Archive for the ‘Emotion’ Category
Posted by gregdowney on March 20, 2009
Walter Goldschmidt, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles got in touch with us here at Neuroanthropology.net to give us a bit of a (friendly) hard time about unfortunate neologisms (touché) and to ask if we were familiar with his work. With my repeated posts on evolutionary psychology, he thought it might be of interest, especially his discussion of affect hunger.
What Prof. Goldschmidt did not realize is that I have an autographed copy of his book, Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene (Oxford U Press listing, Amazon), and I’ve long thought it was both an excellent counter-argument to the ’selfish gene’ hypothesis as well as a much more persuasive account of the possible evolutionary origins of altruism than the typical explanation: kin selection.
So, as a bit of a ‘thank you’ to Prof. Goldschmidt for providing such a compelling work, I’m going to post a bit of a book discussion here, focusing especially on Prof. Goldschmidt’s account of ‘affect hunger,’ which I find a much more neuroanthropologically plausible account of altruism than the usual account provided by evolutionary psychology discussions of ‘kin selection.’
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Posted in Bibliography, Book Review, Emotion, Evolution | Tagged: affect hunger, altruism, evolutionary psychology, kin selection, mutuality, sociality | 3 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on January 24, 2009
In this week’s The Times Magazine of The NY Times, Daniel Bergner has a piece on women’s sexuality and research that’s already in preprint causing a bit of controversy as well as a convulsion of 1950s era humor in the online response. The title, ‘What do women want?’, that nugget of Freudian wonder, no doubt will raise the readership, as will the pictures of models simulating states of arousal (Greg Mitchell is in a bit of snit about them in, Coming Attraction: Preview of ‘NYT Magazine’ With Semi-Shocking Sex Images on Sunday. ‘Semi-Shocking’? I can imagine how that goes… ‘Are you SHOCKED by these photos?’ ‘Well, I’m at least SEMI-shocked, yes!’).
In particular, Bergner gives us thumbnail portraits of women engaged in sex research: Meredith Chivers of Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, and Marta Meana from UNLV, although there’s also commentary from Julia Heiman, the Director of the Kinsey Institute, and others. As with so much of contemporary science writing, we get researchers as characters, with quirky personal descriptions and accounts of meeting the author, each one standing in for a particular perspective in current scientific debates.
Chivers is portrayed as arguing that women are existentially divided ‘between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective,’ Diamond is made to stand in for the ‘female desire may be dictated… by intimacy, by emotional connection,’ and Meana stands in for the argument that women are narcissists desiring to submit. Whether or not these are accurate portrayals—and they might be—the model is prevalent in science writing: get characters to represent lines of thinking, even though many of us are not so clearly signed on with a single theoretical team. Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.
The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.
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Posted in Emotion, Gender, Relationships, Sex | Tagged: sexology, what do women want | 29 Comments »
Posted by dlende on December 19, 2008
Donald Tuzin
In the Scientific American piece Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased, Vaughan Bell describes how the dead stay with us. An embodied sense of them, present yet gone, comes strongly through our memories and our perceptions: “for many people [loved ones] linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences.”
Bell issues a call for more research on grief and embodied remembrances, and then notes, “There are hints that the type of grief hallucinations might also differ across cultures. Anthropologists have told us a great deal about how the ceremonies, beliefs and the social rituals of death differ greatly across the world, but we have few clues about how these different approaches affect how people experience the dead after they have gone.”
I wrote previously on Bell’s article and how writers have explored this terrain in Grief, Ghosts and Gone. Still, the anthropologist in me took Vaughan’s point as a challenge. Ethnographic work is not as widely known in the larger scientific literatures, but it is both broad and deep. My search was rewarded!
Donald Tuzin has a striking 1975 article, “The Breath of a Ghost: Dreams and the Fear of the Dead.” In this piece (scribd full text) he describes his research with the Ilahita Arapesh of northeastern Papua New Guinea and the confluence of their beliefs and practices surrounding the dead with everyday experience.
Tuzin pays particular attention to “the functional implications of (1) the different ghost types encountered by the Arapesh dreamer as distinguished by degrees of familiarity in life, and (2) the strikingly different beliefs held about ghosts as against the more temporally remote ancestors (556).”
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Posted in Cultural theory, Embodiment, Emotion, Psychological anthropology | 2 Comments »
Posted by dlende on November 6, 2008
By Daniel Lende
A long-time research project of mine has been to understand how adolescents get hooked on drugs. Querer más y más, as they say in Colombia, to want more and more. When people get addicted – whatever the substance may be – they often report urges, cravings, and obsessive thinking as a primary force in why they keep using or relapse. Knowing the consequences often doesn’t matter, especially in those moments when that desire feels hot as a knife.
The easiest analogy for me to help people understand this type of desire is to ask people to think about that one time they really craved something to eat. Yes, that time, when you just had to have it. Most people have experienced this one time or another. With substance abuse, craving like this often becomes an unpredictable constant, something that comes on in the morning or while walking by a favorite bar or seeing a friend who has that gleam in his eye and a crooked smile on his face.
So here is what I found in Colombia, reported in a 2005 Ethos article entitled Wanting and Drug Use: A Biocultural Approach to Addiction (click for the full paper: Lende Wanting pdf). The abstract goes:
The integration of neurobiology into ethnographic research represents one fruitful way of doing biocultural research. Based on animal research, incentive salience has been proposed as the proximate function of the mesolimbic dopamine system, the main brain system implicated in drug abuse (Robinson and Berridge 2001). The research presented here examines incentive salience as the mediator of the wanting and seeking seen in drug abuse. Based on field work with adolescents at a school and a drug treatment center in Bogotá, Colombia, this article addresses: 1) the development of a scale to measure the amount of incentive salience felt for drugs and drug use; 2) the results from a risk-factor survey that examined the role of incentive salience and other risk factors in addiction; and 3) the ethnographic results from in-depth interviews with Colombian adolescents examining dimensions of salience in the reported experiences of drug use. Incentive salience proved to be a significant predictor of addicted status in logistic regression analysis of data from 267 adolescents. Ethnographic results indicated that incentive salience applies both to drug seeking and drug use, and confirmed the importance of wanting, a sense of engagement, and shifts in attention as central dimensions of experiences related to drug use.
Several years later, I like to highlight several things about this research. First, different domains of subjective involvement can be linked to dopamine –wanting more and more, the sense of an urge or push to use (often not a conscious desire), and the heightened focus on places and actions and times that lead to using. The scale I developed showed good internal consistency, adding support that these three senses of compulsive involvement are linked. If you want to know more about the scale, I have done a separate post detailing the compulsive involvement scale in both Spanish and English versions.
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Posted in Addiction, Brain Mechanisms, Decision Making, Emotion, Psychological anthropology | 11 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on June 23, 2008
I just slept in a bit, recovering from a long weekend at a conference, Affect at the Interface, at the University of New South Wales. Although I sometimes felt out of my element (pretty typical for conferences), it was a great discussion, even if over-stimulating at times. Thanks to Prof. Anna Gibbs and Dr. Jennifer Biddle for all the hard work organizing it — and also to the staff and other folks who put together a great, stimulating weekend (including the brilliant caterer!).
A host of folks presented diverse papers. I’m reluctant to list any because I’ll inevitably end up slighting someone I don’t intend to, but in addition to Prof. Gibbs and Dr. Biddle, a number of folks were very active guests over the two days: Robyn Ferrell, Anand Pandian, Melissa Hardie, Jim Wilce, and Adam Frank (sorry — couldn’t find a good link quickly to info about him) stand out, not just because of their presentations, but because of their comments on other people’s work. However, I have to admit, pretty much every reference to Gilles Deleuze went over my head (alright, I suffered so much with trying to get into Anti-Oedipus that I never attempted A Thousand Plateaus).
I presented second-to-last and made the mistake of entirely rewriting my paper the night before because in an ill-advised attempt to engage with what had happened on the first day. I’m going to post something like the presentation I aspired to give but failed to because of overly-quick turn-around, lack of sleep, and generally not being clever enough on my feet.
The discussion of affect revived my long dormant interest in the work of Silvan Tomkins, the psychologist and cybernetic theorist. Although I had consulted his work briefly when I was writing my dissertation and first book, especially because of his discussion of shame and my interest in the bodily-nervous effects of inhibition in dance, I hadn’t really taken him seriously enough. Although there weren’t a lot of biologically-inclined individuals at the conference (probably Jennifer Biddle and I were among the most enthusiastic about this line of thinking), it was great to reconsider his work with Prof. Adam Frank there, as he, together with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, were instrumental in encouraging a revival of interest in Tomkins’ work, outside the narrower group familiar with Tomkins in psychology (like the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute).
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Posted in Conferences, Emotion, general | Tagged: Affect, Emotion, Tomkins | 2 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on April 17, 2008
My mind raced for potential titles to a post when I read the recent report from Science, ‘The Antidepressant Fluoxetine Restores Plasticity in the Adult Visual Cortex,’ by a team headed by José Fernando Maya Vetencourt (abstract), but I’ve opted to be demure, rather than go with some of my other options (like ‘Anti-depressants the “Cocoon” pool for brain?’ or something similarly outrageous).
The research team investigated wither fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), could restore plasticity in the visual system of adult rats. They chose fluoxetine because long-term regimens of the drug promote neurogenesis and synaptogenesis in the hippocampus and increased activity of neurotrophin brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its primary receptor, TrkB (close paraphrase to the original article). These effects have been shown essential to the drug’s effect; block one of these processes, and the anti-depressant doesn’t work nearly as well. In order to test plasticity, the team studied how rats responded to monocular deprivation — covering one eye — both the initial shift in ocular dominance and then the recovery of visual function after long-term monocular deprivation. In general, the fluoxetine-treated rats responded in exaggerated fashion to both conditions, suggesting that plasticity was greater with long-term administration of the drug. From the abstract:
We found that chronic administration of fluoxetine reinstates ocular dominance plasticity in adulthood and promotes the recovery of visual functions in adult amblyopic animals, as tested electrophysiologically and behaviorally. These effects were accompanied by reduced intracortical inhibition and increased expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the visual cortex. Cortical administration of diazepam prevented the effects induced by fluoxetine, indicating that the reduction of intracortical inhibition promotes visual cortical plasticity in the adult. Our results suggest a potential clinical application for fluoxetine in amblyopia as well as new mechanisms for the therapeutic effects of antidepressants and for the pathophysiology of mood disorders.
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Posted in Animals, Brain Mechanisms, Emotion, Medical anthropology, Mental Illness, Neural plasticity, Stress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by gregdowney on April 17, 2008
There’s a fascinating post on Testosterone, Cortisol and Market Behavior on the website Pure Pedantry. Normally, I’d have a whole lot of caveats and snarky comments to add, but Jake Young does a great job of handling an original research article by Coates and Herbert, ‘Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor’ (abstract). You should definitely check out Jake’s post if you find this material interesting, as he deals with the article in greater depth. Unlike in my last piece on ‘neuroeconomics’, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis, in which I thought the science writer involved was really responsible, in this case, it looks like the authors of the original study are partly to blame, and Young does a good job of highlighting this issue.
The original research paper examines the links between market risk-taking behaviour among traders with endogenous steroids: testosterone and cortisol. Since both are linked to aggression and stress, this would seem to be a good place to study the body’s response to risk taking. But things don’t go brilliantly, as Young suggests: ‘Let’s file this paper under “wildly over-interpreted” because there are some big caveats that you have to remember before you can make a claim anything like [hormone changes lead to market changes and higher market volatility].’
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Posted in Decision Making, Emotion, Stress | 2 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on April 16, 2008
Another interesting one from The New York Times, Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants, by Dr. Richard A. Friedman; I found this one really well done, asking more questions than it answers, but thought-provoking.
The introduction to the article lays out the central existential question posed by long-term treatment with anti-depressants, especially for patients who started on their regimens when very young:
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.
As Friedman points out, the medical testing for these pharmaceuticals doesn’t include long-term research anywhere close to the lengths of time that people are actually spending on the drugs: the longest maintenance study — done on Effexor — lasted two years.
But the more subtle issues that Friedman raises, as far as I’m concerned, are the questions of identity that are clouded by long-term anti-depressant use. He discusses one woman who was concerned about her ‘low sex drive’ and pressure from her boyfriend to have sex after eight years on libido-reducing Zoloft: ‘She had understandably mistaken the side effect of the drug for her “normal” sexual desire and was shocked when I explained it: “And I thought it was just me!”’ I can’t tell from the way Friedman writes this how he feels about the idea that an individual has a ‘normal’ sex drive, something that might exist ‘prior to’ or ‘independent of’ any outside influences, whether that influence be an anti-depressant or a particular life event or the effects of interpersonal dynamics with a partner.
The idea that the ‘anti-depressed’ state might become ‘normal,’ both in the medical sense that intervention seeks to create this state and in the sense that a patient spends so much time in the drug-influenced state that it becomes a kind of reference, suggests yet another way that cultural expectations might become biological ‘nature.’
Posted in Addiction, Emotion, Medical anthropology, Mental Illness, Sex | 3 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on April 10, 2008
I’m too busy to be blogging right now; I’m putting in an application for academic promotion, and like much else in academe, that means reams of paper must be offered up to the cruel, fickle gods of bureaucracy. But this example of the reporting on brain imaging research, drawn to my attention by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon’s, Using 15 college age boys and some reactionary reporting, we are able to blame the coming depression on boobage, couldn’t pass by without comment. Thank YOU Amanda for getting me worked up enough that I won’t need a morning cup of coffee to get through several hours working on my promotion application, if I can just get back to that. (Thanks also to Echidne of the Snakes.)
The article which inspired this train of commentary is ‘Sex and financial risk linked in brain,’ by Seth Borenstein, who probably needs some sort of award for this piece. I’ll let you decide:
A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.
“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.
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Posted in Brain Mechanisms, Brain imaging, Emotion, Evolution, Gender, Sex | 7 Comments »
Posted by gregdowney on April 7, 2008
Although I’m not a real big fan of some of the work on ‘emotional intelligence,’ here’s an interesting short video of Daniel Goleman on Karma Tube (a positive, social change video site). As the page explains:
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.
I’m really not sure what we gain by putting ‘emotional’ with ‘intelligence’ except that it does seem to increase the importance of empathy and perceptivity for those who undersell these human capacities. That is, I think the furor of ‘EI’ is in part simply that people who normally don’t get just how crucial interpersonal savvy is suddenly notice it.
Nevertheless, Goleman is a good big picture thinker, and in this piece he points out the malleability of human empathy, a crucial consideration for neuroanthropologists. It’s important to point out training effects on these abilities so that we’re not too prone to considering them permanent ‘personality’ traits.
Posted in Developmental psychology, Education, Emotion, Human variation | 1 Comment »
