“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.”

– Charles Darwin

“Teilchenphysik funktioniert ungefähr so, als würde man ein Klavier aus dem vierten Stock auf ein zweites Klavier am Boden fallen lassen, um aus dem Geschepper auf die Existenz der Note Fis zu schließen.”

via iggy via zeit-online

Orlagh O’Brien did some amazing emotion research in 2006 and 2007, called Emotionally Vague. He asked a sample of people different questions regarding emotions.

Q2: How do you feel these emotions in your body? Draw anything you wish.

This image was averaged over all participants of the study.

O’Brien also worked with colors (not unlike the color survey of information is beautiful) and words.

Highly recommendable.

Why facial muscles?
Now, this might seem a bit odd, but there are people who compare the muscles in faces of humans and animals.

Who are those people? Who would occupy himself with such a thing? They usually are evolutionary biologists and psychologists, and focus their work on facial expression, which is, very obviously, closely connected to muscles.

FACS
Ekman and Friesen published the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) in 1978, which is a very precise method of coding which muscles are active in a human face at a given point of time. Today this is commonly used for the interpretation of emotions, but was actually designed as a means to describe human facial expression (note: Ekman and colleages published a new version of the FACS in 2002). The FACS is, as Dr. Bridget Waller (Univ. of Portsmouth) pointed out, an “anatomical description tool”; not more, not less.

In order to make comparisons between non-human primates and humans, biologists started developing FACS for other species. As far as I know, the FACS for gibbons and chimpanzees are finished, and Bridget Waller, Katja Liebal and others are working on the maquaque FACS.

Human anatomy
The human face has 5 basic musles, which are essential for facial expression, and an additional 10 “non-basic” muscles.

The first thing to note is that there are actually huge differences within humans regarding those 10 non-basic muscles: some people lack non-basic muscles, and often they miss muscles in an asymetrical fashion, meaning a muscle is present on one side of the face, but not on the other. This could explain a big amount the variance of interindividuals differences in (subtle) facial expression. And, believe it or not, this was not known until a couple of years ago, maybe because – in the history of medicine – the necessity of examining facial muscle structure in corpses has rarely arisen.

Interspecies comparison of facial muscles
Another very interesting fact is this: there is a huge similarity between the facial muscles of chimps, gibbons, maquaques and humans. To quote Bridget Waller:

“It’s basically the same muscles over different facial bone structure”.

That does not mean, however, that we have (1) the same facial expressions as e.g. chimps. Neither does it mean that (2) the same expression between e.g. chimps and humans means the same thing

(1) Obviously, other species are doing things with their faces we don’t. And, in contrast, we do, too. Moreover, the oftentimes extremely different bone structure makes some of the facial expressions impossible.

(2) When a chimp shows his teeth, it looks to us like he’s smiling. This is a display of (deducted from ethological observation for many, many years) is fear/threat! Now, the FACS for other species obviously helps in coding what these animals do with their faces, but the meaning of it is something entirely different. I was told that different groups of the same species actually show different facial expressions, so there also seems to be a cultural, ontogenetical learning aspect involved.

Thanks for the inspiring lecture, Bridget!

A few words on animal treatment in this line of research:
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I just came across the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, which looks like a rather psychological thing. Since I never heard of that name before (although I’m familiar with some of the studies), I asked a couple of psychologists I’m having breakfast with currently, none of them knew the effect either.

Have you heard of it before?

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. [...] “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

(Quotes from Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Source: Wikipedia)

Bertrand Russell had a funny way to put it:

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile last Saturday actually shifted the axis of the Earth by 8 centimeters. This led to an increase of the rotation of the Earth, which shortens the days by 1.26 microseconds (0.00000126 seconds). Unfortunately, this can only be calculated, not actually measured. The smallest amount of time that can currently be captured is 5 microseconds.

Now, what does that mean?

Even less sleep for me, I guess.

Sigh.

In comparison to Chile, the 2004 Sumatran earthquake (magnitude 9.1) is estimated to have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 7 centimeters. It did not have an impact as strong as the one in Chile – JPL research scientist Richard Gross explains why:

First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth’s mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.

– Adam Smith (1759, p. 1)

Random facts about empathy I dug up during the last week:

The word empathy is not – as one might think – derived from Greek. It appeared for the first time in 1909 in English literature. When we say empathy today, we mean “feeling with someone”. It might be a more adequate translation to go with “suffering with someone” (see: pathos).

In contrast to this, the term sympathy does actually have Greek roots.

Researchers have tried to differentiate between cognitive and emotional empathy, and found different brain regions connected to these concepts. People suffering from antisocial personality disorder are capable of cognitive empathy (enabling them to act extremely manipulative), but they do not actually “feel” with the other person (showing a severe lack of emotional empathy). Autists, on the other side, actually do have the ability to show emotional empathy as long as they are at least acquainted with the person suffering, but don’t show any signs of cognitive empathy. These concepts are heavily discussed in the current literature, and there also seems to be some data this rather simple differentiation cannot account for.

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I just re-read a very recommendable article about depression (Nettle, 2004), and found some numbers I had not payed attention to before:

“Depression tends to be a recurrent or even chronic disease (Pakriev et al., 2001). Although around 80% of patients respond to treatment, only around 50% of them achieve complete remission, which leaves around 30% or 35% of individuals becoming long-term chronic depressives (Bondolfi, 2002). Amongst those who recover, about 50% relapse within 2 years (Belsher and Costello, 1988). In long-term studies, the rate of continuous freedom from illness is very low; 20% over 20 years (Kiloh et al., 1988), or 11% over 25 years (Brodatyet al., 2001). Even post-partum depression [...] entails an extremely high rate of subsequent non-post-partum psychiatric illness (Robling et al., 2000).

These results taken together have been argued by Brodaty et al. (2001) to necessitate a paradigm shift in thinking about depression, such that it is viewed as a chronic illness, with recurrence of the norm.”

On the other hand, it has been stated repeatedly that depression is overdiagnosed, and that a lot of episodes we see as “diseases” are normal, adaptive responses (e.g. Nesse, 2001) and would vanish after a couple of weeks or months. Maybe pharmaceutical treatment interferes with adaptive responses, and prolongs those episodes of low mood into clinical depression.

I’ll try to find out more about this in my PHD.

I strongly believe that the very nature of human beings is a contradictory one, and want to focus on the human psyché here. In my opinion the reason we sometimes have problems deciding – emotionally, or rationally – is that we encompass different personality aspects, dreams and desires; and they may be conflicting or even contrary from time to time.

The little boy wants to buy a new tool, because it’s flashy and big and it will be a lot of fun to drill more wholes in walls; the rational, maybe even greedy mature responds that there are already two of these tools at home; and another one – maybe the romantic? – adds that in order to save up money for the plane ticket to visit the loved one, we should seriously not spend money on useless tools.

We all catch ourselves checking if the door is locked twice – very rarely maybe, but everybody does it – or if we put out the oven. Obsessive-compulsive? No, because we do it seldom. It is a very weak part of us, and only if it dominates the others it is considered a psychological disorder.

We can be brave and afraid, egoistic and altruistic, schizoid and outgoing. In my world, we are everything at the same time, we have everything at the same time. We encompass, we contain, we are different personae in one mind. Clearly we have tendencies – some people are more extroverted, others more introverted – but even the boldest person can feel fear.

This may sound rather trite, but is a very important part of the way I see human beings. I learned it from listening to a great clinical psychologist and lecturer in Munich, who told us about working with patients with Multiple Personality Disorder*. The major difference between this clinical disorder and healthy subjects (read: us) is that these different aspects are less pronounced and more integrated.

We do have multiple personalities, just without disorder. Deciding will in most cases be a compromise which we usually are not aware of. Try to make yourself aware of the internal monologues that are going on inside of you, listen to the barter, quarrel and bargaining. It is an interesting world inside of us, one we tend to ignore completely, one most people are not aware of.

Think, feel and say contrary things. In my world, contradictions are usually the purest and most honest truths.

(thanks to M.M. for all the inspiration)

* Multiple Personality Disorder is not a proper scientific term, psychologists call it Dissociative Personality Disorder, which classifies as dissociative disorder (like dissociative amnesia or fugue), not personality disorder.
Personalitiy disorders are extremely stable, most dissociative disorders have a quite clear onset (in some cases trauma induced), and can usually be treated (unlike personality disorders, for which – oversimplifying a bit – psychoeducation is basically all you can do).