psy 10_09 p826_835 news:Layout 1
human condition and those parts that make life most worth living,’ they write. ‘The good life is not the troubled life avoided or undone,’ they argue, adding that in uncovering what it means to live well, psychology needs more longitudinal studies, more collaboration between specialisms and more focus on behaviours rather than processes.
Why people vary Untangling the relative contribution of nature and nurture to human development has occupied the careers of countless psychologists. Based on several of the contributions to the special issue, it’s a project that remains as pertinent and daunting as ever. Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess at Birkbeck University of London highlight the fascinating issue of individual differences in children’s sensitivity to their environment. Normally this is discussed in terms of some children being more vulnerable than others to adverse circumstances, but Belsky and Pluess review a range of behavioural and genetic research showing that the same children who are affected by negative circumstances also tend to thrive in quality conditions. In other words, children vary in their responsiveness to the environment, be it positive or negative. What’s more, other research shows that this tendency is influenced by conditions in the womb, which, in turn, are affected by maternal experiences, including stress. In one final twist, whether or not a fetus responds to these influences in utero, potentially becoming more sensitive to the environment in early childhood, could depend on their genetic make-up, thus bringing the role of nature back into play. On a related note, Kenneth Dodge says one of the most important questions facing psychology is to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the way that the MAOA gene interacts with exposure to maltreatment in childhood, thus leading to increased risk for the development of conduct disorder. Dodge highlights possible mechanisms in the brain, in social cognition and autonomic arousal, leading him to predict that ‘the greatest possible contributions to science in the coming decade will be made by scientific teams that are able to combine multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods to understand how psychopathology develops.’ This view was echoed by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser in her contribution about psychoneuroimmunology. We already know that stress and depression affect
health – just consider the finding that wounds take longer to heal when people are stressed – but there are many unanswered questions about how stress and psychopathology interact with environmental factors like diet and pollution to affect our immune systems and ageing processes, Kiecolt-Glaser says. ‘We need to put greater emphasis on cross-discipline training for our students,’ she argues, ‘underscoring the importance of getting a strong foundation in basic biological science.’ Gregory Smith at the University of Kentucky provided a clinical psychologist’s perspective on this theme of how nature and nurture interact to influence a person. ‘One fundamental task for clinical psychological science,’ he says, ‘is understanding why different individuals progress along different life trajectories.’ Smith adds that progress in genetics has opened up exciting new possibilities but that psychology needs to catch up by providing ‘sound theories and precise measures of coherent, homogenous, elemental psychological constructs.’ In particular, Smith says there is a need to abandon psychiatric diagnostic categories as the basis for clinical science research because, he argues, many of them ‘consist of sets of moderately or weakly related symptoms that often appear to have different aetiologies from each other.’
Social interaction Others believe psychology should turn the spotlight outwards, to our interactions with others. Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts at Carnegie Mellon University point out that ‘we have known about the importance of social integration (engaging in diverse types of relationships) for health and longevity for 30 years. Yet, we still do not know why having a more diverse social network would have a positive influence on our health, and we have yet to design effective interventions that influence key components of the network and in turn physical health.’ The authors say that the size, consistency and range of reported relationships lead us to talk about them as if they were causal. ‘However, the truth is, we do not know this,’ they write. There are surprisingly few experimental studies testing the possibility that network interventions – increasing the diversity and extent of our social networks, or decreasing conflict and loneliness – would be beneficial to our health. Those that do exist seldom draw inspiration from the evidence reported in the correlational literature, by using natural social
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networks: instead, they tend to facilitate interactions with strangers facing the same or similar threats (such as cancer patients). The authors say that psychologists should be ‘designing and testing social experiments and developing theory and empirical tests of how our social networks ‘’get under the skin’’ to influence disease and mortality.’ In years to come, such social networks could well include the occasional android friend. A psychologist (Neal J. Roese) and artificial intelligence researcher (Eyal Amir) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign write that ‘in 50 years we suspect androids of substantial sophistication to populate our world and participate in everyday social interactions’. The science of psychology will, they say, face a remarkable new set of challenges in grappling with human–android interaction. How would we cope with not knowing whether we were talking to an android or a real person? The AI needed to grasp the complexity of human emotion is perhaps the highest of all AI hurdles, so perhaps we would resolve this ‘sentience ambiguity’ with an angry attack. The authors warn that ‘culture filled with advanced androids might well be an angry one.’ But don’t rush to the bunkers just yet: Roese and Amir see the ‘threshold of indistinguishability – the moment at which technology can create an android that is indistinguishable from human beings – as more than 100 years away from current technology (maybe much further), with roadblocks centering most pivotally on the material science underlying artificial skin and the computational challenges of computer vision and natural language AI.’
Approaches to psychology It doesn’t really matter what the topic of study is if you go about it the wrong way, and several contributors to the special issue focus on this bigger picture. For example, Lisa Oakes (University of California) looks at the ‘humpty dumpty problem’: after years of studying infant cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing cognitive system back together again? For example, infants remember the items they have attended to and perceived, and their emotional state will influence their perception and representation of the events they encounter. So how do psychologists develop tasks and experimental designs that will uncover the co-development of these different abilities? Oakes points to studies that alter an infant’s motor experience in order to assess the impact in other areas, and the difficulty of doing this