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.

Photo by George E. Norkus

Robertson’s piece, Death metal: A “pipeline to God”?, is well worth the read, if for no other reason that it will be an eye-opener for the non-metalhead to what these guys are screaming through the din. (One personal disclosure: Although I went through a phase of fascination with Canadian power trios with front-man shriekers that sounded like modern castrati — Rush, Triumph — and developed a now-mildly-embarrassing love of Supertramp, Aerosmith, and the Who, I was never really a native metalhead, so I can’t talk about these genres from any deep affection.)

I won’t rehearse all of Robertson’s arguments, but he basically asks why Death Metal and related genres are so obsessed with religion, from Satanic album covers to song lyrics that drip with Apocalyptic motifs to echoes of everything from neo-paganism to blatant anti-Christianism. It’s a great question because not every popular music genre, even iconoclastic subcultural genres, features religious imagery so heavily. One would probably have to move to something like gospel or 1970s reggae to find genres that were more saturated with spiritual symbolism (I have no statistics on this, only my own fleeting engagement with these genres).

Robertson explains:

What is fascinating here is the consistency with which black metal has pursued religious forms. Satanism is replaced, not by a basic materialist atheism but with almost anything else: Occultism, Nietzsche, paganism, mystical nazism. Such religious pluralism begs the question as to whether these are just new and interesting attempts at youth rebellion, or whether something more is playing itself out.

Robertson finds several reasons for the dominance of religious themes in Death Metal:

1) ‘Metal’s rebellious streak’ led to a backlash against attempts to censor or criticize these musical genres, most prominently efforts by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the mid-1980s. According to Robertson, the criticism actually hardened the resolves of many musicians to criticize mainstream religion, sparking very explicit anti-religious themes.

2) Extreme lifestyles among the musicians, a character of many Western popular artist communities, but featuring some extraordinary acts of violence, self-destruction and nihilism, especially among proponents of Scandinavian ‘Black Metal’ in the 1990s, Robertson discusses. In this sense, ‘Metal’s obsession with religion is part of its obsession with living at the limit.’ Robertson goes on to explain: ‘This concern with limit experiences explains metal’s obsession with religion. In its aspirations, metal parallels a kind of religious mysticism.’

3) Competition with mainstream religion to provide similar experiences, such as community belonging, emotional transcendence, and mystical experience, what one participant refers to as a ‘pipeline to God.’

4) Shifting philosophical and religious commitments within the community of Metal musicians, including a move away from Satanism toward various forms of paganism, ecological mysticism, and Nietzschean nihilism, reflect a groping to find a language to talk about these profound emotional-mystical experiences: ‘The constant grasping for new ideologies amongst the black metal scene, then, is an attempt to give this transcendental path discursive form.’

Robertson’s discussion is both colourful and insightful, but there are several dimensions I might add just to bring it into the Neuroanthropological fold. Borrowing some ideas from Simon Frith’s piece, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Popular Music,’ I want to argue that Metal, like many musical genres, has a special role in educating emotion and moods among young people when they are trying to understand social interaction and their own emotions.

Although many musical genres perform a similar function (a kind of aesthetic appreciation of emotion performed and articulated) Metal gets particularly religious because the emotional palette on which it draws — the stances it takes toward such emotions as righteousness, rage, death, awe, and solidarity — is very similar to Christian emotional footings, especially in more baroque forms of Christianity (like Catholicism). The use of religious iconography and themes is not simply an act of sacrilege, but rather a cross-fertilization because the music approximates some of the emotional stances believers can take toward the sacred.

That is, Metal doesn’t get linked to all religions, but to very specific religions that share some of the emotional dynamics found in Metal and compelling to its audience. We don’t find too much Buddhist Heavy Metal, nor do we find Islamic Speed Metal (although this is easier to conceive), even though we find Metal expanding into regions where these religions are present, for the same reason that we don’t find too much Catholic reggae or Baptist New Age or Shinto Gospel; musical genres and religious-emotional complexes have to work together. While these suggestions are facetious, the point is one that has come up in studies of Afro-European syncretisms, religions like vodun,

Cultural theorist, Simon Frith, the Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh, has written some of the most perceptive stuff on popular music aesthetics that I have ever come across. When I used to teach a course, ‘Black Music, World Market,’ on popular musics in the African Diaspora, a book chapter he wrote (Frith 1986) was always a high point for the students each semester, a jumping off point that helped them to see how they could better understand the musics that moved them, the odd tastes of people around them, and a host of other pervasive pop culture phenomena. Time and time again, the students would go back to the piece in their individual research projects finding easy-to-understand but really robust insights for interpreting popular music.

The crux of the chapter, entitled ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,’ was to clearly state Frith’s ideas about the social functions of music, laid out elsewhere in greater detail. According to Frith, popular music is important to listeners because:

1) ‘Good’ pop music serves in processes of identity creation, offering an experience of one’s own identity and passions united with the sense of sharing these passions with other people. For example, not only does Black Sabbath form a key point of reference for me, but I also realize that I’m part of a group when I feel that clear statement of my identity.

2) The popular music we like can give shape and elaboration to our inchoate or ill-defined emotions, forming a kind of rich language of sound, texture and lyrics that seem to capture what we are feeling, even if we did not initially know what we were feeling. This effect can produce really ironic moments in emotional communication: e.g., I love you so much that I will now use a song written by someone else and sung by another person to express my deepest, most profound feelings. Frith points out that singers especially become vehicles for feeling and articulating emotions.

3) Over time, popular music actually organizes our sense of the present and past, becoming heavily involved in periodizing eras and defining generations. The experience of listening to popular music can be a profoundly powerful channel for experiencing nostalgia and emotional recall, helping to explain why so much of our popular discourse about decades and generations in most Western countries is often anchored with musical references. If I want to recall or evoke the 80s, for instance, I am almost certain to use music to do so (in addition to fluro colours and hair mousse).

4) Finally, Frith points out that we become terribly possessive of ‘our’ music, demonstrating a kind of territoriality and willingness to defend it against insult, rival or corrosion of all sorts. This very strong sense of ‘ownership’ can make music fans seemingly irrational, such as when they feel very betrayed by an artist when he or she changes styles or when they seem to wish that no one else should like their favourite bands, but they should remain obscure and undiscovered by the vast masses of other music listeners (‘I liked them before they were popular!’).

I’m playing a bit fast and loose with Frith’s framework, but I hope he wouldn’t be too offended as he, too, is good at the fast and loose of cultural commentary. And I’m going to ignore all but the second function for the purpose of this post; that is, I’m going to focus entirely on the emotional articulation function of popular music, the way that singers and musicians seem to express our emotions even more powerfully and evocatively than we can. When I used to teach these points, I’d ask students about this second function: ‘Which is more powerful; saying, “I love you,’ or letting Marvin Gaye do it for you?’ Unless you’ve got a hell of a set of pipes, Brother Marvin’s probably got you beat.

Especially in young people, almost all of these social functions are most pronounced (except for the nostalgia one, which is often later tied to the music people experienced in their youth). But the emotional articulation function (#2), I would argue, is perhaps the most important for most young consumers of pop music. At a time when their emotions are particularly intense and their capacity to both inhibit and understand them is not as well developed, when teens are prone to extremes of emotion, popular musics offer this incredibly powerful symbolic-sensory medium to experiment with emotional ways of being in the world.

Although we may talk about ‘consuming’ music, in fact, we don’t consume music in the sense that, as Christopher Small (in Walser 1993: xii) points out, a) music is not a thing, and b) the music’s still there after you ‘consume’ it. More accurately, we ‘live through’ a song. We give over some portion of our attention to the sensory dynamics of the experience, letting it unfold around and through us. To listen to a song is to have one’s life, for the song’s duration, partially taken over by the artists’ unspooling of experience through sound. Emotion is perhaps most central to this as even afficianados of a particular artist or genre may not even understand the literal meaning of the lyrics (or in some cases – I’m thinking of REM and some of the Brazilian artists I like – the lyrics themselves may be incoherent except as a sort of impressionist poetry).

The point is not that you necessarily have the emotion that the music entails; listening to the Blues doesn’t make you sad any more than watching a tragedy necessarily makes you want to give up hope. But you do have an aesthetic appreciation of the emotion and rehearse ways of being in that emotion. For example, listening to the Blues may not give you the Blues, but it does provide a model for the emotional dynamics of being down and how to respond. You can learn how to express emotion, what to expect of that emotion, and where you might be headed next or what you need to do, whether that’s just staying ‘down so long’ or demonstrating the emotional resiliency featured so heavily in Blues, in my example (for example, contrast with fatalism about depression or a broken heart in other musical genres, even the idea that one’s life must end for the emotion to have been real).

In a response I wrote to a Behavioral and Brain Sciences article by Marc Lewis on dynamic modeling of emotion (Downey 2005), I sought to point out that emotions could be culturally educated, especially in their unfolding over time with neurological consequences. That is, even if there are ‘universal emotions’ like grief or anger or fear, different societies provide diverging models of how emotions should unfold: should grief be quickly suppressed or elaborately expressed? Should we act on fear or try to recover as quickly as possible? If angry, should we feel guilty about that, or dwell in it as a dominating mood for everyday life? Clearly, there’s a complex interplay between pervasive emotional dynamics that underlie human commonalities in emotion with widely different expectations of how emotions should play out which affects our emotional lives. Rehearsing these emotional dynamics over and over again could reinforce culturally appropriate emotional response chains, making them more likely to recur in suitable and culturally-expected fashion. Religious music, for example, helps to rehearse the appropriate awe and respect for the sacred, cuing a whole set of behaviours and moods for sacred settings.

To live through a Black Metal song, then, is to, in some way, surrender over to a musical flow that communicates a set of verbal images in the lyrics. More importantly, however, the sonic stream psychologically summons emotions and sensations through the sound: texture, volume, intensity, pitch, harmonies, and especially vocal dynamics. As ethnomusicologists point out, these aesthetic associations are largely cultural, not natural, but some are very much grounded in pervasive experiences of the human body; screaming lyrics, for example, link to those emotional and social situations where a person would be screaming. It’s hard to get phenomenologically from screamed lyrics to affectionate contemplation of puppies, but I don’t want to dwell on this too much for the moment as it’s a very long running discussion in a number of fields that don’t always communicate too well.

I would argue that the emotional dynamics enacted in Metal are pretty intense; the extraordinarily loud power chords in keys that code majesty and awe in Western music; the frenetic pace of some metal with kick drums pounding as fast as a human heart at the extreme of exertion; the vocal timbres which echo, not just screaming, but particularly powerful human howling… It’s a heady brew of emotion and sensation, too much for many listeners (in surveys of musical taste, Metal tends to beat out even gangster rap as the genre provoking the greatest negative reaction).

To me, this extraordinarily intense, provocative experience is a kind of education of emotions, especially for young people who are already feeling an intense stew of emotions (this isn’t just the case for adolescents and young people who listen to Metal, but to most genres, and helps us to understand their intense appreciation of emotions in music that, to older listeners, may seem exaggerated or melodramatic). Metal offers a model for dwelling in particular emotional spaces, a whole constellation of moods, powerful symbols, sonic textures and other subcultural elements that some listeners will find terribly compelling and emotionally authentic.

Like I said, I don’t think this makes Metal unique, nor do I think that the emotional persuasiveness only affects young people; it’s just that the emotional intensity of youth tends to be crucible in which aesthetic loyalties to some forms of popular music are forged (in part, Frith might argue, to the identity forming function of popular music consumption). The point, however, is that the particular mood and emotional posture of Metal is – ironically perhaps – parallel to certain Western religious ways of dwelling in the world. Robertson suggests that ‘religious’ imagery is present in Metal and that aesthetic innovations don’t lead to secularism or materialism but imagery from a range of religious sources, from Satanism to Nietzschean nihilism to ecological mysticism. I would simply point out that this is a very selective sample of potential sources of religious inspiration; the selectivity is crucial.

I think Robertson’s assertion that both religion and Metal are ‘limit experiences’ has solid foundation, but I want to add to the emotional parallels between certain forms of Christianity, Satanism, nihilism, and ecological mysticsism, on the one hand, and, on the other, Metal: the focus on end times and Apocalyptic violence, the intense moral outrage, the polarized, almost Manichean world view, the sense of awe and respect for ritualized group behaviour, imagery of damnation, focus on the individual as a flawed moral actor, even the disregard for a material world seen as hopelessly corrupt. You can’t get every religious tradition to offer up apt symbols of the sorts of emotions and existential commitments that we find in Metal.

I like Robertson’s piece, but I just feel like, from a neuroanthropological perspective, considering how emotions are encultured requires us to look for forms of emotional education and to recognize that religions might bring diverging experiential dynamics. In Western consumer culture, a number of important channels offer models for contending with, expressing and responding to one’s own emotions. Sometimes it’s the constellation of pop psychology and wellness models clustered around media imagery like Oprah and a range of emotional hygiene practices that have been adopted in schools and other institutions (like self-esteem programs for dealing with bullying). Or one might find emotional postures found in hip hop or another popular musical genre to be a better fit to one’s own grasp of the world. In my research on violent sports, I tend to look more closely at stereotypically male emotional management models instilled through athletic training.

But Metal, like a number of especially powerful musical genres and subcultures, offers its own model for responding to emotion. Although sometimes steeped in a language of sacrilege, paradoxically, Metal entails emotional postures that are surprisingly similar to Apocalyptic and Manichean religious commitments.

From my days as a graduate student, in a seminar on Claude Lévi-Strauss I believe, I vaguely recall one of my professors saying that opposites are alike in all regards except one. Perhaps that’s the greatest sacrilege of Metal: not just to oppose religion, but to oppose it by occupying a very similar stance toward the world.

I’m not entirely persuaded by my own argument; moreso than usually, I feel tentative posting this discussion here. But I thought I’d share it in the spirit of thinking about cultural modes of shaping emotional reality. In my own experience, I find that popular music gets used so often as a form of long term emotional formation, but also short-term or immediate self manipulation; if we need to feel better or want the world to reflect our mood, many people — myself included — use music to tint the immediate experiential environment an appropriate hue. For some, the appropriate colour is obviously Black (as in Metal).

For more:
Online exchange with Simon Frith at Rock Critics

If you’re really into Metal and academically inclined, you should definitely look up Robert Walser’s book, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) (Here on Google books). It won a Choice Outstanding Book Award, and is just a great read, even if it’s a bit dated by now.

Image:
Photo art 2010 by George E. Norkus, Heavy Metal Band Member Paul DiAnno, used under a Creative Commons, attribution license. Original downloaded from Flickr.

References:
Downey, Greg. 2005. ‘The contribution of cross-cultural study to dynamic systems modeling of emotion.’ Commentary on Marc D. Lewis, ‘Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling.’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2): 201-202.

Frith, Simon. 1987. ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music.’ In Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Pp. 133-149. London: Cambridge University Press.

Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press.

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.’

Bridge Toward Humanity

From the book’s promotional material, we have this description:

In Bridge to Humanity, renowned scholar Walter Goldschmidt directs his attention to the way in which learning (that is, culture) has trounced genetic determinism as the force driving human behavior. In doing so, he reexamines what goes into being human, so the resulting book is an essay both on human origins and on human nature. Crucial to his thesis is the distinction between sexual love and nurturant love, which have separate evolutionary origins and make opposite psychological demands. Demonstrating that the desire for the affection of others is biologically based, Goldscmidt introduces the concept of affect hunger, the biological tool for nurturant love. Goldschmidt explains how affect hunger drives infants to obey directives from their parents in order to learn their language and rules. He further analyzes how affect hunger not only provides a reward system for learning language and other cultural institutions, but also remains a motive for social behavior throughout life.

Overall, the book is a passionately written, articulate discussion of human evolution and its implications for theory about human being. It’s a relatively slim, streamlined read, with less elaboration of supporting data, but far to many ideas for the space Goldschmidt has to explain between the two covers. He throws out numerous tangential thoughts that probably warrant their own more complete discussions; for these, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

For example, Goldschmidt provides a brief account of recent theoretical changes in anthropology, especially internal debates in the field, that have made it harder to talk about the biological consequences of human evolution. It’s so fast moving that even the least patient non-anthropological reader is likely to be able to sit through it, and the reader will be left with a much better sense of how current debates are shaped by old arguments.

Affect Hunger

Goldschmidt finds long-standing recognition among scientists that humans, like all mammals, have emotional as well as physical needs. He points out (2006:13), for example, that Abraham Maslow designated ‘love and affection and belongingness needs’ less important only than survival and physiological needs. With the importance of mutuality to human survival and well-being, Goldschmidt argues that the evolutionary pressures on humans are not just competitive: human infants need to convince their mothers to care about them. No wonder they’re so damn cute…

In one of the strongest chapters in The Bridge to Humanity, Goldschmidt lays out the diverse evidence that infants, especially, ‘hunger for’ affection, bodily contact, and emotion. For example, Prof. Jim McKenna’s research on co-sleeping suggests that bodily contact and the proximity of the mother affects sleep patterns in infants, perhaps even protecting them by helping them to regulate their own bodies (see Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone). Goldschmidt points to the neurological effects of mothers’ grooming on infant rats and Harlow’s classic studies of rhesus monkeys’ need for tactile stimulation. The monkeys deprived of contact in Harlow’s experiments ‘were dramatic evidence of the effect of affect starvation’ (ibid.:48).

Because they need this contact, human infants have ‘sociophilic traits,’ according to Goldschmidt, behavioural traits that seem to have no other purpose but to encourage, facilitate and reward social interaction, almost as an end in itself. Smiling, nuzzling, laughter, imitation, our facial structure — many of our distinctive traits can be traced to these neonatal ploys to get and keep a mother’s attention.

One thing that makes Goldschmidt’s account unusual is that he focuses, not on the pair bond of human mating as a motivation for affective change, but on the mother-child bond of nurturing. He writes: ‘Nuturant love is a more recent animal attribute [than competition], coming with the live births that are the hallmark of the mammal class of animals’ (ibid.:35). Although I have problems with the computer metaphor (as long-time readers know), he argues that this need for nurturing is crucial to shaping human psychology:

Both child and mother are programmed to seek and give expressions of affection; this is the the biological ontogeny of affect hunger. Evolutionarily, it began as a device to assure the care and feeding of the neonate among social mammals and is built upon to motivate the neonate to learn from adults and thus to conform to the expectations of the troop, pride, or band and, finally, for human infants to undergo the lengthy curriculum necessary to become a human adult. This hunger for affection is essentially insatiable; it continues as a wish for acceptance, approval, and influence in the ever-expanding community in which every child is to live. (ibid.:37)

Goldschmidt points out that many of the physical manifestations of romantic or erotic love (and addiction) are actually quite similar to those involved in nurturing (ibid.: 54-57). This parallel processing might be interpreted as an exaptation: the neural-affective processes that were selected over evolutionary time because they raised the likelihood of an infant’s survival might subsequently become entangled in other social interactions and behaviour. Selected for ‘affect hunger’ by our helplessness as infants, we went on to seek to fill this hunger in a wide range of ways, not all of them terribly adaptive.

This focus on mother-child bonds as the root of human sociality, away from social relations among adults, is, in my opinion, one of the more interesting, plausible, and far-reaching suggestions that the book offers. So often, arguments for the evolutionary value of social traits (like altruism) are premised upon mating scenarios, which seem much less plausible because pair bonding between mothers and fathers is much less pressing than the mother-child bond. Any argument that pair bonding in humans is ‘universal,’ for example, must contend with the painfully obvious evidence that humans are not always so good at pair bonding and fathers do not inevitably stick around to help raise children. If pair-bonding is the evolutionary reason for humans’ pro-social traits, than its surprising that we’re so lousy at pair bonding, even though we’re quite adept at social life.

The book goes on to discuss the implications of this theory for a range of subjects including cultural variation in child rearing, learning processes, ritual, cultural evolution, ‘the soul,’ differences between foragers and farmers. I have some issues with the latter parts of the book that I might get a chance to comment upon (especially some of the thinking about cultural evolution and adaptation, and that stuff on the soul), but I want to focus on this discussion of affect hunger and its impact on an evolutionary account of the rise of altruism and other social traits.

Affect Hunger or Kin Selection?

Most often, evolutionary psychologists explain the presence of social behaviour like altruism in humans and other animals by reference to kin selection. For those of you who aren’t necessarily familiar with this literature, kin selection is the idea that natural selective pressures can favour a gene if it provides a trait that makes one’s relatives more likely to survive because that relative likely carries many of the same genes. As David C. Queller and Joan E. Strassmann write: ‘Selection normally favors a gene if it increases reproduction, because the offspring share copies of that gene, but a gene can also be favored if it aids other relatives, who also share copies. It is this selection via relatives that is referred to as kin selection’ (2002: R832).

At its foundation, these approaches to altruism really assume that there is a ‘selfish’ selective calculus to seemingly selfless acts, a genetic advantage to being altruistic, if only because it makes our genes likely to live on in those we save even if their copies in our own body go down the gurgler in the brave act of saving somebody else’s copies of those genes. I have no problem with arguing people are selfish, only with arguing that altruism is a good way to be selfish.

Ultimately, I tend to find arguments for kin selection unconvincing for a whole host of reasons, among them:

1) There’s seldom any consideration of the neural mechanisms that might be responsible, only the assumption that the ‘gene’ will cause altruistic behaviour if it is favourable to the gene’s transmission.

2) An inability to explain why, if natural selection cares about our close relatives so much, our ‘altruism gene’ couldn’t be much more selective about who we feel altruistic about, say, a ‘mafia family altruism’ where people don’t feel any altruism toward those to whom we’re not related. (I know some theories of kin selection try to account for our indiscriminate altruism by assuming that our ancestors were generally in the presence of only related individuals, but this certainly wouldn’t explain the way human altruism even extends to other species.)

3) The kin selection perspective tends to take an adaptationist view of natural selection, assuming that organic variation can easily produce candidate ‘adaptations’ to suit any environment and that all traits of an organism are necessarily adaptive (when, in fact, it’s a whole organism that is selected, not each individual trait, and traits are often connected genetically so that selection might be acting on another trait produced by the same gene).

4) The problem of how closely related we need to be to kin for our altruism to really be a selective advantage if we are in competition with each other is daunting. Haldane (1955) famously suggested that, following strictly on the mathematics of ‘comparative advantage’ and selfish promotion of our own genes in someone else’s body, we should be more careful about our altruism, laying down our own life only if we could save two brothers or eight cousins because of the shrinking likelihood that our relatives carry our genes the more distant the relation. That’s a hell of a lot of people to be saving at once, so a rational, ‘selfish’ gene would likely exhibit altruism only rarely, when the risk was offset by danger to a large number of relatives.

In many ways, Goldschmidt’s account of affect hunger in the infant, and the many sociophilic traits that infants have in order to attract the attention and affection of helpful adults, makes a lot more neuroanthropological sense. Rather than a calculation of advantage, we have a developmental trait that’s well documented in infants and a plausible account of how it would carry through in adult traits.

The kin selection account explains a widespread trait of humans by reference to an event that might not have been too common; the sacrifice of one life for a number of related individuals. In contrast, affect hunger is a universal trait structured to seek satisfaction for a universal survival need among helpless infants for a bit of assistance, nurturing, and parental care.

Although some neo-Darwinists might only want to see the role of natural selection in evolution, Walter Goldschmidt’s account of affect hunger is consistent with a broader evolutionary model that considers, not only the driving pressures of selection, but also the material and developmental needs of each individual organism. That is, survival may demand not just a willingness to compete, but also a lot of tricks to wheedle the resources we need out of those around us, even when we’re just a cute, toothless, slobbering little monkey. That’s why, even before we can do most anything except eat and poop, we’re already really good at manipulating each other.

References

Goldschmidt, Walter. 2006. The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene. Oxford U Press; New York.

Haldane, J. B. S. 1955. ‘Population Genetics.’ New Biology 18: 34–51.

Queller, David C., and Joan E. Strassman. 2002. ‘Quick Guide: Kin Selection.’ Current Biology 12:R832. (download pdf)

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.

I must admit that, although I found the article readable, even enjoyable, the last paragraph confused me, so I can’t be entirely certain of my analysis. I’ve read the last paragraph at least four times and am still not sure I understand. I’m going to quote it just so you don’t think I’m crazy, but I’m willing to read to anyone’s comment if you think you know what it means.

Bergner was watching Dr. Chivers scrub her data of outlying data points (I remember being shocked by my girlfriend when I found her doing the same thing in her psychology research before finding it was common practice – more on this in another post.). Chivers spent hours with a graph of ‘arousal’ reported by measuring vaginal blood flow, trying to smooth a red line on a computer screen to make sense of which video images were most arousing. Bergner writes in conclusion:

It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.

‘It was possible to imagine… a scientist blinded… would see just as well…’ Huh? What I’m getting at is not just to make sport of some tortured prose, but rather to suggest that Bergner, after reporting scads of findings highlighting a whole range of interesting phenomena connected to women’s sexuality and sexual desire, on a number of analytical levels, still wants to reach out for the brass ring, the one thing that ‘women want.’ He has to conclude that women’s desire is paradoxical, a ‘giant forest… too complex for comprehension,’ because there’s no simple answer.

One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs. One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!

You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical. So many of these experiments seem to be testing a series of different, related, but ultimately distinct questions: With whom do women mate? With whom do women have sex? With whom do women say they would have sex? What causes women’s bodies’ automatic arousal responses (and under what conditions)? What type of guys do women like in soft porn stories? What type of guys do women like in photographs? Do certain women get aroused by a particular type of porn movies? Does a particular woman realize or acknowledge that she is getting aroused by a particular stimulus? What affects women’s self-reported sense of sexual identity as it changes over time in women who say they are lesbian, bisexual or not sure? They’re all good questions, some better than others, and they’re all about ‘sex,’ but they are testing a whole range of different things. Can they all be glossed as, ‘What do women want?’ Yeah, sort of, but you’re going to get a hopeless answer.

Sometimes I feel like the research makes sense in context, but once it’s sampled, sound-bited, mixed and matched into a single article with the title, ‘What do women want?’, the simplification tragically robs all the individual studies of any of the insight they could have offered in the first place. Here, synthesis makes understanding impossible because the heterogeneity of what is being studied is ignored, as if all these research projects had the same research question. The reason the article is a fun read in the first place is that the research that the people being interviewed are doing is intriguing; the reason the conclusion is hopeless is that everyone is asked (or is treated as if asked) to extend their findings to cover all women in all situations.

For example, questions about women’s reactions to visual images of sex and nudity are intriguing on a number of levels. Dr. Chivers showed women videos of ‘heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude,’ even a clip of bonobos mating. She sexed up the last one by adding hoots and screeching, because the female’s pleased ‘chirping’ sounds weren’t hot enough.

Chivers found at the University of Toronto that straight male subjects’ genitals (presumably college aged, by the way) responded to heterosexual and lesbian sex, female masturbation and nude callisthenics, but were less moved by male-on-male action or the ‘chiseled’ gent’s ocean side walk. Gay men were just the opposite. Neither group got aroused by hot monkey love (even with dubbed-in hooting and screeching).

The women in the study, in contrast, had increased blood flow vaginally when any sort of sex was on screen—except the bonobos. They also were aroused by the naked workout but not by the man strolling nude on the beach, and pretty much liked any footage with people in it. Except for the naked man, oddly enough.

When Chivers asked the subjects to rate how stimulating each bit of footage was, she found that women’s reports of arousal did not coincide with their vaginal blood flow spikes whereas men pretty much reported what the plethysmographs on their penises were saying.

These results, to me, are fascinating. Not only have they caused me to swear off beachcombing au naturel, at least until I find out it’s the ‘chiseled’ quality that turned off some subjects. They also spark a whole series of questions: Is it the phenomenology of male arousal that helps men to be more aware of physiological arousal? Do women report something different as ‘arousal’ when asked (that is, the research instruction was probably not, ‘push this button when your vagina swells’)? Are all women everywhere equally unaware of physiological arousal? Are men and women trained differently through exposure to different sorts of visual sexual images? Are women unaware they are aroused if having an intimate conversation with an attractive potential partner? Are women aroused by any images of human sexually aroused (after all, beachcomber guy presumably wasn’t sporting a serious chubby, although I could be wrong)? Why are both heterosexual men and women aroused by naked women doing callisthenics when gay men are not? And, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t someone find bonobos getting it on sexy?

In other words, I think Chivers research is fascinating, but when it’s paired with the question, ‘What do women want?’, it prematurely leads to some simplistic conclusions. The logic goes sort of like: ‘A number of things turn women on; therefore, we don’t know the one thing that women want. Damn, women are inscrutable.’ Uh, no, actually, we have pretty clear results on the video arousal tests, it’s just not a simple one-line sound-bite answer (nor, for that matter, does it necessarily tell us about what women desire sexually; it tells us about a certain group’s response to videos).

The gap between measured arousal and reported arousal is interesting, but it’s hardly big news that people don’t know exactly what is happening in their own perceptions or bodies. We’ve been down this road before at Neuroanthropology.net (for example, at How well do we know our brains?), but the bottom line is that there are lots of areas of life where self-reported state is out-of-step with objectively measurable physiological or neurological conditions. For example, we have very little conscious access to motor-perceptual information about our own movement and object tracking; we can move things around in people’s visual fields and they are often lousy at noticing it. This doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and say, ‘People are confused and inscrutable because they don’t even know when objects have moved.’

This is the reason that, although it’s great to hear that sexologists studying female arousal are carving out some important research results, I kept seeing some very tired old interpretive frameworks being prematurely introduced. For example, a couple of times Bergner threw in the gratuitous ‘evolutionary’ explanation that men are ‘programmed’ by evolution one way, women another (although this tendency was not NEARLY so bad as some of the other research on human sexuality we’ve discussed, and for that we’re grateful; see Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1). At another point, we got the ‘female narcissism’ explanation for the fact that some women seem to be stimulated by the sense that they are desired more than a desirable object itself.

Fair enough, we can bring it whatever interpretation fits the data, but it seems to me that if women’s desire is really a ‘giant forest’ that is poorly understood, and if the data is multiple and contradictory, it’s likely that any blanket statement (‘Women just want to be desired.’ ‘Women only feel desire after they feel intimacy.’ ‘Women just want money.’ ‘Women use sex to get love.’) will always be inadequate. Some of the older models of an essential female sexual identity contain a partial truth, or they wouldn’t even seem plausible, but they aren’t the simple answer to the simplistic question, ‘What do women want?’

At times in the article, I was reminded of discussions of ‘My Type’ in high school and college. I’m sure you’ve heard these discussions as well, with someone going on ad nauseam about what sort of person they find arousing. Then you show up at the five year reunion, and the guy who said he liked tall, bronzed, blonde beach girls is with a short, perky, darked-haired sexologist wearing high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses (apologies to Bergner). Turns out that ‘desire’ is a more slippery term, and that our sexual arousal and sexual behaviour are in more complex relations than just desire-leads-to-arousal-leads-to-sex. If it were only that easy…

Often, when I read studies of ‘attractive faces,’ I get the same response. The research projects ask students to rate how faces in photographs look, and then make conclusions about desirable mates. But the research is really asking about attractive faces in photographs, not peering into the actual sorting mechanism that produces our mating behaviour. Thank God people don’t pick mates on the basis of their headshots, or I for one likely never would have gotten married. And I’m sure that the research subjects in these experiments would strenuously object if the researchers said that they had to pick a mate on the basis of a photo of a face only, even if they thought symmetrical, feminine faces looked good in pictures.

So often, even when we’re dealing with these research papers, we’re still only seeing a statistical majority or even less when someone is making statements about men and women (for another case, see Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2). Dr. Meana points this out in her interview with Bergner when she suggests that ‘the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders’ in arousal and desire. Although I was pleased to read this, it was immediately followed with some blanket statements about female desire and contrasts with male arousal. The section with Meana was one of the most interesting in the whole article, with some provocative statements about women’s narcissism, the effect of female nudity, the problem of desire in committed relationships, and even sexual fantasies of submission. Don’t get me wrong—it’s well worth reading. But prefaced by this statement about variability within and difference between ‘genders,’ it sort of contains its own critique.

One of the wisest books I ever read about sex was Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch. One of the thing he points out is that the reason sexuality in marriage is a challenge is because so many psychological issues, so much of our own individual, idiosyncratic life experience, can be brought into intimacy for resolution and healing. In fact, other areas of our life are not that different. People make eating and food about all sorts of things, as they do shopping, sports, and so on. That is, the idea that a person desires some one thing in sexuality is part of the problem for understanding sexuality. I suspect that the sexologists Bergner was interviewing are well aware of this, and it’s only this journalistic framing that makes it seem so simple that the question becomes unanswerable: ‘What do women want?’ (For a subtle discussion of the complex experience of desire for drugs, see Daniel’s piece, Wanting to Craving: Understanding Compulsive Involvement with Drugs.)

To go out on a limb, I would argue that most women, like most men, probably desire a number of things, some of which are more likely to be found in sex than others. Not all societies encourage us to seek out the same satisfactions in our relationships, nor do they all saddle us with the same psychological issues to contend with in our sexual relationships. Even within a single society, different people bring different issues to the bedroom (or wherever they deal with sex), whether they are straight, gay, bi- or other. Moreover, once we satisfy one set of desires, that hardly means we are finished with desiring, and we might seek something else in sex. Same activity, but looking for ‘something else’ within it.

I’m not convinced that what men want is all that much less complicated than what women want in sex; perhaps, men’s constellation of desires in sex seem more internally consistent because they conflict less with each other, but that doesn’t mean men only want one thing (just that getting many needs met at once might be easier). We’ve seen a change in women’s desires and how they might be met in Western society over the past half century (and longer), and I suspect that these will continue to change.

In other words, sex is a field for interaction, and arousal is a physiological phenomenon that both influences how those interactions play out, and is influenced by these interactions. Arousal doesn’t determine sexual behaviour. Every time we get aroused, we don’t have sex; every time we have sex, we may not be aroused, although, again, the interaction might end up affecting our physiological state (for better or worse). One of the things that makes humans human is that layers of other considerations can override or modify basic physiological processes like fear, arousal, anger, and panic. Stripping back or ignoring these other factors like inhibition, enculturation, and socialization doesn’t get us to ‘human nature,’ it erases so much of what makes humans distinctive.

What do women want? Lots. Just like men. And, just like men, as soon as they get what they want, women are liable to want something else. If you fine that inscrutable, or ‘semi-shocking’, you need to hang out with humans more often.

Credits:
Image by Ryan McGinley/Team Gallery from New York Times.

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).”

Here is one relevant Tuzin quote in relation to Bell’s piece:

“I once had cause to ask a group of informants what smell was the worst one imaginable. The answer came back quickly: it was the breath of a ghost. The odor, they explained, resembles that of human putrescence, except that it is worse, much worse—and different, like nothing on earth. In quality and derivation the breath of a ghost is to mortal decay as a ghost is to a man.

My informants were not without some experience in this matter, for they were middle-aged and well remembered the traditional practice—discontinued some twenty years ago under administration insistence—of placing a family corpse in a shallow or open grave in the groundhouse floor. This was to protect the remains from hungry witches eager to imbibe the powers of the dead, and also to allow easy access to the bones when later they were exhumed for magical purposes. The stench must have been horrendous and the blowflies bothersome, but not to have suffered these things would have implied a lack of filial piety; the vapors hung as a pungent reminder of the recent loss (Tuzin 1975:556-557).”

Tuzin drew on psychoanalytic theory to help develop his interpretation of dreams and ghosts in relation to the individual. Today we can use neuroanthropology, and talk about memory as relived, the neurological correlates of hallucinations, and the strong emotional component of grief. Still, the insights that Tuzin draws from psychoanalysis, of ambivalence and individual experience and the power of death, are important, since they help us recognize common aspects of human experience. Indeed, psychoanalysis and neuroscience are not always so far apart, as the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Eric Kandel has argued here and here (full text).

Tuzin himself began to see this confluence, and the importance of considering neural function, in some later work. In his 1984 article Miraculous Voices, Tuzin is explicit about linking cross-cultural experience to both brain and culture. In the 2007 American Anthropologist obituary for Tuzin, Robbins and Leavitt write:

“Tuzin drew on research on epilepsy documenting the ‘numinous’ or ‘religious’ feeling that immediately precedes a seizure, to explain how patterns of brain activity might produce an experiential response that can be easily appropriated culturally as ‘religious.’ The deeply resonating sounds of the Arapesh ‘voice of the tambaran,’ created by the amplified sounds of the bamboo flutes (technically trumpets) blown into the base of the wooden drums, could, through base acoustics, produce brain wave patterns that evoke numinous feelings readily interpreted by the individual as religious awe. Tuzin suggested that similar dynamics could be found in the sounds associated with religion everywhere. These and other studies emphasized the deeply human and personal dynamics that he had encountered in his Ilahita field research.”

In Vaughan Bell’s work, it is the same deeply human and personal dynamics that become elaborations into internet communities that support what others call paranoia and delusions, or grief and ghosts that then become both religious and at times pathological.

One critical elaboration for how to think about such a process comes in other parts of Tuzin’s corpus. In Tuzin’s 1976 book The Ilahita Arapesh: Dimensions of Unity, Tuzin discusses the complex social organization of the village, maintained through overlapping and often opposed social networks that work without a central leader.

Rather than the structural oppositions linked to an abstract human mind (as Levi-Strauss might have argued), Tuzin argues that this organization comes from everyday life. Robbins and Leavitt describe in the obituary, “this elaborate social system… resulted from individuals making mundane choices in the face of recurring situational demands.” Those demands are structured by cultural values and knowledge, but not determined by them. You can see more of this argument in Tuzin’s book chapter, The Organization of Action, Identity and Experience in Arapesh Dualism.

I was quite happy to have found Donald Tuzin’s work. In all fairness to Vaughan, I didn’t know of his research either. But here is yet another early precursor of the sort of work that Greg and I now do. Tuzin offers us many insights, from good descriptive ethnography, to a focus on individual and social dynamics, to theory-driven considerations of the intersections of brain, mind and culture.

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.

Second, the original theory of incentive salience and addiction was developed by Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan. (Here’s a recent summary paper of theirs on incentive salience and addiction.) Incentive salience has generally focused on the desire to use drugs, on motivations to use, and separated those from the pleasure or high associated with actually using drugs. My ethnographic research clearly showed that hard-core drugs users often felt surges in desire while using, not just in deciding to go use or seeking out drugs. Querer más y más, to want more and more, often referred to what happened while using. This effect helps to explain the often extraordinary amounts of drugs that some addicts use. It is that rabid urge to continue, to have more, and not just tolerance to a drug, that helps drive the excess often associated with substance abuse.

Third, neuroscientists are plain wrong if they try to reduce craving or desire to the combination of the pharmacological drug action and brain circuits. This common approach does not answer what it is that hard-core users want – it assumes that sensitization and chemicals account for everything (or at least everything that counts). Put differently, why do addicts want drugs?

A disease model or a moral model of addiction cannot answer this question because they assume cause already – it’s a biological problem or a failure in willpower. That avoids addressing what people themselves can tell us about their use. Brain imaging in humans also doesn’t answer the “why” question – scans can show neural correlates associated with craving, but they cannot get at the content of our experiences and our thoughts.

Anthropology can! The question that I devised to help hard-core users explain to me why was rather simple. “Think of your experiences while using as an imaginary place. What sort of place would that be?” For an anthropologist, or anyone interested in subjective experience, this question had one all-important point – it gave me data; it helped my respondents articulate their experiences in words that I could then analyze. It may be not be quite as fancy or expensive as neuro-imaging, but it too let me peer inside someone else’s head.

I will also admit that the question thrilled me because I knew some hard-core neuroscientists and the way they thought about the brain and addiction. Wanting, that’s just dopamine, they argued. Most of them struggled significantly more with imaginary places.

But the best thing about the question was the answers. Kids who had never used did not understand this question at all. But teenagers who used frequently, they got this question immediately. I still remember one of the first boys, a recovering cocaine addict at a local school who was now a heavy smoker. I asked him the question first about smoking. He looked down at his hand and put his fingers together like he held a cigarette. “A world in there? No,” he said. “But cocaine, oh yeah.”

In the end, what I found was that both cultural symbols and an individual’s sense of self impact what users experience. One girl who smoked marijuana nearly every day explained what she sought from using: “estar en un video,” to be in a video, where attention was shifted away from how she felt in her traumatic yet culturally valued family environment. Sure, the dopamine helped produce that shift in attention, but the idiom of “a video” was something cultural. In the end that was what she really wanted, to feel those “so present sensations” from marijuana that put her in a video that seemed, for a moment, far from home.

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).

Silvan Tomkins’ cybernetic theory and neuroanthropology

Tomkins was an American psychologist who developed a rich alternative understanding of affect, one that broke significantly from the Freudian psychoanalytic models that were dominant among his contemporaries (or the cognitivist disinterest in emotion in general). Tomkins argued that there were nine basic affects (two positive, one neutral, and six negative), labeling each with a dyad of terms to indicate how they differed depending upon their intensity: interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, fear-terror, anger-rage, shame-humiliation, disgust, and ‘dis-smell.’ He distinguished these affects both from emotions and from Freudian ‘drives,’ adding several layers (well, more than several) to the complexity of the internal topography proposed by Freud.

In a way that I find particularly interesting as a neuroanthropologist, Tomkins picked up on observations of emotions made by Charles Darwin, especially emotions that Darwin considered to be present cross-species. Just as Darwin focused on facial expressions, Tomkins carefully considered the facial expressions that were typical of each basic affect and argued that the face was the principal organ of affect (rather than even the brain).

Tomkins could be really powerful for anthropology because one of the crucial things that needs to be added to ‘cognitive anthro’ to develop a more robust neuroanthropology is human affect; ironically, just because of the freight attached to the term, ‘cognitive,’ it can sometimes create a tendency toward an overly-conscious, overly-rational, overly-semiotic portrait of the human subject, one that is not consistent with the rest of anthropology (which one could argue tries to respect culturally based ‘rationalities’ in its portrait of humans). Most anthropologists who do psychological anthropology are well aware of this, but the existing discussions of emotion in psychology often strike us as being too ethnocentric. Tomkins offers a more interesting alternative.

Although there are various statements that I found in summaries of his work that I would want to argue against (such as the notion of ‘innate’ affects — more on that in another post, but Sedgwick and Frank already have discussed this issue), I feel that there is too much interesting in the original work to focus on these quibbles. Unfortunately, the four volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness mean that I’m still likely to only get into the abridged version offered by Sedgwick and Frank in Shame and Her Sisters (or find an excerpt including the masterful introduction at Google books).

For example, Tomkins work demonstrates a host of intriguing and prescient quirks: the grounding in cybernetics means Tomkins’ theories are conducive to developmental dynamics accounts of affect, his approach to evolution and biology are pretty sophisticated, his attention to the widespread embodiment of affect are in keeping with third wave cognitive science, the phenomenological dimensions of his work is startlingly good, and a number of other factors. Obviously, he didn’t have some of the brain sciences material that we have now when he was writing, but his thinking seems to be an extraordinarily productive model to work from now that we do.

Ironically, in so much of the current discussion of neurosciences, it’s hard to get a vision of the forest from all the trees; or worse, I’m not even sure that all the trees are in the same forest. Most of the over-arching interpretations we get from philosophy of mind seem to operate at a level of generalization that isn’t supported by the data. For example, some theorists of mind work from research on language or memory to make generalizations that likely don’t apply to perceptions, motor control, affect, or other issues. Theories such as ‘massive modularity,’ for instance, seem to take one principle or one brain function and overly extrapolate until we’re presented with a kind of neural stereotype, a thin, one-sided account of the rich ecology of the brain.

Tomkins willingness to work with very complex but still ambitiously general system models seems to me to be a great inspiration for the kind of bold but non-simplistic theorization that we need. That is, we’re going to have to be attempt to talk about the brain in ambitious general terms while still allowing for a multiplicity of logics and heterogeneity of systems that is seldom found in contemporary social theory.

In the conference, I paraphrased Niels Bohr’s famous rejoinder to Wolfgang Pauli to talk about Tomkins’ theory: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct’ (there are many variants; see Wikiquote). Reading Tomkins theory is exhilarating, in part because of its cybernetic complexity and phenomenological richness, but we may need a far more baroque vision still to have a hope of reflecting the rich diversity of neural dynamics (or perhaps Gothic or Byzantine visions).

For example, one of the things that came up for me, thanks to Profs. Frank and Ferrell, was that a cybernetic approach to affect, although not as organic as a dynamic systems approach, did offer a powerful way to think about how inhibitory processes work in the brain, and how they might be trained into distinct configurations. As Frank and Ferrell discussed, Freud’s model of repression assumed a single mental force (like the super-ego) whereas Tomkins’ discussion saw affects as sometimes pitted against each other, in context-dependent relations. Inhibitory processes seem to be something that the human brain is really good at (like recursive and self-referential processes), something that distinguishes our brains from those of other animals, and there are likely multiple neural ways for us to inhibit reactions.

One of the conference participants (I think it was Robyn Ferrell, but I wasn’t taking careful enough notes) pointed out that model-making itself comes out of a particular set of assumptions about what we are trying to do in studying affect (or the brain). One reason it’s hard to bridge the gulf between science and humanities that Daniel discussed is actually the fact that the two sides of the divide don’t both think ‘making models’ is such a grand idea.

At the moment, I’m comfortable with them; the theoretical terrain in anthropology seems sufficiently denuded of any competing ‘models’ of how the brain, body, and enculturation can be talked about . I hope someone is willing to stick his or her neck out and start proposing some new ones. Maybe the effect will be like that of Silvan Tomkins’ writing: the neuroanthropological models may appear slightly daft, but hopefully a fraction as exciting and thought-provoking. But more on that once I get to read some more…

Ironically, Tomkins was the mentor to Paul Ekman, whose research on ‘universal’ facial expressions I was critiquing in my presentation (h/t to Wikipedia for point that out to me!). In addition, I have no opinion about Tomkins’ theory of ‘scripts,’ which he articulates in volumes 3 and 4 of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness as I have virtually no familiarity with it other than some brief second-hand summaries.

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.

The team tested a number of control conditions in order to isolate the possibility that neurotrophic factors were responsible for the increased plasticity, and the results sound robust across a range of conditions. The team based in Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, report: ‘Our data suggest that the enhanced serotonergic transmission induced by chronic treatment with fluoxetine promotes functional and/or structural mechanisms that shift the intracortical inhibitory-excitatory balance, triggering plasticity in the adult visual cortex’ (from the original Science article).

The researchers also report: ‘The effects induced by fluoxetine in adult visual cortical plasticity are surprisingly similar to those caused by environmental enrichment, a condition characterized by increased exploratory behavior and sensory-motor stimulation, which we recently found to promote amblyopia recovery in adulthood through a reduction of intracortical inhibition’ (from the Science article). Daniel has discussed how some of the same brain mechanisms activated by pharmaceuticals may also be manifest with non-pharmaceutical interventions. That shouldn’t surprise us: we have the same brain all the time, whether drugs or other interventions are affecting us, so some of the same mechanisms are likely involved.

There are many caveats on this research, but the results do suggest that there might be medical ways in which to induce heightened plasticity in the neural system, something a lot of people have speculated about in the wake of discoveries of neuroplasticity. It’s rats, the monocular deprivation regimen is severe, the visual system is particularly susceptible to environmental influences (after all, it’s a sensory system), and so on. But even with these caveats, I find this report pretty fascinating.

Although we’re nowhere near the Matrix stage, when someone’s brain can be opened up to learn martial arts in hours, the results are promising, especially for therapy when added neural plasticity might really advantage recovery. For example, added plasticity in the visual system might be very useful when treating children born with congenital glaucoma. Again, this research is way too early to be talking about application, but this finding, in my opinion, does bring that possibility closer. I’m just surprised how quickly the research team found this effect. I shouldn’t be; in so many cases, we really know very little about the biological mechanisms that actually give pharmaceuticals their effects. Fluoxetine was a great candidate for this research.

But I also think that the research should be a cautionary note on anti-depressants. If one of the primary methods through which they affect the brain is an overall increase in brain plasticity, then the environment in which the patient lives while on long-term treatment with the drug is actually made more important to the patient’s mental and emotional states by the drug, not less. If a person undergoes deprivation (like say, a hospital environment without adequate stimuli or social support), then the drug might actually increase the susceptibility of the patient to the effects of these environments. The drug doesn’t just fight depression, it opens up the possibility of greater, faster neural change, potentially for better or worse.

The same thing would go for attempts to use these drugs to aid learning or recovery, for example. If the environment of recovery or study was very stressful, the drug might actually increase vulnerability to the long-term effects of the environment. A number of authors (such as Norman Doidge) have written about how neural plasticity can be a double-edged sword, leading both to increases in functioning and to losses of function in deprived situations; increasing neuroplasticity with pharmaceuticals or environments likely has the same double-edged potential. The fact that the research effects of an ‘anti-depressant’ were on the visual system should be a cautionary note about the law of unintended consequence. I can imagine situations, for example, where chronic pain might be exacerbated or consolidated by heightening neural plasticity, if these systems are also susceptible to the pharmaceutical manipulation (and I can’t think of any reason off the top of my head that they wouldn’t be).

References
José Fernando Maya Vetencourt, Alessandro Sale, Alessandro Viegi, Laura Baroncelli, Roberto De Pasquale, Olivia F. O’Leary, Eero Castrén, and Lamberto Maffei. 2008. The Antidepressant Fluoxetine Restores Plasticity in the Adult Visual Cortex. Science 320 (5874) (18 April): 385-388. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150516 (abstract).

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].’

The abstract from the original article lays out the research:

Little is known about the role of the endocrine system in financial risk taking. Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader’s ability to engage in rational choice.

The fact that both testosterone and cortisol seem to cycle along with booms and busts of the market is not terribly surprising. As Young writes: ‘Testosterone has been shown to rise in runner’s who win races and fall in runner’s who lose races — the so-called winner’s effect. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and it isn’t unreasonable to expect it the trader’s to respond to market volatility by being stressed.’ The big problem both Young and I have with this research, however, is the creeping suggestion that the hormones are causing the market behaviour. Young argues that there’s a ‘big problem with the interpretation that these hormones are causal for financial depressions and volatility.’

The authors of the original study seem to disagree, and sometimes inconsistently, about whether to attribute causality or correlation to the hormone levels. The Nature News post on this article, The testosterone of trading, for example, reports that the authors are not in agreement: ‘Was the testosterone behind the winnings? Coates thinks so. But co-author Herbert cautions that the results aren’t strong enough to prove that testosterone is driving risky behaviour: “It remains a correlation, not a causation,” he says.’ I think that the relationship is probably more complex than either label captures, but a simple causal story — testosterone causes market bubbles — is probably the least helpful, least accurate way to describe the relationship, and not just because the ‘results aren’t strong enough.’

The irony is that the researchers seemed to understand that the hormones would not be causing the market effects in their initial hypotheses. From the original article:

Because testosterone has been found to play a role in winning and losing, and cortisol has been found to play a role in responding to stress and uncertainty, we developed the hypothesis that these steroids would respond to financial risk taking. Specifically, we predicted that testosterone would rise on days when traders made an above-average gain in the markets, and cortisol would rise on days when traders were stressed by an above-average loss.

In the discussion of the results, as well, the authors offer a nice discussion of how the endocrine system might act as the relay point between the activity of the market (including volatility or price rises) and the decision-making of traders. Their account of steroid feedback loops and the ways in which traders might persist in behavior even when it is no longer appropriate seems to me to be quite measured, and well done, unlike the idea that testosterone causes risk taking in some one-way, simplistic manner.

It’s odd, then, that at least one of the author perseveres in offering simplistic explanations. I’m sure he’s not aware of how crucial the causation-correlation issue is to some people, but it’s too sloppy. From the Nature News interview:

Coates says the findings point to an intriguing possibility — that hormones may be driving irrationality in the markets. The dizzying highs seen in market ‘bubbles’ may be pumped up further by elevated testosterone levels in traders, while crashes and sell-offs could be exacerbated by cortisol, he speculates.

I’m too suspicious of the instincts of science writers to simplify to blame this entirely on Coates. There’s always the danger in getting interviewed about our research (or even trying to write accessible explanations) that someone will misinterpret what we’re saying. Hell, every essay exam I gives me abundant examples of distorted versions of explanations that I once offered in lectures — reading the versions that students give back to me is always deeply sobering.

But Young’s critiques are more specific and penetrating than this, I believe. He highlights four problems with the original research: 1) a duration problem, especially arguing for a chronic effect on hormones using an acute experimental design; 2) the link between testosterone and aggressive behaviour has been shown to be complicated, with endocrinologists like Robert Sapolsky pointing out the unexpected nuances of this relationship; 3) the use of a gambling-related test, the Iowa Gambling Task, as a measure of ‘high risk-high profit’ behavior when it, in fact, tests whether subjects, lured by the possibility of a high return, persist in pursuing a lower profit strategy; and 4) the effect of increased cortisol is unpredictable, and unlikely to have the sort of collective stress effect that the authors argue. Young concludes:

Taking all these caveats into mind, I remain skeptical that this finding is anything other than an interesting correlation. In order to prove me wrong, they would have to perform a much longer survey associating this hormones with market behavior. They would also have to demonstrate that the doses of hormonese they are observing cause significant and consistent changes in behavior. They haven’t done either of those things.

Ironically, one cautionary note on the easy interpretation of the study’s results are offered in the Nature News piece by Benedict Stoddart, a trader at a London firm. ‘In reality, most employers want traders who try to remain calm, despite their raging hormones: “Testosterone is not something that banks would look for,” [Stoddart] says.’ In other words, running with your testosterone or cortisol, or pursuing any trading strategy driven by collective emotion, would likely be a problem and might shorten one’s potential employment. Perhaps one thing that makes traders successful isn’t just high testosterone (I doubt it), but rather the ability to know when to work against the emotional grain, when to check powerful contagious emotions such as panic or euphoria.

But ultimately I think there’s a bigger ‘take away’ from Young’s discussion: the mechanisms through which social moods or collective emotions become effective in individuals’ bodies or experiences are likely to be quite subtle and difficult to explain in a short few paragraphs. The idea that we could tell a simple story about the relations between individuals’ endocrine systems and market dynamics, when both of these systems are already so complex that they beggar the imagination at times, is a dangerous ambition, one likely to lead to distortion, crucial omissions, or misleading characterization.

References
Coates, J.M., and J. Herbert. 2008. Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104 (16): 6167–6172. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704025105