Major conscious and unconcoscious processes in the brain: part 3: Robot minds

This article continues my series on major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. In my last two posts I have talked about 8 major unconscious processes in the brain viz sensory, motor, learning , affective, cognitive (deliberative), modelling, communications and attentive systems. Today, I will not talk about brain in particular, but will approach the problem from a slightly different problem domain- that of modelling/implementing an artificial brain/ mind.

I am a computer scientist, so am vaguely aware of the varied approaches used to model/implement the brain. Many of these use computers , though not every approach assumes that the brain is a computer.

Before continuing I would briefly like to digress and link to one of my earlier posts regarding the different  traditions of psychological research in personality and how I think they fit an evolutionary stage model . That may serve as a background to the type of sweeping analysis and genralisation that I am going to do. To be fair it is also important to recall an Indian parable of how when asked to describe an elephant by a few blind man each described what he could lay his hands on and thus provided a partial and incorrect picture of the elephant. Some one who grabbed the tail, described it as snake-like and so forth.

With that in mind let us look at the major approaches to modelling/mplementing the brain/intelligence/mind. Also remember that I am most interested in unconscious brain processes till now and sincerely believe that all the unconscious processes can, and will be successfully implemented in machines.   I do not believe machines will become sentient (at least any time soon), but that question is for another day.

So, with due thanks to @wildcat2030, I came across this book today and could immediately see how the different major approaches to artificial robot brains are heavily influenced (and follow) the evolutionary first five stages and the first five unconscious processes in the brain.
The book in question is 'Robot Brains: Circuits and Systems for Conscious Machines' by Pentti O. Haikonen and although he is most interested in conscious machines I will restrict myself to intelligent but unconscious machines/robots.

The first chapter of the book (which has made to my reading list) is available at Wiley site in its entirety and I quote extensively from there:

Presently there are five main approaches to the modelling of cognition that could be used for the development of cognitive machines: the computational approach (artificial intelligence, AI), the artificial neural networks approach, the dynamical systems approach, the quantum approach and the cognitive approach. Neurobiological approaches exist, but these may be better suited for the eventual explanation of the workings of the biological brain.

The computational approach (also known as artificial intelligence, AI) towards thinking machines was initially worded by Turing (1950). A machine would be thinking if the results of the computation were indistinguishable from the results of human thinking. Later on Newell and Simon (1976) presented their Physical Symbol System Hypothesis, which maintained that general intelligent action can be achieved by a physical symbol system and that this system has all the necessary and sufficient means for this purpose. A physical symbol system was here the computer that operates with symbols (binary words) and attached rules that stipulate which symbols are to follow others. Newell and Simon believed that the computer would be able to reproduce human-like general intelligence, a feat that still remains to be seen. However, they realized that this hypothesis was only an empirical generalization and not a theorem that could be formally proven. Very little in the way of empirical proof for this hypothesis exists even today and in the 1970s the situation was not better. Therefore Newell and Simon pretended to see other kinds of proof that were in those days readily available. They proposed that the principal body of evidence for the symbol system hypothesis was negative evidence, namely the absence of specific competing hypotheses; how else could intelligent activity be accomplished by man or machine? However, the absence of evidence is by no means any evidence of absence. This kind of ‘proof by ignorance’ is too often available in large quantities, yet it is not a logically valid argument. Nevertheless, this issue has not yet been formally settled in one way or another. Today’s positive evidence is that it is possible to create world-class chess-playing programs and these can be called ‘artificial intelligence’. The negative evidence is that it appears to be next to impossible to create real general intelligence via preprogrammed commands and computations.

The original computational approach can be criticized for the lack of a cognitive foundation. Some recent approaches have tried to remedy this and consider systems that integrate the processes of perception, reaction, deliberation and reasoning (Franklin, 1995, 2003; Sloman, 2000). There is another argument against the computational view of the brain. It is known that the human brain is slow, yet it is possible to learn to play tennis and other activities that require instant responses. Computations take time. Tennis playing and the like would call for the fastest computers in existence. How could the slow brain manage this if it were to execute computations?

The artificial neural networks approach, also known as connectionism, had its beginnings in the early 1940s when McCulloch and Pitts (1943) proposed that the brain cells, neurons, could be modelled by a simple electronic circuit. This circuit would receive a number of signals, multiply their intensities by the so-called synaptic weight values and sum these modified values together. The circuit would give an output signal if the sum value exceeded a given threshold. It was realized that these artificial neurons could learn and execute basic logic operations if their synaptic weight values were adjusted properly. If these artificial neurons were realized as hardware circuits then no programs would be necessary and biologically plausible artificial replicas of the brain might be possible. Also, neural networks operate in parallel, doing many things simultaneously. Thus the overall operational speed could be fast even if the individual neurons were slow. However, problems with artificial neural learning led to complicated statistical learning algorithms, ones that could best be implemented as computer programs. Many of today’s artificial neural networks are statistical pattern recognition and classification circuits. Therefore they are rather removed from their original biologically inspired idea. Cognition is not mere classification and the human brain is hardly a computer that executes complicated synaptic weight-adjusting algorithms.

The human brain has some 10 to the power of 11 neurons and each neuron may have tens of thousands of synaptic inputs and input weights. Many artificial neural networks learn by tweaking the synaptic weight values against each other when thousands of training examples are presented. Where in the brain would reside the computing process that would execute synaptic weight adjusting algorithms? Where would these algorithms have come from? The evolutionary feasibility of these kinds of algorithms can be seriously doubted. Complicated algorithms do not evolve via trial and error either. Moreover, humans are able to learn with a few examples only, instead of having training sessions with thousands or hundreds of thousands of examples. It is obvious that the mainstream neural networks approach is not a very plausible candidate for machine cognition although the human brain is a neural network.

Dynamical systems were proposed as a model for cognition by Ashby (1952) already in the 1950s and have been developed further by contemporary researchers (for example Thelen and Smith, 1994; Gelder, 1998, 1999; Port, 2000; Wallace, 2005). According to this approach the brain is considered as a complex system with dynamical interactions with its environment. Gelder and Port (1995) define a dynamical system as a set of quantitative variables, which change simultaneously and interdependently over quantitative time in accordance with some set of equations. Obviously the brain is indeed a large system of neuron activity variables that change over time. Accordingly the brain can be modelled as a dynamical system if the neuron activity can be quantified and if a suitable set of, say, differential equations can be formulated. The dynamical hypothesis sees the brain as comparable to analog feedback control systems with continuous parameter values. No inner representations are assumed or even accepted. However, the dynamical systems approach seems to have problems in explaining phenomena like ‘inner speech’. A would-be designer of an artificial brain would find it difficult to see what kind of system dynamics would be necessary for a specific linguistically expressed thought. The dynamical systems approach has been criticized, for instance by Eliasmith (1996, 1997), who argues that the low dimensional systems of differential equations, which must rely on collective parameters, do not model cognition easily and the dynamicists have a difficult time keeping arbitrariness from permeating their models. Eliasmith laments that there seems to be no clear ways of justifying parameter settings, choosing equations, interpreting data or creating system boundaries. Furthermore, the collective parameter models make the interpretation of the dynamic system’s behaviour difficult, as it is not easy to see or determine the meaning of any particular parameter in the model. Obviously these issues would translate into engineering problems for a designer of dynamical systems.

The quantum approach maintains that the brain is ultimately governed by quantum processes, which execute nonalgorithmic computations or act as a mediator between the brain and an assumed more-or-less immaterial ‘self’ or even ‘conscious energy field’ (for example Herbert, 1993; Hameroff, 1994; Penrose, 1989; Eccles, 1994). The quantum approach is supposed to solve problems like the apparently nonalgorithmic nature of thought, free will, the coherence of conscious experience, telepathy, telekinesis, the immortality of the soul and others. From an engineering point of view even the most practical propositions of the quantum approach are presently highly impractical in terms of actual implementation. Then there are some proposals that are hardly distinguishable from wishful fabrications of fairy tales. Here the quantum approach is not pursued.

The cognitive approach maintains that conscious machines can be built because one example already exists, namely the human brain. Therefore a cognitive machine should emulate the cognitive processes of the brain and mind, instead of merely trying to reproduce the results of the thinking processes. Accordingly the results of neurosciences and cognitive psychology should be evaluated and implemented in the design if deemed essential. However, this approach does not necessarily involve the simulation or emulation of the biological neuron as such, instead, what is to be produced is the abstracted information processing function of the neuron.

A cognitive machine would be an embodied physical entity that would interact with the environment. Cognitive robots would be obvious applications of machine cognition and there have been some early attempts towards that direction. Holland seeks to provide robots with some kind of consciousness via internal models (Holland and Goodman, 2003; Holland, 2004). Kawamura has been developing a cognitive robot with a sense of self (Kawamura, 2005; Kawamura et al., 2005). There are also others. Grand presents an experimentalist’s approach towards cognitive robots in his book (Grand, 2003).

A cognitive machine would be a complete system with processes like perception, attention, inner speech, imagination, emotions as well as pain and pleasure. Various technical approaches can be envisioned, namely indirect ones with programs, hybrid systems that combine programs and neural networks, and direct ones that are based on dedicated neural cognitive architectures. The operation of these dedicated neural cognitive architectures would combine neural, symbolic and dynamic elements.

However, the neural elements here would not be those of the traditional neural networks; no statistical learning with thousands of examples would be implied, no backpropagation or other weight-adjusting algorithms are used. Instead the networks would be associative in a way that allows the symbolic use of the neural signal arrays (vectors). The ‘symbolic’ here does not refer to the meaning-free symbol manipulation system of AI; instead it refers to the human way of using symbols with meanings. It is assumed that these cognitive machines would eventually be conscious, or at least they would reproduce most of the folk psychology hallmarks of consciousness (Haikonen, 2003a, 2005a). The engineering aspects of the direct cognitive approach are pursued in this book.

Now to me these computational approaches are all unidimensional-

1. The computational approach is suited for symbol-manipulation and information-represntation and might give good results when used in systems that have mostly 'sensory' features like forming a mental represntation of external world, a chess game etc. Here something (stimuli from world) is represented as something else (an internal symbolic represntation).
2. The Dynamical Systems approach is guided by interactions with the environment and the principles of feedback control systems and also is prone to 'arbitrariness' or 'randomness'. It is perfectly suited to implement the 'motor system' of brain as one of the common features is apparent unpredictability (volition) despite being deterministic (chaos theory) .
3. The Neural networks or connectionsim is well suited for implementing the 'learning system' of the brain and we can very well see that the best neural network based systems are those that can categorize and classify things just like 'the learning system' of the brain does.
4. The quantum approach to brain, I haven't studied enough to comment on, but the action-tendencies of 'affective system' seem all too similar to the superimposed,simultaneous states that exits in a wave function before it is collapsed. Being in an affective state just means having a set of many possible related and relevant actions simultaneously activated and then perhaps one of that decided upon somehow and actualized. I'm sure that if we could ever model emotion in machine sit would have to use quantum principles of wave functions, entanglemnets etc.
5. The cognitive approach, again I haven't go a hang of yet, but it seems that the proposal is to build some design into the machine that is based on actual brain and mind implemntations. Embodiment seems important and so does emulating the information processing functions of neurons. I would stick my neck out and predict that whatever this cognitive approach is it should be best able to model the reasoning and evaluative and decision-making functions of the brain. I am reminded of the computational modelling methods, used to functionally decompose a cognitive process, and are used in cognitive science (whether symbolic or subsymbolic modelling) which again aid in decision making / reasoning (see wikipedia entry)

Overall, I would say there is room for further improvement in the way we build more intelligent machines. They could be made such that they have two models of world - one deterministic , another chaotic and use the two models simulatenously (sixth stage of modelling); then they could communicate with other machines and thus learn language (some simulation methods for language abilities do involve agents communicating with each other using arbitrary tokens and later a language developing) (seventh stage) and then they could be implemented such that they have a spotlight of attention (eighth stage) whereby some coherent systems are amplified and others suppressed. Of course all this is easier said than done, we will need at least three more major approaches to modelling and implementing brain/intelligence before we can model every major unconscious process in the brain. To model consciousness and program sentience is an uphill task from there and would definitely require a leap in our understandings/ capabilities.

Do tell me if you find the above reasonable and do believe that these major approaches to artificial brain implementation are guided and constrained by the major unconscious processes in the brain and that we can learn much about brain from the study of these artificial approaches and vice versa.

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Major conscious and unconcoscious processes in the brain

Today I plan to touch upon the topic of consciousness (from which many bloggers shy) and more broadly try to delineate what I believe are the important different conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. I will be heavily using my evolutionary stages model for this.

To clarify myself at the very start , I do not believe in a purely reactive nature of organisms; I believe that apart from reacting to stimuli/world; they also act , on their own, and are thus agents. To elaborate, I believe that neuronal groups and circuits may fire on their own and thus lead to behavior/ action. I do not claim that this firing is under voluntary/ volitional control- it may be random- the important point to note is that there is spontaneous motion.

1. Sensory system: So to start with I propose that the first function/process the brain needs to develop is to sense its surroundings. This is to avoid predators/ harm in general. this sensory function of brain/sense organs may be unconscious and need not become conscious- as long as an animal can sense danger, even though it may not be aware of the danger, it can take appropriate action - a simple 'action' being changing its color to merge with background. 
   
2. Motor system:The second function/ process that the brain needs to develop is to have a system that enables motion/movement. This is primarily to explore its environment for food /nutrients. Preys are not going to walk in to your mouth; you have to move around and locate them. Again , this movement need not be volitional/conscious - as long as the animal moves randomly and sporadically to explore new environments, it can 'see' new things and eat a few. Again this 'seeing' may be as simple as sensing the chemical gradient in a new environmental.
3. Learning system: The third function/process that the brain needs to develop is to have a system that enables learning. It is not enough to sense the environmental here-and-now. One needs to learn the contingencies in the world and remember that both in space and time. I am inclined to believe that this is primarily pavlovaion conditioning and associative learning, though I don't rule out operant learning. Again this learning need not be conscious- one need not explicitly refer to a memory to utilize it- unconscious learning and memory of events can suffice and can drive interactions. I also believe that need for this function is primarily driven by the fact that one interacts with similar environments/con specifics/ predators/ preys and it helps to remember which environmental conditions/operant actions lead to what outcomes. This learning could be as simple as stimuli A predict stimuli B and/or that action C predicts reward D .
4. Affective/ Action tendencies system .The fourth function I propose that the brain needs to develop is a system to control its motor system/ behavior by making it more in sync with its internal state. This I propose is done by a group of neurons monitoring the activity of other neurons/visceral organs and thus becoming aware (in a non-conscious sense)of the global state of the organism and of the probability that a particular neuronal group will fire in future and by thus becoming aware of the global state of the organism , by their outputs they may be able to enable one group to fire while inhibiting other groups from firing. To clarify by way of example, some neuronal groups may be responsible for movement. Another neuronal group may be receiving inputs from these as well as say input from gut that says that no movement has happened for a time and that the organism has also not eaten for a time and thus is in a 'hungry' state. This may prompt these neurons to fire in such a way that they send excitatory outputs to the movement related neurons and thus biasing them towards firing and thus increasing the probability that a motion will take place and perhaps the organism by indulging in exploratory behavior may be able to satisfy hunger. Of course they will inhibit other neuronal groups from firing and will themselves stop firing when appropriate motion takes place/ a prey is eaten. Again nothing of this has to be conscious- the state of the organism (like hunger) can be discerned unconsciously and the action-tendencies biasing foraging behavior also activated unconsciously- as long as the organism prefers certain behaviors over others depending on its internal state , everything works perfectly. I propose that (unconscious) affective (emotional) state and systems have emerged to fulfill exactly this need of being able to differentially activate different action-tendencies suited to the needs of the organism. I also stick my neck out and claim that the activation of a particular emotion/affective system biases our sensing also. If the organism is hungry, the food tastes (is unconsciously more vivid) better and vice versa. thus affects not only are action-tendencies , but are also, to an extent, sensing-tendencies.
5. Decisional/evaluative system: the last function (for now- remember I adhere to eight stage theories- and we have just seen five brain processes in increasing hierarchy) that the brain needs to have is a system to decide / evaluate. Learning lets us predict our world as well as the consequences of our actions. Affective systems provide us some control over our behavior and over our environment- but are automatically activated by the state we are in. Something needs to make these come together such that the competition between actions triggered due to the state we are in (affective action-tendencies) and the actions that may be beneficial given the learning associated with the current stimuli/ state of the world are resolved satisfactorily. One has to balance the action and reaction ratio and the subjective versus objective interpretation/ sensation of environment. The decisional/evaluative system , I propose, does this by associating values with different external event outcomes and different internal state outcomes and by resolving the trade off between the two. This again need not be conscious- given a stimuli predicting a predator in vicinity, and the internal state of the organism as hungry, the organism may have attached more value to 'avoid being eaten' than to 'finding prey' and thus may not move, but camouflage. On the other hand , if the organisms value system is such that it prefers a hero's death on battlefield , rather than starvation, it may move (in search of food) - again this could exist in the simplest of unicellular organisms.

Of course all of these brain processes could (and in humans indeed do) have their conscious counterparts like Perception, Volition,episodic Memory, Feelings and Deliberation/thought. That is a different story for a new blog post!

And of course one can also conceive the above in pure reductionist form as a chain below:

sense-->recognize & learn-->evaluate options and decide-->emote and activate action tendencies->execute and move.

and then one can also say that movement leads to new sensation and the above is not a chain , but a part of cycle; all that is valid, but I would sincerely request my readers to consider the possibility of spontaneous and self-driven behavior as separate from reactive motor behavior. 

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The first 30 seconds: Trustworthiness, Dominance and their neural correlates

A lot has already been written in the blogosphre regarding this study that found the brain regions that are involved in first impression formation. I view the study from a slightly different angle , but first let me introduce the study and its main findings.

The study was focused on finding the brain regions that are involved in the impression formation of a new social entity. We all know that we form automatic and consistent first impressions of strangers we meet based on things like their face to the social information that is available about them. The authors theorized that to know which regions of the brain are involved in evaluating a person for the first time, it would be sufficient to know which regions of the brain were engaged more while the evaluation-consistent information was being processed. To understand this logic, consider the brain regions involved in memory and how they are discovered. Typically, a series of words/images to be remembered are presented to the subjects, while simultaneously their brain are imaged. Later a memory recall/recognition test is administered. It is found that some brain regions are consistently more active during encoding of the original stimuli which are later recalled/ recognized correctly. This effect is know as Difference in Memory effect (DM effect). the fact that these areas are differentially engaged during encoding of remembered stimuli as opposed to forgotten stimuli is taken as evidence for the fact that these brain regions are involved in encoding of memory. Similar to this effect, it is found that evaluations that are consistent with the later overall evaluation of the person engage some brain regions more than when the evaluation is inconsistent with the later overall evaluation. This difference in evaluation effect (DE ) can be used to locate the regions that are involved in social evaluation or formation of first impressions.

Previous studies had indicated that dmPFC was engaged in social evaluation; however many cognitive factors other than purely evaluative factors might be in action here.

It has also been indicated that amygdala is involved in both social evaluation and valence based evaluations and might be involved in these first impression formation. So the authors hypothesized that they would find differential activity in amygdala in consistent as opposed to inconsistent evaluations and this is what they actually observed. They also found that PCC was also differentially engaged while forming first impressions and thus was another brain region involved in evaluating others.

Here is the study design:

To test these hypotheses, we developed the difference in evaluation procedure (see Figure), allowing us to sort social information encoding trials by subsequent evaluations. More specifically, we measured blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) signals using whole brain fMRI during exposure to different person profiles. Each profile consisted of 6 person-descriptive sentences implying different personality traits. The sentences varied gradually in their positive to negative valence (or vice versa) but evoked equivalent levels of arousal. A 12-s interval with the face alone separated the positive and the negative segments. Subsequently, an evaluation slide instructed subjects to form their impression on an 8-point scale. On the basis of these evaluations, we determined which of the presented descriptive sentences guided evaluations (evaluation relevant) and which did not (evaluation irrelevant). For example, if a subject's evaluation was positive, we assigned the positive segment of the profile to the evaluation-relevant category and the negative segment to the evaluation-irrelevant category. We then identified the brain regions dissociating items from each category (that is, difference in evaluation effect). Notably, we correlated subjects' BOLD signal with their own individual evaluations. This allowed us to identify brain regions that were consistent across subjects in processing evaluation-relevant information regardless of the particular stimuli that they considered. Immediately after the scanning session, subjects underwent a memory-recognition task.

The results were clear and found that while dmPFC was involved in social evaluations it was not differentially engaged: thus it had a general role to play, perhaps holding the representation of evaluation after it had already been formed; in contrast both amygdala and PCC were differentially recruited and thus underlie the first time evaluations. In the words of the authors:

Understanding the neural substrates of social cognition has been one of the core motivations driving the burgeoning field of social neuroscience. A number of studies have highlighted the dmPFC in the processing of social information. Our results provide further evidence that the dmPFC is recruited to process person-descriptive information during impression formation. However, BOLD responses in this region do not dissociate evaluation-relevant from evaluation-irrelevant information, suggesting that the dmPFC is not essential for the evaluative component of impression formation. In fact, social evaluation recruits brain regions that are not socially specialized but are more generally involved in valuation and emotional processes.

Valuation and emotional processes, as a substantial amount of research has shown, are characteristic of the amygdala. In particular, the amygdala is considered to be a crucial region in learning about motivationally important stimuli. It is also implicated in social inferences that are based on facial and bodily expressions, in inferences of trustworthiness and in the capacity to infer social attributes. Moreover, the involvement of amygdala in social inferences might be independent of awareness or explicit memory. For example, increased amygdala responses were correlated with implicit, but not explicit, measures of the race bias, as well as with presentation of faces previously presented in an emotional, but not neutral, context, regardless of whether subjects could explicitly retrieve this information. Here we provide evidence linking the two domains of affective learning and social processing by showing that the amygdala is engaged in the formation of subjective value assigned to another person in a social encounter.

Although the amygdala is typically implicated in the processing of negative affect and negative stimuli have been shown to modulate it more than positive stimuli, we found that the amygdala processed both positive and negative evaluation-relevant information, suggesting that amygdala activity is driven by factors other than mere valence, such as the motivational importance or salience of the stimuli. This result is consistent with recent findings showing enhanced amygdala responses for both positive and negative stimuli as a function of motivational importance.

Evidence related to the PCC has been more diverse. There have been reports in the social domain, such as involvement in theory of mind and self-referential outward-focused thought33, in memory related processes such as autobiographical memory of family and friends34, and in emotional modulation of memory and attention. More recently, the PCC has been linked with economic decision making, the assignment of subjective value to rewards under risk and uncertainty, and credit assignment in a social exchange. A common denominator of these studies might be that all involved either a social or an outward-directed valuation component. Our task also encompasses these features, extending the role of the PCC to value assignment to social information guiding our first impressions of others.

The amygdala and the PCC are both interconnected with the thalamus as part of a larger circuitry that is implicated in emotion, arousal and learning. Beyond the known role of the amygdala and the PCC in social-information processing and value representation, our results suggest a neural mechanism underlying the online formation of first impressions. When encoding everyday social information during a social encounter, these regions sort information on the basis of its personal and subjective importance and summarize it into an ultimate score, a first impression. Other regions, such as the ventromedial PFC, the striatum and the insula, have also been implicated in valuation processes. However, these regions did not emerge in our difference in evaluation effect analysis. This might suggest a possible dissociation in the valuation network between regions engaged in the formation of value and its subsequent representation and updating. The latter regions would not be engaged during encoding and therefore would not show a difference in evaluation effect but would instead have an effect once the evaluation is formed. The amygdala and the PCC probably participate in both value formation and its representation. The difference in evaluation procedure may provide a useful tool for disentangling the different components of the valuation system and their specific contributions to social versus nonsocial evaluations.

Now I would like to link all this new research with an earlier research on face attributes that found that there were two orthogonal factors that characterize a face- trustworthiness (valence) and dominance. It is important to note that faces are an important mechanism by which we make snap judgments and if it has been found that there are two orthogonal dimensions (found using factor analysis) on which we judge faces and form rifts impressions, there is no reason to suppose that those same two orthogonal factors would not come into play when we form first impressions based on social information and not the face. What I am trying to say is that the non-face social information driven social evaluation would still be structured around the factors of whether the social information pointed to the person as Trustworthy or as Dominant. I would expect that there would be different brain regions specialized for these two functions: We all know too clearly that amygdala is specialized for trustworthiness judgments and that fits in with one of the areas that has been identified for snap judgments. thta leaves us with the PCC, which has normally been implicated in self-referential thinking with an outward and evaluative (as opposed to inward and executive) focus and also a preventive focus. It seems likely that this region would be used to evaluate a social other and judge as to whether he has the ability to execute, harm and dominate oneself. So, what I would like to see is a study that dissociates the scoial information provided to subjects in terms of trustworthiness and dominance factors and sees if there is a dissociation in the evaluative regions of amygdala and PCC; or maybe one can juts factor analyze the results of the original study and see if the same two factors emerge! I am excited,and would love to see these studies being preformed!!

Schiller, D., Freeman, J., Mitchell, J., Uleman, J., & Phelps, E. (2009). A neural mechanism of first impressions Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn.2278
Oosterhof, N., & Todorov, A. (2008). The functional basis of face evaluation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (32), 11087-11092 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805664105

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Cultural differences are Vodoo correlations: I beg to differ

Normally, I am delighted to read a new Ed Yong NERS blog post, and this article not only was published in New Scientist, but was also whole heartedly endorsed by Vaughan , again a person I admire the most.  Yet, I cannot hide my dismay over the fallacies that Ed commits and the muddled and biased thinking he displays- I can admire the moralistic stand from which he tries to interpret the recent findings with the conclusion that "But instead of dividing the world along cultural lines, we might be better off recognising and cultivating our cognitive flexibility." and I whole heartedly agree with that conclusion, but one need not nullify cultural differences to achieve the same objective of more cultural/ethnic tolerance and proactive re-wiring of what may be 'human / individual/ cultural nature'.

So, instead of dwelling on the moralistic aspect of the whole debate, let me get to the science part directly. Some of it may seem nit-picking, but others have profound implications.

AS A SPECIES, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on differences between groups and individuals.

The first fallacy Ed commits is to implicitly link any individual / group differences with genetic variation. Genetic variation need not be,and is not,the be-all and end-all of individual / group differences. Let us focus on an individual trait like intelligence or say the personality dimension of neuroticism for an individual for the rest of this article and we can easily extend the arguments to other individual/ group differences. It is standard practice nowadays,to admit the crucial role of epigenetics, development, social environment or Nurture along with Nature to explain any complex phenomenon like Intelligence or Neuroticism. Thus while my IQ or temperament may be partly inherited (inherited again does'nt mean genetics alone, it includes shared environment factors), it is also partly under the influence of non-shared environmental factors and partly expressed uniquely for each individual depending on idiosyncratic individual factors or random variation. Thus, some of the individual differences in two persons for intelligence/ neuroticism will be due to genetics, but most of it would be due to environmental influences(including social/ cultural factors) and some of it would be 'undetermined' by either genetics or environment, but be random/due to luck/chance/history factors.

Perhaps Ed chose a wrong opening line, but that doesn't negate his thesis, or does it? We'll get to that , but remember that Personality psychology based on studying both individual differences , as well as finding human universals, has a long tradition and is a worthy field of study- if only because personality is not a myth- individual differences exists , are consistent and can be reliably assessed and have profound implications for our day-to-day interaction, or in more clinical settings.

Before I proceed let me first list my points of agreements- I agree with Ed that media always sensationalizes findings and stereotypes the cultures involved, sometimes overextending or over interpreting the actual study findings, there is no such thing as an 'Eastern' and a 'Western' culture- I'll be more happy talking about nation-state based cultures like the Indian culture, the Chinese culture, the Japanese culture and the American culture; I agree that studies have only looked at China , Japan, Us and some western countries and generalized and caricatured it as Eastern and Western Culture; that there is an either-or dichotomy between Analytical and holistic thinking styles - but they are more on a continuum. Now to points of disagreements.

Psychologists have conducted a wealth of experiments that seem to support popular notions that easterners have a holistic world view, rooted in philosophical and religious traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism, while westerners tend to think more analytically, as befits their philosophical heritage of reductionism, utilitarianism and so on. However, the most recent research suggests that these popular stereotypes are far too simplistic. It is becoming apparent that we are all capable of thinking both holistically and analytically - and we are starting to understand what makes individuals flip between the two modes of thought.

A study that shows that we are capable of both analytical and holistic mods of though does not negate the fact that their could still be important and significant individual/group diffrences for the same. Consider Neuroticsm- if someone, in particular, and we in general, are capable of exhibiting behavior/ emotional states that are the opposite of characteristic neurotic traits, it doesn't negate the fact that one can still have persons who exhibit abnormally high levels of Neuroticism. Nowhere is it claimed that someone with high trait neuroticism cannot display flexibility under proper environmental conditions- or that the behavior is totally independent of the situation- we gain go back to Miscels debate of how much situation and how much traits are responsible for behavior- but the fact of cognitive flexibility does not negate the existence of stable traits or tendencies. Consider a low IQ person- he may display intelligence under some situations and not display intelligence under other situations - that cognitive flexibility would not negate the fact that he has low intelligence in general. We may also understand the factors that lead to more intelligent behaviors and be able to manipulate his behavior to display state intelligence- still that wont negate his low trait intelligence. So the assertion that cognitive flexibility means no individual/ cultural differences is pure wishful thinking. Similarly the fact that state differences can be easily created and manipulated does not lead to automatic negation of trait differences. I can easily create the state anxiety in Ed Yong as he sees his article criticized severally, but the fact that I can easily manipulate and understand a neurotic state, doesn't say anything about the existence or non-existence of a neurotic trait or tendency.

Time and again, studies like these seem to support the same basic, contrasting pattern of thought. Westerners appear to perceive the world in an analytic way, narrowing their focus onto prominent objects, lumping them into categories and examining them through logic. Easterners take a more holistic view: they are more likely to consider an object's context and analyse it through its changing relationships with its environment.

I wont generalize to Westerners or Easterners, but definitely this does say something about the existence of an anayltical and holistic thinking style trait, which exists on a continuum, is highly correlated to 'cultures' and is thus a group trait, and a dimension on which some cultures may display extreme values. If studies have consistently supported and found that US culture leads to extremes of analytical tendencies while Chinese/Japanese culture ingrained people lean towards holistic style of thinking, why deny the fact. Is it because of a misplaced notion that if groups/ cultures differ it means one is 'better' than other- what about Neuroticism- is low (trait) neuroticism always beneficial and high (trait) neurtocism always bad. Not anymore- Read 'Personality' by Nettle for a quick overview but the growing consensus is that the extremes of traits are good under particular environmental conditions and a little variation against a continuum foolproofs one against future unpredictable environmental catastrophes. Extremes of traits can also be a result of adaptation to different environmental niches. So case settled- group/cultural differences on at least one important dimension fo analyitcal/ holistic thinking do exist.

For a start, the simplistic notion of individualistic westerners and collectivist easterners is undermined by studies designed to assess how people see themselves, which suggest that there is a continuum of these traits across the globe. In terms of individualism, for example, western Europeans seem to lie about midway between people in the US and those in east Asia.

Ed, what are you getting to here. Individualistic 'US'ers and collectivist Chinese are perfectly compatible with existence of Europeans who do lie midway. To go back to Neuroticim, the fact that some are Neurotic, while others are calm is nowhere in contradiction to the existence of some people who lie midway on this dimension and do not show any extremes.If the point was that analytical/ holistic is not categorical but dimensional point well taken!

So it's not all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett's group recently compared three communities living in Turkey's Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent. He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 8552). A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the east. "Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan," says Nisbett. "The citizens are regarded as cowboys - highly independent and individualistic - and sure enough, they're more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese."

Why has it always to be an either-or. Ed agrees that local and social factors are important, so at least he agrees that cultural/environmental factors are important and lead to group trait differences. His argument is that within-group variation is more than between-group variation (if one considers a culture as a group and the 'local groups, as individuals belonging to that bigger group) so it doesn't make sense of talking about differences in cultural mean values. I don't buy that. This argument has often been applied to ethnic/ racial IQ differences issues etc., and I believe that one should not deny facts based on their political or moral ramifications. Just like there are differences in average heights of chinese and americans, though the mean difference between chinese and american heights may be less than the variation exhibited in chinese or american society with respect to height, still it makes sense to say that on an average chinese are of lesser height than americans. This doesn't sound racist, it is a fact. Same holds true for other differences like IQ or in this case the average holistic/analytical thinking displayed by a culture.The fact that there is variation within the culture does not negate differences in mean values between cultures.

Is it time we moved beyond simplistic notions of eastern and western psychology? Daphna Oyserman from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor certainly thinks so. She is not happy invoking history to explain modern human behaviour. "We can't test if history mattered," she says. "But we can test how contexts can evoke one or other mindset."

Why not history- just based on the personal comfort factor? now that it is established that cultures differ in holistic/analytical dimension, one needs to find out why. Again, the effect may be inherited (and thus partly genetic) or it may be learned and due to non-shared environmental factors- different local and geographic conditions to which the cultures are currently exposed. To endorse one extreme of non-shared environmental influences(based n personal comfort levels) as paramount and to rubbish any suggestion of influence of shared environmental factors (which in this case is culture itself as it provides the cultural and social context in which the group develops)or even genetics is to me an extremely stupid and outdated stand. History (or the then non-shared environment like the intensive agriculture of chinese) has influenced the cognitive style and the cognitive style gets ingrained in cultural traditions. These cultural traditions in turn provide the shared environment in which the culture develops. Also , people who display more holistic/ analytical style in a particular culture, may be culturally selected for, and it would not be surprising, if the favored trait gets fixed in the genetic code by cultural selection of that trait as individuals having that trait will be more successful and this would get fixed in the population as a whole. Thus, the group differences on cognitive style trait could be inherited (due to genes and shared cultural traditions) and also may be learned a new (response to novel non-shared local conditions) .

This experiment suggests that while the psychology of westerners may be superficially distinct from easterners, when social isolation is an issue there is little difference between the two. In fact, Oyserman's analysis of 67 similar studies reveals just how easily social context can change the way people think. For example, psychologists have "primed" east Asian volunteers to adopt an individualistic mode of thought simply by getting them to imagine playing singles tennis, circling single-person pronouns or unscrambling sentences containing words such as "unique", "independence" and "solitude". In many of the experiments volunteers from a single cultural background - be it eastern or western - show differences in behaviour as large as those you normally get when comparing people from traditionally collectivist and individualist cultures

One has to pause and ask where does 'social isolation' arise from if not a cultural tradition. If Chinese culture makes one feel more socially isolated and thus constantly in need of reaffirming relationships, than is that not a cultural difference - maybe we have narrowed it down to one important cultural tradition that leads to inheritability of thinking style, but still the cultures are different in important ways. Also, Experiments showing that priming can cause a lean towards a tendency nowhere prove that there are no group differences. Priming experiments have shown that when primed with old age related terms people walk slowly- does this negate the fact that young people are young, old people are old and there is whale of a difference in the average energy or walking speed of an old person and a young person. Should we conclude that age is a myth and that age is irrelevant to the average energy or time taken to walk a particular stretch!

The ease with which priming can alter our modes of thought makes it very unlikely that a penchant for either analytic or holistic thinking stems from deep-seated differences in the brains of westerners and easterners. Instead, it seems that the cultural context in which we grow up simply gives us more practice in thinking about the world in a particular way. "Everyone can think both ways, but on average, people tend to do more of one than the other," says Oyserman.

Sorry again. We can all be primed to display more intelligent behavior and our modes of thinking (creative or detail oriented) can be altered and manipulated, still people are looking (and have found some lateralization differences) for brain differences in these modes of thinking and like every phenomenon there is bound to be brain differences involved.(No I'm not endorsing the right-brained/ left-brained myth, but saying that creative and detail oriented thinking have no neurological basis to me seems wrong. Also, I'm glad that at last it is acknowledged that cultural practices in which we grow up gives us more practice/ exposure to a particular thinking style and lead to differences. Why should learning not lead to brain differences(remember plasticty 101) but genetics do I fail to understand. Also, remember critical developmental periods. It may be that there is a critical period in which this holistic/analytical thinking style gets fixed and that causes a long-lasting effect. Consider language- what language, and any language at all, that the child learns is dependent on correct exposure during critical developmental time; one can learn foreign languages later also , but with considerable effort and not as naturally as a child does. The story with holistic/analytical thinking style may be the same. One may develop this trait duirng a critcial developmental window and although manipulable it may not be totally non-hardwired.

Brain imaging supports this. In an experiment that involved subjects looking at a series of squares with lines in them, Trey Hedden from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that in east Asians the areas of the brain involved in focusing attention worked harder if they had to identify lines of the same length regardless of the surrounding squares - an "absolute" task that requires you to focus on an object regardless of its context. But with Americans the same brain areas were working harder to identify lines whose sizes varied proportionally with their squares - a "relative" judgement where context is key (Psychological Sciences, vol 19, p 12). In other words, people had to think harder to perform tasks outside their cultural comfort zone. The brain uses the same mental machinery to solve complex tasks, but cultural differences can affect how well trained these areas are.

No it doesn't, Haven't read the original studies, but from your discussion the areas involved are those relating to focusing attention- I believe it is common sense that you would focus more attention on a task that is not ingrained and is novel.What about other brain areas specific to the task. Were there differences in brain activation related to holistic/ analytical thinking. Was there some lateralization effect?

What is clear is that the minds of east Asians, Americans or any other group are not wired differently. We are all capable of both analytic and holistic thought. "Different societies make one option seem to make the most sense at any given moment," says Oyserman. But instead of dividing the world along cultural lines, we might be better off recognising and cultivating our cognitive flexibility. "There are a lot of advantages to both holistic and analytic perception," says Nisbett. In our multicultural world it would benefit us all if we could learn to adopt the most appropriate mode of thought for the situation in which we find ourselves.

No It is not at all clear that the brains are not wired differently. I believe there should be small differences, but based on the flexibility shown by people in switching from one style to another one can use plasticity and practice to re-wire the brain. Whether that re-wiring is required, or cultural social engineering is required would depend on whether one considers extremes maladaptive or just adaptive responses occupying particular niches. To deny differences outright is to deny the truth and perhaps lead to the fallacy of thinking everyone thinks like oneself. To understand differences is a first step towards greater tolerance and understanding. Hope I make sense.

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An online personality guessing experiment

I came to know of You Just Get Me experiment today, courtsey PsychCentrals post on the top 10 online psychology experiments .

In a nutshell, the site lets you guess the personality of a person based on clues he provides. In my case the public clues I have provided are my photograph and my facebook profile. Now, as a fun experiment, I'll request all my readers to go to that site and try to guess my personality from these , as well as additional clues you might have got following my blogging practices and habits. Its bound to be fun and I believe the questionnaire has correctly guessed my personality (OCEAN based) and I have a separate application on facebook that profiles my personality (please do not take a sneak peak at it to guess my personality) and I found that the two personality characterizations do corroborate each other.

So, please go ahead and guess me; and of course if yopu like put some data on the site for your personality analysis too. Go to this link to guess my personality.

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Perosnality and Neurotransmitters

Although all introductory Psychology textbooks warn against any simplistic correlations between neurotransmitters and complex behavioral and cognitive measures like Personality traits, I am going to do exactly that in this post. In an earlier post , I had related personality traits to neurotransmitter systems and operant learning paradigm and here I present some corroborating evidence for the personality- neurotransmitter system linkage.

First to recap:

1. Nueroticism/ Harm Avoidance: Serotonin system
2. Conscentiousness/ novelty seeking: Dopamine system
3. Extarversion/ Reward Dependence:  Norepinephrine system 
4. Agreeableness/ Persistance: Epinepherine system
5. Openesses/ Rebeliious-conformity/self-directedness: Histamine system

 First off to bat consider the following- Neuroticism is manifested as anxiety and if serotonin system is implicated , then genes affecting the serotonin system should affect the neuroticism levels of individuals . This is exactly what was found by Lesh et al.

Transporter-facilitated uptake of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) has been implicated in anxiety in humans and animal models and is the site of action of widely used uptake-inhibiting antidepressant and antianxiety drugs. Human 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) gene transcription is modulated by a common polymorphism in its upstream regulatory region. The short variant of the polymorphism reduces the transcriptional efficiency of the 5-HTT gene promoter, resulting in decreased 5-HTT expression and 5-HT uptake in lymphoblasts. Association studies in two independent samples totaling 505 individuals revealed that the 5-HTT polymorphism accounts for 3 to 4 percent of total variation and 7 to 9 percent of inherited variance in anxiety-related personality traits in individuals as well as sibships.

Next comes a recent study finding that a gene variant related to NO (a neurotrasmitter) is related to Impulsiveness. Now One of the defining traits of NS/ C is Impulsiveness. This has been found related to NOS1 gene. Here is the original study.

Context Human personality is characterized by substantial heritability but few functional gene variants have been identified. Although rodent data suggest that the neuronal isoform of nitric oxide synthase (NOS-I) modifies diverse behaviors including aggression, this has not been translated to human studies.

Objectives To investigate the functionality of an NOS1 promoter repeat length variation (NOS1 Ex1f variable number tandem repeat [VNTR]) and to test whether it is associated with phenotypes relevant to impulsivity.

Design Molecular biological studies assessed the cellular consequences of NOS1 Ex1f VNTR; association studies were conducted to investigate the impact of this genetic variant on impulsivity; imaging genetics was applied to determine whether the polymorphism is functional on a neurobiological level.

Setting Three psychiatric university clinics in Germany.

Participants More than 3200 subjects were included in the association study: 1954 controls, 403 patients with personality disorder, 383 patients with adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 151 with familial ADHD, 189 suicide attempters, and 182 criminal offenders.

Main Outcome Measures For the association studies, the major outcome criteria were phenotypes relevant to impulsivity, namely, the dimensional phenotype conscientiousness and the categorical phenotypes adult ADHD, aggression, and cluster B personality disorder.

Results A novel functional promoter polymorphism in NOS1 was associated with traits related to impulsivity, including hyperactive and aggressive behaviors. Specifically, the short repeat variant was more frequent in adult ADHD, cluster B personality disorder, and autoaggressive and heteroaggressive behavior. This short variant came along with decreased transcriptional activity of the NOS1 exon 1f promoter and alterations in the neuronal transcriptome including RGS4 and GRIN1. On a systems level, it was associated with hypoactivation of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotion and reward in behavioral control.

Conclusion These findings implicate deficits in neuronal signaling via nitric oxide in moderation of prefrontal circuits underlying impulsivity-related behavior in humans.

Now there does exist a relationship between NO and dopamine (but then which two neurotransmitter systems are not related) and that way I can still save my face by claiming that it is the dopamine that is finally mediating the impulsivity and not NO.

There is evidence suggesting that nitric oxide (NO) may play an important role in dopamine (DA) cell death. NO may act as a neuroprotector or neurotoxic agent in dopamine neurons, depending on cell redox status. Glutathione (GSH) depletion is the earliest biochemical alteration shown to date in brains of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. However, data from animal models show that GSH depletion by itself is not sufficient to induce nigral degeneration. Low NO concentrations have neurotrophic effects on DA cells via a cGMP-independent mechanism that may implicate up-regulation of GSH. On the other hand, higher levels of NO induce cell death in both DA neurons and mature oligodendrocytes that is totally reverted by soluble factors released from glia. Alterations in GSH levels change the neurotrophic effects of NO in dopamine function into neurotoxic, under these conditions, NO triggers a programmed cell death with markers of both apoptosis and necrosis characterised by an early production of free radicals followed by late activation of the sGC/cGMP/PKG pathway. Arachidonic acid metabolism through the 12-lipoxygenase (12-LOX) pathway is also central for this GSH-NO interaction. Neurotrophism of NO switches into neurotoxicity after GSH depletion, due to persistent activation of the ERK-1/2 signaling pathway in glial cells. The implication of these cell death signaling pathways in pathological conditions like Parkinson's disease, where GSH depletion, glial dysfunction and NO overproduction have been documented, are discussed.

Next we move to the sociability factor underlying Extraversion/ Reward dependence. Here studies show that Noardrenaline is related to sociability/ dependence etc. Here is a study showing effects of NA on sociability.

Rationale: Treatment with antidepressants has been shown to affect social functioning, but drugs with actions on different neurotransmitters may have a different profile of effects. Objective: To study the effects of acute manipulation of two neurotransmitters, serotonin and noradrenaline, on social behaviour in healthy volunteers. Methods: Sixty volunteers were randomly assigned to a single dose of a selective noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, reboxetine (4 mg), a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, citalopram (10 mg), or placebo. They socially interacted with a confederate behaving in a non-sociable manner in a stranger-dyadic social interaction paradigm 1.5 h postdrug. Social behaviour during the interaction was video recorded by a hidden camera and subsequently analysed. After the interaction, volunteers played the mixed-motive game with the confederate. This game has been shown to measure cooperative behaviour and communication. Volunteers read a short story and rated their mood predrug and before and after the interaction. Results: Subjects on reboxetine showed reduced hand fiddling during the interaction and gave significantly more cooperative communications during the mixed-motive game. More volunteers on reboxetine were classified as cooperative players. On the reading task, the speech of subjects on citalopram showed less reduction of energy variation after the social interaction. Conclusion: Reboxetine had clear effects on social behaviour. Noradrenaline was related to increased social engagement and cooperation and a reduction in self-focus. Citalopram had less effect on cooperative behaviour but serotonin may be associated with protection of the self from the negative consequences of social interaction.

Also, Zuckerman has clearly related NA to sociability and dependence.As per him:

Ellison studies the effects of chemical lesions of either dopamine or noradrenaline system in rats. ...Norepeinepherine-lesioned rats spent more time in their burrows and less time in a behavioral arena in which spontaneous social interactions could occur....

That takes us to the fourth trait of agreeableness and the related Empathy system . Here the famous Scacter- singer experiment of administering Adrenaline and then finding that the mood became congruent with that of other people has to be reinterpreted in terms of empathy at work rather than james-lange two-step appraisal of emotion. Do read the expermine in more detail at the above link.

The Experiment in a nut shell.
Independent Variables

1. Injected Adrenaline or Saline solution
2. The subjects were given a description of side-effects, misinformed about the side-effects, or told nothing.
3. The subjects were placed in a 'Euphoric' (Happy) or 'Angry' situation.

Dependent Variables

1. Observed signs of happiness
2. Observed signs of anger
3. Self-report of happiness or anger

Results:
Euphoria: As expected, the adrenaline misinformed group, and the adrenaline ignorant group, reported being happiest
Anger:  This didn't work. Most subjects were positive about their feelings. Schachter and Singer attribute this to the fact that they were students eager to please their tutors

It is important that those people who were placed with confederates exhibiting happy states felt happy and the same was felt by those who received adrenaline; a more valid interpretation is that adrenaline increased the empathetic feelings and lead to transmission or contagion of mood. the situational variable where one tried to induce anger by being irritable did not lead to to anger; perhaps if the confederate was irritated, they might have become irritated too due to empathy; but no anger is expected as per my interpretation that it is empathy that is primary and not the cognitive appraisal of emotional physiological state.

Finally I agree that I have not been able to find much about histamine system and how it may be affect the openness/ rebellious/conformity trait. As an exercise to reader here are some low histamine condition links.

That is it for now. would love if somebody points to some other studies that corroborate the case.

K.-P. Lesch, D. Bengel, A. Heils, S. Z. Sabol, B. D. Greenberg, S. Petri, J. Benjamin, C. R. Muller, D. H. Hamer, D. L. Murphy (1996). Association of Anxiety-Related Traits with a Polymorphism in the Serotonin Transporter Gene Regulatory Region Science, 274 (5292), 1527-1531 DOI: 10.1126/science.274.5292.1527
Wai Tse, Alyson Bond (2002). Difference in serotonergic and noradrenergic regulation of human social behaviours Psychopharmacology, 159 (2), 216-221 DOI: 10.1007/s00213-001-0926-9

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Perosnality traits: some more evolutionary perspectives

My last post  was about the David Buss chapter in The Handbook of Personality Psychology book by Hogan et al; this post is about the Arnold Buss chapter in the same book.

In this chapter, Buss considers Humans as a primate and lists down 7 personality traits that are found in most primates especially the great apes. These are:

The seven traits listed below have already been mentioned in previous sections. They may be divided into two groups.

The first involves activation, which is defined as involving various kinds of arousal (here defined broadly):

1. Activity, the total energy output as observed in rate of movements and their vigor

2. Fearfulness, wariness, running away, cowering, and the concomitant physiological arousal

3. Impulsivity, acting suddenly and on the spur of the moment; the opposite is the tendency to inhibit behavior

The second set of personality traits are all social:

4. Sociability, preferring being with others (though primates are a highly social group, there are still individual differences in sociability within each species)

5. Nurturance, helping others, especially those who need help, even at a cost to the helper (altruism)

6. Aggressiveness, attacking or threatening others

7. Dominance, seeking and maintaining superior status over others versus the opposite pole, submissiveness

I would like to group them slightly differently ( and in accordance with my eight stage theories) and also introduce another trait that of suspiciousness when we consider humans as other primates have a rudimentary ToM ability.

1. Fearfulness mapped to Neurtoticsm.
   
2. Impulsivity mapped to Conscnetiousness
3. Sociability mapped to Extraversion
4. Nurturance mapped to Agreeableness
5. Dominance mapped to Rebelliousness/ Conformity
6. Suspiciousness mapped to Trust/Defensiveness
7. Activity mapped to Activity
8. Agressivenss mapped to Masculinity/Feminity

He also lays down the framework for how such traits may become evident ; he works within attachment theory paradigm and highlights research on primate attachment studies to lay down the foundation for why such traits may develop in an individual.

The period of attachment in primates has been divided into three phases (H. F. Harlow, Harlow, & Hansen, 1963). At first the mother is solicitous and completely accepting of the infant, and she is a haven of safety and nurturance.

The infant's feeling of security depends in large part on the mother. If she is sufficiently protective and available, the infant will be secure enough to venture out in the wider environment. Primate infants appear to be motivated by two opposing tendencies: the need to seek novelty and stimulation versus the need for security and protection (Mason, 1970). An insecure infant remains close to the mother, too scared to explore the environment. A secure infant tends to be low in fear and can venture away from the mother so long as she is in sight.

In the second phase of attachment, the mother withdraws affection, diminishing attention to the infant, and starts to punish the infant. The latter may react with withdrawal, anger, resistance, or negativism. These first signs of independence are typically met by even more irritabihty and punishment by the mother.

In the third phase, the mother is often occupied with the birth of the next offspring and therefore is even more rejecting of her older child. The presence of this new infant is likely to elicit jealously and temper tantrums by the displaced sibling. If the mother can spare some attention and affection for her older sibling, the latter's jealousy and annoyance should gradually wane.

The events of the attachment period may be expected to affect personality traits. The mother's behavior should be regarded as only one determinant, albeit an important one, of her youngster's personality. If she is not sufficiently protective and a haven of security, her infant may become fearful and inhibited. If she fails to provide enough attention and social stimulation, her infant may become withdrawn and less sociable. And if she cannot share at least some affect with her older offspring after the birth of a new one, the older one may become intensely jealous. In brief, the events of attachment are assumed to affect the personality traits of fearfulness, impulsivity (the opposite of inhibition), sociability, and the anger component of aggressiveness (jealousy).

To me this seems to be valid developmental trajectory of the traits: A non-protecting mother leading to Fearfulness (N); not providing a safe haven leading to lack Impulsivity or Inhibition (C); not providing enough attention leading to less sociability (E); not providing social stimulation and care leading to lack of Nurturnace in child (A) (which Buss doesn't touch upon) and finally not sharing affect leading to Jealousy/ Dominance problems within siblings(Rebelliousness/Conformity).

Before we accept this attachment theory in its entirety it is apt to pause and remeber that many times the behaviour of mother is driven by infant behaviour and that mother and chil may share the sam temperamental quality due to genes and not due to nurturing and this however reflects in a pattern of traits in child and parenting practice in parent.

Finally Buss goes on to show how some of the traits in other primates are not well developed as compared to humans and are at the level of human infants and thus cannot lead to much insight about human personality. One exapmle is that of self-awareness; though primates and human infants may have a mirror-test self-awareness, it is limited.

Adult humans are capable of mirror-image recognition, which is absent in infants and develops slowly during the second year of life as part of more general trends in cognitive development. By the age of 2 years most infants possess this capacity (Amsterdam, 1972; Schulman & Kaplowitz, 1977). Does this mean that children of 2 years have a self-concept and the same kind of self-awareness as older children and adults? There are five cognitive attributes present in older children that are absent in 2-year-olds, which suggests that the answer is no.

The first is self-esteem. The basis for later self-esteem may be laid down in 2- year-olds, but children of this age do not show behavior that allows us to infer the general self-evaluation called self-esteem. This diffuse feeling of self-worth develops gradually and can be measured perhaps by the age of 4 years. Nor are infants clearly aware of the difference between their private feelings and public behavior.

It is still too early for the sense of covertness and an awareness that private thoughts and feelings cannot be observed. Infants and primates lack the sense of covertness that can be inferred in children of 4 years. Infants are still egocentric and do not know that others view the world from different perspectives. Even children of several years of age are Umited in social perspective-taking. In one study children were asked to select gifts for their parents, teacher, brother, sister, and self (Flavell, 1968). Most 3-year-olds selected the same gifts for others as for themselves. Some 4-year-olds selected gifts appropriate for others, half the 5-year-olds did, and all the 6-year-olds did. Social perspective-taking evidently emerges during the fifth year of life. Linked to perspective-taking is the abihty to view oneself as a social object. Such public self-awareness, as seen in the reaction of embarrassment, does not occur until the fifth year of life (Buss, Iscoe, & Buss, 1979).

The last facet of the advanced self to develop is identity. It may be a personal identity, the sense of being different from everyone else in appearance, behavior, character, or personal history, or it may be social identity, knowing oneself to be a member of a nation, religion, race, vocation, or any other group that offers a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. And most of us have a sense of continuity, identifying ourselves as the same person across decades of time or across diverse social roles.

Thus five aspects of the self are absent in 2-year-old human children: selfesteem, a sense of covertness, perspective-taking, public self-awareness, and identity. These may be regarded as evidence for an advanced or cognitive self, which is conspicuously absent in human infants and the great apes. They do appear to have a primitive, sensory self—an awareness of where the body ends and not-me begins, and mirror-image recognition (Buss, 1980). But they lack the advanced cognitive self that is implicit in constructs such as self-concept, self-esteem, selfconsciousness, and identity, constructs easily applied to older human children and adults.

To me this beautifullay sums-up what we can and cannot derive from studies of primates and other mammals about human personality.

References: Buss, H. Arnold. (1997). Evolutionary perspectives on personality traits. In R. Hogan, J. A. Johnson, & S. R. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 345-366). New York: Academic Press..

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Personality traits: evolutionary perspectives

I have been reading and enjoying The Handbook of  Personality Psychology by Hogan et al, and found the chapter written by David Buss particularly useful.

Here I would like to expand on the idea and while buss explicitly does not want to indulge in a discussion of a few psychological tendencies and associated behavioral class acts; I would like to walk exactly that particular path.

First to recap,

Humans, like other organisms, can be viewed as organized structures that exist in their present form because of a long history of natural selection, operating over millions of years. Each one of us owes our existence to a long and unbroken line of ancestors who successfully solved problems posed by survival and reproduction in our evolutionary past. Therefore, human structures, as well as human psychological mechanisms, at some fundamental level of description, can be analyzed in terms of the problems they solve.

But "survival" and "reproduction" are broad categories, each subsuming a large and complex array of subproblems. To the extent that the evolutionary psychologist can identify the nature of the specific problems that humans have evolved to solve, she or he has some advantage over the nonevolutionary psychologist in discovering the nature of human nature.

Buss then goes on and breaks the survival and reproduction into many component and also adds genetic investment to the mix. I parse the same data in my own way and generate the hypothesis that the most important concern of any living organism, and especially humans are survival, genetic investment and reproduction.

Survival behavioral tendency can be further split in three parts: one pure survival as in escape from predators or death; I'll refer to this as Foes! the second concerns growth or acquiring resources necessary for thriving and I;ll call this Food. The third maintaining one'd edge in avoiding foes and finding Food by building alliances with con specifics. I'll call this Friends. Thus survival is characterized by the three F's of Foes, Food and Friends!

Genetic investment can be split into two K's that of Kids and Kins. The first tendency that of Kids is concerned with issues of parental investment and care of offsprings.the second that of Kin is concerned with how to help other genetic related individuals at minimal cost to self such that maximum fitness ensues.

Reproduction can be split into three parts that of mate selection, that of mate attraction and that of mate retention. I'll call these the three S's of reproduction(Sex is *NOT* one of them!). The first task is to Select the right mate; the second task is , that once you have zeroed in on a suitable mating partner, you have to court and attract the partner, I call this function Seduce; the final task, especially in long-term pair bonded species like Humans is to guard or retain the mate, I call this Securing the mate.

What I propose is that given these Eight tasks ( 3 survival, 2 investment and 3 reproductive tasks ) that each species has to solve, each specie would evolve some mechanism to solve these problems that are species-typical; however there would be individual variation to the extent that the extent to which an individual organism is driven by that particular conscious motivation/ behavioral tendency and gets into environments and situations that trigger that particular task would determine the psychological mechanism that drives that individual.

To make things more clear , what I am proposing is that there are bound to be individual differences in the relative importance of these psychological mechanisms for an individual- thus a human may be primarily driven by mate selection concerns at a particular age- while another may be forever primarily concerned with safety, security etc- and this would be the first factor that would lead to individual variation in personality. Moreover, I am proposing something radical, that depending on the environment, there may be two extreme types of responding to each of these tasks- and the second most important variation that we get from person to person - is in whether one habitually and instinctively (genetically determined) responds in one way or the other as one faces the task and whether or not one factors the environment and context in which the task demand is made or whether ones behavioural tendency is fixed and inflexible.

To take by way of an example, lets us focus on the Kids part of genetic investment. It has been well documented that their are two types of parental strategies r-type and K-type; now a species may have predominantly K-type investment strategy, but within the species individual organisms would differ in their reproductive strategy around the mean in K-type and r-type directions. thus, Humans exhibit predominantly K-strategy, but Africans show more r-type and Asians more K-type. It is equally well documented that these r-type and K-type strategies are actually responses to the external environment (food abundant, predictable , stable environment etc) and thus, though a species has a set point, there is enough individual variation such that in changing environemnetal conditions at least one sub type is able to thrive and survive and reproduce and invest!


To take another example from Buss, Absence of father leads to short term mating strategy in daughters (amongst other things like premature puberty etc) and this environmental facyor may be the most important environment variable as related to Securing task of retaining the mate; if one sees the father as absent from home, one may think its wise to go for a short term mating strategy as the culture is one that encourages low stability of pair bonds; this might be a justifiably welcome strategy; on the other hand it might be genetically the case that someones set point is set towards short-term relationships.

I will now claim that the eight personality traits I had outlined earlier are directly related to these eight evolutionary task (see here for another slightly different list of the eight tasks ) that one faces- and more so are mapped one-on-one with the same ordered mapping!

Thus,

1. Foes (survival 1) : A behavioral tendency to be on the lookout for foes / troubles leading to Neuroticism trait. The extremes of courage/calmness and fear/anxiety  are driven by what type of environment one lives in - whether it is full of dangerous objects or not so! One prediction is that those high in N should have more Phobias and vice versa. 
2. Food (survival 2):A behavioral tendency to acquire resources leading to Conscentiousness. The extremes of ambition/ covetousness and laziness/ easy-going are driven by whether the environment is abundant in resources or lacking thereof! One prediction is that those high in C should be more readily diagnosed with OCD and vice versa.
3. Friends (survival 3):A behavioral tendency to form alliances leading to Extraversion. The extremes of sociability and seclusion dependent on some environmental factor (like how important is community interference in day to day activity) . Might be related to mean group size (150 in humans)
4. Kids (investment 1)   A behavioral tendency to invest in ones offsprings leading to Agreeablness. the extremes of care/ empathy vis-a-vis apathy/ psychopathy may be driven by the same concerns that decides whether to go for r-strategy or K-strategy.
5. Kins (investment 2) : A behavioral tendency to help one kins leading to Conformity / Rebelliousness: Here it is instructive to note that older siblings are generally conformists while younger siblings are rebellious - thus age-order and environmental variable may decide whether one would be conformist or rebellious and this somehow affects your behavior towards sibling and his/her reproductive fitness. Also, irrespective of your birth order in the family (kin) , due to variation, some may be genetically predisposed to be conformists and other rebellious!
6. Selecting (reproduction 1) : A behavioral tendency to judge others intentions etc accurately and thus determine who is a suitable candidate for mating/trusting  leading to Trust/Defensiveness. The extremes of trust and suspicion may be adaptive in environments differing with respect to levels of promiscuity; in a highly promiscuous and cheating/ cuckolding environment it may pay to be suspicious.     
7.   Seducing (reproduction 2): This behavioral tendency of intra sexual competition can be broken into three components: i) Testing against own sex con specifics(building better muscles for men) ii) Embodying preferences of opposite sex (Chauvinism in case of Males) and the third I havent been able to figure yet!! The extremes of too much effort/activity  in seducing as against the extreme of being dull/boring and uninterested in other sex leads to the dimension of Activity. 
8. Securing (reproduction 3) : A behavioral tendency towards sociosexuality;At one end of this dimension are individuals who are "restricted" in sociosexuality—they require more time, attachment, and commitment prior to entering a sexual relationship. At the other end are those who are "unrestricted" in sociosexuality—they require less time, attachment, and commitment prior to sexual intercourse. These extremes may lead to the trait of Masculinity- Feminity in how one guards and forms a pair bond.

I would thus end my argument; to me the eight stage process is compelling- I am sure with each passing day there are more converts to that developmental and evolutionary eight stage theory.

References: Buss, D. M. (1997). Evolutionary foundations of personality. In R. Hogan, J. A. Johnson, & S. R. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 317-344). New York: Academic Press..

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