Kelsey Siepser, my niece as well as an accomplished actor and artist in LA, sent me this photo of the Darwin Altar she saw at the Dia de los Muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Kelsey (@ksiepser) tweeted me the instragram version, and also sent along the full-sized picture. I like it so much, you get three versions!
Medium-sized Darwin Altar:
The Instragram Version:
Full-sized version:
One of the only disappointments of the ‘Culture, Mind and Brain’ conference in Los Angeles this weekend — and there were plenty of things that turned out even better than expected — was that Prof. Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford was not able to join us. However, because she couldn’t be here, she was kind enough to prerecord her lecture: Hearing Voices in Accra and Chennai: How Culture Makes a Difference to Psychiatric Experience.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/51863833
Tanya Luhrmann’s hearing voices (link to video)
(The video doesn’t seem to want to embed for me. I’ll try to fix it, but let’s get this up sooner rather than later.)
Luhrmann explored in her talk whether culture makes a difference in the voices that patients with serious psychotic disorder experience. She has elsewhere made the argument that the types of voices may vary, based on available research on patterns of hallucination. In a review in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Luhrmann writes:
local theory of mind—the features of perception, intention, and inference that the community treats as important—and local practices of mental cultivation will affect both the kinds of unusual sensory experiences that individuals report and the frequency of those experiences. Hallucinations feel unwilled. They are experienced as spontaneous and uncontrolled. But hallucinations are not the meaningless biological phenomena they are understood to be in much of the psychiatric literature. They are shaped by explicit and implicit learning around the ways that people pay attention with their senses. This is an important anthropological finding because it demonstrates that cultural ideas and practices can affect mental experience so deeply that they lead to the override of ordinary sense perception. (2011: 72)
Day Two featured three great sessions: (1) Stress and Resilience, (2) The Cultural Neuroscience of Cognition and Self, and (3) Pathways to Interdisciplinarity. We also saw Rob Lemelson’s powerful documentary, Standing on the Edge of a Thorn. You can find coverage of Day One here.
Stress and Resilience
I had fun chairing this session; the four presenters put on a synthetic display of how culture, mind and brain come together in understanding stress, trauma, and our responses to adversity.
Paul Plotsky spoke of his research on development and early adversity using a rat model in his talk Early life adversity, allostasis, and resilience. A simple intervention – removing a rat pup from its mother early in life for eighteen hours – produced lifelong negative changes in the baby rats’ ability to handle stress. The main conduit for that change: the mother’s disorganized behavior, where she no longer engaged in calm mothering but rather moved around the cage in a highly aroused state.
Many people nodded along, as this research is fairly standard stuff now. We know that early stress, particularly in sensitive periods, can really push the HPA axis and up stress reactivity. We also know, based on important work by Michael Meaney and Plotsky, that rat mothers’ play a central role in helping rat pups regulate their own biology. Then Plotsky delivered the ringer.
He changed the environment. Instead of the standard experimental model, where mothers were housed in a one-room cage, he introduced a “two-bedroom condo.” Mothers, rather than running around anxiously in the one-room cage upon return of their long-lost pup, could now move their nest and the pup to the new bedroom. This change facilitated the dame’s return to normal mothering behavior, so much that the dramatic life-long effect of the “adverse event” went away!
So it wasn’t really the adverse event, it was the adverse event and the social relationship. And it wasn’t really the adverse event and social relationship, it was the adverse event, social relationship, and local context! Some amazing experimental work.
To summarize: A humanly-designed and deliberately executed event, a new understanding of how open and dynamic our biology is, how interactive social relationships mediate biology, an operating environment that played a significant role in organizing behavior (and thus biology), and the power of altered developmental trajectories (when pushed by a confluence of factors).
Or five factors:
-Social construction
-Biological embedding
-Agentive relationships
-Operative environment
-Dynamic development
[All right, time to rein it in a little bit - I could write so much about each talk, but I'll try to aim for short. Or at least shorter...]
Lance Gravlee showed these factors in action with his talk on Cultural meaning, social structure, and the stress process: Lessons from hyptertension in the African Diaspora. Gravlee jumped right into the debate of how to understand race and its relation to biology and health, including the dubious notion that race indicates a certain “biological type”. Race does not equal biology – it is a false comparison, an equivalence that unravels under even a little critical analysis of the concept of race and a little understanding of human variation. Yet the alternative hypothesis, that the social construction of race can actually drive biology and health, is rarely tested.
Bad enough that we anthropologists have to compete with the clothing line Anthropologie. Now real competition shows up, a genuine cultural phenomenon. Anthros are becoming furries in popular internet parlance – anthropomorphized versions of humans. Is it now game over?
[Update: Got the video to embed; here's the link to What Is Anthro?, complete with theme music from Haddaway's What Is Love?]
Globalized culture is often visual culture. So just check out the image results of Google searches on “anthro girls” and “anthro boys.” Or if you’re too lazy (I know you are; via biocultural evolution, you are optimized to do internet searching for visual benefits over clicking costs), just scroll down. Here are two top results.
How’s that for the anthro image!? Somehow, somewhere I (my professional anthro self) should feel violated. But I’m too busy clicking on more images…
Now, just what is happening? Well, it appears “anthros” has become a broad term for humanoid objects. Kinda like several professors I know. Here’s the expert opinion from jekkal on How to Classify Anthro:
Anthro covers every possible thing you could turn into a humanoid, from superintelligent shades of blue to your pencil, and even covers various things like your tattoos coming to life. Machines, Animals, and Plants, in non-anthro form, are all what they sound like. Anthro machines are Droids, anthro plants are Treants, and Anthro Animals are Furries. Combining Droids and Furries gives us Cyborgs, while the same combination outside of the Anthro spectrum gives us virtual pets like Aibo. Plants don’t really merge with Machines or Animals too well.
And the handy Venn diagram from jekkal:
Here we thought the threat to the discipline was getting split by the science controversy, or so diffused that we merge with disparate scholarly traditions. Popular culture has already overtaken us!
Greg and I are having a fabulous time here at UCLA and the Culture, Mind and Brain conference. With Greg in Australia and me in Tampa, we don’t get to see each other in person that often. We had a great brain storming and planning session right before the conference on our next projects – but that’s a post for another day.
For whatever reason, links are not working on this computer easily. So here is the main website for the conference. Please check it out. A lot more information there, and links to all the speakers’ sites and so forth.
Culture, Mind and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, and Applications
Day One in a nutshell. Three themes:
-Recognizing diversity
-Biological dynamism
-Multifactorial interdisciplinarity
Recognizing Diversity
Steve Heine, Marco Iacoboni, and Greg Downey. Weird samples, which narrow our vision to human variation and pointedly question assumptions of universality. Weird scanners, which create their own experimental environments, and the need for new designs that recognize brain processes like mirror neurons as biomarkers of sociality. Embracing the exotic, so we expand our recognition of the envelope of human possibilities and recognize how that envelope is often built from crooked neurological timber.
Biological Dynamism
Steve Cole, Edith Chen, Steve Suomi, John Capitanio, and John Cacioppo.
Cole delivered a magisterial overview of genetics and epigenetics, and how highly contingent biological processes force us to recognize that our bodies are products of culture. He showed, using cascades of biological functioning, how cells are permeable and embodied, so that experiences and environments on the outside can bevome real biochemistry. He emphasized quite strongly that “subjective experience is the effective experience.” Coupled to that, social genomic processes give a temporal persistence to our embodied selves, and this social biochemistry means that we are embedded in and reflections of our own experience and local environments over various time courses. To understand the genome, then, we need to know what other genomes are around a person – the metagenome.
Chen, Suomi, Capitanio, and Cacioppo provided powerful examples of how this overall biological dynamism happens. Chen focused on socioeconomic status and gene expression, examining the link between perceptions of the social world (e.g., social threat and low SES) linked to transcription factors in dynamic ways. Suomi demonstrated the impact of early mothering and early mirroring, demonstrating how the agentive intentionality of both mothers and babies, shaped across different situations, can have lifelong impacts. Capitanio showed us how social and individual factors, often in interaction, affects gene expression and immune function in rhesus monkeys. Cacioppo demonstrated the powerful impact of social isolation on our biological function and health, and gave us the counter-intuitive evidence that the oldest parts of our immune system are in fact most open to social influence. We are social creatures with a time depth that extends back to our origins.
Multifactorial Interdisciplinarity
The third session gave us a different approach to culture, mind and brain. Here the key to working across these three domains, and across disciplines, is to recognize the different elements in play -, say, cultural beliefs, psychological function, and genetics – and measure representative factors as best as possible and then see how the data play out. It is the start of a new sort of model building, still quite young and thus bounding some of the variation and dynamism seem in the first two sessions for an approach that tries to get empirical purchase on the array of factors we recognize as shaping our lives.
John Novembre gave an overview of the often unrecognized genetic diversity around the world, much of it recent, most of it quite subtle in its effects and its distribution. He then presented rare genetic variants as a way to think about evolution, migration, health, and other domains.
Heejung Kim presented oxytoic and dopamine polymorphisms in cross-cultural view. What was impressive was her demonstration of how different variants look to code for cultural susceptibility in specific domains, such that in Korea, the GG variant of oxytocin shows more emotional suppression (in line with cultural values tehre) while in the United States the GG variant is the one that actually demonstrates less emotional suppression. And Korean immigrants to the United States show intriguing shifts to the new cultural pattern, with the GG variant moving more.
Finally, Joan Chiao gave a rapid overview of cultural neuroscience, focusing on her work where ecology pushes both genetics and culture, and those then shape the brain, and those co-evolutionary formed neurological processes then lead to patterned behavior. By taking each of these domains into account, better understanding of how one area leads to another (including how genes and culture interact) produces novel recognitions of how human diversity can get patterned.
Thus, the final talk came back to the first one, presenting one model of how to understand cultural diversity beyond weird undergraduates and assumed universality. That model leaves room for dynamic approaches to diversity and divisions within societies, and as Carol Worthman said in earlier comments, leaves open the question that anthropology has long addressed, getting at the underlying processes that produce variation rather than taking the phenotypes or outcomes as what should be measured. A diversity of models and of processes, then…
Some Reflections
Here are some miscellaneous reflections I had over the course of the day.
Marco Iacobono stated rather provocatively that he doesn’t care about the brain, and then in his talk, showing mirror neurons as markers for sociality. But the interesting thing over the day was that, even if people talked about dropping out the biology, everyone still built their approaches around biology. As someone who studies addiction, biological mechanisms certainly drew attention, produced deep engagement, and compelled certain types of research, even as the speakers presented social genomes and subjective environments and cultural patterns. I found it a fascinating tension.
And here anthropology can add a great deal, from opening up what often seems like a black box. Our understanding of social processes and cultural experience can help provide the same sort of dynamism on the outside of bodies and biochemistry. Provided we too can let go of some of our own temptations of explanation.
The other interesting discussion, which people circled around but couldn’t quite put all the pieces together, is what exactly will some of the systemic dynamics and organizing social/biological pathways look like and function. In other words, as dynamic biology, subjective experierience, and embedded social processes come together, these too will demonstrate regularities and patterns. A certain sort of systemic shape that can take on different, often subtle forms that we will have to work hard at teasing apart and yet surely play a foundational role in the lives we lead.
So those are my reflections. Looking forward to the second day. Forgive typos and grammar, as this is a one-and-done deal. Gotta get ready for another great day at the conference.
Update: Day Two Coverage is now up.
Othello Syndrome is a type of delusional jealousy, marked by suspecting a faithful partner of infidelity, with accompanying jealousy, attempts at monitoring and control, and sometimes violence. The problem is named for Shakespeare’s Othello, who murdered his beautiful wife Desdemona because he believed her unfaithful.
I came across Othello Syndrome because of a fascinating article at The Dana Foundation, When a drug leads to suspicions of infidelity. Here we have a mental illness induced as a side-effect in some patients as a result of taking dopamine to help with Parkinson’s disease.
In rare cases the treatment, which attempts to boost dopamine levels, brings on this stubborn delusion, which can transform a previously trusting relationship into a nightmare of suspicion, bitterness, and relentless accusations of infidelity.
The sheer strangeness of Othello syndrome aroused the curiosity of Keith Josephs, a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn.
“I think of Othello syndrome as a delusion —an abnormal thought, sort of like believing in aliens,” said Josephs, winner of the 2009 Judson Daland Prize for outstanding achievement in patient-oriented research. “It’s as though a man decides, ‘My wife is having an affair, and no one is going to talk me out of believing that.’”
As an illustration, Josephs describes a 42-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease who started to demand frequent sex from his wife while he was taking pramipexole, a drug that binds to dopamine receptors and mimics the action of dopamine. The man also was taking a combination of carbidopa and levodopa, which work together to boost levels of dopamine in the brain.
Under the influence of these drugs, the man started to accuse his wife of having an affair. He obsessively watched the driveway because he expected to find a car parked there, waiting to pick up his wife so she could go off and have sex. He also lost $3,000 while trying to satisfy a sudden urge to gamble, and came home one day with two new fishing poles even though he already owned five.
The man was a bundle of impulse control disorders, a recognized side-effect of dopamine agonists given to Parkinson’s patients to boost their inadequate levels of dopamine, but Josephs had never seen the drugs produce such an intense belief in a spouse’s infidelity.
“Then I saw a second patient,” he said. “I reviewed the literature and came across Othello syndrome, which described my patient. I thought, if I have seen two patients with this, and everyone else sees two, no one would ever notice the connection, but when you pull 100 patients together into one study, you really have some valuable data.”
Keith Josephs has a 2012 co-authored paper on all those cases he found, Clinical and imaging features of Othello’s syndrome.
The average age at onset of Othello’s syndrome was 68 (25-94) years with 61.9% of patients being male. Othello’s syndrome was most commonly associated with a neurological disorder (73/105) compared with psychiatric disorders (32/105). Of the patients with a neurological disorder, 76.7% had a neurodegenerative disorder. Seven of eight patients with a structural lesion associated with Othello’s syndrome had right frontal lobe pathology. Voxel-based morphometry showed greater gray matter loss predominantly in the dorsolateral frontal lobes in the neurodegenerative patients with Othello’s compared to matched patients with neurodegenerative disorders without Othello’s syndrome.
Treatment success was notable for patients with dopamine agonist induced Othello’s syndrome in which all six patients had improvement in symptoms following decrease in medication.
Robert Wright, the journalist and science writer, was kind enough to invite me over to bloggingheads.tv to discuss research on internet addiction. Neither of us liked a recent paper on “genes for internet addiction” that got a lot of public press. We then went on to debate our respective approaches to understanding addiction: evolutionary psychology vs. neuroanthropology.
I’ve tried to embed the video here, but the PLOS site isn’t liking the flash player. So for the full 50 minute glory, head over to Bloggingheads.tv; you can even navigate between different sections with handy embedded links there.
You can also see a five-minute piece that popped up over on Slate with the title, The Psychology of Constantly Checking Twitter.
Wright is the author of books like Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The whole shebang started with recent headlines like “German scientists find ‘internet-addiction gene’” and “Caught In The Web? Blame Your Genes“. The journalists were reporting on the supposed results from this 2012 paper, The Role of the CHRNA4 Gene in Internet Addiction: A Case-control Study. A relevant piece of the abstract:
Recent studies from Asia provided first evidence for a molecular genetic link between serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmission and Internet addiction. The present report offers data on a new candidate gene in the investigation of Internet addiction-the gene coding for the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit alpha 4 (CHRNA4)… A total of 132 participants with problematic Internet use and 132 age- and sex-matched controls participated in the study. Participants provided DNA samples and filled in the Internet Addiction Test Questionnaire. The T- variant (CC genotype) of the rs1044396 polymorphism on the CHRNA4 gene occurred significantly more frequently in the case group.
Wright actually paid the money to access the whole paper, and wrote about it in his piece Do You Have the ‘Internet-Addiction Gene’?
I really liked this part from his first piece on internet addiction:
Here’s what the German scientists found: People who reported heavy dependence on the internet–including feelings of unhappiness when denied access to it–were more likely to have a certain gene than comparable people who weren’t so internet-dependent.
One thing that would be nice to know, before we decide how excited to get about this result, is: How much more likely? Do 90 percent of internet addicts have this gene whereas only 15 percent of non-addicts have it? Or is the difference much less dramatic than that? …
It turns out that the numbers are underwhelming: 27 percent of the people identified as internet addicts had the gene, whereas 17 percent of non-addicts had it. In other words, the “gene responsible for internet addiction” isn’t found in most people who are addicted to the internet! And the chances that a non-addict will have the gene are, relatively speaking, pretty high–63 percent as high as the chances that an addict will have it.
Not all that impressive, we both agreed. It gets worse. As I talk about on bloggingheads (yes, direct to the relevant section!), the scores the researchers used to qualify someone as an “internet addict” on the Internet Addiction Test Questionnaire actually indicate that the person is an “online user with complete control.” The updated guidelines for the test are easily found, um, online.
So, where was the debate? Wright went on to pen Why We All Have ‘Internet-Addiction Genes’. It was standard evolutionary psychology, an argument from universal psychological dispositions, with evolutionary medicine and environmental mismatch (our different modern environment) added to explain our vulnerability to drugs of abuse.
Here, our evolved genes explain our present behavior: “the biochemical mechanisms (including genes) involved in chemical addictions will naturally be the mechanisms involved in habit formation more generally since habit formation is what they were originally designed for.”
Looking for a neuroanthropology book that is accessible to lower level undergraduates and the general public?
Need a book that draws on current literature to explain how infants and young children learn culture and that can reach a wide variety of readers?
Sarah Mahler, a professor of anthropology at Florida International University, has penned the new Culture as Comfort
Yet increasingly we are being pushed out of our cultural comfort zone through globalization, technology, migration, and other dynamic forces shaping our world today. Amidst all this diversity, it’s often easy to go back to what feels “natural”. But it comes at a cost – fewer opportunities for learning and for rich engagement with the variety of life that surrounds us every day. Mahler aims to change that dynamic. Her book will help readers learn more about how we acquire culture so we can better understand our own cultural talents and embrace new cultural experiences.
As Mahler writes:
If you possess culture, were you born with it? Most people will answer no to this question but then have little knowledge about how they acquired culture other than to say they acquired it in childhood. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know more about how children learn culture? Do teenagers share the same culture as that of their parents? If not, where do they get their one culture since we acquire culture from those around us?
Hopefully you begin to see that culture is a very worthwhile concept to understand. It’s my mission to open up the black box of culture so that we all understand it better and be more creative cultural practitioners.
Doug Massey, professor of sociology at Princeton, writes:
The time has come to bring social scientific understanding of culture into the 21st century, and Sarah Mahler’s book leads the way in its conceptualization of culture as embodied in the brain and recalled implicitly to shape everyday behavior. In an era when neuroscience and cognitive psychology are adding insights into our understanding of culture at a breathtaking pace, I’m glad that Sarah Mahler has answered the call to update our understanding of this critical concept.
You can “Meet the Book” here. Mahler is on a book tour, so you might be able to meet her in person. She’ll be part of the “Brains in the Wild” session on neuroanthropology next month at the American Anthropological Association meeting.
Culture as Comfort has an extensive website, where you can learn more about the book, download sample chapters, and find out more about Sarah Mahler and her work.
Culture as Comfort
Culture as Comfort
Good op-ed out in Science by Hans-Ulirch Wittchen, an esteemed clinical psychologist in Germany, on the burden of mood disorders in industrial societies. He highlights the secondary or indirect costs of mood disorders, which are not as apparent as the more direct costs of something like heart disease.
Wittchen also calls for an interdisciplinary approach for intervention and health services:
Improved integrative models, based on research in the behavioral, social, and neurosciences, are urgently needed that better reflect the heterogeneity and complexity of mood disorders. The goal is to provide a range of effective interventions within a personalized perspective, taking into account the vulnerability and risk factors responsible for one´s clinical trajectory to illness, its duration, and remission, in addition to pharmacogenomic and other biomarker approaches. Early interventions based on personalized approaches have the most promise.
Improved integrative models do matter. The question then becomes what type of integrative model. Is it an epidemiological model, where the approach is to measure different “risk factors” in behavioral, social, and neural domains? That can atomize the person, and reduces important formative processes like human development and culture from systemic attributes to token measures.
Or is it a consilience model, where reductive neuroscience is placed in the lead position, the frame of reference for trying to do integration? That often happens, going from consilience to con-silenced.
Or is there some sort of dynamic systems model, a we-can-all-get-along approach because there are emergent properties which somehow bring it all together? That often lacks the specificity a clinician like Wittchen wants, an ability to focus on specific problems and processes that can readily make a difference in people’s lives.
I don’t have a good answer today. Wittchen recommends looking at Roamer, Europe’s three-year project to build road maps for mental health research, which favors the epidemiological approach. My suspicion is that full integration will involve all three approaches, with an additional fourth one that brings to bear historical, cultural, and critical considerations. But I do want to comment on one idea that struck me vis-a-vis neuroanthropology and Wittchen’s op-ed.
Wittchen lauds personalized medicine as an approach to improve interventions. Many social scientists, anthropologists included, would object. Somatosphere’s excellent coverage of Global Mental Health and Its Discontents gives us a direct sense of that debate.
Discussion about the nature and vision of the GMH agenda oscillated between two antagonistic poles. One described it as a bottom-up, public health movement driven by local knowledge and priorities, with the aim of providing access to mental health care for everyone. On the other end of the spectrum, GMH was seen as a top-down, imperial project exporting Western illness categories and treatments that would ultimately replace diverse cultural environments for interpreting mental health.
A social approach to dealing with mental health issues at the community level, rather than a focus on personalized medicine and its biomedical tenets, was something directly advocated at the McGill Conference on Global Mental Health.
Hilary Robertson-Hickling, a behavioural scientist at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, questioned whether mental health work should actually be taken out of a medical framework, pointing out that “psychiatry does not do humanity work due to its obsession with pathologies” – a focus which distracts from social processes and the question of “what can we do together?”
Neuroanthropology certainly embraces that side. The social matters. Yet I was struck by the thought too of whether neuroanthropology could change the notion of “personalized medicine” as well. The nervous system is at once individual and personal, yet encultured and trained. As Greg Downey and I argue in The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology
With the nervous system, personalization inevitably happens through familial, social, and cultural relations, contexts and meanings. At the same time, the personalization involves neural wiring, epigenetic mechanisms, and developmental canalization. It is biocultural in the utmost sense of the word. And trying to make sense of these mutual dynamics is one of the main themes of the Culture, Mind and Brain conference that will take place in Los Angeles in a couple weeks.
In other words, “personalized medicine” cannot be disembodied medicine, forgetting the reciprocal interactions between the person’s nervous system and the developmental and social processes that help define who that person is, not just in the sense of identity but also at the level of basic neurological function. Personalized inevitably is social; personalized medicine should be too.
Photocredit: Stern.de
“Neuroanthropology and Its Applications,” the summer issue of the journal Annals of Anthropological Practice, is now out. The full issue includes ten articles – a comprehensive introduction, and then nine articles split into three sections.
I am proud of this collection. Alongside The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology
Introductory Essay: Neuroanthropology and Its Applications
A succinct background to neuroanthropology, including how it draws on distinct theoretical strands from distinct sub-fields inside anthropology. This essay then provides a framework for future work in applied neuroanthropology.
Sociocultural Analyses and Engagement
Greg Downey, Cultural Variation in Rugby Skills: From Research to Coaching
Cultural differences in sports playing styles may be the result of players possessing diverging cognitive–perceptual strategies, with resulting differences in the underlying neurological correlates of skilled behavior… Neurocognitive differences in skill have implications for talent identification, appropriate training, and the difficulty of capturing skilled action in laboratory settings, which artificially narrow players’ potential to use diverse problem solving strategies.
Eric Lindland & Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, Sensical Translations: Applied Cognitive Communications
This article traces three case studies, in the areas of child mental health, budgets and taxes, and environmental health, where substantial gaps between scientific and public knowledge were identified, and describes the research process to develop “explanatory metaphors” to close those gaps and cultivate more accurate and expansive patterns of public thinking. Three distinct cognitively attuned communications tasks are described: (1) foregrounding an extant but recessive cognitive model prominent among the public; (2) filling a domain-specific “cognitive lacuna” in public thinking by introducing a modified version of an existing model from a kindred cognitive domain; and (3) building off of or working around an existing dominant cognitive model that is consistent with expert knowledge but incomplete.
Katie Glaskin, Empathy and the Robot
Roboticists developing socially interactive robots seek to design them in such a way that humans will readily anthropomorphize them. For this anthropomorphizing to occur, robots need to display emotion-like responses to elicit empathy from the person, so as to enable social interaction. This article focuses on roboticists’ efforts to create emotion-like responses in humanoid robots. Both the actual design process and the understanding of how these technologies can shape our daily lives are core applied dimensions of this work, from carrying out the research to capturing the critical implications of these technological innovations.
Mental and Behavioral Health
Brandon A. Kohrt, Sujen M. Maharjan, Damber Timsina, & James L. Griffith, Applying Nepali Ethnopsychology to Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Mental Illness and Prevention of Suicide among Bhutanese Refugees
Ethnopsychology is the study of emotions, suffering, the self, and social relationships from a cultural perspective. Nepali ethnopsychology can be used to develop and adapt mental health interventions for refugees. We discuss applying ethnopsychology to provide safe and effective mental healthcare for Bhutanese refugees, including cultural adaptation of cognitive behavior therapy, interpersonal therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy. Psychological interventions are proposed for the high rates of suicide among Bhutanese refugees.
Neely Myers, Toward an Applied Neuroanthropology of Psychosis: The Interplay of Culture, Brains, and Experience
Neuroanthropology investigates the ways that cultural context interacts with vulnerable people’s brains to both encourage and inhibit the neurodevelopmental processes that lead to a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia.
Culturally grounded investigations enable us to investigate the ways a person’s lived experiences perpetuate neural changes in the brain that may shape the onset and course of psychotic disorders. This article presents an ethnographic case study of a young man diagnosed with a psychotic disorder after spending 80 days in solitary confinement. Applied neuroanthropological research on the interplay of culture, brains, and experience in psychotic disorders contributes to clinical and policy recommendations that improve the lives of people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder around the globe in ways that are locally meaningful for them.
Gino Collura & Daniel Lende, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Neuroanthropology: Stopping PTSD before It Begins
The high rates of PTSD among veterans has pushed research and intervention to address the serious mental and behavioral health problems associated with wartime trauma. However, these efforts have largely proceeded using biomedical and psychological approaches, without recognizing the institutional and social contexts of trauma, adaptation, and recovery. Moreover, biomedical and psychological approaches have serious shortcomings in recognizing how individual–environment interactions, meaningful interpretations, and sense of identity play a key role in the impact of trauma and development (or not) of PTSD. A neuroanthropological approach can use ideas of neural plasticity and the encultured brain to link culture, interpretation and identity, and the impact of trauma.
Political Economy and Critical Analysis
Victoria Burbank, Life History and Real Life: An Example of Neuroanthropology in Aboriginal Australia
A recent conceptual reworking of the developmental origins of health and disease model that places it within a life history framework is used to interpret some of the history of people living today in the remote Arnhem Land community of Numbulwar. This approach suggests some of the means by which their past circumstances may have had an impact on their current health. A combination of history, ethnography, and the neurobiology of stress and pregnancy provides a neuroanthropological approach for considering the manner in which environmental stressors, particularly those of social origin, may have intergenerational consequences for health.
Helena Hansen & Mary Skinner, From White Bullets to Black Markets and Greened Medicine: The Neuroeconomics and Neuroracial Politics of Opioid Pharmaceuticals
Based on participant-observation and interviews among pharmaceutical executives, policy makers, patients and prescribers, this article describes the neuroeconomics and neuropolitics of new opioid maintenance treatments. This article contrasts the historical emergence of methadone clinics from the 1960s to the 1980s as a treatment for the Black and Latino urban poor, with the current emergence of buprenorphine, a maintenance opioid approved for prescription on doctor’s offices, as a treatment for white, middle-class prescription opioid abusers. The article then traces the counterintuitive result of bringing addiction pharmaceuticals into the medical mainstream in an effort to reduce the stigma of addiction: a two tiered system of addiction treatment that reinforces stigma among the urban poor, and enhances the biological, political, and economic dependence of all classes on opioid markets, both legal and illegal.
Daniel Lende, Poverty Poisons the Brain
This article systematically presents the research behind poverty poisons the brain, which includes the impact of socioeconomic status on human development, the developmental models used to understand how poverty impacts children, and the proximate social factors and brain mechanisms that represent the core causal model behind this research. Nevertheless, a simplistic cause–effect approach and the reduction of the social to the biological often hamper this type of research. A critical approach to how poverty poisons the brain provides the basis for making the shift to a more robust neuroanthropological approach to poverty. Neuroanthropology can utilize social embodiment, the dynamics of stress, and the production of inequality to transform research on poverty and children, and to make policy recommendations, do applied research, and craft and test interventions to deal with the pernicious impact of poverty.
Neuroanthropology on Facebook – Shorter Posts, More Fun!
lizlosin: Feeling even more inspired to communicate science via social media by @talyarkoni in talk on communicating social neuroscience at #SANS2013
bradleyvoytek (Bradley Voytek): @daniel_lende @David_Dobbs @harpersnotes thank you for sharing, gentlemen!
somatosphere (Somatosphere): RT @daniel_lende From Social Structure 2 Gene Regulation & Back: Critical Intro 2 Envirnmntal Epigenetics 4 Sociology http://t.co/lKHYV2SQhS
HelgaBitter (Helga Bitter): RT @daniel_lende: Crack Babies: A Tale from the Drug Wars http://t.co/x7Ew8vCzJH Highly recommended. Fascinating depiction of medical & med…
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Neuroanthropology. Sometimes it’s straight-up neuroscience, sometimes it’s all anthropology, most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle. Greg is the cultural guy, now interested in bio stuff. Daniel is the bio guy, now interested in cultural stuff. Or, to say it differently, Greg does capoiera, mixed martial arts, and rugby. Daniel does alcohol, drugs, and video games. Two very different styles of recreation.
Twitter:
@daniel_lende
@GregDowney1
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About blog, bloggers, and field
Book: The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology
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