A Monthly Summary of News and Events
Vol. 11 No. 2 - February 2008
This newsletter is sponsored by EEG Spectrum International, Inc.,
the leader in providing neurotherapeutic services and training professionals.
Past issues are available at start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/
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Opinions in this newsletter reflect those of the author only.
Copyright (c) 2008
by ESII or David Kaiser, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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Catherine Genovese, or Kitty, as she was known by friends, parked and got out of her car. It was very late, getting cold, and the streets were empty at this time of night. She had worked late again but she's wasn't worried. Her apartment was a few steps away.
“Oh my God! He stabbed me!” she screamed. “Please help me! Please help me!... I’m dying! I’m dying”
Lights went on. A neighbor yelled down from a 7th floor window, “Hey, let that girl alone!”
Kitty lost her keys in the attack and stumbled around her apartment, blindly trying doorknobs. A back doorway opened and she made her way in, collapsing on the steps. Unknown to her, the man had retreated at the shout. He waited in his car and watched the windows. Light after light went dark. When the very last window went dark, he ventured out and found his way into the building through the same open doorway.
"I heard a scream for help, three times," a neighbor informed the court the summer of 1964, "I saw a girl lying down on the pavement with a man bending down over her, beating her."
Nearly 40 people heard or observed some part of the fatal assault. It lasted 32 minutes but no one called the police until after it was over. When someone did call, he decided to call a cousin who lived in a neighboring county to first ask for advice.
The last response, the most human, could hardly have been entered into the record without even a stenographer passing judgement. The assault and its observation was one of the worst forms of mob behavior in recent times, an old filthy habit of humans which this time was given a name, the bystander effect. The bystander effect involves three layers of mental behavior:
Ambiguity about the situation.
Pluralistic ignorance, which is that we look to others to help disambiguate situations and when they look to us, we stay in a state of ignorance.
Diffusion of responsibility, which is we look to others to take responsibility.
The Bystander Effect reveals how we use perceptions of others to fill holes in our own. We are molded by others, we conform to their perceptions, we change our behaviors, even our brain function, to be part of the group. And sometimes this means we conform ourselves into standstill, no one taking charge, except for the murderer in the case of Kitty.
Solomon Asch studied the role of conformity in the mid-1950s. His graduate students pretended to be subjects in an experiment where only the behavior of one person was free to change. There was a true subject and seven or eight confederates, as they are called. The group of fake subjects and one real subject was shown a simple diagram of three lines of varying heights and asked which line was of equal height to a test stimulus. Initially the trials went smoothly as each comparison was easy and everyone gave the same answers. But this was prelude. After 8 or 9 trials, the actual experiment began: the confederates now called out the wrong answer, again and again, one after the other. The clear perceptual answer was B but they called out C... C...C....C...C...C...C... and then it was the true subject's turn to answer. What would you do?
The subject went bonkers; he squirmed in his seat, peered closer at the two cards, wondered if the instructions had changed. Did he space out and miss a change of instructions by the experimenter?
Asch reported that only 1 in 4 subjects held their ground throughout the experimet. Most people caved -- and often, conforming to the group 2 out of every 5 trials. The group exerted normative influence, Asch explained, by instilling fear of appearing deviant, which led to public conformity (surface change) without private conformity (mental change). Subjects, when debriefed, admitted that they went against what they knew was true in going with the group but did so because it seemed easier at the time.
When a scientist is lucky enough to frame reality in such a way that nearly everyone understands what he or she is saying and some see actual value in his or her pursuit, good scientists know to run all the variants. Play all hands, in every conceivable fashion. They don't stop at the first experiment but after the 101st. Asch ran dozens of variants on his Conformity experiment, nearly everything available to him in the 1950s.
He tested the effect of having an ally. Having beaten down the true subject with round after round of the group seeing what is not there, another round begins and the group begins in familiar chorus C...C... C...C.. but then something remarkable happens. The next confederate calls out B, like a miracle, the correct answer! And then it is over, conformity restored, C...C...C... Now it is your turn? What do you do?
Nine out of 10 subjects, freed of normative pressure, do what's right and give the correct response. (I wonder if the 10th fellow remained with the group and mocked the lone dissenter, get a load of that guy...).
The ally effect is interesting but it conflates conformity-breaking with support. How about breaking conformity without support? Asch ran this variant as well: the group responds C..C..C..C..C... until one lunatic chimes in A, the shortest line on the card, 4 inches if that, compared to the 6 inch test item. So C C C C C - A? huh?? C C C and now it's your turn again?
Asch discovered that few need support, about 1 in 25. Most of us just need a break in group. 86% or 6 out of 7 people went on their own and gave the correct response when in the presence of a wrong dissenter.
Asch also examined the emotional toll of conforming. People were found to be emotionally distressed when they conformed to easier decisions (agreeing that a 4" line was equal to a 6" line) and less distressed by harder ones (6.25" line said to equal to a 6" test item). What I consider the most significant and relatively unrecognized finding of Asch's work: how many people are a group. How many people must mill around together to constitute groupness. How many others must there be for us to put on our public face?
When a group consisted of you and one other, and that person answered first and gave the wrong answer, only 1 in 25 of us caved, a 4 % conformity rate, which is 1/9th the power of full-grown group conformity. Add another person to your group and confirmity more than tripled to 14%. Then add a 3rd person and voila, you are now a group forever. The rate of conformity remained constant, between 32 to 36 percent, for groups from 4 to 14. The greatest conformity (37%) was for a group of 6 others, which is probably within the margin of error but it would be of interest to know how many friends we need on our side to bear our full force. Though as his data suggested, two will do, you being a 3rd, and the 4th being the person who you're trying to convince.
Likewise, we may be that unconvinced person and when approached by three people, we turn on our public mode of behavior and stay in it until a stranger or two drops away. The real factor that directs conformity, however, which he didn't examine, is our strength of relationships. He kept relationship strength constant, a zero, essentially, stranger. Had he used a group of three associates, three friends, or three lovers, or three children, three officers of the law, or three sisters, he'd have stumbled upon the algebra of interpersonal reality.
Other factors that influence conformity besides group size are awareness of group norms ("if you are not with us, you're against us", "we act as one"), and age & experience. Those most vulnerable to others are not young children but young teenagers. Adults know which way the wind blows but also knows when it cannot possibly blow that way. Older people conform the least at a simple task. The nature of the task was also held steady, at low significance and low difficulty, and both aspects should be examined. As to the difference between the birds and the bees, in face-to-face encounters women tended to conform more and men conform less when they thought they are being observed but the difference evened out when unobserved, and this was 50 years ago.
Social pressure ranges from negligible to extreme, from who cares to who dies. Social conformity is most tested by warfare and it was a student of Asch, Stanley Milgram, who would go on to investigate obedience to leaders in a series of classic experiments taught to every psychology undergrad. In his Experiment on Obedience, people off the street were asked, in a series of small steps, to kill another human being. (Increasing requests little by little is the common "foot in the door" manipulation technique.)
Milgram called the experiment, the "Effect of Punishment on Memory", a cover name to misinform his subjects. He asked people to act as "teacher" and shock a "learner," who they considered another random subject but was in fact a confederate of the experiment, in league with Milgram. Subjects were asked to shock this man whenever he replied incorrectly to test questions. Now the "learner," an unlikely actor, a middle-aged man, tells the experimenter in his labcoat and indirectly the teacher, the true subject, that he suffers from a mild heart condition and asked whether the shocks are dangerous. The labcoat explains how they are painful but not harmful, only providing momentary discomfort. To prove his point, and to increase the believability of the set-up, the "teacher" is given a sample jolt of 45 volts. This is the only time when Milgram's famous shocking device works as advertised. Otherwise it is ominous in appearance but an empty theatrical prop. But effective! 30 lights and 30 light switches labelled sequentially from "15 volts (mild)" all the way out to "450 volts (XXX)."
Once the teacher gets a taste of the device, the 45 volt shock, the learner is taken out of the room to an adjacent room by the labcoat and attached to the device, or so the teacher is lead to believe. The memory tests are simple but over time they are suppose to tax the mind. Here is an example: "Remember this word, bird" says the teacher. "Now of the following list, house, toy, bird, fly -- what word did I ask you to remember?" Simple, and the learner gave correct answers for some time, paralleling Asch's initial trials. But here and there he would give a wrong response and the teacher was reminded by the labcoat to click the toggle of the next level of shock, a buzzer would sound, and then the jolt was supposedly given.
After a 120 volt shock, a script came into play: The actor/learner gives his first shout about the pain. He take sthe next shock stoically, but at 150 volts, he demands for the experiment to end. After 180 volts the actor/learner screams “no more pain!” “no more pain!” over and over and after each and every shock until 300 volts is reached. At this point he starts to pound on the wall which separated him from the teacher; and finally at 330 volts, he lets out a final cry. He is mum from this time forward and when the teacher balks at shocking an assumingly unconscious fellow in the next room, he is reminded by the labcoat (another actor, of sorts) that no response by the learner counts as a wrong response and is to be treated as a wrong answer. The teacher must also continue to increase the voltage at each non-response. Silence is wrong and the shock will test the effect of punishment on memory.
Prior to running the experiment, Milgram asked psychiatrists and students to predict the most voltage anyone would give the learner in this situation. The general consensus was that nearly everyone would stop around 150 volts and only perhaps 1 in a 1000 might enjoy torturing another human being and go all the way to the maximum (450 volts). But what Milgram discovered in the first run of his obedience experiment, done at Yale University with mostly unemployed men, is that 2 out of 3 men went to the maximum (65%). Everyone, including Milgram, failed to judge the power of the situation. Situations drive behavior. Settings and persons dictate more than our disposition.
When the results were published, people couldn't believe that 2 in 3 people were so gullable, so controllable, as to kill a stranger at the bequest of another, outside of warfare. Critics argued that this finding was absurd and tainted by a number of coercive elements in Milgram's original design including setting (Yale University) and awareness of a worthy goal (pursuit of science). Others mentioned how volunteering self-coerced subjects and how the "learner"'s supposed volunteering granted freer license to the teacher. There was also the money: unemployed men were paid $4 to come to lab and wouldn't want to disappoint and lose out of what amounts to lunch-money in today's dollars. Also, subjects didn't have time to think, the learner was in another distant room, all kinds of reasons, including gender. Women, some critics offered, would not hurt another person so incautiously.
Milgram repeated the experiment off-grounds, using women, labcoats removed, with even the experimenter sometimes slipping out of the room to get coffee. In each variant he ran a new group of 40 subjects and here is the percent who went to the maximum.
Singer Peter Gabriel subtitled his song "We Do What We're Told" "Milgram's 37" in honor of the last finding. Thirty-seven out of 40 can conscience being a cog for the powers of darkness as long as the devil doesn't make us pull the actual trigger.
The lowest compliance occurred not when a group broke apart, but when authority broke apart. In one version, Milgram had two men in labcoats running the experiment and they began to bicker about going forward and this killed compliance. The 2nd lowest compliance rate was, ironically, for when the learner demands to be shocked. Less than 1 in 20 comply to a crazy man's request,which shows that we're okay in hurting you but not if you wants us to.
Obedience varied as a function of authority legitimacy and other factors. Clothes made a difference (labcoats trump blue jeans), as did distance from the victim (touching compared to same room or a different room), degree of supervision (absent, present, remindful authority figure), presence of others who modeled obedience, and lack of dissent in group tasks. Personality had little impact on behavior, nor did gender, age, or education.
Here is an example transcript Milgram provided, Subject is a 50y unemployed man. After delivering 180-volt shock, he pivots around in chair and addresses experimenter:
Subject (agitated): I can't stand it I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?
Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but . . .
S: But he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?
E: The experiment requires that you continue… (lame justification, but enough, apparently!)
S: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering
E: It's absolutely essential that you continue….
S: All right.
(He continues experiment. Learner is "shocked.")
Learner (screaming): Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out of here, my hearts bothering me, let me out!
S: You see he's hollering. Hear that?
E: The experiment requires . . .
S: I know it does sir, but I mean -- he doesn't know what he's getting in for. He's up to 195 volts!
(Experiment continues, through 210 volts, 225 volts, 240 volts, 255 volts, 270 volts, at which point subject, with evident relief, runs out of word-pair questions.)
E: You'll have to go back to the beginning of the page and go through them again until he's learned them all correctly.
(Experiment continues with no responses by learner. At 375 volts, subject stands up.)
S: I think something's happened to that fellow in there. I don't get no answer. He was hollering at less voltage. Can't you check in and see if he's all right, please?
E: Not once we've started. Please continue, Teacher.
S (sits down, sighs deeply): "Cool day, shade, water, paint." Answer please. Are you all right in there? Are you all right,
E: Please continue, Teacher. Continue, please. (Subject pushes lever. Zzumph!)
S: You accept all responsibility?
E: The responsibility is mine. Please go on.
Subject returns to list, runs through all the test items as rapidly as he can read them, working quicly to the end, 450 volts.
S: That's that.
E: Continue using the 450 switch for each wrong answer.
S: But I don't get anything!
E: Please continue....
We are taught to obey authority from an early age. Neurons are also taught to obey. When neural authority breaks down, we have disease, forgetfulness, and numerous disorders. In EEG rhythm training we often train towards normalcy in terms of rhythm incidence, partly because we know so little about brain function and assume group norms are reasonably good for any individual. Normalcy is a start, and as we advance in our understanding of brain synchrony, we'll know better when to seek rhythmic conformity and when rhythmic conformity is an individual's complaint.
-DK
News & Reviews
NEW BOOKS
Mood Disorders: A Practical Guide
by S. Nassir Ghaemi
For clinicians - assists in diagnosing mood disorders.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0781727839/eegspectrum
The Neurology Of Autism
by Mary Coleman (Editor)
Medical/educational therapies and a detailed evaluation of alternative therapies.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195182227/eegspectrum
Trends In Epilepsy Research
by Shawn M. Benjamin (Editor)
Newest research on detecting and treating seizures.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594542376/eegspectrum
Dealing with Depression: A Commonsense Guide to Mood Disorders
by Gordon Parker
Traditional and alternative approaches for treating depression are reviewed.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1741142148/eegspectrum
Neurobiology of Human Values
by Jean-Pierre P. Changeux (Editor), et al
Neuroscience enters the fray of ontological discussions including morality.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540262539/eegspectrum
Neurobiology for Clinical Social Work: Theory and Practice
by JS Applegate, JR Shapiro
Current brain research on attachment and neurobiology, including plasticity, early trauma, adolescent mothers,
assessment and intervention strategies.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393704203/eegspectrum
Models of EEG rhythms and connectivity.
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A single population can exhibit different simultaneous rhythms.
Disorganized attachment and atypical parenting in externalizing disorder.
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Pervasive disorganization was associated with very high maternal expressed emotion.
Spirituality and Religion in Epilepsy.
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Postictal religious experiences occur in few epilepsy patients (2%). Changes in beliefs and convictions are associated with right frontal lobe epilepsy and ecstatic religious experience with right TLE.
Brain activation in pediatric OCD during inhibitory control tasks.
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Task switching and interference inhibition were associated with attenuated activation in frontal, temporoparietal and cerebellar regions.
Recognition of 'Fortune of Others' Emotions in Asperger Syndrome
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Individuals with Asperger have trouble identifying envy and gloating.
Neurofeedback in fibromyalgia syndrome.
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Three patients with Fibromyalgia Syndrome were treated successfully with neurofeedback.
Upcoming Courses
Our course is a hands-on experience right from the start. Attendees consistently say this format is a very good way to learn neurofeedback. "Neurofeedback should be viewed as one of the three essential or primary forms of intervention - psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurofeedback. In my experience, neurofeedback is every bit as important and powerful as the other two forms of treatment." - Dr. Laurence Hirshberg, Brown University Medical School, psychologist specializing in Developmental Disorders and Autism. Contact Karie Kramer, our training coordinator, for more information 818-789-3456 ext 847 or see www.eegspectrum.com/Training * EEG Spectrum International, Inc. is approved by the APA to offer continuing education to psychologists. ESII maintains responsibility for the program. |
Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers | ||
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| CONFERENCE | LOCATION | DATES |
| SABA - www.skiltopo.com/saba | Sarasota FL | Apr 30-May 3 |
| ISNR - www.isnr.org | San Antonio, TX | Aug 28-Sep 1 |
Churchville Elementary is just across the street but there is no stoplight or crossing guard so my child rides a bus to school. After picking her up the bus meanders around our little village and passes under the single traffic light once, sometimes twice, on its way to school. Our house sits on Main and School Street, or so it seems, as bus after school bus rumble by every few minutes in the early morning light.
A few years ago, before my son joined her on the bus, one of the drivers fell ill and his substitute stopped in front of our door. It was an obvious mistake and I waved him off. As I watched him turn the corner, another bus pulled up. I turned to say goodbye to my five year old -- but she wasn’t there. She had gotten on the first bus.
We panicked and called the school. The voice over the phone assured us that the first bus also stopped at Churchville Elementary and our bundle of joy would be fine. We needed to see for ourselves so we hurried to the back entrance and waited for our intrepid kindergartener to appear. Well, she did in a matter of moments, without incident, as could be expected in a town with one stoplight and a bus for nearly every school child. What stayed with me to this day was not the overwhelming relief at seeing her spill out of the bus or fear, unfathomable as it was, which we swallowed as best we could, but what my five-year-old said as she bounded off the bus and into her mother’s arms.
"Mommy," she said, "There were a whole lot of new friends on the bus!"
What a way to be! Dropped into a pool of strangers my five-year-old envisions friends, friends she simply doesn’t yet know.
The late Jeffrey Gray and Neil McNaughton (2000) published a seminal work on anxiety and fear that describes how adult brains respond to strangers on the bus. They conceive clinical disorders as overactive responses of specific structures or networks. This book is rarely cited in clinical neuroscience, which may be due to its title, a mouthful, "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: An Enquiry into the Functions of the Septo-Hippocampal System." "Septo-Hippocampal Systems" sounds like a how-to guide for plumbers.
According to the model whenever our neural plumbing encounters a threat, potential or actual, and whether these threats are detectable, avoidable, or not, different brain structures govern our response. There is an order to our defenses.
Threat type, Detectable, Avoidable: Mental strategy, Behavioral Response, Associated clinical disorder, Brain system in control
The entire hierarchy could come into play in a single encounter. For instance, imagine ourselves an animal milling about the woods at night:
According to Gray and McNaughton, the last two defenses are fight followed by freeze (bottom two rows of the table). I asked Neil about this peculiar sequence in his behavioral typology: Why would we fight for a bit, and failing to keep a predator at bay, reeze? Only a few creatures succeed at playing possum, and fewer still after a good predatory tussle, and given that most threats -- bigger fish, larger crustraceans, unruly bosses -- have a longer reach than us, a larger zone of attack, why stop fighting once darkness has drawn within reach of our teeth, claws, tentacles? Why not freeze before we start to fight and be passed over.
Neil responded in his emails to what I saw as an apparent misordering of last resorts by arguing that a final freeze enables a victim to leap past an attacker without exposing its flank. But if we could outrun it in close quarters, how did it close in on us in the first place? So thinking this over I had to believe that this model, while extensive, was not the whole story. A major subplot, but incomplete in explaining what is going on behaviorally. And I was reminded of another form of behavioral freezing. Perhaps a freeze occurs at the very end because if the larger entity didn't incapacitate us already, maybe its intention never was attack.
But a date.
Many species are dimorphic, with males physically larger than females, sometimes even a magnitude larger. Perhaps the last stage of threat response is not defensive but reproductive. Risking death for sex is what most animals do for a living.
So mating may be a form of defense. Lordosis (reproductive behavioral freezing) is not triggered by periaqueductal gray nuclei as fear freezing is, yet a second behavioral hierarchy competing with defense makes sense. Approach works with avoidance, a brake next to the accelerator. I can imagine a similar organization for mating behaviors, using the same terminology but with mating in mind: potential and actual, detectable and undetectable, avoidable and unavoidable... actually those terms generate more humor than insight… something along the line of high school and my Senior ball and all of them, avoidable, unavoidable, and potential mates, sitting at my table, making it a very awkward evening, a night I cannot get out of my head.
As for clinical disorders, symptoms such as phobia, fear, anxiety, panic, and OCD are of maladaptive intensity due to either (1) excessive sensitivity to eliciting stimuli or (2) excessive activation of a brain structure or network, according to Neil. In other words, too many resources are being used in defense. It is of course healthy for defensive systems to override higher reasoning during emergencies, but emergencies are rare and when primitive systems coup d'etat at the drop of a hat, and refuse to step down once a crisis is over, it’s time to let reason step in. 'I'm in charge here,' proclaimed Alexander Haig to the press corps in 1981, after President Reagan was shot. The subcortex claims the same in a brain disorder -- “I'm in charge here” – and therapy can restore cortical leadership to a traumatized brain. If you remember correctly that Monday afternoon in March, 1981, Haig never was in charge. He only thought he was. And the subcortex is under similar delusion, when it feigns control of the human mind.
-DK