Can Brain Scans Detect Lies?
Brain scans are opening new avenues in science, including forensic psychiatry. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is being used to discover new insights into how the brain works and what makes people tick. By studying which areas of the brain “light up” on MRI images, researchers are uncovering differences in how men and women communicate and process information that may lead to stronger relationships at home and more effective relationships in the workplace. Scientists are using MRI research to explore new paths of treating drug, alcohol and nicotine addiction. Recent studies in Europe indicate that brain scans may some day replace lie detector tests in the courtroom.
Instead of using the physical indicators of anxiety — changes in pulse, blood pressure and respiration — measured by a polygraph, fMRIs purport to show whether an individual is lying by which areas of the brain show increased activity. According to an article in Scientific American some entrepreneurs are already trying to capitalize on this, as yet, unproven science. Cephos in Massachusetts and No Lie MRI in California claim to be able to predict with 90% or better accuracy if someone is lying. One firm even advertises its services for “risk reduction in dating.” However, neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt the company’s accuracy claims, saying the science is too new and unproven.
A 2007 article in the American Journal of Law and Medicine by researchers at Stanford University that analyzed existing research on the subject concluded that current studies has failed to prove the validity of fMRIs as a lie detector “at any accuracy level.” Article authors criticized the small number of studies, the failure to replicate results and the fact the most studies focused on groups and not individuals. Concern was also expressed about assumptions being made about MRI results. Scientific consensus has yet to be reached on what illumination of various parts of the brain indicates.
Opinion is divided on when or even if our understanding of how the brain operates will ever be precise enough to consider MRIs dependable courtroom evidence. However, the possibilities are so intriguing that new research is already being funded. The MacArthur Foundation has donated $10 million to a three-year pilot Law and Neuroscience Project to assess how fMRIs and other neuroscience discoveries could affect the law. The day may come when polygraphs are replaced by MRIs.
Is Happiness Contagious?
Happiness has the same ripple effect as dropping a pebble in a pond. Its effect radiates outward in ever-greater rings, affecting everyone it touches, brightening each person’s life in turn. Surrounding yourself with happy people, just being near a happy person, even knowing someone who knows a happy person, makes you happier. Happiness is contagious, says Harvard University physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis.
Using study data that tracked 5,000 people over 20 years, Christakis tracked the path of happiness. He found that being around happy people makes us happier but that contact didn’t need to be direct for happiness to be transferred. The model worked both with social ties, such being around family and friends who were happy, and with simple physical proximity. Just being in the same room or check-out line with a happy person or passing a smiling person on the street allowed enough contact to “catch” happiness.
It’s easy to understand how the happiness of family and close friends can make us happier. The surprise in Christakis’ analysis came in finding that happiness is able to transcend direct links. We become happier not only when our friends are happy; but when the friend of a friend is happy, even if we don’t know or have any direct contact with that person. The bottom line is that surrounding ourselves with happy people makes us happy, makes the people we love happy, and makes the people they love happy.
In addition to spending time with happy people, what can you do to become happier? Try some of these ideas to brighten your day:
- Read a funny book. Dave Barry and Janet Evanovich are tw0 authors who make me laugh out loud.
- Watch a funny movie or a video of your favorite comedian. Tim Allen, Robin Williams and Jeff Foxworthy tickle my funny bone.
- Create your own happiness ripple. Smile at strangers as you walk down the street or through the mall. You’ll be surprised how many smile back.
- Look for the little things in life that give you pleasure and make you smile: leaves blowing in the breeze, birds on a wire, rosy sunsets, a shining sliver of moon.
Happiness is all around if we just look for it. Grab some and pass it along.
Fame, Money, Beauty Don’t Bring Happiness
It turns out that those oft sought goals in life — fame, wealth and beauty — don’t bring happiness and can, in fact, make life miserable. That’s the finding of a new study by three researchers at the University of Rochester in New York that was reported this week on ScienceDaily online.
“People understand that it’s important to pursue goals in their lives, and they believe that attaining these goals (fame, wealth, beauty) will have positive consequences,” said study author Edward Deci, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. However, he noted that the study disproved that belief. “Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life,” Deci said. “The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community.”
The study tracked recent university graduates using in-depth psychological surveys to gauge satisfaction, self-esteem, anxiety, stress and positive/negative emotions. Goals were evaluated as intrinsic such as developing deep, personal relationships or extrinsic such as attaining personal wealth. Identical surveys were administered 12 and 24 months after college graduation, a critical development stage for young adults who have finally left the safety net of home and university to make their own way in the world.
While the study confirmed earlier research that commitment to a goal increases an individual’s success in achieving that goal, it broke new ground in analyzing the relationship between goals and happiness. The study found that the content of the goal, not the desire to achieve it, most affected happiness. Achieving materialistic and image-related goals actually generated negative emotions like shame and anger and produced anxiety symptoms including headaches and stomachaches. The greatest satisfaction came from the achievement of intrinsic goals such as personal growth, building relationships, improving the community and physical fitness that met the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.
While study authors emphasized the need for further study over broader population groups, they did suggest that the emphasis on extrinsic pursuits — career building, long work hours, possession acquisition, etc. — that is typical of the educated, post-collegiate, young adults may lead to general feelings of dissatisfaction with life. Young people may be happier if they place less emphasis on career pursuits and greater emphasis on psychologically nourishing experiences such as spending time with friends and family or pursuing personal interests.
Rage, Revenge Spur Mass Murder
Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy in Littleton, Colorado during which 12 students and one teacher lost their lives at the hands of two disturbed students who killed themselves at the end of their rampage. The tragic event ended the open-door policy most schools had practiced, changed society’s view of childhood bullying, changed the way SWAT teams respond to such events, and shattered our personal sense of safety. If such horror could happen in a quiet, little town like Littleton, Columbine made us realize that catastrophic violence could touch our own lives.
While mass murder is nothing new, its increasing occurrence — seven in the past month — has shocked and troubled psychiatric experts. While there does not appear to be any common trigger that sends a mass murderer on a killing spree, experts have identified two common characteristics: a cataclysmic event that triggers a suicidal rage and a thirst for revenge.
“It’s the constellation or coming together, the perfect storm of someone’s last shot at something,” retired FBI senior profiler Mark Safarik told the Associated Press. “For them, there’s just no other way out. Or if there’s another way out, they don’t choose it, because they’re going to punish somebody.”
Safarik doesn’t think there’s any way to predict who will leap over the edge of reason. There is scant similarity in motivations, personality types, individual experiences or even choice of targets to guide behavior analysts in their efforts to predict and thereby prevent mass murders. For example, Jiverly Wong who opened fire in a Binghamton, New York immigration center had recently been laid off, but investigators do not understand why he went to the center instead of his former workplace to exact his grim revenge.
What behaviorists have discovered is that intense media coverage seems to encourage more mass murders. “I think that people that are on the edge, that are contemplating such tragic events, sometimes all it takes is that being highlighted in the media for them to go, ‘You know, I could do something like that, I’m that angry,’” Safarik said. “It’s in their face on the television, and now it’s in their thinking patterns. It becomes an option that, perhaps earlier on, wasn’t an option for them.”
When Does Parental Involvement Become Meddling?
Parents today pride themselves on how tuned in they are to their children. They coach their soccer teams, drive them to karate and gymnastics classes, chaperone field trips, and work the pancake breakfast. They enjoy spending time with their children and their friends. But many parents have trouble finding the right balance between being involved in their children’s lives and meddling. They friend their children’s friends on Facebook. They “help” their children with school projects. They pick up job applications and some have even attended job interviews with their children.
Such over-involvement is problematic, psychologists say. Stepping over the line from monitoring your child’s activities to active participation blurs the necessary demarcation between parent and child. Friending your child on Facebook allows you to appropriately monitor his online activities, but friending your child’s friends interferes with his ability to develop independence. Parents who assume too much responsibility for their children’s lives rob them of the experiences necessary to learn life skills and opportunities to practice responsibility.
“The responsibility of being a parent has diminished,” elementary school teacher Linda Graves told reporter Martin Rozenman of The Columbus (OH) Dispatch in an April 16, 2009 article. “I think, because of their limited time, parents want to be the good guy — the friend rather than the disciplinarian.”
The problem is exacerbated when parents try to relive the glories of their own youth — whether real or unattained — through their children. Even when children have an interest in these activities, parental pressure to succeed can create anxiety that overpowers any pleasure the child might experience.
“It’s one thing to enjoy the success of your kids, but, when parents’ self-esteem is based on their kids’ success, it’s horribly self-destructive. Kids crumble under that pressure or succeed and are really unhappy,” California psychologist Jim Taylor, author of two books on parenting, told The Dispatch’s Rozenman.
There are healthy ways for parents to be involved in their children’s lives. Eating dinner as a family, turning off the TV and playing a board game once a week, and vacationing together will bring you closer to your children without crowding their space.
Children Can Strain Marital Bliss
There is nothing so miraculous and charming as a sleeping baby — and nothing so frustrating or exasperating as a tantruming toddler. Children have the power to evoke a wide range of emotions in their parents — often running through the entire emotional repertoire from love to resentment within the space of a few hours. Having a child can turn life into an emotional rollercoaster for which most parents are unprepared. The parenting classes taken during pregnancy do little to prepare parents for the emotional strain that having a child can place on their marriage. As many new parents find out, having is not the same as wanting.
In an 8-year study of 218 couples recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, nearly half of the couples reported a decrease in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child. Study author Brian Doss, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M, teamed with researchers from the University of Denver to study the effects of children on their parents’ marriages. While childless couples also suffered diminished marital quality over time, University of Denver psychology professor and study researcher Scott Stanley told MyFox National, “having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”
The study found that couples who had been married longer and those with higher incomes experienced fewer marital problems after the birth of a baby than those who had been married only a short time or who had lower incomes. Couples who lived together before marriage seemed to find it harder to cope with a new baby than those who had lived separately before getting married.
While sleep deprivation, lost freedom, lack of time for pursuits outside of childcare, and necessary changes in the division of labor within the home — and perceived inequities — contribute to marital strife when a baby joins the family; the study found that communication and sex were the keys to maintaining marital bliss. Parents often put sex and their relationship with each other on the back burner when a baby enters the picture, allowing the child to take center stage. That’s a mistake, researchers found. The happiest marriages were those where parents still “dated,” made time for sex, and made an extra effort to focus on their relationship and each other.
Are You Stingy With Praise?
There’s a saying, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” There is merit to this statement and can work well in casual relationships. But with people who are close to you, if you often have little to say about their accomplishments, you can fall short of being a supportive friend.
People like being around people who make them feel good. I think if you frequently have trouble finding something positive to say, you need to examine yourself. Are you overly critical? Are your standards for acceptance too high? I’m not saying you should lie or be disingenuous. But is it really that hard to find something good to say?
For example, suppose your friend redecorates her home. You walk in and immediately notice you hate the loud purple color of the walls. This in addition to the mismatched furniture lead you to believe your friend doesn’t have good taste.How can you find something good to say? You could start by realizing that her “bad taste” is simply not your taste. Even though you wouldn’t have decorated your home that way, doesn’t mean there is not some sense of style in it. You could comment on how much work she must have put into it. If she hired a decorator, you could compliment her on how much patience it must have taken to get to the finished product. You could comment how the boldness of the wall color accents the rug. Even though you don’t like the wall color, it still may be striking or rich-looking.
It takes more work to think of positive things to say in a situation, but with practice, it can come more naturally. In this example, if the friend asks openly “do you like it?” You should still be honest if you don’t. But honesty doesn’t have to be brutal or hurtful. You could say, “this isn’t my style”, or “I wouldn’t have picked this for me, but it does stand out and I can see how you put a lot of work into it.” Then in searching for something else positive to say, you could switch the attention to her family and ask “do they like it?” If the answer is yes, then focus on how that’s really what matters.
Why do this? Why not simply say what’s on your mind and be honest? You can if you don’t care how you make people close to you feel. And in some settings that’s the prudent approach. But if you want to build people up, take steps to think of positive things to say and be generous with the praise.
What’s Wrong With Being Emotionally Unavailable?
The short answer is nothing, if you don’t want to have close relationships. There are people who really are content to live as an island. But most people aren’t built this way. The usual scenario I see is the person who spends their young adulthood (20′s and 30′s) charging forward with their career, with limited intimate relationships (usually because they don’t have time) and then at 45 or late thirties for women, decide they are tired of being alone now want to settle down.
There is nothing wrong with choosing to delay marriage or a serious relationship because of other priorities. In fact, it’s better to be honest up front about your focus rather than string someone along feigning interest just to keep them around. However, it can be very difficult to connect with someone quickly if you’ve spent 10 – 20 years being self-centered and avoiding closeness. Once you decide you want a companion, you have to learn how to be a companion who can meet other’s needs.
What does emotional unavailability look like? I think another term that could be used is psychological independence. They don’t need anyone. This person usually feels threatened and uncomfortable when people ask too many questions. Rather than see this positively as someone taking interest in them, they see it as prying or being nosey. They may be easily suspicious of other’s motives; having difficulty trusting others. They may feel smothered by their partner’s attention or desire to spend time together. This often comes from needing to feel in control. When they start to fall in love, they feel less in control and prefer to push the other person away to regain some control. Staying too busy is a passive way of avoiding closeness. In your mind, you have a legitimate excuse for not “wasting” time building relationships.
There are other ways a person can demonstrate emotional unavailability; these are just a few. As you can see these behaviors are not conducive to building intimacy and connectedness in a relationship. The person, who is emotionally unavailable and wants to have a serious relationship some day, should expect to need a running head start to learn how to be close to others. Don’t expect it to all come together just because you’ve met your financial or career goals. You’ll still have some work to do to break old habits so you can be a better partner for the person you choose.
The other side of this coin is emotional neediness. I’ll discuss this in a future post.
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