Science Sunday: Evolutionary Psychology: The Emperor's New Paradigm

I've always been suspicious about Evolutionary Psychology, and David Buller is (or was nine years ago) as well. Let me be clear, I don't doubt evolution; I doubt in the methods and results ascribed to evolutionary psychology. So in short this paper is preaching to the choir. Prepare for some rah-rah in this post.

Tangent: I think the title of this article is needlessly inflammatory, just as much as "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience." It comes as no surprise to me that when scientists engage in tearing down other scientists research, we do so with no lack of venom. Criticizing (destructive or otherwise) the science of others is half of what science is (the other 90% is statistical errors), in my experience scientists have a thick skin about it.

"Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it (Cosmides & Tooby 1997)."

This definition sets up the paradigm of evolutionary psychology (EP) with the goal to analyze human behavior as an adaptation that would have helped our ancient hunter-gatherer kin survive or reproduce. This seems logical enough, but how could this be science? In review of The Method, we see that logical observation is only half of the equation, and that relevant and testable explanations are also required (Copi 1982). In this paper Buller examines three 'discoveries' of EP and suggests that they are not sufficiently supported by evidence.

The Cheater-Detection Module

If altruism is an evolved adaptive behavior (a vampire bat regurgitates excess blood for others to eat so that when times are lean others will reciprocate the behavior), then cheating would also be adaptive (vampire bats that do not regurgitate blood), and thus cheater-detection would be required for altruism to remain an adaptive behavior (vampire bats that don't regurgitate for fat bats hording all the blood). Need an explanation of vampire bats sharing blood? EP would then like to apply such a logical progression to human altruism and the evolution of a cheater-detection module, and that this module would focus on social interactions.

EP researchers claim to have evidence of this predisposition to thinking about social interactions by manipulating the content of situations (social and otherwise) presented as part of the Wason selection task. The original Wason selection task involves logical deductions about the relationships between the color of a card and the number printed on the other side; the EP modification changed this to social relationships between the age of a person and the presence of alcohol. Unfortunately, as Buller illustrates, the manipulations used were flawed at least linguistically if not also logically; by making the situation a social interaction researchers also changed the logical type of the situation from indicative (if statements) to deontic (must statements). I'm not entirely sure if I've use the correct grammar vocabulary, but the important thing is that subjects may have interpreted the social situation as what "must" be instead of as an "if-then".

Sex Differences in Jealousy

The theory from EP is that men are more concerned with sexual infidelity since his offspring would have to compete with another male's offsprings for maternal care. Likewise, women are more concerned with emotional infidelity since her mate might withdraw paternal care from her and her offspring. Thus men respond to sexual cues of infidelity while women respond to emotional cues. EP researcher David Buss gathered survey data from a questionnaire on infidelity to support this theory. And while it did show that men care more about sexual infidelity than women, it did not show that men cared more about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. Additionally female sexual infidelity is more (compared to males) indicative of general relationship dissatisfaction and is more likely to result in abandonment. So the perceived threat of the infidelity may be the cause of the sex-difference, rather than an adaptive behavior related to competition of offspring.

Discriminative Parental Solicitude

EP suggests that substitute parents are more likely to engage in dangerous parenting than genetic parents. I'll restate that: Step-parents are more likely to abuse their kids than biological parents. Estimating conservatively step-children are 8 times more likely to be physically abused. But the problem is that the data are confounded. Invariably these data come from official state records, and unfortunately state records only note about half of the fatal maltreatment of children officially. Maybe as few as 1 in 10 child abuse cases are confirmed by the state. Also, state child-protection workers often use the presence of a step-parent as a diagnostic indicator of abuse; step-parents are more likely to be recorded as abusers by the state simply because they are step-parents. So it may be there step-parents don't abuse kids anymore than biological parents; the state just catches more step-parents. Results: inconclusive. In the interest of full-disclosure: I'm a step-father.

I'll close here with a direct quote from this paper:

"Thus, although the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm is a bold and innovative explanatory framework, I believe it has failed to provide an accurate understanding of human psychology from an evolutionary perspective."

Buller, D. (2005). Evolutionary psychology: the emperor's new paradigm Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9 (6), 277-283 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.003

Science Sunday: Gut Reaction

I recently read a 2006 paper titled "Visceral Influences on Risk-Taking Behavior." In spite of it's problems this paper uses some great language. Take for example this opening paragraph from the introduction:

"People often do things that they almost immediately regret. Would-be dieters succumb to the lure of forsworn foods, only to curse their weak wills once their hunger (or the food) is gone. Unfaithful spouses live wracked with guilt after an impulsive sexual dalliance, only to repeat the cycle again and again, each time as bewildered as the last by the inconsistency between the strength of their resolve in the company of their families and the crumbling of this resolve in the presence of a willing lover." (Ditto, et al., 2006)

Forsworn. Dalliance. These aren't words that get bandied about normally. The paper also sports a comprehensive literature review of "failures of will" dating back to the 4th century BCE and the Aristotelian akrasia, where a person knowingly does something wrong. Economists have also been baffled about our ability to act against our own self-interest, and folks like Larry Winget make a career telling us about it. But why do people behave this way?

The authors of this paper attribute it to Visceral Factors. According to Loewenstein (1996) Visceral Factors are motivational states such as hunger, thirst, pain, and sexual desire. In this paper the authors looked at hunger and sexual desire and how exposure to them led participants to make irrational or impulsive decisions. (Surprised yet?)

Chocolate chiopcookie

In the first experiment participants wagered spending more time in the lab doing experiments  vs. chocolate chip cookies. One group had the cookies described to them, but the other got to see and smell the cookies. The smellers were the fellers ones more likely to wager time, even when told they didn't have good odds. The idea being that the visceral hunger response led to the impulsive, riskier decision. Side note: Imagine how awesome it would be to be the researcher; tempting hapless volunteers with delicious cookies but forcing them to wager time just in the hopes of getting a taste.

French Kiss

The second experiment involved a vignette where a young couple begins to make out and prepare to have sex, and then realize they have no condom. In the visceral condition this was presented as a video, in the non-visceral condition this was presented in a passage that participants would read. Then participants were asked to respond as if they were in that situation how likely they would be to have sex even without a condom. Again the idea is that the stronger visceral response to viewing the soft-core video was the reason that group was more likely to choose to engage in risky sexual behavior.

All of this is great, and as I said I thought the paper has great use of language in science writing. But I'm not so sure that it is just viscera, and not just stronger stimuli. In general Bigger Stimuli = Bigger Response. The response here being desire for the stimuli. What I'm saying is, you want the cookies you smell more because the smell is more stimulating in general, not just because it made your tummy rumble. So in order to control for the impact of the stimuli, you would have to find a way to use the same stimuli but have it effect the viscera of only some participants. I think you could do this with a group of quadriplegic participants, right? I mean they have viscera but they can't sense them. Or maybe easier you could have a hungry and full groups when presented with cookies, but that I think would still be looking at motivation, not viscera exclusively. But hey, I don't have to have the solution, just identify the problem.

Ditto, P., Pizarro, D., Epstein, E., Jacobson, J., & MacDonald, T. (2006). Visceral influences on risk-taking behavior Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19 (2), 99-113 DOI: 10.1002/bdm.520

Science Sunday: The ontogeny of behaviour in the albino rat

Every Sunday, I'd like to post a review of an interesting peer-reviewed science article. To kick things off I'm picking an old favorite, originally posted in 1964! It is certainly well cited, Google Scholar lists the citation count at 452! Indeed this paper was a "Citation Classic" in Current Contents in 1981. At the time the lead author  Robert Bolles, was still living and stated:

"I have always believed in the idea that experimenters should look at their animals...the human eyeball is the instrument of choice if you want to observe a new phenomenon, and particularly if you want to gain a new understanding of it."

Sprague-Dawley Rat

If you have ever wondered why science uses rats the answer is that we know everything there is to know about rats. We know how they age, how they metabolize ... anything, how the respond to stress, how they develop over time, even how they laugh when tickled. Well, our understanding of rat behavior begins in antiquity but is greatly expanded by this 1964 article originally published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

In fact this article describes qualitatively the behaviors of infant rats from birth to about 24 days (rats are weened at day 21). In the first experiment, Bolles and Woods observed 13 litters with an average of 9 pups (117 pups) in their "natural" laboratory environment (cages). The animals were of the Sprague-Dawley line, which is still used today. They did use several different methods of observation and schedules of observation to arrive at a comprehensive guide to the ontogeny of lab rats.

They begin with postural observations, describing three postures that develop over time: lying, sitting and standing. Lying being the default resting position of the rat, often using other bodies for support. Sitting began on day 4 when subjects first began to lift their heads, and was fully developed by day 17 when subjects could sit and perform activities such as grooming. Also beginning on day 4 are the first attempts to support weight on the legs, and by day 10 the animals can support themselves. By day 13 they can run, by day 15 they can stand on three legs and scratch with the fourth. They can rear up on two legs with support for the front legs on day 16 and can rear independent of support (for the purpose of play-fighting with siblings) by day 18.

In similiar fashion reflexes are described. Without relating the specific timeline the reflexes are: twitiching, head waving, stretching and yawning, body flexion, righting reaction, freezing, sniffing, auditory orientation, and visual orientation. When describing startle response int he auditory orientation section there is a great footnote on the word "click:"

*The sound used was relatively well-controlled and constant, but, unfortunately rather poorly defined; it was the sound of a Parker T-Ball Jotter pen being retracted at a distance of approximately 1 foot.

Psychologists are hilarious. Also found it interesting that the animals did not freeze in fear until day 26 and they froze for approximately 15 seconds. I've never seen any rats hold still for that long unless they were sleeping. Following this functional activities are described. Here is the list: sleeping, consumatory behavior, locomotor activity, climbing, grooming, exploration  manipulation, digging, and defecation  Here the theme of development was similar as above, with rudimentary non-functional behaviors appearing first (such as scratching motion without making contact with the skin), that later developed into full-fledged adult-like behavior.

Ultimately we get a description of the social behaviors in the observed rats. Social behavior in young rats is evidenced by chasing and fighting. Bolles, and Woods observed rats begin this social play-fighting on day 14 when their eyes began to open.The activity peaks between day 20 and 30 when the whole litter engages in a high level of activity.

Table 1

In a second experiment Bolles and Woods attempt to quantify the behaviors they observed in the first experiment. Using experimental methods the authors observed 12 rats (2 each from 6 litters) and summarized their behaviors as percentages. To the right is table 1 from the paper. There are many more graphs showing the time course of the development of behaviors and it really is a fascinating reference, but I won't reproduce all of that here.

The first point of discussion and perhaps the most salient is that from these findings we can view rats as a far more social animal than might otherwise be considered. Early social interactions are to wrangle for nursing or comfort, and later become play fighting and chasing. As the authors noted this social behavior likely leads to long lasting changes in the adult organism and "offers interesting possibilities for research in this area." (See the next 50 years of rat studies for more on these possibilities)

Bolles, R., & Woods, P. (1964). The ontogeny of behaviour in the albino rat Animal Behaviour, 12 (4), 427-441 DOI: 10.1016/0003-3472(64)90062-4

A Classy Post

Welcome dear reader to a post of self-promotion. I am teaching TWO special topics classes coming up and I want you to take them. So here I will give you a brief sketch of what each class is going to be about and hopefully you want to register for one or both of them.

PDF Version

First, this summer I'm teaching Psychology on Film. This will be the third summer that I've taught this course. The theory of this class works thusly:

1. Art imitates life
2. Artists (film makers in this case) are attempting to capture moments of the human experience
3. Psychology is an integral part of the human experience
4. Artists, perhaps inadvertently, capture psychology in their art (in this case film).
5. As fledgling psychologists we can examine, discuss, and evaluate this process in order to gain not only a better understanding of the film, but also a better understanding of the underlying psychological phenomenon.

In summer class we meet for three hours twice a week, so that means in each class we will watch a film, and then discuss. I try to pair the films each week so that both are about a related topic. Each week you will write a short essay that explores the psych phenomenon in each or both films. Generally during the discussion I give you a solid sample outline of a perfectly acceptable paper. So if you like talking about movies, or psychology, then this might be a good class for you.

PDF Version

The second class, coming this fall, Drugs and Behavior. This is the first semester I've been able to offer this class and I think you'll enjoy taking it. This is an introductory psychopharmacology class where we will talk about various chemical agents and how they interact with the brain and change behavior. This is not a class about addiction, treating addiction, drug policy, or the criminality of certain drugs. We will however be studying both therapeutic and recreational drugs including: alcohol, amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, hallucinogens, marijuana, nicotine, opiates, psycho-therapeutic medications, stimulants, and probably some other drugs. So I imagine this class is valuable for students majoring in criminal justice, human services, nursing, or psychology. Although anyone with an interest in the effects of drugs on behavior would be welcome.

Third, is an old class delivered in a new way. This summer. I'm offering Intro to Psych as a Hybrid class. The purpose of a hybrid class is to blend on-line and face-to-face class elements. On-line you'll be doing all the content work, reading material, watching videos lectures, etc. In class we will work specifically on applying that content in activities, projects, and such. So this results in meeting once a week instead of twice a week. For example, you might read in your textbook about the principles of operant conditioning, watch a video on-line about pet training, then class will meet at Rabbit Run Park and we can teach your dog a trick. If you are someone you know needs to take Psych-101 then I think this would be a fun and interesting way to do it.

So I hope you register for my classes, I'll look forward to seeing you. And if you've take my summer film class in the past, feel free to write a testimonial in the comments! 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cell Phones

Cat on the Phone

In the past I wrote about some big problems I have with cell phones:

1. Students are rude with their cell phones
2. Cell-phone bans cause students significant anxiety.

Science is the best way to understand the universe and solve our problems; I wanted to tackle this problem scientifically. So I applied The Method.

First step: ask an answerable question. This is a bit harder than it might at first seem, since whatever question I ask will need some definitions so that it can be answered. Simply asking, "What is best?" is not sufficient unless we all agree on what "best" is. So here is what I came up with:

How much cell-phone use in class results in the greatest academic achievement, course engagement, and student satisfaction?

That question has three measurable outcomes, as long as I define how I will measure those results. So for the purposes of this experiment I used the following operational definitions:

• Academic achievement was measured by overall course grade (points out of 1000).
• Course engagement was measured by counting good-questions asked per class.
• Student Satisfaction was measured by an end-of-course evaluation by students.

The next step is to do background research so I read a multitude of articles about cell-phones and attention, cell-phones and learning, anxiety and learning, cell-phones and anxiety, and many other permutations of the key-words: cell-phone, learning, anxiety, engagement, classroom, and teaching. After weeks of literature review I thought I was ready to design my study.

Since I was teaching three sections of Introduction to Psychology on the same day that semester. I planned a different cell-phone policy for each class and put the relevant information in the syllabus.

VERBOTEN!

1. Verboten: "There will be NO cell-phone use during class. Phones must be off or on silent, remember that vibrations are sounds, turn your phone off.. If I see your phone out I will take it and put it on my desk for the duration of class. If you are expecting an emergency call inform the caller ahead of time to wait and call after class time, or do not come to class until your anxiety about your potential emergency has been resolved. After your third offense I will begin to penalize your course grade. " (Note: Thankfully no students called my bluff on the harshness of this policy.)

2. Permissive: There was no statement about cell-phones in the syllabus and I ignored completely any use or ringing of cell-phones.

3. Interval: "The class will be organized into roughly 20-minute blocks of activity (20 minutes of lecture, 20 minutes of video, 20 minutes of group work, 20 minutes of an in-class activity, etc.). During these times you may not use your cell-phone, not even for texting. However, between blocks there will be 2-5 minutes of transition time during which you are free to check your messages, send a tweet, update your status, or whatever it is you do on your phones. I will make clear announcements about when it is cell-time and when it is class-time before and after these transitions."

I generated a lot of usable data from this semester and went about analyzing the results. As far as academic achievement was concerned there was no significant difference between all three courses. The Interval section had significantly greater course engagement and student satisfaction (even out scoring the cell-phone permissive section). So to interpret and speculate a bit, I think this shows that good students are still good students regardless of cell-phone policy (they probably weren't using their phones even when allowed) and bad students are still bad students even if they aren't texting. But, students engage with the course more when they are not anxious about their missed messages while remaining free from texts for large blocks of class time. I also speculate that student satisfaction is directly influenced by higher classroom engagement.

The last step will be to share my results, which I suppose I am doing here, but I'm also preparing a manuscript to share with the larger scholarship of teaching and learning community. In the mean time I have adopted the interval policy in all of my courses since. Thank you Science!

A Little Bit of Unpredictable Stress Everyday

That is the recipe for depression. Chronic Mild Stress (CMS). Or at least it is the recipe I used to depress rats. As I mentioned earlier I worked with rats to research the mood-effects of Salvia. One important piece of this research was the idea that a depressed brain is different than a healthy brain and may respond differently to drug exposure. So in order to apply that in rats, I needed a way to create depressed rats. For me, that meant using CMS.

In the CMS model, developed first by Richard Katz, rats exposed to mild stressors everyday showed a decrease in sucrose consumption that was later reversed by administration of an anti-depressant (Katz, 82). Let me explain.

Chronic (happening regularly over time) Mild (not severely traumatic) Stress (a feeling of strain to adapt to changing environmental (or psychological) conditions). Practically this means doing things to rats to make them a little bit uncomfortable everyday. In my research, inspired by work that came out of Paul Willner's lab, this involved the following: overnight strobe-light (2Hz),  cage tilting at 45 degrees, forced paired housing (a strange rat was put in the subject rats cage separated by a wire mesh), continuous illumination (there is no night), overnight food deprivation, overnight water deprivation, and empty water bottle exposure. These were all done briefly enough not to cause excessive stress, remember I was going for uncomfortable not traumatic.

A Long-Evans Lab Rat

There is a hallmark feature of human depression called anhedonia. Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from pleasurable stimuli. Or joylessness. Anhedonia is the reason that depressed people don't laugh at jokes, or smile when a baby giggles, or enjoy doing any of the things they used to enjoy doing. Pleasure doesn't feel good anymore. If you or someone you know has ever been depressed it is likely you witnessed anhedonia.

Happy rats love to drink sugar water. Even when dissolving a very small amount of sugar in water (less than 1% sucrose solution), rats show a strong preference for sweet-water over regular water. We can measure that by giving the rats two water bottles, one with plain drinking water and one with sweet-water. Come back 24-hours later and measure how much of each the rat drank. Happy rats drink around 90% sweet-water. We might say that sweet-water has a greater hedonic value; it is more pleasurable for the rat.

After three weeks of CMS my rats exhibited anhedonia. After three weeks of exposure to the mild stressors listed about the rats no longer show a preference for sweet-water. Again we present the rats with two water bottles, one with plain drinking water and one with sweet-water. 24-hours later we see that they drank about 50% sweet-water. This shows no preference for the sweet-water. Even though the sweet-water might taste better (have a higher hedonic value), the rats don't care. Because they are joyless. They have developed anhedonia. They are depressed (or at least they are now a robust animal model of human depression).

Katz, R. (1982). Animal model of depression: Pharmacological sensitivity of a hedonic deficit Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 16 (6), 965-968 DOI: 10.1016/0091-3057(82)90053-3

Willner, P. (2005). Chronic Mild Stress (CMS) Revisited: Consistency and Behavioural-Neurobiological Concordance in the Effects of CMS Neuropsychobiology, 52 (2), 90-110 DOI: 10.1159/000087097

Servire Est Vivere

As a member of the faculty here at SCC I am encouraged to engage in campus service. Which means I should do things on campus. Fortunately, I would do things even without encouragement, but it is still nice to know that the college is interested in fostering this kind of internal community. So... what does campus service look like?

One of the first things I did on campus was volunteer to speak at the annual Scary Movie Marathon. Around Halloween I saw a flier advertising the scary movies that were going to be shown and I thought that would be a great opportunity for me to bring some academic psychology to what otherwise would be a purely entertaining movie. That first year I spoke about the nature of fear, and about a different topic from psychology (Aliens, Zombies, and Bloody Mary) each year since.

Last spring I helped to organize a week of child abuse prevention events during child abuse awareness month. This included speakers from the community like Dr. Jamie Spurrier-Kondis a pediatrician specializing in child abuse, and also a nationally recognized advocate Erin Merryn who went on to be named Glamour magazine's woman of the year. I also got to speak at an anti-bullying event when speaker cancelled at the last minute.

Aside from talking, I serve on tasks force (is that right?) and committees. That really means I go to meetings and try not to doodle too much. Like with most meetings some are effective and others not. Either way I always try to bring some entertaining ideas to the table.Presently I serve on the Long-Range Planning Steering Committee (LRC-SC) and the Distance Learning and Educational Technology (DLET) Task Force.  Both are trying to create systems and plans where, in many cases, there was no system before. It is very challenging since so many interests are vested in both of these arenas. I suspect that there will be no way to please everyone in either of these groups, but hopefully we can find a healthy consensus for our plans.


I've also been helping with the promotion of The American Theater Festival. This is the most fun I think you are allowed to have doing campus service. The English and History departments work together each year to stage plays (RFK and Gertrude Stein) that are connected to American History. There are so many events aside from just the plays that are going to make this spring a fun time to be at SCC. If you are looking for more information you can check out the ATF Facebook page. This year, in an effort to increase attendance to the plays we are trying to do more promotion on social media. Like this blog, the ATF has a blog, but the best part about it is that this year we found a very special guest blogger to write for us: Gertrude Stein herself! So go ahead over to her latest blog post and check it out!