Sunday, 21 July 2013

PSYC 1200: A Blended Approach

Dear PSYC 1200 students,

Welcome to the world of psychology! We hope you learn much useful information over the next two terms. The field of psychology is relatively young, compared to other sciences, such as physics and biology. As you’ll discover, the official beginning of psychology as a science did not occur until the late 1800s. Even so, the popularity of psychology as a career path, in various forms, has increased astronomically, since then. As an illustration of psychology’s popularity, departments of psychology frequently host more faculty members than any other department on university campuses. Moreover, vastly more students enrol in Introduction to Psychology classes than almost any other introductory course. In other words, your decision to register in this Introduction to Psychology course is part of a broader trend that has increasingly placed the science of psychology as among the most popular disciplines offered by institutions of higher education. We are very glad to welcome you to PSYC 1200 and hope that you find the topics interesting and informative. We will be discussing issues related to human thought and behaviour. Your best strategy for effectively learning the content of this course is to turn the material that we discuss, as much as possible, into developing a better understanding of yourself and other people that you know. That strategy should definitely help you perform well on examinations and the other components of the course and, more importantly, the knowledge that you accumulate in this course may also help you perform better in life.

With this post, we'd like to introduce you to some novel aspects of our course. Your course's design is often called "blended" because some of the learning occurs in class, but most of the information that you must learn to succeed on exams will be delivered through web-based resources. Although you will have one class per week as you proceed through our course, the lecture material that many exam questions will be based on must be accessed online through our course's Desire2Learn web pages. That is where you will access video recordings of lecture slides overlaid with our voices discussing the essential concepts that you will need to master to do well in PSYC 1200.

You'll hear us on your lecture recordings, but your in-class activities will be led by a knowledgeable and helpful Section Instructor. These classes are not meant to provide you with detailed instruction on the information and concepts that you will find in the online lectures and in the textbook. Instead, they are an opportunity for you to ask questions and for your Section Instructor to demonstrate some important concepts in a way that puts them into a broader context. Since classes are less often for this course, we have designed the classes so that there is plenty of time for students to have their questions answered by a live person. That means the material that they want to cover may not fill a full 50-minute timeslot. You will get the most out of these classes if you listen to the relevant online lectures and read the relevant textbook chapters ahead of time. Then, you can identify details that you find confusing or unclear ahead of time. That would allow you to ask your Section Instructor for explanations and clarifications during the class time. 

THE CLASSES ARE ALSO VERY IMPORTANT BECAUSE THAT IS WHERE YOUR EXAMS WILL TAKE 
PLACE THROUGHOUT THE YEAR

*It should be noted that Tuesday sections are scheduled in 75 minute timeslots, but the classes are designed to fill only a 50-minute timeslot, including some time set aside for students to ask their questions. We designed classes this way to ensure that the content presented in Tuesday sections match the content provided to students registered in Wednesday sections of the course. That means, Tuesday classes will usually be shorter than the official amount of time assigned to those classes, by about 25 minutes. 

The university just happens to schedule Tuesday classes in 75-minute timeslots, because almost all other classes occur either twice per week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or three times per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, those classes would either have two 75-minute timeslots or three 50-minute timeslots, which all works out just perfectly for those courses. It doesn't work that way for our course, since we only have one scheduled class per week.)

Don't worry, we aren't getting away with anything. The lead instructor's absence from your class is simply the role that has been assigned to them by our Department. This year, Dr. Launa Leboe-McGowan will be responsible for coordinating 10 sections of PSYC 1200, consisting of more than 2,500 students. That means you must rely primarily on your very competent Section Instructor to respond to your questions about the course material, as well as about exams and assignments. There are simply too many students for one person to serve as your main contact regarding information about the course. If problems arise, Dr. Leboe-McGowan is in regular contact with Section Instructors. She will be able to ensure things go smoothly by working closely with them, but please do not seek her out as your main source of information about PSYC 1200. Details about your Section Instructors contact information and when and where you can meet with them can be found in the course syllabus. It is essential that you get a syllabus for our course as early in the term as possible and that you read it very carefully. Nearly all of the information that you need to complete PSYC 1200 successfully will be in there.

Please do not take Dr. Leboe-McGowan's absence as a live instructor for your Section of PSYC 1200 personally. Us professors do very much enjoy lecturing in a live format and find it very rewarding to interact with students, like yourself. The thing is that the role of overseeing PSYC 1200 requires presenting the course content electronically. At the moment, doing things this way is our only option. Otherwise, we would not be able to accommodate the large number of students that either want or need to complete PSYC 1200. In other words, absence of the lead instructor from your class is not a sign of laziness. Supervising a course that serves hundreds upon hundreds of students, each year, is quite challenging and time-consuming. It is simply the role of the instructor of this course is to act as coordinator of the 10 sections and to leave the classroom activities in the hands of our very competent Section Instructors. Since they are responsible only for a much smaller number of PSYC 1200 students, they are in the best position to provide you with the information that you need. 


We hope you get useful information out of this class and wish you all the best in your studies this year!

Saturday, 20 July 2013

About the Instructor


DR. LAUNA LEBOE-MCGOWAN received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1997 from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and received a Master of Arts degree in 2006 and a Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Manitoba’s Department of Psychology. Dr. Leboe-McGowan joined the Department of Psychology as a member of the faculty in 2009. To support her graduate studies, she received generous scholarships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Manitoba Graduate Fellowships program. Since 2003, Dr. Leboe-McGowan has published 9 articles in scholarly journals. Her primary areas of expertise include auditory cognition and perceptual integration of visual and auditory inputs. Currently, her research activities are funded by a five-year grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Wednesday, 10 July 2013

Blended PSYC 1200 for Osborne House


For the past couple of years, we have been offering PSYC 1200 in a blended format, as will quickly become apparent to all of you students who are enrolled in one of our 10 sections. The "web-based" part of the "blended" set-up mainly has to do with our delivery of lecture materials through on-line recordings. In class, students should also attend classes once per week to experience demonstrations and activities that are meant to bring the lecture and textbook material to life a bit. The classes also provide an opportunity for students to get their questions answered about material presented in online lectures and in the textbook. Finally, these classes are where you will write your exams. As mentioned in an earlier post, these weekly classes are led by a Section Instructor, so students actually do get contact with a live person with expertise in the course material and an understanding of the course's structure. Perhaps the downside is that students will not regularly have live contact with the instructors (us) whom they hear describing concepts on the lecture recordings. Often, the gain of one thing (the capacity to offer PSYC 1200 to hundreds of students under constraints having to do with the cost and availability of course instructors) results in the loss of something else (live contact with the people who are in charge of designing the course and presenting the lecture material).

In any case, there was a recent MacLean's article about this new trend of to trying to accommodate large classes by blending online with in-person instruction. Our PSYC 1200 class was specifically discussed in the article, the link to which is here:
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/04/20/where-did-the-prof-go/


People are free to argue about whether blended learning approaches to teaching a course like Introduction to Psychology are good or bad, although there is some research suggesting that blended approaches can actually produce better outcomes for students than more traditional approaches (e.g., Wang & Newlin, 2000, Journal of Educational Psychology). Our experience is that things have gone pretty well. We wouldn't yet make any bold claims that our way of offering PSYC 1200 is better than the traditional, live-person lecture method. We are still trying to make our course better, year by year. We may well get to a point in which folks prefer our PSYC 1200 course to others. We certainly do hope that we can achieve that. 

One thing that occurred to us, now that we've offered PSYC 1200 in this way for a couple of years, is that there are obvious practical challenges associated with offering a course to 2,500+ students, but there are also unique opportunities. For one thing, we are able to reach a staggering (and, to be quite honest, intimidating) number of people such that the shear numbers involved might provide an avenue for doing some good for the community. 

What we've come up with, starting last year, is an effort to bind the various issues in our Intro Psyc course to a social problem that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as it should. Moreover, this social problem doesn't even receive as much financial support as it should. So, here it is: We think it would be fantastic if Winnipeg as a community could claim to provide adequate support to women and children who are victims of domestic abuse. Right now, it can't, and that is completely unacceptable. 

In Winnipeg, Osborne House Inc. provides a safe shelter for women and children whose safety is at risk on account of domestic violence. Over the past few years, this organization has slipped off the radar of what folks consider to be worthwhile causes to support, but hopefully that situation is improving. The organization has recently experienced a 75% drop in donations,  although we hope that all of the information about the financial troubles of Osborne House has helped generate a renewed commitment to the organization. All donations to Osborne House feed directly into operating costs of Osborne House's programs and not at all to the costs of advertising or fundraising. In other words, a very high proportion of donations actually go to pay for the services provided by the Osborne House (specifically, 100%). It isn't all that common for charities to devote such a high percentage of the cash that you give them to the actual providing of services. Even so, donations are very much in decline in support of Osborne House and requests by the organization for the City of Winnipeg to meet their funding shortfall have been rejected. It looks like the primary organization for promoting and helping to ensure the safety of women and children who find themselves at risk of violence in their home must seek support from sources other than our municipal government.

If it so wishes, the City of Winnipeg has the right to set its priorities and to de-prioritize the safety of its most vulnerable citizens. We  hope that a sufficient proportion of the rest of Winnipeg has different priorities and will choose to support Osborne House, Inc so that they may provide their very important services. We've taken a description of the organization and their stated goals from their Facebook page and posted them here:

About Osborne House

Osborne House is a Winnipeg non-profit shelter for women and children escaping domestic abuse. It provides a safe place to stay and rebuild independence.

Mission
Osborne House empowers women and their children, who are experiencing domestic abuse, by providing them with a safe and supportive environment through residential and non-residential programs and services.

Company Overview
Osborne House is one of the oldest women’s shelters in the world.

Osborne House, though not yet so named, was one of the first shelters to open in Canada. In 1972, a small pilot project funded by the Secretary of State was begun under the management of the Grey Nuns. The program and services offered were developed to serve the crisis needs of young women, 18 – 29 years of age, seeking to move from a dependent to an independent living situation.

In September 1974, the facility moved to a new location and the program focus changed to a 3 day crisis shelter for abused women and their children. By November, the Osborne Street address was available for 10 women and children.

By 1980, Osborne House had moved two more times and had survived a number of funding crises. The shelter was a pioneer in many ways and it resulted in the development and acceptance of spousal abuse as a community issue and responsibility.

In 1985, it became evident that the current facility had become inadequate and could no longer accommodate the range of programs and services now offered through Osborne House. In 1989, Osborne House moved to its present facility, which can accommodate 45 women and children and is the largest shelter in Canada.

Osborne House was for many years considered a forerunner and a model for Domestic Violence Shelter Facilities both in Canada and far beyond. Its commitment to continuing on as a pioneer and positive example has never waned.

Description

Osborne House now has a PayPal account to accept donations! Donations can be sent via PayPal to barbarajudt@osbornehouseinc.ca. 

Osborne House is a registered charity so tax receipts can be e-mailed/mailed to you if you donate via PayPal.

General Information
General Line and Donations: (204) 942-7373
24 hour Crisis Line: (204) 942-3052

Philosophy of Osborne House

• Violence and all types of abuse are unacceptable in our society.
• Women should not be forced to remain in a violent relationship due to lack of safe alternatives.
• Women have the right to be informed of alternatives and to make self-determined choices within the context of their own lives.
• Services are to be provided to women and children in a manner which respects client’s confidentiality and the right to privacy.
• Women have the right to receive services which are sensitive to and respect their cultural and linguistic heritage, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.
• Services are provided in a supportive, non-judgmental environment.
• Education, training, and prevention are essential to end the generational cycle of violence.
• The delivery of enhanced services is achieved through the partnership of dedicated staff, volunteers, student field practicum placements, and work experience placements.

Goals of Osborne House

• To ensure a safe environment for women and their children, who have experienced domestic violence, on a 24 hours, 7 days a week basis.
• To provide women with information and support in making informed choices by helping them recognize and access available options.
• To assist women in developing and implementing an individual plan toward personal growth, increased independence, and empowerment, and toward living in a non-abusive environment.
• To assist women with identifying their needs and helping women access resources, programs, and services that meet their (and their children’s) identified needs.
• To assist women in establishing support networks in their communities.
• To increase women’s ability to protect themselves.
• To raise awareness and increase understanding of domestic violence issues within the community at large and among other social service providers.

We think that's all good stuff, so we are going to help in the best way that we can. What we intend to do is to incorporate a discussion of domestic violence and the consequences it has for individuals and families within the context of the diverse topics discussed in our Introduction to Psychology course. These topics  include biological, behavioural, cognitive, social, and clinical perspectives, among other things. In a series of brief articles, as we relate domestic violence to these various topics within psychology, we will post our writings here and elsewhere. We will encourage students to read them by embedding questions about the articles into our exams. Thus, you can expect about 3-4 questions about the articles we post to appear on each of our PSYC 1200 exams, throughout the year. With these articles, we hope that people might be inspired to help Osborne House or other, related organizations. It would be most excellent if any of the many students enrolled in PSYC 1200 donate cash or supplies or choose to volunteer for Osborne House as a result of our directing their attention to this issue. 

Already, Nelson Education, the publisher of the textbook we use for our PSYC 1200 course (Weiten & McCann's Psychology: Themes & Variations, 3rd Canadian Edition) has generously agreed to donate 75 cents to Osborne House for each new Weiten & McCann textbook that U of Manitoba PSYC 1200 students purchase this year. This donation did not increase the normal price of the textbook, whatsoever. It is a generous donation by Nelson Education in support of our efforts to raise awareness about the serious problem of domestic violence and the important work being carried out by Osborne House Inc. 

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

The Problem of Intimate Partner Domestic Violence


Like many topics, domestic violence is not easy to write about or read about, mainly because most humans tend to feel bad when they learn about others’ painful experiences. That bad feeling is called empathy. Empathy involves experiencing, to some degree, someone else’s thoughts and/or feelings. If you’ve ever been moved by a character’s tragic or heart-wrenching experience while watching a movie or reading a book, that’s empathy. People vary on their tendency to experience empathy. For example, one of the signature traits of people with Antisocial Personality Disorder (people who are more popularly called psychopaths or sociopaths) is the incapacity to experience empathy.

Even people who have fully functioning empathy mechanisms can avoid such uncomfortable feelings in several ways. One way is active avoidance of knowledge about other peoples’ pain and perspective. A person can’t feel empathy if they don’t expose themselves to information having to do with other peoples’ painful experiences. Also, a person won’t feel much empathy if they decide to view someone else’s pain as well-deserved. Painful feelings of empathy can be halted by the (often unfair and cruel) tendency for people to blame victims for the horrible event or events that have happened to them. That way, victims of abuse get doubly-victimized: once from the assault they experienced and again through people’s lack of compassion and tendency to consider the victim as having “had it coming to them”. Victim-blamers get to sidestep their own fears and the sad feelings that come from empathy by interpreting tragedies that others experience as due to some defect in people who have been victimized.

A psychologist does not have the luxury of managing their own emotional reactions by ignoring other peoples’ pain or dismissing it as somehow deserved or exaggerated. A scientist of human behaviour could choose to only study the sweetness of humans, but they’ll be left with a very incomplete understanding of what humanity is all about. Psychology is the SCIENCE of human thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. To be fully competent, a psychologist must face the dark side of the human experience head-on, and must disengage whatever mechanisms reside within them that would otherwise make them feel better and safer about the horrible things that do happen to people on a daily basis. At the same time, psychologists must be concerned about their own compassion for victims of crime and abuse distorting their conclusions about the nature and motives of criminals, abuse perpetrators, and their victims. (For example, in defense of victims, it is possible to oversimplify abusers as just evil people. Doing so makes it more difficult to understand what causes a person to be an abuser, in the first place. Understanding that can have the useful consequence of making it possible to help abusers stop abusing people or it might help in the development of strategies to prevent people from becoming abusers before they start.) To be legitimately scientific about issues that naturally generate strong emotions, psychologists must be objective and must try, as much as possible, to base conclusions on facts; to not go very far beyond what is known to be true when generating theories about humanity. The main purpose of these posts is to give you a taste of the knowledge that psychology can contribute to making sense about a difficult, but also an extraordinarily traumatizing and costly social problem.

When some psychologist is interested in researching a topic, they need to narrow things down a bit. Suppose our main interest is in understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of violent behaviour engaged in by humans. That topic is might be too large to make any progress with, given limits on time and money. We’ve chosen to focus on domestic violence, so that emphasis eliminates acts of violent aggression engaged in by armies, street gangs, schoolyard bullies, etc. Those are all important social concerns, but we and our readers don’t have the time to deal with all of that, right now. Even the topic of domestic violence might be too big and complicated, since researchers publish thousands of research articles on the different facets of domestic violence, each year. (Part of the challenge of conducting research in an area of psychology is getting up-to-speed on what is already known and what sorts of studies have already been done.) Consequently, we’ve decided to orient mainly to intimate partner violence, which eliminates the need to thoroughly investigate the vast amount of published research on domestic violence involving the abuse of children. Can you see how painful psychological research can be? Do you feel any empathy for the psychologist who must, for practical purposes, set aside investigating the very alarming and real problem of child abuse to get a better handle on intimate partner abuse? (If it makes you feel better, reader, the pain of studying one important thing and not another is not all that comparable to the trauma of experiencing domestic violence, so don’t feel too bad.)

Stubbs and Fife (2012, p. 51) describe Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) as a “public health epidemic”. Both men and women can be victims of IPV, but an estimated 85% of IPV involves abuse of women by men. For example, in Canada 83% of spousal assaults involve attacks on women by men (Statistics Canada, 2009). There are many instances in which people assume the existence of gender differences that are actually non-existent or too small to have much practical relevance; this is not one of those instances. Risk factors for women include being unmarried, younger than 35 years old, and having an annual income of less than $15,000. These factors only somewhat elevate the risk. IPV is something that women may experience, regardless as to their marital status, age, or income. In the United States, about 5 million women are assaulted by their intimate partners each year. Intimate partner assaults directly result in the death of 17,000 people each year in the United States, and most of those people are women. To put the homicide aspect in perspective, 1/3 of female victims of homicide in the United States are murdered by their intimate partners. The cost of these assaults is financial for society, in addition to causing extraordinary physical and emotional harm to the victim of IPV. IPV-related medical and mental health treatment costs more than $4 million, annually, in the United States and costs victims of IPV (and the companies they work for) a total of approximately 8 million lost work days per year (Stubbs & Fife, 2012).

As for Canada, with 40,200 incidents in 2007, spousal violence was responsible for 12% of all police-reported violent crime. Four times as many women (51) than men (14) were killed by a current or former spouse (Statistics Canada, 2009).  

In subsequent posts, we will discuss the nature, causes, and consequences of Intimate Partner Violence from the various perspectives that psychology provides, beginning with the neuropsychological perspective.

References

Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile. (2009). Statistics Canada: Canada's national statistical agency / Statistique Canada : Organisme statistique national du Canada. Retrieved July 17, 2012, from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/85-224-x2009000-eng.pdf.

Stubbs, D., & Fife, R. S. (2012). Intimate partner violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Saturday, 6 July 2013

A Biological Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence

From the perspective of practically every psychological scientist, human thoughts, experiences, and behaviours derive from the human nervous system. The structure of the human nervous system, itself, depends on the genetics that each person acquires from their parents and the experiences they have. Our brains consist of millions of neurons and the moment-to-moment electrical activity of those neurons is roughly equivalent to everything we are and controls everything that we think and do. In that way, all of psychology adopts a biological perspective, but a researchers’ emphasis might be at a level that is either very close or somewhat at a distance from the actual biological processes that determine who we are and what we do. Biological psychologists stay closely oriented to the genetic and neurological processes that underlie human experience and behaviour, so we may as well begin there with our series of discussions on IPV. It is also a convenient place to start, since our PSYC 1200 course begins with an overview of the human nervous system, after some introductory discussion about what psychology is, psychology’s history, and the sorts of research methods that psychologists rely upon.

A common approach to violence, whether intimate partner violence or otherwise, is to conceive of a tendency to engage in violent behaviour as reflecting a neurological defect. For instance, many psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, can be understood as emerging from imbalances in the chemical composition of the brain. A neuron may stimulate the firing of another neuron (or it may inhibit the firing of another neuron) by releasing chemicals, called neurotransmitters, into the gap between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. That way, the availability of one or more neurotransmitters determines how the brain functions. Too little or too much of a certain neurotransmitter in a person’s brain may disrupt that person’s mental processes and their behaviour. Consuming drugs, like cocaine, marijuana or Prozac, influence experience and behaviour by changing the amount of neurotransmitters that are available to stimulate neural impulses in a person’s brain. Perhaps IPV could be explained by structural defects or chemical imbalances in a person’s brain? Unfortunately, this approach has led to some overly aggressive treatments to control the behaviour of people who are prone to violent outbursts. Several decades ago, efforts to “cure” people with violent tendencies included electroconvulsive shock therapy (sessions in which a person has an electric current passed through their brain, Eller, 2006).

The rather simplistic (and incorrect) theory that motivated electroconvulsive shock therapy was that problems with the functioning of the brain could be fixed by the ordered electrical impulses provided by a community’s electrical power grid. Another approach was to sever certain parts of the brain from other parts or cut out other parts of the brain entirely. For example, a common treatment for those prone to violence and other erratic behaviour was to sever the frontal lobes of the brain from the rest of the brain. This procedure was called a “frontal lobotomy”. The procedure succeeded in eliminating violent behaviours, but mainly because it reduced a person’s tendency to engage in any behaviour at all (Eller, 2006).

The early days of psychology are filled with very stupid ideas and the reckless application of unverified theories, which often caused much more severe problems for people than they fixed. Unfortunately, in the name of psychology, there are people who still apply idiotic theories that have no scientific merit, causing a great deal of harm to people in the process. One of the biggest problems humans face, including some scientists who are meant to know better, is that we can develop strong beliefs in the absence of any scientific evidence and then act as though those beliefs are absolutely true. Acting as though false things are true, even when a person has the best of intentions, can be an extraordinary waste of time, money, and human lives. As just one example, quite a few depressed stay-at-home mothers and even some highly energetic children were given frontal lobotomies as a supposed cure, but the main outcome for them was permanently disabling brain damage.

There are people who do appear to have such dysfunctional brains that it makes them violent and neurological defects may explain some of the instances of IPV that occur. At the moment, treatment for people who are prone to violent outbursts involves prescription of medications, such as antipsychotics, that block receptors in the brain that receive the neurotransmitter, Dopamine. To make a long story short, dopamine pathways in the brain play an important role in mental stimulation and aggressive behaviours, such as violent actions. However, antipsychotics are mainly used to treat people with a severe mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, for which violent actions are quite indiscriminate. Intimate partner violence, most often, is not indiscriminate. The violence is focused on one individual, and it’s quite personal. People who engage in IPV are frequently not violent toward people, in general. Their violence tends to be aimed primarily at the people closest to them, which will naturally include their intimate partner. Although all of human psychology originates from the activity of the brain, in most cases it is not sensible to seek a neurological defect for the cause of IPV. Instead, it is more likely that IPV emerges from neurological processes that are, sadly, quite normal in humans. From that point of view, the evolution of humans as a species may have incorporated a natural tendency toward IPV, supposing that there exists a certain combination of environmental conditions. Those who are most likely to adopt that kind of perspective call themselves Evolutionary Psychologists, which is actually a sub-category of biological psychologists, who emphasize the role of inherited, genetic influences on human psychology (Eller, 2006).

Evolutionary psychologists may address the question of IPV by pointing out that violence is a prominent component of the behaviour of many species, and humans are just another species that has a tendency to engage in violence. The prevalence of violence throughout nature suggests that the tendency to be violent is something that we have inherited from our ancestors because it must have served them some useful purpose. Many thousands of years ago, the capacity to engage in violence must have made our ancestors more successful at surviving and reproducing, thereby allowing them to ensure that their genes would get transmitted inside of all of us, all the way into 2012. Hunting is a form of violence and that capacity has had obvious benefits for us and our ancestors, not to mention all of the other species that rely on hunting. Being able to fight when threatened is a form of violence and one that is quite useful for members of a species who would prefer to survive an encounter with a predator or an assailant. When a person wants something that some other person has, there is always the option of taking it by force, which is clearly something that would have provided our ancestors with a competitive advantage. Murder has been observed in many nonhuman species from insects to birds to nonhuman primates, like macaques (Eller, 2006). A capacity for violence should probably be thought of as something that exists within each of us as biological organisms, rather than as something that could only emerge from a diseased mind. All of us can quite naturally be violent and simply await the conditions that stimulate that kind of reaction from us. But, why is violence against intimate partners such a common form of violence in humans and why are men so much more likely engage in that kind of violence?

In response to those questions, someone could argue that a tendency to be aggressive depends on the amount of testosterone in a person’s system and, in humans, men have higher levels of testosterone than females. The problem with that response is that it doesn’t explain WHY men almost always tend to have more testosterone than women. The source of that difference in hormone level is ultimately genetic, which means that human males evolved to have more testosterone than human women for some reason having to do with it being more important for males’ success at reproducing than it is for females’ success at reproducing. The driving force behind human biological traits and those of all other species on the planet is “reproductive fitness”. The more offspring that a member of a species can produce that are in good enough shape to survive and reproduce on their own, the more likely it is that the genes possessed by that member will be represented in future generations of the species.

 (To anticipate that certain folks will have a pre-existing, strong dislike for the “Evolution by Natural Selection” approach to biology, the reader might expect us to say something as a hedge, like, “from the evolutionary perspective, reproductive fitness is what matters”. We won’t be doing that because our course is about a science and the science of psychology presumes that humans and all other species on Earth appeared on the scene gradually over the course of millions of years, with the traits of species determined by their capacity to allow members of the species to reproduce more than other members of the same species. These are the guiding principles that nearly all scientists have used for many decades to understand the biological species that exist on Earth. To entertain any alternatives would be intellectually dishonest of us and would be nothing more than cheap pandering. Traits inherited genetically through the process of evolution may only get us so far in understanding humans. There's also experiences and a person's environment to consider. However, there is, by now, no doubt in the minds of scientists that understanding humans requires understanding the evolutionary processes that gave us the DNA that we all have in common.)

An evolutionary psychologist would explain gender differences in violent behaviour with reference to how the capacity to be violent provides greater reproductive benefits for male than for female humans. The idea is that the reproductive success of females is more or less the same, whether or not they engage in violent behaviour. Female humans can only have so many children, anyway, since it demands so much time and energy for women to develop children inside of them and then take care of them after they are born. In the environment we all evolved from, if a woman was physically capable of reproducing, securing enough mating partners to achieve success at reproduction is very easy. By contrast, for male humans, there is virtually no limit to the number of children they could (theoretically) father. The only required cost of producing a child, from a males’ perspective, is one tiny sperm and contributing that doesn’t really take very long. For a woman, the required cost of producing a child is an egg, sustaining the developing baby for many months, facing the health risks associated with giving birth to a child, nursing, ensuring her infant’s and her own survival needs during those very vulnerable years as the child grows and slowly becomes able to be more independent, and so on.

In the primitive world we evolved in, although the sky was the limit for males, as far as reproduction went, the downside was that it was quite possible for only a few males to monopolize all of the females, leaving the rest of the males with no mating and reproduction opportunities. This situation is common in primate species, such as gorillas, in which one alpha male can dominate all of the other males and serve as the primary mate for all of the females in the group. An alpha gorilla doesn’t get to mate with all of the female gorillas by being polite. He earns that right by being the strongest and most viciously frightening gorilla. Violence maintains his high status and this kind of desperate competition for women to mate with was also the context in which human males evolved. Among humans, males tend to be more violent than females because being violent provided men with a major reproductive advantage over other men. It is understandable why men are so much more likely to fight and kill one another than women are. Historically, about two-thirds of all murders in the United States are committed by men against other men (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2012). Even now, competition is fierce and, from the evolutionary psychology perspective, the ultimate goal for men, generally speaking, is to defeat other men for access to female mates. Evolutionarily speaking, women represent the reproductive resources that males need to transmit their genes. Once a man has attracted a woman to mate with, control over that resource is a priority and violence is one tool that a man may use to maintain that control.

There is an unease that naturally emerges when describing this evolutionary approach to understanding IPV. If such a proneness to violence embedded within the male DNA, what can we do about it? Fortunately, humans are much too sophisticated to be ruled completely by these inherited traits. Our evolutionary past means that men face a challenge that women do not face to the same degree and they must deliberately work to overcome it. Failure to overcome it risks their causing physical harm or even death to the people closest to them. The challenge for men is to overcome the tendency that evolution has instilled in them to treat women as property and to conceive of a woman’s role as to serve merely as receptacles for reproduction. A person’s experiences and social context can either facilitate the worst and most destructive parts of us humans that we have inherited from our ancestors or it can cause those traits to remain dark, primitive parts of us that we never express. A place like Canada has many mechanisms that tend to discourage IPV, relative to what humans would be likely to experience in the ancient world in which we evolved. We have a list of official crimes and punishments for those crimes that make it risky for people to violently attack their intimate partners. There are less formal risks involved, as well. We are a society that generally (or should we say “kind of”) abhors violence and many of us would shun a person for engaging in IPV.

In part, these restraints emerge from historically quite novel cultural values that favour gender equality over the more traditional view of women as property and as inherently inferior. (As one of hundreds of historical examples we may have chosen, the North Carolina Supreme Court dismissed a complaint against a certain Mr. Black for assaulting his wife in 1964 even though they were separated at the time, on grounds that “a husband is responsible for the acts of the wife, and he is required to govern his household, and for that purpose the law permits him to use towards his wife such a degree of force as necessary…” (Klein, 2004). Note that the amount of force deemed necessary tended to be left entirely up to the husband, making every male head of household his own sort of totalitarian dictator. We should be grateful to some of our most recent ancestors for dismissing these ideas and pulling us all out of the mud. The problem is that the genes remain and they support a persistence of gender discrimination and a persistent willingness by a fair number of men (not the majority, but a sizeable minority) to use violence to control “their woman”. To be fair, there is some much smaller group of women who have the same notions about “their men”. An interest in having power over others, and a willingness to use violence to maintain that power, is not exclusive to men.

Neither biological nor evolutionary psychology can provide much guidance in addressing this social problem, because they merely explain why humans are capable of violence and why some men (and even some women) will be violent toward their intimate partners. It is clear that most people can be encouraged to suppress whatever violent urges they might experience. Luckily, most people don’t assault their intimate partners, despite what their genes might encourage. That’s encouraging and suggests that a person’s experiences can be constructed in a way that will make them very unlikely to act violently toward their loved ones. Perhaps there are experiences that a person can have that would override the tendency to think about the world in a way that encourages violent action toward an intimate partner, such as viewing an intimate partner as property to be controlled by any means necessary? How experiences determine an individual’s behaviour is the primary emphasis of the Behaviorist approach to psychology, whereas the investigation of mental processes and how they guide human behaviour is the main focus of the Cognitive Psychology perspective. Those two approaches will provide the basis for our next two posts on IPV.  


References:

Klein, A. R. (2004). The criminal justice response to domestic violence. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.

Eller, J. D. (2006). Violence and culture: a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach. Southbank, Victoria, Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth.

Friday, 5 July 2013

Perception, Violence, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves


The basic premise of our discussion about sensation (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and so on) is that our sensory organs deliver notes to our brains about external energy (light, sound, pressure, chemicals in the air, etc.) and our brains go to work telling a story about the world. Perception is the word we use to describe the story that our brains tell about what’s going on out there. We relate the notes that we receive from the sensory organs to experiences we’ve had before and make some sense of them that way. Sometimes the sensory inputs are not information about the world, directly, but are spoken or written descriptions of it that other people provide us. We can accept those descriptions as reality or we can reject them as incorrect, based on any number of reasons, like whether we consider the source credible or not or whether those descriptions are consistent with our own personal experiences. The bottom line is that whatever we perceive to be true is something that we construct. Arriving at some perceptions of truth occur quickly and without us using much mental energy. Other perceptions of truth we develop very slowly and painstakingly over the course of a lifetime, accepting certain perspectives temporarily and then revising them as new information comes available to us. Whether perception occurs quickly and easily (e.g., being able to tell the difference between a coffee mug and a flower pot) or slowly and deliberately (e.g., figuring out whether one is a cat person, a dog person, or a people person), it is all just a story. It’s our best guess based on what information a person has available to them and errors in perception can and do occur often, because the information any one person has available to them is ridiculously incomplete and our personal experiences and narrow viewpoints introduce biases that can lead our perceptions astray. For better and worse, these narrow perspectives emerge from the particular places we come from, the perceptions we inherited from the people who helped educate and raise us, and the tendency for us all to perceive things in ways that make us feel better about ourselves and that make us feel superior to others. These biases can be minimized by doing things like making reference to scientific consensus and evidence and, for those of you who are interested, here are some of Dr. J. Leboe-McGowan’s comments about that:


The contents of that post will not be tested on any exams, but 2-3 questions for Exam 2 will be drawn from the text within this post.

So, perceptions are stories that we tell ourselves. Although there is some chance that they are completely riddled with error, they do guide the decisions we all make and the things that we do. This essentially constructive, creative story-telling nature of perception that all humans share helps to determine all instances of violence that humans engage in, which is why we are making such a big deal about it in the context of a post about Intimate Partner Violence.

Breaking a rule established in an earlier post, we consider it useful to adopt a perspective that is a broader than the focus on IPV permits. We want to discuss an event that we are a bit reluctant to talk about, mainly because of the deep respect and admiration we have for the person involved and the extremely horrible and traumatic experience that they went through. We do not want to exploit the experiences of this person. Instead, we sincerely hope that this post will succeed only in honouring them and expressing our sadness for what happened to her. We think it is a worthwhile goal to try to understand the worst instances of human behaviour. Not talking about such events and not trying to understand them at all is certainly not going to get us very far in reducing the chances of those events happening in the future.

Lara Logan is an extraordinarily brave journalist who commonly rushed into the most unstable parts of the world to deliver her stories.  For example, she was embedded with American combat troops during their operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. People like Lara Logan courageously risk their safety and lives to allow people like us and most of you, who mainly find out about the world by sitting at home and watching television, to become aware of events that we would not be made aware of any other way. Needless to say, Lara Logan is a hero, and that is the only sensible perception a rational person could have about her. In February of 2011, Lara Logan was reporting for CBS from Cairo, Egypt. She was reporting on the Arab Spring uprising, which is already regarded as an extremely important event in world history. After delivering a broadcast from Tahrir Square, which was the major site of protests that ultimately forced the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Lara Logan was ripped away from her team by about 200-300 men. This vicious mob then proceeded to sexually assault her in a more horrific way than it is even possible for most of us to imagine. Here is a link to a Youtube clip of Lara Logan’s 60 Minutes interview several months after the assault took place, in which she describes what happened to her, in her own words:


Our perception is that Lara Logan is among the most admirable humans in existence. Her job was to bring people information that they were unable to get themselves. Most of the people who do have the time and money to go out and get information about happenings in the most dangerous parts of the world would choose not to. It’s extraordinarily hard work and it’s too scary for most. That is our perception of Lara Logan and there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to her that could ever change that. What about the perceptions of the men who attacked her? What is in the minds of those men that would compel them to try to destroy her in the most degrading way possible? Something we might sensibly assume is that a person cannot physically attack someone that they truly respect and admire, so we can safely assume that the perceptions of the men who attacked Lara Logan couldn’t be more different from our perceptions of her.

There really are only two main reasons why people behave violently toward other people. First, people engage in violence toward another person because they PERCEIVE them as some type of threat. Second, people engage in violence toward another person as a way to impose their will. They do it to control the behaviour of that person or the behaviour of observers. We suppose that those men in Tahrir Square attacked Lara Logan for both of these reasons, and the reason they assaulted her are not all that different from what often causes violence in the context of intimate relationships. Lara Logan is a respected woman of status and her occupation deviates from traditional roles of women, not only in the Middle East, but also in Western countries. (Manitoba was ahead of the curve, since it was the first Province in Canada to acknowledge that women should have the right to vote in elections. Even so, Manitoba didn’t formally permit women to exercise this right until 1916, which isn’t really very long ago in the grand scheme of things.) Many people all over the world are content with the way power has tended to be allocated throughout most of human history, in that men tend to have more wealth and power and opportunities to acquire wealth and power than women. For this type of people, a woman like Lara Logan is a symbol of processes of reform (i.e., the global movement toward gender equality that has been going on for some time now) that they find both frightening and disgusting. Nevertheless, it may not be simply fear and disgust that would motivate that kind of violent assault. Another motive for that kind of attack is strategy. Destroying someone like Lara Logan sends a message to all other women who might wish to participate fully in the public life of their society. It might succeed in discouraging them from filling roles in their society that have traditionally been filled by men. We suggest that it is the perceptions of Lara Logan held by those men in Tahrir Square and their perceptions of what ought to be done about women like her that guided their actions. We also expect that many acts of violence that occur between partners in an intimate relationship emerge from the perceptions of the participants in that relationship that have to do with power and control.

We want to leave you with the following, regarding the consequence of a violent attack by one person (or persons) against some other person (or persons) who have no desire to engage in violence. whether or not the violence occurs in the context of an intimate partnership. Our perception is that it is completely impossible for a person to lose any dignity from being victimized by a violent physical or sexual assault. A person can only gain dignity from going through hell and surviving it. Our perception is that, in any instance of violence, the assailant is the only actor who suffers a loss of dignity, no matter how extreme they are in their efforts to degrade their victim. If a person cannot achieve their goals without violence, we perceive them as not worthy of achieving those goals and their need to resort to violence is pathetic and the ultimate expression of a weakness and defect within themselves, at least on every dimension that matters. 

Thursday, 4 July 2013

The Role of Learning in Intimate Partner Violence

Unit 4 of our PSYC 1200 course covers Principle of Learning and Variations in Consciousness. In this post, we will try to describe how the causes and consequences of IPV arise from known principles of learning, although learning may combine with genetic influences to cause individuals to act violently toward intimate partners. 

(Behavioural Genetics is a scientific field founded on the idea that genetic factors can make a person more or less prone to engage in certain behaviours, such as violent assaults, but that a person's experiences also help to determine whether these genetic tendencies actually lead them to engage in those behaviours and under what circumstances.)

Observational Learning

As far as learning principles go, a significant concern  is that a person's tendency to cause harm to their intimate partner will get passed down from one generation to the next through a process called observational learning (also known as social learning, Bandura, 1989). For example, if children witness incidents of violence engaged in by one of their parents toward the other, what they learn is that violence is a component of intimate adult relationships. The outcome is that there will be a greater likelihood for those children to grow up and either engage in violence toward their romantic partners or expect as a routine part of life that they will be a target of violent assaults by their intimate partner. (This process is called "intergenerational transmission of violence". Some people refer to this transmission as the "cycle of violence", because children who witness violence and experience it within their families bring the violence back around again when they are older.) 

Psychological studies confirm this link between exposure to violence in childhood and a host of negative consequences for those individuals (and the rest of society) as they develop into adulthood.  The tendency for parents to use physical punishment to control the behaviour of children is known to cause a rather lengthy list of short- and long-term problems for children. Children who routinely experience physical punishment by their parents are more physically aggressive, they tend to have lower levels of concern or empathy for others, they are less likely to follow rules and behave pro-socially at home and in school, and they have less affection and respect for their parents (Gershoff, 2002; Graham-Behmann, 2009). In adulthood, people who experienced physical punishment during childhood tend to be more physically aggressive, they are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour, they are more likely to develop mental health problems, and they are more likely to perpetrate violence against their own children and intimate partners. Boys who witness their father engage in domestic violence are more likely to engage in domestic violence as adults. Thus, as a consequence of peoples' tendency to learn through watching others, violence has a tendency of generating yet more violence (Cappel & Heiner, 1990; Corvo & Carpenter, 2000; Dutton, 1995; Hyde-Nolan & Juliao, 2012; Kaufman & Zigler, 1987; Jackson, Thompson, & Christiansen, 1999; Marshall & Rose, 1990).

The Problems with Physical Punishment as a Technique of Behavioural Control

In our lectures on operant conditioning (see also Chapter 6 of the textbook, Weiten & McCann, 2013), we discussed that negative and positive punishments provide fairly effective ways to stop people from engaging in certain behaviours. The whole point of speeding tickets and prison sentences is to discourage people from doing illegal things in the future and there wouldn't be much hope of preventing people from committing those crimes without having those kinds of punishments as a threat. A problem occurs when punishments are more severe than necessary, which physical punishments tend to be, since the surprising truth is that the severity of a punishment often does not increase how successful it is at discouraging people from engaging in whatever behaviour we want them to stop doing. Also, even though physical punishment can discourage people from engaging in undesirable behaviours, the downsides should discourage anyone from relying on it as a method for controlling the behaviour of others. For one thing, anyone who experiences a physical attack will most certainly be cautious about doing whatever it was that set their attacker off, at least as long as that person is nearby. However, doing the right thing out of fear of getting hurt is not quite the same as following the rules because of their inherent value. We want people to refrain from cheating and stealing because they agree that it is unfair and wrong to cheat and steal. That's called doing the right thing for intrinsic motives; because doing the right thing feels good and doing the wrong thing gives people an uncomfortable guilty feeling. If a person's only motive not to cheat or steal is their selfish interest in avoiding physical punishment, there will be no restraint on their cheating and stealing whenever the threat of physical punishment is low. In addition, it's best if children do the right thing because they love and respect their parents and want to be like them. It is very challenging to retain affection for someone who beats you, even if they tell you that they're giving you the beating for your own good. 

Physical punishments have these potential downsides  even when parents apply them rationally and consistently and only when their children do something bad. The situation becomes a great deal worse when parents physically punish their child for bad behaviour sometimes, but then fail to react at all when the child does the same thing at other times. For example, suppose that a parent spanks their child for drawing on the wall on one day, but then ignores the same behaviour on the next day. Moreover, suppose that a parent physically punishes their child for no particular reason at all, sometimes, because they are under stress at work or for whatever reason that has nothing to do with the child's behaviour. These kinds of inconsistencies are a disaster for a child's development because it makes the child's behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour unpredictable. It can lead to two unpleasant outcomes. First, the child may stop doing anything at all, since they have no way to know what actions will provoke a physical punishment and what actions will not. Second, the child will have no motive to act in appropriate ways, since behaving badly may or may not result in a physical punishment and not behaving badly may result in the same painful consequence.

All of these comments are to establish that physical attacks are both wrong, to the extent that they cause pain and physical harm, and they are a horribly stupid way to maintain a long-term relationship with a loved one. An abusive spouse may succeed in controlling their partner's behaviour, but they may well lose their partner in the process. This outcome can occur quite literally, as we've indicated before. Physical violence can cause permanent damage or even result in death for women (and, less commonly, men) who find themselves in an abusive relationship. In other cases, victims of domestic violence will make the very understandable choice of abandoning their abusive partner in the search of a safer and less painful existence without them. Yet, even if an abused partner lives and stays, experiencing physical abuse can only harm the bond that intimate partners are meant to share and suppress the aspects of a person that originally made them attractive as a partner in the first place. Children can and will lose affection for a parent who beats them, so adults are all the more likely to experience a persistent disgust for a physically abusive partner. 

Now, we can introduce the role of Pavolovian Classical Conditioning into considerations of IPV. Experiencing positive reactions to an object (or a person) depends on the history of associations between that thing (or person) and one's own thoughts and physiological  responses. People will tend to love other people to the extent that they have a history of experiencing many more positive emotions than negative emotions during events involving that person. Once a person becomes a source of pain and danger, it is impossible for an intimate partner to feel the same affection for them. Through learning, the abusive individual will necessarily come to generate negative emotional reactions from that point onward. A victim of domestic violence might be strongly motivated to keep their partner happy, but it won't be out of an authentic love for that person. It will be out of fear for their own safety. The take-home message is: Once someone cares about your happiness because they are afraid of you, they are no longer actually your partner or your loved one. You have made them your slave. Quite appropriately, slavery is illegal in Canada. 

The idea of these kind of conditioned responses to a stimulus originated with famous studies by Ivan Pavlov in which he paired a bell ringing with presenting food to dogs again and again and measured their salivation. After establishing that association, he removed the food and presented only the sound of the bell ringing. The dogs salivated in response to the bell, even in the absence of the food. This basic (and unconscious) learning process has been used to explain many psychological phenomena, ranging from severe phobias to sexual fetishes. The expectation that experiencing physical harm from a loved one will tend to make that person less of a loved one and more of an aversive, fear-inducing stimulus is a fairly straightforward implication of classical conditioning principles.



References
(These are just for giving credit to researchers. 
We would never generate test questions based on this kind of thing.)

Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta. (Ed.), Annals of Child Development. Greenwich, CT: JAI.

Cappell, C., & Heiner, R. B. (1990). The intergenerational transmission of family aggression. Journal of Family Violence, 5, 135-152.

Corvo, K., & Carpenter, E. (2000). Effects of parental substance abuse on current levels of domestic violence: A possible elaboration of intergenerational transmission processes. Journal of Family Violence, 15, 123-137.

Dutton, D. G. (1995). Male abusiveness in intimate relationships. Clinical Psychology Review, 15, 567-581.

Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviours and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin128, 539-579.

Hyde-Nolan, M., & Juliao, T. (2012). Theoretical basis for family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Jackson, S., Thompson, R. A., Christiansen, E. H., et al. (1999). Predicting abuse-prone parental attitudes and discipline practices in a nationally representative sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 15-29.

Kaufman, J., & Zigler, E. (1987). Do abused children become abusive parents? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry57, 186-192.

Marshal, L. L., & Rose, P. (1990). Premarital violence: The impact of family of origin on violence, stress, and reciprocity. Violence Victims, 5, 51-64.

Weiten, W., & McCann, D. (2013). Psychology: Themes and Variations, Third Canadian Edition. Nelson Education, Ltd: Toronto, ON.