Catharsis: Makes me so mad I could punch a pillow!

By, Adam K. Fetterman

Taken from angrybits.com

Generally, catharsis can be described as the venting of aggressive energy in a socially acceptable way. Brad Bushman, Craig Anderson, and others are thought to have put this idea to rest a long time ago. However, they continue to add nails to the coffin, presumably, as Wray Herbert asserts, because catharsis is still widely believed to work. Wray Herbert recently wrote a post in response to the California Supreme Court’s decision that banning sales of violent video games to children was unconstitutional. In it, he describes some of the latest work coming from Bushman and his colleagues. The research indicates that those that believe in catharsis gravitate toward violent video games. This is yet another attempt to demonize both the idea of catharsis and violent video games, as Bushman and his colleagues seem so constantly eager to do. It is interesting that they show that belief in catharsis (an individual difference) leads to choosing violent video games, because it seems that much of the research on the topic tends to minimize the role of individual differences. However, violent video games are not the issue here. The issue at hand is the idea of catharsis.

While I have not done a exhaustive review of catharsis research, I am quite versed with the literature. Given the specific definition of catharsis as operationalized by certain researchers, one could conclude that catharsis does not work and may actually increase aggression. However, their definitions do not always align with more casual definitions of catharsis. Furthermore, the timeline of aggression reduction and the role of individual differences are often minimized; due to space constraints, I can give only a couple of examples. As for the issue of the type of catharsis being researched, many times the venting acts involve direct aggression towards an offending party as opposed to indirect aggression (e.g., hitting a pillow). In regards to the timeline, the “increased” aggression witnessed, in many studies, shortly follows the cathartic behavior. Indeed, it seems that for catharsis to work, an individual would need to be removed from the offending situation. Moreover, these studies should investigate the longer term health benefits to release (i.e., reduction in blood pressure). Finally, like most of the research involving violent video games, many catharsis experiments either fail to control for individual differences in tendencies towards violence and aggression, or simply minimize the role of this factor. All of this is beside the issues of ecological validity and meaningful effect sizes.

Additionally, not all researchers fail to find positive effects of catharsis. For example, Murray and Feshbach (1978) found that aggressive movements led to a decrease in aggressive fantasy, while non-aggressive movements did not. Future studies should re-investigate this study using more contemporary methods (i.e., video games). In any case, for me, the jury is still out on the case of catharsis.

Author’s note: Depending on age, I do not believe children should be exposed to violent video games.

“Calif. video game band struck down by supreme court.” – Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle

“Fast and furious: Belief, catharsis and video violence” – Wray Herbert, We’re Only Human

Murray, J. & Feshbach, S. (1978).Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater: The catharsis hypothesis revisited. Journal of Personality, 46, 462-473.

Read all of Adam K. Fetterman’s posts here.

Free will is the new god.

By, Adam K. Fetterman

Image: istockphoto/Janne Ahvo

Sam Harris has been discussing the idea of (or lack thereof) free will. He is of the mindset that there is no free will. Many scientists are in agreement, but at the same time, there is still plenty of arguing. In fact, Sam Harris has had to add some installments to his initial post on the subject. This age old debate has two sides. On the free will side (broadly), individuals argue that since we make decisions every day, all day, we must have free will. I am typing this out as I please therefore I’m exercising my free will. On the determinist side (again broadly), individuals argue that my actions are determined by automatic processes already in motion. I am typing this because of some biological or environmental push-pull. These descriptions are vague and simplistic, but the arguments go far beyond the word limit provided here. The scientific evidence on this debate is mixed, but seems weighted in favor of determinism, or lack of free will. This is true for social psychology (see Bargh, 2000) and neuroscience (Tancredi, 2007).

Even if it can be argued that the scientific evidence is not in favor of determinism, the amount of research on automaticity and the findings of brain activation prior to behavior should leave a large population of people believing in determinism. This, however, is not the case. The fact that Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne (with largely science-minded and atheist followings) have had to write numerous blog posts to continue arguing against free will, speaks to prevalence of the belief in free will. Indeed, Sarkissian and colleagues (2010) have recently found that belief in free will is quite universal (cross-culturally so) and that morality and determinism are at odds.

Jerry Coyne recently stated “I’m starting to see realize there are striking parallels between belief in God and belief in free will. There is no evidence for the existence of either, and plenty of evidence against both.  Belief in both makes people feel better.” Indeed, future psychological research should investigate a parallel benefits (real or imagined) between belief in a god and free will. I predict it will be quite similar. However, this does not exactly explain why blogs with strong atheistic followings would meet such resistance. Perhaps free will is a way to hang on to the anxiety relieving aspects of religious belief, without believing in god. Future studies should investigate this line of reasoning.

As far as the free will debate goes, I conclude that biological brain processes create consciousness, but not the other way around.

Note: Adam K. Fetterman is back from a hiatus. Check back every other Tuesday for his posts.

Sam Harris blog posts

Morality without free will    Free will and why you still don’t have itYou do not choose what you choose

Jerry Coyne posts

Joe Horgan: “We do too have free will.”

My definition of free will

Cited references

Tancredi, L. R. (2007). The neuroscience of “free will”. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 295-308.

Sarkissian, H. et al. (2010). Is belief in free will a cultural universal? Mind & Language, 346-358.

Read all of Adam K. Fetterman’s posts here.

“Our love is dead, according to science!” What does science tell us about marriage?

Can science really predict divorce? Can science really tell you how to select the “right” partner? A recent post by Chris Matyszczyk brought a sarcastic and ironic view about the finding of a marriage study. Chris claimed, according to this study, the perfect wife is five years younger than her husband, is from the same cultural background, and is at least 27 percent smarter than her husband. 

Sounds ridiculous? Yes. If people try to over-generalize certain research findings to general population in any situation by ignoring its specific subjects and applicable context, or make prediction based on correlational studies, it’s possible that they will always obtain disappointing or ridiculous results.  Then, how should we think about the scientific findings on complicated human phenomena, such as marriage? What does science tell us about marriage? 

Gottman & Notarius (2002) reviewed the advances made in the 20^th century in studying marriages. The first published research study on marriage dealt with one major research question, “What is fundamentally different about happily and unhappily married couples?”  Following that, with the development of more sophisticated measures and methods, some grim and interesting findings began emerging from research on marriage. For example, in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Burgess’ longitudinal study (Burgess & Wallin, 1953) found that, for most couples, marital satisfaction was high right after the wedding and then began a slow, steady, and nontrivial decline thereafter. Another example is Hicks and Platt’s (1970) decade-review article on marital happiness and stability which concluded that “perhaps the single most surprising finding to emerge from research is that children tend to detract from, rather than contribute to marital happiness”. Then, research in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the realization of many secular changes in the American family, including the changing role of women, social science’s discovery of violence and incest in the family, and the beginning of the study of cultural variation in marriages et al.

In sum, marriage as an ultimate human condition has been intriguing to both scientists and common people for a long time. However, when we try to understand and interpret research findings on marriage, we need to be very careful about their applicable conditions and limitations. For example, as we know, psychological studies have relied on samples of convenience that have limited generalizability. Although based on the evidence we have so far, marital relations haven’t yet succumbed to delightfully efficient approaches, scientific findings keep shedding light on the mystery of human marriage.

Why your wife should be 27% smarter than you

John M. Gottman, Clifford I. Notarius. ( 2002), Marital Research in the 20th Century and a Research Agenda for the 21st Century. Family Process, 41, 159-197.

Mad Scientists: Can we ever revisit Milgram’s diabolical studies?

By Erica Zaiser

Every student of social psychology remembers studying Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. His studies shaped future thinking about authority, extreme group behavior, and morality. Many of those same psychology students, captivated by the lure of such exciting and revealing studies, would have also learned that you can no longer actually do that kind of research anymore.

The BBC recently reenacted the Milgram experiment for TV and now, the French have added their own twist. The BBC recently reported on a French TV documentary, which showed that under the guise of a game show, contestants were willing to send an electrical shock to other contestants– sometimes at dangerous levels. These types of TV “experiments” are not subject to the same ethical considerations social psychologists are. Of course, this also means they are also not subject to the same expectation of scientific rigour.  It’s always somewhat exciting to see confirmation (even in a highly unscientific setting) that what was shown by Milgram in the 60s may  still hold true today. However, the potential harm to participants from that type of experiment justifies the ethical limitations preventing such research.

Is there a middle ground?

Some psychologists have found that they can still re-do old experiments but also reduce potential harm to their participants by moving the experiments from the physical world into a virtual world. Two researchers in France used virtual reality to re-examine Milgram’s ideas. Like Milgram, they found that participants showed more obedience when they couldn’t see the victim and they also found that participants felt less distress when the victim was from North Africa than when he was of their same ethnic background.  Virtual reality has opened up a way for psychologists to do research on extreme behaviour, but minimize harm to participants.  Perhaps both psychologists and participants can benefit from future use of virtual reality as a medium for experiments.

Read more: Reopening the study of extreme social behaviors: Obedience to authority within an immersive video environment

The evolution of language

Doctor John Dolittle satisfied a nagging curiosity for young readers: What are animals saying? Even scientists can appreciate the premise behind Hugh Lofting’s children books, though not many likely seek the secret language of squid. For social psychologists, the evolution of language has been a fascination at least since the pragmatists.

The New York Times reports efforts to decipher early traces of language development among non-human primates. The review comes over 30 years after a Times reporter allegedly used sign language to communicate with a chimpanzee. More recently, scientists differentiated alarm calls by vervet monkeys, each one indicating a specific predator. Others suggested that baboons understand social hierarchy based on the order of sounds among their peers. And Campbell’s monkeys seem to add suffixes to alarm calls to signify whether a threat has been directly or indirectly observed.

Given that many non-human primates are physically able to generate human language sounds, the findings beg the question: How do we develop language while our relatives fail? Or in the words of the article author, Nicholas Wade, “What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?”

George Herbert Mead suggested that language development stems from a child’s ability, through early role-playing games, to take on the role of the other. The development of the self relates to the ability to recognize how others’ actions affect one’s own. Contrary to Wade’s suggestion that non-human primates simply cannot communicate their thoughts, Mead suggests that communication is at the root of, and in some sense precedes, human thought.

While the presence of primitive communication does not necessarily mean that Campbell’s monkeys are able to think like humans, we can still learn about language development by observing, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, how the words are used.

‘Your Jedi mind tricks will not work on me!’

The film ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’, which is currently on general release, tells the story of a fictional division of ‘psychic-warriors’ within the United States (US) military.

Whilst clearly a tongue-in-cheek portrayal, it is evident from the original book that much of the film is based on actual happenings, such as the MK-ULTRA project, or the controversial recent involvement of US military psychologists in interrogation and torture.

Such military involvement in psychology is apparent even within classic social psychological studies such as Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, which was funded by the US Office of Naval Research.

Whilst the ‘feel-good’ moral of the film is that belief is perhaps more important than any true abilities, such a suggestion can be seen as somewhat more questionable when human lives are at stake.

This is highlighted by the widespread use at military checkpoints within Iraq of a dubious explosives detection device that is accused of working solely “on the same principle as a Ouija board — the power of suggestion”. Although this ‘hi-tech dowsing-rod’ apparently functions effectively for its usual operators, third-parties find themselves unable to replicate this.

Although explainable as a “lack of training”, this can also be viewed as a consequence of ‘expectation bias’, a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Within experimental psychology the dangers of such a phenomenon were clearly illustrated by Rosenthal, who found that researchers obtained different results for ‘maze-bright’ and ‘maze-dull’ rats, despite these labels having been randomly assigned.

Film review from the Guardian

Book review from the Guardian

Strohmetz, D. B. (2008). Research Artifacts and the Social Psychology of Psychological Experiments

Lord, C. G. & Taylor, C. A. (2009). Biased Assimilation: Effects of Assumptions and Expectations on the Interpretation of New Evidence

Banksy vs. the ‘viewer’s maxim’

In some of my previous news edits, I have discussed how Harvey Sacks’ (1995) Membership Categorisation Analysis is a useful methodological apparatus for social psychologists wishing to examine the deployment of identity categories and the practices that get them produced. In this news edit I want to briefly outline one element of the ‘viewer’s maxim’ and suggest, some pieces of Banksy’s satirical graffiti trade on challenging its ‘relevance rules’.

Sacks argued that the everyday use of categories rely on some ‘relevance rules’. One of these is ‘that it proposes that for an observer of a category-bound activity, the category to which the activity is bound has a special relevance for formulating an identification of its doer’ (Sacks, 1995: 259). In other words, the identity (category) of the doer can be ascertained from seeing a category-bound activity being done.

Suppose you were to observe a person throwing flowers. You might expect the identity of the flower thrower to be a member of the category ‘romantic person’ or perhaps a ‘festival goer’ (e.g. The Lotus Throwing Festival in Bang Phli, Thailand). It is probably unlikely that you would expect to see a person dressed like the one in Banksy’s ‘flower thrower’ (see inset picture), presumably a member of the category ‘rioter’.

Since specific activities tend to be associated with particular category members, for the ‘viewer’s maxim’ to work, observations of these in practice necessarily produce expectations of normative behaviour. When a disjuncture occurs between activity and doer, we hold the doer accountable for their non-conformative behaviour. Of course with artwork, we can only question the motive of the artist for challenging what we expect to normatively see.

Social Psychology and Discourse

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory

Generation X, Y…Me?: Meanings, Methods, and Measurement of Narcissism

Narcissism is itself a slippery concept that psychologists have debated for years. How to define it and how to measure it have been looming questions as well as the extent to which a certain level of narcissism may be adaptive in a psychological sense. More recently, however, Twenge and colleagues have published volumes about the current narcissism “epidemic” plaguing those of us in our 20s and 30s.

According to Twenge, there are significant differences between “cohorts” (generations) in terms of narcissism, with young adults today having higher levels of self-esteem and narcissistic attitudes making them worthy of the “Generation Me” moniker. In a recent Social and Personality Psychology Compass article, however, Donnellan and colleagues argue otherwise. They present compelling evidence that the differences, if there are any, are only very slight. Additionally, they claim that any differences are not generalizable to the larger population because of the convenience sampling of college students. Further, they critique the notion of grouping generations of individuals under a larger umbrella that is only defined by a few questions on a scale.

Their critique raises important questions not only about method and measurement, but about the interconnection between social and personality psychology with “popular sentiment” and the way in which academic — ‘scientific’ — research is uniquely positioned to corroborate or complicate the reality which surrounds us.

Donnellan, M. B. & Trzesniewski K. H. (2009). How should we study generational ‘changes’ or should we? A critical examination of the evidence for ‘Generation Me’

The Red Book

Carl Jung in 1910

As reported in the New York Times Magazine, the “Holy Grail of the Unconscious” is finally being published. The author, the legendary Carl Jung, is the founder of analytical psychology. For those with affection for the terms “collective unconscious” or “psychological archetypes,” news of the availability of the elusive and much coveted Red Book should provoke enthusiasm, and with any hope, pleasant dreams.

Sara Corbett describes the last minute details of the long-disappointed but persistent Jungian Stephen Martin working with the Jung family to publish the book. The family had kept it locked up since Jung’s death in 1961, despite the efforts of his followers for nearly half a century. Jung left no instructions on how to handle the book, which some thought could be embarassing in content. Historian Sonu Shamdasani has worked for half a decade on “decoding” the book, inserting over a thousand footnotes and a long introduction. Thanks to Jung’s grandchildren and the Philemon Foundation, which Martin directs, W.W. Norton will release the book next month.

Finally the dreaming public will be able to peer into Jung’s unconscious, as the book describes his demon-filled journey during which “even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.” Corbett, who went to Zurich to see the original book, describes the tome’s content as such: “Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.” Indeed, this marks a significant moment for the world of dreamers.

Mothers, Sex Tapes and Gender Morality

Coleen Nolan’s recent televised revelation that she made a sex tape provides an interesting example of how talk and discourse is saturated with moral work. Her self-confession allowed for a host of consequential moral assumptions to be made about her making of a sex tape. These assumptions rest on the known-in-common attributes that are associated with gender categories. The apparent ‘shock’ experienced by her sons, panel and audience about the revelation allows us to see her actions as a ‘breach’ to the common-sense cultural knowledge about how ‘moral types of women’ (e.g. mothers) should behave.

Wowk’s (1984) research from a murder suspect interrogation and Stokoe’s (2003) neighbour disputes research provide interesting examples of this moral accountability in practice. Their data revealed that peoples’ perceptions of morality, in relation to women, were aligned with specific activities and characteristics for ‘good mothers’ (e.g. ‘sexually discreet’, ‘mother-as-childcarer’) and ‘bad mothers’ (e.g. ‘being overtly sexual’, ‘swearing’). They also found that moral judgments were often non-explicit and smuggled in through indirect references to illicit behaviour in order to subtly police moral boundaries. Coleen’s sons, the panel and the audience therefore, by their very (re)actions, can be seen to be unavoidably engaged in producing and sustaining a gendered moral order out of the particulars provided by Coleen.
Loose Women – Coleen Nolan

Coleen Nolan shocks the Loose Women TV audience – and her sons – as she admits to starring in a sex tape

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes