Psychopaths are not cold-blooded, but have attention deficit

AN ATTENTION deficit, rather than an inability to feel emotion, may be what makes psychopathic individuals seem fearless. It's a finding that challenges the common characterisation of such people as cold-blooded predators.

"A lot of their problems may be a consequence of something that's almost like a learning difficulty," says Joseph Newman, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who investigated how prisoners with psychopathic personalities react when anticipating pain.

Previous experiments have suggested such people may not feel fear, while brain imaging studies have found abnormalities in the amygdala, a region that processes fear and other emotions. This has encouraged the perception that they are "emotionally shallow", Newman says. "People call them cold-blooded predators." But he questioned whether this was the whole story.

To tease apart why such people behave the way they do, Newman's team recruited 125 male prisoners convicted of serious crimes and scored them on traits characteristic of a psychopathic personality, including narcissism, impulsivity and callousness. About 20 per cent scored highly enough to be described as psychopathic - a proportion typical for criminals but well above the 1 per cent expected in the general population.

The researchers then hooked each prisoner up to a device that measures how strongly they blink - an indication of how afraid they are - and placed a screen in front of them. The subjects were warned that during tasks in which letters flashed on the screen, an electric shock would sometimes follow a red letter, but never a green one.

When instructed to push buttons to indicate whether letters were green or red, subjects with marked psychopathic characteristics flinched in response to red letters with the same strength as other subjects.

Yet when they were told to indicate whether letters were capitals or lower-case, the psychopathic prisoners barely blinked upon seeing red letters, while the others continued to anticipate the mild shock (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.07.035).

This suggests that psychopathic individuals sense fear as much as anyone, and only seem fearless because they find it harder to pay attention to what is scary and what is not, says Newman, who hopes his hypothesis can be used to discourage psychopathic repeat offenders. "They're famous for being difficult if not impossible to treat," he says.

Donald Hands, director of psychology at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, is working with Newman to design a pilot treatment programme. Reminding psychopathic lawbreakers of the immediate consequences of their actions, such as getting arrested and sent back to prison, might help to dissuade them from reoffending, he says.

Newman's finding may also persuade prison authorities to treat psychopathic individuals differently. "I think this shows that there's some humanity there," Hands says. "It challenges the belief that they are robots."

Free Speech under attack in the UK - Guardian gagged over Trafigura oil dumping scandal

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Remarkable, even by the appalling standards of our libel laws and addled judiciary. This appears to be the question in, er, question:

From Parliament.uk, “Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009″

(292409)
61
N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

And this is a report on how the oil company Trafigura tried to cover up pollution in Africa.

This country's libel laws have been a disgrace for years and one can only hope that egregious abuses of an already abusive system persuades folk that, dash it, something must be done.

UPDATE: The Twitterverse is going mental for #trafigura and I suspect that by the time all this is over far more people will be aware of the controversy swirling around Trafigura's African adventures than would have been the case had they kept quiet and not attempted to silence the press. Combatting this sort of bullying, however, is one thing the blogosphere is good at.

UPDATE 2: There is, at the time of writing, no mention of this story on the BBC's website. Why on earth not?

Barbara Ehrenreich on The Perils of Positive Thinking - TIME

Barbara Ehrenreich on The Peril of Positive Thinking - TIME

What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being "positive" and optimistic - traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic, it was a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the "prosperity gospel," whose God wants to "prosper" you.

In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to "attract" it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world. (Read "Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking.")

Optimism wasn't just a psycho-spiritual lifestyle option; by the mid-'00s it had become increasingly mandatory. Positive psychologists, inspired by a totally over-optimistic reading of the data, proclaimed that optimism lengthens the life span, ameliorates aging and cures cancer.

In the last few years, some breast cancer support groups have expelled members whose tumors metastasized, lest they bring the other members down. In the workplace, employers culled "negative" people, like those in the finance industry who had the temerity to suggest that their company's subprime exposure might be too high.

No one dared be the bearer of bad news. The purpose of work, at least in white-collar settings, was to flatter and reassure the boss, who had in turn probably read enough of the business self-help literature to believe that his job was to motivate others with his own relentless and radiant optimism. (Read "A Primer for Pessimists.")

Two years into the Great Recession, it's time to face the truth: Optimism feels good, really good, but it turns out to be the methamphetamine of run-amok American capitalism. Meth induces a "Superman Syndrome." Optimism fed into what Steve Eisman, a banking analyst who foresaw the crash, calls "hedge-fund disease," characterized by "megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism" and the belief that "to think something is to make it happen."

The meth-head loses his teeth and his mind; the madcap optimists of Wall Street lost something like $10 trillion worth of pension funds, life savings and retirement accounts. (See five reasons for economic optimism.)

Fortunately, the alternative to optimism is not pessimism, which can be equally delusional. What we need here is some realism, or the simple admission that, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, "stuff happens," including sometimes very, very bad stuff. We don't have to dwell incessantly on the worst case scenarios ” the metastasis, the market crash or global pandemic ” but we do need to acknowledge that they could happen, and prepare in the best way we can. Some will call this "negative thinking," but the technical term is sobriety.

Besides, the constant effort of maintaining optimism in the face of considerable counterevidence is just too damn much work. Optimism training, affirmations and related forms of self-hypnosis are a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, set down. They won't make you richer or healthier, and, as we should have learned by now, they can easily put you in harm's way. The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world.

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Securing Access to Open Internet Accounts in the Cloud, is our responsibility

As security conscious IT and Business Management professionals, we need to be concerned and informed if our organisation is using a social networking site as part of their business model. Especially if it is disappearing into the Cloud, currently the main or prime target for all the shadowy internet 'terroristas'.

Also, we may have a little more time on our hands, now that those precious customers are thin on the ground. This is just the opportunity you need to review and strengthen your defences: check the perimeter and infrastructure by all means but you know the 'people' are the biggest risk to security.

We are all too aware that cyber-criminals can easily hijack accounts and e-mail customers on our behalf, and we take account of that through our extensive and elaborate, e-mail scanning and monitoring efforts. According to the FBI and other global law enforcement authorities, you are obliged to warn your colleagues, customers and users to make all efforts to protect themselves and the organisation whilst using an open internet connection.

The user is also responsible for the consequences of their own behaviour. It has always been thus but the rate of change of threats we are experiencing does create a lag in time between the separate actions of knowing, defending and informing. We see that lag as a risk and the criminals see it as an opportunity.

Make your people aware of threats and the emerging, changing nature of threats. Request that they think about 'secure' usage and help them do this by drawing their attention to, and take note of, the following good advice:

1.Adjust Web site privacy settings to help protect your identity.
2.Be selective when adding contacts.
3.Limit access to your profile.
4.Disable options that you rarely use.
5.Be careful what you click on.
6.Be familiar with security settings and know how to recognize if your account gets hijacked.
7.Understand the process of how to report a hijacked account to the site owner.

Although this is not a comprehensive list, neither is it a guarantee of full protection, it is important to educate our colleagues and users about the possible security risks and the issues they face. Remember, their issues, if unresolved, will quickly become our problems. If we accept and consider them the weakest link in our security chain, what are we doing about it?

The Return of the Scribe - Not just for Pharoahs

These days all hospital doctors have access to electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, bedside ultrasounds and are just a hop skip and a jump away from a CT scanner and MRI machine.

Yet in thsi high tech world, Derek Leiner's job title harks back to the days of the pharaohs, those early dictating people and papyrus scrolls. He's known as a 'scribe' but he doesn't use a quill.

Instead of pens, scribes use laptops as they walk behind the doctors,, going from bed to bed, taking detailed notes that will form part of each patient's electronic medical record.

Experts say the scribes' peculiar role — with one foot in 2009 and one in 2000 B.C. — illustrates hospitals' often bumpy transition from clipboards, paper forms and closets of paper based charts, to high tech digital records.

While most other businesses scrapped their paper files decades ago, hospitals have lagged a long way behind. Several of the health reform proposals being considered would push the industry to convert to electronic records but I fear in the average physician's practice, you are still going to see closets and filing cabinets full of paper charts - et sanctum gloria!

Why is your boss more like a baboon?

Research shows that whether human or baboon, your social or professional rank—your place on the torment or be tormented scale—influences your level of stress and your health, for better or for worse.

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford University neurobiologist who's spent 30 years studying stress and illness in baboons to better understand the effects of stress in humans.

Sapolsky studies baboons because they experience the same kind of social and psychological stress that humans experience. Everything that stresses us—traffic, work, bad relationships—is socially constructed. The same is true for baboons.

We all live with stress—so much, in fact, that we accept chronic stress in our lives as a given, an inescapable force to which we're powerless. We feel we have no control over our stress, and indeed, our stress controls us—our behaviour, our emotions, our health. Some people go so far as to wear stress as a badge of honour. Their stress level, they believe, testifies to their importance, their valour and their work ethic.

By accepting chronic stress as a fact of life, we fail to realise that our resigned attitude toward this biological response will kill us. Chronic stress is an epidemic in American and European society, one that takes a devastating—even deadly—toll on our minds and bodies.

Chronic stress impairs our memory and brain function:

We can't think straight when we're stressed out. It debilitates our immune system and makes us more susceptible to illness. It elevates our blood pressure, causes our arteries to harden and leads to belly fat—all of which increase our risk of heart attack.

It can lead to ulcers, and it hinders our reproductive functions and then there are the headaches and backaches, the insomnia and impotence that stress causes.

Sapolsky notes that we seem to have lost our innate ability to shut off our stress response. We're stressed out all the time. Everything from deadlines to awkward social situations causes our bodies to produce elevated levels of stress hormones that never seem to abate. Even after we've met the deadline, we allow new stressful tasks or situations to enter our lives and replace it.

Our rank at work and in society also impacts our stress level, perhaps not surprisingly. Sapolsky's research suggests that the amount of stress we experience is directly related to our social status.

What was observed in the baboons:

By taking blood samples from them and screening them for stress hormones, Sapolsky found high levels of stress in submissive baboons and low levels of stress in dominant baboons. The reason the dominant baboons had low levels of stress was because they had a lot of leisure time.

The reason the low-ranked baboons had high levels of stress was because the dominant baboons spent their leisure time tormenting them.

Does that sound familiar? I'm sure you've observed similar behaviour —and its consequences—where you work. Ever feel like your boss's primary role is to make your life miserable? Perhaps he has too much time on his hands.

UK Civil Servants
Sapolsky's findings on stress and rank corroborated an earlier study of British civil servants. The British study, which examined the health of British civil service workers, found that low-level civil servants had higher stress levels and were more prone to illness than high-ranking civil servants despite the fact that they all had access to the same healthcare.

Extrapolating from this research we can conclude that lower-level IT workers experience more stress and illness than IT executives, while IT executives are more stressed and sickly than the chief executives. What goes around comes around!

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