Being Human

GRE阅读话题功能段落之
青年人
Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. ...

Republican Gomorrah Documents the Christian Right Takeover of the GOP
Religion Dispatches
... about why people join right-wing social movements have been displaced by more recent social movement theories in sociology and social psychology. ...

Scienceline (blog)
Nature Brings Out the Best in People, Cities the Worst, Study Finds
Scienceline (blog)
Now, a study published in the October issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin gives us one more reason to escape the urban jungle in favor of ...

Psychology Today (blog)
Love Conquers Death
Psychology Today (blog)
... close relationships: Evidence that relationship commitment acts as a terror management mechanism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 527-542.

The Herald
Mother of all arguments
The Herald
Dr Anna McGee, a senior lecturer in developmental psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University, says: “As is so often the case, there are too many ...

Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website:

SNP signals debate legal threat

Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize as the abbreviation for the Scottish National Party. Then comes signals, which can be a plural noun or a singular present verb; following a noun, most readers would expect it to work as a verb. The third word, debate, can be a singular noun or a plural verb, and if you've parsed the first two words as Noun + Verb, then you'll be inclined to take debate as the direct object of the verb. So far, so good. But then comes legal threat. What to do now?

Well, you could go back to the beginning of the headline for a reparsing, now construing signals as a plural noun modified by SNP. That would allow you to continue on with debates as a plural verb and legal threat as the object of the verb. But what in the world are SNP signals and why are they debating a legal threat?

Turns out the first path was moving in the right direction. Signals is indeed the verb here, and the object of the verb is debate legal threat — one of those wonderfully opaque compound nouns that British headlines are prey to. You see, debate legal threat refers to threatened legal action that could be taken if the SNP isn't permitted to take part in televised debates before the next UK election. And the SNP is now signaling that it may follow through on this threat.

We've had fun with such outrageous compounding in previous posts (Geoff Pullum in "Noun noun noun noun noun verb," "Canoe wives and unnatural semantic relations," and "Dentist fear girl," and Mark Liberman in "UK death crash fetish?"). This one's a bit different in that the second element of the compound noun, legal threat, is a noun phrase consisting of an adjective modifying a noun. That makes debate legal threat unusually hard to parse.

Noun-Adjective-Noun compounds are possible in English, of course — think of such constructions as Minnesota Supreme Court, Obama White House, Guardian front page, or Microsoft legal team. In those cases, however, the Adjective-Noun component is a set phrase (Supreme Court, White House, front page, legal team), which makes the addition of a premodifying noun unproblematic. But legal threat is not such a set phrase, and debate is not an immediately obvious choice for an attributive noun ready for grafting (certainly not compared to the proper nouns in my examples: Minnesota, Obama, Guardian, Microsoft). So these factors, plus the ambiguous syntactic role of the preceding word, signals, conspire to make this crash blossom particularly crashy.

"Thought for the Day" is a four-minute reflective sermon delivered each morning on BBC Radio 4 at about ten to eight by some representative of one of the country's many religious faiths. On the first day of October the speaker was the Reverend Angela Tilby, Vicar of St Bene't's in Cambridge, England. (Bene't is an archaic shortened form of Benedict.) Developing a familiar theme from prescriptivist literature, she preached against adjectives. It was perhaps the most pathetic little piece of inspirational prattle I have ever heard from the BBC (read the whole misbegotten text here).

"Adjectives advertise," claims the Rev. Tilby, and "brighten up the prose of officialdom", but she was always "encouraged to be a bit suspicious" of them when she was a girl: "Rules of syntax kept them firmly in their place" (as if the rules of syntax left everything else to do what it wanted!). This was good, she seems to think, because "For all their flamboyance they don't really tell you much." Adjectives "float free of concrete reality" like balloons, and are guilty of "not delivering anything except, perhaps, hot air." Which aptly describes her babbling thus far. But now, inflated with overconfidence, she risks some factual statements. And steps from the insubstantial froth of metaphor into the stodgy bullshit of unchecked empirical claims about language use.

I shall deal with only one such claim in this post. Another will be dealt with later.

Because adjectives are so airy-fairy, the Rev. Tilby holds, "you don't find many adjectives in scientific prose and when you do they are precise and exact." I'm sure that Language Log readers will realize instantly that it is time for what Mark Liberman calls a breakfast experiment.

Keep in mind, as I undertake the experiment, that in most kinds of English prose about 6% of the words are adjectives (see Douglas Biber et al., Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman, 2002, p. 506). In academic prose it's a little higher, around 8%.

I turned to the home page of what is arguably the most important general science journal in the world, Nature, picked the second article title from the top of the page ("Cheater resistance is not futile", by Anupama Khare, Lorenzo A. Santorelli, Joan E. Strassmann, David C. Queller, Adam Kuspa, and Gad Shaulsky, doi:10.1038/nature08472; it just looked somewhat more interesting to me than the first one), and did just a little bit of counting.

You'll notice that the last word of the title (futile) happens to be an adjective, so that's 20% in the title. The first word of the opening sentence of the abstract (cooperative) is also an adjective, and so is the second, and so is the 5th (that's over 15% so far). Here is the whole of the abstract, with the adjectives underlined (I've been very conservative, not counting many items that traditional grammars classify as adjectives: articles, demonstratives, numerals, other determinatives, genitive pronouns, or nouns functioning as attributive modifiers):

Cooperative social systems are susceptible to cheating by individuals that reap the benefits of cooperation without incurring the costs. There are various theoretical mechanisms for the repression of cheating and many have been tested experimentally. One possibility that has not been tested rigorously is the evolution of mutations that confer resistance to cheating. Here we show that the presence of a cheater in a population of randomly mutated social amoebae can select for cheater-resistance. Furthermore, we show that this cheater-resistance can be a noble strategy because the resister strain does not necessarily exploit other strains. Thus, the evolution of resisters may be instrumental in preserving cooperative behaviour in the face of cheating.

That's over 9% adjectives. A bad sample? I took the first paragraph of the text and did the same:

Dictyostelium cells propagate as unicellular amoebae in the soil. Upon starvation, they aggregate into multicellular structures and differentiate into viable spores and dead stalk cells. Stalk-cell differentiation supports spore maturation and dispersal, but this altruistic behaviour can be exploited by cheaters that make more than their fair share of spores in chimaeric fruiting bodies. The genetic potential for cheating is high and cheaters abound in nature, but cheating behaviour can be restrained by various mechanisms, such as intrinsic lower fitness of the cheater, pleiotropy of the cheater gene, high genetic relatedness in natural populations, and kin discrimination.

That's 16 adjectives in 97 words of that paragraph, or over 16%. In total, the title and abstract and opening paragraph of the first scientific paper that I picked — genuinely a random choice — are nearly 13% composed of adjectives, well over double the frequency that you find in most prose.

Now, I could check a few hundred more words, of course. But wait: why me? Why am I doing the work for her? What am I, an unpaid assistant curate of St. Bene't's? Did the Rev. Tilby do even as much elementary checking as I have done so far — glancing at a couple of hundred words in a random paper — before spouting her ridiculous remark? Of course not. Her method is a time-honored one in amateur writing on language: she just makes stuff up. On the basis of nothing but prejudice about science, she invented her data and went straight to the microphone with it.

Her suggestion that in science the adjectives are "precise" is further evidence of uninformed stereotyping. There's nothing precise about the meanings of words like cooperative, social, viable, altruistic, fair, lower, high, natural… These are vague terms, in the classic technical sense: in any situation there will be clear cases for their application, but also a border area where the appropriacy of applying them is in doubt.

There is of course nothing wrong with vague terms, with denotations partly set through common sense and reference to context; we use them literally every minute that we speak or write. Their logic and semantics can be studied with ruthless precision (see, for an example of the technical literature, Stewart Shapiro's lucid and masterful Vagueness in Context). Science is replete with them, and has to be. (Think of global warming, for heaven's sake: there's a truly vague concept. How warm? How global? Yet it's an important one, and serious science is being done every day to flesh it out and give it clearer content.)

It is merely one more sign of the the Rev. Tilby's contempt for truth, and cluelessness about science, that she thinks science is all precision. Scientists live their lives floating in a probabilistic soup of uncertainty and unclarity, murky associations and ill-defined tendencies, statistical degrees and extents.

Tilby sees herself as a minister of religion and thus a professional talker; and she therefore assumes (the crucial fallacy) that she is an expert on language; so she doesn't need to check a thing. As a vicar, she thinks she can go into the Radio 4 studio and simply invent her facts.

It is not that she lied; it is worse than that. Tilby didn't know what the facts about adjectives in scientific prose were, and state untruths about them to mislead her audience: she simply didn't care whether she was uttering untruths or not. It wasn't lies; it was bullshit, in the sense defined by Harry Frankfurt. And as Frankfurt notes, the purveyor of bullshit is worse than a liar, in virtue of caring less about truth. The liar at least keeps track of what's true and recognizes its special status. (That is precisely why it is a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive: the committed liar has to attempt to remain consistent.)

A recent xkcd:

In the case of power, the original ordinary-language meaning is still dominant for most people, especially in a frame like "With great __ comes great __". But it's easy to forget how recently words (and concepts) like speed, distance, and duration took on their current "literal" meanings as aspects of ordinary-language physics rather than as terms referring to prosperity, dissension, endurance, and so on.

The physicists' sense of power as "work per unit time" seems to date from the early 19th century, and the specifically electrical sense, featured in this strip's caption, is somewhat later. But it was only a century or two earlier that today's meanings for words like distance came into general use, replacing earlier meanings that (like power) had more to do with personal struggle than with physical interaction.

One of the most influential and controversial papers in psychiatry was from a 1976 study published in The Lancet that found that people with schizophrenia had larger fluid filled ventricles in the brain.

Yesterday, I looked up the original paper in London's Institute of Psychiatry library and was amazed to see that the controversy seems ingrained into the paper copy, which has been ripped, repaired, damaged and defaced.

In the early days of scientific psychiatry, during the 1800s, many famous German psychiatrists expended a great deal of effort examining the post-mortem brains of patients with schizophrenia (also known at that time as dementia praecox) attempting to demonstrate Wilhelm Griesinger's theory that "all mental illness is disease of the brain."

Despite numerous studies, they were unable to replicate the success of studies on dementia, which they linked to specific changes in the brain. So for generations, schizophrenia came to be defined as a condition in which the brain was structurally normal.

This fact was often highlighted by the antipsychiatry movement to suggest that 'mental illness' was nothing more than a difference in human experience and there was no medical evidence supporting the work of psychiatrists.

But the fact was also cited by many psychiatrists resistant to the relatively new wave of medications that had appeared on the scene. The drugs were claimed to 'fix' the brain with the assumption that the discovery of clear evidence for brain differences would just be a matter of time.

Enter Eve Johnstone and her colleagues at Northwick Park Hospital in London, who, in the midst of this politically charged environment, completed a study that compared CAT brain scans of 18 patients with schizophrenia to a group of healthy control participants. Alongside the scans, the researchers also tested the participants' mental abilities with psychological tests.

The results were striking. They found the size of the ventricles, the fluid filled spaces in the brain, was, on average, larger in patients with schizophrenia and that it was correlated with the degree of difficulty with tests of memory, concentration and problem solving.

This caused enormous interest and controversy at the time. The paper copy from London's Institute of Psychiatry library clearly reflects this, as it has been read so many times (and possibly ripped out) that it is virtually in tatters and has been reattached with sticky tape in an otherwise pristine copy of the journal.

There are a few annotations on the page, including the word "Rubbish" written in the margin!

Although seminal, the study has been rightly criticised and one of the major difficulties with these sorts of studies is that because patients are normally taking antipsychotic medication, it's hard to distinguish where the effect is linked to schizophrenia or the treatment.

While some medication is thought to also thought to affect brain structure, a study on patients that have never taken medication seem to suggest some differences in ventricle size, on average, are still apparent.

The 'on average' bit is important though, as these differences are not present in everyone with the diagnosis. They're just an average difference when you compare a group of people with and without schizophrenia. Furthermore, we're still not quite sure of its significance.

So the topic is still as controversial as when Johnstone's study first appeared in 1976, although the argument has shifted from whether differences in the structure of the brain are associated with schizophrenia, to whether they are telling us anything useful.

Link to scan of article from Institute of Psychiatry library.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

She's just not that into it
Boston Globe
Vandello, J. et al., “Men's Misperceptions about the Acceptability and Attractiveness of Aggression,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology ...

Lagos To Host Scientific Nutrition Seminar
The Guardian - Nigeria
Key speakers expected at the seminar include Dr. Peter Willatts, an expert in developmental psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland; ...

Laurence Cohen & Gina Barreca Irreconcilable Differences
Hartford Courant
In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology this year, researchers reported that women harbor all sorts of stereotypes about women that can damage ...

When phrases are coordinated, readers infer that the the juxtaposed elements are in some way parallel. Careless coordination produces unwanted inferences. Today's Daily Beast serves up an object lesson:

Stunned colleagues Friday described veteran CBS News producer Joe Halderman—who was arrested outside the network’s West 57th Street offices Thursday in the alleged scheme to blackmail David Letterman—as a rogue and a womanizer, a lover of literature, a “smart frat boy,” a swashbuckling journalist, and an occasional barroom brawler who distinguished himself in dangerous war zones and occasionally displayed a certain reckless streak.

Fucking literature lovers.

Deccan Herald
Psyche of mob fury
Deccan Herald
Empirical social psychology has come with some interesting work on the subject. This work is not in opposition but complementary to the psychodynamic ...

Subliminal messages could work after all: study
Canada.com
Darke, who also has background in social psychology, said the more common practice of "priming" consumers is a more worthwhile. ...

and more »

I just found a curious case study of a man who developed 'robotic speech' after being hit by lightning. Rather than the "I am a Dalek!" style mechanical sound it seems to be more like the very. deliberate. and. exact. speech synthesis style, somewhat like Data from Star Trek the Next Generation

Lightning-induced robotic speech

Neurology. 1994 May;44(5):991-2.

To the Editor

Because of a recently observed case, I was intrigued by the communication of Cherington et al[1] concerning lightning encephalopathy. The authors referred to evidence by Critchley[2] that the cerebellum can be selectively injured in lightning-struck patients, Two of their there patients had signs of cerebellar dysfunction. MRI in one of their patients evidenced superior cerebellar atrophy.

The force of a lightning strike threw a 20-year-old roofer to the ground from the truck in which he was standing. Panicked, he immediately began to run. A numbness and weakness of his arms and back cleared after several days, but the more striking abnormality was a profound alteration of his speech, which he described as having become robotic. Each syllable was clearly enunciated with a slight pause between syllables, so that while the flow of his speech was slowed, he was able to communicate well. His speech was actually easier to comprehend than that of some normal persons. His brother had indeed complained that the patient's premorbid speech had been too rapid and word-jumbled; that speech was transformed to robotic speech, with fine diction and super-clear enunciation. Each morning, his speech was "normal" until shortly after he began to talk, when it reverted to the robotic pattern for the remainder of the day. The neurologic examination was normal except for right upper extremity hypalgesia. Brain MRI was normal.

I considered his robotic-speech problem to be most like the "scanning speech" of cerebellar disease. I have found no references to similar cases, but the reports of selective cerebellar injury by lightning strike[1-3] lead-me to suspect that robotic speech maybe a more common sequel than has been recognized.

Gordan J. Gilbeft, MD
St. Petersbutg, FL

1. Cherington M, Yarnell P, Hallmark D. MRI in lightning encephalopathy. Neurology 1993; 43(7):1437-8
2. Critchley M. Neurological effects of lightning and electricity. Lancet 1934;1:68–72
3. Morocutti C, Spadaro M, Amabile G. TRH treatment in cerebellar ataxia following a lighting stroke. Ital J Neurol Sci 1989;10:531.

The original authors reply and seemed somewhat baffled, saying that it could equally arise from the shock of the experience rather than damage to the brain.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

Prospect magazine has an interesting article covering psychologist Irving Kirsch's widely publicised meta-analyses that have questioned whether Prozac-style SSRI antidepressants are any better than placebo.

Kirsch has become well known for requesting unpublished trial data via the US Freedom of Information Act and pooling it with the published evidence. The conclusion of his latest re-analysis was that there was little difference between sugar pills and SSRIs in the treatment of depression.

This has kicked up all sorts of merry hell, not least because the media reported (and the Prospect article implies) that 'antidepressants don't work' which is clearly false. They do work, but the debate is over how much of the effect is due to placebo.

It's not quite as simple as it seems of course, as not everyone agrees with Kirsch's methods and, as noted in an insightful 2008 paper, his argument is based on the assumption that people who respond to antidepressants also respond to placebo in a similar way, when we know there are individual variations in both.

Kirsch apparently has a book coming out shortly which is likely to restart the debate and it's likely to be heated.

There are some hints of this in the article where several prominent psychiatric scientists give variations on the "don't criticise the evidence, you're harming children!" argument. In fact, head of the NHS trust where my research institution is based apparently blames 'the media, and psychologists' "who have a vested interest in constantly attacking antidepressants". Yes, we've reached that level already.

We went through a very similar process when concerns over whether SSRIs increased suicidal thinking in adolescents were raised. Lots of similar mud-flinging ensued.

Interestingly, a meta-analysis of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts in 372 trials just published in the British Medical Journal found that overall SSRIs had no effect on risk of self-harm, and that when the data was divided by age, there was a slight increase in thoughts and attempt in people younger than 25 and a slight decrease in adults aged over 65 (the comments on the article are also worth reading).

It's probably worth saying that even in young people self-harm when taking antidepressants is very rare, but the fact that the drugs had no overall protective effect except in older people should give us pause for thought.

But getting people to focus on the evidence when they're wound up is like getting people to focus on the fire exits during a strip show. We all accept the importance of doing so but few can quite manage it when the time comes.

Link to Prospect article on antidepressants (via @researchdigest)

Nature, the cure for bad behavior?
Los Angeles Times
The study, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, might help persuade urban planners to incorporate more parks, ...
Interacting with nature makes you caringTimes of India

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Kids love finger foods
Knoxville News Sentinel
Much that is learned about children in developmental psychology seldom trickles down to the folks who could use it the most: parents. ...

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