Proud Men Die Young

People who most believe in a culture of honor -- who agree that "A real man doesn't let other people push him around" or that aggression is a reasonable response to being insulted -- told the researchers they were quite willing to engage in risky behaviors, such as bungee jumping or gambling away a week's wages. This willingness to take risks might well translate into an early death[.] . . .

Honor cultures are more powerful in rural areas, where the influence of personal reputation is higher than it is in cities. Although honor states had a 14% higher accidental death rate in the cities, they had a 19% higher rate of accidental death in more rural areas, compared to non-honor states. More than 7,000 deaths a year can be attributed to risk-taking associated with the culture of honor in the USA.

From here.

FWIW, it could also have something to do with the fact that "cultures of honor" also have disproportionate shares of blue collar workers whose jobs are more dangerous. But, the urban-rural comparison casts some doubt on that economic as opposed to cultural interpretation.

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How Stable Is Childhood IQ?

[T]he correlation between [an IQ] score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age 5, 6 and 7 correlates about .85 with adult score. This suggests that while it is difficult to measure a child's IQ in any single sitting, the IQ itself is relatively fixed already by age 7 or so . . .

This is using data in which the IQ was tested *three times* over the interval listed and the results averaged. A single measurement at age 5 would probably do worse than what is listed below. [N=61] . . .

age range correlation with adult score

42,48,54 months .55
5,6,7 .85
8,9,10 .87
11,12,13 .95
14,15,16 .95

. . . . another study of 80 kids [based on a single test at age 7] that appears in Bias In Mental Testing. . . found a .7 correlation between scores at 7 and 17.

From here.

Another study looked at pre-formal instruction number sense in two hundred children who were four years old and found that "the precision of children's estimations correlated with their math skill. That is, the children who could make the finest-grained estimations in the dot comparison task (for example, judging that eight yellow dots were more than seven blue dots) also knew the most about Arabic numerals and arithmetic.  According to the researchers, this means that inborn numerical estimation abilities are linked to achievement (or lack thereof) in school mathematics."
This is also supported by earlier research, with a sample size of sixty four, which use the same test involving estimating a number of dots in a time period too small to count them and comparing it to past academic performance.

Good "number sense" at age 14 correlates with higher scores on standardized math tests throughout a child's life up to that point and weaker "number sense" at 14 predicts lower scores on those standardized tests. . . . They then examined the teenagers' record of performance in school math all the way back through kindergarten, and found that students who exhibited more acute number sense had performed at a higher level in mathematics than those who showed weaker number sense, even controlling for general intelligence and other factors.

Thus, it both showed mathematical ability to be somewhat distinct from general IQ and showed that this measurement is strongly tied to academic performance in mathematics despite not having any formally overlapping content base.

It also suggests that tracking in educational instruction based on multiple middle school performances is as accurate as tracking at later points in an educational career in sorting students by IQ which is closely related to academic ability (although it lacks a component akin to conscientiousness).

The study does not test if it is possible to train children to develop number sense, something that is not generally done in modern math curricula, and if such training would bear fruit in generalized mathematical ability.  It also offers little guidance regarding the most sensible educational strategy to take knowing the some students have a greater aptitude for learning math than others.

READ MORE - How Stable Is Childhood IQ?

Glasses Half Full For Russian Passengers

John Hawks tweets:

In praise of dog not barking: Russian passengers break into applause after every perfectly ordinary landing.

From here (July 13).

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When Does Talk Therapy Work?

Some mental health conditions are utterly unresponsive to sessions spent talking with a psychologist or counselor, but very responsive to drugs.  For some conditions for some people, drugs and talk therapy support each other.  Others people with particular conditions are responsive to talking with someone, but the mere fact of having a conversation with someone who cares matters more than the content of the talk, the talking to a professional may not be the most cost effective solution.  How is one to make sense of what works and doesn't work in talk therapy for mental health issues?

A good place to start is an index of resources accompanying one of today's National Public Radio stories. 

For example, it includes a registry of 193 different interventions whose effectiveness is supported by scientific evidence.  For example, there are dozens of interventions proven to be effective in treating substance abuse problems of various types that are evidence based.  Others deal with issues connected to parenting, eldercare, PTSD, suicide prevention, general juvenile delinquency, aggression, ODC, workplace stress, and depression.

One common and basic deficiency in the status quo is a failure to know that there are approaches that have been proven to work with a condition or situation.  When there is good news, it needs to be spread far and wide.

While any list of evidence based talk therapies is necessarily driven by the funding and institutions incentives of programs to have their approaches validated with scientific research, it is also a good starting place to get a sense of what kinds of issues there is evidence to support benefits from this kind of treatment, and by inference, what issues there is no solid evidence at this time that this kind of treatment is effective in treating.  Thus, lists like these are a logical empirically driven starting point to a larger widely available resource for determing how best to deal with mental condition or emotionally difficult situations.  Moreover, as one puts together these lists, one ends up with a more practically relevant classification scheme for dealing with these conditions and situations than one that is more focused on cause and classification than in the availablity of treatment.

Also worth noting from the list is that many effective approaches take a group or community orientation rather than an individual psychotheraputic one.  Some issues are not best dealt with in a self-referring patient medical model and can look more like generalized character education.

There is probably a siginificant residual of conditions (for example, Alzheimer's disease) for which the answer is that there are no evidence based treatments, talk based or drug based, available.  Knowing that, too, has value as well, both in counseling skepticism towards unrealistic claims about proposed treatments and fostering inquiry about a broad range of treatment modalities to see if any look like a promising source of a future evidence based intervention.  Knowing this also favors an inquiry approach that focuses on minimizing harm and side effects, given that positive benefits aren't well established.

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Does Law Have Insufficient Visual Drama?

Once upon a time, where you wanted to sell real estate, you handed some soil or twig for the property to the buyer in what was called livery of seizen. Couples kiss, wear traditional costumes, and exchange rings when they marry in front of a crowd. One of the traditional ways to revoke a will (recently litigated in Colorado) is to destroy or deface the physical document (which leads to a number of peculiarities of probate law). Traditionally, wills were read aloud after a death, although that rarely happens these days. Even though it no longer legally matters, it is traditional to seal a contract with a handshake. When sports teams finish a game, win or lose, the players each slap hands saying "good game", emotionally putting an end to disputes over the details that led to the final result. Churches acknowledge affiliations to their faith with dramatic baptisms in the Christian church and a vividly memorable circumcision ceremony for infant Jewish and (at least in traditional societies) adolescent Muslim boys. Basic trainees in the military, men entering monastic orders, and prison inmates have their hair shorn, and are stripped of almost all of their personal possessions.

The current story arc in the webcomic Red String's (set in Japan but written by Gina Biggs of Georgia) features Hanae Niijima, a lesbian whose mother will not accept the fact that she has come out or acknowledge Hanae's true love Fuuko Akimoto. The set up to the scene is in this dialog:

Hanae: Why can't you be happy for me? This is who I am. This is ME.

Mother: It's NOT you. You were my sweet little girl who liked flowers and unicorns; who loved to be dressed up in frilly clothes and have me curl your hair. You were never a tomboy!

Hanae: That's STILL me. You think you have to be boyish to like a girl? That's . . .you can't believe that.

Hanae decides the overcome the conceptual block that seems to be getting in the way of her mother by making a visual statement:

Hanae: Fine. [Grabbing scissors with one hand and her long flowing curly hair with the other.]

Mother: What are you doing?!

Hanae: If its frills and curls keeping you from accepting this then I'll get rid of them. Will that work?

Hanae then hands a long pony tail of crudely cut off hair into the hands of her shocked mother who sits, holding it, staring off into space.

Obviously, I'm not recommending that this become a ritualized part of the process of coming out that is mandated in any way. But, powerful visual dramas can often convey meanings about abstract concepts, particularly emotionally charged ones, that some people have a hard time grasping from mere words.  Hanae's mother might be able to understand from the hair in her lap what she couldn't when her daughter merely spoke to her.

For example, one of the classic problems that one sees in modern family law litigation is that one or both of the people who once were married, or at least a loving couple, can't let go of that relationship. The service of the divorce petition, the signing of the papers, the dryly worded court order ending a marriage and providing for the sharing of the children and property of the marriage, and often a restraining order as well, don't communicate to the former member of that relationship with adequate emotional force that the relationship is really, once and for all, over.  Some people are simply beyond reaching by any means of communications, but a large number of people who go through family law proceedings simply don't really understand at an emotional and subconscious level what has happened until much later, even if they can parrot the court's ruling.

Perhaps if that message could be conveyed with more visual drama in some universally accepted new ritual, more people who move on, and there would be, as a result, less senseless fighting driven by old emotions instead of new practicalities. The demise of fault based divorce has made the process much more antiseptic for all involved in the process, but have we overdone it to the point of failing to really acknowledge in an emotionally valid way that not just the legal construct of the marriage, but also the emotional reality of the relationship that it approximates, has ended. Shouldn't the symbolism and ritual that ends of marriage need to be even more powerful and less subtle than the symbolism and ritual that starts one?

Adoptions tend to be even more understated, for fear of spooking the relinquishing parents, and not surprisingly, the main complaint that gets litigated in adoptions is that of relinquishing parents who claim they were properly appraised of the gravity of their actions.

A classic problem in consumer litigation of all kinds is the not infrequent failure of a debtor or consumer, already overwhelmed by paper and having trouble determining what is most important, to realize that a summons and complaint in a lawsuit is a once and for all speak now or forever hold your peace notice that has profound legal consequences if ignored.  This lack of understanding is one of the driver's of the almost ubiquitous paranoia about ulterior motives and about being cheated by one's betters found among unsophisticated people who have frequently been on the receiving side of litigation.

Perhaps we would do well to imitate the litigation practices of the protocol agents of the advanced civilization in the science fiction book "Jaran" by Kate Elliott, where legal disputes are announced by delivery of a physical baton in person by a courier, and one responds to the allegations at a mandatory in person appearance at the designated place and time, as inefficient as that may be, rather than simply enforcing the duty to appear by entering a default judgment against a party who does not appear (one that is often forgotten until property is seized pursuant to the judgment).

I have no empirically evidence to support the theory that more dramatic visual drama in the legal system would make any difference at all. The modern trend has been to strip away formalities, arcane language, pompous court room surroundings, wax seals, fancy ribbons and the like from legal matters. Instead, modern legal proceedings and legal facilities, favor plain English, the bare minimum of in person appearances, contemporary but understated and inoffensive surroundings suited for efficient, processing of business matters, dispenses with wigs and obtuse morning suits, and use very simple seals and acknowledgements - relying on the ability to confirm orders with third party repositories rather than lack of counterfeitability for reliability. Many documents that used to have to be notarized are now simply signed under penalty of perjury with no third party verification of identity or intent.

For lots of purposes this trend may be a good one. It demystifies the legal system and makes it more accessible to pro se parties. Much of what courts do is as much administrative business as it is emotionally meaningful decision making. For the most part, people prefer an inexpensive, quick, form driven informal probate process to the traditional succession proceedings of courts of equity will all their pomp and circumstance. And, some parts of the court process, like the delivery of jury verdicts finding someone guilty or not guilty, have managed to hold onto some of the drama that gives them emotional power. But, maybe some of the time, particularly in civil matters that don't involve business people and may have consequences for people who do not have the same cultural heritage as the lawyers and judges who are running the system, a higher touch, lower tech approach is in order and would make courts more effective. It is certainly a hunch that would be worth exploring with more systematic research.

READ MORE - Does Law Have Insufficient Visual Drama?

Trust Declining

The General Social Survey has documented a great decline in support for the proposition that you can generally trust people. In 1984, equal numbers agreed and disagreed with that statement. In 2010, there was a thirty percentage point gap, with those who felt that you couldn't trust people outnumbering those who felt that you could by about 62% to 32%. It is a long term trend, with minor bumps along the way, whose causes aren't manifestly obvious.

Indeed, it is counter to what you would expect in some respects. For example, having more education is strongly tied to having more trust in others. But, the decline in trust has taken place despite modestly rising education levels in that time period.

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"Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

A new twin study finds that while people tend to choose spouses who are similar to themselves, that mate choice doesn't seem to have any other hereditary component. Twins choose spouses who are no more or less similar to them than non-twins.

The myth that boys tend to choose spouses who are similar to their mothers, while girls tend to choose spouses who are similar to their fathers, also doesn't stand up to empirical scrutiny. People tend to choose spouses who are more similar to them than their opposite sex parent.

The study (from here citing Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij, Andrew C. Heath, Nicholas G. Martin. "Variation in Human Mate Choice: Simultaneously Investigating Heritability, Parental Influence, Sexual Imprinting, and Assortative Mating." The American Naturalist, 2011; 177 (5): 605 DOI: 10.1086/659629) involved more than 20,000 subjects and examined traits including height, body mass index, education, income, personality, social attitudes and religiosity.

The only trend discovered, other than a strong tendency of people who choose mates who are like themselves in the measured traits at the time they meet (convergence towards each other in traits over time was ruled out), was a tendency for a woman's family background to influence her choices in terms of age and income.

The tendency to choose someone similar to yourself as a spouse is strongest for age, social attitudes and religiosity, moderate for IQ, education and physical attractiveness, and less strong, but still statistically significant, for height, weight and personality traits.

Pheromone transmitted information about a potential mates MHC complex of genes (related to immunity) influences someone's attractiveness but has essentially no actual impact on who people actually end up in a long term relationship with in the end. The degree of MHC similarity or dissimilarity in married couples is no different that would be expected from random chance.

People also tend to deceive themselves about what kind of person they want in marriage. There is little connection between self-reported preferences in a potential mate and the person that people actually chose to marry.

The study did not attempt to measure which marriages worked and which did not, only what kind of people individuals actually choose to marry in the first place. Thus, the study doesn't rule out the possibility that the best person for someone to marry has traits different than the person an individual is most likely to marry.

In a somewhat related matter, sexual orientation is almost completely unrelated to shared family environment or prevailing societal attitudes. A large (n=7600) twin study in Sweden found that sexual orientation was explained 0%-17% by shared environment (including familial and societal attitudes), 18%-39% by genetics, and 61%-66% by unique environment, "for example, circumstances during pregnancy and childbirth, physical and psychological trauma (e.g., accidents, violence, and disease), peer groups, and sexual experiences." The study was Niklas Långström, Qazi Rahman, Eva Carlström, Paul Lichtenstein. "Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behaviour: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden." Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 7 June 2008 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1. At least in a large share of cases, there is a fair amount of evidence that sexual orientation tends to be congential and is related to some extent to genes and to some extent to hormone exposure in utero and possibly to other epigenetic or in utero enviromental factors.

READ MORE - "Your Type" In Marriage Isn't Genetic

Physiological Test Predicts Effectiveness of Talk Therapy For Depression

[A] quick, inexpensive, and easy to administer physiological measure, pupil dilation in response to emotional words, not only reflects activity in brain regions involved in depression and treatment response but can predict which patients are likely to respond to cognitive therapy[.]. . . activity in the brain's cortical emotion regulatory systems is strongly related to pupil size when people are viewing emotion-laden words . . . It is because of this relationship between eye and brain that pupil measurements predict the response to cognitive therapy."

Cognitive therapy is a type of psychotherapy designed to help individuals overcome difficulties by modifying negative or irrational thoughts and behavior, which, in turn, can improve mood and reduce stress. It is usually completed in weekly sessions, with 10-20 sessions being effective for most individuals who benefit.

From here, citing Greg J. Siegle, Stuart R. Steinhauer, Edward S. Friedman, Wesley S. Thompson, Michael E. Thase. "Remission Prognosis for Cognitive Therapy for Recurrent Depression Using the Pupil: Utility and Neural Correlates." Biological Psychiatry, 2011; 69 (8): 726 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.12.041.

The abstact of the paper provides more details:

Although up to 60% of people with major depressive disorder respond to cognitive therapy (CT) in controlled trials, clinicians do not routinely use standardized assessments to inform which patients should receive this treatment. Inexpensive, noninvasive prognostic indicators could aid in matching patients with appropriate treatments. Pupillary response to emotional information is an excellent candidate, reflecting limbic reactivity and executive control. This study examined 1) whether pretreatment assessment of pupillary responses to negative information were associated with remission in CT and 2) their associated brain mechanisms.

We examined whether pretreatment pupillary responses to emotional stimuli were prognostic for remission in an inception cohort of 32 unipolar depressed adults to 16 to 20 sessions of CT. Twenty patients were then assessed on the same task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Pupillary responses were assessed in 51 never-depressed controls for reference.

Remission was associated with either low initial severity or the combination of higher initial severity and low sustained pupillary responses to negative words (87% correct classification of remitters and nonremitters, 93% sensitivity, 80% specificity; 88% correct classification of high-severity participants, p < .01, 90% sensitivity, 92% specificity). Increased pupillary responses were associated with increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions associated with executive control and emotion regulation. For patients with higher severity, disruptions of executive control mechanisms responsible for initiating emotion regulation, which are indexed by low sustained pupil responses and targeted in therapy, may be key to remitting in this intervention. These mechanisms can be measured using inexpensive noninvasive psychophysiological assessments.

The small study obviously needs to be replicated in a larger sample before being used on a widespread basis, but the 88% rate at which this simple test determines if high severity depressed patients will respond to cognitive therapy, compared to a 60% response rate in the absence of screening, is a major improvement for a technique that requires no investment in drugs or equipment and only minimal additional training for mental health practitioners. This test could spare more than half of severely clinically depressed individuals time and misery trying cognitive therapy that is unlikely to be effective for them, allowing them to use alternative therapies like drug treatments that are likely to be more effective for them immediately, while allowing about half of severely clinically depressed individuals to receive cognitive therapy, knowing that it has a very high probability of being successful, and avoiding the need for them to undergo a psychiatric drug treatment regime that is unnecessary for their recovery. The fact that the benefit is statistically significant at the 99% level in this small study also makes a study calculated to replicate this result look like a promising good investment.

Given that clinical unipolar depression is one of the most common mental health conditions, and is by far the most common one that is not typically congenital, which makes it disproportionately likely to be a condition dealt with by a primary care physician as opposed to a specialist mental health care professional, this kind of advance has particularly great practical relevance. Also, since unipolar depression is so common, the cost savings to the health care system of a diagnostic tool for determining what kind of treatment will be most effective could be an evidence based medicine technique that could make a material dent in the overall cost of mental health care.

Since this is a diagnostic approach, rather than a drug or device, it also doesn't need a long and costly approval process from the Food and Drug Administration. Funding of a simple large scale replication of this study which could be completed in a year or two, would be enough to include this diagnostic technique as part of the standard by the book treatment regime for unipolar depression nationally. Of course, since this isn't an approach would have a biotech company backing it, this kind of study almost necessarily would need to be funded by the public sector, for example, through a National Institute of Mental Health (NIHM) grant.

The real value of treatment effectiveness prediction tools as a means to improve the quality of patient care while reducing health care costs, a field which is coming into its own as a subfield of psychiatry and psychology, also suggests another funding possibility. Health insurance companies have historically viewed themselves primarily as financial institutions and as institutions through which patients can collectively bargain for provider health care pricing. But, the health insurance industry might be well advised to develop and fund a non-profit research foundation to develop treatment effectiveness prediction tools that do not have drug companies or medical equipment makers to fund them, as a way to promote health enhancing quality control.

The benefits of this little study aren't just practical in an immediate sense either. This is some of the hardest empirical evidence yet that there are medically relevant subtypes of unipolar depression in existence, with some indication of what the underlying neurological basis of that subtyping might involve. One of the deep issues in psychiatric classification of mental health conditions, for which the DSM-IV is the current industry standard, is that diagnosis of psychiatric conditions is almost entirely based upon non-physiological symptoms. It is entirely possible that some common DSM-IV conditions are really a cluster of separate conditions with similar symptoms but different causes (and hence different courses of treatment that are likely to be effective), and that other common DSM-IV conditions currently viewed are in fact merely distinctive syndromes that arrives when separate co-morbid conditions are present.

For example, this study shows that there are at least two types of unipolar depression, one of which is talk therapy responsive and one of which is not. This very likely indicates that the causes of the two types of unipolar depression are different. If this insight in incorporated into prior research on the causes of unipolar depression, the sometimes muddy and contradictory theories about what causes unipolar depression and how it can best be addressed might be clarified. One leading theory regarding the cause of unipolar depression conceptualizes it as a situation where prolonged stress and anxiety cause the body's normal responses to stress to shut down and try the new strategy of becoming depressed to deal with the situation. This might be a primary causal mechanism in one but not the other of subtypes of unipolar depression. If so, somewhat muddy data linking this cause to depression might become much more definitive with regard to the relevant subtype of depression, while clearing the decks for a search for one or more alternative causal mechanisms for the other subtype of depression.

Another possibility is that the pupil dilation response to emotion laden words may be a congenital element of a person's personality that is present even in the absence of unipolar depression. If this is the case, this trait might be one of many that is routinely tested for in children or young adults along with traits like blood type. Children with the trait might be at higher risk for the cognitive therapy responsive subtype of depression. Similarly, medical records could indicate which children are at risk for non-responsiveness to cognitive therapy as a treatment for unipolar depression. Since the physiological test for this trait is quite objective and easy to administer on a mass basis, it might also be possible to see if this trait corrolates with other mental health conditions, particularly those which are often co-morbid with unipolar depression (a co-mordidity pattern that might be more stark when restricted to a particularly subtype of depression), and to determine if it has a hereditary component. Patterns of co-morbidities associated with a particular subtype of unipolar depression might shed insight into the causal mechanism of a variety of mental health conditions which in turn might shed light on the kind of treatment regimes that are likely to be effective for those co-morbid mental health conditions.

Indeed, it might even be possible to provide these children or young adults, on a prophylactic basis, the kind of cognitive training that people with unipolar depression receive after they are diagnosed to help these individuals deal with situations that could lead to clinical depression before they happen.

There is no obvious reason that the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, which boils down to teaching people habits of thinking and mental tools for coping with certain kinds of problematic cognitive habits or tendencies, in general, can't be almost as effective when administered in advance as they are when administered as therapy after the fact. It might be possible to put together a set of empirically validated cognitive behavioral therapy regimes into a comprehensive set of coping skills that could be transmitted on a mass basis in a manner not unlike the model by which we instruct people in first aid, CPR, rescue breathing, the use of abdominal thrusts to respond to choking incidents, the proper way to respond to house fires, tornados and tsunamis, or suicide and bullying prevention programs. People who experience cognitive behavioral therapy responsive conditions anyway may benefit for refresher instruction and may be able to make more sense of what these therapies involve when they actually have the conditions that they are designed to alleviate, but it isn't unreasonable to think that this kind of public health preparedness model could materially reduce the overall incidence and impact of many common mental health conditions, some of which are subclinical or would otherwise never be diagnosed as such.

READ MORE - Physiological Test Predicts Effectiveness of Talk Therapy For Depression

Prenatal Environmental Exposures Produce Mental Health Harms

Researchers found that within a sample of 215 children monitored from birth, those children with high levels of a pollution exposure marker in their cord blood had more symptoms of attention problems and anxiety/depression at ages 5 and 7 than did children with lower exposure.

The researchers measured a biologic marker or "fingerprint" of exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and other combustion-related pollutants in newborns' cord blood. When inhaled by the mother during pregnancy, these pollutants can be transferred across the placenta and bind to the DNA of the fetus, forming "adducts" in blood and other tissues and providing a biologic measure of pollutant exposure. Mothers completed a detailed assessment of their child's behavior.

In urban air, traffic emissions are a dominant source of the pollutants measured in the study. The authors accounted for other sources such as environmental tobacco smoke and diet in their analyses. None of the mothers in the study were smokers.

From here citing Frederica P. Perera, Shuang Wang, Julia Vishnevetsky, Bingzhi Zhang, Kathleen J. Cole, Deliang Tang, Virginia Rauh, David H. Phillips. PAH/Aromatic DNA Adducts in Cord Blood and Behavior Scores in New York City Children. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011; DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1002705.

READ MORE - Prenatal Environmental Exposures Produce Mental Health Harms

The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

There are two medical specialties that deal with brain disorders and conditions. One is neurology. The other is psychiatry. Where does one draw the line between the two?

Neuroskeptic compares the number of articles on particular conditions in leading academic journals for each specialty (Neurology and the American Journal of Psychiatry), to look empirically at how the line has been drawn within the medical profession.

The division doesn't seem to be very strongly linked to the extent that a condition is biologicallly based. As he notes:

Schizophrenia, which is probably considered "the most neurological" psychiatric disorder, is in fact the least talked about in Neurology.

Both mental retardation and autism are middle ground between the two specialties, with mental retardation leaning towards neurology, and autism leaning towards psychiatry.

Eyeballing the data, one way to think of the way that the conditions have been allocated is that psychiatrist deal with conditions that influence your personality and social interactions, other than pure cognition, while neurologists deal with other conditions and conditions that impact pure cognition.

This explains the mental retardation v. autism divide, for example. While both have a cognitive function element, explaining the neurological interest in both conditions, what distinguishes an autism diagnosis from a mental retardation diagnosis that is not autism is the diagnostic and treatment focus on how autism affects personality, social interaction and empathy, particularly in the case of autism spectrum disorders like Asperger's, where IQ is often in the normal range.

The gray area for ADHD, likewise, can be explained as a product of the lingering ambiguity over whether to think of the condition as a personality disorder that is a cogential part of who someone is, or as a developmental disorder of something large is part of a larger cognition process.

Psychaitry is concerned with "who you are" while neurology is concerned with "what you are" even though there isn't obviously any fundamental difference between the kind of brain functions that lead to schizophrenia and those that lead to congential epilepsy. The looming question behind Neuroskeptic's post is whether the divide says more about perhaps unfounded biases about mental health that pervade even the supposedly enlightened medical profession, than it does about science.

There are other ways to see the distinction, of course. One is that neurologists deal with issues that are believed to be exclusively "hardware" issues, while a core issue for psychiatrists is to parse "hardware" from "software" issues and address each appropriately. Some conditions may not neatly fit that divide today simply because historical ambiguity led a condition to be assigned to one category or the other, and given that all of the physicians involved have a similar allopathic medical background and training, there is no compelling reason to upset the apple cart of institutional and funding and bureaucratic arrangements based on the distinction at this point, even if it isn't terribly logical.

In the same way, no one is urgently pushing to have responsibility for counterfeiting enforcement removed from the duties of the United States Secret Service even though this doesn't logically have much to do with is primary responsibility to provide bodyguard protection to the President and other senior federal officials and candidates, because the skill set for the two tasks is similar.

Still, the divide has a strong impact on treatment modality. Neurologists use drugs and sometimes surgery, while seeing little place for therapy. Psychiatrists, while also prescribing drug treatments, recognize the value of psychological talk therapies as a complementary treatment modality to a much greater extent.

A footnote to the post in the study is also interesting:

"Gathering" this data took me 15 minutes. 20 years ago, it would have taken... well, you'd have had to read and manually categorize 30,000 abstracts. Even at 2 minutes per abstract (bare minimum) that's, er, 1000 man-hours of work.

READ MORE - The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Democratic socialists, including those in Britain, are much better at conducting very large scale, multi-purpose longitudinal studies than Americans, and those studies are starting to bear fruit. The British National Child Development Study tracks 17,634 children born in March 1958 for fifty years, checking in on the subject's progress at nine regular intervals from birth to the present and gathering detailed and accurate informaton each time from multiple sources in multiple institutions. What did they find?

In this article we assess and compare long-term adult socioeconomic status impacts from having experienced psychological and physical health problems in childhood. . . . Large effects are found due to childhood psychological problems on the ability of affected children to work and earn as adults and on intergenerational and within-generation social mobility. Adult family incomes are reduced by 28% by age 50, with sustained impacts on labor supply, marriage stability, and the conscientiousness and agreeableness components of the “Big Five” personality traits. Effects of psychological health disorders during childhood are far more important over a lifetime than physical health problems.

From Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, and James P. Smith, "The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life", PNSA 2010.

The abstract poses the question as one of a particular childhood "problem" having a long term effect, but the results are equally consistent with the notion that psychological health has a large congential component, with much of the rest of the environmental component been based on the quality of one's early childhood environment, rather than later environment. In this view, the "problems" that a child experiences are simply manifestations of who a child is that persist throughout life rather than being the cause of later in life difficulties. In our mental health and IQ focused world, in which capacity to labor physically is largely unimportant socio-economically, it also isn't surprising that fitness that is physical, or the lack of that fitness is comparatively unimportant.

Alas, the early childhood window may be surprisingly narrow, and social class effects tend to be much more powerful than instructional effects. For example, according to another very large longitudinal study (n=13,776), the beneficial effects of full day kindergarten programs relative to partial day kindergarten programs in low income children tend to vanish by the third grade:

[T]he study found that the reading and math skills of children in full-day kindergarten grew faster from the fall to the spring of their kindergarten year, compared to the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten.

However, the study also found that the full-day kindergarteners' gains in reading and math did not last far beyond the kindergarten year. In fact, from the spring of their kindergarten year through fifth grade, the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten grew faster than those of children in full-day kindergarten, with the advantage of full-day versus part-day programs fading by the spring of third grade. The fade-out can be explained, in part, by the fact that the children in part-day kindergarten were less poor and had more stimulating home environments than those in full-day programs[.]

Social class linked intellectual achievement gaps are already great at age two.

Implications

The good news, for the parents of older children, I suppose, is that whatever good or bad your parenting has had on their lives, the older your children get, the less the quality of your parenting seems to matter. So, the pressure isn't as intense. A child's academic progress and character as a late tween is immensely predictive of the rest of the course of that child's life.

Then again, this may simply be a product of the fact that whatever parenting and educational quality was present early on continues to be present and having the same effect, with interruptions of these patterns being too rare to be statistically significant. Unless you are comparing kids who experience late childhood misfortune against their otherwise equal pre-misfortunte peers, you can really accurately measure the impact of those misfortunes on a child's life chances.

On the other hand, these studies are really terribly discouraging for those whose job it is to try to get people on track in life once their early childhood years have passed. The school system, for example, frequently becomes involved in a child's life only starting in kindergarten at age five or six years old, and the second study seems to suggest that it is already extremely hard to help kids who are developmentally behind at that point catch up to their more academically ready peers.

Needless to say, if your job is to turn around the lives of kids who have already started high school, fifteen years of accumulated inertia is just that much harder to reverse. If your job is to turn around the lives of adult prison inmates, the burden you must overcome is surely even more profoundly difficult to surmount.

As previous posts at this blog have noted, you may be born with a gene which is a powerful predicter of your capacity to sustain a long term marriage, and people who commit violent crimes as adults overwhelmingly are already continuing to have discipline issues that their peers have grown out of by the time that they are in elementary school: "it is extremely unlikely that an adolescent who has not been highly physically aggressive in the past will suddenly manifest significant problems with physical aggression." Such seemingly learned and social traits as succeptibility to bullying and one's likelihood of being a teenaged crime victim likewise show powerful genetic predispositions. The non-IQ factors that play an important part in life success seem to manifest just as early in life as academic ability does: Your ability to defer gratification at age four turns out to be a powerful discriminator for your life success a decade and a half later. Children likely to grow up to be psychopaths already start acting differently at age three (also here). A group of three non-IQ related genes can account to up to a 0.5 point difference in your GPA on top of any IQ effect.

We may live in the post-nature v. nuture synthesis of genes x enviroment, but the more we know, the more predictable our lives seem to be. For us, like characters in Greek tragedies, it seems that knowing our fates offers us surprisingly little help in changing our fates. Our genes are seemingly immutable, and most mental health genetic conditions are incurable, even if they are treatable in some cases. Many psychological predispositions have no established treatment. Even if you know you have a gene that makes you likely to have short lived relationships, there is no drug you can take to fix that and no solidly evidence based therapy that will solve your predisposition. Gene therapy hasn't reached that point yet, and given the implications it would have for personal identity and neurodiversity in society as a whole, perhaps this is a good thing.

Our enviroments, while theoretically mutable, aren't easy to change. And they seem to matter. People in the top fifth of the income distribution are twenty-eight times as likely to attend a selective college as those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example. We don't choose our parents, and it seems as if those of us who are raised by someone other than our parents are usually worse off in the bargain - although perhaps starting off in a spot like that leaves one off poorly even with great improvement. And, of course, unlike J.K. Rowling or Eminem, most of us who find ourselves in poverty don't readily emerge from it to great riches by virtue of our intellectual talents. Parents who know that their poverty and lack of education is dragging down their children have little capacity to do anything about it. Even the heart wrenching option once available of sending tween or teen children into domestic service for a more prosperous family, or a scholarship funded tenure at a boarding school, in hopes that some of the benefits of that social class will rub off on them has largely vanished as options. Assortive marriage trends are reducing the availability of marriage as a means of class advancement, and American social class lines are deeper than those in contemporary Europe or earlier eras of American history. Just about the only thing a parent can do to improve the environment that the parent provides his or her children is to transform him or herself, which is a profoundly difficult matter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do indeed change sometimes. But, the overwhelming weight of the statistics and studies tell us that this is the exception and not the norm, and becomes ever more exceptional as we get older. Kids who are well behind grade level in reading in the third grade are almost certainly not going to go to Harvard, are exceedingly unlikely to go to medical school or law school, and will have to struggle mightily and have considerable good fortune to earn a college degree of any kind. Kids who are perfect angels in fifth grade are exceedingly unlikely to have criminal justice problems or violence issues in the remainder of their lives unless they have a family history of a late manifesting mental health condition like bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or substance abuse, or experience a brain injury, or sustain PTSD.

I don't want the world to be this way. I'm a liberal. I believe in progress and opportunity and social mobility. I value education. Environment does matter, especially for the less well off, even if they can't change that environment themselves.

But, one can't simply ignore what study after study after study tells you either. One can look for loopholes and exceptions and ways to beat the system. There clearly are some and they should be leveraged for all that they are worth. The more I read these studies, the more that I am forced to conclude that policies designed to secure social justice have to focus more on developing meaningful productive paths for the people who we have in our society, and less on trying to transform people into something that they are not and cannot reasonably aspire to become -- especially for older youths and adults for whom the die is more firmly cast.

READ MORE - Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

More Than Three Years Of Grief

A significant share of mental health issues are congenital. But, episodes of severe stress, grief and trauma don't fit this pattern. Miscarriage and stillbirth is one common, but profound stressor.

Women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth experience unusually high levels of depression and anxiety during new pregnancies and for nearly three years after delivering healthy infants. . . . Many women become depressed and anxious after losing a baby during pregnancy, and these reactions often persist after carrying another child to term[.]

From here.

Infant morality is now much lower than it used to be, so few Americans will have to bury very young children, something that my grandparents and almost all of the generations before them often experienced. But, it is estimated that about one in three pregnancies ends with a miscarriage or stillbirth, which means that the average American woman will experience at least one in a lifetime.

My mother experienced this before I was born. My wife and I experienced this before our children were born. Even people who welcome pregnancies routinely keep this very private for the first three months, when the risk of a miscarriage is greatest, so that they won't have to endure the discomfort of explaining what happened to everyone who knew.

This is one of the more emotionally potent experiences that a person can encounter. When it happened to us, we remembered it in a little ceremony for just the two of us in the mountains. For better, or for worse, this grief is rarely a community event. It can be a painful, silent, lonely grief.

People are resilient. Eventually, they do reach a point where the present overwhelms the potency of life's past heartbreaks. But, the time it takes to reach that point is often much longer than the pregnancy itself.

READ MORE - More Than Three Years Of Grief

Life Imitates Art

Fiction is full of children who discover one day that they aren't the people they thought because their parents weren't who they thought that they were. Fairy tales are full of royals raised as peasants, changlings, and more. The impulse hasn't run its course yet. For example, Nicole Peeler's debut novel of 2009, "Tempest Rising," features a young woman who discovers that her mother was a Selkie and that she is half supernatural.

This kind of surprise, of course, isn't nearly so common in real life. But, surprise revelations about who your parents happen to be do happen, and one such event was recently recounted in "The Australian":

In the 1950s, ten Iraqi Jewish Mossad agents were sent undercover to spy on Israeli Arab communities, each married a local woman while pretending to be an Arab Muslim, and they each had children. The operation was shut down in 1964. The reveal happened and the consequences weren't very good for the children.

[T]he wives were invited to France, where they were met by the Mossad station chief. He told them they could either join their husbands in a Jewish community, where the children would be raised as Jews, or arrangements could be made for them to be resettled in an Arab country of their choice. . . . The women chose to remain with their husbands. Israeli army chaplains brought to Paris converted them to Judaism and by special dispensation their young children were also recognised as Jews without undergoing separate conversion.

The ensuing identity crisis required psychological intervention. "We tried to rehabilitate the people involved, but weren't really successful . . . . The kids experienced serious trauma. They tried to forget their past, where they came from, but they couldn't. A few succeeded in life, but most still suffer from problems."

READ MORE - Life Imitates Art

Ecological Models of Neurodiversity.

Ephiphenom has a nice discussion of how evolution could favor diversity in personality as a result of an ecology of different personalities in a community, rather than a single optimal personality, having the most fitness for the community as a whole. This discussion, in turn, is supported by a nice scholarly journal article from 2007 on the topic (Penke, L, Denisson, J, & Miller, GF (2007). The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality European Journal of Personality, 21, 549-587).

The biggest downer conclusion of the journal article analysis is that: "genetic variation maintained by environmental heterogeneity implies that there are always some individuals for whom an optimal niche does not currently exist." This is the moral equivalent of structural unemployment in the domain of human neurodiversity.

But, the journal article also reaches some quite interesting conclusions about the likely genetic architecture of personality traits, based on the theory that IQ and psychopathologies are generally "good" or generally "bad" for fitness and hence, would be expected to follow a "mutation-selection" model, while one would expect a balancing selection that produces a stable mix of variation in personality traits to generate the diversity in proportions that are optimal for the community:

[W]hile personality traits will be influenced by a limited set of high-prevalence alleles (plus maybe several rare ones, see Kopp & Hermisson, 2006), general intelligence and psychopathologies like schizophrenia will be influenced by rare, recessive, mildly harmful mutations that vary between samples, since they are equally likely to occur at thousands of different, otherwise monomorphic loci, and are removed fairly quickly by selection once they arise. (Note that this goes beyond Kovas & Plomin’s (2006) concept of ‘generalist genes’, which proposes that the same large set of weak-effect polymorphisms underlies cognitive functioning in every individual.)

In other words, it is probably going to be difficult or impossible to find a predominant IQ gene, or single primary genes for just about any mental health condition strongly correlated with advanced parental age (a sign that incidence is driven strongly by novel mutations and that many different kind of mutations can impact the trait). These conditions include autism, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

But, it may be easier than we might expect to find a pretty simple set of genes that explain most of our personalities within the normal range, and even to find simple, but rare genes associated with unusual personality traits. One can imagine receiving shortly after a child is born, a short "genotypic personality profile" along with a blood type based on a mass produced "lab in a chip" that costs $50 or less and looks only at a handful of alleles for a few dozen gene locations that tells you what to expect your child will turn out like personality-wise over the decades to come.

READ MORE - Ecological Models of Neurodiversity.

Experts Make Bad Prophets

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of SPRs [statistical prediction rules] are at least as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction. . . even when experts are given the results of SPRs, they still can't outperform those SPRs.

From here.

This is something that I've know for a long time, but the post linked is notable because it shows the extent to which this tendency is widespread and pervasive.

Some of the better known examples of statistical prediction rules that are actually used on a regular basis include:

1. Pre-trial services evaluations of criminal defendants for pre-trial release.
2. A formula used by the Colorado Department of Corrections to assign new state prison inmates to the most appropriate security level prison facility.
3. Credit scores for making loan decisions, and determining the likelihood that a borrower will go bankrupt.
4. Test score and GPA formula based college admissions decisions.
5. Test score based standard for whether or not to accept military recruits into particular military services and into military occupational specialities.

There is a simple SPR for predicting marital happiness, and I recent heard an NPR report describing an SPR that predicted the likelihood that unmarried couples would stick together based on the extent to which their speech patterns were similar.

Uncritical reliance on test scores by low level bureacrats produces better results than consideration of these scores as one factor out of many by highly qualified experts. Finessing the result with expert analysis undermines the virtues that make SPRs work.

There are lots of situations where there simply aren't SPRs available, and in those cases, experts may be the next best thing, but when you have a regularized situation where there is an advantage to be had from making accurate predictions, you are better off devising an SPR from a good data set than relying on experts to make the calls. And, in the era of mass data collection and cheap computing resources to mine it, it is much easier to create a decent SPR than it used to be.

This isn't the only situation where the general cognitive bias towards undue faith in capacity of experts or decision-makers with access to large amounts of data to goods better judgments comes into play. Studies have shown that attorneys systemically overestimate the strength of their cases. People like judges and juries who are able to watch the demeanor of witnesses on the stand testifying are less effective at distinguishing true from untrue statements than people forced to rely on transcripts of the same testimony.

One of the main things that an SPR does is to toss out of the model all of the factors that somebody thought might be relevant but don't actually have an empirical predictive power. But, experts and others with a wider fact set are tempted to consider all of the information, even the irrelevant bits, which inserts non-empirically support biases into the decision making process.

Indeed, one way to understand the structure of legal rules in statutes and precedents is as SPRs that force a highly diverse set of legal expert judges to consider only a small subset of all the facts in a situation according to a particular formula to get a result, rather than relying on the totality of their life experience in making those kinds of decisions.

Limits of SPRs

This doesn't mean that SPRs are the be all and end all solution to all of society's woes.

It is possible to design rules like look like SPRs but don't have the empirical grounding linking potential causes and potential effects accurate or are based on incorrect data or assumptions. Perhaps the classic example of this can be found in the United States Sentencing Guidelines which relied on assumptions like a 100:1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine ratio that was just plain wrong and produced grossly unfair results as a result. Indeed, that example is an apt cautionary tale, because a bad SPR affects large numbers of people in a systemic way, while mistakes by experts tend to be diffuse and to vary in differing directions from the correct prediction.

It is also possible to build a SPR that is the best possible SPR given the data that is used to build it, but remains quite inaccurate because there are factors that it fails to consider. For example, an SPR designed to predict natural gas usage that fails to consider average monthly temperature as an input is going to be much less accurate than one that does considers it.

One can also build a suboptimal SPR by designing it to predict something other than the thing that you actually want to measure. A recent practical example of that kind of problem is the use of law school grades by large law firms to predict law firm success. Law school grades are an important factor, (indeed better than social class or law school prestige) but it turns out that it is a factor that has diminishing returns when you reach a point where all of your applicants have very good law school grades and academic ability. Indeed, lawyers with good law school grades from less prestigious schools, who on average had lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs than their peers at more prestigious schools, actually perform better when hired by big law firms and are happier than lawyers with the same law school grades from more pestigious schools. There are other factors that matter too that aren't measured, but work to develop efficient ways to test these factors in a format such as a two hour test, is in its infancy.

This is a classic case of an SPR with a design problem. LSATs and undergraduate grades predict law school grades, particularly in the first year of law school, as well as any other measure available, but there are far more abilities that are relevant to the practice of law than there are to being a law student. Two dimensions (correlated strongly with each other, but more weakly with "g heavy" LSATs and academic grade point averages) were multiple choice tests of "situational judgment" and "biographical information" which were calculated to predict effectiveness measures such as practical judgment, organization, self-discipline, creativity, and effectiveness in interpersonal communication.

Another problem is SPRs is that they are often formulated in one context and then used in another that they are ill suited to, where they are not validated to work. For example, an IQ test administered in the Standard American English works just fine as a predictor of academic success and many other things when the people taking the test are native speakers of Standard American English. But, it works rather less well when the people taking the test are native speakers of Spanish or Chinese and have only been learning English for a few years.

A recent Army test designed to measure "spiritual fitness" may be reasonable reliable for the Christians who make up most soldiers and for a significant number of people who practice other religions. But, the questions it presents may present category errors that aren't valid when given to people who are considered atheists and agnostics. The fact that the test was developed by a psychologist who also inspired the CIA's torture program also casts real doubt on the methodology used to create it.

More generally, one should be suspicious of SPRs in any situation where there are two or more populations of people who are very different in relevant ways, one of those populations is much larger than another, and the SPR isn't separately validated for each subpopulation. For example, the body measurements that indicate optimal fitness for men aren't likely to be the body measurements that indicate optimal fitness for women.

Likewise, SPRs in the criminal justice system that are predominantly validated with normal "blue collar" criminal defendants and show validity across of wide range of those kinds of criminal defendants, may not necessarily be very useful in accurately predicting how "white collar" criminal defendants, who make up a tiny part of the validation sample but are different in a great many respects from blue collar defendants demographically and otherwise, will act.

Further, many SPRs only make sense for individuals within the "normal range" of whatever they were designed to measure. SAT scores from high school, for example, are a poor instrument to use to distinguish between graduate students who will go on to be professors at less prestigious institutions from graduate students who will go on to be professors at more prestigious institutions. Everyone who finishes graduate school and goes on to become a professor is very academically able, and the SAT is not very discriminating at the high end of the scale. Similarly, an SAT is a poor instrument for distinguishing between someone who has a mild and a severe developmental disability, because it isn't designed to be particularly discriminating or accurate at the very low end of the scale.

Using Imperfect SPRs

Expert supplementation of SPRs is probably best when one knows what an SPR does measure, what factors were ruled out as irrelevant in the formulation of SPR, what flaws have been demonstrated in the SPR, and what factors are known to be relevant but are not measured by the SPR.

For example, credit scores are probably as good as one is going to get at predicting propensity to default on loans. Any loan officer effort to second guess propensity to default on loans from other data (like "good character") is likely to be counterproductive. But, credit scores don't measure ability to pay factors such income and assets. For example, default rates and bad debt losses are extremely low in the case of purchase money mortgages involving large down payments, even when the borrower has very low credit scores.

Similarly, an expert may be helpful in identifying circumstances when an SPR (perhaps a "second best" one) is and is not likely to have validity. Someone who got high SAT scores in high school almost certainly mentally retarded unless some sort of brain injury has taken place since then. But, in the case of someone who got low SAT scores in high school, the SAT may be unhelpful.

READ MORE - Experts Make Bad Prophets

Church Attendance And Survey Accuracy

About 22% of Americans actually attend church in any given week. About 40% say that they do, however, when asked that question in surveys, and that data is often used to make the case that Americans are much more religious than people in other countries. The great exaggeration of church attendance is long standing, well documented and largely limited to Americans and Canadians. In reality, "Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans."

The number of people who actually attend church in any given week is only a little larger than the number of people who claim no religious affiliation.

READ MORE - Church Attendance And Survey Accuracy

Invoking Christianity Incites Prejudice

Is a Christian invocation as the start of a jury trial really harmless?

Apparently not.

“[A]ctivation of Christian religious concepts increases subtle and overt prejudice towards a racially disadvantaged group”. . . . well—priming Christian religion led to significant increases in negative attitudes toward gay men, Muslims and atheists.

READ MORE - Invoking Christianity Incites Prejudice