Biological Psychology Links

By Brian Mossop Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk. Having spent my postdoctoral career in neuroscience, brain development is particularly fascinating to me. But on this family visit, more striking than the baby’s neurodevelopment was the re-development of my 26-year-old brother-in-law. In just a few months’ time, Jack went from my wife’s little brother to a hands-on, first-time father. When I first met Jack, he was a tall, lanky, wet-behind-the-ears nineteen-year-old kid, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy right after graduating high school. As a two-tour Iraq war veteran, Jack saw more of the world in six years than most of us ever will, and had a large repertoire of crazy sailor stories to boot. Still, raising Landon will no doubt be the biggest challenge Jack’s ever faced. Whether he knows it or not, and whether he likes it or not, things are about to drastically change for him. By the end of the weekend trip, I saw glimpses that Jack had come to terms (well, sort of) with the fact that his life will never be the same: After struggling with securing Landon’s car seat in the back of his souped-up Mazda RX-8 for several weeks, Jack finally broke down and traded it in for a more sensible car that will make it easier to transport the little guy. © 2010 Scientific American

People who are aggressive may be at higher risk for heart attack or stroke, a new study suggests. The study of 5,614 Italians in Sardinia found that those who scored high for antagonistic traits like competitiveness and aggression on a standard personality test had more thickening of their neck arteries compared with those who were more agreeable. The thickness of this carotid artery is considered a risk factor for heart attack and stroke, researchers said in Monday's online issue of the journal Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association. "People who tend to be competitive and more willing to fight for their own self-interest have thicker arterial walls, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease," Angelina Sutin, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral fellow with the U.S. National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Md., said in a news release. "Agreeable people tend to be trusting, straightforward and show concern for others while people who score high on antagonism tend to be distrustful, skeptical and at the extreme, cynical, manipulative, self-centered, arrogant and quick to express anger," she added. When researchers followed up with study participants three years after the initial tests, they found they found the link between artery thickening and antagonism had persisted. © CBC 2010

by Kristen Minogue "Free-range" chickens are the gold standard for consumers interested in humanely raised livestock. But for most chickens, the wide-open spaces of a free-range poultry farm aren't nearly as idyllic as they sound. The birds often peck at each other's feathers, causing painful scars, bleeding, and even death. Now, researchers have developed a mathematical model that may help farmers stop the pecking before it starts. It's unclear why chickens like to bite the feathers off their neighbors. According to bird-welfare researcher Bas Rodenburg of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the best explanation is that they've evolved to peck for food in the wild, and this need is not satisfied on the farm. "Instead of pecking at the floor, for instance, they start pecking at each other's feathers," Rodenburg says. Right now, the only way for free-range farmers to prevent the behavior is beak trimming, a euphemism for cutting off the sharp tip of a bird's beak with a hot blade or directing infrared rays into its inner tissue until the tip falls off a few weeks later. To find a better solution, a team of zoologists and engineers studied video recordings of more than 300,000 hens living on free-range farms in the United Kingdom. The researchers applied a mathematical technique called optical flow modeling, which has been used to study traffic patterns and human crowds, to track how the chickens moved in large groups. The process involved analyzing multiple snapshots of the same 50 to 100 hens taken at different times to find patterns of movement that correlate with chicken-on-chicken violence. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Aggressive teenagers with severe behavioural problems may have developed a biological abnormality in their brain, causing them to be aggressive and anti-social, a study has found. Scientists believe they have discovered the first hard evidence showing that conduct disorder in adolescents has a biological basis connected with brain chemistry, rather than being the result of the desire in teenagers to ape their badly-behaved peers. The findings suggest that it may be possible to diagnose a predisposition to conduct disorder in early childhood so that child psychologists could intervene before the behaviour starts to deteriorate. Conduct disorder affects five per cent of teenagers and costs society millions of pounds in terms of remedial education. "Detecting conduct disorder in adolescence may be too late to do anything about it. Early identification of a biological abnormality may be a route to take in terms of early intervention," said Andy Calder of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where the study was carried out. "These are pretty severe kids. They are frequently excluded from school over and over again. Some of them will go into young offenders institutions, so they are not just badly behaved kids," Dr Calder said. "Psychiatrists in the past have not really considered conduct disorder as a medical condition. This is research that's saying that actually it has a biological basis and this is soomething we should consider as a medical issue," he said. ©independent.co.uk

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue. Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity. "The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile." "Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation. On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse. Copyright 2010 NPR

By Dara Greenwood If your children are like 99 percent of boys and 94 percent of girls, they play video games. And, if they are like 50 percent of boys and 14 percent of girls, they prefer games with “mature” – read: violent -- themes, such as Grand Theft Auto, an urban dystopia of gun fights, car chases, pole dancers and prostitutes, where blood splatters realistically on the “camera lens.” Should you worry whether such a game will warp your children’s minds? A new paper by Cheryl Olson, a public health specialist at Harvard, suggests the answer may be: au contraire. Olson surveyed children’s reported motivations for video game playing and found that their top rated choices were to have fun, compete well with others, and to be challenged. She then elaborates on the psychological benefits such play might afford, describing how video games facilitate self-expression, role play, creative problem-solving, cognitive mastery, positive social interactions and leadership. Sounds more utopian than dystopian, right? If only it were that simple. As laudable as it is to debunk negative stereotypes about non-violent game play, it is less laudable to gloss over the negative effects of violent video games. Olson’s rosy spin on violent video games positions her on one side of a heated academic debate with staggering stakes in policy and industry. (See recent salvos here, here and here.) One contingent warns that violent games reduce empathy and effective anger management skills, and promote aggression. The other contingent rebuts that such research plays into “moral panic,” exaggerates the negative impact and ignores the positive effects of violent game play. Given the sheer popularity of violent video games, their psychological impact is an urgent issue for society, and for the millions of parents whose children dive into virtual worlds for hours every day. Let’s take a closer look at the research in question. © 2010 Scientific American,

By NICHOLAS WADE On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted. The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars. “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats at the farm, about six miles from Akademgorodok, near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Frank Albert, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is working with both the tame and the hyperaggressive Siberian strains in the hope of understanding the genetic basis of their behavioral differences. “The ferocious rats cannot be handled,” Mr. Albert said. “They will not tolerate it. They go totally crazy if you try to pick them up.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BENEDICT CAREY The video testament that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC during the intermission in his killing spree offers a compelling peek into the troubles that shaped a gunman, experts in forensic psychology say. The clips suggest a person with holes in his soul, who lacked features like the emotional control and empathy for others that keep a lid on the violent impulses anyone might have. But can grainy, YouTube-ish video snippets offer real insight into the nature of Mr. Cho’s mental illness? A solid diagnosis requires time and access to the patient, whose history can be as important as his actions; and most people with mental illness are far more likely to harm themselves than others. There is a universe of possible labels, and the exercise can be an empty one, said Robert Hare, an expert in violent behavior who has been a consultant to the F.B.I. “Diagnoses are ill advised if they are made too quickly,” said Dr. Hare, who created one of the most authoritative models for detecting psychopathy. “After-the-fact explanations of this sort can go in about a thousand different directions.” Experts who have watched the videos say that while the picture may yet change, they did see sentiments and thought that hint at Mr. Cho’s mental landscape. Their opinions coalesce around a handful of conditions with names like “psychotic depression” and “avoidant personality disorder” and “schizophrenia-paranoid type.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Crayfish may be small, but they aren’t stupid. After losing a fight they can remember who beat them, and may use that information to steer clear of another fight against the same opponent. Australian researchers studied fights between males of an aggressive species of freshwater crayfish, Cherax dispar. Like most crayfish, C. dispar fights by locking claws with its opponent and holding on until one creature gives up and slinks away. The crayfish with the stronger claws almost always wins a first fight and, in subsequent fights with the same crayfish, it keeps winning, The loser often slinks away without even fighting. The researchers, Frank Seebacher of the University of Sydney and Robbie S. Wilson of the University of Queensland, wanted to see whether in those subsequent fights the loser just blindly leaped into the fray again or recognized that it was up against a superior opponent. In their experiments, described in Biology Letters, they disabled the claws of the winner of the first fight by supergluing them shut and let the two crayfish go at each other a half-hour later and 24 hours later. Even with its claws disabled, the winner of the first fight kept winning, indicating that the loser somehow remembered that the winner was stronger. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

by Sunita Reed You may have seen robotic fish, robotic dogs, and even robotic roaches. But you’ve probably never seen a robotic lizard that does four-legged pushups. Its creator is evolutionary ecologist Terry Ord. Ord’s interest in lizards and other animals began as a child growing up in Australia, where his family spent weekends and holidays on their property in Australia’s bush country. “Amongst the rock outcrops around the house, lizards defended territories with elaborate performances of pushups and other displays,” Ord recalls. “The spectacle evidentially had a lasting impression because I would devote my PhD research to deciphering what exactly it was they were saying to each other.” As a researcher, Ord spent weeks at a time observing the male yellow-chinned anole lizard. He noticed that it defended its territory against other males with two types of displays. One is the subtle headbob. The other display is done with the flap of skin under its chin called a dewlap. When extended, it looks like an inflated bright yellow balloon. These two actions comprise the information-rich message that means, “I’m tough, so back off!” But sometimes the lizards would do exaggerated four-legged pushups before they gave this regular message. Was it just another way of flexing their muscles or was it an alert signal that the mostly silent lizards used to get their neighbor’s attention before “talking”? Ord suspected the latter was the case, and decided that the best way to talk to a lizard�was to be a lizard. Ord was at University of California at Davis and worked with Judy Stamps on this project. He now works at Harvard as well. ©2008 ScienCentral

Boys who have a so-called "warrior gene" are more likely to join gangs and also more likely to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, a new study finds. "While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," said biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of Florida State University. In 2006, the controversial warrior gene was implicated in the violence of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, a claim that Maori leaders dismissed. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here But it's no surprise that genes would be involved in aggression. Aggression is a primal emotion like many others, experts say, and like cooperation, it is part of human nature, something that's passed down genetically. And almost all mammals are aggressive in some way or another, said Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, whose research last year suggested that humans crave violence just like they do sex, food or drugs. "Previous research has linked low-activity MAOA variants to a wide range of antisocial, even violent, behavior, but our study confirms that these variants can predict gang membership," says Beaver, the Florida State researcher. "Moreover, we found that variants of this gene could distinguish gang members who were markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons from members who were less likely to do either." © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Richard A. Friedman, M.D. On Sunday afternoon, September 3, 2006, Wayne Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia expert and an associate director at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), was found dead in his office. He had just seen a 19-year-old patient with schizophrenia who later admitted to the police that he had beaten Fenton with his fists. This tragic incident was widely publicized and raises, once again, the controversial question about the potential danger posed by people with mental illness. The killing also left many in the mental health and medical communities concerned about their own safety in dealing with psychotic patients. After all, if an expert like Fenton, who understood the risks better than most, could not protect himself, who could? It is not an idle question. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey for 1993 to 1999, conducted by the Department of Justice, the annual rate of nonfatal, job-related, violent crime was 12.6 per 1000 workers in all occupations. Among physicians, the rate was 16.2 per 1000, and among nurses, 21.9 per 1000. But for psychiatrists and mental health professionals, the rate was 68.2 per 1000, and for mental health custodial workers, 69.0 per 1000. For Tim Exworthy, a forensic psychiatrist at Redford Lodge Hospital in London who was recently assaulted by a patient, the risk of job-related violence is no longer a dry statistic. © 2006 Massachusetts Medical Society.

Tropical crooners sing when they're winning. HELEN R. PILCHER Football fans aren't the only ones to celebrate a win with a rousing song. Tropical birds called boubous do the same, a study has found. The monogamous birds sing a special 'victory duet' after they have seen potential intruders off their patch, report Ulmar Grafe of the University of W�rzburg and Johannes Bitz of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, Germany, who studied the birds. The researchers played recordings of four bird-song duets, which are often sung by boubous during contests over territory, to 18 different bird couples in Africa's Como� National Park on the Ivory Coast. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

By Claire Thomas In tribal societies, one might expect that the fiercest warriors get the most women and father the most children. But that's not necessarily the case, says a new study of the brutal Waorani tribe of Ecuador. The most aggressive Wao warriors have about the same number of wives and children as milder-mannered men have, and their children are less likely to survive beyond the age of 15, largely due to an endless cycle of revenge killings. The Waorani are one of the most homicidal tribes ever studied. Located in a region just south of the Napo River, the place where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon Basin, the tribe is preoccupied with revenge. Young Wao men are encouraged to develop a ferocious reputation early on, and before long they start raiding. The tribespeople constantly recount stories of these raids in gruesome detail, noting who was responsible and who needed to be avenged. Half of all Waos die violently. Studies of a similarly murderous tribe, the Yanomamö of nearby Venezuela, suggested that such homicidal behavior conveyed an evolutionary advantage. In a 1988 paper in Science, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the most aggressive Yanomamö men had higher prestige within the tribe, which led to them having more wives and children, than less-aggressive men. The new study argues that the picture is not so clear-cut. Lead author Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and colleagues interviewed 121 Waorani elders to compile histories of 95 of the tribe's warriors. (The Waorani are much more peaceful today than they were in the past, possibly due to Christian missionaries, who first made contact in 1958.) The team defined highly aggressive men as those who took part in more than four raids over their lifetimes; some of the most violent warriors fought in as many as 16 raids. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Janelle Weaver Pigeons wearing miniature backpacks containing tracking devices have revealed that the birds rapidly shift direction during flight in response to cues from the leading members of their group. "It is the first study demonstrating hierarchical decision-making in a group of free-flying birds," says Tam�s Vicsek, a biophysicist at Eötvös Lor�nd University in Budapest who led the study, which is published today in Nature1. The discovery became possible only recently with the introduction of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that can collect data at a high rate: five times per second. Vicsek's team strapped lightweight GPS devices to individual pigeons and tracked flocks of up to 10 birds during free flights lasting around 12 minutes and 15-kilometre homing flights. In total, the GPS logged 32 hours of data and captured 15 group flights. The researchers couldn't pinpoint individuals' exact positions within a flock, but were able to accurately compare birds' directions of motion. Within flocks, the authors looked first at the behaviour of pairs of birds. For each possible pairing, the team identified a leader — the bird that changed direction first — and a follower, which copied the leader's motion. Followers reacted very quickly, within a fraction of a second. Next, the scientists constructed a network of relationships among birds in the group during each flight. They uncovered a robust pecking order: birds higher up the ranks had more influence over the group's movements, and each individual's level of influence was consistent across specific free and homing flights. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Whether war or violent crime touches our lives directly, or whether we are subjected to it secondhand through the media, on some level we experience the connection between our own biology and our emotions each day. Anyone who’s been cut off in traffic, even once, has felt the connection between that first perceived insult and the flush of anger, the spike of adrenaline, the body’s fight-or-flight mechanisms that seem built into human nature. Aggressiveness of character, early nineteenth-century phrenologists believed, could be judged by observing bumps on the skull; modern scientists peer into the brain beneath the bone. The idea that violence just might be hardwired into our genes has grown ever more acceptable as the technology, including gene mapping and brain scans, has grown more sophisticated. By the mid-1980s, according to one study, about forty percent of students believed war was intrinsic to human nature. Moreover, Wesleyan University psychology professor David Adams found that these students became less likely to engage in activities for peace. To challenge the alleged biological findings being used to justify violence and war, he convened a group of scientists at the Sixth International Colloquium on Brain and Aggression held in May 1986, and together, twenty of them drafted the Seville Statement on Violence. It concluded that, “Just as ‘wars begin in the minds of men,’ peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.” The statement was endorsed by the 65,000-member American Psychological Association at a 1987 meeting in New York, but of 400 invited reporters, only four—from the APA Monitor, Tass, ADN from then-East Germany, and the People’s Daily World of the U.S. Communist Party—showed up to cover the event. © 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine.

By CHARLES SIEBERT ‘We’re not going anywhere,” my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered to me one morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front seat of a jeep just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We’d originally stopped to observe what appeared to be a lone bull elephant grazing in a patch of tall savanna grasses off to our left. More than one “rogue” crossed our path that morning — a young male elephant that has made an overly strong power play against the dominant male of his herd and been banished, sometimes permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue but part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush. We sat there watching the elephants cross the road before us, seeming, for all their heft, so light on their feet, soundlessly plying the wind-swept savanna grasses like land whales adrift above the floor of an ancient, waterless sea. Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged — “the matriarch,” Okello said softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant’s favorite food, and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of the herd milling about in the brush a short distance away. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Daniel Cressey Controlling your anger and reacting sensibly when someone treats you badly can be a problem. And if you have low levels of serotonin, it can be even more of a problem, a new study has found. Molly Crockett at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues gave volunteers a drink that temporarily lowered their levels of serotonin, a brain 'neurotransmitter' linked to happy mood. They then had them play ‘the Ultimatum Game’, which involves accepting or rejecting offers of money. Those with lower serotonin levels showed increased retaliation to offers that they perceived to be unfair. “We’ve suspected for years that there’s a link between serotonin and impulsive aggression and emotional regulation,” says Crockett. “Until this study it wasn’t clear whether serotonin was playing a causal role.” It has long been known that low serotonin levels are associated with groups of people prone to impulsiveness and problems with emotional control, such as alcoholics, violent criminals and suicide attempters. Low serotonin is also found in clinical conditions such as depression and anxiety. “We’ve known for 30 years that low serotonin is associated with impulsivity, inwardly directed aggression and outwardly directed aggression,” says David Nutt, head of the Psychopharmacology Unit at the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, who was not involved in the new study. “What we are doing now is externally manipulating it. We need to study it in a more controlled environment.” © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Seeds of a sociopath Violence in the brain? By Josh Fischman You wouldn't want your child to date either of the two British teens identified only as Case I and Case II. Perhaps you would blame derelict parents–or a lax society–for the teenagers' school failures, fighting, drug abuse, and arrests. But if you were a neuroscientist like Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, you'd instead blame serious head injuries that in both cases damaged a tiny spot in the brain, just above the eyes. "It turned the boys into walking time bombs, because the trouble didn't show until years after the injuries," says Vargha-Khadem of University College London Medical School. "It's the first time we've seen this." U.S.News & World Report Inc. All rights reserved.

Are violence and aggression genetic or a response to our upbringing? As this ScienCentral news video reports, psychologists say it's both–but parenting can shape the effects of childrens' genes. Nurture just might trump nature when it comes to certain aspects of behavioral development. Psychologists who studied rhesus monkeys, which share over 92 percent of their genetic material with us, found that mothers not only took care of their young but also corrected any bad behavior. "Mothers are very good at giving the kind of inputs that change behavior," says J. Dee Higley, a research psychologist at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism , "but that's happening at the very time that the brain is changing, when it needs that kind of input. It's almost as if evolution said, 'let's put mothers there so that the brain gets the right kind of input.'" © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

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