‌Two

‌High, Brainy Mindedness

In brief

‘“Holy PTSD, Batman!”: An Analysis of the Psychiatric Symptoms of Bruce Wayne’

by S. Taylor Williams (published in Academic Psychiatry, 2012)

Some of what’s in this chapter: How to grasp Machiavellianism • Mental magic • One: Must take what they say seriously • Spatula to the brain • Honestly: Appropriated thoughts • Judging while asleep • Strudels in the brain • Laugh into unconsciousness • Mutter, Russia, about unhappiness • Prozac is for animals • In defence of one’s new parking spot • Red bull bull • An Eiffel Tower in the head • Insulting insulting language • Bad breath in the head

Princely behaviour

By reputation, stockbrokers have manipulative personalities. So do people who sell cars or buildings. Professor Abdul Aziz took the measure of these groups of professionals, hoping to see whether each lives up or down to the legend.

Aziz, who teaches business at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, together with colleagues published three studies a decade ago: ‘Relations of Machiavellian Behavior with Sales Performance of Stockbrokers’; ‘Machiavellianism Scores and Self-rated Performance of Automobile Salespersons’; and ‘Relationship between Machiavellianism Scores and Performance of Real Estate Salespersons’. All appear in the journal Psychology Reports.

Aziz explains that a Machiavellian person is someone who ‘views and manipulates others’ for ‘personal gain, often against the other’s self-interest’. He says this ‘modern concept of Machiavellianism was derived from the ideas of [Niccolò] Machiavelli as published in [his book] The Prince in 1532’, and that interest in it as a personality trait blossomed in the 1970s.

Aziz used a questionnaire based on psychological tests devised in the 1960s that claim to measure Machiavellianism by presenting statements and asking the test-taker to agree or disagree. The statements range from the goody-goody: ‘Most people who get ahead in the world lead clean, moral lives’, to the not-so-goody: ‘The biggest difference between most criminals and other people is that the criminals are stupid enough to get caught’.

From ‘Relations of Machiavellian Behavior with Sales Performance of Stockbrokers’

Aziz prepared similar questions.

He got answers from 110 brokers who sell stocks on a commission basis. Aziz also wanted to know how good these stockbrokers were at their sales work, so he asked them to compare their own sales performance to that of their colleagues. Aziz would have preferred not to take the brokers’ word for this. But, he writes, ‘the company was not willing to disclose the actual amount of sales by individual stockbrokers’. After analysing what the stockbrokers told him, Aziz reports a strong association between the brokers’ ‘Machiavellian behaviour scale’ rank and how good they claim to be at selling.

His conclusion: the stockbroker data support the ‘assumption of a positive relationship between Machiavellianism and sales performance’.

Aziz then did a similar study of eighty car salespersons, all of whom work on commission. He asked them his Machiavellianism survey questions. He also asked each to tell him ‘(a) the number of cars sold during the previous year and (b) the income bracket that most closely matched their income during that year’. His conclusion: what the car salespersons told him provides ‘partial support for earlier findings’.

Rounding out the Big Three, Aziz then talked with seventy-two estate agents who earn their money selling property on commission. The things they told him, Aziz says, ‘support earlier results from samples of stockbrokers and automobile salespersons’.

A few other studies have cited Aziz’s work. One of the first was a Canadian report called ‘Psychopathy and the Detection of Faking on Self-Report Inventories of Personality’.

Aziz, Abdul, Kim May and John C. Crotts (2002). ‘Relations of Machiavellian Behavior with Sales Performance of Stockbrokers’. Psychology Reports 90 (2): 451–60.

Aziz, Abdul (2004). ‘Machiavellianism Scores and Self-Rated Performance of Automobile Salespersons’. Psychology Reports 94 (2): 464–6.

— (2005). ‘Relationship between Machiavellianism Scores and Performance of Real Estate Salespersons’. Psychology Reports 96 (1): 235–8.

Christie, R., and F.L. Geis (1970). Studies in Machiavellianism. Academic Press. Activity 9.3: Machiavellianism Scale is reproduced at http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0073381225/student_view0/chapter9/self-assessment_9_3.html.

MacNeil, Bonnie M., and Ronald R. Holden (2006). ‘Psychopathy and the Detection of Faking on Self-Report Inventories of Personality’. Personality and Individual Differences 41 (4): 641–51.

Research spotlight

‘Preconditioning an Audience for Mental Magic: An Informal Look’

by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1980)

Trinkaus tests out a simple magician’s trick, then asks: ‘Based on this limited inquiry, it appears that preconditioning of an audience by mentalists may well be effective. While this finding is interesting, perhaps of more interest are the implications associated with the use of this technique in situations other than mental magic. For example, is the seller’s use of this method in the marketplace, to influence buyer selection, ethical?’

Diviner interference

How do diviners divine? How do they achieve such dependable results? Barbara Tedlock, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, analysed the mystery. Her crystallized thoughts appear in a study published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness.

In the report, Tedlock explains why other anthropologists were unwilling or unable to build what she has built – a ‘theory of practice for divination’. The other anthropologists made a mistake. To them, divination is just ‘the irrational weak sister of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine: a parasitic pseudoscience feeding on these more logical, rational sciences’. To Tedlock, it is more than that. The key was staring everyone in the face. ‘One must’, she writes, ‘take what diviners say and do seriously.’

One must also be willing to study the findings of Stephen Hawking and other modern scientists. Given that scientists are now imagining gravity-bent light, faster-than-light particles, ‘and other strange concepts that defy common sense reality’, Tedlock says, ‘why should we not approach divination with the same conceptual openness?’

Tedlock’s theory applies to most kinds of divination. These include ‘reading patterns of cracks in oracular bones, made from the shoulder blades of deer, sheep, pigs, and oxen, or the shells of turtles. Water-, crystal-, and star-gazing, dreaming, and the casting of lots. The taking of hallucinogenic drugs, and the contemplation of mystic spirals, amulets, labyrinths, mandalas, and thangkas. Reading natural signs such as the flight of birds or the road crossings of animals. Rod or pendulum dowsing. The Tarot, the Chinese I Ching, and the Yoruba Ifa readings, together with palmistry and geomancy. Contacting spirits to answer questions.’ These practices occurred in so many places that we must assume they work, Tedlock points out.

Much of their value comes from shifting between being rational and being irrational. She gives this example: ‘The anthropologist Roy Willis narrated his experience of this latter divinatory shift, which he observed when he visited Jane Ridder-Patrick, a well-known British herbalist, astrologer, and author of A Handbook of Medical Astrology. When he asked her to do his astrological chart, he observed that she appeared rational at first but then, about two-thirds of the way through the hour-long reading, the atmosphere changed.’

By injecting ancient, irrational practices with modern scientific analogies, Tedlock has brought anthropology to a new level of sophistication.

The field has come a long way since 1983, when Nigel Barley of the University of Oxford published his book The Innocent Anthropologist. Here’s how Barley described his arrival in the Dowayo village of Kongle, in the Cameroons: ‘By now the silence was becoming very strained and I felt it incumbent upon me to say something. I have already said that one of the joys of fieldwork is that it allows one to make use of all sorts of expressions that otherwise are never used. “Take me to your leader”, I cried. This was duly translated and it was explained that the Chief was coming from his field.’

Tedlock, Barbara (2006). ‘Toward a Theory of Divinatory Practice.’ Anthropology of Consciousness 17 (2): 62–77.

Barley, Nigel (1982). The Innocent Anthropologist. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

May we recommend

‘Modelling of Interaction between a Spatula and a Human Brain’

by Kim V. Hansen, Lars Brix, Christian F. Pedersen, Jens P. Haase and Ole V. Larsen (published in Medical Image Analysis, 2004)

The authors, who are at Aalborg University, Denmark, explain: ‘The idea is to provide surgeons with a tool which can teach them the correlation between deformation and applied force.’

Copy wrongs

Cheating, cheating was made the central theme of a special issue of the Journal of College and Character. Published in 2007, the issue featured two especially focused studies on the topic.

One study looked at university honour codes, which are popular in the US and are sprouting in the UK and elsewhere. Rodney Arnold, of the College of the Ozarks, together with Barbara N. Martin, Michael Jinks and Linda Bigby, of the University of Central Missouri, surveyed students at six universities in the American Midwest. The study asks ‘Is there a difference in the level of academic dishonesty between colleges and universities that have incorporated an honor code system and those that have not?’

The answer: no.

But honour-coded students see things their own way. The authors report that ‘students from honor code institutions perceived that the amount of academic dishonesty at their institutions was lower.’

The three honour-code campuses in the study are no mere run-of-the-mill specimens. Each has been formally recognized by the John Templeton Foundation as a ‘character building’ college. The Templeton Foundation’s website (www.collegeandcharacter.org) celebrates these universities for ‘shaping the ideals and standards of personal and civic responsibility’. The foundation’s motto is ‘How Little We Know, How Eager to Learn’.

The second study looked at that most literary form of cheating: plagiarism. Jean Liddell, a librarian at Auburn University in Alabama, and Valerie Fong, an adjunct professor at two small colleges in San Francisco, call their report ‘Faculty Perceptions of Plagiarism’. Liddell and Fong learned that professors vary widely in their perception of plagiarism.

They surveyed teachers at Auburn University, asking each of them how bad the problem is. The answers spanned from never-see-it-in-my-classroom to about-three-quarters-of-my-students-do-it.

Some responses posed a statistical challenge. Liddell and Fong say: ‘One faculty member responded that in his/her class, the percentage of plagiarism “cannot be estimated. I imagine it is quite [a bit] higher than any administrator would feel comfortable with”.’

Nearly all the professors claimed that plagiarism was slightly worse nationwide than on their campus, slightly worse campus-wide than in their department, and slightly worse in the department than in just their own classes.

Auburn University has an official definition of what constitutes plagiarism. However, the study finds that professors’ ‘personal definitions are often quite different’.

One history professor put the whole matter into a fuller perspective. He or she explained that some supposedly deplorable actions are just peachy, but that plagiarism is a sin: ‘There is no problem publishing something that has no original thought. In History we do that all the time. But, and this is important, you must cite all the sources from which you borrowed those thoughts.’

Arnold, Rodney, Barbara N. Martin, Michael Jinks, and Linda Bigby (2007). ‘Is There a Relationship Between Honor Codes and Academic Dishonesty?’. Journal of College and Character 8 (2): 1–12.

Liddell, Jean, and Valerie Fong (2005). ‘Faculty Perceptions of Plagiarism’. Journal of College and Character 6 (2).

In brief

‘Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess’

by Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark (published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013)

The authors, at Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University, explain: ‘We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women’s strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent’.

‌Crime doesn’t pay much

When economists train their sights on robbers, the point traditionally is to study those who loot on the grandest, most legal scale and who are called ‘financiers’, and also (if there be consulting fees) to assist those persons.

Economists Barry Reilly, of the University of Sussex, and Neil Rickman and Robert Witt, of the University of Surrey, went against that tradition. They stole a hard look at the lowest class of bank robbers, the ones who physically go into bank branches, grab cash and literally leg it. Reilly, Rickman and Witt got access – exclusive and confidential access, they proudly confide – to data from the British Bankers’ Association about bank robberies. In 2012 they published a study called ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’.

‘Our research’, they say, ‘was concerned with the various factors that determine the proceeds from bank robberies; hence, we could work out (among other things) the economics (to the criminal) of attempting one, and the economics (to the banks) of trying to thwart it.’

Several factors influence both the likely gains and likely costs of a typical bank robbery. Adding more henchmen can boost the size of the haul (‘Every extra member of the gang raises the expected value of the robbery proceeds by £9,033.20, on average, and other things being equal.’), but it also, of course, increases the total labour cost.

Each unsuccessful robbery attempt yields £0, and thus lowers the average gross (and net) income. The economists point out that failures, on average, incur particular expenses: ‘The expected costs are the lengthy term in jail – converted into monetary terms at the robber’s own conversion rate – times the probability of serving that term – that is, of being caught and convicted.’

Table 1 from ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’. The article teases: ‘With access to a unique data set’, the authors ‘give us the low-down on the economics’.

They calculate that the average financial return on classical bank-robbing is ‘a very modest £12,706.60 per person per raid’, and that an industrious robber can expect, statistically, to work steadily at his trade for only about a year and a half before being caught and canned.

Reilly, Rickman, and Witt report that fewer and fewer bank robberies are being attempted, in both the UK and the US. They explain that economics – specifically, the decreasing ‘expected value’ of a bank robbery – accounts for the decline.

They offer small-time bank robbers an attractive alternative goal: ‘In the UK, robberies from security vans are on the increase. Security vans offer more attractive pickings. Our framework provides a way of thinking about this, [and] effectively introduces a competing product into the robbers’ “product space” and asks them to think about which will generate more proceeds.’

Conclusions: ‘Why robbing banks is a bad idea’

The study ends with what it says is a four-word ‘lesson’ – that ‘successful criminals study econometrics’. It does not state, but perhaps does imply, a more valuable suggestion: successful criminals can hire econometricians.

Reilly, Barry, Neil Rickman and Robert Witt (2012). ‘Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much’. Significance 9 (3): 17–21.

Research spotlight

‘Honesty at a Motor Vehicle Bureau: An Informal Look’

by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1980)

Trinkaus notes that he ‘Assessed the veracity of people taking vision tests at a district office of a motor vehicle bureau … Results suggest that, when given an option, a sizeable percentage of people may well elect a style of behavior that is neither completely honest nor dishonest.’

To sleep, perchance to judge

When a judge falls asleep in the courtroom, sometimes people are alert enough to notice – and then word gets out to the public. That’s happened often enough for two doctors to decide to do something. What they did was to gather news reports about slumbering judges, write a paper about those reports, and then submit it for publication in the medical journal Sleep.

Dr Ronald Grunstein of the Royal Prince Alfred hospital in Sydney, Australia, and Dr Dev Banerjee of Birmingham Heartlands hospital in the UK saw their judge-filled-but-not-judgemental treatise appear in print in 2007. The headline was ‘The Case of “Judge Nodd” and Other Sleeping Judges: Media, Society, and Judicial Sleepiness’.

Grunstein and Banerjee tell of fifteen cases – one in Australia, one in the UK, one in Canada, ten in that sometimes slumbering giant the US, and one at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. The ‘Judge Nodd’ story comes from Australia’s New South Wales district court.

Grunstein and Banerjee write that Judge Ian Dodd ‘had been reported to the State Judicial Commission for allegedly repeatedly falling asleep while listening to witness testimony and legal argument’ in different cases over several years. The jury in a 2004 trial, they say, even ‘commented on Judge Dodd’s loud snoring’. The ‘Judge Nodd’ nickname arose the previous year, they let on, from jurors who had kept themselves awake to opportunities for self-amusement.

Grunstein and Banerjee explain that ‘some months prior to any press reports about his sleepiness during trials, Judge Dodd … was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea, and was apparently treated effectively’. The news stories led to a ‘media frenzy’, which led to early retirement for Judge Dodd. All of this woke Grunstein and Banerjee up to the titillating yet consequential tangle of medical, legal and moral issues.

Many judges are alert, quietly, to the undesirability of snoozing in court. Grunstein and Bannerjee point to a survey done by Professor Nancy J. King, a law professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. King asked 562 American judges about trials they had overseen recently: ‘69% of the judges reported cases in which jurors had fallen asleep’, she writes. ‘By judges’ estimates, this had happened in more than 2,300 cases.’

King also asked, and learned, what those judges did to those sleepers: ‘Sleeping jurors were usually awakened and offered a break, or a chance to drink water, cola, or coffee, but not reprimanded. Many other judges stated that they left it up to the lawyers to take action when jurors dozed, some noting that after all it was the lawyers who had put them to sleep.’

Grunstein, Ronald R., and Dev Banerjee (2007). ‘The Case of “Judge Nodd” and Other Sleeping Judges: Media, Society, and Judicial Sleepiness’. Sleep 30 (5): 625–32.

King, Nancy J. (1996). ‘Juror Deliquency in Criminal Trials in America, 1796–1996’. Michigan Law Review 94 (8): 2673–751.

May we recommend

‘Daydreaming, Thought Blocking and Strudels in the Taskless, Resting Human Brain’s Magnetic Fields’

by Arnold J. Mandell, Karen A. Selz, John Aven, Tom Holroyd and Richard Coppola (paper presented at the International Conference on Applications in Nonlinear Dynamics, 2010)

The dangers of Seinfeld

A medical study called ‘Recurrent Laughter-induced Syncope’ documents the existence of a paradoxical malady. Prior to reading the report, physicians might assume the phenomenon to be nothing more than a joke. A joke, they will learn, is just the beginning of the problem.

The two authors, Drs Athanasios Gaitatzis and Axel Petzold, describe their case in simple, albeit technical, prose: ‘A healthy 42-year-old male patient presented to the neurology clinic with a long history of faints triggered by spontaneous laughter, especially after funny jokes … There was no evidence to suggest cardiogenic causes, epilepsy, or cataplexy and a diagnosis of laughing syncope was made.’ Gaitatzis is based at the SEIN-Epilepsy Institute in Heemstede, the Netherlands, and Petzold, at the UCL Institute of Neurology in London.

Sadly, the doctors withhold information that would specifically identify the jokes. ‘The first episode occurred 17 years earlier while laughing’, they say. ‘A year later, a particularly funny joke triggered spontaneous heavy laughter followed by another brief episode of loss of consciousness.’ But they do not tell the joke. Nor do they allude to its subject, structure or resolution.

They do offer something that’s distantly akin to a punchline: ‘He has suffered similar episodes ever since, where he would pass out after spontaneous, unrestrained, heavy laughter.’

They reveal only spare, peripheral information about the man’s recurrent episodes of loss of consciousness. His swoons had been witnessed, and described, by bystanders. He would lose consciousness for just a few seconds. There were no characteristic body movements except, say the doctors, ‘some mild, non-sustained twitching of his limbs seen in the last attack that lasted 15 seconds’.

The medical treatise resonates, perhaps unintentionally, with an early Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny that it was lethal (‘No one could read it, and live’).

Gaitatzis and Petzold searched through medical archives and discovered accounts of some fifteen non-fictional cases. The earliest appeared in a 1997 issue of the journal Catheterization and Cardiovascular Diagnosis, under the headline ‘ “Seinfeld Syncope”.’

Drs Stephen Cox, Andrew Eisenhauer and Kinan Hreib at the Lahey Hitchcock Medical Center, Burlington, Massachusetts, treated a sixty-two-year-old man who had fainted on at least three occasions, each while ‘watching the television show Seinfeld, specifically, the antics of the George Costanza character played by Jason Alexander. While laughing hysterically, the patient suffered sudden syncope with spontaneous recovery of consciousness within a minute. During one event, he fell face first into his evening meal and was rescued by his wife. The patient and his family were adamant that syncope has not resulted from any other television sitcoms or other stimuli.’

Drs Cox, Eisenhauer and Hreib conclude with happy news. Seinfeld syncope, they say, ‘is curable by percutaneous stenting’.

Gaitatzis, Athanasios, and Axel Petzold (2012). ‘Recurrent Laughter-induced Syncope’. The Neurologist 18 (4): 214–5.

Cox, Stephen V., Andrew C. Eisenhauer and Kinan Hreib (1997). ‘ “Seinfeld Syncope”’. Catheterization and Cardiovascular Diagnosis 42 (2): 242.

Unhappy? You should ask

Are the Russians as unhappy as they say they are? Ruut Veenhoven was so worried about that question that he wrote a study about it. Veerhoven did not skedaddle about the shrubbery; he titled his study ‘Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are?’

Happiness is something of an obsession for Veenhoven. Based at Erasmus University Rotterdam, he is the editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, where the ‘unhappy Russians’ study was published.

In poking at the Russian psyche, Veenhoven limited himself to considering just the Russians who were living in Russia during the 1990s. He evaluated neither the Russians of earlier eras nor the perhaps apocryphal moaning Russians abroad, who enjoy their unhappiness expatriotically. In his report, Veenhoven acknowledges all those masses of historical and wandering Russians with the simple statement: ‘The Russians have a firm reputation for being an unhappy people.’

Why did Professor Veerhoven undertake this research? Because, he says, he was skeptical about certain things he had been reading: ‘Since the 1980s, several polls in Russia have included questions about happiness. The responses to these questions were quite similar. Average happiness was low in comparison to other nations and declined over time.’

Veerhoven saw a problem. ‘There are doubts’, he writes, ‘about the validity of these self-reports.’ He challenged himself to either verify or dismiss those doubts. After amassing and examining evidence, he reached a conclusion: ‘It appears that the Russians are as unhappy as they say they are, and that they have good reasons to be so.’

‌Not very to quite happy

Veenhoven built on bits and pieces of research by, among others, a professor with the delightful name ‘Zapf’. Veenhoven did his writing during the year 2000, and got it into print the following year.

At about that same time, the American scholar Patricia Herlihy looked back at Russia’s happy-and-unhappy national relationship with potent liquor. Herlihy titled her study ‘“Joy of the Rus”: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking’. ‘Joy of the Rus’, she explains, is a phrase from the tenth century, credited to Prince Vladmir of Kiev in praise of booze. The joy from ‘joy’ would, in the coming thousand years, be part of a moody, mixed cocktail of emotions:

By the late nineteenth century … drinking in Russian society had become something other than an unmitigated joy … popular medicine developed aversion techniques to free the drunkard from his thirst for ‘the devil’s blood’. The goal was to concoct a drink so disgusting that the drunkard would react against it or be unable to stomach it. It may be that the temperance advocates, to whom we owe some of these recipes, made them especially nauseating, so as to convince readers to stay sober! The drunkard seeking to break his addiction gulped down his vodka with eels, mice, fish, the sweat of a white horse, the placenta of a black pig, vomit, snakes and worms, grease, maggots, urine, water used to wash corpses, and other disgusting things.

Vodka, especially, survived these efforts at bastardization, and in the twentieth century became the dominant alcoholic element in the Russian internal struggle over happiness.

Questions linger. Will the Russians ever find happiness? If so, is it possible that some day they will become too happy? A study by David A.F. Haaga and his colleagues, which perhaps inevitably appeared in the Journal of Happiness Studies, seems to anticipate this concern. The researchers, at the American University in Washington, DC, called their paper ‘Are the Very Happy Too Happy?’.

In it, they nod to a study by investigators Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Martin E.P. Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who concluded, rather flatly, that ‘being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction.’ But on the basic question of the very happy being too happy, Haaga and his fellows have not themselves taken a permanent stand. ‘Future studies’, they insist, ‘should address this possibility.’

Veenhoven, Ruut (2001). ‘Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are?’. Journal of Happiness Studies 2 (2): 111–36.

Herlihy, Patricia (1991). ‘ “Joy of the Rus”: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking’. Russian Review 50 (2): 131–47.

Friedman, Elisha Tarlow, Robert M. Schwartz and David A.F. Haaga (2002). ‘Are the Very Happy Too Happy?’. Journal of Happiness Studies 3(4): 355–72.

Diener, Ed, and Martin E.P. Seligman (2002). ‘Very Happy People’. Psychological Science 13 (1): 81–4.

The inhumanity of Prozac

Some have concluded that the drug fluoxetine – commonly known as Prozac – ‘makes people more human’. If that conclusion is true, we can probably learn something very, very interesting from the long series of experiments in which Prozac has been shared with other members of the animal kingdom. Here are a few of the reports that document this happy scientific adventure.

• Bears pacing on Prozac. ‘Use of Fluoxetine for the Treatment of Stereotypical Pacing Behavior in a Captive Polar Bear’ by E.M. Poulsen, V. Honeyman, P.A. Valentine and G.C. Teskey (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1996)
• Voles socializing on Prozac. ‘Effects of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Fluoxetine on Social Behaviors in Male and Female Prairie Voles (Microtus ochrogaster)’ by C. Villalba, P.A. Boyle, E.J. Caliguri and G.J. DeVries (published in Hormones and Behavior, 1997)
• Pigeons tumbling on Prozac. ‘Serotonergic Involvement in the Backward Tumbling Response of the Parlor Tumbler Pigeon’ by G.N. Smith, J. Hingtgen and W. DeMyer (published in Brain Research, 1987)

• Goats ventilating on Prozac. ‘Effects of Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibition on Ventilatory Control in Goats’ by D.R. Henderson, D.M. Konkle and G.S. Mitchell (published in Respiration Physiology, 1999)
• Turkeys being turkeys on Prozac. ‘Serotonergic Stimulation of Prolactin Release in the Young Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)’ by S.C. Fehrer, J.L. Silsby and M.E. El Halawani (published in General and Comparative Endocrinology, 1983)
• Dogs dominating on Prozac. ‘Use of Fluoxetine to Treat Dominance Aggression in Dogs’ by N.H. Dodman, R. Donnelly, L. Shuster, F. Mertens, W. Rand and K. Miczek (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1996)
• Cats spraying on Prozac. ‘Effects of a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor on Urine Spraying Behavior in Cats’ by P.A. Pryor, B.L. Hart, K.D. Cliff and M.J. Bain (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 2001)
• Mice phagocytosing on Prozac. ‘Effects of Fluoxetine on the Activity of Phagocytosis in Stressed Mice’ by M. Freire-Garabal, M.J. Núñez, P. Riveiro, J. Balboa, P. López, B.G. Zamarano, E. Rodrigo and M. Rey-Méndez (published in Life Sciences, 2002)
• Lobsters retreating on Prozac. ‘Serotonin and Aggressive Motivation in Crustaceans: Altering the Decision to Retreat’ by R. Huber, K. Smith, A. Delago, K. Isaksson and E.A. Kravitz (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1997)
• Lizards changing on Prozac. ‘Behavioral Changes in Anolis carolinensis Following Injection with Fluoxetine’ by A.W. Deckel (published in Behavioural Brain Research, 1996)
• Croakers maturing on Prozac. ‘Stimulatory Effects of Serotonin on Maturational Gonadotropin Release in the Atlantic Croaker, Micropogonias undulatus’ by I.A. Khan and P. Thomas (published in General and Comparative Endocrinology, 1992)
• Worms moving on Prozac. ‘The Effects of Cholinergic and Serotoninergic Drugs on Motility in Vitro of Haplometra cylindracea (Trematoda: Digenea)’ by D.M. McKay, D.W. Halton, J.M. Allen and I. Fairweather (published in Parasitology, 1989)

The most celebrated case may be that of Peter Fong, of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, who gave Prozac to clams. This caused two things to happen. First, the clams began reproducing furiously – at about ten times their normal rate. And second, Professor Fong was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in biology, honouring him, his Prozac and his reproducibly happy shellfish.

Fong, Peter F., Peter T. Huminski and Lynette M. D’urso (1998). ‘Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)’. Journal of Experimental Zoology 280 (3): 260–4.

Defending pay phones and parking spots

As pay telephones disappear from our cities, with them vanish opportunities to watch an entertaining, maddening form of behaviour. The behaviour was documented in a study called ‘Waiting for a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defense’. The report came out in 1989, before mobile phones nudged public pay phones towards oblivion.

Professor R. Barry Ruback, with some of his students at Georgia State University, performed an experiment. They began by asking people what they would do if, while talking on a public pay telephone, they noticed someone else waiting to use that phone. Most people said they would hurry up and terminate their call.

The researchers put that common belief to the test. They lurked discreetly near public telephone booths in the Atlanta area. Seeing someone engaged in a call on a pay phone, they would send a trained stooge to hover expectantly. The stooge ‘simply stood behind the caller, sometimes looking at his watch and putting his hands in his pockets’. Sometimes they sent two stooges. Every stooge was ‘instructed not to stare at the subject’.

In the absence of stooges, people’s phone calls lasted on average about 80 seconds. When a single stooge stood nearby, people stayed on the phone longer – typically about 110 seconds. And when two stooges queued up, clearly waiting, waiting, waiting for access to the telephone, people kept using that phone much longer – averaging almost four minutes.

After varying the experiment in small ways, trying to tease out exactly what was or wasn’t happening, the researchers decided they had seen a clear cause and effect – that ‘people stayed longer at the phone after an intrusion, primarily because someone was waiting to use the phone’.

Even in the absence of pay phones, one can, while strolling through town, see bursts of this kind of ‘territorial defense’. They happen in the street and in parking lots, wherever motorists vie for parking spaces.

Professor Ruback went behaviour-hunting in a shopping mall car park near Atlanta. In 1997, he and a colleague, Daniel Juieng, produced a report with a title that hints at more violence than the paper delivers: ‘Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers’. When the researchers saw someone get into a car, preparing to drive away, they measured the time until the car actually departed. They saw that, consistently, drivers took longer to leave if someone else was obviously waiting for their space.

Ruback and his minions forced the issue, sending their own drivers, in various cars, all with particular instructions. They learned that if their ‘intruding’ driver honked a horn, the departing driver would take an especially long time to leave. They also learned that men typically would leave more quickly if they saw that the person waiting to take their place drove a blatantly more expensive vehicle. Women, though, usually were not cowed by such things.

Ruback, R. Barry, Karen D. Pape and Philip Doriot (1989). ‘Waiting for a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defense’. Social Psychology Quarterly 52 (3): 232–41.

Ruback, R. Barry, and Daniel Juieng (1997). ‘Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers’. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27 (9): 821–34.

Red: bull

Bulls care little about the redness of a matador’s cape. Psychologists have been pretty sure about that since 1923, when George M. Stratton of the University of California published a study called ‘The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle’.

‘It is probable’, Stratton opined, ‘that this popular belief arises from the fact that cattle, and particularly bulls, have attacked persons displaying red, when the cause of the attack lay in the behavior of the person, in his strangeness, or in other factors apart from the color itself. The human knowledge that red is the color of blood, and that blood is, or seemingly should be, exciting, doubtless has added its own support to this fallacy.’

Professor Stratton, aided by a Miss Morrison and a Mr Blodgett, conducted an experiment on several small herds of cattle – forty head altogether, a mixture of bulls and bullocks (bullocks are castrated bulls) and cows and calves, including some who were accustomed to wandering the range and others who lived in barns.

The researchers obtained white, black, red and green strips of cloth, each measuring two by six feet. These they attached ‘endwise to a line stretched high enough to let the animals go easily under it; from this line the colors hung their 6 feet of length free of the ground, well-separated, and ready to flutter in the breeze.’

The cattle showed indifference to the banners, except sometimes when a breeze made the cloth flutter. Males and females reacted the same way, as did ‘tame’ and ‘wild’ animals. Red did nothing for them.

Farmers seem to have already suspected this. Stratton surveyed some. He reports that ‘Of 66 such persons who have favored me with their careful replies, I find that 38 believe that red never excites cattle to anger; 15 believe that red usually does not excite them to anger, although exceptionally it may; 8 believe that it usually so excites, though exceptionally it may not; and 3 believe that it always so excites.’

One of those three dissenters described her views, well, colourfully: ‘A lively little Jersey cow whom I had known all her six years of life, chased me through a barbed wire fence when I was wearing a red dress and sweater, and never did so before or after. I changed to a dull gray, and reentered the corral, and she paid no attention to me, and let me feed and water her as usual. Also a Durham bull whom I had raised from a calf, and was a perfect family pet, chased me till I fell from sight through some brush when I was wearing the same outfit of crimson.’

More typical, though, was the farmer who told Stratton: ‘In referring to the saying, “Like waving a red rag before a bull, I have found that to wave anything before a bull is dangerous business.” ’

Stratton, George M. (1923). ‘The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle’. Psychological Review 30 (4): 321–5.

In brief

‘An Eiffel Penetrating Head Injury’

by M. George and J. Round (published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2006)

The authors, at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, report that: ‘A 3 year old boy presented to our accident and emergency department with an obvious penetrating head injury. He had tripped and fallen onto a metal model of the Eiffel Tower which then became rigidly lodged into his skull.’

‌X-ray of a three-year-old boy’s head with souvenir Eiffel Tower

Insulting in French

Prior to 2008 no one knew, at all precisely, the pain people suffer when they gaze at an ugly painting – relative to what they’d feel if they were looking at a pretty picture – while a stranger shoots them in the back of the hand with a powerful laser beam. Now something is known about the subject. The knowledge is preserved in a study called ‘Aesthetic Value of Paintings Affects Pain Thresholds’.

The study’s authors, Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea at the University of Bari, Italy, had twelve people each identify paintings as beautiful or ugly, then stare at some of each kind while a laser heated into the dorsal surface of their hand. Each volunteer, after each viewing, rated the pain on a scale of 0 to 100. The hurt was a little worse when they looked at ugly art, they said, mostly.

This manner of inflicting pain – applying a carefully aimed column of light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation (that’s the phrase, more or less, that gives us the cool, five-letter word ‘laser’), is not the only possible way. In analysing how people respond to pain, researchers have dabbled or experimented with different methods of causing that pain. Harold Hillman, of the University of Surrey, published a paper in 1993 called ‘The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods’. His key observation was: ‘It is difficult to know how much pain the person being executed feels, or for how long, because many of the signs of pain are obscured by the procedure.’ In contrast, Richard Stephens of Keele University and his colleagues plunged people’s hands into ice-cold water in their 2009 study ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’, and again in the 2011 follow-up, ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain – Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency’.

Swearing is risky for researchers. They must beware of the foreign-language discount. Several psychologists have found that swearing in one’s native language dredges up deeper, more hellacious emotion than swearing in a ‘foreign’ language. Among the more subdued descriptions of this quirk, one finds a paper called ‘The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals’ by Jean-Marc Dewaele of Birkbeck, University of London. It was published in 2004. Six years later Dewaele produced a study with a more colourful title, one that risks inflicting pain on any journal or newspaper editor who considers permitting a writer to mention it: ‘Christ Fucking Shit Merde’.

The authors of the basic research on people’s reactions to being shot with a laser beam while watching ugly or pretty paintings also continued researching and writing. De Tommaso, Sardaro and Livrea repeated their original experiment, this time on people who were already prone to heady suffering. The result: a 2009 paper called ‘Effects of Affective Pictures on Pain Sensitivity and Cortical Responses Induced by Laser Stimuli in Healthy Subjects and Migraine Patients’.

Tommaso, Marina de, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea (2008). ‘Aesthetic Value of Paintings Affects Pain Thresholds’. Consciousness and Cognition 17 (4): 1152–62.

Hillman, Harold (1993). ‘The Possible Pain Experienced during Execution by Different Methods’. Perception 22 (6): 745–53.

Stephens, Richard, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston (2009). ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’. Neuroreport 20 (12): 1056–60.

Stephens, Richard, and Claudia Umland (2011). ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain – Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency’. Journal of Pain 12 (12): 1274–81.

Harris, Catherine L., and Jean Berko Gleason (2003). ‘Taboo Words and Reprimands Elicit Greater Autonomic Reactivity in a First Language than in a Second Language’. Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (4): 561–79.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2004). ‘The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25 (2&3): 204–22.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2010). ‘Christ Fucking Shit Merde! Language Preferences for Swearing among Maximally Proficient Multilinguals’. Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (3): 595–614.

Tommaso, Marina de, Rita Calabrese, Eleonora Vecchio, Francesco Vito De Vito, Giulio Lancioni and Paolo Livrea (2009). ‘Effects of Affective Pictures on Pain Sensitivity and Cortical Responses Induced by Laser Stimuli in Healthy Subjects and Migraine Patients’. International Journal of Psychophysiology 74 (2): 139–48.

May we recommend

‘Delusions of Halitosis’

by R.L. Goldberg, P.A. Buongiorno and R.I. Henkin (published in Psychosomatics, 1985)