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.

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.

American culture may be deviating increasingly from traditional social practices that emerged in our ancestral “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). Empathy, the backbone of compassionate moral behavior, is decreasing…

In fact, the way we raise our children it seems that the USA is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well being and a moral sense.

Together Narvaez and Panksepp are organizing a conference on Human Nature and Early Experience: Addressing the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”, where Schore will be one of the featured speakers.

Charles Darwin had high hopes for humanity. He pointed to the unique way that human evolution was driven in part by a “moral sense.” Its key evolutionary features are the social instincts, taking pleasure in the company of others, and feeling sympathy for fellow humans. It was promoted by intellectual abilities, such as memory for the past and the ability to contrast one’s desires with the intentions of others, leading to conscience development, and, after language acquisition, concern for the opinion of others and the community at large…

What Darwin considered the moral-engine of positive human thriving may be under threat. Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become normalized without much fanfare, such as the common use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms, the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby is spoiling it, the placing of infants in impersonal daycare, and so on. We recommend that scientists and citizens step back from and reexamine these common culturally accepted practices and pay attention to potential life-time effects on people. It is an ethical issue.

Link to The Decline of Children and the Moral Sense

Today, I want to write briefly about ‘neuroanthropology’ as a badge, but spend more time on ‘neuroconstructivism,’ as it’s a term that sometimes gets associated with the sort of research and thinking that we are advocating here at Neuroanthropology.net. In a sense, this piece is written for non-anthropologists, to help them understand why they might get a really strange reaction from an anthropologist colleague if they start talking excitedly about new ‘neuroconstructivist’ perspectives.

We’ve obviously decided that ‘neuroanthropology’ is one of the labels that we find helpful. We stand by the neologism, even though some of our readers have described our choice of terms ‘deplorable,’ and we’ve sometimes had to struggle against the term’s use elsewhere. For example, Oliver Sachs, the wonderful chronicler of the lived worlds of people with severe brain lesions, often calls himself a ‘neuroanthropologist,’ as Jovan Maud at Culture Matters pointed out to me and Daniel highlights in a recent, more thorough post on the relation of what we’re doing to what Sachs has done (see also Neuroanthropology).

For Sachs, the emphasis is on the ‘neuro-’ with the ‘anthropologist’ part of the term referring more to the genre or style in which he writes and his humanistic concern for the sufferer’s-eye-view in neuropathology. That is, Sachs uses the term to inflect ‘neuro-’ with a sympathy for the sufferer’s own perceptions, what in anthropology we call an ‘emic’ or ‘experience-near’ perspective. I’m not sure when he started using the term, but one of his subjects, the brilliant and autistic Temple Graddin, used it to describe her sense of being an outsider in everyday interactions, like an ‘anthropologist on Mars.’

Unlike anthropologists, Sachs doesn’t really consider the range of normal (non-‘pathological’, with all the challenges that this label brings along). He also tends to study cases in isolation, without much of a focus on the social relations, cultural influences, and interplay between factors like environment, education, inequality, ideology, and the like that is a hallmark of contemporary anthropology. So although I’m very happy to be associated in any way with the remarkable Oliver Sachs, I would say that we are putting the ‘neuro-’ in the ‘anthropology’ to get neuroanthropology, perhaps working in the opposite direction and on slightly different terrain than the good Dr. Sachs. Still, if there’s any guilt by association, he’s good company to keep.

Still, the fact that we’re trying to bring the ‘neuro-‘ to ‘anthropology’ helps me to explain why I don’t like the term ‘neuroconstructivist’ even though I like nearly everything about neuroconstructivists themselves.

Okay, so I admit I was over-reacting…

What really got me thinking about intellectual labels and this issue was a one-line remark that pissed me off a while back when I first read it. Oliver Morin, who writes great stuff for the Cognitive and Culture Institute weblog, posted a veeeeeery short comment on a piece that I wrote on an article by Andy Clark and William Wheeler. Morin wrote: ‘Neuroanthropology dwells at some length on a paper published by Andy Clark and William Wheeler in the latest PTRS special issue. It is basically a celebration of neuroconstructivism. [emphasis added]‘

For a while, that brief comment by Morin kept irritating me, but I knew his work enough to know that he is a sophisticated thinker, not one to simply consign what I found to be a really interesting article by Clark and Wheeler with a shallow label (I know, I know – it was only a one-line description. A propensity to mull things over extravagantly is likely an adaptive trait for an academic.). I had to dig a bit into the literature to find what specifically was meant by ‘neuroconstructivism,’ in the process running into a bibliography that included a number of my favourite thinkers on subjects like emergence, cognitive development, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. It also occurred to me that there was likely to be a serious translation problem when the term ‘neuroconstructivist’ crossed over into anthropology if it set my teeth on edge, and I’m both reasonably neuro-savvy and trust the person who used the term.

Neuroconstructivism: not just another constructionism

The term ‘neuroconstructivism’ bothered me at first because of its close proximity to ‘social constructionism’ and ‘cultural constructionism,’ and, by extension, ‘deconstruction.’ (Although some proponents draw a distinction between social constructionism and social constructivism, I’m going to ignore that distinction because it’s inconvenient for my argument, at best. Besides, it’s already an overly-long blog post.)

Various forms of social constructionism have encouraged contemporary cultural anthropologists to focus on the degree to which important collective social products such as ideologies, narratives, languages, imaginaries, and discourse are social fictions. The short definition of ‘social constructionism’ (and it is anything but ‘short’ on internal disagreements and variations) is that social constructs, the products of human interaction – whether they be ideas, material artifacts, or practices – persuade socialized actors of their reality and independence from the actors’ perception of these fictions. Social constructs appear to be objective reality.

Social constructionists focus on the arbitrariness and implications of constructs, even if actors take them to be accurate representations of reality often precisely because the users of constructs don’t recognize that they are not operating with simple reflections of a reality external to culture. For social constructionists, these social fictions can then be seen to have all sorts of consequences, some of them quite material and even detrimental to those who believe in the fictions.

Clearly, certain facts or objects, however persuasive, are culturally specific and sufficiently autonomous from brute reality that it’s hard to disagree that they are social constructs. That is, it’s very hard to argue that, without customs, belief, and social consensus, entities like money, law, language, nations, reputations, and the like have much existence prior to human conviction that they exist. As we’ve seen in the recent financial crisis, some social constructs are quite precarious; rattle the markets a little, and ‘assets’ like mortgaged-backed securities or financial derivatives, even some ‘corporations,’ turn out to be shaky fictions indeed (‘Wasn’t there just a Fortune 500 corporation here a minute ago?’).

Observers sometimes draw a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘week’ social and cultural constructionism. Strong varieties of social constructivism, in the work of philosophers like Jean-François Lyotard and some anthropologists, argue that reality itself is a product of social consensus, that we interact, not with a reality external to us, but with social fictions that we have created. In truth, strong social constructionists are rare, although a fair bit of contemporary cultural anthropology has a tendency to look like strong social constructionism because writers often skirt the thorny problem of how ‘real’ native concepts are and don’t really grapple with some of the materiality of cultural life.

For example, many anthropologists are much more comfortable talking about indigenous concepts of illness and healing than asking hard questions about causes, consequences of different therapies, and mechanisms for understanding how they work. Since we started Neuroanthropology.net, I’ve actually grown more sympathetic to this approach because I now better recognize how deep the theoretical water is and how difficult the empirical questions are if you want to think about the relationship of cultural concepts to things like biological causation.

But most social and cultural anthropologists, although they may write extensively about social constructions, are not strong social constructionists. They acknowledge that material reality is obdurate, that biology plays a part, that genes influence development, that language is both social creation and response to an objective world, but they tend not to focus on these parts of the mangle of everyday experience because the field has spent so much of its time trying to disabuse other people, academics and civilians alike, that reality wasn’t as simple and objective as they might think. That is, I suspect that, although they spend much of their professional lives working in constructionism, anthropologists don’t wander around in their off hours spiraling in existential contemplation of the fictions that surround them.

Looks like a neuroconstructionist, quacks like a neuroconstructionist…

To neuroscientists, ‘neuroconstructionism’ is an analytical perspective that focuses on the emergence of neurological abilities out of less complex neurological abilities. As Westermann and colleagues (2007:75) describe, many developmental psychologists tends to explore ‘children’s abilities at specific ages without devoting equal attention to the question of the mechanisms by which these abilities unfold and change over time.’ In constrast, neuroconstructivism tries to ‘link the observed abilities of infants and children at different ages into one developmental trajectory’ (ibid.).

Neuroconstructivism is also discussed in the two-volume collection of that name (Mareschal, Johnson, Sirois, Spratling, Thomas & Westermann 2007; Mareschal, Sirois, Westermann, and Johnson, eds. 2007).

One of the crucial characteristics of neuroconstructivism is the recognition that neural activity, affected by the environment, behaviour patterns, and a host of other influences, effects change in neural architecture: ‘cognitive processing itself shapes the neural networks that are responsible for this processing in the first place’ (Westermann et al. 2007:75). Acknowledging the fact that no specific level of analysis is determining the others (neither gene determining behaviour, nor behavioural independence from biology), means treating cognitive and neural levels of description as inseparable; neither can be studied in isolation from the other. As Westermann and colleagues (ibid.:76) write, neuroconstructivism calls, not for reduction of phenomena to neurological correlates, but for ‘consistency between the neural and cognitive levels in characterizing developmental trajectories.’

Westermann and his colleagues (ibid.) highlight six levels of interrelated phenomena, but I don’t think they have any intention of suggesting these are exhaustive:

1) insights from epigenesis on the probabilistic relationship between gene and expression, including the impact of behaviour on gene expression;
2) how experience affects the development of different neural structures;
3) how regional brain specialization emerges through interaction among brain regions;
4) how bodily experience affects cognitive development;
5) how the child’s own activity and active pursuit of its own goals affect its cognitive development; and
6) how social environments affect the developing child.

There’s so many problems with the old organism-environment dichotomy that it’s a bit of dead horse abuse to flog it anymore, but one thing that comes out of Westermann et al.’s discussion is that, depending on the scale of the analysis, what is the ‘environment’ can be radically different. For the gene, the cell is the environment; for the individual organ, such as a brain region, the body is the environment; but at the scale of the organism as a whole, these smaller scale ‘environments’ are, of course, the organism which is nested in still greater concentric environments. Westermann and colleagues (ibid.:77) write, ‘As the brain is embedded in a body (embodiment [note: not what anthropologists mean by ‘embodiment’]), so an individual functional brain region is embedded in a brain where it co-develops with other brain regions.’

Westermann and colleagues offer the following figure to outline some of the relations in embodiment:

Westermann et al. 2007: 79, Fig. 3: 'Embodiment'

In a sense, neuroconstructivism is a synthesis of some of the most promising integrative research that we have been exploring on Neuroanthropology.net. Although I could cite a number of passages to highlight the type of thinking that the neuroconstructivist perspective offers, I’ll just leave you with one from Westermann et al.’s discussion of ‘interactions between constraints’:

Interactions with a social environment have effects on both neural development and on the expression of genes (Eisenberg, 1995). These effects can either be mediated through direct experience with the environment or through altered caregiver behaviour in a specific environment (Sale, Putignano, Candedda, Landi, Cirulli, Berardi & Maffei, 2004).

That is, social environments affect biological development through several different mechanisms, some of them direct environmental contact and some of them indirect through the environment’s effect on the caregiver.

What’s in the name, neuroconstructionist

This is why I have reservations with Olivier Morin’s use of the label ‘neuroconstructivism,’ even though he’s spot on and has every right to label accurately (in other words, he’s right, and I still have a problem). After the AAA conference and some of the conversations I’ve had, I’m not content with the term, not because of what it means to neuroscientists but because of how it will likely be understood by anthropologists. The gap between our field’s understanding of ‘constructionism’ and this conception of ‘neuroconstructivism’ is huge and yet it may be invisible to anthropologists.

I can almost hear my colleagues right now: ‘Neuroconstructivism’? What would that be? ‘Constructivism’ plus ‘neuro-’, I suppose. Sounds like ‘social constructionism’….

Then, there’s a moment of hesitation as the anthropological reader tries to decide whether to attack (‘They’re saying our neurons construct us!’) or to prematurely agree with an incorrect understanding of what we’re about (‘Oh yeah, neurons are a social construct; that’ll really piss off the neurologists. I’m down with that!’). Especially when what follows is likely to be complex material on multiple scales, some of which might be unfamiliar to an anthropologist, I’m afraid that the response is liable to be either entrenched, knee-jerk resistance to ‘biological reduction’ (it’s obviously not reductionist from even the short description) or overly-quick acceptance without digesting the real significance of what’s being argued (this is not your retired thesis supervisor’s ‘constructionism’).

Either way, we don’t get what we want, which is really a more subtle discussion of the interaction between different scale processes, from the cellular and neural to the developmental, social and cultural. That is, I fear that the closeness of the label ‘neuroconstructivist’ to a set of older terms might signal battle… errr, business as usual.

In anthropology the label ‘x-constructivist’ (following the examples of ‘cultural constructionist’ and ‘social constructivist’) indicates that the person being tarred with the brush places the overwhelming emphasis in any model on the ‘x-’ against ‘y-innatist’ or ‘z-determinist.’ That is, there are two poles in some anthropological thinking, one ‘constructivist’ that emphasizes ongoing influences (culture, social interaction, upbringing, environment…) and the other ‘determinist’ that emphasizes innate traits (genetic, biological…). Part of my own strategy as a neuroanthropologist is to try to avoid saying things that let my readers off the hook, allowing them to engage in old-fashioned, one-sided, reductionist thinking that has made biocultural synthesis hard to imagine.

I don’t think Morin has ANY intention of dragging this tired constructivist v. determinist dichotomy into the new territory, but this may be a difference between European and American anthropology. Or maybe Morin is sufficiently recovered from the Constructionist-Determinist War and I’m still suffering from the lingering fear that the conflict will re-ignite. (‘The horror!’) The terms we use have to be carefully chosen, and translation between fields is sometimes hairy, especially if we see a term and don’t realize it even needs translation.

For example, one term that I’ve brought up before is ‘representation’; in the neurosciences, the term means the physiological neural correlates that produce a percept, concept, or other neural activity. Westerman and colleagues (2007:75), for example, offer the following: ‘Representations are here defined as neural activation patterns in the brain that contribute to adaptive behaviour in the environment.’ The term is debated, in some quarters of the brain sciences, though it is widely accepted, because it may imply a degree of stability, fixity or clear structural location that some theorists argue is unwarranted.

My problem with ‘representation’ like my problem with ‘neuroconstructivist’ is that I’m worried about how they will cross over into an anthropological audience; in particular, I’m concerned that these terms will blunt the potentially positive theoretical challenges that research in the brain sciences might pose for anthropological theory. Anthropologists talk about ‘representations’ and ‘construction’ a lot, but they do not mean the neural activation pattern that contributes to adaptive behaviour nor do they mean a sensitivity to the complex unfolding of organism-environment interactions in developmental timeframes (see, for example, the discussion in Beyond Bourdieu’s ‘body’ — giving too much credit?).

I personally prefer ‘neurocultivationist’ to ‘neuroconstructionist,’ but I feel like we’ve likely used up our neologism allotment for the year here at Neuroanthropology, so I probably won’t get my way. ‘Cultivation’ has a bit more organic implications, a bit less of a metaphoric extension to teleological or plan-driven development. One ‘constructs’ a house from a plan, digging out a foundation with a backhoe and tearing out trees to realize a pre-existing vision; one must work with nature and over time to ‘cultivate’ a garden, never sure how or even if everything will grow.

So even though Morin is right, and I was wrong to get testy about being called a ‘neuroconstructivist,’ I still won’t use the term around anthropologists too much. I don’t want them to think they actually know what I mean.

Stumble It!

Credits: Graphic from iStockphoto.

References
Eisenberg, Leon. 1995. The social construction of the human brain. American Journal of Psychiatry 152 (11): 1563–1575. (abstract, pdf available here)

Mareschal, Denis, Mark Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, and Michael Spratling, Michael Thomas, and Gert Westermann. 2007. Neuroconstructivism: How the brain constructs cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Amazon)

Mareschal, Denis, Sylvain Sirois, Ger Westermann, and Mark Johnson, eds. 2007. Neuroconstructivism vol II: Perspectives and prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sale, Alessandro, Elena Putignano, Laura Cancedda, Silvia Landi, Francesca Cirulli, Nicoletta Berardi, and Lamberto Maffei. 2004. Enriched environment and acceleration of visual system development. Neuropharmacology 47(5): 649–660. (abstract)

Westermann, Gert, Denis Mareschal, Mark H. Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, Michael W. Spratling and Michael S.C. Thomas. 2007. Neuroconstructivism. Developmental Science 10(1): 75–83. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00567.x (pdf available here)

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics. After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong.

Kristof cites Richard Nisbett’s new book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. I covered some of Nisbett’s work in the post IQ, Environment and Anthropology, and Jim Holt gave a strong review of the book recently in the NY Times. The publisher’s home page simply says that this book is a “bold refutation of the belief that genes determine intelligence.”

From the damning research of The Bell Curve to the more recent controversy surrounding geneticist James Watson’s statements, one factor has been consistently left out of the equation: culture…

World-class social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett takes on the idea of intelligence as something that is biologically determined and impervious to culture— with vast implications for the role of education as it relates to social and economic development. Intelligence and How to Get It asserts that intellect is not primarily genetic but is principally determined by societal influences.

Well, not quite. As Kristof notes, “While I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life. Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back. ‘Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,’ Professor Turkheimer said.”

First, for those interested in understanding IQ measures, I strongly recommend Greg’s posts Girls Closing Math Gap? Troubles with Intelligence 1 and The Flynn Effect: Troubles with Intelligence 2. In the first post, Greg takes on the idea of “natural” differences in male/female math ability, discusses problems with how IQ gets measured, and discusses how the “changing status of women seems to correlate pretty strongly with the math gap.” In the second post, Greg discusses James Flynn’s work on the steadily rising IQ scores seen around the world, what intelligence actually means, and how best to measure it.

Turning to the inequality side, Kristof’s point is that on a level-playing field genetics can become a primary factor in IQ scores. But just like low-quality nutritional environments can lead to stunting of physical growth, so too can unequal environments stunt the growth of brain function and intellectual growth, as we’ve written about before in Poverty Poisons the Brain and Poverty and the Brain: Becoming Critical.

Eric Turkheimer has a recent paper with K. Paige Harden and John Loelin entitled, Genotype by Environment Interaction in Adolescents’ Cognitive Aptitude (pdf). Using 839 twin pairs from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, the paper shows that “Shared environmental influences were stronger for adolescents from poorer homes, while genetic influences were stronger for adolescents from more affluent homes.” In an accompanying press article, Turkheimer says “[This research] suggests that if you’re going to work with people’s environment to try and increase IQ, then the place to invest your money is in taking people in really bad environments and making them OK, rather than taking people in pretty good environments and making it better.”

Better outcomes are also a concern for Kristof. He notes that Nisbett “strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes.” The Milwaukee Project showed that in a randomly assigned study, “By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.”

Nisbett also pushes a simple idea: “tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.”

For more on these types of interventions, see Nisbett’s recent op-ed Education Is All In Your Mind. The one thing I would add is that motivation needs to work hand-in-hand with opportunity. Working harder to no effect, with little sense that one’s effort will lead to a better outcome, is pernicious.

Kristof has addressed education and intelligence in other columns, which I also recommend. He wrote about DC schools and the reform efforts of Michelle Rhee in Education’s Ground Zero. Earlier he argued for education as our number one national priority, and a needed focus for both stimulus money and for making the US globally competitive. And in Raising the World’s IQ he discussed the environmental side of generating change, in this case the importance of iodized salt. I’d add lead to that as well, which even at low levels is linked to lower IQ scores.

Gary Evans and Michelle Shamberg recently published a PNAS paper, Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress and Working Memory (pdf). Here’s the abstract:

The income–achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood. Chronic stress is measured by allostatic load, a biological marker of cumulative wear and tear on the body that is caused by the mobilization of multiple physiological systems in response to chronic environmental demands.

The Evans and Shamberg paper has gotten prominent media attention. Over at Wired, Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain got an enormous number of diggs. Brandon Keim’s opening lines are, “Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.”

Jonah Lehrer wrote Stress, Poverty, Working Memory which includes this effective summary, “The scientists uncovered a statistically significant link: the longer children had been poor, the worse their working memory. Furthermore, levels of chronic stress seemed to be the causal factor.”

The Economist also covered the PNAS paper, and wrote about how stress does its damage. “Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the ‘remodelling’ of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory. Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn.”

Lehrer, in his 2006 Seed article Reinvention of the Self about the work of primatologist/psychologist Elizabeth Gould, presents us with one of the main “take home” messages of work that links stress, poverty and development:

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance.

This work by Evans and Shamberg is important, another step forward in showing that inequality matters and that it works through specific processes that directly shape individual development and function. But this line of work also has some limitations because it lacks a critical side – do we really need 500+ diggs to know that poverty is bad?

One piece that raises important critical questions is Michelle Chen’s The Impoverished Mind over at RaceWire. She writes, “Put simply, if your childhood is consumed by a constant struggle to survive day-to-day, your brain is less likely to develop the abilities you need to succeed tomorrow, compared to your economically better-off peers. This is empirical evidence that nature-versus-nurture is not an either or, but that social factors interplay with the brain’s biology throughout life.”

Then Chen goes further:

Empirical research on the connection between poverty and intellectual development can cut both ways—leading some to write off poverty as biological destiny, and others to look deeper into missed opportunities to lift youth over economic barriers… The policy implications for the growing body of achievement-gap research are [also] fraught with the same tensions straining other civil rights issues: how do you emphasize systemic impediments without pathologizing communities and cultures? How do you make the case for structural inequalities without fueling reactionary accusations of victimology?

Some of my own concerns focus on the biology side. Take a section from Lehrer’s Seed piece, “From the brain’s perspective, stress is primarily signaled by an increase in the bloodstream of a class of steroid called glucocorticoids, which put the body on a heightened state of alert. But glucocorticoids can have one nasty side-effect: They are toxic for the brain.”

Here stress “from the brain’s perspective” is taken to be entirely physiological. In general, stress is often made out to be psychobiological, an internal and individual state largely shaped by “fight-or-flight” ideas about activation of the stress system. As I’ve argued before, stress is actively social and intimately meaningful. These are not outside the perspective of the brain – they become part of how the brain functions. In this way stress becomes a process and not simply a state, either of mind or body.

But the more problematic area is that the brain becomes a fetish: Oh, see the neuroanatomical changes there, this stuff about poverty being bad for you must be true…

Recall the opening of the Wired piece, “Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains.” Here children become a mere token, placed to one side in favor of our new marker of individual self, the brain.

While I advocate for the role that brain processes can play in social theory, the sword cuts both ways. Referencing the brain as central mediator of poverty hides the truth, and distorts our understanding. To take a more extreme example to illustrate the same point, it’s like saying that slavery is both harmful to people and morally wrong because it impacts brains.

The brain becomes rather like property in this approach, something a person possesses and that poverty – somehow separate from the person, a naturalized thing that causes stress – negatively impacts. But that approach avoids the radical implications here on both sides.

First, that poverty literally can be anatomy, which means we need to fundamentally rethink the token brain metaphor and actual functioning of the brain. Second, that taking the neuroscience results seriously means that social environments, in all their complexity, become as important as any brain function. Indeed, many would argue that in this case, social inequality is more important than brain function, since it is what is driving the system.

To bring a critical approach into better view, I have found it useful at times to watch the following video of Paul Gilroy speaking on slavery, ignorance, and property. Rather than just working memory, Gilroy brings the larger picture into focus: “[We often] think that ignorance is a kind of vacuum into which truth can get stuffed at the right moment. And I think that we need a better account of the politics and the meaning of ignorance in our time than that. We need to think about ignorance in a different way. We need to think about ignorance as a systematic product.”

By excessively focusing only on the brain, we miss doing what Gilroy advocates for truly understanding ignorance and inequality — engaging in “critique of life as property, of humanity as property, of history as property.” We need to move beyond seeing the brain as a physical thing, similar to a book we can reference to say poverty is bad or a kind of currency that we carry around and barter to show off we’re smart and current. Or worse, something to manipulate through pharmaceuticals and computers and emerging types of neuroengineering. As Gilroy says, we need to become more critical while also realizing the dignity and meaning of people’s lives.

Completely unscientific chart from Brainz.org

The Baroness Greenfield has written a stack of books, including a best-seller on the brain, earned a peerage for her outstanding career, and has so many titles and honours that I’m not even sure what to call her (Prof? Lady?). Browsing her homepage and publications list, there’s a range of interesting stuff on consciousness, analgesia, dopamine, and a fair number of subjects upon which I don’t have even the expertise to comment. The only problem is that her fears, closely examined, reveal that she doesn’t know what to be afraid of, adopting a ‘one-paranoia-fits-all’ approach to technological change.

The Guardian article seems a bit over-wrought, and I don’t have the transcript of Greenfield’s presentation to the House of Lords, so I’m hesitant to attribute too much of the phobia to the original speech (for a critique of Greenfield’s habit of alarmism, however, see Ben Goldacre’s weblog). As we’ve seen repeatedly, the transition from scientist presenting to science writer submitting the story to editor reworking to press printing can be really rough, transforming subtle and measured analysis into formulaic, exaggerated soundbites. However, there are some extensive quotes, so in this piece, I’ll do my best to analyze what we have. In another post, I want to move beyond the fear of Facebook, using Lady Greenfield’s comments to think about how we might actually do research on the effects of technological change among developmental influences, but I won’t get to that in this post, as it’s already too long.

I’m not blasé about the developmental consequences of heavy exposure to screen technology, but I think that a legitimate interest in the possible effects of significant technological change in our daily lives can inadvertently dovetail seamlessly into a ‘kids these days’ curmudgeonly sense of generational degeneration, which is hardly new. That is, we have to be careful when we look at the research as it’s easy to annex our popular understandings of generational dynamics, even frustrations with our own children, students, and other young people, into a snowballing sense that everything’s going to hell.

Is new technology affecting our brain development and how? Is the recent change in the developmental environment much greater than previous changes in childhood ecology? And what specifically can we say about social networking sites as a factor in cognitive development? Obviously, these are huge questions, and it’s not my area of research specialty exactly, so I’m not going to bring fresh unpublished data to the table. But I do have some thoughts on the subject nonetheless, as our regular readers might imagine… but here’s the first part, where I deal with the concerns voiced by Greenfield and others.

Fear of Facebook & video games & Bebo…

According to the Guardian story, Greenfield told the House of Lords that children’s experience on social networking sites are devoid of ‘cohesive narrative and long-term significance,’ leading to degeneration of attention span, lost empathy, undermining of identity, sensationalism, and even infantilization. Although she points to social networking sites, she focuses some of her comments on the pace of user-screen interaction. Greenfield testified:

If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

In her comments, quoted at length in the original article (worth checking out), Greenfield frets about a number of potential impacts of online interaction on childhood development: desire for immediate gratification, failure to consider consequences, assuming all outcomes are reversible (like ‘dying’ in a video game), lack of concern about context (because video game narratives are decontextualized), compulsive reward seeking (virtual rewards), disregard for others’ emotions (because we do not read novels), and identity erosion.

Greenfield worries that social networking websites might replace face-to-face interaction, which requires greater interpersonal sensitivity and offers less time to think up ‘clever or witty responses.’ She wonders whether people in the future might recoil from the ‘messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction’ just as, she alleges, ‘we’ now eat meat that is processed before ‘we’ get it (presumably, farmers, ranchers, butchers and meat-packers are not part of the ‘we’ to which she is referring — sorry, it’s petty, but I live in the country, and future steaks and burgers are wandering around outside my dining room window…).

Whereas children were once safe to interact in realtime, outside, they now are trapped indoors, and ‘a child confined to the home every evening may find at the keyboard the kind of freedom of interaction and communication that earlier generations took for granted in the three-dimensional world of the street.’ Given the insulation from direct interaction, Greenfield wonders whether young people will reveal too much, unrestrained by embarrassment, inhibition, or concern for being evaluated.

Untangling the anxieties

As you might be able to tell from the way that I’ve written this up, I find Greenfield’s critique of online interaction internally inconsistent and contradictory, in part because Greenfield is critiquing in one slather (at least the way it’s written up in the story) a number of distinct computer-based activities, some of which aren’t even really online. For example, the effects of violent first-person video games on a user would likely be significantly different than self-presentational social networking websites like Facebook or flash communication technologies like texting or Twittering.

So I’ll try to sort out what I think Lady Greenfield’s primary fears are see how they square with each other:

1) Some online experiences are ‘devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance,’ which may have detrimental effects on cognitive development.

2) Fast action and reaction onscreen might ‘accustom the brain to operate over such timescales,’ which might lead to attention-deficit disorder if non-screen responses do not live up to these accelerated expectations. Does immersion in ‘screen technologies’ in the last decade help to explain the three-fold influence in diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder?

3) Social network users might develop a preference for immediacy where there are no long-term consequences (this may actually be two fears).

4) The clear rewards of video games are potentially addictive, especially because they are so reliable and immediate.

5) The de-contextualized situations in online interactions will lead to a decrease in empathy, because unlike novels, in which the goal is to understand participants, online media do not offer avenues for developing insight into characters.

6) Social networking sites might lead to an erosion of a person’s sense of identity because people might become more dependent upon the reactions of others to understand their own identities.

7) Because online interaction is easy, people may become lured into greater dependence on online interaction rather than risk the perils of face-to-face interaction. Children deprived of a chance to interact with each other in real time (perhaps because of safety concerns or longer commutes) now do so online, and they may like it more than interacting face-to-face.

8 ) Without the intensity of face-to-face interaction, children might become less inhibited about revealing things about themselves.

Let’s all take a deep breath…

My responses:
1) Anthropologists and others have long argued that ‘narrative’ is imposed on events, and may be created by the narrator or by the listener. For example, I might invent a ‘narrative’ about my blogging ‘career,’ creating coherence out of non-cumulative and loosely connected events. ‘Narrative’ is not inherent in events themselves but in the significance that we ascribe to those events (for example, see Erin Finley’s excellent post, Cultural Aspects of PTSD, Part II: Narrative and Healing).

And online interaction often has extensive narrative elements, in the sense that people often capture a sense of time, change, key events, and the like on personal Facebook pages. Far from evacuating narrative, some social networking sites might be said to cause users to ‘narrativize’ their experience, engaging with everyday life already with an eye toward how they will represent it on their personal pages. For example, I find visiting students from the US annoying in Australia because they’re always looking for opportunities for stupid posed photos to put on their websites rather than just engaging with Australia; they are prematurely narrativizing their experience, in my opinion, treating what they find as an elaborate set for photo opportunities.

2) Do fast action-reaction expectations cause attention-deficit disorder? I don’t know of any research that supports this theory, but I don’t think we can rule it out. Correlation, of course, is not causation, however, so I wouldn’t be too quick to jump on this particular theoretical bus.

Fast action-reaction patterns exist in other activities that are not treated as suspect for the historical spike in ADD: for example, sports or games of quickness and reflex, like four-square or even dodge ball. In addition, having watched children engrossed with onscreen interaction, it’s not immediately obvious to me how screen obsession, a highly focused almost trance-like state, is linked to the scattered attention and inability to focus more typical of ADD.

If ‘screen technologies,’ the general term Greenfield employs, are the suspect for attention-deficit disorder, I suspect that some old culprits — manic editing of television, over-stimulation by children’s programming, advertising, violence — are more likely candidates for the primary cause.

Of course, there are other theories about the increasing diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder (and ADHD), including that these disorders are substantially over-diagnosed (for a similar argument, see our Psychiatry affects human psychology: e.g., ‘bipolar’ children or Neurotosh, Neurodosh and Neurodash). But one interesting note of caution would be that some observers have argued that the increasingly sedentary demands we place on children — in activities like sitting and reading or working on a computer — are a significant challenge to active children, leading to their diagnosis as ‘pathological,’ rather than the stimulus that makes them over-active.

3) It’s also not clear to me that video games are all that different in the narrative department (point 1) and long-term consequences department from any other games, either of the Monopoly variety or of the backyard soccer sort. In fact, as I understand Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens, one of the defining characteristics of play, in general, is that it is outside everyday life, including the normally rigid rules and the social consequences of actions. The more a game has long-term consequences, the less play-like it is.

Prof. Greenfield seems to be in favour of more novel reading and less online interaction and video games for children (fair enough, and I’d probably agree with her), but I think she’d be very hard pressed to argue that novels have much greater long-term consequences than social interaction online.

4) Can anything with a clear and immediate reward become addictive? If so, then can gurgling at a baby, throwing a ball with a Labrador, or giving money to strangers on the street become addictive? Daniel’s written far better points on addiction on this website (see, for example, One Day at Kotaku: Understanding Video Games and Other Modern Obsessions and Studying Sin), but the idea that anything with clear, immediate rewards might become debilitatingly addictive doesn’t explain the negative cases very well, when clearly rewarding things don’t become compulsive.

5) If novels were necessary for empathy, we’d be in far deeper trouble than we are. I read somewhere that only 20% of the US population read a book last year (or something like that). Most serious studies of empathy don’t see Facebook as a serious problem, although there is some well-founded concern about desensitization to violence through some forms of first-person, realistic, graphically violent video games.

A lot of media, and even forms of social life, don’t allow us to investigate the motives of others, so I’m not persuaded that this is sufficient reason to be afraid of social networking websites. In addition, I think that this critique is more of video games than of Facebook or its ilk. This is one place where I think that the anxieties are being mixed to create hybrid technophobia.

6) Many social theorists argue that identity is inherently interactional (for example, George Herbert Mead or Herbert Blumer).

And it’s not clear how the extraordinary self-obsessed medium of Facebook might lead a person to lose their sense of identity; on the contrary, one could argue that the genre contributes to a generational narcissism, an excessive emphasis on working on one’s own identity performance. Prof. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University found that 30% more college students scored high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory in 2006 than in 1982 (see her book, Generation Me and the accompanying website).

7) I’m not sure if online interaction is actually ‘easier’ than face-to-face interaction, nor am I convinced that young people are not interacting face-to-face, although they may be interacting remotely when they are in close proximity to us (but I doubt that they would want to talk to us geezers even if they were stripped of their mobile phones). When I see young people, they seem to be interacting a lot, even the ones with Facebook pages. The debasement of the word ‘friend’ by the website’s use of it should not make us assume that users can’t tell the difference between friends and Facebook ‘friends.’ As Vaughn at Mind Hacks discusses, research on the use of social networking sites by young people often find that they use these technologies to maintain social relations established in non-virtual interaction.

Although Greenfield describes this as a danger, I think it’s fascinating that we once were told to worry about how social isolation, borne of safety concerns and latchkey lives, would stunt our children’s social development. Now that they have technology that reaches around the barriers between people, we’re worried about their forms of interaction.

If I’m afraid of anything related to this pervasive embedding in electronic communication, it’s the way that bullying can follow victims anywhere and the sheer banality of so much of the communication. But I’m also afraid of face-to-face bullying, and the banality of most conversation is also pretty frustrating, that’s probably why I’m an academic.

8 ) Clearly, I would not advocate telling one’s children to disclose private information about themselves online, but this fear of excessive intimacy seems to be contradictory to fear #6. If online social networkers are growing more shallow and dependent upon others’ opinions, then their intimate selves are already less private as they are public performances of a virtual sort.

This may be a case where fear of online grooming of children by predators is being amalgamated with a fear of excessive self disclosure; the majority of people on Facebook are not children, so the fear that they are targeted by pedophiles doesn’t apply. While this is a real fear, again, I think it needs to be separated from Facebook or any other specific social networking site and applied to the context in which it actually occurs: children online being targeted for recruiting by pedophiles. No one in their right mind, who has read a newspaper or watched television news, could think that this concern is not pervasive in our communities (whether or not it is appropriate to the level of threat).

But this fear is not really about the effect of technology on the cognitive development of the users; this is a different fear about social threats and dangers in the community.

Technophobia in each generation

If we search for analogies, we can think of countless previous techno-moral panics that now seem positively quaint: the dangerous effects of rock ‘n’ roll, comic books, music videos, television, the wireless, air conditioning, trains… Mesopotamians parents were probably fearful of the impact of the newfangled chariot, and German parents no doubt fretted about what horrors Gutenberg’s movable type was about to introduce into their homes.

‘Every generation is phobic about the effects of new technology on the next,’ Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, cautions on his website (well worth a read). He goes on to offer his own diagnosis:

I don’t like the idea of kids spending hours on the web, probably being groomed by paedophiles from Liège; and yet all the kids I know – whatever they have been goggling at – seem remarkably unruffled, and surprisingly moralistic. No matter how sordid the programmes, they disapprove vehemently of swearing. Anything remotely racist or homophobic sounds much more profane, to their ears, than it did to children 30 years ago. I could direct you to an 11-year‑old who certainly likes Desperate Housewives, but the show she really loves is called High School Musical and is so clean as to be positively emetic.

The young people I know may not disapprove of swearing, but like Johnson, I think we could find ample evidence to support a ‘our children are growing *more* moralistic/upstanding/square,’ if that were our inclination, our dominant lens for viewing cultural change. For example, I remember long discussions in grad school and when I was teaching at an American university in which members of my generation (X) and the older generation (young Boomers, I suppose) wondered at the naivité, androgynous relationships, and overall squareness of younger generations of students. We had to bite our tongues about our own pasts of experimentation with drugs and sex as they offered much more timid, fear-filled visions of the world of choices that they faced.

The point is not whether young people are more or less moral, more or less imperiled, or whether their fears, if greater, have sound grounding, but rather, why are we older folks so worried about their moral degeneration? Johnson thinks it’s less about protecting them from dangerous influences and more about our own shame: ‘Sometimes I think our censoriousness is not so much about protecting children as it is about preventing them from seeing the embarrassing silliness of adult behaviour.’

Johnson points to a bigger issue, in my opinion, when he suggests that overall consumption itself is frightening, whether or not it’s leading kids to depravity: ‘The real trouble is that they watch too much blasted electronic media altogether…’

Certainly, ADD might be, in some cases, a socially and technological induced or at least exacerbated health problem, but so, in some cases, are obesity, type-2 diabetes, heart problems, stress, and a host of other issues. Although Greenfield may see online social networking as a significant new threat, from a health perspective, it’s likely more an incremental change on what has already been a seismic shift in developmental environment: the spread of television and ‘screen technologies’ into households and their increasing dominance of daily activities.

From a whole-body or even an evolutionary perspective, I’m not convinced that online social networking is all that different from other sedentary activities, which have heralded a profound change in developmental activity patterns for children. If anything, texting and Internet surfing are more active and responsive than passive media consumption, and probably not as compelling (I’m looking at my computer screen right now and the large screen TV in the room is far louder, faster changing, colourful, and ‘instantly rewarding,’

I do think that Greenfield’s final point makes for a great set of questions (well, except for the laboured distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘brain’): ‘It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world.’

I’m not sure that she’s right: the brain may be ‘exquisitely sensitive,’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting neural architecture will necessarily be so alien. A developmental system can be exquisitely sensitive without being unstable or prone to erratic change. Part of the problem is an over-estimation of the fragility of the brain as a developmental system.

And the other possible blind spot is an over-estimation of the degree that recent developments, like Facebook or Twitter, are actually a changed environment, or that we automatically perceive the fundamental relevance of the change to ourselves as organisms. To understand how the ‘cognitive environment’ is changing, we really need a longer-term evolutionary perspective on our environment as a species.

For example, the ‘degeneration’ narrative about social relations may make assumptions about what our social relations look like as a species, over evolutionary time. That is, some institutions that we might identify as ‘long-standing’ might actually be relatively recent innovations, and their disappearance might be less of a crisis than the removal of a perturbation to the patterned development of our brains. For example, over evolutionary time, our recent explosion of reproduction and heightened social density may be an aberration to a pattern of less extensive social networking; maybe kids spending a lot of time alone with objects is actually pretty normal if we take the long perspective.

It’s these questions I want to pick up on the next part of this post (well, that, and this technophobic discussion of the brain rotting effects of Twitter: Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be?).

Additional resources

H/t: Chris Gilbey at Perceptric (and my neighbour here in Berry, NSW) pointed out the original article in the Guardian that started me down this particular path.

There’s an audio clip from an interview with Lady Greenfield available here.

Vaughn at Mind Hacks has a piece on a television debate between Greenfield and Aric Sigman, both concerned about the effects of Internet use on children, and Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science: Think of the children, not the evidence. For more on Aric Sigman at Mind Hacks, see Facebook causes marble loss.

Goldacre writes about his televised encounter with Sigman on his blog: “Facebook causes cancer”.

Vaughan linked to the BBC Newsnight episode (24 Feb 2009) on YouTube, in which Goldacre debates with Sigman, who echoes many of Greenfield’s fears, and even trumps them, painting a picture of 5- and 6-year-olds spending half their waking hours on social networking sites (one caveat: apparently I have a Facebook page, but it was put up by a student and I don’t even know how to use it, so I can’t tell you firsthand if there are numerous 6-yr-olds out there trawling for ‘friends’).

All I can think is: New Scientist, Old School. Old, as in nature-nurture old and biological determinism old. Old as in moldy, rusted, failing ideas old.

But it’s not just New Scientist. Discover matches New Scientist with, “Teenage Hoodlums Can Blame Bad Behavior on Hormones.” And The Daily Mail delivers “Now Teenage Thugs Can Blame Their Hormones for Bad Behaviour.”

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s two-fold. First are journalists playing out a cultural script just like they subscribe to old-school cultural determinism. And second is some bad research that, not coincidentally, helps the journalists act like cultural automatons.

The cultural model goes like this: stereotypes, then blame, then biology. Take a stereotype we fear (“we” meaning journalists and readers alike). Bring in the politics and ideology of blame – hey, there’s a reason they are not like us, and why they threaten us. Invoke a cause, generally biological (though cultural causes come up too), outside of our particular realm of control. Hormones, nothing we can do about that, it means they were bad from the get-go. So we’re right to fear them and better make sure they don’t hurt us, whatever it takes.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the photos that accompany the articles. At the Daily Mail, a hooded guy point his hand like a gun at us the reader. Over at Discover, a crazed man with a clenched fist yells in our faces.

We all know journalists will play to stereotypes and will get research wrong and so forth. But in this case, like in most of the biologically-oriented research about complex human phenomena, the research only feeds into journalists typing out the normal crap.

The article in question is “Cortisol Diurnal Rhythm and Stress Reactivity in Male Adolescents with Early-Onset or Adolescence-Onset Conduct Disorder” (full access) by Graeme Fairchild, Stephanie van Goozen et al. and appears in the October 2008 issue of Biological Psychiatry. Neurocritic gives us the overview of the article if you don’t want to read the whole thing. (While I liked the Bad Boys music, I could have done with some more criticism in this particular Neurocritic post – but that’s okay, I’m going to play the bad boy this time.) Here’s the popular take from New Scientist on the article:

Out-of-control boys facing spells in detention or anti-social behaviour orders can now blame it all on their hormones. The “stress hormone” cortisol – or low levels of it – may be responsible for male aggressive antisocial behaviour, according to new research. The work suggests that the hormone may restrain aggression in stressful situations. Researchers found that levels of cortisol fell when delinquent boys played a stressful video game, the opposite of what was seen in control volunteers playing the same game.

The basic result of the study is that boys diagnosed with conduct disorder don’t have the same rise in cortisol in response to a stressful challenge, in this case a rigged game where the opponent taunts the player and it is impossible for the player to succeed. As the article says:

The competition began between 1 and 2 pm with a task involving confrontation, the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG), in which the opponent always failed to cooperate and sent antagonistic messages. Frustration was induced by having the participant perform a difficult, computer-based manual precision task (MPT) under time pressure while the video opponent and experimenter watched. By design, all participants failed to achieve their target score and received negative evaluations of their performance from the opponent.

So here is the fancy graph from Biological Psychiatry showing how the conduct disorder boys stayed close to controls who weren’t stressed while boys without conduct disorder has their cortisol go up in response to the challenge.

So what is so bad about this? Seems like a pretty clear case of a biological difference. End of story. The blame can start, since there’s obviously something wrong with those kids.

Just for the record, here’s the summary of the article:

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have reported lower basal cortisol levels and reduced cortisol responses to stress in children and adolescents with conduct disorder (CD). It is not known whether these findings are specific to early-onset CD. This study investigated basal and stress-induced cortisol secretion in male participants with early-onset and adolescence-onset forms of CD. METHODS: Forty-two participants with early-onset CD, 28 with adolescence-onset CD, and 95 control subjects participated in the study. They collected saliva across the day to assess their cortisol awakening response and diurnal rhythm. Subsequently, salivary cortisol was measured before, during, and after a psychosocial stress procedure designed to elicit frustration. Cardiovascular activity and subjective mood states were also assessed during stress exposure. RESULTS: There were no group differences in morning cortisol levels or the size of the cortisol awakening response. Basal cortisol levels in the evening and at 11 am during the laboratory visit were higher in both CD subgroups relative to control subjects. In contrast, cortisol and cardiovascular responses to psychosocial stress were reduced in both CD subgroups compared with control subjects. All groups reported similar increases in negative mood states during stress. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that group differences in cortisol secretion are most pronounced during stress exposure, when participants with CD show cortisol hyporeactivity compared with control subjects. There was no evidence for reduced basal cortisol secretion in participants with CD, but rather increased secretion at specific time points. The results do not support developmentally sensitive differences in cortisol secretion between CD subtypes.

So what’s wrong? Let’s start with the research design itself, before we move onto the overall approach and how that links into the supposed implications (promoted, of course) of this research.

Even just focused on the experimental methods, the study is suspect. The video game protocol was reported in a previous study, Salivary cortisol and cardiovascular activity during stress in oppositional-defiant disorder boys and normal controls, cited by the authors. The major conclusion of that work was: “Cortisol increase due to stress exposure was strongest in highly externalizing and highly anxious subjects.” Remember, this is the study to which they refer us to understand their main experimental protocol. It’s even done by the same main researcher, Stephanie van Goozen. But there is no direct measure of anxiety induced by the experimental protocol in this new paper.

Even worse, the protocol is designed to make them feel frustrated. No measurement of that. The researchers are proposing a link between low cortisol reactivity and aggression or conduct disorder. No measurement of aggressive impulses either.

It’s really breathtaking. They are working with individuals who have repeatedly been involved in aggressive situations and have dealt with their fair share of frustration in social situations where “conduct disorder” is a convenient label for being uppity (ah, did I mention that the conduct disorder kids came from a lower SES and had a greater percentage of minorities?). So, these kids are likely used to dealing with antagonistic opponents and negative evaluations. Why should that get a stress reaction out of them?

It’s absurd. And it could have been corrected by one small thing (well, besides measurements that actually get at the things that researchers are claiming). Say, a short interview after the experimental protocol to understand how the boys interpreted the test. But the researchers have absolutely no awareness of that need, and thus no sense of whether their measures capture anything realistic other than these kids have less cortisol reactions to situations that are likely similar to situations they have faced many times before.

The kicker is that Graeme Fairchild, the lead author, is aware of some of these problems and still did not address them in the research design. Here are some quotes from the press interviews: “It could be that they’re used to provocative situations and habituated to stress,” he says. Or: Researcher Dr Graeme Fairchild said: ‘The game was rigged to be impossible. The whole point is to make them feel angry and annoyed, and as if they were being socially evaluated.’

If the researchers want to make the claims that they do, then they should at least consider a more robust methodology. Besides actual measurements of the variables of interest, it would have been helpful to have at least two challenges in the study. An antagonistic, frustrating video game protocol could have been complemented with something, say a standard public speaking protocol, that would have provided some point of comparison.

Enough about the bad research design. Let us turn to the overall approach.

Describing something as “conduct disorder”, what a surprise, means it’s a mental illness, and thus should be treated as such. Did you realize that the researchers pulled that fast one right from the beginning?

Put differently, conduct disorder is simply something that psychiatrists have defined in the ways they see fit. In this case, it’s about behaviors like aggression and vandalism. The same thing happens with the other measures – subjective emotions, personality traits and the like. The only thing that really matters with these measurements is that they are reliable, that they give you the same scores more-or-less each time they are used. At times their connection to actual reality is quite tenuous.

So here we are dealing with a house of cards held together by statistics and the agreement of the research community – it’s their own cultural phenomenon, their own set of stereotypes and assumed causes and assigned blame. Think I sound absurd? Well, certainly I am pushing my analysis here, just the same as the researchers – this one cortisol drop in an experimental paradigm explains why these kids have problems.

Another thing that annoys me about this style of research is the lack of consistency, really of being thoughtful, by the majority of these types of researchers. They approach problems not as problems but as a chance to get data and get a publication. I already mentioned that they ignored one of the main results about anxiety from their previous research. But it’s worse than that. In a recent study, these same researchers showed that cortisol generally went up among antisocial/conduct disorder individuals: “reactive aggression was strongly correlated with elevated cortisol.” So one study it goes down, the other it goes up; one study it’s anxiety, the next study is that they have an emotional disconnect. That’s just being a bad scientist. I’d prefer someone who at least tries to think through problems alongside publishing research results and getting more funding.

The emphasis on biological causes also twists the accepted understanding of conduct disorder in the scientific literature, that it is a “biosocial” problem. A 2002 review by Adrain Raine, one of the major researchers in the field, states, “[W]hen biological and social factors are grouping variables and when antisocial behavior is the outcome, then the presence of both risk factors exponentially increases the rates of antisocial and violent behavior (pdf).”

These researchers’ own synthetic theoretical proposal goes “It is argued that serotonergic functioning and stress-regulating mechanisms are important in explaining individual differences in antisocial behavior. Moreover, low fear of punishment and physiological underactivity may predispose antisocial individuals to seek out stimulation or take risks and may help to explain poor conditioning and socialization.”

Serotonin and stress mechanisms are both sensitive to environmental influences; lower fear of punishment indicates an experience with punishment; socialization is a cause as well as a consequence. At least that’s how this neuroanthropologist sees it. They go back to nature vs. nurture, to a focus on “neurobiological deficits” not just as the mediators but often the assumed cause of antisocial behavior. It’s a safe bet, I am guessing, that these researchers rarely spend time outside their safe lab to see what life is really like in a rough neighborhood.

No, I am not saying it’s all social! That review by Raine, mentioned above, indicates that biological function can play an important role; for example, in well-to-do families, the link between neurobiological function and antisocial behavior are clearest, precisely since the social causes of antisocial behavior are not in the picture. But all this means is that the biology depends on context, a decidedly non-determinist view.

Conduct disorder and antisocial behavior are about behavior, types of social interactions, and violation of social norms. Here’s the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: “Children and adolescents with this disorder have great difficulty following rules and behaving in a socially acceptable way.” But these researchers went looking for biological differences, and gosh darn it, they found them. There is little sense that their research examined “why” in a holistic and integrative sense (biological and social) and in a way that takes into account the life experiences and perspectives of the individuals most affected by determinations of “antisocial disorder,” the boys themselves.

Rather, the researchers’ finding of biological difference then becomes the cause of behavior. Bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

That leads to the final and most scary part. Sure, journalists can get in wrong in selling a story. Researchers use bad methods and incomplete theoretical frameworks. It happens all the time. But in this case, the two add up to some frightening and completely wrong ideas about social policy and intervention.

Here’s the ending to the New Scientist piece:

The results also raise the possibility of finding biological markers in the blood of infants that identify those most likely to develop conduct disorders. Families and children could then be given help to manage and refocus their behaviour before it degenerates into the usual habits of lying, stealing, violence, malevolence and lack of concern for other people.

Alternatively, the research might lead to new drugs that have the same effect. It’s too soon to say whether extra cortisol would help. But Fairchild cites earlier experiments showing extreme violence in rats unable to make corticosterone, the rat equivalent of human cortisol. When the rats received extra corticosterone to compensate, it calmed them down.

Rather than people, we now have degenerate lab rats in need of injections and Big Brother re-training.

Or over at Discover, Graeme Fairchild is quoted as saying, “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.” The Daily Mail actually opens with this point: “Teenage thugs could be suffering from a mental illness caused by a hormonal imbalance, scientists suggest today… Its findings point to the possibility of drugs being used in the future to control teenagers’ behaviour.”

So now antisocial behavior is a mental illness, rather than a social problem. Rather than tackling the social conditions that might bring about antisocial behavior, we are told that they have a mental imbalance and need to take drugs.

Indeed, the researchers aim to redefine the problem into biological terms and point to highly profitable ways for companies to extend their pharmaceutical reach and for governments to control their populations. It is a scary prospect, given the power of drug companies and the increasing reach of jails and other institutions for criminals and, now, “pre-criminals.”

Besides increasing those types of social control, disturbing questions arise, for example, if an “antisocial” child – determined by a blood test – is not given his drugs by the family, will that family lose the child? Will their taxes go up?

Biological determinism plays right into company profits and governmental oversight. If you like those things in your life, by all means, encourage one-dimensional research. But I for one think it would be quite nice if good research could help us get beyond letting other people determine my life.

Here’s a question along a very different line: If we think of antisocial disorder as related to neural processing, might it make more sense to think in terms of specific language deficits? Here early training programs and educational support can make a significant difference in making sure that specific deficits do not affect overall linguistic ability. Similarly, early interventions to help children interact in socially skilled ways could make a large difference for these kids. But no, it’s easier to say they have a biological problem, then drug them and walk away.

When Fairchild says, “A possible treatment for this disorder offers the chance to improve the lives of both the adolescents who are afflicted and the communities in which they live,” he has it backwards. How about improving the lives of those adolescents and the communities in which they live first?

Stereotypical reporting, bad research design, biological determinism, and social control – those are a very, very bad mix. Rather than helping us explore ways to work with these children, their families, their schools and their communities, this approach encourages us to stomp down, through harsh laws or harsh drugs, that which we don’t understand. In the end, it is much easier to blame their biology than to question ourselves.

That information? That, given the way their brain is maturing (both fast-growing synapses and other sections relatively unconnected), adolescents are more “easily influenced by their environment and more prone to impulsive behavior.” As expected, there follows a typical line of parental angst: the sexes are different, drugs harm brains, kids need to sleep and get exercise, they are suffering from sensory overload from all the new technology. By implication, it is all due to being in “this paradoxical period in brain development.”

Certainly there are some intriguing results about brain development in adolescent related to differential brain maturation, developmental plasticity, and the like. Some early research based on longitudinal research is summarized here in an NIMH press release, which concludes in better fashion: “the teenage brain is a very complicated and dynamic arena, one that is not easily understood,” whether for parents or for researchers. But as I covered earlier in a post on emotion and decision making, teenagers can actually be seen as rather good decision makers, just focused on differential goals and contexts than most adults.

And come on, teenagers are overwhelmed by information and multitasking in today’s “brave new world”? I wish I had half the skills that my incoming freshmen display in this arena-I’m the one who doesn’t quite know how to handle the sensory overload…

Another graphic accompanies the Harvard article (only in the pdf though), an illustration by Leslie Cober-Gentry. For me, it shows the enormous gap between the brain imaging graphic and this more cultural graphic. As with all imaging research, there can only be correlations between level of activity and a particular task at hand. But that equation leaves out all the other important correlations that exists between, say, being impulsive and a particular environmental context. The juxtaposition of the two images capture perfectly what Urion and Jensen do, project our everyday life and concerns onto our newest explanatory cause-the brain.

Okay, you all need to help me: do I feel this under ‘hokum,’ ‘malarky,’ or ‘balderdash’? Rear Admiral Parry, sir, will the wireless technology use the brain’s Bluetooth or WiFi receptors? Which part of the brain’s RAM will you use when you install the new ‘human operating system’?

Okay, Admiral Parry, repeat after me: The brain is not a computer.

This kind of stuff is fun (‘and in the future we’ll have flying cars, and get beamed to other planets with Stargates, and eat coloured goo that comes out of tubes on the walls and tastes like anything we want, but it’ll be perfectly nutritionally balanced, and all the aliens will sort of look like us except they’ll have bumps on their noses or ears so they’re still kind of sexy…’).

I wouldn’t be irritated at all if the man was just a futurist crank or some science fiction writer, but the guy actually makes educational policy, and the ISAC involves 1300 schools which together teach half a million children, according to the story, who will be in for a rough ride over the next few years if Admiral Parry is plotting the ‘teaching technology’ plans for them. As the article continues:

He told the TES that the Keanu Reeves thriller may not look like science fiction in 30 years’ time.

“Within 30 years, sitting down and learning something will be a thing of the past,” Mr Parry said.

“I think people will be able to directly access, Matrix-style, all the vocabulary you need for a foreign language, leaving you just to clear up the grammar.”

Uhhh, Admiral Parry, do I have to have one of those big plugs in the back of my neck or live in a tank of fluid while the robots steal my body heat after we suffer enormous losses in the big robot-human war? And can I learn super-ninja-no-gravity-martial arts along with my foreign language programming? And if I do have to live in the tank, can I at least choose which virtual reality I get to live in because I don’t really want to move back to Chicago…

Someone needs to send Admiral Parry a copy of John Medina’s Brain Rules (which I will eventually review here). Or, for that matter, maybe he could sit in on Neurology 101 somewhere in the UK. How exactly does one get put in charge of an educational institution when one has NO CLUE how learning occurs? Everything from the way attention works, to the necessity of repetition for changes in neural patterns, to the need for compelling experiences to aid memory, to the fact that education is not ‘information’ but includes a host of other factors such as perceptual change, to the need for sleep…. We could go on and on.

I suppose people like Admiral Parry assume that we’re going to have memory ‘chips’ installed in our brains at some point. That’s entirely possible, I suppose, although I think there’s likely to be some serious issues involved, including not just ethical ones but also practical, neurological, and economic problems. Is he aware that the biggest challenges in schools are not the absence of technology or wireless connections to students’ brains, but lack of resources, social problems from outside the classroom affecting teaching, lackluster teaching, behavioural issues among students, and basic disagreements about what education is even supposed to accomplish (witness the problem with standardized testing)? And that’s not even touching on the fact that in the developing world, where most children are being educated, these problems are even more acute.

While I’m hardly opposed to thinking seriously about the ways technology might affect basic facets of our social lives and interactions (see, for example, Daniel’s post, Cellphones Save The World), I hope that the ISC that Parry now heads isn’t dumping its scarce resources into his ‘wireless brain programming’ plan just yet. I’m not usually the gambling type, but I’d be willing to bet good money against Matrix-style, wireless brain programming for foreign languages in our classrooms in thirty years, if Parry wants to put up a few pounds.