Identity

The past three nights I’ve found myself a) stuck in New Jersey when I was supposed to be in Colorado, and b) watching a new game show on NBC, “Identity”. The premise is all about initial impressions. Contestants are presented with 12 strangers and 12 identities, and if they correctly match all 12, then they win $500,000. Along the way they are allowed one mistake and two other “cheats”: they can consult a team of experts (including a body language expert, a psychologist, and an FBI expert) or narrow their choices down to 3 strangers.

It’s an oddly compelling show. I’ve tuned in 3 nights in a row and I can’t remember the last time something on TV made me do that. But there’s also a large element of psychology here. Stereotyping, for sure. However, the show is tricky in breaking stereotypes with the strangers. The pro jump-roper last night wasn’t the young-looking girl, it was the muscular guy with lots of tattoos. The athletic-looking black guy wasn’t the boxer, he was a go-go dancer. I like that they flip things like that.

This is also a prime example of identity cues in our clothes and self-presentation. The witch doctor the other night was pretty obvious–who else runs around with a dead animal on his head? The lifeguard wears swim shorts and a wetsuit top. And so on.

There are a lot of ways to go into social psychology with this show (see also social categorization), and that might be why I like it. I don’t know when this will finally settle on the TV schedule, but so far it’s been at 8 p.m. ET on NBC. Try to find it in your area; it’s definitely worth a watch.

Pixies

One of the concepts that we just talked about in my class (in the social psych chapter) is stereotype vulnerability. Stereotypes do not only affect the thoughts and behaviors of the people who hold them, but also the people who may possibly be stereotyped. I talk about a couple of fairly innocuous examples in class, but this sketch from “Chappelle’s Show” does a really great job of demonstrating it. I wouldn’t show this in class though, because, like many things from Dave Chappelle, it pushes the boundaries. Not for those who are at all thin-skinned or easily offended.

Racial pixies

This sketch was also cited by Chappelle as one that made him wonder if he had gone too far in his comedy and was perpetuating stereotypes instead of making fun of them. Because of this, the audience was invited to discuss what they saw and how they felt about it. It’s interesting to see what people have to say about this.

Audience discussion  (contains some offensive language)

So, what do you think? Do you find yourself trying not to conform to certain stereotypes? As both a woman and a Latina, I certainly have been in this situation. What about you?

Hello, Gorgeous!

“Know thyself.” It’s something we take for granted a large part of the time. But self-awareness is pretty huge in the whole scheme of things. Once we get the idea that we are an entity separate from others, we can start examining aspects of our own experience and think about others’ experiences from that context. Self-awareness lays the foundation for things like subjectivity and intersubjectivity, in which we interpret our own realities and the realities we create by interacting with others. Sorry, I have subjectivity on the brain because it’s a large part of what I’m writing about in my qualifying exams (from which I am currently taking a quick break).

Anyway, Happy is an elephant at the Bronx Zoo who has shown some evidence of self-awareness. Researchers used the ol’ “mark on the head” paradigm to show that Happy recognizes herself in the mirror. This sounds really simple, but most species can’t do this. I know my cats don’t do it, I’ve tried it.

More research is needed to determine the extent of awareness and see if it generalizes to other elephants (so far, Happy’s zoo-mates don’t pass the mark test). But still, pretty cool.

Fugue in D

CNN reported on a man who turned up in Denver who had no idea who he was or what he was doing there. He went on TV pleading for clues to his identity. This is a classic case of dissociative fugue, or what I like to call “soap opera amnesia”. It’s not due to a brain injury, as retrograde or anterograde amnesias are. This is purely psychological, and extremely rare. Apparently our friend “Al” is really Jeff from Olympia, Washington. How he ended up in Denver is anyone’s guess. He also hasn’t recovered his memory of himself yet. The news outlets probably won’t report on his recovery, but it would be interesting to see how long it takes for him to get his memory back and also to find out what triggered this episode.

EDIT 2/20/07: A student of mine sent me this link, updating us on Jeff’s condition. Still no sign of the lost memories, but he’s building new ones with his wife.

Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

Time reports on a study out of Cornell University that claims TV watching causes autism. They used correlational, not experimental methods, which renders their conclusion of causation complete speculation. It’s studies like this that makes the general public skeptical of science, even though I would not be inclined to label this as “science” so much as “sensationalism”. At least the news outlets reporting the study have done a decent job of showing the unreliability of the purported link. I’m just mad that this study was even done. What a complete waste of time and resources. It just goes to show you that if you are determined enough, you can twist your statistics to support just about anything.

As Seen on TV…

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been busy with teaching, qualifying exams, and other fun stuff. However, I have noticed a couple of things on TV lately. Namely, some episodes of shows that have featured various disorders.

“Grey’s Anatomy” last week had a “split-brain” patient–someone who was suffering from such severe epileptic seizures that he had his corpus callosum severed to contain them. The resulting difficulties in associating names and faces was explored. Also on the same episode was a little girl who suffered from a pain disorder–she couldn’t feel it. This is extremely rare, but it can happen. The consequences, as were shown in the storyline, can be quite severe. Sometimes feeling pain is a GOOD thing.

“Desperate Housewives” featured a storyline in which a character wakes from a coma and experiences retrograde amnesia. I’ll be interested in their accuracy in portraying this–usually TV shows are notorious for overdramatizing amnesia and blurring the facts of the phenomenon. So, keep up and we’ll see.

Back to work! Promise to update more often in the future.

Armchair Diagnosis

HUGE DISCLAIMER: I am not a clinical psychologist, nor am I a person qualified to actually diagnose mental disorders, despite having a limited background in clinical psychology and having taken graduate courses in abnormal psychology and taught the undergraduate course. To my knowledge, John Mark Karr has not been formally diagnosed or undergone a psychiatric evaluation by a qualified professional. The following is pure speculation on my part. There, did I cover my ass enough?

I have followed the JonBenet Ramsey case from the beginning because I was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado (and was living there at the time of the crime). I remember seeing the story on the 5 o’clock news on December 26, 1996, and since then I have read every newspaper story and devoured every bit of information I could obtain about the case. I have had several theories of who might be responsible, but I’m not a detective and I’m just as stumped as the Boulder Police were and are. Call it intuition, call it an intimate knowledge of the facts of the case, but I never thought that John Mark Karr was actually responsible for JonBenet’s murder. His story just never added up for me.

Now, based on the DNA evidence, we know that Karr did not commit the crime, one wonders why he would confess to something he didn’t do. My personal theory is that he suffers (I’m not sure if this is the right word, he seems to be pretty content in his delusions) from delusional disorder. DSM-IV-TR defines the criteria for delusional disorder as follows:

• Criterion A: Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
• Criterion B: Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met (i.e., patients do not have simultaneous hallucinations, disorganized speech, negative symptoms such as affective flattening, or grossly disorganized behavior). Note: Tactile and olfactory hallucinations may be present in delusional disorder if they are related to the delusional theme.
• Criterion C: Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired, and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
• Criterion D: If mood episodes have occurred concurrently with delusions, their total duration has been brief relative to the duration of the delusional periods.
• Criterion E: The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition.
• Subtypes are defined, including erotomanic, grandiose, jealous, persecutory, somatic, mixed, and unspecified.

Perusing this description and assuming Karr has never been diagnosed with schizophrenia (which I’m sure would have been in the press if he had been, also his behavior–other than his apparent flat affect– doesn’t seem congruent with someone who has that diagnosis) or is not on drugs, it looks like he’d meet the criteria fairly easily for the unspecified type. Or possibly the grandiose type, given that JonBenet Ramsey has risen to iconic status in our culture, and his self-perceived association with her could arguably be grandiose. Anyway, why else would someone be so convinced that he committed a crime that he had nothing to do with?

He also meets the criteria for pedophilia, one of the paraphilias listed in DSM-IV-TR. So to play armchair clinical psychologist, and for those of you keeping score at home, I’d say that John Mark Karr has delusional disorder comorbid with pedophilia.

I’ll be interested to hear about the results of his psychiatric evaluation if he undergoes one in connection to his possible indictment in California for 5 counts of possessing child pornography.

We’re Only Human

Just a few minutes ago I received an email asking me to renew my membership in the Association for Psychological Science (formerly the American Psychological Society). Embedded in this wordy email keeping me updated on the goings-on of APS, there was a link to a new blog published by APS that discusses various current research findings in psychology. It’s definitely worth a look, and some interesting reading:

We’re Only Human

Food, Glorious Food

Glamour magazine has an article this month on “The Sneaky Little Ways America is Making You Fat”, an interesting look at the social psychology of how and what we eat. When I talk about hunger and food in my class, I try to stress the interaction of culture and food in our society (e.g., how 99% of all first dates involve getting something to eat, or how it’s culturally acceptable to curl up with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in order to cope with heartbreak). This article provides a good review of other examples.

Not included in the online article, but in the print version, is a box on “How to feel full on less food”. The second tip is to “make your meals appear bigger”:

“Studies show that people feel fuller when their food looks like a large portion–even if it’s just an illusion and not the result of added calories. Pad your hamburger or sandwich with lettuce and tomato so it looks thicker; blend your smoothie with ice to give it more volume; pour your juice in a tall, narrow glass so it seems to contain more liquid; or serve your meal on a smaller plate or in a smaller bowl.” [italics added]

Hmm…Sounds like taking advantage of an inability to conserve (or inducing a deliberate ignorance of conservation properties) may be a “stupid human trick” to help lose weight. There’s a study in here somewhere…the only question is whether it’s been done already.

The Knowledge

I use a study of London taxi drivers in my class as an example of how the hippocampus acts like an internal GPS system that helps us remember mental “maps” of areas. These taxi drivers have to pass a notoriously difficult exam (The Knowledge) about the layout of London’s streets before becoming licensed. London cabbies have been shown to have a larger hippocampus than the average citizen, either as a result of learning those layouts or predisposing the ability to learn them (or some other factor affecting both of these; it’s a correlational finding).

Now that computerized GPS systems are becoming more prevalent, The Knowledge may become obsolete. But London cabbies are decidedly old-school, holding out on widespread implementation in their cabs. If GPS does take hold, does this mean the end of the London taxi driver as we know it?

Find the CNN article here.

On a related note, a favorite new blog of mine is New York Hack, a blog chronicling the adventures of a NYC taxi driver who also happens to be female. Fascinating stories, and she’s got a book deal, so keep an eye out at your local bookstore. It’s a great read.