Transgender children

"‘I am a girl’: Transgender children face a society slow to accept them"

by

Eric Adler

February 8th, 2014

The Kansas City Star

She is only 6 years old. Already the child who sits, legs tucked, on a canopied bed near a closet filled with princess dresses has lost her best friends.

 Kids who used to ask A.J. to birthday parties stopped calling.

Parents back in preschool avoided making eye contact.

Once, at a ballet open house, A.J. and her mom ran into a family with whom they had always been close.

“They looked at us,” the Kansas City mother recalls, “crossed the sidewalk and didn’t say anything.”

“For a while it made me hate humanity,” she conceded. “ ‘You just proved yourselves to be the lowest human beings on the planet. You know my kid. You know my child is a happy, kind, sweet, considerate kid and nothing has changed, except …’ ”

Except that A.J., born and known to all as a boy, had been determined to be transgender. The rough-and-tumble kid who once sported buzz cuts and dressed for his birthday as a pirate was growing her chestnut hair below her shoulders.

A.J. was now a girl.

“There is huge judgment in society,” said her father. “Not only on her, but on us.”

Today some 2,500 young people are gathered for the final day of the annual Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference, held this year at the Kansas City Convention Center and hosted by LGBT groups at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

In the 21 years since the conference began, no one denies the advances that gay, lesbian and bisexual people have made in winning broader acceptance and civil rights, as evidenced by the open policy toward gays in the military and the growing legalization of same-sex marriage.

Yet when it comes to public understanding of the T’s in the LGBT community, many agree that transgender people have largely been left behind.

“They’re lagging — maybe a decade or more,” said Jill Jacobson, an endocrinologist at Children’s Mercy Hospital.

Jacobson saw her first transgender patient several years ago — an 8-year-old girl who at age 3 had asked her mother, “If I died and went to heaven, would I come back in the right body?”

Now Jacobson is using hormones or hormone blockers to treat 28 children from grade school to high school who are making the transition from one gender to the other. Nearly all began treatment in the last year and a half.

“It is certainly true that America’s acceptance of gay people is ahead of trans people,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, a Washington-based social justice group formed in 2003. “I think we are getting to the point where every reasonable person in America understands that gay people really exist, that it’s not a choice, that some people are just gay. We are not nearly at that point yet for transgender people.”

Advocates insist that because of the diversity battles fought by others — women, minorities, gay people — the arc of history is moving quickly toward both greater tolerance and acceptance. They point to a spate of events:

•  Barneys New York, a high-end fashion store, last month unveiled a national ad campaign in magazines, online and in its own catalog featuring 20 transgender models.

• The U.S. Senate in November voted 64-32 to approve the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that has been introduced since 1994. It would protect workers based not only on sexual orientation, but also on gender identity. It now awaits a vote in the House.

• A Colorado civil rights panel ruled in June that a 6-year-old transgender girl, born as a boy, suffered discrimination when she was not allowed to use the girls’ bathroom at her grade school.

• Last month, the Kansas State High School Activities Association, which administers interscholastic activities in Kansas public high schools, adopted a policy allowing transgender students to participate in activities “consistent with their gender identity.” Missouri high schools and the National Collegiate Athletic Association already had similar policies.

• Also in January, a federal appeals court ruled that the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ refusal of sex reassignment surgery for a transgender inmate was unconstitutional, a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Michelle Kosilek, 64, who was born a male and since 1992 has been serving a life sentence for murder, had been taking female hormones for decades. The court ruled that Kosilek had received a legitimate diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” — defined as “a psychological condition involving a strong identification with the other gender.”

The corrections department needs to offer the medical care, the court said. The department has said it will appeal the decision.

In Johnson County, two students — Michael Galvin, 17, and Isaac Barnett, 18, who have been friends since grade school — felt comfortable enough with the atmosphere at their Blue Valley district high school to agree to be the focus of a video played last year for the student body. For years, the two students had been known as girls and called by different names.

In the video, they revealed that they are transgender, explained what it meant and said they preferred to be called by their male names. The reaction, the boys said, has been almost all positive. Some of that may be chalked up to student ennui, but experts also give credit to schools’ efforts to combat bullying and embrace diversity.

“Some people have said, ‘I don’t approve of what you’re doing, but I’m still going to be your friend,’ ” Isaac said. “Or ‘I think what you’re doing is really brave and you have a lot of courage.’ ”

But none of that speaks to how difficult it is not only for individuals to come to terms with being transgender, but also for their friends, families and outsiders. When it comes to children, it can be even harder. Misconceptions abound.

A.J.’s parents understand.

“We were just parents going to work, sending our kids to day care, and this happened to us,” the mother said. “I had never even heard the term ‘transgender.’ ”

It is a sad reality of life now, she said, that they felt compelled to request that neither A.J.’s full name nor an identifiable picture be used for this story.

If they had a son or daughter who was gay or lesbian or bisexual, they are convinced that people would view it as no major matter, no reason for anonymity. But they have come to realize many in the public still don’t accept transgender people, considering them inscrutable oddities.

A.J.’s parents said that choosing not to be identified was not an easy choice. They support their child.

“She’s a blessing to us,” her father said.

But their daughter has lost enough friends. Some new pals don’t yet know that A.J. is transgender, and her parents don’t want to take the chance of her losing more. Moreover, they think A.J.’s gender identity is ultimately her business.

“I’m trying to protect her,” her dad said, “but I’m also trying to allow her to put this out to the world when she wants to.”

Their hope is to dispel misconceptions.

No, they are not liberal activists trying to push a gay or transgender agenda. A.J.’s mom grew up in the South, a Republican raised Southern Baptist by a conservative, Christian family.

“I was my high school chaplain and on the student council,” she said. “I actually read a devotional over the PA system every day.”

Yes, there was plenty of male influence in the house. A.J.’s dad is a sports medicine expert who helps train competitive athletes.

No, the couple didn’t secretly want a girl and thus “turned” one of their sons. In fact, it’s the opposite.

“I wanted boys,” said A.J.’s mom, who concedes to having been a sports-minded tomboy.

“The idea of having a little girl whose hair I would have to put up in braids, and later deal with teenage hormones, was scary.”

She had two boys. One, now 8, and A.J., now 6. Their behavior was the same. They wrestled. They played with trucks and footballs. She and her husband had no clue that A.J. was anything other than “all boy” for the first few years. It’s only looking back now that they see it.

They had gone shopping together.

“I think he was 3,” his mom said. “He asked if we could turn down the girls’ aisle and pointed to a princess dress and said, ‘Mom, can I have that?’ I thought, ‘Huh.’ Our rule is not to entertain (purchases) at first. But if, after a month or two, they are still interested in it, we will get it for them.”

A few days later at day care, A.J. brought his mom over to some dresses. “Look, Mom,” she recalled him saying, “this is the one I wanted.”
Curious, she talked to the teachers. They assured her that at that age, boys play with girls’ stuff and girls play with boys’ stuff and A.J. played with both. It was no big deal.

“We thought, if that’s normal, whatever,” A.J.’s mom said. “We’re not going to freak out about something like that. Girls play with footballs. If he wanted to wear a dress for a little while, whatever.”

But it wasn’t a little while. A few months passed and A.J. still hounded his parents to buy a dress. They relented. Why not? He was just a little boy.

“We thought he’d move on, no biggie,” his mom said. But it became more than a phase.

At home, the dress was all he wanted to wear. Soon he asked for a nightgown. Then “the disturbing thing” happened, she recalled.

“I say disturbing because it got our attention,” she said. A.J. was about to turn 4. “He started pushing down on his genitals a lot. Pressing down, squeezing his legs together” as if he didn’t have male genitalia.

His parents checked for rashes, itches.

“He said, ‘No, I don’t like them,’ ” his mother recalled “They’re in the way.’ … This is a 4-year-old!”

It was time to seek advice.

Psychologists and other researchers concede they know very little about what creates transgender. A few studies of transgender adults have found differences in the brain’s white matter and in hormones.

Males who transition to female, known in the transgender community as MTFs, for males-to-females, have been shown to have some neurons and hormone levels more consistent with females. Females who transition to males, FTMs, have shown some of the opposite.

A key to understanding transgender, experts said, is first to understand the difference between “gender identity” and sexual orientation.

Sexual orientation is about which sex one is attracted to. Individuals attracted to men are either straight or gay. Attracted to women — straight or lesbian. Bisexuals are attracted to both.

“Who you’re attracted to has nothing to do with your gender identity,” said Laura Edwards-Leeper, a psychologist at Oregon’s Pacific University who works with transgender kids.

Gender identity is the deep-seated, believed to be hard-wired, inner knowledge that one is either male or female. Why an individual who is biologically one gender, with all the organs and chromosomes of that gender, would be absolutely sure they are the opposite gender is far from clear.

What is known is that gender is not as binary as is often thought. Beyond singular males and females, biology allows for various “intersex” individuals who are born with mixed genitalia or even the chromosomes of the opposite sex.

In transgender individuals, experts said, the brain appears to say they are one sex while their body is the opposite.

“We are talking about a subset of kids who are saying, ‘I am born in the wrong body. My body doesn’t match my brain. God made a mistake,’ ” Edwards-Leeper said.

Just as homosexuality was once considered a mental disorder, the American Psychiatric Association had for years used “gender identity disorder” to explain and diagnose transgender individuals. The diagnosis has been a mixed blessing.

It allowed people to receive medical treatment such as counseling, hormones and even surgery and increasingly have it covered by insurance. But it also suggested that transgender people suffered a stigmatizing mental illness.

As a consequence, the association changed the name in the new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to “gender dysphoria,” an unhappiness with one’s biological gender.

“Replacing ‘disorder’ with ‘dysphoria’ … removes the connotation that the patient is ‘disordered,’ ” the association said.

A.J.’s parents certainly knew their child was not mentally ill. He was happy, healthy, athletic.

Wearing sparkly princess dresses was one thing. They wondered if perhaps their son was gay. If so, fine. But it is a different matter to contemplate him being transgender.

They talked to their day care providers, their pediatrician and a psychologist. A.J. asked for more princess dresses and more nightgowns.

“We asked all the experts. Everyone said it was probably not a big deal,” A.J.’s mother said. “We were trying to be good parents and ask the right questions.”
A.J. began asking for girls’ toys, girls’ shoes. His parents tried to steer him toward boys’ things. When his fourth birthday party arrived, he agreed to a pirate theme with swords.

“We are figuring we have a boy who likes girl things,” his mom said.

Soon he was asking for girls’ underwear. His parents said no.

When they went out for ice cream one night, he wanted to wear a fairy dress with wings. It was the first time he insisted on wearing girls’ clothes in public. He was wary.

“I don’t want people to make fun of me,” he said.

They took him out. A few people gawked.

“I gave them the death stare,” his mom said.

Then around Christmas, A.J. said it. He took his mom’s breath away. They were in a store, walking hand in hand.

“ ‘Mom,’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘Do you know that I’m a girl? I’m really a girl on the inside.’ ”

It was not a question. It was a statement.

“My child did not say, ‘I want to be a girl.’ He said, ‘I am a girl. How can you not see it? Don’t you know?’ ”

The room went out of focus. She tried to respond.

“I said, ‘No. No. I didn’t know. The doctors told us you were a boy, so that’s what I thought.’ ”

“OK,” her son replied. They kept walking. Her mind spun.

“You cannot be prepared for this as a parent,” she said. “It’s not in any of the ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ books.”

Back home, she phoned her husband. “We have big stuff going on here,” she said.

Caroline Gibbs, a Kansas City psychologist who sees more than 100 clients at the Transgender Institute, said many transgender people “come out,” publicly revealing their gender identity, at puberty.

Others reveal after high school, from age 19 to the mid 20s.

“Some people bury this, they are so afraid. My oldest client is 73, male to female,” Gibbs said.

But many realize their gender, she said, when they are as young as 3, 4 or 5.

“I knew I wasn’t a girl. I kind of always knew,” said Michael Galvin, one of the Blue Valley FTM seniors. “I have been talking about it with my mom since about elementary school.”

Janet Galvin, Michael’s mother, said some signs arose as early as first grade when she threw a Harry Potter party and her child wanted to dress as a boy.

Isaac Barnett, the other FTM senior, said, “I’ve known since I was 8.”

“What makes me a boy is that, I don’t know, I don’t feel comfortable in my (female) body,” he said. “… It’s not that God made a mistake or I’m blaming anybody. It’s that I was born in the wrong body and I need to fix that.”

As late as his junior year, Isaac was still known to all but a few classmates as a girl. He had even grown his hair long.

“Still, looking in the mirror and stuff, I still saw a boy,” he said. “I will look at my old pictures and stuff when I was a girl and I’ll think, ‘That’s not me. Who is that person?’ ”

Isaac was adopted from China in 1997 as a 17-month-old girl by his mother, Lynn Barnett, and her partner, now separated.

Lynn Barnett remembers that when Isaac was 8, “he didn’t like dressing in girls’ clothes. … He really didn’t get into playing with other little girls in the same way they played.”

But, she said, “I wasn’t sure he was transgender until last fall, his junior year, when he said he was transgender.”

Feelings now: “He is so happy and feels so much better about himself, I have to be OK with it. I am so glad to see that he is feeling comfortable in his body. I’m pleased that he’s happy.”

A.J.’s parents kept looking for answers.

“I had no idea what to do with a kid like this because no parent had ever said, ‘Yes, my kid has done this too,’ ” A.J.’s mother said. “You feel completely isolated and question everything. … What did I eat? What chemicals? Is this a genetic thing? Is it a medical thing?”

They called Children’s Mercy and then Gibbs. They remained cautious and skeptical, wondering whether someone who ran a place called the Transgender Institute might be too apt to diagnose a child as transgender.

They sat down with A.J., watching Gibbs for signs of leading questions.

Gibbs, as A.J.’s mother recalled, began talking to A.J.

“Can you tell me something about yourself? Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m a girl,” A.J. said.

“What makes you think you’re a girl?”

“I just am,” she said.

“Is it what you wear or what you play with?”

“No. I just am,” she said.

“Your parents say ‘my son’ and ‘him.’ How does that make you feel?”

“I’m really a she,” A.J. responded, “ ’cause I’m a girl. I’m a daughter.”

“But they don’t call you that.”

“Yeah, I know,” A.J. said. Her mother could see her sadness.

The eventual diagnosis: gender dysphoria, which led to weekly counseling.

Treating and guiding young children identified as transgender remains a thorny issue.

Some therapists discourage the transitions. Some remain neutral and allow free gender expression to see what evolves. And some actively support and guide children with their new identities.

Part of the contention centers on a few studies out of Toronto, the Netherlands and elsewhere suggesting that without treatment, as many as 80 percent of children who identify as transgender early, before puberty, may actually become “desisters.”

Desisters are kids who, upon follow-up, are found to no longer consider themselves transgender but instead identify again with their birth gender. Only a handful of published studies have shown this effect and the sample sizes in each tend to be extremely small, often only a couple of dozen children.

Jacobson at Children’s Mercy said flatly, “I have never seen a desister.”

At Boston Children’s Hospital, which operates one of the leading programs for transgender children, physician Norman Spack said he has treated more than 250 transgender children. Desisters?

“One,” he said.

But because therapists currently have no way of knowing which children will be “desisters” as opposed to “persisters” — and because early hormone therapy can have negative side effects on the developing body — they roundly agree that young kids should not be subject to any permanent medical intervention until later in puberty.

In puberty’s earliest stages, children can be given hormone blockers, which have reversible effects. When given to young FTMs, the blockers help prevent menstruation and the development of breast tissue, which can be psychologically jarring for individuals who identify as male, Jacobson said.

In MTFs, blockers help prevent the deepening voice, facial hair and other changes that accompany male puberty.

Hormone therapy comes later. And one must be at least age 18 before undergoing the “top” or “bottom” surgeries to add or remove breast tissue or augment or remove lower genitalia. The surgeries are not required or necessary and a great many transgender men and women never have them.

Still conflicted about what to do or how to react, A.J.’s parents gradually allowed her to wear the sparkly clothes and have the girls’ toys she wanted.

What her mom called “the watershed moments” came near and after Christmas. A.J. was invited to a birthday party with all the 4- and 5-year-old boys and girls from day care.

To that point, A.J. had worn girls’ clothes only at home and on weekends. Now she wanted to wear them to the party. Her mom had no idea what would happen. Parents would be there too.

“She had a long-sleeved pink shirt with sequins and pink hearts and pink leggings and a tutu skirt and out the door we went,” A.J.’s mother said. “We show up at the party and the moms are all OK with it. … The other kids are like, ‘Cool. Let’s go skate.’ ”

Then one day in January, A.J. showed up at school dressed as a girl. “We’ll work it in,” the teachers said. They calmly talked about diversity and accepting differences. A.J.’s mom was thrilled — but only briefly.

“The kids were OK all day long and then they got home and talked to their parents,” she conjectured, “and then they came back and said (to A.J.), ‘You’re weird.’ ”

A.J.’s mom wrote an email to the parents explaining what A.J. was going through.

“If you’re confused, just imagine how confused we are,” she wrote. “But we are trying to do what is going to make our child the most happy and confident kid possible.”

In the pickup line after school, parents stopped making eye contact. Invitations disappeared. Some parents said they would call, but they never did.

When A.J.’s mom looks back on the most significant moments, she recalls a time around the day care Christmas party when A.J. was still dressing as a boy. Around her buddies, she was urging her mother to check out the boys’ toys.

Then the boys left. A.J. whispered to his mom.

“ ‘Come here. I want to show you something else,’ ” she recalled her child saying. “ ‘We got these new Barbie dresses over here, and this thing turns into a shower.’ He’s showing me all these things in hushed tones.

“That’s when everything changed for me. You think it would be the moment when he said, ‘I’m really a girl.’ But I saw my 41/2-year-old living two lives. What 41/2-year-old has to play that game?”

She now home-schools both A.J. and her older brother, who, his mom said, was a bit confused by his sibling’s transformation but quickly adapted.

“He had one week when he was kind of upset,” the mom said of the older brother. “He said, ‘She’s a girl and she’s not going to play ninjas with me anymore.’ ”

The mom assured him A.J. would, and he was happy.

The family is not sure what lies ahead except that now, A.J. is growing up as a girl.

Her pink and purple room, her clothes, her dolls, her toothbrush, everything. New friends only know her as such.

Currently she is receiving no medical intervention.

Eighteen months after A.J.’s gender identity changed, she is as happy as she has ever been, her parents say. They’re grateful.

Historically, rates of depression, self-mutilation, drug use and suicide attempts have been high among transgender individuals — which many believe is as much a consequence of poor societal or family acceptance as anything else.

A.J.’s mom concedes that her own conservative parents are not as accepting.

“We still have discord happening,” she said, but they are making headway.

A.J.’s parents know the future may not be easy when it comes to their daughter’s friendships, dating, marriage, children. Positive experiences like Isaac’s and Michael’s bring hope. Recently Isaac shopped for a suit for a date for an upcoming dance.

“Honestly, I don’t know about other people,” Michael said. “I haven’t had anyone who was mean to me about it. I’ve never been bullied or anything.”

There are still some problems, the boys said. At school they are not allowed to use the boys’ restrooms but must go to a nurse’s bathroom, which is hardly convenient for their schedules.

They maintain that greater acceptance comes from understanding.

“Family is everything,” said Gibbs of the Transgender Institute. “It is everything. … You can handle anything if you have a loving mother and loving dad, or at least one.”

A.J. has two.

“It is not something that I expected,” said A.J.’s father, “but as a parent you want to do what is in the best interest of your child. Your job is to shepherd them into the world. And if your own family can’t be accepting of who they are, how is the rest of the world going to accept them, or how are they going to accept themselves?”

The numbers.

How many people are transgender?

It’s difficult to know for many reasons, including that many people never come forward as transgender, said Seth T. Pardo, a San Francisco psychologist who is scheduled to present a paper on transgender demographics this month at the World Professional Association of Transgender Health in Bangkok, Thailand.

Different studies offer different numbers:

• Data from the Netherlands cite a rate of 1 in 11,000 (0.009 percent) of biological males who identify as women, and 1 in 30,400 (.0033 percent) of biological females who identify as men.

• Various parental reports from 1997 to 2009 indicate as many as 0.5 percent to 1.4 percent of biological males and 0.6 percent to 2 percent of biological females express a “wish” to be the opposite gender.

• International reports of college students from 2010 and 2011 report 0.7 percent to 0.9 percent of biological males and 2.2 percent to 2.9 percent of biological females expressing a similar wish.


Genetic mishap and bathroom privileges

Colorado showdown on "transgenderism"

Charm of the Nazi body politic

Heinrich Himmler with His Daughter Gudrun

"‘Heini’ Himmler: When Nazis Play Cute"

A new trove of letters from an architect of the Holocaust and a new scientific study shed light on the roots of hate

by

Jeffrey Kluger

January 27th, 2014

Time

Let’s be honest, there’s something about Nazis that makes them impossible to ignore. Those boots, those salutes, that deeply creepy goosestep. And then of course there’s the small matter of their unspeakable evil. Murdering 11 million people—six million of them for their religion alone—makes you unique among history’s monster states. But what about the individual monsters themselves?

The architects of the Holocaust long go achieved a sort of undifferentiated, single-name infamy—Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels—all of them evil, all accursed, all deservedly so. But there’s also the fact that most of them were family men, strivers climbing the career ladder and bringing home paychecks to a wife and children whom they told themselves they loved—and they probably did.

It’s that duality—the man who can dote on a cherished handful, then go to the work murdering millions of others—that has always mystified us the most. The just-released cache of correspondence between Heinrich Himmler—the Reichsführer responsible for building the concentration camps—and his wife and daughter, has raised the mystery of this aspect of human behavior anew. Coincidentally, on the same day the news of the Himmler letters went wide, investigators at SISSA-International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, have released the results of an experiment that may help explain it.

The sound-bites from the Himmler letters are jaw-dropping. There are the 150 tulips he sent his wife Margarete and their daughter from Holland, which his Nazis had only two years earlier terrorized and conquered. “Striped, jagged, two-color, one-color. The kind you cannot find [in Germany],” he wrote attentively. There are his regular updates on his important work, expressed with a chilling pride and nonchalance: “From Saturday until Tuesday I’ll be in a killing field to test new and interesting methods of shooting.” And there’s his affectionate farewell as he embarks on a business trip to a place that has become synonymous with the very essence of evil: “I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses, Yours, Heini.”

Ethicists, morality researchers, historians and more have done as good a job as possible explaining how people who manifestly care for their own families can so easily slaughter members of other people’s. It begins by dehumanizing the group to be eradicated so that the act feels more like pest control than genocide. And so the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats in their propaganda films and the Hutus labeled the Tutsis “cockroaches” during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Even history’s good guys—the Allied nations in the Second World War, for example—are capable of that. Hitler and Mussolini were caricatured as cartoonishly evil in American propaganda posters. The Japanese, however, were drawn as yellow-faced, fang-toothed and claw-handed—when they weren’t simply depicted as monkeys.

But the Allies weren’t looking to exterminate all of the Japanese, Italians or Germans, while the Nazis had just that fate in mind for the Jews and other undesirables. In this, Himmler and his wife were aided by another tool of the actively evil: mutual validation. Humans do appear to have an innate sense of right and wrong—what researchers call “moral grammar”—and it’s with us from birth. Hatred and bigotry require that that impulse be beaten back, and cultural reinforcement helps. There’s a reason American racism is more common in the South which, even now, has more pockets that serve as echo chambers for bigotry than the North does. The more social opprobrium the racist feels, the faster hatred can be choked off. The Himmlers pumped plenty of fresh oxygen to their mutual antisemitism.

As early as 1928, Heinrich wrote to Margarete, who was trying to sell her share of a health clinic to a Jewish co-owner of the same building: “You have to fight with these wretched Jews because of the money. Don’t get frustrated over the Jews good lady—if only I could help you.”

A decade later, after Kristallnacht—the Nazi-sponsored looting and destruction of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues—Margarete wrote to Himmler, “This thing with the Jews. When will this scum leave us so that we can lead a happy life?”

The Himmlers even seemed to revel in a shared sense of what they saw as their impetuous wickedness. “I am so lucky to have a bad husband who loves his bad wife,” she wrote. Himmler responded, “There’s nothing other than ‘revenge.’ Forever.” Margarete then upped the evil ante. “My black soul is thinking about the most impossible things.” In a measure of the slipperiness of language, the German word Margarete used in describing them both as “bad” was “böse,” which can also mean naughty, misbehaved or, less commonly, evil. The U.K.’s Daily Mail, in its reports on the letters, used the “bad” translation. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot went for the full “evil.” Either way, the Himmlers hardly come out looking good.

The new Italian study explains—at least a little—the roots of their awfulness by looking at how the brain processes individuals versus groups. As long ago as 1984, neuroscientists began documenting the fact that people suffering from brain damage or dementia may have trouble categorizing nouns that belong in the category of either animate or inanimate things. Often, they did much better with one category—reliably identifying plants, animals and humans as animate, say—while struggling with the inanimate. Since damage can be particular to certain parts of the brain, this suggested that the two concepts are also processed in certain regions.

In the new study, the Italian researchers recruited a group of 21 subjects with varying stages of either fronto-temporal dementia or Alzheimer’s type dementia—which are specific to different areas of the brain—as well as a group of healthy control studies. The subjects were asked to make distinctions among three categories: the nonliving (including beds, forks, windows and hats), the living (including monkeys, onions, butterflies and horses) and groups (including gypsies, Jews, criminals and the disabled—all Nazi targets).

Across the board, the subjects with some form of dementia performed less well than the healthy, but there was no uniformity in the particular categories on which they did well or poorly. Without brain scans, it’s impossible to know which portions of the brain were responsible for the deficits, but one patient who had trouble with social categories was already known to have frontal temporal dementia, with the damage localized to the left hemisphere, so perhaps that is the spot that plays the biggest role.

None of this is remotely to suggest that the Himmlers—nor any of the other authors or enablers of the Holocaust—either suffered from brain damage or could blame their hate on physiological functions beyond their control. Instead, it seems the brain is, for better or worse, what one morality researcher calls a “meaning-making machine” and that it’s hardwired to make all manner of value judgments, including judgments concerning whole groups of people. Through circumstances, surroundings and our own disreputable choices, we may sometimes make hateful judgments. The Himmlers and their ilk were history’s grotesqueries. But all of us, like it or not, have the same brains—and the same capabilities.

The poor and a true meaning of life

"Do the Poor Have More Meaningful Lives?"

by

Adam Alter

January 24th, 2014

The New Yorker

Jonathan Safran Foer, in the first chapter of “Eating Animals,” recounts a conversation he once had with his grandmother, in which she described the combination of fear and hunger that haunted her in Eastern Europe as the Second World War drew to a close. When she became so hungry that she couldn’t imagine living through another day, a kind Russian farmer gave her a piece of meat:

    “He saved your life.”
    “I didn’t eat it.”
    “You didn’t eat it?”
    “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
    “Why?”
    “What do you mean why?”
    “What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
    “Of course.”
    “But not even to save your life?”
    “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Shigehiro Oishi, a University of Virginia psychologist who studies well-being, pointed to this passage when I e-mailed him last week to discuss a paper he wrote, with Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychologist, which will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. In the paper, Oishi and Diener found that people from wealthy countries were generally happier than people from poor countries. No surprise there. But they also found that people from poor countries tended to view their lives as more meaningful. Even Foer’s grandmother, impoverished and desperate, seems to have favored a meaningful, life-enriching religious tradition over immediate gratification.

Oishi and Diener have spent much of their careers hunting for the ingredients of well-being. For some economists, well-being is seen as arising when benefits outweigh costs; for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it requires good living conditions and positive relationships; for spiritualists, it’s a pleasurable state that can’t be measured by economists or by the C.D.C. Oishi and Diener, like many psychologists, believe that well-being is the sum of the positive and negative thoughts and feelings that arise when we reflect on our lives.

That includes—but can’t be limited to—happiness. Happiness, after all, doesn’t explain the popularity of ultramarathons, mountaineering, and Tough Mudder events (which Lizzie Widdicombe describes in this week’s magazine)—or the sacrifices parents must make to raise children. Some of the most rewarding life experiences are popular because they favor meaningful hardship over simple pleasure.

Oishi and Diener decided to understand how wealth influences both happiness and meaningfulness by examining the relationship between a country’s wealth and the well-being of its citizens. Thousands of people, completing an annual Gallup survey administered in a hundred and thirty-two countries, reported how happy they were, whether their lives had “an important purpose or meaning,” and where their lives stood on a scale from zero (worst possible life) to ten (best possible life).

The first result replicated plenty of earlier research: people from wealthier countries were generally happier than those from poorer countries. To reach an average life-satisfaction score of four out of ten, people needed to earn about seven hundred dollars a year; for a score of five, they needed to earn an average of three thousand dollars per year; for a score of six, they needed to earn an average of sixteen thousand dollars per year; and to score seven they needed to earn an average of sixty-four thousand dollars a year.

But, if wealth fostered happiness, it appeared to drain meaningfulness. Between ninety-five and a hundred per cent of the respondents from poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, Togo, Kyrgyzstan, Chad, and Ethiopia reported leading meaningful lives. Only two-thirds of the respondents in Japan, France, and Spain believed their lives had meaning.

There are plenty of reasons that poverty might inspire a search for meaning. Oishi and Diener found that people from religious countries were more likely to report that their lives had meaning. In fact, religious belief turned out to be the trait most strongly correlated with meaning. Religion provides a sense of purpose, and imbues otherwise mundane choices, like an observant Jew’s decision to avoid pork, with great significance. People from poor countries also tended to have stronger social connections—to report that they could count on friends and family for support if they encountered trouble—and to have more children than the rich; Oishi and Diener found that people from countries with a higher fertility rate consistently reported leading a meaningful life.

For a paper published last year by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, four hundred adults in the United States completed a survey designed to measure, separately, what made their lives happier or more meaningful. The researchers found that people were happiest when their needs and desires were met in the present, but that this immediate fulfillment “was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness.” Respondents derived meaning from considering the whole of their lives, including the past and future. Happiness was generally a reflection of how they felt in the present alone. Happier people were more likely to report leading easy lives, to be in good health, to feel good much of the time, and to be able to buy what they needed without financial strain. People who felt their lives were meaningful, on the other hand, were likelier to have experienced fulfilling social relationships, engaged in acts of charity, taken care of their children, thought about struggles and challenges, and prayed, among other activities. These characteristics sound a lot like the social ties and religious beliefs that gave poorer people a sense of purpose in Oishi and Diener’s paper. Perhaps because poverty strips people of happiness in the short term, it forces them to take the long view—to focus on the relationships they have with their children, their gods, and their friends, which become more meaningful over time.

Foer’s grandmother knew that food could be a source of happiness, but, in her misery, it was a source of meaning. “Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes you, and it helps you remember,” Foer notes, in a description of the Jewish Passover meal. “Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.”

[Adam Alter is the author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, and an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business.]

A mask of anonymity, a cauldron of abuse--Internet commentary

"The Psychology of Online Comments"

by

Maria Konnikova

October 24th, 2013

The New Yorker

Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. “Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story,” wrote the online-content director Suzanne LaBarre, citing a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as evidence. While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse. Cicero, for one, openly called Mark Antony a “public prostitute,” concluding, “but let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery.” What, then, has changed with the advent of online comments?

Anonymity, for one thing. According to a September Pew poll, a quarter of Internet users have posted comments anonymously. As the age of a user decreases, his reluctance to link a real name with an online remark increases; forty per cent of people in the eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demographic have posted anonymously. One of the most common critiques of online comments cites a disconnect between the commenter’s identity and what he is saying, a phenomenon that the psychologist John Suler memorably termed the “online disinhibition effect.” The theory is that the moment you shed your identity the usual constraints on your behavior go, too—or, to rearticulate the 1993 Peter Steiner cartoon, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re not a dog. When Arthur Santana, a communications professor at the University of Houston, analyzed nine hundred randomly chosen user comments on articles about immigration, half from newspapers that allowed anonymous postings, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle, and half from ones that didn’t, including USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, he discovered that anonymity made a perceptible difference: a full fifty-three per cent of anonymous commenters were uncivil, as opposed to twenty-nine per cent of registered, non-anonymous commenters. Anonymity, Santana concluded, encouraged incivility.

On the other hand, anonymity has also been shown to encourage participation; by promoting a greater sense of community identity, users don’t have to worry about standing out individually. Anonymity can also boost a certain kind of creative thinking and lead to improvements in problem-solving. In a study that examined student learning, the psychologists Ina Blau and Avner Caspi found that, while face-to-face interactions tended to provide greater satisfaction, in anonymous settings participation and risk-taking flourished.

Anonymous forums can also be remarkably self-regulating: we tend to discount anonymous or pseudonymous comments to a much larger degree than commentary from other, more easily identifiable sources. In a 2012 study of anonymity in computer interactions, researchers found that, while anonymous comments were more likely to be contrarian and extreme than non-anonymous ones, they were also far less likely to change a subject’s opinion on an ethical issue, echoing earlier results from the University of Arizona. In fact, as the Stanford computer scientist Michael Bernstein found when he analyzed the /b/ board of 4chan, an online discussion forum that has been referred to as the Internet’s “rude, raunchy underbelly” and where over ninety per cent of posts are wholly anonymous, mechanisms spontaneously emerged to monitor user interactions and establish a commenter’s status as more or less influential—and credible.

Owing to the conflicting effects of anonymity, and in response to the changing nature of online publishing itself, Internet researchers have begun shifting their focus away from anonymity toward other aspects of the online environment, such as tone and content. The University of Wisconsin-Madison study that Popular Science cited, for instance, was focussed on whether comments themselves, anonymous or otherwise, made people less civil. The authors found that the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the “nasty effect.” But the nasty effect isn’t new, or unique to the Internet. Psychologists have long worried about the difference between face-to-face communication and more removed ways of talking—the letter, the telegraph, the phone. Without the traditional trappings of personal communication, like non-verbal cues, context, and tone, comments can become overly impersonal and cold.

But a ban on article comments may simply move them to a different venue, such as Twitter or Facebook—from a community centered around a single publication or idea to one without any discernible common identity. Such large group environments, in turn, often produce less than desirable effects, including a diffusion of responsibility: you feel less accountable for your own actions, and become more likely to engage in amoral behavior. In his classic work on the role of groups and media exposure in violence, the social cognitive psychologist Alfred Bandura found that, as personal responsibility becomes more diffused in a group, people tend to dehumanize others and become more aggressive toward them. At the same time, people become more likely to justify their actions in self-absolving ways. Multiple studies have also illustrated that when people don’t think they are going to be held immediately accountable for their words they are more likely to fall back on mental shortcuts in their thinking and writing, processing information less thoroughly. They become, as a result, more likely to resort to simplistic evaluations of complicated issues, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has repeatedly found over several decades of research on accountability.

Removing comments also affects the reading experience itself: it may take away the motivation to engage with a topic more deeply, and to share it with a wider group of readers. In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially. Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share or comment in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas.

What the University of Wisconsin-Madison study may ultimately show isn’t the negative power of a comment in itself but, rather, the cumulative effect of a lot of positivity or negativity in one place, a conclusion that is far less revolutionary. One of the most important controls of our behavior is the established norms within any given community. For the most part, we act consistently with the space and the situation; a football game is different from a wedding, usually. The same phenomenon may come into play in different online forums, in which the tone of existing comments and the publication itself may set the pace for a majority of subsequent interactions. Anderson, Brossard, and their colleagues’ experiment lacks the crucial element of setting, since the researchers created fake comments on a fake post, where the tone was simply either civil or uncivil (“If you don’t see the benefits … you’re an idiot”).

Would the results have been the same if the uncivil remarks were part of a string of comments on a New York Times article or a Gawker post, where comments can be promoted or demoted by other users? On Gawker, in the process of voting a comment up or down, users can set the tone of the comments, creating a surprisingly civil result. The readership, in other words, spots the dog at the other of the end of the keyboard, and puts him down.

As the psychologists Marco Yzer and Brian Southwell put it, “new communication technologies do not fundamentally alter the theoretical bounds of human interaction; such interaction continues to be governed by basic human tendencies.” Whether online, on the phone, by telegraph, or in person, we are governed by the same basic principles. The medium may change, but people do not. The question instead is whether the outliers, the trolls and the flamers, will hold outsized influence—and the answer seems to be that, even protected by the shade of anonymity, a dog will often make himself known with a stray, accidental bark. Then, hopefully, he will be treated accordingly.

[Maria Konnikova is the author of the New York Times best-seller “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.” She has a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.]

Quirky human activity...we all do it

"The psychology of the to-do list"

by

Tom Stafford

January 29TH, 2013

BBC NEWS

If your daily schedule and email inbox are anything like mine, you’re often left a state of paralysis by the sheer bulk of outstanding tasks weighing on your mind. In this respect, David Allen's book Getting Things Done is a phenomenon. An international best-seller and a personal productivity system known merely as GTD, it’s been hailed as being a “new cult for the info age”.

The heart of the system is a way of organising the things you have to do, based on Allen's experience of working with busy people and helping them to make time for the stuff they really want to do. Ten years after the book was first published in 2001, scientific research caught up with the productivity guru, and it revealed exactly why his system is so popular – and so effective.

The key principle behind GTD is writing down everything that you need to remember, and filing it effectively. This seemingly simple point is based around far more than a simple filing cabinet and a to-do list. Allen's system is like a to-do list in the same way a kitten is like a Bengal Tiger.

“Filing effectively”, in Allen's sense, means a system with three parts: an archive, where you store stuff you might need one day (and can forget until then), a current task list in which everything is stored as an action, and a “tickler file” of 43 folders in which you organise reminders of things to do (43 folders because that's one for the next thirty-one days plus the next 12 months).

The current task list is a special kind of to-do list because all the tasks are defined by the next action you need to take to progress them. This simple idea is remarkably effective in helping resolving the kind of inertia that stops us resolving items on our lists. As an example, try picking a stubborn item from your own to-do list and redefining it until it becomes something that actually involves moving one of your limbs. Something necessary but unexciting like "Organise a new fence for the garden" becomes "ring Marcus and ask who fixed his fence". Or, even better with further specifics on how to move your fingers, "dial 2 626 81 19 and ask Marcus who fixed his fence".

Breaking each task down into its individual actions allows you to convert your work into things you can either physically do, or forget about, happy in the knowledge that it is in the system. Each day you pick up the folder for that day and either action the item, or defer it to another folder for a future day or month. Allen is fanatical on this – he wants people to make a complete system for self-management, something that will do the remembering and monitoring for you, so your mind is freed up.

So what’s the psychology that backs this up? Roy Baumeister and EJ Masicampo at Florida State University were interested in an old phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, which is what psychologists call our mind's tendency to get fixated on unfinished tasks and forget those we’ve completed. You can see the effect in action in a restaurant or bar – you can easily remember a drinks order, but then instantly forget it as soon as you've put the drinks down. I’ve mentioned this effect before when it comes to explaining the psychology behind Tetris.

A typical way to test for the Zeigarnik Effect is to measure if an unfulfilled goal interferes with the ability to carry out a subsequent task. Baumeister and Masicampo discovered that people did worse on a brainstorming task when they were prevented from finishing a simple warm-up task – because the warm-up task was stuck in their active memory. What Baumeister and Masicampo did next is the interesting thing; they allowed some people to make plans to finish the warm-up task. They weren't allowed to finish it, just to make plans on how they'd finish it. Sure enough, those people allowed to make plans were freed from the distracting effect of leaving the warm-up task unfinished.

Back to the GTD system, its key insight is that your attention has a limited capacity – you can only fit so much in your mind at any one time. The GTD archive and reminder system acts as a plan for how you'll do things, releasing the part of your attention that it struggling to hold each item on your to-do list in mind. Rather than remove things from our sight by doing them, Allen, and the research, suggest we merely need to have a good plan of when and how to do them. The mere act of planning how to finish something satisfies the itch that keeps uncompleted tasks in our memory. 

Zeigarnik Effect [Wikipedia]

Psychology of Richard III

"Richard III: Psychopath or Just a Control Freak?"

by

Yue Wang

March 7th, 2013

Time

Thanks largely to his portrayal in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, Richard III is generally remembered as a murderous, hunchbacked villain who killed his nephews to gain the throne. But now that his remains, found beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, have been positively identified, researchers at the University of Leicester now say the 15th century monarch was no bloodthirsty psychopath — just a control freak in need of some security.

In findings presented this past weekend, Psychologist Mark Lansdale and forensic psychologist Julian Boon suggest that there is no evidence supporting Shakespeare’s depiction of the last Plantagenet king. After going through historians’ consensus on Richard’s experiences and actions, they found that the king exhibited little sign of the traits used to identify psychopaths today — including narcissism, deviousness, callousness, recklessness and lack of empathy in close relationships.

The two academics presented their studies at the University of Leicester on Saturday. Lansdale said though Richard was not a psychopath, he did suffer psychologically. The king showed signs of a common syndrome known as the intolerance to uncertainty, which is associated with the need to seek security after an insecure childhood. According to Lansdale, people suffering from this syndrome tend to respond disproportionately when loyalty is betrayed, and this can emerge as an authoritarian streak — as in the case of the England king.

Lansdale added that Richard’s spinal deformity — one aspect of his characterization that Shakespeare got right — might have affected him psychologically as well. In medieval times, such physical disabilities were often associated with a twisted soul; this perception might have made Richard cautious in his interactions with others.

Richard III only held the throne for two years — from 1483 to 1485 — before being slain in the Battle of Bosworth Field. But he remains one of England’s most famous kings. Lansdale and Boon are not the first to suggest that he was not Shakespeare’s villain. In 1924, Saxon Barton, a Liverpool surgeon and amateur historian, founded the Richard III society to promote a more balanced view of the king. The group liked to cite British statesman Francis Bacon (who lived more than a century after Richard), who once wrote that monarch was “ a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people.”

Hermann Rorschach's inkblots and Wikipedia

Hermann Rorschach

Much ado about nothing.

"A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?"

by

Noam Cohen

July 29th, 2009

The New York Times

There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are tests with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test taker's mind.

The Rorschach test, a series of 10 inkblot plates created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach for his book "Psychodiagnostik," published in 1921, is clearly in the second category.

Yet in the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia's users, who share the site's "free culture" ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish. (Because the Rorschach plates were created nearly 90 years ago, they have lost their copyright protection in the United States.)

"The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way," one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, "Just don't pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research."

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

"I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up," Dr. Heilman said in an interview. "The debate has exploded from there."

Psychologists have registered with Wikipedia to argue that the site is jeopardizing one of the oldest continuously used psychological assessment tests.

While the plates have appeared on other Web sites, it was not until they showed up on the popular Wikipedia site that psychologists became concerned.

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather "render the results meaningless."

To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted — tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith's estimate — to try to link a patient's responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research — "the normative data," in the language of researchers — that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.

And, more fundamentally, the psychologists object whenever diagnostic tools fall into the hands of amateurs who haven't been trained to administer them. "Our ethics code that governs the behavior of psychologists talks about maintaining test security," Steve J. Breckler, the executive director for science at the American Psychological Association, said in an interview. "We wouldn’t be in favor of putting the plates out where anyone can get hold of them."

Alvin G. Burstein, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wrote in an e-mail message that his preference was to have the images removed but that he did not think they would harm the psychological process.

"The process of making sense of one's experience," he wrote, "is gratifying. To take Rorschach's test is to make sense of ambiguity in the context of someone who is interested in how you do that."

Trudi Finger, a spokeswoman for Hogrefe & Huber Publishing, the German company that bought an early publisher of Hermann Rorschach's book, said in an e-mail message last week: "We are assessing legal steps against Wikimedia," referring to the foundation that runs the Wikipedia sites.

"It is therefore unbelievably reckless and even cynical of Wikipedia," she said, "to on one hand point out the concerns and dangers voiced by recognized scientists and important professional associations and on the other hand — in the same article — publish the test material along with supposedly 'expected responses.'"

Mike Godwin, the general counsel at Wikimedia, hardly sounded concerned, saying he "had to laugh a bit" at the legal and ethical arguments made in the statement from Hogrefe.

Hogrefe licenses a number of companies in the United States to sell the plates along with interpretative material. One such distributor, Western Psychological Services, sells the plates themselves for $110 and a larger kit for $185. Dr. Heilman, the man who originally posted the material, compared removing the plates to the Chinese government’s attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre. That is, it is mainly a dispute about control, he said.

"Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do," Dr. Heilman said, adding that he was not impressed by the predictions of harm from those who sought to keep the Rorschach plates secret. "Show me the evidence," he said. "I don't care what a group of experts says."

To illustrate his point, Dr. Heilman used the Snellen eye chart, which begins with a big letter E and is readily available on the Wikipedia site.

"If someone had previous knowledge of the eye chart," he said, "you can go to the car people, and you could recount the chart from memory. You could get into an accident. Should we take it down from Wikipedia?"

And, Dr. Heilman added, "My dad fooled the doctor that way."

Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics A Diagnostic Test Based On Perception

Rorschach test

Here are the inkblots...

Lunatics

Popular mythology brings to mind the lycanthropes [werewolves] that make their transformation during a full moon. No difference...I am sure we have all considered others as a lunatic minus a full moon. But, if your are curious...

Full Moon dates 2009: March 11th, April 9th, May 9th, June 7th, July 7th, August 6th, September 4th, October 4th, November 2nd, December 2, and December 31st [a "blue moon" month].

"Lunacy and the Full Moon"

Does a full moon really trigger strange behavior?

by

Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz

February 9th, 2009

Scientific American

Across the centuries, many a person has uttered the phrase "There must be a full moon out there" in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night. Indeed, the Roman goddess of the moon bore a name that remains familiar to us today: Luna, prefix of the word "lunatic." Greek philosopher Aristotle and Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the "moistest" organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. Belief in the "lunar lunacy effect,” "or "Transylvania effect," as it is sometimes called, persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were widely reputed to transmogrify into werewolves or vampires during a full moon.

Even today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events. One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

Water at Work?

Following Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, some contemporary authors, such as Miami psychiatrist Arnold Lieber, have conjectured that the full moon's ­supposed effects on behavior arise from its influence on water. The human body, after all, is about 80 percent water, so perhaps the moon works its mischievous magic by somehow disrupting the alignment of water molecules in the nervous system.

But there are at least three reasons why this explanation doesn't "hold water," pardon the pun. First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of a “mosquito lunacy effect.” Second, the moon’s gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. Third, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons—when the moon is invisible to us—as it is during full moons.

There is a more serious problem for fervent believers in the lunar lunacy effect: no evidence that it exists. Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon. In all cases, they have come up empty-handed. By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called meta-analysis—they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled "Much Ado about the Full Moon," which appeared in one of psychology's premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.

Persistent critics have disagreed with this conclusion, pointing to a few positive findings that emerge in scattered studies. Still, even the handful of research claims that seem to support full-moon effects have collapsed on closer investigation. In one study published in 1982 an author team reported that traffic accidents were more frequent on full-moon nights than on other nights. Yet a fatal flaw marred these findings: in the period under consideration, full moons were more common on weekends, when more people drive. When the authors reanalyzed their data to eliminate this confounding factor, the lunar effect vanished.

Where Belief Begins

So if the lunar lunacy effect is merely an astronomical and psychological urban legend, why is it so widespread? There are several probable reasons. Media coverage almost surely plays a role. Scores of Hollywood horror flicks portray full-moon nights as peak times of spooky occurrences such as stabbings, shootings and psychotic behaviors.

Perhaps more important, research demonstrates that many people fall prey to a phenomenon that University of Wisconsin–Madison psychologists Loren and Jean Chapman termed "illusory correlation"—the perception of an association that does not in fact exist. For example, many people who have joint pain insist that their pain increases during rainy weather, although research disconfirms this assertion. Much like the watery mirages we observe on freeways during hot summer days, illusory correlations can fool us into perceiving phenomena in their absence.

Illusory correlations result in part from our mind's propensity to attend to—and recall—most events better than nonevents. When there is a full moon and something decidedly odd happens, we usually notice it, tell others about it and remember it. We do so because such co-occurrences fit with our preconceptions. Indeed, one study showed that psychiatric nurses who believed in the lunar effect wrote more notes about patients’ peculiar behavior than did nurses who did not believe in this effect. In contrast, when there is a full moon and nothing odd happens, this nonevent quickly fades from our memory. As a result of our selective recall, we erroneously perceive an association between full moons and myriad bizarre events.

Still, the illusory correlation explanation, though probably a crucial piece of the puzzle, does not account for how the full-moon notion got started. One intriguing idea for its origins comes to us courtesy of psychiatrist Charles L. Raison, now at Emory University, and several of his colleagues. According to Raison, the lunar lunacy effect may possess a small kernel of truth in that it may once have been genuine. Raison conjectures that before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside—including many who had severe mental disorders—of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras. So the lunar lunacy effect is, in Raison and his colleagues' terms, a "cultural fossil."

We may never know whether this ingenious explanation is correct. But in today's world at least, the lunar lunacy effect appears to be no better supported than is the idea that the moon is made of green cheese.

And, if you like literature...

Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.

The Moonstone of the title is a large yellow diamond (not to be confused with the semi-precious moonstone gem). It gained its name from its association with the Hindu god of the moon. Originally set in the forehead of a sacred statue of the god at Somnauth, and later at Benares, it was said to be protected by hereditary guardians on the orders of Vishnu, and to wax and wane in brilliance along with the light of the moon.--Wikipedia

The Moonstone