The researchers used the following analogy to make their point. Imagine taking a vacation to Cancun sometime in the future. If the vacation is six months away, the traveler is probably thinking about beaches, sunsets, and other abstract information. On the other hand, if the vacation begins the following week, the traveler is thinking about taxi cabs, boarding passes, and specific, concrete concerns.

In similar fashion, a voter facing a choice in the distant future is less interested in particular plans and policies than in broad, abstract themes. It is only as the election gets closer do voters start paying attention to details of the candidate’s positions on issues of importance to them. The study authors demonstrate this effect in a series of studies and further observe that it is relatively uninformed voters who are subject to this effect. That is, while informed voters are not affected by abstract or concrete information nor how distant the election is, political novices tend to be more persuaded by abstract messages when the choice is far in the future, and by concrete messages when the choice is in the near future.

The researchers observe that, while their experiments focused on political contexts, the underlying argument applies equally well to many consumption contexts such as deciding which college to attend, which automobile to purchase when one graduates from college, or where to live when one retires.

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Hakkyun Kim, Akshay R. Rao, Angela Y. Lee, “It’s Time to Vote: The Effect of Matching Message Orientation and Temporal Frame on Political Persuasion” Journal of Consumer Research: April 2009.

Reprinted from University of Chicago Press Journals.

Blunted reward response, gene may trigger overeating

AUSTIN, Texas-Obese individuals may overeat because they experience less satisfaction from eating food due to a reduced response in their brains’ reward circuitry, according to a new study by Eric Stice, psychology researcher at The University of Texas at Austin.

While eating, the body releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the reward centers of the brain, but Stice found obese people show less activation in the striatum relative to lean people. He also found individuals with a blunted response were more likely to show unhealthy weight gain, particularly if they had a gene associated with compromised dopamine signaling in the brain’s reward circuitry.

Stice and a team of researchers have published their findings in the Science article, “Relation Between Obesity and Blunted Striatal Response to Food is Moderated by TaqIA A1 Allele.”

Although research has revealed biological factors play a major role in causing obesity, few studies have identified factors that increase people’s risk to gain weight in the future.

With support from the National Institutes of Health, Stice led a research team-comprising clinical psychologists from the university and Oregon Research Institute and sensory scientists from the John B. Pierce Laboratory and Yale University-to explore how blunted responses in the brain relate to weight gain in young females.

“The research reveals obese people may have fewer dopamine receptors, so they overeat to compensate for this reward deficit,” Stice, who has studied eating disorders and obesity for almost two decades, said. “People with fewer D2 receptors need to take in more of a rewarding substance-such as food or drugs-to experience the same level of pleasure as other people.”

Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Stice’s team measured how the dorsal striatum was activated in response to the taste of a chocolate milkshake (versus a tasteless solution). The researchers also tested participants for the presence of a genetic variation linked to a lower number of dopamine D2 receptors, the Taq1A1 allele.

For one year, the researchers tracked participants’ changes in body mass index. The results revealed participants with decreased striatal activation in response to the milkshake who also had the A1 allele were more likely to gain weight over time.

“Understanding the abnormalities in activation of reward circuitry in response to eating is critical to helping people regulate their weight because dopamine serves as the primary neurotransmitter in the reward pathways of the brain,” Stice said. “Although people with decreased sensitivity of reward circuitry are at increased risk for unhealthy weight gain, identifying changes in behavior or pharmacological options could correct this reward deficit to prevent and treat obesity.”

Reprinted from University of Texas at Austin.

In three studies of more than 1,000 people Dr Tim Phillips and his fellow researchers discovered that women place significantly greater importance on altruistic traits that anything else. Their findings have been published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Dr Phillips said:  “Evolutionary theory predicts competition between individuals and yet we see many examples in nature of individuals disadvantaging themselves to help others. In humans, particularly, we see individuals prepared to put themselves at considerable risk to help individuals they do not know for no obvious reward.”

Participants in the studies were questioned about a range of qualities they look for in a mate, including examples of altruistic behaviour such as ‘donates blood regularly’ and ‘volunteered to help out in a local hospital’. Women placed significantly greater importance on altruistic traits in all three studies.

Yet both sexes may consider altruistic traits when choosing a partner. One hundred and seventy couples were asked to rate how much they preferred altruistic traits in a mate and report their own level of altruistic behaviour. The strength of preference in one partner was found to correlate with the extent of altruistic behaviour typically displayed in the other, suggesting that altruistic traits may well be a factor both men and women take into account when choosing a partner.

Dr Phillips said: “For many years the standard explanation for altruistic behaviour towards non-relatives has been based on reciprocity and reputation - a version of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. I believe we need to look elsewhere to understand the roots of human altruism. The expansion of the human brain would have greatly increased the cost of raising children so it would have been important for our ancestors to choose mates both willing and able to be good, long-term parents. Displays of altruism could well have provided accurate clues to this and genes linked to altruism would have been favoured as a result.”

Dr Phillips concluded: “Sexual selection could well come to be seen as exerting a major influence on what made humans human.”

Dr Tom Reader in the School of Biology said: “Sexual preferences have enormous potential to shape the evolution of animal behaviour. Humans are clearly not an exception: sex may have a crucial role in explaining what are our most biologically interesting and unusual habits.”
Reprinted from The University of Nottingham.

Evanston, Ill. (October 2, 2008) - New research published in the journal Science explains why individuals seek to find and impose order on an unruly world through superstition, rituals and conspiratorial explanations by linking a loss of control to individual perceptions. The research finds that a quest for structure or understanding leads people to trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that simply don’t exist.

The research was done by Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in collaboration with lead author Jennifer Whitson, an assistant professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Through a series of six experiments, the researchers showed that individuals who lacked control were more likely to see images that did not exist, perceive conspiracies, and develop superstitions.

“The less control people have over their lives, the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics,” said Galinsky. “Feelings of control are so important to people that a lack of control is inherently threatening. While some misperceptions can be bad or lead one astray, they’re extremely common and most likely satisfy a deep and enduring psychological need.”

The Need for Control

According to Whitson, that psychological need is for control, and the ability to minimize uncertainty and predict beneficial courses of action. In situations where one has little control, the researchers proposed that an individual may believe that mysterious, unseen mechanisms are secretly at work. To test their theory, the researchers created a number of situations characterized by lack of control and then measured whether people saw a variety of illusory patterns.

For example, in one experiment individuals were asked to look at “snowy” pictures. Half of the pictures were grainy patterns of random dots, while the other half also contained images like a chair, a boat, or the planet Saturn, that were faintly visible against the grainy background. While all people correctly identified 95 percent of the hidden images, the group of people who had felt their control had been eroded in a previous part of the experiment also “saw” images in 43 percent of the pictures that were just random scatterings of dots.

“People see false patterns in all types of data, imagining trends in stock markets, seeing faces in static, and detecting conspiracies between acquaintances. This suggests that lacking control leads to a visceral need for order - even imaginary order,” said Whitson.

Explaining Superstitions

To better understand superstitions, Whitson and Galinsky asked a group of individuals to write about situations they had experienced. Half of them recalled situations in which they had control, while the other half detailed paralyzing instances of a loss of control, like car accidents caused by others or illnesses to friends or family. Following the exercise, all participants read short stories in which significant outcomes, like getting an idea approved at a business meeting, were preceded by unrelated behaviors, such as stomping one’s feet three times before entering a meeting. Participants who had initially written about a situation in which they had no control expressed greater belief in a superstitious connection to the story’s outcome, and were more fearful of what would happen if the superstitious behavior wasn’t properly repeated in the future.

While foot stomping or lucky socks are quirky and usually harmless, the participants in the experiment whose feelings of control had been diminished were more likely to perceive more sinister conspiracies lurking beneath the surface of innocuous situations. For example, when reading about an employee who was passed over for a promotion, the powerless participants tended to believe that private conversations between co-workers and the boss were to blame.

Restoring a Sense of Control

To test whether individuals with diminished power can restore control and realign their perceptions, the researchers asked participants to rate how strongly they believed in certain values (like aesthetic beauty or valuing scientific theory and research). They then asked participants to write about situations in which they were helpless or lacked control. To restore feelings of control afterwards, some participants were asked to elaborate on the values they had rated as important. As a comparison, other participants were asked to elaborate on the value they held in lowest esteem.

The results were clear: participants who didn’t have an opportunity to regain feelings of control were more likely to perceive visual images that didn’t exist and to perceive conspiracies in innocent situations, while participants who regained feelings of control by focusing on important personal values were no different from people who never lost their feelings of self-control in the first place.

“It’s exciting - restoring people’s sense of control normalized their perceptions and behavior,” said Galinsky.

The report, “Alcohol and Violence: Exploring Patterns and Responses,” examines the association between alcohol and violence through the disciplines of anthropology, clinical psychology, human rights law, gender, and public health.

“We need to look more closely at the meaning attached to both drinking and violence in different cultures, without assuming that the one causes the other,” writes Anne Fox, PhD, a contributor to the report and founding director of Galahad SMS Ltd. in England.

Dr. Fox writes that the presence of certain cultural features can largely predict levels of homicide, spousal abuse and other forms of violence. Violence-reinforcing cultures tend to share the following features:

• Cultural support (in media, norms, icons, myths, and so on) for aggression and aggressive solutions;
• Militaristic readiness and participation in wars-societies that are frequently at war have consistently higher rates of interpersonal violence as well;
• Glorification of fighters;
• Violent sports;
• Corporal and capital punishment;
• Socialization of male children toward aggression;
• Belief in malevolent magic;
• Conspicuous inequality in wealth;
• A higher than normal proportion of young males in the society;
• Strong codes of male honor-in general, societies and subgroups that actively subscribe to strong codes of honor tend to have higher rates of homicide;
• A culture of male domination.

In her paper, “Sociocultural Factors that Foster or Inhibit Alcohol-related Violence,” Dr. Fox argues that efforts to counteract a “culture of violence” and “the male propensity for aggression” should be channeled toward altering “beliefs about alcohol” and “social responses to violence and aggression.”

The report includes other papers including “The Role of Drinking Patterns and Acute Intoxication in Violent Interpersonal Behaviors” which looks at patterns of violence at the individual level. The paper “Working with Culture to Prevent Violence and Reckless Drinking” studies alcohol and violence from a gender perspective and identifies strategies used to respond to analogous social problems. “Practical Responses: Communications Guidelines for First Responders in Cases of Alcohol-related Violence” presents international guidelines for enhanced communication among first responders (police, emergency room staff, social workers) to alcohol-related violence, particularly between the health and law enforcement sectors.

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ICAP has been engaged in the relationship between alcohol and violence since 1998, including a literature review and a report on violence in licensed premises. The organization has engaged in discussions with a variety of international bodies, including the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Center for the Prevention of Crime, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. In 2005, the World Bank hosted a meeting organized by ICAP and co-chaired by UNIFEM to discuss how best to move forward on the issue through some form of public-private cooperation. This report is a result of ongoing international collaboration to contribute to greater international understanding on the intersection between alcohol and violence.

The full report may be found at ICAP’s web site:

http://63.134.214.153/Portals/0/download/all_pdfs/Violence%20Monograph.pdf

Alcohol and Violence: Exploring Patterns and Responses was commissioned by the International Center for Alcohol Policies. ICAP is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote the understanding of the role of alcohol in society through dialogue and partnerships involving the beverage alcohol industry, the public health community, and others interested in alcohol policy, and to help reduce the abuse of alcohol worldwide. ICAP is supported by major international producers of beverage alcohol. The views expressed in this book are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of ICAP or of its sponsoring companies.

“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”

The study, co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University, will appear in a special supplement to the journal featuring papers based on presentations from the December 2007 Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction.”

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species. Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events, and there have been only five in our planet’s history, until now.

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events. “My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens,” Wake said.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said. It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction. It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

But no matter what the start date, empirical data clearly show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on the wane.

Our own backyard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.

“We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too,” Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened. Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park. This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size. Originally, frogs living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but recently, they also succumbed.

There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said. The first hint of frog decline in this area came in the 1990s, and researchers originally thought that rainbow trout introduced to this area were the culprits - they like to snack on tadpoles and frog eggs. The UC Berkeley team did experiments in which it physically removed trout from some areas, and the result was that frog populations started to recover.

“But then they disappeared again, and this time there were carcasses,” Wake said.

The culprit is a nasty pathogenic fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis. Researchers discovered the fungus in Sierra Nevada frogs in 2001. Scientists have documented over the last five years mass die-offs and population collapses due to the fungus in the mountain range.

But the fungus is not unique to California. It has been wiping out amphibians around the world, including in the tropics, where amphibian biodiversity is particularly high.

“It’s been called the most devastating wildlife disease ever recorded,” Wake said.

Global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs around the world, Wake said. And the Sierra Nevada amphibians are also susceptible to poisonous winds carrying pesticides from Central Valley croplands. “The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch,” Wake said, “although it’s more like a one-two-three-four punch.”

The frogs are not the only victims in this mass extinction, Wake emphasized. Scientists studying other organisms have seen similarly dramatic effects.

“Our work needs to be seen in the context of all this other work, and the news is very, very grim,” Wake said.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health helped support this study.

Audio files and slides of presentations from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on biodiversity and extinction are available online.

In an experiment carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London), volunteers were shown a selection of images, which they had already been familiarised with. Each card had a unique probability of reward attached to it and over the course of the experiment, the volunteers would be able to work out which selection would provide the highest rewards. However, when unfamiliar images were introduced, the researchers found that volunteers were more likely to take a chance and select one of these options than continue with their familiar - and arguably safer - option.

Using fMRI scanners, which measure blood flow in the brain to highlight which areas are most active, Dr Bianca Wittmann and colleagues showed that when the subjects selected an unfamiliar option, an area of the brain known as the ventral striatum lit up, indicating that it was more active. The ventral striatum is in one of the evolutionarily primitive regions of the brain, suggesting that the process can be advantageous and will be shared by many animals.

“Seeking new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioural tendency in humans and animals,” says Dr Wittmann. “It makes sense to try new options as they may prove advantageous in the long run. For example, a monkey who chooses to deviate from its diet of bananas, even if this involves moving to an unfamiliar part of the forest and eating a new type of food, may find its diet enriched and more nutritious.”

When we make a particular choice or carry out a particular action which turns out to be beneficial, it is rewarded by a release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. These rewards help us learn which behaviours are preferable and advantageous and worth repeating. The ventral striatum is one of the key areas involved in processing rewards in the brain. Although the researchers cannot say definitively from the fMRI scans how novelty seeking is being rewarded, Dr Wittmann believes it is likely to be through dopamine release.

However, whilst rewarding the brain for making novel choices may prove advantageous in encouraging us to make potentially beneficial choices, it may also make us more susceptible to exploitation.

“I might have my own favourite choice of chocolate bar, but if I see a different bar repackaged, advertising its ‘new, improved flavour’, my search for novel experiences may encourage me to move away from my usual choice,” says Dr Wittmann. “This introduces the danger of being sold ‘old wine in a new skin’ and is something that marketing departments take advantage of.”

Rewarding the brain for novel choices could have a more serious side effect, argues Professor Nathaniel Daw, now at New York University, who also worked on the study.

“The novelty bonus may be useful in helping us make complex, uncertain decisions, but it clearly has a downside,” says Professor Daw. “In humans, increased novelty-seeking may play a role in gambling and drug addiction, both of which are mediated by malfunctions in dopamine release.”

Reprinted from Wellcome Trust.

The research, conducted by political scientists James H. Fowler, Christopher T. Dawes (of UC San Diego) and psychologist Laura A. Baker (of University of Southern California), appears in the May issue of the American Political Science Review, a journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA).  The article is available online at: www.apsanet.org/imgtest/APSRMay08Fowler_etal.pdf.

“Although we are not the first to suggest a link between genes and political participation,” note the authors, “this study is the first attempt to test the idea empirically.”  They do so by conducting three tests of the claim that part of the variation in political participation can be attributed to genetic factors.  The results suggest that individual genetic differences make up a large and significant portion of the variation in political participation, even after taking socialization and other environmental factors into account. They also suggest that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, family upbringing may have little or no effect on children’s future participatory behavior.

In conducting their study, the authors examine the turnout patterns of identical and non-identical twins-including 396 twins in Los Angeles County and 806 twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.  Their findings suggest that 53% of the variation in turnout can be accounted for by genetic effects in the former, with similar outcomes in the latter.

Moreover, genetic-based differences extend to a broad class of acts of political participation, including donating to a campaign, contacting an official, running for office, and attending a rally.  According to Fowler, “we expected to find that genes played some role in political behavior, but we were quite surprised by the size of the effect and how widely it applies to all kinds of participation.”

“The fact that we have found genetic variation in voting, and political participation in general, should not be surprising given the large numbers of behaviors that have already been found to be heritable,” observe the authors.  They conclude by noting that “the next step in this line of research must move beyond estimates…and attempt to identify why genes matter so much.”  Some potential avenues include examining the interaction of genes and the environment on political participation, tracing the connections between participation in small groups and large-scale participation, and identifying the genes or groups of genes implicated in political behavior.  

# # #

 The American Political Science Association (est. 1903) is the leading professional organization for the study of politics and has over 14,000 members in 80 countries. For more news and information about political science research visit the APSA media website, http://www.politicalsciencenews.org/.

When you are sick or injured, you want to know what’s wrong and what can be done. You want a diagnosis. A correct diagnosis reveals what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment and what is the likely outcome. For example, a diagnosis of pneumonia indicates a serious lung infection that can usually be cured with antibiotics.

While medical diagnoses are based on science, psychiatric “diagnoses” are not at all scientific. They do not reveal what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment, and what is the likely outcome. Nor are they reliable. Different psychiatrists who examine the same patient typically offer different “diagnoses.” Moreover, psychiatric “diagnoses” move in and out of favor, depending on a variety of social factors.

Psychiatric “diagnosis” is actually a labeling process, where the patient’s symptoms are matched with a grouping of symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM). As we shall see, this psychiatric “bible” was developed and is maintained by financial and political interests.¹

Sigmund Freud

Who decides what is normal or healthy and what is deviant or sick?

Before the 20^th century, life stresses were generally seen as spiritual problems or physical illnesses, and people turned to religious advisors and physicians for help. Medical doctors treated “hysteria” and “nerves” as physical problems. Psychiatry was restricted to the treatment of severely disturbed people in asylums.² The first classification of psychiatric disorders in the United States appeared in 1918 and contained 22 categories. All but one referred to various forms of insanity.

In 1901, Sigmund Freud revolutionized psychiatry by breaking down the barrier between mental illness and normal behavior. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,³ Freud argued that commonplace behaviors - slips of the tongue, what people find humorous, what they forget and the mistakes they make - indicate repressed sexual feelings that lurk beneath the surface of normal behavior.

By linking everyday behavior with mental illness, Freud and his followers released psychiatry from the asylum. Between 1917 and 1970, as psychiatrists cultivated clients with a broad range of problems, the number of psychiatrists practicing outside institutions swelled from eight percent to 66 percent.⁴

The social movements of the 1960’s opposed psychiatry’s focus on inner conflict and emphasized the social sources of sickness instead. Dr. Alvin Poussaint recalls the 1969 convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

“After multiple racist killings during the civil rights movement, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have murderous bigotry based on race classified as a mental disorder. The APA’s officials rejected that recommendation, arguing that since so many Americans are racist, racism in this country is normative.”⁵

Growing the industry

In 1980, the APA overhauled the DSM. The Task Force established to create the new manual declared that any disorder could be included,

“If there is general agreement among clinicians, who would be expected to encounter the condition, that there are significant number of patients who have it and that its identification is important in the clinical work it is included in the classification.”⁶

In other words, the new DSM was not based on science, but on the need to maintain existing patients and include new ones who might seek help for any number of problems. A profitable and self-perpetuating industry was born. The more people could be encouraged to seek treatment, the more conditions could be entered into the DSM, and the more people could be encouraged to seek treatment for these new conditions.

By 1994, the DSM listed 400 distinct mental disorders covering a wide variety of behaviors in adults and children. Significantly, racism, homophobia (fear of homosexuality) and misogyny (hatred of women) have never been listed as mental disorders. In 1999, the chairperson of the APA’s Council on Psychiatry and the Law confirmed that racism “is not something that is designated as an illness that can be treated by mental health professionals.”⁷ Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until activists campaigned to have it removed.⁸

The women’s liberation movement condemned labeling symptoms of oppression as mental illnesses. In They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, Paula Caplan explains,

“In a culture that scorns and demeans lesbians and gay men, it is hard to be completely comfortable with one’s homosexuality, and so the DSM-III authors were treating as a mental disorder what was often simply a perfectly comprehensible reaction to being mocked and oppressed.”⁹

Caplan describes efforts to prevent “Masochistic Personality Disorder” from being included in the DSM. This disorder assumes that women stay with abusive spouses because like to suffer, not because they lack the resources to leave. Despite protest, “Masochistic Personality Disorder” was added to the 1987 edition of the DSM, although it was later dropped.

The inclusion of “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD) in the DSM also raised a protest. According to Caplan,

“The problem with PMDD is not the women who report premenstrual mood problems but the diagnosis of PMDD itself. Excellent research shows that these women are significantly more likely than other women to be in upsetting life situations, such as being battered or being mistreated at work. To label them mentally disordered - to send the message that their problems are individual, psychological ones - hides the real, external sources of their trouble.”¹⁰

As soon as PMDD was listed in the DSM, Eli Lilly repackaged its best-selling drug, Prozac, in a pink-pill format, renamed it Serafem, and promoted it as a treatment for PMDD. By creating Serafem, Lilly was able to extend its patent on the Prozac formula for another seven years.

A marketing gold mine

The DSM is a marketing gold mine for the drug industry. The FDA will approve a drug to treat a mental disorder only if that disorder is listed in the DSM. Therefore, each new listing is worth millions in potential drug sales. Most of the experts who construct the DSM have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, and every new edition of the DSM contains more conditions than the previous one.

Once the DSM lists a new mental disorder, drugs for that disorder are heavily marketed for everyone who might fit the symptom checklist. (Doctors are also encouraged to prescribe these drugs for “off-label use,” which means to anyone they think might benefit.) Not surprisingly, the   numbers of people “diagnosed” with a mental condition rise rapidly after a drug is approved to treat that condition.

In 2005, a major study announced that “About half of Americans will meet the criteria for a DSM-IV disorder sometime in their life…¹¹ How is this possible? Has it become normal to be mentally ill, or has the definition of mental illness expanded beyond reason? Both could be true.

Capitalism damages people in many ways. It’s also true that the more people can be labeled as sick, the more profits can be made from selling them treatments. In Creating Mental Illness, Alan Horowitz warns,

“…a large proportion of behaviors that are currently regarded as mental illnesses are normal consequences of stressful social arrangements or forms of social deviance. Contrary to its general definition of mental disorder, the DSM and much research that follows from it considers all symptoms, whether internal or not, expected or not, deviant or not, as signs of disorder.”¹²

Most people know the difference between normal behavior (such as grief over the death of a loved one) and abnormal behavior that could indicate an internal disorder (such as prolonged grief for no apparent reason). However, the DSM does not consider what happens in people’s lives. With one exception (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), the DSM lists and categorizes symptoms outside of any social context. As a result, DSM-based surveys artificially increase the numbers of people suffering from mental disorders and, therefore, the market for drug treatments.

DSM-inflated rates of mental illness are typically accompanied by the warning that not enough people are getting treatment,¹³ which serves to further expand the market for drugs. The question of whether all these people are actually sick is never raised, nor is the question of whether their symptoms might be linked to physical illnesses. 

Many physical diseases generate psychological symptoms. Researchers estimate that from 41 to 83 percent of people being treated for psychiatric disorders are actually suffering from misdiagnosed physical diseases like hyo- or hyper-thyroidism, heart disease, immune-system diseases, nervous system diseases (including multiple sclerosis) and cancer.¹⁴ Undiagnosed and untreated, these physical diseases can progress to cripple or kill. Furthermore, psychiatric drugs can worsen physical diseases, sometimes fatally. None of these “costs” are borne by the pharmaceutical industry - the most profitable industry in America.

Social control

Psychiatry has a long history of medicating the oppressed, including children, for social control.¹⁵

Schools force youngsters to sit still in closed rooms for long periods of time and force-feed them information that has no connection to their lives. Those who rebel are diagnosed with mental disorders (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc.) and forced to take mind-altering drugs. To preserve a crazy-making system, the healthy child must be made “crazy.”

Using DSM criteria, at least six million American children have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders, triple the number in the early 1990’s. The rate of boys aged 7 to 12 diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder more than doubled between 1995 and 2000 and continues to rise.

A 2007 survey of 8- to 15-year-olds discovered that nine percent met the DSM criteria for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The survey found that fewer than half of these children had been diagnosed or treated, “suggesting that some children with clinically significant inattention and hyperactivity may not be receiving optimal attention.” Noting that poor children were least likely to receive medication, the authors of the study recommend “further investigation and possible intervention.”¹⁶

Instead of addressing the oppressive social conditions that agitate children, psychiatry imposes conformity through medication. To force compliance with this oppressive system, access to insurance benefits, medical care and social services depends on “having a diagnosis.”

Most of the symptoms listed in the DSM describe human responses to deprivation and oppression (anxiety, agitation, aggression, depression) and the many ways that people try to manage unbearable pain (obsessions, compulsions, rage, addictions). Depression is strongly linked with poverty,¹⁷ and alleviating poverty can lift depression.¹⁸

The suffering of war veterans is labeled as a mental disorder (PTSD) instead of the inevitable consequence of war. These soldiers are sick because they have been violated. Their symptoms express their anguish and outrage at the barbarism they witnessed and perpetrated on others.  What’s sick is sending good people into the hell of war.  

Schizophrenia is designated as a mental illness that is assumed to be genetic. However, studies from several countries show that living in a city gives a person a higher probability of developing schizophrenia than having a family member with the disease. Moving from rural to urban centers increases the risk of developing schizophrenia, while moving in the other direction reduces the risk.¹⁹ City living is associated with increased stress and trauma, exposure to lead,²⁰ infection,²¹ malnutrition,²² and racial discrimination²³- all of which are linked with higher rates of schizophrenia.

Under capitalism, addressing the social causes of illness is politically risky and unprofitable. So psychiatry extracts the individual from society, splits the brain from the body, severs the mind from the brain and drugs the brain.²⁴

A sick society

Capitalism is a system that requires the majority to have no control over their lives and to believe that this condition is normal. Therefore, all reactions to inequality and deprivation must be viewed as signs of personal inadequacy, biological defect, mental illness - anything other than reasonable responses to unreasonable conditions.

During slavery days, experts argued that Black people were psychologically suited for a life of slavery, so there must be something wrong with those who rebelled.² In 1851, the diagnosis of “drapetomania”(runaway fever) was developed to explain why slaves try to escape.²⁶ Not much has changed. Today, exploitation and oppression are considered normal, and those who rebel in any way are considered to be sick or deviant and in need of medication or incarceration.

What’s the diagnosis for a sick society? We know what’s wrong. Most people are kept in sick social conditions so that a few can maintain their wealth and power. What is the treatment?  Putting human needs first would eliminate most human misery. Who will deliver the medicine? The majority must organize to take collective control of society.

I don’t expect this diagnosis to appear in the DSM anytime soon.

1  Kirk, S.S. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

2. Horowitz, A.V. (2002). Creating mental illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3. Freud, S. (1901/1991). The psychopathology of everyday life. New York: Penguin

4. Shorter, E. (1997). A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

5. Poussaint, A.F. & Alexander, A. (2000). Lay my burden down: Suicide and the mental health crisis among African-Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, p.125.

6. Spitzer, R.L., Sheeney, M. & Endicott, J. (1977).  DSM III: Guiding principles. In Psychiatric diagnosis, (Eds). Rakoff, V., Stancer, H. & Kedward, H. New York: Brunner Mazel.

7. Egan, T. (1999). Racist shootings test limits of health system and laws. New York Times, August 14, p.1.

8. “DSM and homosexuality: A cautionary tale.” in Kirk, S.A. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Aldine De Gruyter  p 81-90

9. Caplan, P. (1995). They say you’re crazy: How the world’s most powerful psychiatrists decide who’s normal. New York: Addison-Wesley, pp.180-181.

10. Caplan, P.J. (2002). Expert decries diagnosis for pathologizing women. Journal of Addiction and Mental Health. September/October 2001, p.16.

11 Kessler, R.C. et. al. (2005). Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Arch Gen Psychiatry. Vol.62, No.6, pp.593-602.

12. Horowitz, A.V. (2002). Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.37.

13. Talen, J. (2005). Survey says nearly half of all Americans will be affected by a mental illness, some before adulthood. Newsday, June 7. www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsment0607,0,6745489.story 

14. Klonoff, E.A. & Landrine, H., 1997, Preventing misdiagnosis of women: A guide to physical disorders that have psychiatric symptoms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 

15. Breggin, P.R. & Breggin, G. R. (1994). The war against children: How the drugs, programs, and theories of the psychiatric establishment are threatening America’s children with a medical ‘cure’ for violence. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

16. Froehlich T.E., et. al. (2007). Prevalence, recognition, and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in a national sample of US children. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Vol.161, pp.857-864. 

17. Duenwald, M. (2003). More Americans Seeking Help for Depression. New York Times, June 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/health/18DEPR.html

18. Costello, E.J., Compton, S.N., Keeler, G. & Angold, A.(2003). Relationships between poverty and psychopathology: a natural experiment. JAMA. Oct 15, Vol.290, No.15, pp.2023-9.

19.. Pedersen, C.B. & Mortensen, P.B. (2001). Evidence of a dose-response relationship between urbanicity during upbringing and schizophrenia risk. Arch Gen Psychiatry. Vol. 58, No. 11, pp.1039-46.

20. Calamai, P. (2004). Lead exposure in womb linked to schizophrenia. Risk also found if mother had flu: 1960’s U.S. data help unravel mystery. The Toronto Star, Feb. 15.

21. Opler, M.G.A. et al. (2004). Prenatal lead exposure, -aminolevulinic acid, and schizophrenia. Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol.112, pp.548-552.

22. St Clair, D., Xu, M., Wang, P. Yu, Y., Fang, Y., Zhang, F. Zheng, X., Gu, N., Feng,G., Sham, P. & He, L. (2005). Rates of adult schizophrenia following prenatal exposure to the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. JAMA. Vol.294, No. 5, pp.557-562.

23. Joan Arehart-Treichel, J. (2003). Is schizophrenia a downside of urban life?  Psychiatric News (American Psychiatric Association) May 16, Vol.38,  No.10, p.37.

24. Ross, C.A., & Pam, A., (1995).  Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry: Blaming the body.  New York: Wiley.

25. Poussaint, A.F. & Alexander, A. (2000). Lay my burden down: Suicide and the mental health crisis among African Americans. Boston: Beacon Press.

26. Cartwright, S. (1851). Report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race. New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. May, p. 707.

Susan Rosenthal is a practicing physician and the author of POWER and Powerlessness (2006) and Class, Health and Health Care (2008). She is a founding member of International Health Workers for People Over Profit. She can be reached through her web site: http://www.powerandpowerlessness.com/ or by email: powerandpowerlessness@rogers.com

This article was origanily published on Dissident Voice.

In the “first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution,” the authors show that one in eight high school biology teachers present creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to Darwinian evolution. While this number does not reflect public demand-38% of Americans would prefer that creationism to be taught instead of evolution-it does represent a disconnect between legal rulings, scientific consensus, and classroom education.

The majority of biology teachers spend between 3 and 15 hours on evolution. This is a wide range for a topic considered by the National Academy of Sciences to be “the central concept of biology.” The amount of time spent teaching human evolution is even less: the majority of teachers spend no more than five hours on the subject. “This is the hottest of the hot buttons” says Berkman, suggesting that pressure from the community might play a role in how teachers structure their classes. Even the strongest legal ruling “still gives boards of education, school districts, and especially teachers considerable leeway” he says.Teachers are still in charge of implementing state standards, adhering to court decisions, and integrating textbooks into their classrooms. “And about this,” the authors write, “we are less sanguine.”

The authors show that the disparity in teaching evolution is not linked to differences in state regulations, but can more likely be attributed to differences of religious belief and education amongst teachers. Less than one-third of high school biology teachers believe that God had no part in evolution, nearly one-half believe God had a hand in evolution, and almost one in six believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. The teachers who hold creationist or intelligent design beliefs spent substantially less time teaching evolution than their Darwinist counterparts. Likewise, teachers with a stronger background in evolution spent 60% more time teaching it than those who had the least education in the subject.

There are no federal standards for class curriculums, and the state regulations are often inconsistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. Rather than adjusting government regulations, Berkman et al. argue, raising the certification standards for teachers could have a significant impact on the amount of time they spend on evolution. The authors propose requiring extra courses in evolutionary biology. “The extra background could make a large difference” says Berkman. “The legal ruling and legislative victories are clearly necessary for evolution to maintain its proper place in the biology curriculum,” the authors conclude, “but they are not sufficient.”

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Citation:Berkman MB, Pacheco JS, Plutzer E (2008) Evolution and creationism in America’s classrooms: A national portrait. PLoS Biol 6(5): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124

To learn more about this report visit: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124

Researchers found that EU countries with the highest rates of children living in institutions also had high proportions of international adoptions. This did not reduce the number of children in institutional care but attributed to an increase. The study highlights that in countries such as France and Spain, people are choosing to adopt healthy, white children from abroad rather than children in their own country who are mainly from ethnic minorities.

This process has been labelled the ‘Madonna-effect’, so-called after the singer’s high-profile adoption of a young boy from Zambia in 2006. Statistics show that the media attention surrounding this case contributed to an increase in the number of international adoptions, but at the expense of local orphans.

Child Psychologist, Professor Kevin Browne, said: “Some argue that international adoption is, in part, a solution to the large number of children in institutional care, but we have found the opposite is true. Closely linked to the Madonna-effect, we found that parents in poor countries are now giving up their children in the belief that they will have a ‘better life in the west’ with a more wealthy family.

“Some celebrities have unwittingly encouraged international adoption, yet it has been shown that 96 per cent of children in ‘orphanages’ across Europe and probably across the globe are not true orphans and have at least one parent often known to the local authorities. The fact that these rules and regulations can be broken makes international adoption an ‘easier’ process than it has ever been before.

Professor Browne added: “Governments and orphanages can reap substantial financial gains from international adoption and this appears to be fuelling its growth but many are breaking the UN Convention of Rights of the Child which states that international adoption should only be used as a last resort in situations where all other means of fostering, adoption and care within the child’s country of origin, are exhausted.”

The Liverpool researchers are recommending that more stringent guidelines for monitoring policy and practice are implemented to ensure that international adoption is used as a last resort.

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The study was published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering last week.

Notes to editors:

1. Results from the study were complied from questionnaires sent to the governments of 33 European countries, which provided researchers with detail on the number, characteristics and reasons for children residing in institutions for more than three months without a primary caregiver. Information was also gathered on the proportion of national and international adoptions and fostering and professional support to families in need. Results were compiled from the 25 countries who responded.

2. Professor Kevin Browne holds the Chair of Forensic and Child Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He is currently Consultant to the European Commission, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation following 12 years as an Executive Counsellor of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. He has worked in more than 50 countries worldwide, working with governments to improve the lives of children.

3. The University of Liverpool is a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive institutions in the UK. It attracts collaborative and contract research commissions from a wide range of national and international organisations valued at more than £108 million annually.

Reprinted from University of Liverpool.

UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia, and colleagues Ajay Satpute and Matthew Lieberman, used a psychological test called the “ultimatum game” to explore fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular version of the test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which they can divide in any way they want with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and accept or reject it; there is no negotiation. If Person B rejects the offer, neither of them gets any money.

Whatever Person A offers to Person B is an unearned windfall, even if it’s a miserly $5 out of $23, so a strict utilitarian would take the money and run. But that’s not exactly what happens in the laboratory. The UCLA scientists ran the experiment so sometimes $5 was stingy and other times fair, say $5 out of a total stake of $10. The idea was to make sure the subjects were responding to the fairness of the offer, not to the amount of the windfall. When they did this, and asked the subjects to rate themselves on scales of happiness and contempt, they had some interesting findings: Even when they stood to gain exactly the same dollar amount of free money, the subjects were much happier with the fair offers and much more disdainful of deals that were lopsided and self-centered.

The psychologists wanted to know if there is something inherently rewarding about being treated decently. So, they scanned several parts of the participants’ brains while they were in the act of weighing both fair and miserly offers. Consistent with previous results, the researchers found that a region previously associated with negative emotions such as moral disgust (the anterior insula) was activated during unfair treatment.   However, interestingly, they also found that regions associated with reward (including the ventral striatum) were activated during fair treatment even though there was no additional money to be gained.

As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons also finds genuine fairness uplifting. What’s more, these emotional firings occur in brain structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the emotional brain is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain’s default position is to demand a fair deal.

Furthermore, when the scientists scanned the brains of those who were “swallowing their pride” for the sake of cash, the brain showed a distinctive pattern of neuronal activity. It appears that the unconscious mind can temporarily damp down the brain’s contempt response, in effect allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily.

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Reprinted from the Association for Psychological Science.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego

Fishing activities can provoke volatile fluctuations in the populations they target, but it’s not often clear why. A new study published in the journal Nature by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and colleagues has identified the general underlying mechanism.

Research led at Scripps with a distinguished team of government and international experts (including two chief scientific advisors to the United Kingdom) demonstrates that fishing can throw targeted fish populations off kilter. Fishing can alter the “age pyramid” by lopping off the few large, older fish that make up the top of the pyramid, leaving a broad base of faster-growing small younglings. The team found that this rapidly growing and transitory base is dynamically unstable-a finding having profound implications for the ecosystem and the fishing industries built upon it.
“The data show that fished species appear to be significantly more nonlinear and less stable than unfished species,” said Professor George Sugihara of Scripps. “We think the mechanism involves systematic alteration of the demographic parameters-and especially increases in growth rates that magnify destabilization in many ways-which can happen as fishing truncates the age structure.”

Imagine a container of water with a 500-pound fish. With food, it grows a little bigger. Without food it gets a bit smaller. Imagine the same container with 500 one-pound fish. They eat, reproduce and the resulting thousands of fish boom, quickly outstripping the resources and the population crashes. These many smaller fish-with the same initial “biomass” as the larger fish-can’t average out the environmental fluctuations, and in fact amplify them through higher turnover rates that promote boom and bust cycles.

The study that included academic and government scientists from Alaska, Asia and Great Britain is based on data from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), a program based at Scripps that has monitored fish and oceanographic activities of the California Current for more than 50 years. To arrive at their results, the researchers compared the CalCOFI records of larvae, a key indicator of adult populations, of both fished and non-fished species in the California Current.

The schematic outlines variability on exploited and unexploited.Fishing typically extracts the older, larger members of a targeted species and fishing regulations often impose minimum size limits to protect the smaller, younger fishes.
“That type of regulation, which we see in many sport fisheries, is exactly wrong,” said Sugihara. “It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger, older fish that should be spared. Not only do the older fish provide stability and capacitance to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring.”

Thus the danger, according to Sugihara, is that current policies that manage according to current biomass targets (without significant forecast skill) while ignoring fish size pose risks that can further destabilize the population. This instability can in principle propagate systemically to the whole ecosystem, much like a stock market crash or a domino effect, and magnify risk for the fishing industry itself as well as those of ecologically related fisheries.

This is especially true when trying to rebuild fish stocks, Sugihara says.

“This may be the most important implication of this work, as we attempt to rehabilitate fisheries,” said Sugihara. “Regulations based solely on biomass harvest targets are incomplete. They must also account for age-size structure in the populations,” he said. “Current policies and industry pressures that encourage lifting bans on fishing when biomass is rehabilitated-but where maximum age and size are not-contain risk.”

This is currently the case with Atlantic swordfish, for which industry pressures to resume fishing are based on the restoration of historic biomass levels, even though the swordfish are clearly undersized.

“In the extreme case, the danger of such unstable dynamics for certain populations for management is that harvest targets may lag the population, potentially making things worse,” said Sugihara. “A high harvest target may be set after an especially abundant period when the population may be poised to decline on it’s own. Likewise future abundant periods may represent missed opportunities, despite current low abundances. As senior officials of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans have said, ‘we are often a year behind in our stock projections.’”
Sugihara cautioned that nonlinearity is not unique to fished species. Nonequilibrium overshooting and undershooting occurs in unexploited stocks, but to a lower extent. Therefore, classical single-species population models that require equilibrium are unlikely to be very successful in stock forecasts, except perhaps in the very short term.

“Other methods that do not rely on these assumptions may be more promising,” suggests Christian Anderson, paper co-author.

In addition to Sugihara and Anderson, the study included Scripps Oceanography Chih-hao Hsieh (now a professor at National Taiwan University); Stuart Sandin of Scripps; Roger Hewitt of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Southwest Fisheries Science Center; Anne Hollowed of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Fisheries Science Center; Sir John Beddington of Imperial College London (current Chief Science Advisor to the United Kingdom) and Lord Robert May of Oxford (a former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK).

The research was supported by NOAA Fisheries and the Environment program, The MacQuown Chair of Natural History, The Deutsche Bank - Jameson Complexity Studies Fund, the Sugihara Family Trust and the Kyoto University grant for Biodiversity Research of the 21st Century.

# # #

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and graduate training in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration.

Reprinted from Scripps Institution of Ocenography.

Off to buy a new handbag and fabulous red shoes, or how about overalls and a riding lawnmower? Before going, a mood check for signs of despair and gloom might be in order because how a person feels can impact routine economic transactions, whether he or she is aware of it or not.

So says a team of behavioral scientists from four major U.S. universities, whose research study finds that sadness impacts spending. Specifically, people who feel sad and self-focused pay more money for goods than those in neutral states, even when purchasing the same item.

“The tendency is to focus on oneself when sad drives this effect,” says the study’s lead author Cynthia E. Cryder, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. “Our studies revealed the more self-focused people were in the sad condition, the more money they spent.”

“More research is needed to determine whether participants are deliberately trying to improve their sense of self by acquiring goods,” adds study co-author Jennifer Lerner, an experimental social psychologist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.

The study, “Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More,” was funded by the National Science Foundation and was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. in February of this year. It will be published in the June 2008 issue of Psychological Science–a premier journal for scientific experiments in psychology.

In one experiment, primarily conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard University, test subjects viewed either a sad video clip or one devoid of human emotion. The video clips included either a sad scene from the 1979 movie “The Champ” or neutral scenes from a National Geographic documentary on coral reefs.

Afterward, participants could purchase an ordinary commodity, such as a water bottle, at various prices. Participants, randomly assigned to view the sad video clip, offered almost 300 percent more than the “neutral” participants to buy the same product.

Interestingly, in a prior, similar study led by Lerner, participants who viewed the sad video clip typically and incorrectly insisted the emotional content of the film clip did not affect their spending. The finding showed that people can lack awareness of how feelings impact their own economic decisions.

Research team members speculate that self-focus coupled with sadness causes people to devalue both themselves and their current possessions. The result, they believe, is increased willingness to pay more for new material goods, presumably to enhance the sense of self.

“Self-focus helps explain the spending differences between the ’sad’ and ‘neutral’ groups,” says Lerner. “Sadness tends to increase self-focus, making the increased spending prompted by the combination of sadness and self-focus difficult to avoid.”

The “misery is not miserly” effect may be even more dramatic in real life, as the low-intensity sadness evoked in the experiment likely underestimates the power of intense sadness on spending behavior.

Moreover, say researchers, the effect could extend to domains beyond purchasing decisions. It may cause people to engage in increased stock trading or to seek new relationships without conscious awareness that they are being driven by their emotions.

According to Lerner, the research could also be “scaled-up” to factor in events for groups or communities and not just individuals.

“If a sad event happens in a community, for example a school bus accident,” she says, “people in that community might be willing to sell their homes for less money than the actual value and buy homes for more than the new home’s value.”

She says the study’s results lend weight to the contention that policymakers may want to build emotional factors into disaster recovery models.

“It is important to increase understanding of how emotion and economic decisions interact,” says Cryder. “The relatively new field of behavioral decision research is increasingly moving in that direction.”

Professor James Gross from Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif. and Professor Ronald E. Dahl from the University of Pittsburgh, Pa. also co-authored this study.

-NSF-

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of $5.92 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to over 1,700 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 42,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 10,000 new funding awards. The NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly.