Day: August 29, 2010

Carol Worthman – Habits of the Heart Video

In the previous post Carol Worthman: From Human Development to Habits of the Heart, I covered two of Carol’s recent papers. Just after that I discovered a great lecture by Carol, where she covers her work on “Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion Regulation.” So now you can see her in action!

This lecture was part of The Evolution Institute’s Risky Adolescent Behavior Workshop. You can see all the videos from the workshop at The Evolution Institute’s Viddler Page.

Carol Worthman: From Human Development to Habits of the Heart

Carol Worthman, a mentor of mine at Emory University and a real leader in doing neuroanthropological research (even if she might call it “biocultural”), has two recent articles out that I really want to highlight.

The first is The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology. Here is the abstract, part of a whole special issue in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology on the work of the husband-wife team John Whiting and Beatrice Whiting:

The Whiting model aimed to provide a blueprint for psychocultural research by generating testable hypotheses about the dynamic relationships of a culture with the psychology and behavior of its members. This analysis identifies reasons why the model was so effective at generating hypotheses borne out in empirical research, including its foundational insight that integrated nature and nurture, its reconceptualization of the significance of early environments, and its attention to biopsychocultural dynamics active in those environments.

Implications and the evolution of the ecological paradigm are tracked through presentations of three current models (developmental niche, ecocultural theory, bioecocultural microniche) and discussion of their related empirical literatures. Findings from these literatures converge to demonstrate the power of a developmental, cultural, ecological framework for explaining within- and between-population variation in cultural psychology.

The figure above is from this paper, and represents Carol’s own model for understanding human development. But the real point that Carol wants to make in emphasizing these three models goes as follows:

All of these models share a concern for how the cultural ecology of affect and affect regulation drive psychobehavioral development, competence, and well-being or health. Whoever has looked has found linkages among cultural practices, stress physiology, and emotion regulation. Note that each of these models foregrounds the development of emotion and emotion regulation and de-emphasizes classic knowledge acquisition. Although there are important reasons for this emphasis (Damasio, 2005), a reconsideration of what constitutes “knowledge” and more systematic investigation of the linkages between emotion and knowledge might prove valuable (588).

The second article is Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion. This article was part of a special issue on Advances in Evolutionary Endocrinology in the American Journal of Human Biology. Here is Carol’s abstract:

The centrality of emotion in cognition and social intelligence as well as its impact on health has intensified investigation into the causes and consequences of individual variation in emotion regulation. Central processing of experience directly informs regulation of endocrine axes, essentially forming a neuro-endocrine continuum integrating information intake, processing, and physiological and behavioral response. Two major elements of life history—resource allocation and niche partitioning—are served by linking cognitive-affective with physiologic and behavioral processes. Scarce cognitive resources (attention, memory, and time) are allocated under guidance from affective co-processing. Affective-cognitive processing, in turn, regulates physiologic activity through neuro-endocrine outflow and thereby orchestrates energetic resource allocation and trade-offs, both acutely and through time. Reciprocally, peripheral activity (e.g., immunologic, metabolic, or energetic markers) influences affective-cognitive processing.

By guiding attention, memory, and behavior, affective-cognitive processing also informs individual stances toward, patterns of activity in, and relationships with the world. As such, it mediates processes of niche partitioning that adaptively exploit social and material resources. Developmental behavioral neurobiology has identified multiple factors that influence the ontogeny of emotion regulation to form affective and behavioral styles. Evidence is reviewed documenting roles for genetic, epigenetic, and experiential factors in the development of emotion regulation, social cognition, and behavior with important implications for understanding mechanisms that underlie life history construction and the sources of differential health. Overall, this dynamic arena for research promises to link the biological bases of life history theory with the psychobehavioral phenomena that figure so centrally in quotidian experience and adaptation, particularly, for humans.

In this second article, Carol is tying her work back into evolutionary theory. If the first took up more the cultural/psychological side, then here we are grounded in the mechanisms and ideas of biological anthropology. She writes here:

Given the evidence of gene-environment interactions and developmental effects discussed above, combinations of history and circumstance will condition the phenotypes generated from the genetic structure, and thus influence the impact of that structure on corresponding experience, welfare, behavior, and the balance of selective pressures upon genetic diversity. Such gene-environment interactions and their consequences for function and welfare deserve investigation across a wide range of human cultures and conditions. Such study bears exciting possibility for unlocking dynamics among culture, social conditions, the nature and distribution of social niches, and selection pressures operating on allelic variants (779).

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology.

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion.

Update: You can see Carol lecture on Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion regulation here.

Glory Days – Anthropologists as Journalists

Brian McKenna, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan – Dearborn, has a great piece in the August 2010 newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Starting on p. 11 (the newsletter is a pdf), McKenna has a piece entitled “Doing Anthropology as an Environmental Journalist.”

He uses his 2002 article in City Pulse, Can Glory Days Return to Lake Lansing?, to discuss how he crafted a very effective piece of reporting that was also a very effective piece of public anthropology.

You just have to love how he uses a great hook at the beginning, and then seamlessly transitions to the broader “this is what this piece is about” while still maintaining relevance. Some great writing:

Lake Lansing just wants to be left alone. In the Prohibition Era, bootleggers raised hell in a house on stilts that sat in the belly of the lake – site of a men’s social club – while a lookout warned of an impending sheriff’s raid. By the time the police boat reached the moated fortress, all alcohol had been hurriedly dispatched into the lake through a trap door.

Over the years, the lake has imbibed more than its share of bad whiskey. Septage, arsenic, fertilizer, dog poop, gull dung, mercury and just about everything that people throw on the ground for miles around the 450-acre waterworld winds up in the lake. “If you spit on the sidewalk,” says Pat Lindemann, the Ingham County drain commissioner, “it goes into the lake.”

But what I really want to highlight in McKenna’s SFAA piece is how he demostrates how to connect core anthropological analysis with journalistic writing. He calls it using “The Anthropological Dozen.”

In every journalistic article I write I try to incorporate what I call “The Anthropological Dozen.” These questions help insure a muckracking result.

Very briefly, here they are: 1) holism (how do disparate phenomenon connect?); 2) fieldwork (from lab tests to participant observations); 3) What’s taken for granted (Did the Ojibwa help create this lake?); 4) culture (how is capital behind what’s behind); 5) cross-cultural justaposition (how did Indians and colonialists use the lake?); 6) Getting the native’s point(s) of view (Who are the natives? What are the ways in which the “native points of view” are ignored, omitted, or supressed?); 7) Contradictions and ideologies (Do people say one thing and do another? Are there dialectical tensions in the terrain of inquiry?); 8.) Origins and history (human origins, the origin of the state, the origin of a nation, the origin of a given institution, the origin of a name, the origin of a place. How have things transformed since the origin?); 9) epistemological critique (Begin with a “reification of names” in your analysis. Do names – like “Lake Lansing” in this instance – accurately capture the idea/object represented?); 10) conformity/resistance (what are the modes of resistance that the less powerful play?); 11) privilege the most powerless; and 12) analyze social change.

McKenna goes on in his essay to provide examples of these various techniques in action, and also to describe how he got the necessary information as journalist/anthropologist through interviews, library research, and the like. And all on a four day deadline!

Here is just one example, focusing on the writing part:

The colonialists originally called it Pine Lake for the stand of beautiful white pine trees on the east side of the lake – the largest stand in Ingham County. But the white pines were soon destroyed for their wood resources in the second half of the 19th century. According to Raphael, the biggest logging operation was conducted by a John Saltmarsh, whose name ironically revealed his intent. He “assaulted the ‘marsh’” in the winter one year, sending the logs over the lake ice on sled runners. They were stockpiled for export behind the new train depot. Saltmarsh also owned a picket mill, to make the fences that would set the enclosures around the new form of land division around Lansing: private property.

Notice how I translated academic parlance into civic voice. This is journalism as a public anthropology, a syncretism (McKenna 2010b). Think of it as converting ethnography into a good story. There are villains, dramatic tensions, metaphors and ample use of quotation to enliven the narrative.

Link to the City Pulse article, Can glory days return to Lake Lansing?

Link to the Society for Applied Anthropology August Newsletter