Sunday, September 1, 2013

Contradictions

An interesting reaction to the book is that it has contradictions. The most popular one is that I say that I was not the victim of abuse but then describe a less than idyllic childhood. Perhaps a close second is that I say that I have average looks yet consider my own breasts to be remarkably beautiful. Or maybe another is that I say I don't necessarily think anybody is better than anybody else, but I happen to be smarter than most people.

To me these things aren't contradictions. I never felt like the victim of abuse. Although I have sometimes played the role of victim (provoking my father, trying to get teachers fired or get better educational/job opportunities, etc.), perhaps due to my self-delusion/megalomania about being powerful and being someone who acts rather than be acted upon, or perhaps due to an inability to really feel bad about bad consequences that happen to me, I have never been able to actually identify with victimhood. I love my breasts, but I know that objectively I am average looking (I feel like men should understand this concept well, I feel like I have almost never known a man who wasn't infatuated with his genitalia). And I just happen to be smarter than most people -- that is exactly what it means to score in the 99th percentile on tests measuring intelligence (at least speaking of the type(s) of intelligence that these tests are meant to measure, and I acknowledge even in the book that there are a variety of different ways to be intelligent). Being smarter than most people is a fact about me the same way that my height and weight are facts. If I were exceptionally tall or fat, I would acknowledge those things about myself too without making any normative judgment that being tall makes me better or being fat makes me worse. I know people tend to think that smarter = better, but I have seen enough incompetent geniuses to not hold this opinion myself.

But I think people's negative reactions to seeming contradictions suggests something about people's discomfort with ambiguity. From Joss Whedon's recent graduation address to Wesleyan University:

[Our culture] is not long on contradiction or ambiguity. … It likes things to be simple, it likes things to be pigeonholed—good or bad, black or white, blue or red. And we’re not that. We’re more interesting than that. And the way that we go into the world understanding is to have these contradictions in ourselves and see them in other people and not judge them for it. To know that, in a world where debate has kind of fallen away and given way to shouting and bullying, that the best thing is not just the idea of honest debate, the best thing is losing the debate, because it means that you learn something and you changed your position. The only way really to understand your position and its worth is to understand the opposite.

That doesn’t mean the crazy guy on the radio who is spewing hate, it means the decent human truths of all the people who feel the need to listen to that guy. You are connected to those people. They’re connected to him. You can’t get away from it. This connection is part of contradiction. It is the tension I was talking about. This tension isn’t about two opposite points, it’s about the line in between them, and it’s being stretched by them. We need to acknowledge and honor that tension, and the connection that that tension is a part of. Our connection not just to the people we love, but to everybody, including people we can’t stand and wish weren’t around. The connection we have is part of what defines us on such a basic level.

I liked this a lot. Some of the most black and white thinkers use sources that are anything but, e.g. the ultra-religious using scriptural texts that portray a God of seeming contradictions (both kind and vengeful, both forgiving and damning) to justify making their own black and white assessments of certain things as being pure evil and others being unassailable good. A little like the junk science you see in sociopath research. The Joss Whedon quote also reminded me of one of my favorite twitter quotes:

UPDATE: I think this article about being gay and Catholic is very interesting and relevant to any discussion of seeming contradictions and how there are many ways to live a life consistent with what you believe, despite what everyone else might think.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Junk science

I often see sociopath research that by itself is not dubious, but the implications or the conclusions that the researchers draw from the evidence seems stretched, non sequitur, or wholly unsupported by the data. For instance, I wrote about research suggesting that the sociopath's corpus callosum is longer and thinner than the average person's brain, resulting in a faster rate of transfer of information between the two hemispheres of their brain. Rather than cite this as a possible advantage of the sociopath brain, researchers conjectured that this might explain why sociopaths have "less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness." What? Maybe it's just my lack of understanding, but that conclusion doesn't seem to follow at all from the fact that sociopaths have a more efficient corpus callosum.

Sometimes the problem with the research or logic is the complete circularity of the research -- i.e. the tautology of the assertion people who manifest antisocial traits tend to behave antisocially. For instance, a new study found out that people who self-report that "what matters for me is the bottom line,"will behave more ruthlessly and selfishly in prisoner's dilemma style games:

The study involved normal undergraduate students around age 19. The students were divided into small groups and told to converse on a topic of their choice for 10 minutes. Then, they were separated and given a questionnaire to measure their psychopathic tendencies. The questionnaire asked them to rate their agreement with statements, such as"what matters for me is the bottom line," or "I am often angry in social situations." There are two kinds of psychopathy, but this study was looking at the classic "conniving and cold" psychopaths.

Next, the researchers had the students play a "prisoner's dilemma" game, in which each person was given a sum of money that they could keep for themselves or transfer to a partner, for whom it would be doubled. For example, both people would start with $3; they could either keep $3 or give $6 to their partner. If the game has several iterations, it is in both people's best interest to cooperate and give the money away, because both will receive $6 instead of $3. But if it's just a one-shot game, it's in a person's best interest to keep the $3 for himself or herself, as there can be no consequence of not cooperating. (This experiment involved a one-shot game, though participants weren't told that fact.)

The students who scored higher on the questionnaire (meaning they were more psychopathic) were more likely to betray their partner and keep the money for themselves if that partner interrupted them more frequently (a sign of disrespect). The more psychopathic students were also more likely to betray a partner with whom they appeared to have less in common, and were therefore less likely to see again. In other words, those with more psychopathic tendencies only cooperated if there was something in it for them.

The conclusion:

"Traits such as deceitfulness and conceitedness — as opposed to honesty and humility — involve a willingness to take advantage of others when the opportunity arises."

Hm.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Borderline personality disorder vs. sociopathy

This was an interesting article from the Psychology Today blog relating an experiment done examining the brain activity of sociopaths and comparing it to that of people with borderline personality disorder. Why these two disorders? Apparently, sociopathic and borderline traits occur with equal frequency among violent offenders, but they reach their antisocial behavior in different ways:

Typically, antisocial offenders with borderline personality disorder are emotionally reactive, unable to regulate emotions, bereft of cognitive empathy (knowing how another person feels), rageful, and reactively aggressive. By contrast, antisocial offenders with high psychopathic traits can be characterized as emotionally detached, cognitively empathic, morally problematic, exploitative, and proactively and reactively aggressive.

The experiment:

The investigators took MRI scans of the two groups of antisocial offenders, with the aim of exploring differences in the cerebral structure of their brains. All offenders had been convicted for capital, violent crimes (including severe bodily injury such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, or rape) from high-security forensic facilities and penal institutions and were formally diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. There was also a comparison group of healthy men.

The results:

The antisocial offenders with borderline personality disorder had alterations in the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions, which are involved in emotion regulation and reactive aggression; there were also differences in the temporal pole, which is involved in the interpretation of other peoples’ motives. By contrast, the antisocial offenders with high psychopathic traits showed reduced volume mostly in midline cortical areas, which are involved in the processing of self-referential information and self reflection (i.e., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus) and recognizing emotions of others (postcentral gyrus). 

I thought this was interesting. I wrote previously about the connection between sociopathy and alexithymia, or the decreased ability to identify, understand, and describe one's own emotions. This trait has been linked to a lack of empathy, the idea being that if you are unable to understand your own emotions, you don't stand much of a chance of understanding the emotional worlds of others. I feel like I don't understand my emotions, that they feel out of context to me, like I'm getting only snippets of a movie played backwards. This feeling probably contributes to my weak sense of self. This brain scan study seems to comport with this theory -- that sociopaths suffer from an ability to process self-referential information and to self-reflect, and that consequently sociopaths have flexible understandings of not only morality, but basically every human trait.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Nature vs. nurture

This New York Times article states the obvious -- bad parents can't take all the credit for good children and good parents can't take all the blame for bad children. Interestingly, it goes out of its way to say that bad behavior does not necessarily equal sociopathy:
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.
She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.
When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.
I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.
Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.
But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?
To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.
But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?
My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.
But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.
But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.
When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic. . . .
I often tell readers that not every asshole ex of theirs is a sociopath, and the same applies for misbehaving children. In this situation, though, I actually think it is foolish to discount the potential role of sociopathy. There is a strong genetic but weak environmental link to sociopathy, which is consistent with having two normal sons and one sociopathic one. Furthermore, although inconsistent discipline may not be enough to cause anyone to become a sociopath, it could trigger sociopathy in someone who was genetically predisposed to it, as sociopath children are particularly sensitive to incentive structures and perceived fairness (i.e. consistency and reciprocity). I obviously don't know the full story, but just based on the article, the description fits sociopathy, at least for this kid.

After spending time with my family recently, I am more convinced that nurture had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. When people ask me whether I had a bad childhood, I tell them that it was actually relatively unremarkable, however I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up -- how my independent emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. Still I don't think I was "made" into a sociopath, nor was I born one. I feel like I was born with that predisposition, that I made a relatively conscious decision to rely on those skills instead of developing others, and that the decision was made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. It's a bit similar to this author's description of her own survivalist adaptations:
If you’ve read much about writers, you know that many of us grew up with an alcoholic parent or in some otherwise dysfunctional home. Me, too. Kids who are raised in households where feelings of safety and predictability are up for grabs might be more likely to turn into storytellers. We spend a lot of emotional energy trying to guess what might happen next, and mentally drawing up different contingency plans. It puts us in the “what if” habit early.
Genetics are important for sociopathy, but environment plays a crucial role as well. Although the NY Times article notes that "[f]or better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children," such that they should be reluctant "to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become," unfortunately (or luckily?) they can still take quite a bit of blame (or credit) for sociopathic children, particularly with new "studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching." Knowledge is power.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The paternalistic pull of conscience

I asked a reader why it is a relief to know that his ex was a sociopath. His response:
Woah, Never thought about that one, I guess it makes me feel better because of two reasons.

First reason would be that it means that I can just let go, As I've read sociopaths can't change, I'm not saying "Can't get better" on purpose because I don't think you're that much different to people who can't see certain colors or can't hear certain tones. If it she can't change that means I have the complete right to let her go and not try to help her and still feel good about myself.

Second reason is that it gives me the right to actually blame everything on her, keep my hands clean as some people say. I guess I sound about low on the empathy when saying that but truthfully that's how I feel.
My response:
That reminds me of a comment one of the socio readers once wrote: "Empaths are the idiots who will help anything that's in pain or distress for no other reason than its state." A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed a wild animal intrude on civilization. The animal was in no danger, the area wasn't that urban, but people were so surprised to see it that they began discussing what they should do about it, how they should protect him. To me it seemed bizarrely paternalistic and presumptuous for these people to assume that they knew better than this animal how best to survive, or to see any potential action on their part as anything but unwanted interference. Anyway, I guess you can't help it, but what you said reminded me of seeing people react to that wild animal.
Normal people are always trying to do the right thing, God love them, which makes it even more tragic when things like this scene from a television series happen, as described by the New Yorker:
When the three [friends] head out of the city for a day hike, in the first episode, Joe hits a possum in the road and is torn about what to do. He can’t tell whether it’s dead or alive, and he decides that the only humane solution is to make sure it’s dead, so he backs up over it, then pulls ahead again. It becomes clear that the possum is definitely not dead, as they look back and see it walking across the road. Of the three guys in the car, Joe is the most upset by this mess; at first, he thought he might have killed the animal, then he tried to kill the animal, and now he’s left wondering whether it will die because of him. It’s to the show’s credit that this isn’t (only) a metaphor for the uncertainty and the inevitable mistakes of adult life; the scene is viscerally disturbing, and you watch it closely, as if some magical method for undoing irreversible damage will reveal itself, not just to Joe but to you, too.
I always say that one of my biggest fears is well-intentioned people, from the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the colonization of the New World, to everyone who has ever done something "for my own good."
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