Category: Psychological anthropology

Autism, Depression and The Body

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchMental disorders such as depression and autism are generally viewed in one of two lights, either as something neurological or something psychological.  Cultural anthropology obviously has greater affiliation with the psychological side, and biological anthropology with the neurological.  The same split is true in psychiatry, ably demonstrated by Tanya Luhrmann’s Of Two Minds, which, to radically simplify, describes the fight between talk-therapists and pharmaceutical-dispensers.  (Still, at least this anthropologist wishes Luhrmann had gone beyond ethnographic description of fields to tackle the same problem that both anthropology and psychiatry embody—bridging the nature/nurture or biology/culture split.)

 But is this way of dividing things, an enculturated mind versus an epigenetic brain, an accurate description?  Recent research suggests no. 

Continue reading “Autism, Depression and The Body”

‘Exercise’ is mindset as well as activity

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAn article last year in Psychological Science by Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer, Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect, laid out an extremely interesting example of ‘top-down’ culturo-psycho-physiological dynamics in the body from my favorite area of research: exercise and sports.  Crum and Langer looked at a group of 84 hotel room keepers.  From the abstract:

Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. 

If this were the only finding, there wouldn’t be too much news here.  But the change in understanding of what they were doing also had physical effects on the room attendants, including, in addition to changed impressions, an average weight loss of 2 pounds, decrease in systolic blood pressure of 10 points, and positive effects on body mass and heart rates — in only 4 weeks with NO change in the actual activity level.  Becoming convinced that they were getting enough exercise or engaged in adequate activity to promote health helped their background activity to affect their physiology.  Exercise was not just a physical activity, it was also a state of mind (more accurately, without the ‘state of mind’ activity didn’t have the effects of ‘exercise’).  (This research is also discussed in an article in The New York Times.) 

Continue reading “‘Exercise’ is mindset as well as activity”

Drugs and Biosociality

By Daniel Lende 

There’s an article in the NY Times today, “Drugs Offer No Benefit in Curbing Aggression, Study Finds.”  Here’s the lead-in: “The drugs most widely used to manage aggressive outbursts in intellectually disabled people are no more effective than placebos for most patients and may be less so, researchers report.” 

What’s particularly interesting are quotes from the article such as “the message to doctors should be, think twice about prescribing, go with lower doses and monitor side effects very carefully…  Or just don’t do it. We know that behavioral treatments can work very well with many patients.” 
Continue reading “Drugs and Biosociality”

Repressed Memory

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchIn the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine, there is a short piece on “Repressed Memory: A Cultural Symptom?”  The basic point: some “neurological” symptoms are cultural.  Harrison Pope, co-director of the Biological Psychiatry Lab at McLean Hospital, posted a $1000 bet that no one could identify a “case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800.”  The exception was found—a 1786 opera—and the $1000 dolled out.  But that only helped prove the researchers’ premise: unlike some other neurological phenomena, repressed memory appears to be a culture-bound syndrome.  (What’s also impressive is that these are hard-core neuroscientists arguing for this…)

 For example, accounts of hallucinations and depression appear in the world’s literature for hundreds of years.  But the development of amnesia after a serious traumatic event, such as being raped or witnessing the death of a friend, appears to be a phenomena developed initially in modern Western culture and then imposed on the brain.    Continue reading “Repressed Memory”

Marian Radke-Yarrow

I think some of you might appreciate this short piece, The Anthropological Psychologist, on Marian Radke-Yarrow, who pioneered the studies of parenting and depression.  What I find striking is her longitudinal work and her use of observation and description to reach her conclusions.  She passed away this past year. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30Radke-t.html

Avatars and Cultural Creole

Can video games change the way we think about culture?  Yes!  In the previous posts I’ve explored how the interaction and embodied perception that both designers and players use outlines an area of research for neuroanthropology.  And I’ve dropped plenty of hints that gaming can help us re-think culture.  Today I’ll continue to develop those ideas some more. 

Let’s start with a rather conventional statement on “culture” in relation to this new world of Internet, gaming, and all the rest.  Arturo Escobar, professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (and better, a Colombian!), has a chapter, “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture,” which appears in the book The Cybercultures Reader.    Continue reading “Avatars and Cultural Creole”