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Posts archived in Abnormality


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Antipsychotic drugs

May 20, 2013 by .

flat,550x550,075,fA German study just published by Moritz and colleagues provides an interesting insight into antipsychotic drugs used in the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses. Data was collected by asking psychiatric patients to complete a questionnaire about their experiences in taking antipsychotic medication for their mental disorder. The conclusion was that such drugs are effective because they dampen emotion rather than treating any specific symptoms. ‘Doubt, numbing and withdrawal were the main subjective antipsychotic effects’. Basically such drugs just keep patients quiet – an effect which many patients find unpleasant. One reviewer says ‘It is clear we need better ways to help people’.

You can read fuller details of the study here (which contains some evaluative points) and here.

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Obedience to authority

March 24, 2013 by .

compliance-movie-poster-slice1Some of you may be familiar with the MacDonald’s incident of 2005 where a hoax caller masqueraded as a policeman and delivered orders over the phone. Astonishingly he was obeyed despite the extreme nature of his instructions (read about the event here). I recently gave a talk in London including this event in my talk and one of the teachers directed my attention to a new film Compliance, which tells the story of the incident.

In my talk I distinguished between obedience in situations such as the MacDonald’s incident, which can be explained in terms of agentic shift and socialisation to obey orders from an authority figure, and obedience to the directions of the Nazi regime which can’t be explained in this way – Haslam and Reicher re-analysed Milgram’s original data (see here) and concluded that participants were identifying with the science of the experiments, which is why they obeyed, not because they were ‘just following orders’.

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Stress and attachment

February 15, 2013 by .

You will have heard of the nature-nurture debate. In the last decade researchers have come to a deeper understanding of how the two interact. The field is called epigenetics and there is an interesting example of this in the link between stress and attachment.

rat-grroming-babyResearch has shown that rats who have been raised by mothers who groom and lick them are later better able to cope with stress than pups who were infrequently licked and groomed. What appears to happen is that the brains of well-licked baby rats have been changed. There are receptors in the brain that mop up the stress hormone cortisol, reducing the effect of stress on the brain. The gene that codes for these receptors is modified by the mothers’ behaviour so that ‘unlicked’ pups ultimately have fewer cortisol receptors in their brain.

The bottom line is that the attachment behaviours of the mother appears to alter the young rats’ brains so they cope less well with stressful experience. And this also affects the way the young rats subsequently treat their own babies. Nurture modifies nature. Poor attachment experiences have negative effects.

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DSM 5

June 14, 2012 by .

The American Psychiatric Association are preparing the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due for release May 2013. They are currently testing some of their new criteria in field trials. This involves clinicians using the list of proposed clinical characteristics to diagnose patients. Comparisons are then made between clinicians to see how reliable the diagnoses are i.e. whether clinicians agree on the diagnoses they give.

The field trials use a statistic called kappa where 1 means effect agreement and 0 is agreement may just be due to chance. A few of the current results are kappas of 0.32 for major depressive disorder, 0.2 for generalised anxiety disorder and 0.01 for patients with symptoms of anxiety and depression. A recent article in the New Scientist (‘Diagnosis Uncertain’) reports that leaders of the DSM revision are suggesting that kappas as low as 0.2 should be considered acceptable whereas others dispute this. The end result may be that millions of people end up with erroneous diagnoses.

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Useful AO2 point

March 22, 2012 by .

Some recent research reported here suggests the fMRI studies may present a misleading picture of brain activity. Such studies are used to provide evidence that certain areas of the brain are active when a person is engaged in a target task. However the new research has demonstrated that, while certain areas may be especially active, it isn’tt a question of them being the only active areas – they are simply more active than the rest of the brain. This means that conclusions that link a specific area of the brain to a specific behaviour may be unjustified, because many other areas are also involved.

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How ECT works

March 20, 2012 by .

A team of Scottish researchers (Perrin et al., 2012) have produced evidence that ECT decreases connectivity in the brain of depressed patients, leading to a reduction in symptoms. They used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan the brains of nine patients, all of whom had severe clinical depression and had not responded to drug therapy. Each received ECT for two sessions per week, an average total of 8 treatments. They were scanned before ECT was applied, and then again afterwards. Using a new mathematical analysis they were able to determine to what extent 25,000 different brain areas ‘communicated’ with each other.  This indicated changes after ECT in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortical region; connectivity was reduced and this was associated with improvements in depressive symptoms.

When a patient has depression, parts of the brain that control mood and those involved in concentration and thinking have an overactive connection. So it appears that ECT ‘turns down’ these connections leading to improved mood.

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Success of Psychoanalysis

November 1, 2011 by .

There is increasing evidence that psychoanalysis may be an effective therapy. A landmark review by Shedler (2010) included a number of randomised control trials* where psychodynamic therapies proved as effective as other forms of therapy. Midgley and Kennedy (2011) conducted another review, this time of studies relating to children and young adults and again found strong evidence of the value of psychodynamic therapies.

In fact Shedler suggests that non-psychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because therapists use techniques that have long been central to psychodynamic theory and practice, such as gaining awareness of previously implicit feelings.

Shedler describes psychodynamic therapies as ‘a range of treatments based on psychoanalytic concepts and methods that involve less frequent meetings and may be considerably briefer than psychoanalysis proper. Session frequency is typically once or twice per week, and the treatment may be either time limited or open ended. The essence of psychodynamic therapy is exploring those aspects of self that are not fully known, especially as they are manifested and potentially influenced in the therapy relationship’. In his article he provides a useful description of the techniques used in the therapy.

*A randomised control trial is the gold standard of medical research where patients are randomly assigned to treatment or no treatment groups.

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Majority influence – just complying?

March 8, 2011 by .

Asch’s classic study judging the length of lines demonstrated people will go along with majority opinion even when the answer is clearly wrong. One of the key questions was whether they were just going along with the answers (called ‘compliance’), or whether the majority influence actually changed their opinions (i.e. they internalised the majority view).

A recent study (Zaki et al., 2011 see BPS digest) provides evidence that people are not just complying. In this study men rated the attractiveness of 180 female faces. When they entered their ratings other peer ratings were displayed which were sometimes much higher and sometimes much lower.

About a half-hour later, the participants rated each of the faces again. The outcome was that their ratings had been influenced by the others’ opinions – when the peer rating was higher than theirs, the participants now rated the faces as more attractive and when the peer rating had been lower, the participants’ ratings were now lower.

Most importantly the researchers had scanned the participants’ brains on the second task. When the participants shifted to a more favourable view, activity was triggered in a reward-related area of the brain (it was rewarding to look at these faces). This wasn’t the case when they shifted to a less favourable view. This shows that the the faces rated attractively by peers had increased in value i.e. the opinions of others had been internalised.

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When an experiment is not an experiment

January 20, 2011 by .

Some of you will have heard my talk last November at the Science and Pseudoscience conference explaining why Milgram’s study is not an experiment, even though he called it one. The same issue has arisen with Asch’s classic conformity experiment – oops – study. You can read the lengthy discussion over on psychexchange, but briefly …

In the WJEC AS book we have written (on page 72) Asch’s study is not an experiment and failed to explain why. It is not an experiment because the behaviour being studied (conformity) is not caused by Asch’s manipulation. Some participants conformed whereas others didn’t (a kind of dependent variable). However this difference did not depend on any independent variable – the behaviour of the confederates or the different trials (confederates giving correct answer or erroneous answer). Therefore it is not an experiment, it is a demonstration of conformity or an investigation, if we want to label it. Asch did call it an experiment but people used the term more loosely then.

In his subsequent variations Asch was conducting an experiment e.g. he varied the size of the group which had an effect on whether participants conformed or not (one confederate led to little conformity, 3 led to more). We can therefore conclude that the size of the group causes conformity.

On page 69 (baseline study, paragraph 4) I have called it an experiment! An error.

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BBC radio – The man who couldn’t remember

August 8, 2010 by .

The excellent BBC radio series about case studies in psychology is returning this week and is about Henry Molaison (HM) – on Wednesday 11 August at 11 am. You can find details here. The blurb in the Radio Times says ‘In 1953, after a brain operation to cure his epilepsy, Henry Molaison was left unable to form new memories. But he was happy that others would benefit from the research conducted into his condition; he was happy every time he was told about it because it was always news to him. Recordings of Molaison made before he died in 2008 make this a particularly poignant programme. Claudia Hammond talks to the scientists who studied him and got to know him, though, sadly, he never got to know them.’

The programme also covers the story of HM’s brain after his death – which you can read about here. Provokes some interesting ethical questions about a person who couldn’t give informed consent.

The previous case studies series covered Kitty Genovese, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, The Man with the Hole in his Head and Little Hans. Some of these can be downloaded from Psychexchange, see here.

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