Wednesday, December 15th 2010
The “Around the Web” series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.
The second to last Around the Web of the semester covers female behavior. Because testosterone and aggression are sexy, there is a lot more popular coverage of it. Further, when I do find popular science coverage of topics that relate to female behavior, a lot of it relates to the menstrual cycle and mate preference. That stuff is interesting, but there is a lot more to female behavior than when we feel like having sex, and who we choose when we are ovulating or not. The other issue I often find interesting about the study of female behavioral endocrinology versus male behavioral endocrinology is that, for all the jokes made about men being driven by their hormones, most people work pretty hard to provide a nuanced perspective on the relationship between testosterone and aggression. Perhaps people have arrived more recently at the study of women, but I don’t always notice the same nuance when looking at menstrual cycle research.
So, I have a handful of links for you today that try to cover some of the other material. I think I’ve picked some of the best posts for you, ones that do their best to have a reasoned, thoughtful perspective.
Emily Anthes of Wonderland has an interesting post on impulse shopping and rewards; she discusses an article that found women in the luteal phase had a higher rate of impulse buys compared to those in the follicular phase. She also refers to an article she wrote in Scientific American MIND covering these issues more broadly. Both are worth a read.
Next, a few posts about women’s behavior and hormonal contraceptives – specifically because a student in class asked me to cover it. This is an increasingly important field of study as 1) we still don’t seem to understand the pharmacokinetics of women as well as men and 2) more women, and younger and younger women, are getting on the pill every day. To give you a sense of the pervasiveness of hormonal contraceptives, I’ll start you out with this OB quote: “Really? Without any regulators?” This demonstrates that hormonal contraceptives are no longer just for, you know, contraception, but for “regulating” the cycle. Why the cycle needs to be regulated is a topic for another day.
Then, Scicurious does an excellent job providing her perspective on a research finding that recently received a bit of attention. Scientific American wrote about an article that found that women’s brains who were on hormonal contraceptives were different than those who were not. Since women with spontaneous (that’s without contraceptives) cycles and hormonal contraceptives cycles have very different hormone profiles, this shouldn’t be surprising. We don’t even know if it should be cause for concern. Either way, it’s interesting, and I think Scicurious’s take on it brings the frenzy down a notch, and assesses the validity of the study’s claims.
As always, where would I be without Ed Yong and Not Exactly Rocket Science? He cogently reviews all the articles I wish I had the time to read (where do you find the time again, Ed?). In fact, I used information from two of his blog posts in the lecture I provided on this topic: his post on the oxytocin receptor gene and cultural responses to social stress, and the one on the “dark side” of oxytocin that discusses how oxytocin enhances favorable and unfavorable perceptions of mothers’ parenting styles.
Random links
Just a couple of random links for you today. First, Ed Yong (I know, again! I can’t help it!) helps us curb our holiday eating with his post on mental exercises that can curb food cravings.
Next, a new article by Gettler and McKenna that covers the biology of breastfeeding and co-sleeping practices in humans. A great article for those new to this topic. (hat tip AAPA Bandit)
Then, an interesting perspective on “patient refusal” being a contraindication in the use of epidurals during labor over at Unnecesarean.
Finally, a post about beauty in the birth room over at Science & Sensibility (quickly becoming a favorite blog of mine), which constructively criticizes a Boston Globe article about women who want to look beautiful while in labor.
The last Around the Web of 2010 will cover cognitive sex differences, and it will be a doozy. Thanks to Cordelia Fine’s book, it’s a good year for discussions on this topic!
Wednesday, December 8th 2010
The “Around the Web” series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.
On the week we learned about stress and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, we didn’t just talk about Type A personalities or parachute jumping. Instead, I tried to apply our understanding of how acute and chronic stress impact the body by examining social disparities and racism. This led to all of us being confronted with some very harsh statistics about the health of people of color in this country and the long-term effects of systemic oppression, and powerful narratives about internalized oppression in first and second-generation immigrants.
I wanted to augment that lecture with some links on social disparities and racism. I have a TON of links for this topic, so enjoy!
Check my what?
First, some primers to help us contextualize social disparity and conversations about it. One of my favorites is “Check my what?” On privilege and what we can do about it. This is a post that does get updated from time to time, and it defines privilege, and instructs the reader how to identify one’s own privilege, accept it, and from that point of acceptance, move towards actions and attitudes that are pro-equality. I like this because of the way it implicitly explains the uselessness of the seemingly pro-equality stance of “not seeing color.”
A slightly more humorous, but still important, primer, is called Derailing for Dummies. I hope a reading of this primer will help people communicate respectfully around oppression.
Context matters
I also wanted to share a few posts about Western perspectives on mental health, because of the time we spent in class on immigration. Aspects of immigration and acculturation are stressful, and cultural contexts strongly influence behavior. Another issue to consider is whether Western perspectives on mental health overpathologize context-dependent behaviors (that is, doing things that make sense in context and are occurring in context, like a toddler tantrum, or grieving after losing a loved one). Take a look at these links: Will anyone be normal? discusses the overpathologization issue I just mentioned; Westerners vs. the World: we are the WEIRD ones brings population variation in behavior to light; and a related story interviewing Ethan Watters, Going Mad the American Way.
The science of oppression
In addition to the material we learned in lecture on race and immigration, I wanted to add some other good sources. Science of oppression I is a great primer from Racialicious. Scicurious also has a great researchblogging post on inflammatory responses to stress, particularly as they relate to social rejection. She reviews a particular paper that links immune health to neural sensitivity to social rejection (meaning, those demonstrating the most sensitivity to social rejection also had an increase in inflammatory markers), which is interesting since it demonstrates a relationship between the immune system and psychosocial stress.
This Jonah Lehrer article in Wired follows up on the Sapolsky article we read about stress vaccines. I also like this story (well, press release) from ScienceDaily on how stress relates to one’s coping method. I imagine this is also linked, in some ways, to the study Scicurious discussed on neural sensitivity. It seems as though if we can change some of our coping and sensitivity behaviors, we can probably alter the degree to which stress negatively impacts our health. I also wanted to link to this special edition of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that was exclusively on “The Biology of Disadvantage.” Really great articles in there. Finally, this post at Language Log critically analyzes some of the ways in which we misunderstand and essentialize disadvantage. An important read.
Random, unrelated, but always interesting, stuff
Patrick Clarkin has a great post on Evolutionary Aesthetics — basically, the idea that our concept of beauty is context-dependent in more ways than we may realize. I found it inspiring and insightful.
Here’s a weird story about mercury exposure and how it changes the sexual behavior of the ibis. See how flexible sexuality can be?
This is a piece I really enjoyed on the ways in which current journalism practices don’t get at the subtlety and complexity of science. It refers back to a kerfuffle earlier this year when Martin Robbins of the Lay Scientist wrote a very funny satire piece called This is a news website article about a scientific paper.
Finally, while it’s a bit belated, a nice Thanksgiving post by Krystal D’Costa over at Anthropology in Practice.
Monday, November 15th 2010
The “Around the Web” series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. This semester I teach Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.
This week I broadly introduced the field of behavioral endocrinology, and focused on male behavioral endocrinology as a way to apply it. Of course a week on male behavior can’t go without Robert Sapolsky’s essay The Trouble with Testosterone, and students wrote some very thoughtful posts reflecting on that reading. Next time we’ll cover stress, and the week after that female behavioral endocrinology.
This week, though, it’s all about the testosterone. I spent a fair bit of time in lecture trying to parse out what the relationship between hormones and behavior really is: 1) the relationship goes both ways, meaning behavior impacts hormone levels at least as much as hormones impact behavior, and 2) hormones rarely make anyone do anything, but in some cases they can increase your willingness. It’s as though the hormone opens the door to a particular behavior, but doesn’t push you through.
Also, the last week of the course covers cognitive sex differences (or not), so you will notice an absence of that type of material here. Don’t worry, you can do mental rotation tests in a few weeks!
Aggression
I wanted to link to several stories about testosterone and aggression from the mainstream media. Testosterone and aggression relationships have been covered, with at least some degree of complexity, the New York Times and TIME. The New York Times article is of course by Natalie Angier, a rather wonderful science writer who wrote Woman: an Intimate Geography.
I also found two other links: this student paper on testosterone and aggression from Bryn Mawr. I hope work like this shows my students the kinds of sophisticated thinking they are also capable of, and starts some fun conversations. This one from the website About Gender also has a thoughtful take on this often-exaggerated relationship.
Business sense?
This press release (at least, I think that’s what it is) suggests that male CEOs with higher testosterone concentrations are more likely to drop deals or attempt hostile takeovers. The whole piece struck me as odd, in its phrasing, and in the fact that an article on hormones was accepted in a journal called Management Science. So I decided to look up the article on which the press release is based (Levi et al 2010).
It’s a mess, and here’s why: THEY DON’T ACTUALLY MEASURE TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS. They use age as a proxy for testosterone, saying that testosterone is higher in young men, and because younger men do these more reckless behaviors, it is because of Teh Evul Testosterone. Further, as far as I can tell, the way they use age as a variable is that you are “young” if you are under forty five years old, and “old” if you are over that age. Age significantly impacts testosterone, but the amount of variation unrelated to age is also considerable. And when it is so easy to measure testosterone — we’re talking about getting someone to spit for you a handful of times — it seems silly to use a proxy so far removed as to be almost meaningless. It also ignores the many other factors related to age that might make someone reckless, like brain development and experience.
Et cetera
Greg Laden has a short, tongue-in-cheek blog post about Testosterone and Humor: he reviews a rather earnest article by a dermatologist who hypothesizes that humor develops from aggressive behavior (that, perhaps, it is a kind of verbal aggression?). Go read the weirdness.
Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has two interesting posts on testosterone. In Prejudice vs. Biology I think Ed does a marvelous job demonstrating what I was trying to explain above: testosterone and other hormones might open the door to a behavior, but you (or you and your pre-conceived notions of hormones) are the one who decides whether to walk through. His other post looks at a study of the differential effects of testosterone and estrogen on economic decisions in postmenopausal women and found… nothing. I loved that this study actually looked at women, not men. The authors of the study even go so far as to suggest that some of the results that have found correlations between hormones and economic behavior are a result of publication bias. Go, go on and read!
Your dose of random
A lot of posts and articles have caught my eye recently. I’ll share some this time and maybe save a few for my next Around the Web.
Ever wonder how to get more young people to be more responsible about their reproductive health? Perhaps we need to understand the adolescent brain better to come up with more targeted campaigns.
The Shadow Scholar is a rather disturbing read by a pseudonymous writer for hire who helps college students cheat. Related to this (in my mind), is the story of how students lack basic research skills. On a more positive note, some perspective on why being hardworking (and, you know, not cheating) is more important than being smart.
Related to the last Around the Web on sexual differentiation and variation, this post by sex-positive Alice Dreger answers a young girl’s question who is worried that her clitoris is too big.
Finally, though we’ve already covered parenting, I wanted to share with you this neat story about adoption in sea lions. Read the story. Revel in the cute babies.
Next time I’ll write about stress and social disparities.
Reference
Levi, Maurice, Li, Kai, & Zhang, Feng (2010). Deal or no deal: hormones and the mergers and acquisitions game Management Science, 56 (9), 1462-1483
