes. This may demystify the true potential of human adaptation and, ultimately, help develop innovative and effective methods for rehabilitation following sensory loss or injury.

François Champoux, director of the University of Montreal's Laboratory of Auditory Neuroscience Research, will present his team's research and findings at the Acoustics 2012 meeting in Hong Kong, May 13-18, a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Acoustical Society of China, Western Pacific Acoustics Conference, and the Hong Kong Institute of Acoustics.

Black Cat

Best of the Web: Can Psychopathy in Children be Cured?

Image
© Elinor Carucci/Redux, for The New York TimesMichael, a 9-year-old whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment, with his mother, Anne.
One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call "summer camp." For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael's eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study - less summer camp than camp of last resort.

Michael's problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said, Michael was mostly just acting "like a brat," but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren't ordinary toddler's fits. "It wasn't, 'I'm tired' or 'I'm frustrated' - the normal things kids do," Anne remembered. "His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did." For several years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. "Going somewhere, staying somewhere - anything would set him off," Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punching the wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke.

People

Positive Dissociation, and its Importance: "Losing Yourself" in a Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life

Image
© Unknown
When you "lose yourself" inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own - a phenomenon the researchers call "experience-taking."

They found that, in the right situations, experience-taking may lead to real changes, if only temporary, in the lives of readers.

In one experiment, for example, the researchers found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later.

"Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways," said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

There are many ways experience-taking can affect readers.

Comment: Considering the above information, check out the following forum thread on Positive Dissociation.


Info

Bipolar Disorder Has Its Upside, Patients Say

Bipolar Disorder
© Andrea Dal Max | ShutterstockBipolar disorder is characterized by elation and depression.
The problems that come with bipolar disorder are well-known, however, some people with the condition feel lucky to have it.

In a British study, 10 people with biopolar disorder - a serious mental illness characterized by swings between elation and depression - talked about positive ways the condition had affected their lives.

The participants described an amplifying effect on their own internal experiences, say the researchers in their study published online April 1 in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

For instance, a participant the researchers call Alan (names were changed to protect privacy), said: "It's almost as if it opens up something in the brain that isn't otherwise there, and er I see color much more vividly than I used to. ... So I think that my access to music and art are something for which I'm grateful to bipolar for enhancing. It's almost as it's a magnifying glass that sits between that and myself."

In some cases, participants believed bipolar disorder had helped them achieve goals that would not have otherwise been possible. For Alan, this meant performing in comic theater: "Had it not been for being bipolar, there's no chance I could have done it," he said.

When talking about the relationship between the disorder and a sense of self, only one participant described the mood swings as an illness separate from the self, as something that needed managing.

And most participants clearly viewed their "bipolarness" as a gift for which they felt extremely grateful, write the researchers, led by Fiona Lobban of Spectrum Centre for Mental Health Research at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.

Info

Brain Represses Bad Words for Bilingual Readers

Dual Language
© Lim Yong Hian, ShutterstockMandarin Chinese depends on tones to differentiate word meanings.
Reading a nasty word in a second language may not pack the punch it would in your native tongue, thanks to an unconscious brain quirk that tamps down potentially disturbing emotions, a new study finds.

When reading negative words such as "failure" in their non-native language, bilingual Chinese-English speakers did not show the same brain response as seen when they read neutral words such as "aim."

The finding suggests that the brain can process the meaning of words in the unconscious, while "withholding" information from our conscious minds.

"We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system.

We think we've identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness," study researcher Yanjing Wu, a psychologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorized about but never previously located."

Butterfly

Fighting Learned Helplessness with Self-Compassion

Image
© Unknown
After having worked in a residential treatment facility for abused and neglected girls for 8 years, I observed that the phenomenon of learned helplessness had become an all-to-common denominator for these children. It was very rare that an abused child was placed with us for a single incident of abuse. By the time these children reached our facility, many of them had already been physically or sexually abused numerous times throughout their childhood and adolescence.

Many times these children had been abused not by a single perpetrator but by several different people, including members of their families and outsiders from the community or in their schools, even after they had been removed from danger. One might assume that once children have been delivered from such abuse, they would immediately take advantage of their sanctum by staying away from dangerous situations, choosing more trustworthy friends and safer boyfriends. Yet again and again, these victims of abuse continued to find themselves with partners that would ultimately perpetrate on them or take advantage of them in some way. Once children are taught they have no control in their lives, it is extremely difficult to learn they can ever have it or that they even deserve to have any control at all.

Comment: It's been found that writing excercises can help with changing the way one thinks of themselves. For more information, see this Sott article:

Writing to Heal


Info

9-Month-Olds Show Racial Bias When Looking at Faces

Babies
© Dreamstime
Adults have more difficulty recognizing faces that belong to people of another race, and this deficit appears to start early.

New research indicates that by the time they are 9 months old, babies are better able to recognize faces and emotional expressions of people who belong to the group they interact with most, than they are those of people who belong to another race.

Babies don't start out this way; younger infants appear equally able to tell people apart, regardless of race.

"These results suggest that biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed. It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate [the biases]," said study researcher Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in a statement.

Chalkboard

Awake Mental Replay of Past Experiences Crucial For Learning

Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals' memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay -- encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task.

"It appears to be these ripple-like bursts in electrical activity in the hippocampus that enable us to think about future possibilities based on past experiences and decide what to do," explained Loren Frank, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "Similar patterns of hippocampus activity have been detected in humans during similar situations."

Frank, Shantanu Jadhav, Ph.D., and colleagues, report on their discovery online in the journal Science on May 3, 2012.

Magnify

Neuronal Avalanches And Learning

The brain's neurons are coupled together into vast and complex networks called circuits. Yet despite their complexity, these circuits are capable of displaying striking examples of collective behavior such as the phenomenon known as "neuronal avalanches," brief bursts of activity in a group of interconnected neurons that set off a cascade of increasing excitation. In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics' journal Chaos, an international team of researchers from China, Hong Kong, and Australia explores connections between neuronal avalanches and a model of learning - a rule for how neurons "choose" to connect among themselves in response to stimuli. The learning model, called spike time-dependent plasticity, is based on observations of real behavior in the brain.