Millions Like Stars In My Hands, Daggers In My Heart, Wage War

Iraq Conflict Has Killed A Million Iraqis: Survey

LONDON - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.

The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the researchers found.

The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million.
. . .

Published on Thursday, January 31, 2008 by Reuters

Single Gun Theory, Like Stars In My Hands

And to follow up the grim post about PTSD and violence is an outstanding summary of the mental health crisis plaguing the Army. In Mental Health and the Rapidly Breaking Army, Mike Dunford describes of series of articles in the Washington Post about the rapid rise in suicide attempts/self-injuries and in particular, the sad case of US Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside:

In the note that she wrote before swallowing whatever pills she had around her, she said that she was "very disappointed in the Army". It's hard to find any reason for her not to be disappointed. The Army's treatment of her has been absolutely abysmal. Unfortunately, the same can be said for many other soldiers and veterans. Although the Army has been working to improve mental health care, the system is not where it needs to be, and faces no shortage of hurdles along the way.

Around me the grass was burning. I crouched down and waited. The sheet of fire retreated.

I will carve my own heart and serve myself to God

-Single Gun Theory, Angels Over Teheran

...always sardonic (and occasionally scathing).

The Neurocritic is very pleased about this wonderful review from Nikhil Swaminathan in the February 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind:

Blogs on the Brain
by Nikhil Swaminathan

Scientific American Mind offers up a hearty helping of science, but for the most voracious brain buffs six issues a year may not be enough. Fortunately, plenty of extra crumbs of brain candy can be picked up online in the blogosphere.

. . .

For a blog with more personality, try The Neurocritic, which is always sardonic (and occasionally scathing). According to his bio, the anonymous author has led a hard-knock life, and he works out his hostility by excoriating scientists and journalists who dare to sensationalize findings. In November he jumped on the authors of a New York Times op-ed over the dubious results of their fMRI study regarding people’s perceptions of the 2008 presidential candidates.

Fabulous!

Also reviewed are these terrific blogs: Cognitive Daily, Mind Hacks, PsyBlog, The Frontal Cortex, and Channel N.

Cost of the War in Iraq

What is the cost of the war in Iraq? In financial terms, it's...



In human terms, how does one even begin to calculate the horrific toll? The New York Times is running

A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.

This special series, "War Torn," has revealed this startling statistic:

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.

Here's just one horrifying example that appears to go well beyond PTSD:

Specialist Brandon Bare, a soldier who saw fierce combat in Iraq, was sent home early after suffering head injuries from a grenade attack. He was placed in an intensive outpatient psychological treatment program, where he told counselors about the difficulty he was having controlling his anger toward his wife, Nabila Bare, 18. On July 12, 2005, after Mr. Bare saw his wife e-mailing another man, he stabbed her more than 71 times, carved a pentagram into her stomach and wrote a message with her blood on the refrigerator: "Satan said she deserved it." After confessing to Army investigators, Mr. Bare was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. A military psychiatrist said Specialist Bare exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The victim's parents -- her father was a soldier, too -- were angered by defense efforts to portray Specialist Bare as a scarred war veteran betrayed by his wife. "He is not a hero," said Irene Neverette, the victim's mother. "He is a monster, a criminal."

18 year old Nabila Bare, savagely murdered by her husband, who appeared to have experienced a psychotic break after returning from Iraq

Here's another:

Jacob Burgoyne, a Fort Benning soldier who served as an Army gunner in Iraq, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Specialist Richard Davis in Georgia in 2003. Two other soldiers were convicted of murder in the case, which inspired the 2007 film, "In the Valley of Elah."

How do judges and juries and families on both sides fairly consider the role that post-traumatic stress disorder [see also PTSD Information Center] played in some of these 121 cases?

An Iraq Veteran’s Descent; a Prosecutor’s Choice

By DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: January 20, 2008

Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.

Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. ...

... Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder...

The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.

. . .

Nobody believes that Mr. Smith’s killing of Ms. Speirs can be justified. But many involved in the case have wondered aloud, at some point, whether Ms. Speirs’s life might have been spared if the marine’s combat trauma had been treated more aggressively.

Ms. Speirs’s parents do not engage in such speculation. They view their daughter as a victim of fatal domestic violence and not as an indirect casualty of the war in Iraq.

Two years ago, this blog was launched with a post entitled, Men are Torturers, Women are Nurturers... It was about a paper by Singer et al. (2006) and the overblown press coverage that followed.

Revenge 'more satisfying for men'

"This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment."

-- Lead researcher Dr Tania Singer

At the time, I said...

Well then, that explains why the public outrage directed at Lynndie England was so much greater than that directed at the Abu Ghraib ringleader (and father of Ms. England's child), former prison guard Charles A. Graner.

...and quoted this commentary:

Lyndie England, the Right and Feminism
Equal Opportunity Torture

By BRANDY BAKER

Right wing pundits have been seeking to draw special notice to Private Lynndie England. Though only one of many sadistic individuals involved in the horrific acts at the prison who were photographed, England has been on the receiving end of the most invective. Though her fellow sadists were just as cruel, England is getting all of this extra attention because she is an easier target. England is an easier target because she is a woman.

Where am I going with all this? I don't know. What have Human Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience told us about preventing torture, murder, war?

I can't go on, I'll go on.

I've started a blog to critique some of the most outrageous claims published in high-profile journals and discussed in the popular press:

http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/

Because The Neurocritic is not a member of the all-powerful Editorial Boards at Science, Nature, or Neuron, The Neurocritic is published under an assumed identity. Your comments are most welcome.

Enjoy the inaugural posting! [we'll see how long it lasts.]

The Unnamable

You must go on.

I can't go on.

I'll go on.

-- Samuel Beckett

Visit the Psychologists for Social Responsibility website. PsySR uses psychological knowledge and skills to promote peace with social justice at the community, national, and international levels.

Reference

Singer T, Seymour B, O'doherty JP, Stephan KE, Dolan RJ, Frith CD. (2006). Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature 439:466-9.

Does It Look Painful or Disgusting? Ask Your Parietal and Cingulate Cortex

...............Ouch!............Yuck!


Figure 1 (Benuzzi et al., 2008). Sample frames extracted from some video clips representing painful (left), disgusting (middle), and neutral (right) stimuli. All video clips began with 200–400 ms of a static hand or foot picture, followed by a stimulus rapidly approaching and contacting the skin. Needles and knifes apparently punctured the hand or foot, but actually they did not: the images were digitally corrected to simulate bleeding. [NOTE: blood not shown here. Perhaps the authors made use of this classic site, Jarrett's Blood Splatter Photoshop Tutorial.]


Think I made up the title of this post? No, it's the real title of a journal article published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience:

Francesca Benuzzi, Fausta Lui, Davide Duzzi, Paolo F. Nichelli, and Carlo A. Porro. (2008). Does It Look Painful or Disgusting? Ask Your Parietal and Cingulate Cortex. J. Neurosci. 28:923-931.

Looking at still images of body parts in situations that are likely to cause pain has been shown to be associated with activation in some brain areas involved in pain processing. Because pain involves both sensory components and negative affect, it is of interest to explore whether the visually evoked representations of pain and of other negative emotions overlap. By means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we compare the brain areas recruited, in female volunteers, by the observation of painful, disgusting, or neutral stimuli delivered to one hand or foot. Several cortical foci were activated by the observation of both painful and disgusting video clips, including portions of the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior, mid-, and posterior cingulate cortex, left posterior insula, and right parietal operculum. Signal changes in perigenual cingulate and left anterior insula were linearly related to the perceived unpleasantness, when the individual differences in susceptibility to aversive stimuli were taken into account. Painful scenes selectively induced activation of left parietal foci, including the parietal operculum, the postcentral gyrus, and adjacent portions of the posterior parietal cortex. In contrast, brain foci specific for disgusting scenes were found in the posterior cingulate cortex. These data show both similarities and differences between the brain patterns of activity related to the observation of noxious or disgusting stimuli. Namely, the parietal cortex appears to be particularly involved in the recognition of noxious environmental stimuli, suggesting that areas involved in sensory aspects of pain are specifically triggered by observing noxious events.

Image credit: Jarrett Heather

I'm Alive I'm Dead

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand

-The Cure


Are you Dead or Alive? To find out, now you too can take another Implicit Association Test (IAT)!

Are you alive? Are you sure?

The Neurocritic is NEITHER Dead NOR Alive. Or both Dead AND Alive. Plus, as promised, today we'll cover "Tips for Manipulating the IAT."

You have completed the study. Your Result Your data suggest little to no automatic identification with Alive compared to Dead. Your results, summarized above, are an implicit indicator of whether you are alive or dead. Implicit measures are superior to self-report because the latter is notoriously unreliable. People may report being alive because social pressures suggest that it is more desirable to be alive. Also, people may not have introspective access to their animate-status, making such self-report untrustworthy. In a prior study, we found that self-report was particularly unreliable for people who were dead suggesting that implicit measures will be especially useful for this population. Importantly, your results may be influenced by cultural norms rather than your personal animate status. Cultural norms are strongly biased toward "alive" so if you show a stronger identity with alive over dead, you should be suspicious that the result may be due to this extrapersonal influence. Also, these associations are inherently "relative" meaning that we cannot estimate your alive associations separately from your dead associations. So, if you are both or neither, we cannot tell the difference. Finally, if you hang out with a lot of dead people, then your effects might be due to strong associations of others with dead rather than yourself with alive. Cautions aside, this implicit measure of dead identity shall become the new standard assessment. For too long, the low-reliability finger-finding-pulse method has errantly allowed dead people to continue 'living' among us. This must stop. A Professor Dr. Arina Bones Ph.D. production. If you are otherwise confused or uncertain about your results, you may wish to evaluate whether you are Human or Alien.

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an arab

-The Cure, Killing An Arab

it was a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in 'l'etranger' (the outsider) by albert camus (R. Smith, cure news number 11, October 1991).

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is all the rage in social psychology as a measure of hidden "unconscious" biases or prejudices that most people are afraid to admit to themselves (or to reveal in polite company within academic settings). The Situationist linked to an article in the APS Observer:

The IAT: How and When It Works

By Jesse Erwin

. . .

In a time where social desirability confounds are of pervasive concern in psychological research, one of the IAT’s greatest merits appears to be resistance to faking. Studies have demonstrated that participants rarely devise a successful faking strategy. It appears that taking one’s time is the easiest way to doctor results. “It does work,” Greenwald says of the strategy, “but it also tends to be detectable statistically.”

In Monday's entry, The Neurocritic was Human, All Too Human (AND Alien). My "faking" strategy was simple, and relied on neither deliberate slowing of response times nor a long-standing affiliation with aliens. When SELF and ALIEN were mapped to the same key, I merely said to myself, "I'm an alien." This strategy was transient, applied only when those stimulus-response mappings were the same, not when SELF and ALIEN were mapped to different keys. I used the same strategy for the Dead or Alive IAT. In both cases, I responded as quickly and as accurately as possible. So what's up?

A recent study by De Houwer and colleagues (2007) demonstrated that participants can easily fake their results in an IAT for newly-acquired attitudes about fictitious social groups (Niffites and Luupites), when instructed to do so by the experimenters. The subjects were able to manipulate both the magnitude and the direction of the IAT effect. The authors raised the general point that "implicit" measures of attitudes may not be entirely implicit. Furthermore,

The present study is the first to demonstrate successful faking in the IAT when participants perform an IAT for the first time during an experimental session. One explanation for this apparent discrepancy is that we focussed on novel attitudes whereas previous studies looked at overlearned attitudes and associations. It could be that it is easier to fake novel attitudes because it is not necessary to counteract well-established existing attitudes toward those same attitude objects. However, before strong conclusions can be drawn about this issue, new studies are needed in which faking attitudes toward novel and familiar attitude objects are compared directly.

Granted, it's preferable that IAT-takers are naïve to the purposes of the study, which is why "Bones & Johnson" (2007) lamented the fact that

the population of new participants available to take IATs will expire by the year 2023. Shrill, doomsday proposals from IAT experts involve rationing the precious pool of remaining IAT novices or other naive strategies. ... Building on our prior experience of adapting the IAT for measuring infant cognition and rooting out aliens among us, we demonstrate that new pools of participant resources—the unborn and passed on—are available, if we take the time to develop the methods to exploit them.

But if one is fully cognizant of the true purpose of any IAT, does that render your results invalid, since the test is not immune to manipulation? What do the experts say about that? Here's Brian A. Nosek in The Bias Finders (Bower, 2006):

Several investigations suggest that it's difficult to initially manipulate one's IAT score. However, people who take the IAT many times or who receive explicit cheating instructions can fake their scores. "I've taken the IAT so many times that I know how to get any score I want to on it," Nosek says.

Wah! I'm not so SPECIAL, after all (even though my prior IAT tally for all of the 21st century is 10 at most [not 100] -- and zero in the last few years). At any rate, I'm not a social psychologist, so I was was initially unaware of the [nearly] true extent of this edict:

With the Association for Psychological Science's new ethical standards requiring that all research studies include an Implicit Association Test (IAT)...

...but really, any issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology has at least 5 articles using some IAT or another! Everybody loves the IAT! Or not (see Criticism and controversy). According to Mixing Memory:

While the IAT has been publicized (by its authors!) as a measure of implicit attitudes, and even more, as a measure of implicit prejudice, there is no real evidence that it measures attitudes, much less prejudices. In fact, it's not at all clear what it measures, though the fact that its psychometric properties are pretty well defined at least implies that it measures something. On top of that, the IAT (like all of the other implicit tests) has serious methodological flaws that are currently being discussed in the literature. It's just irresponsible to publicize work, and claim that it does something very particular, when the work is still in the early stages and it's not at all clear what it's actually doing...

Welcome to "The Disturbing World of Implicit Bias..."

References

Bones AK, Johnson NR. (2007). Measuring the immeasurable: Or "Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?" Perspectives on Psychological Science 2:406-411.

Bower B. (2006). The bias finders. Science News 169(16):250.

De Houwer J, Beckers T, Moors A. (2007). Novel attitudes can be faked on the Implicit Association Test. J Exp Social Psychol. 43:972-978. [PDF for those without journal access.]

We asked participants to imagine that a researcher would provide them with positive or negative information about fictitious social groups. Half of the participants were asked to act in such a way that they would conform to the expectations of the researcher. The other participants were asked to behave in the manner opposite to what the researcher expected. Participants then completed an IAT designed to measure the newly formed attitudes toward the fictitious social groups. The direction of the IAT effect depended on the faking instructions. The results call for caution when using the IAT to study the development of implicit attitudes.

Human, All Too Human (AND Alien)

Are You an Alien?

To find out, now you too can take the latest Implicit Association Test (IAT)!

Human or Alien?

The Neurocritic is Human AND Alien. Coming soon: "Tips for Manipulating the IAT."

You have completed the study. Your Result Your data suggest little to no automatic identification with Human compared to Alien. If your results, provided above, indicate a stronger identity with alien relative to human, then you are probably an alien. Self-reports of humanness sometimes differ from the results revealed by the IAT because either aliens do not want to admit to being an alien either because of plans for world domination or because of low collective self-esteem. Also, one's implicit alien identity can be a surprise to the test taker because "he" or "she" did not know previously about being an alien. These cases are surprisingly common and are likely due to memory impairment or alieodissociative identity disorder (not yet recognized by the APA diagnostic manual). A few humans - mostly bleeding heart liberals - implicitly identify with aliens more than humans because of a uncontrollable need to disidentify with the ingroup. In either case, if you show an implicit alien identity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is interested to speak with you. If you instead show an implicit human identity, then it is likely that you are in implicit denial. Why would you have taken this test if you were not an alien? Please report yourself to DHS anyway. A Professor Dr. Arina Bones, Ph.D. production. If you are otherwise confused or uncertain about your results, you may wish to evaluate whether you are Dead or Alive.

I Look Terrible! My Right mIFG Is SO Embarrassed!

Imagine being part of a psychology study in which you are filmed making short speeches in front of a camera. You're told that the purpose of the study is to investigate the eye movements that people make while speaking. You wear a plain black t-shirt and sit opposite the exerimenter, who records you when you talk about three themes related to your own history and experience (e.g., your hometown) for about a minute each.

Then it turns out the real purpose of the study is to record your reactions to less-than-flattering still images of yourself gleaned from the videos! How were these embarrassing images selected?

We established the following six criteria for the "badness" of each image: first, whether the eyes were totally or partly closed (eyes); second, whether the gaze was averted (gaze); third, whether the mouth was unnaturally open (mouth); fourth, whether the lip stuck out (lip); fifth, whether the chin stuck out (chin); and sixth, whether the expression was strange (expression). "Bad" images that met some of these criteria contained awkward facial expressions, such as those in which the participants showed the whites of their eyes or had their mouths wide open. By contrast, "good" images did not meet any of the criteria, and appeared as if the subjects had posed for a photograph rather than the images having been taken from a video recording. These sets of 21 images were used as the stimuli for the SELF condition in the subsequent fMRI experiment. By contrast, in the OTHERS condition, 21 face images that were selected from three gender-matched unfamiliar individuals (seven images per person) were used.

You can see where this is going: the authors (Morita et al., 2008) wanted to see how the brain reacts to seeing a terrible picture of yourself. They were also interested in how this relates to a bunch of hyphenated "self-" words: self-recognition, self-face recognition, self-consciousness, self-conscious emotions, "public self-consciousness", self-awareness, "public self-awareness", "meta self-awareness", self-esteem, and self-evaluation. I think I'll stick to embarrassment, rather than a meta-meta discussion of self-*.

In the scanner, the task was to rate, from 1 to 7, how photogenic each face was, for images of both SELF and OTHER (i.e., other participants in the experiment). After scanning, the subjects performed a self-paced task in which they rated the same faces on photogenic-ness (again), embarrassment, valence, and arousal.

To make a long story short, some of the results were not surprising at all:


Figure 2 (Morita et al., 2008). Relationship between the ratings of embarrassment and the photogenic scores for each face.

People are quite embarrassed by bad pictures of themselves, but of others...not so much. The key fMRI finding was from the SELF vs. OTHERS contrast, as shown below, namely that greater activity in the right middle inferior frontal gyrus (mIFG) was associated with lower embarrassment scores.


Figure 5 (A) Brain activity in the right mIFG negatively correlated with the embarrassment ratings for individuals' own faces. A random effects statistical parametric activation map (SPM{t}) was overlaid on a canonical transverse section. The height threshold was set at p < .01 at each voxel level for display purposes. The light blue outlines indicate areas that were significantly activated by the SELF versus OTHERS contrast.

So really, the title of this post should be "I Look Terrible! My Right mIFG Is SO Embarrassed and Suppressed!" Hmm. The authors have a string of "self-" words to explain this finding:

As the standard for an individual's face appears to be recognized as one's own representative face, it could be the most self-relevant stimulus. Individuals whose own faces are rated as "good" tend to be close to the standard and these individuals experience relatively little embarrassment. Therefore, in the current study, an increase in the right mIFG activity associated with reduced embarrassment would reflect increased relevance to the standard self, which could be regarded as self-relevance. In addition, the activity of the right mIFG did not depend on public self-consciousness; this was in agreement with our finding that the extent of embarrassment was not associated with public self-consciousness. Taken together, our results suggest that the right mIFG is selectively engaged in the self-evaluation, reflecting self-relevance.

OK, then. Did any brain region show a positive correlation with embarrassment ratings? No...

At any rate, the present experiment was conducted with Japanese participants. The cultural contributions to the degree of embarrassment, self-consciousness, self-evaluation, self-*, etc. -- and whether the participants are early rejects from Pop/Pinoy/Deutschland/Canadian/American Idol, and how this influences right frontal activation -- would be interesting topics for future study.

Ashlee Simpson caught lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live.

Reference

Morita T, Itakura S, Saito DN, Nakashita S, Harada T, Kochiyama T, Sadato N. (2008). The Role of the Right Prefrontal Cortex in Self-evaluation of the Face: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. J Cog Neurosci. 20:342-355.

Individuals can experience negative emotions (e.g., embarrassment) accompanying self-evaluation immediately after recognizing their own facial image, especially if it deviates strongly from their mental representation of ideals or standards. The aim of this study was to identify the cortical regions involved in self-recognition and self-evaluation along with self-conscious emotions. To increase the range of emotions accompanying self-evaluation, we used facial feedback images chosen from a video recording, some of which deviated significantly from normal images. In total, 19 participants were asked to rate images of their own face (SELF) and those of others (OTHERS) according to how photogenic they appeared to be. After scanning the images, the participants rated how embarrassed they felt upon viewing each face. As the photogenic scores decreased, the embarrassment ratings dramatically increased for the participant's own face compared with those of others. The SELF versus OTHERS contrast significantly increased the activation of the right prefrontal cortex, bilateral insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral occipital cortex. Within the right prefrontal cortex, activity in the right precentral gyrus reflected the trait of awareness of observable aspects of the self; this provided strong evidence that the right precentral gyrus is specifically involved in self-face recognition. By contrast, activity in the anterior region, which is located in the right middle inferior frontal gyrus, was modulated by the extent of embarrassment. This finding suggests that the right middle inferior frontal gyrus is engaged in self-evaluation preceded by self-face recognition based on the relevance to a standard self.

Ashlee Simpson walks off the SNL stage.