Loved the thrashing though!

I happen to have my very own pathetic and deluded Australian anti-psych troll, who left this [unpublished] comment on my Bad Boys post. An edited excerpt:

Pushing unreplicated piece of sh*t studies in an effort to undermine the concept of free will, and brand boys with your misandric f*cking pseudoscience. Of course you eugenic social darwinist c*nts are nothing but biopsychiatric fanatics, that much is clear.

Although it sounds appealing on the surface, there are at least two problems with your colleague’s suggestion to use the retrospective narration of meaningful adverse life events as a stressor. The first is that such a procedure would not be standardised and there would be considerable inter-individual differences in the ability to vividly recall or imagine the adverse events that were being described (regardless of whether they concerned an embarrassing or a frightening situation). Cortisol responses are highly variable both between and within individuals even when standardised procedures are used. This suggestion would be likely to introduce even more variability and problems with interpretation of results.

The second, and more important, problem is that such a procedure would probably not cause physiological stress responses (and particularly increases in cortisol release) in most individuals. Most neuroendocrine studies involving children and adolescents have failed to elicit stress responses in the majority of the participants (see Gunnar & Vasquez, 2006, for a review), and it actually requires a fairly intense stressor to elicit meaningful cortisol increases in > 50% individuals. Even the most widely used social stressor (the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST)), which involves public speaking in front of an audience, often does not cause statistically significant cortisol increases in studies of children or adolescents. A recent meta-analysis showed that in order for stressors to be effective, they had to include elements of social evaluation and induction of feelings of loss of control (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). It may also interest you to hear that some adult studies using the TSST have shown larger stress responses in low SES relative to high SES participants, so it doesn’t necessarily follow that being of low SES means that you are relatively unresponsive to stress. Also, the literature on the impact of early adverse life events on subsequent stress responses in adulthood is pretty mixed. Some studies find exaggerated cortisol or cardiovascular responses to stress in adults who have been abused as children, whereas others find that stress responses are blunted in such individuals.

ADDENDUM: For a lengthy and thorough thrashing of this article (and of The Neurocritic’s light treatment thereof), see Bad Boys or Bad Science by Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology. Although my sarcastic COPS reference was an admittedly lazy critique of the press coverage and only an oblique criticism of the diagnosis of conduct disorder, I believe Lende goes overboard in saying the authors are complete biological determinists, because they did acknowledge the alternative [i.e., see the Fairchild et al. quote above, "...rather, both CD subgroups may have experienced increased social adversity during development (e.g., maltreatment)..."].

A colleague of mine also emailed me with this comment about the post and the research:

The low CORT – “antisocial” behavior link is an interesting and curious one, and pretty robust. [It has been] found in Nepal [and elsewhere]. I agree with you, though, that a big problem with these “standardized” stressors is their essential non-comparability in terms of meaningful impact across individuals from different backgrounds. One work-around is to ask individuals to narrate events of a specific nature (offensive, emabarassing, scary, etc.) that happened to them personally, but of course that has its problems as well.

It is a tough thing, when your science gets out into the media. They like to twist things around immediately… You nailed it though – Fairchild’s quote is incriminating – “These findings basically indicate that antisocial behavior is probably more biologically based than many people recognize and is similar to conditions like depression and anxiety” – that is definitely old-school dualistic thinking. What happened to context?! I find it doubtful that low cortisol could ever “cause” aggressive behavior; it is more a symptom of chronic dysregulation perhaps, or chronic under-arousal (or lack of connection to social context), but I don’t know of a pathway through which it could directly “cause” antisocial behavior. I agree that a degenerate incapable of producing any CORT is not a good model here!!

So here is to acknowledging alternatives, contexts, robust links, criticisms, developmental pathways, social adversity, and all the rest.