Bammer & Gold: Scientists, Humanists, and Collective Memory

Angelika Bammer and Hazel Gold, Now You See It, Now You Don't: Scientists, Humanists, and Collective Memory

What exactly do we mean when say “collective memory” and how might individuals’ personal memories of an event converge into a cohesive memory maintained by a group? This was the central inquiry of the second CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the spring 2015 semester, titled “Now you see it, now you don’t: scientists, humanists, and collective memory” and led by Dr. Angelika Bammer (Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory University) and Dr. Hazel Gold (Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University). In the fall of 2014, Drs. Bammer and Gold co-taught a CMBC sponsored seminar called “Mapping Memory: History, Culture, and the Brain ”, the purpose of which was to examine how our memories of the past shape the present from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The class struggled with how to approach collective memory from an interdisciplinary perspective, failing to reach a satisfying resolution by the semester’s end. Drs. Bammer and Gold reviewed this struggle in the lunch discussion, and raised questions about how to best define and conceptualize collective memory.

The “Mapping Memory” class was organized around two aims. The first aim was to foster an open inquiry into relationships between memory, the past, and the present from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The second aim was to use the assumptions and approaches of one discipline as a check on the accepted premises and methods from another discipline. These aims worked well for the class at the outset of the semester, as the class examined the processes of memory and forgetting within individual minds. The class studied memory and forgetting from a neurobiological perspective, reading case studies and scientific research to understand how memories are encoded and retrieved at a neuronal level. Approaching these questions through a humanities lens, the class also looked at how individual acts of memory are represented in literary texts, film, and art. For example, the class read the Jorge Luis Borges story, “Funes the Memorious”, about a boy who acquires the ability to remember every detail of his life, down to the shape of every cloud he sees in the sky. The protagonist’s experience is similar to that of people living with Highly Superior Autobiographical memory, a rare condition whose existence invites questions about the limits of memory capacity in the human brain.

When the class began investigating the question of collective memory, it ran into difficulty reconciling perspectives from the humanities and the sciences. The term ‘collective memory’ was first coined by the sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs in the 1950s and refers to the larger social framework in which individual memories are believed to be constructed and embedded. Halbwachs argues that memory is largely a social act, given that many of our memories are laid down and recalled in social settings and for social purposes. Halbwachs asserts that memory is often invoked in response to questions posed by others, and that we assume others’ perspective in formulating a response. Hence, group membership informs the encoding and retrieval of memories, such that memories are formulated within a larger social framework, rather than in individual minds. According to Halbwachs (Halbwachs,1992):

There is no point in seeking where they [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them, upon condition, to be sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking… It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection.

To understand how collective memory would be approached by cognitive scientists, Drs. Gold and Bammer invited Dr. Daniel Schacter (Psychology, Harvard University) to visit Emory and speak with their class. Dr. Schacter has researched and written extensively on the topic of memory, and often appeals to the humanities in his own writing. Drs. Gold and Bammer believed the visit could prove fruitful for synthesizing a richer understanding of collective memory by forging a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. While Dr. Schacter was familiar with the term ‘collective memory’, he does not recognize it as a useful or meaningful construct in the field of cognitive science. He understands the term to be used metaphorically, and does not believe it can be operationalized and measured in an experimental setting. Dr. Schacter’s objection to ‘collective memory’ as a meaningful construct in the sciences compelled Dr. Gold and Bammer’s class to reflect on collective memory and try to make more sense of it—reflections which were actively discussed in the CMBC lunch talk.

A central challenge in defining and understanding collective memory is how to delineate the ambiguous boundary between individual and collective memories. This inquiry leads to questions about ownership of memories--when is a memory an entity we can claim individual ownership over, and when and how does it become collective? Dr. Robyn Fivush (Psychology, Emory University) attended the talk and argued that we are born into cultures that prescribe the way we should live our lives and form our memories. As a result, our memories are heavily shaped and constrained by cultural stories and definitions from the very beginning of our lives, such that it may be difficult to speak of veritable ‘individual’ memories that exist outside of a sociocultural framework.

The boundary between individual and collective memories is also murky when we stop to consider how a cohesive collective memory emerges from the individuals’ disparate experiences of an event. In the CMBC faculty lunch discussion, attendees all shared their personal experiences of 9/11, an exercise which revealed that many people’s recollections activated associated memories of tangential events and people. When and how do all these personal memories of an event like 9/11, each with their own complex web of associations and memories, hang together and become the collective memory we speak of when we say “never forget” 9/11? In discussing this issue, Dr. Bammer also raised questions about what gets lost as this collective memory emerges, and what happens to all the individual memories along the way?

Defining ownership over individual and collective memories in turn raises questions about the transmission of memories across time and space. Can individuals claim to have access to a collective memory of an event for which they were not present? For example, children born after 9/11 will have had no first-hand experience of the event, but will hear others’ accounts and be exposed to media coverage of the event many times throughout their lives. Do we acknowledge these children as having shared ownership of the collective memory of 9/11? Many attendees participating in the discussion endorsed the belief that intergenerational memories constitute collective memory, for the experiences of an event are effectively shared and constitute memories that are central to people’s identities. If collective memories can be claimed to extend to individuals who do not have first-hand experience of the event, they would stand in sharp contrast with Dr. Schacter’s definition of memory. In Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, Schacter explains “In order to be experienced as a memory, the retrieved information must be recollected in the context of a particular time and place and with some reference to oneself as a participant in the episode” (Schacter, 2008, p.17).

Defining collective memory also raises thorny questions about the reliability of memories and whether the term ‘story’ may be more appropriate than ‘memory’ in some contexts. When events are transmitted across generations, details may be added, altered, or dropped, calling into question the verisimilitude of the memory. Hence, it may be argued that memories that have been altered in various ways may be more accurately described as ‘stories’. This does not necessarily discriminate collective memories from individual ones. Dr. Gold pointed out that individual memories are altered when they are reconstructed by the mind, and that individual memory is also fallible in all kinds of ways—a point that Dr. Schacter raised himself in his talk on the seven sins of memory when he was visiting Emory. Thus, fallibility should not necessarily be a reason to deem collective memory any less valid than individual memory from a scientific perspective.

Although Dr. Schacter was not amenable to the idea of ‘collective memory’ from the perspective of a scholar in the cognitive sciences, his visit ultimately proved to be generative for the class. Dr. Bammer explained that the students were frustrated with Dr. Schacter’s response, and that it motivated them to tackle “richer, more nuanced, more risky, more experimental projects” probing questions concerned with collective memory. For example, one student examined how collective memories of the Irish famine are represented in Irish literature and how these memories may be affecting the way people experience the current economic crisis. Many unresolved questions remain concerning how to define and understand collective memory, but Drs. Gold and Bammer’s class and the CMBC faculty lunch discussion made progress in hashing out these questions and opening a dialogue about how to address them from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

References

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press.

Schacter, D. L. (2008). Searching for Memory: The Brain, Th. Basic Books.

Jaeger & Wolff: Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology?

Dieter Jaeger and Phillip Wolff, How to Build Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology

In the first CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the Spring 2015 semester, titled ‘How to Build Bridges between Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology?’ Dr. Phillip Wolff (Department of Psychology, Emory University) and Dr. Dieter Jaeger (Department of Biology, Emory University) conversed about the ways in which cognitive psychology and neuroscience can develop more meaningful cross-disciplinary collaborations. The two fields address overlapping research questions and use some of the same modeling tools, but, historically, have been relatively isolated from one another. Drs. Wolf and Jaeger emphasized the benefits that can come from greater collaboration between the two disciplines, and acknowledged the challenges that make collaboration inherently difficult. The lunch discussion itself provided a starting-point for bringing faculty and researchers from both disciplines together, encouraging dialogue about the advantages of building a stronger alliance between the two disciplines.

Collaboration between cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience has the potential to be mutually beneficial, as research findings from one discipline help constrain and guide research in the other. Cognitive psychology research delineates how human minds represent information and perform computations in different contexts. Through subtle manipulations of task design, cognitive psychologists can identify whether information can be represented in different ways and which representation is most likely, given the particular context, learning-related changes, and individual cognitive biases. For example, cognitive psychology research has found that the spatial relationship between objects can be represented in multiple ways by the human mind, and that different cultures have biases toward particular representations. A ball sitting on the ground in proximity to a chair could be described as being to the north of the chair, in front of the chair, or to the right of the chair. The first description captures allocentric properties of the scene, the second reflects the position of the objects relative to each other, and the third corresponds to an egocentric perspective. By asking participants to describe the scenes, cognitive psychologists can discern which type of spatial representation participants are using. These varied representations likely map on to different neural processes, so it would be important for a neuroscientist to identify which representation is being used in a particular task, in order to test a more constrained hypothesis about neural pathways of activity. In this way, research findings from cognitive psychology provide top-down guidance to neuroscientists, allowing them to make more precise predictions about the location and type of neural activity they expect to see.

Neuroscientists examine neural processes at varying spatial levels, from subcellular processes taking place in individual neurons, at one end of the continuum, to interactions between functional brain networks at the other end of the continuum. Just as cognitive psychology findings can be used to provide top-down guidance in constraining the hypotheses of neuroscientists, the corpus of neuroscience research can provide bottom-up information about the flow of activity in neural pathways and help psychologists make more refined predictions about cognition, perception, and behavior. For example, lesion and neuroimaging research has provided evidence that there are distinct learning and memory systems in the brain—a hippocampal-based system and a striatal-based one--and that these systems competitively and cooperatively interact, depending on the context. Neuroscience research can help cognitive psychologists refine predictions and build more accurate models to capture how people learn new skills and remember information.

Despite the advantages to be had from greater communication between the disciplines, there are a number of challenges that make collaboration difficult. Some attendees raised the point that between the cellular processes that computational neuroscientists study, and the higher-level cognitive phenomena that cognitive psychologists research, exist multiple layers of neurobiological complexity that are challenging to traverse. A single neuron itself is very complex, receiving inputs from thousands of other neurons and responding to diffuse neuromodulators in a variety of different ways.  Thousands of neurons organize into well-structured networks, which themselves give rise to larger-scale maps, such as the somatotopic map in the somatosensory cortex. At a larger spatial scale, brain regions with well-studied functions come into view, and these regions interact with one another in coordinated ways, defining systems (e.g., the limbic system). Because there are many intermediary steps between the level of neurons and the level of functional systems, and each level is itself defined by profoundly complex interactions, it is inherently challenging to model how activity in individual neurons, or even neuronal networks, map on to higher-level phenomena like language and perception. Despite these challenges, neuroimaging is a promising tool for bridging the gap between nervous system activity at different spatial levels and human cognition. Neuroimaging detects functional activity at the systems level in the brain as humans perform cognitive and perceptual tasks. Thanks to research being carried out by investigators like Shella Keilholz in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, we are gaining insight into how systems-level activity detected by neuroimaging corresponds to the coordinated neural activity occurring on a much finer spatial scale. Hence, neuroimaging provides an important link between how activity at smaller spatial scales in the brain generates higher-level cognitive processes.

Another challenge that has proven to be problematic historically for the two disciplines is the dearth of models and theories that make clear and testable predictions. In the early 1990s, the two disciplines temporarily came together to experiment with a new generation of connectionist network models. However, neuroscientists quickly soured on these models because they failed to make clear predictions about neural activity, and psychologists found that they modeled cognition and behavior in ways that were very different from how human minds appear to work. As a result, the two disciplines drifted apart and made less effort to coordinate conferences and meetings together. Recently, new and exciting machine learning algorithms have emerged that may encourage the disciplines to work together more closely again, by providing the means to design and test more promising models. In addition, efforts made by centers like CMBC and other cross-disciplinary institutes and national meetings can facilitate greater communication between the researchers in these fields. As a case in point, the CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion was successful in bringing together Emory researchers from computational neuroscience and cognitive psychology, some of whom had never met before, and creating a space for the two fields to consider how they can benefit from greater collaboration.

Saliers & Patterson: Thinking Musical Thoughts

Don Saliers and Richard Patterson, Thinking Musical Thoughts

Dr. Don Saliers (William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship, Candler School of Theology) and Dr. Richard Patterson (Philosophy) held the second CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the 2014 Fall Semester, titled “Thinking Musical Thoughts.” In addressing this theme, Saliers and Patterson focused on the question of how musicians embody expressive elements of musical pieces when they perform. As they move through a piece, musicians modulate fine and gross motor movements, attending to layers of technical details as they do so. Aside from the technical component, musicians are concerned with conveying the meaning or mood of a musical composition, and this expressive quality must imbue the playing itself. How, then, do musicians transmute the expressive mood of a piece of music into the technical execution of the notes? Moreover, how do listeners decode the emotions musicians are transmitting through their playing? Saliers’ and Patterson’s discussion of the types of strategies musicians use to communicate certain moods, along with recent research findings on the universal structure underlying music, motion, and emotion, offer some insight into these questions.

As musicians themselves, Saliers and Patterson provided examples of the cognitive strategies they and other musicians use to instill their performances with an intended expressive quality. One technique musicians use is to describe verbally what they want to convey in the musical piece, whether it is an emotion, mood, attitude, idea, or ideal. For example, musicians may articulate emotional states they want to evoke like “excitement” or “mournful sadness.” Musicians keep these verbal descriptions in mind while they monitor their playing, making subtle adjustments to stay faithful to the piece’s intended mood.

A complementary strategy is to use visual imagery that captures the mood of a musical piece. Musicians will conjure visual imagery like the opening of a flower or a foggy night in a graveyard to infuse their playing with a particular emotion. Similarly, musicians use bodily metaphors to help them transmute the mood of the music into their playing. Musicians evoke bodily metaphors like heaviness/lightness, as well as varieties of dancing—elegant, courtly, comical and drunken, etc.—to play in a style consonant with these metaphors.

How exactly do these cognitive strategies allow musicians to imbue music with specific feelings? How does the visual imagery of a flower opening, for example, transmute into the tactility with which a pianist or cellist manipulates her fingers when playing a piece of music? It may have something to do with synesthesia—a neurological phenomenon in which features of distinct bodily sensations or meaningful percepts are experienced in a fashion that seems to blend the sensory modalities. For people who experience one of the most common forms of synesthesia—grapheme-color synesthesia—letters and numbers are perceived as being tinged with a particular color. It has been argued that we all experience at least a mild version of synesthesia, in that we perceive non-arbitrary mappings between different sensory percepts, in some instances. For example, many people experience non-arbitrary mappings between certain speech sounds and visual shapes. Research has found that a majority of people select an irregular star-shaped object as matching the sound “Kiki”, and a rounded blob shape as matching the sound “Bouba” (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). It has been suggested that this phenomenon is an example of sound-vision synesthesia, and that people choose the “bouba” sound for the rounded object because the enunciation of the word requires the mouth to make a more rounded shape, whereas the enunciation of “kiki” requires the mouth to make more angular shapes.

Recent research suggests that there may also be non-arbitrary mappings between dimensions of music, movement, and emotions. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, participants were asked to create either a melody or a bouncing-ball animation that expressed a specific emotion (Sievers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013). The participants could adjust five sliding bars to modulate the beats per minute (of the ball or the music), the predictability of the beats, smoothness (i.e. the ball could be manipulated to be smooth or spiky, and the music could be made more or less dissonant), the step size (height of the bounce/distance between notes), and the pitch of the note/angle at which the ball leans. For each emotion the participants were asked to express (angry, happy, peaceful, sad or scared), the groups chose very similar positions for the dimensions adjusted by the sliding bars, no matter if they were assigned to the melody group or the animation group. This result replicated in a group of participants from a Kreung community in Cambodia, suggesting that music and movement may be experienced as structurally similar and reflect specific emotional states across cultures. It is unclear how these non-arbitrary mappings arose, but it may be the case that humans learned to decode emotion from the movement of other people or animals; in turn, music may exploit neural systems dedicated to perceiving subtle changes in rhythm and speed to elicit emotions.

The overlapping representations of emotion, movement, and music may help explain how musicians encode expressive qualities in their works. When musicians evoke visual or bodily metaphors, these semantic representations may directly map onto specific representations in the motor cortex, allowing musicians to modify their muscle movements in alignment with the percepts activated by the metaphors. Alternatively, the pathway may be less direct, with a mental representation of a visual image or bodily metaphor evoking a distinct emotional state, which in turn maps onto a particular pattern of activation in the motor cortex. Future research promises to provide a more fine-grained account of how expressive qualities are both successfully encoded by musicians and decoded by listeners.

Throughout their discussion, Saliers and Patterson also touched on questions concerning the degree to which conscious versus unconscious processes influence musical performance. Conjuring a visual metaphor is definitively conscious in nature, but this semantic representation may influence breathing or motor movements controlled by unconscious processes, and it is unclear how these conscious and unconscious processes interact with one another. A process that contributes to musical performance may also switch from being conscious to unconscious, depending on various factors, including the length of time a musician has practiced a piece. While a musician is still learning a piece, she is consciously attending to certain muscle movements, but this conscious attention may significantly subside as she becomes more familiar with the piece such that previously conscious processes become unconscious. However, this is a fluid and dynamic process, as musicians anecdotally report bringing more automatic processes under conscious control again—for example, when they make a mistake in a performance and must correct on the fly.

Musical ‘flow states’ are a particularly rich source for questions about the relative contribution of conscious and unconscious processes, as phenomenological descriptions and research findings suggest that consciousness is altered during this state. Dr. Saliers gave a personal account akin to a flow state in which, as he commented, “the music began to play me.” Dr. Salier’s personal experience leads him to believe the state is associated with “a cessation of conscious attention” and intensification of perception. In the psychology literature on this topic, flow states are marked by effortless and complete absorption in an activity, merging of action and awareness, and a loss of reflective self-consciousness. Research on flow states among pianists found that entrance into a flow state was accompanied by a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure and a relaxation of facial muscles, perhaps explaining the effortless quality described by those experiencing a flow state (de Manzano, Theorell, Harmat, & Ullén, 2010). Researchers propose that flow states may be associated with a transient reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex (Dietrich, 2004). Because this region is strongly involved in self-awareness and higher-level cognitive processes, reduced activity in this region during flow states accords with the phenomenological experience of diminished self-awareness and conscious attention. Because flow states are experienced as pleasant and conducive to heightened creativity, it will be interesting to see whether future research highlights strategies for more easily entering a flow state.

de Manzano, Ö., Theorell, T., Harmat, L., & Ullén, F. (2010). The psychophysiology of flow during piano playing. Emotion, 10(3), 301.

Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746-761.

Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synesthesia--a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of consciousness studies, 8(12), 3-34.

Sievers, B., Polansky, L., Casey, M., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1), 70-75.

Duke and Reynolds, From Rambo to Rushdie via Linklater and Lavant: Our Peanut Butter Cup Runneth Over

Marshall Duke and Daniel Reynolds, From Rambo to Rushdie via Linklater and Lavant: Our Peanut Butter Cup Runneth Over

In the first CMBC lunch talk of the 2014 academic school year, Dr. Marshall Duke (Psychology, Emory University) and Dr. Daniel Reynolds (Film and Media Studies, Emory University) discussed their recent collaboration, the joint teaching of last spring’s interdisciplinary class, “Film and the Mind.”

Bringing together psychology and film studies in an interdisciplinary approach can lead us to a richer understanding of what films—and our responses to them—disclose about the human mind. Dr. Duke began the discussion with an impassioned endorsement of consilience—a term popularized by E.O. Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name. Consilience refers to “a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation” (Wilson, p. 7). For example, researchers from a range of scientific disciplines—genetics, paleontology, biology—have arrived at similar conclusions about evolution using independent lines of research, providing converging support for evolutionary theory.

Drs. Duke and Reynolds created the interdisciplinary course, “Film and the Mind,” in the tradition of consilience, creating a space for inquiry at the nexus of film studies and psychology. As a metaphor for the goal of consilience, the two professors brought in a jar of peanut butter, chocolate bars, and Reese’s p-b cups, encouraging the students to begin thinking from a “Reese’s p-b cup place”—in other words, from the juncture where these two disciplines overlap. There is a historical precedent for this: two early prominent film theorists—Hugo Munsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim—studied human behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing from both psychology and film studies. Both Munsterberg and Arnheim were psychologists by trade who became interested in the novel ways film contributes to the study of human behavior. As Dr. Duke explained, Munsterberg is a well-known figure in the film studies discipline, but has been all but forgotten within the field of psychology. This underscores how far apart these two disciplines have drifted—and Drs. Duke and Reynolds believe that it is time to bring them back together.

An interdisciplinary approach that draws from psychology and films studies can be used in the viewing and analysis of films to reach a deeper understanding of strengths and weaknesses in psychological theories and concepts. For example, psychoanalysis plays a large role in the narrative of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and analyzing the film enables a greater understanding of the ways psychoanalysis has proven itself simultaneously to be both useful and limited in comprehending the inner workings of the human mind.  The protagonist of “Vertigo” is crippled by a fear of heights and attempts to overcome this fear in order to save a woman from the top of a tower. He misinterprets the actions and events around him and is unable to understand whom the woman in the tower really is, mirroring the types of misinterpretation and identity confusion that frequently arise in psychoanalysis. With this film, Hitchcock succeeds in making these core psychoanalytic constructs accessible to the viewer and illustrating their utility for understanding how the human mind works. “Vertigo” has a very tight narrative with the characters’ behavior all neatly accounted for by conscious or unconscious intentions, reflecting the psychoanalytic position that all behavior has an identifiable cause. It is Dr. Duke’s belief that this constitutes a simplistic account of human behavior.

In contrast to “Vertigo,” in which psychoanalytic theory was used to directly construct the film’s narrative, other films loosely embody speculations about psychological processes and may allow greater traction on questions about the human mind by virtue of being less rigidly constructed. “The Tree of Life” exemplifies this type of film and was viewed in the class because of its portrayal of features of human consciousness. The film follows the story of a family living in Texas in the 1950s and is framed by meditations on the experience of being alive, family relationships, and humanity’s place in space and time within the expansiveness of our cosmos. The film has a daring style, performing experiments in perception and incorporating stylistic elements that are novel and unique. For example, the film features an unexpected interlude chronicling the creation of the universe and development of biological life. Films like “The Tree of Life” make it clear that we are not simply learning about the mind by passively digesting the view of human experience that the film projects. Rather, the viewer has a range of reactions to a film, and it is in the interplay between what a film is communicating and how the viewer responds to a film where we gain insights about our own mind and the minds of others.

Because of the complexity associated with unraveling these interactions, studying film and the mind from an interdisciplinary perspective is a particularly useful approach to thinking about such topics as how absorbing watching films is. When the lights are dimmed and a film is projected on a large screen, most viewers have the experience of becoming absorbed in the film to the point that they forget there are other people around them. The literary critic Zunshine argues that in this state we allow ourselves to fully experience the moment because we are minimally self-conscious and maximally absorbed in the film. This quality allows us to strongly empathize with a film’s characters, crying when they are in despair and applauding when they are joyous or victorious. There are factors about the film-watching experience and the film itself that can modulate the degree to which we become absorbed in a film, or empathize with its characters. For example, if the lights aren’t dimmed or the film is being viewed on a small portable device, the degree to which the viewer becomes absorbed is likely diminished. Furthermore, factors like the tone of the film or how sympathetic the characters are can enhance or reduce the degree to which the viewer empathizes with the films’ characters.

Although we are capable of deeply empathizing with others, we are also embodied physical beings and retain some level of distance from others, enabling us to judge them. Dr. Reynolds contends that we likely exist at the confluence of these two states, shifting dynamically between them as circumstances change. “The Act of Killing”—another film viewed in Drs. Reynolds’ and Duke’s class—reveals the dynamic shift between states of greater and lesser empathy and judgment as we relate to the characters on screen. “The Act of Killing” is a documentary that portrays re-enactments of genocide and includes one particularly profound moment in which one of the perpetrators of the genocide realizes the horror of his acts and begins crying. The perpetrator is a very unsympathetic character that most viewers would judge as a monster, but in this singular moment of the film, the viewer is forced to reconcile this judgment with a feeling of sudden empathy for the man. By provoking this pronounced shift from a judging stance to one of empathy, the film compels the viewer to experience a moment of intense self-awareness of the dynamic nature in which we relate to others.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience research provides insight into how the experience of empathy and judgment may be instantiated at a neural level. Mirror neurons are so-named because they fire both when an individual initiates an action and when an individual observes another initiating the same action. In effect, activity in mirror neurons does not meaningfully discriminate between the action of self and the action of others, leading researchers to hypothesize that these neurons play a role in empathy. The mirror neuron system may function in parallel with neural systems that support our sense of self. For example, research suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction may promote self-reflection and a sense of physical embodiment. The brain may be capable of toggling between these neural systems, allowing fluid transitions between judgmental and empathetic states.

An interdisciplinary approach is, however, not without its challenges. At the culmination of the talk, Dr. Reynolds discussed one of the challenges of attempting an interdisciplinary inquiry—namely, the differences in what defines ‘rigor’ between different disciplines. Different disciplines have different standards and interdisciplinary inquiries inevitably require the examination of those differences. But Dr. Reynolds maintains that as you start thinking from a place of consilience between disciplines, you can converge on a ‘hybrid rigor’ by bringing rigor from both disciplines to bear on new inquiries. He champions a consilience approach because it can be a transformative experience. Drs. Duke and Reynolds ultimately felt the “Film and the Mind” class was a success and the students were able to transcend their traditional disciplinary boundaries, developing a more informed and broader perspective in the process. Dr. Duke’s concluding thoughts returned to E.O. Wilson’s book on consilience, arguing Wilson’s point that as we continue to explore interdisciplinary approaches, we will ultimately find that there is a unified body of knowledge in the world.

References

Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience: The unity of knowledge (Vol. 31). Random House LLC.

Freeman and Wallen, Gender Matters in the Academy?

Carla Freeman and Kim Wallen, Gender Matters in the Academy?

The first CMBC lunch talk of the spring semester brought together Dr. Carla Freeman (Anthropology; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University) and Dr. Kim Wallen (Psychology, Emory University) to discuss the issue of gender and the academy. The (intentionally) ambiguously titled talk gave rise to a fruitful conversation on a variety of topics.

To highlight the differential representation between men and women in the academy, Dr. Freeman shared data from a recent two-volume diversity report conducted by Emory from 1998-2008. The report shows that while the number of women on the faculty at Emory has increased, a greater concentration of women is found in lower rank positions, such as non-tenure track, lecturer, part-time, etc. By contrast, there are fewer women in tenure-track, tenured, and full professorship positions. Additionally, the study found that women’s representation clusters around certain fields, such as dance and women’s studies, while men appear in greater numbers in physics, and computer and political science. The latter fields are, of course, much better remunerated and hold a different status.

Meanwhile, the general trend at Emory, as at other universities—both nationally and internationally—indicates that education is becoming feminized. For example, 57 percent of incoming undergraduate freshman at Emory are female. In light of this development, Freeman chose to focus her remarks on the interesting implications surrounding the feminization of education and the academy. For Freeman, the issue concerns not just the statistical breakdown among men and women and the fields into which they fall, but more importantly how certain cultural attributes of femininity get mapped onto higher education itself. That is, how do genres of academic work and knowledge production become imbued with gender and what are the implications of this process? Moreover, how does value get ascribed to certain kinds of gendered attributes?

Freeman noted that the feminization of certain fields within academia parallels a similar development in the global economy, where many industries have moved from manual production to knowledge production. As an example of this shift, Freeman cited the progression of clerical work and teaching, which began in the 19th century as largely masculine vocations. Over time, however, these professions became more populated by women and, as a result, became lower paid and lower status. Freeman therefore encouraged us to think about the academy as a workplace in which the labor we perform is increasingly feminized. This involves not only parsing out the difficulties facing women vis-à-vis men, but also questioning what it means to understand the work itself as “feminine.” According to Freeman, “feminized labor” includes a growing emphasis on  “emotional labor,” work that hinges upon qualities thought to be naturally associated with femininity, such as nurture, care, and consideration. If emotional labor, as opposed to material labor, is traditionally associated with “feminine” skills, how does this affect our perception of teaching and scholarship as areas that include elements of emotional labor? Freeman noted that at just the moment in which service industries are recognizing the critical importance and value of emotional labor, some analysts are arguing that this form of work is becoming de-gendered. Specifically, they seek to reconceptualize emotional labor as being gender-neutral. For her part, Freeman found this move ironic and potentially troubling. She suggested the alternative possibility of simultaneously acknowledging the importance of emotional labor within academic work, especially that of a residential academic campus, and retaining an understanding of the feminine underpinnings of these skills. This position has been adopted, to some extent, by businesses, which increasingly value emotional skills for the rewards they garner in the marketplace. In thinking about gender in the academy, Freeman returned to the question: what are the implications of disavowing the importance of gender as we move to an increasingly immaterial enactment of labor, especially in the academy?

Dr. Wallen opened his remarks with the provocative question: why does the academic pipeline leak women? As a psychologist and educator, he has witnessed a huge rise in female graduate students over the course of his career. Despite the progress made on this front, the increase has not translated into a commensurate number of academic careers, especially in tenure-track positions. For example, of the 11 female Ph.D. recipients Wallen has supervised, most were hired as post-docs, but only 33 percent ended up in academic positions. Why does this happen?

In addressing the question, Wallen suggested that women experience a greater gender load than do men. Gender load, comprised of four factors, affects the likelihood of women leaving academia. First is the issue of gender discrimination, which, while not absent from today’s academic climate, Wallen considered the least substantial factor. The second factor is gender awareness. That is, the cost of being aware of the degree to which one’s gender has consequences. Wallen suggested that whereas men proceed through life without thinking about their gender—or why it may be responsible for this or that outcome—this is a more significant factor for women. Third, the cost of reproduction disproportionately affects women more than men, and academia in general is inflexible when it comes to taking time off to raise children. The fourth factor concerns the range of occupations that each gender regards as viable. Wallen suggested that women often choose not to continue pursuing academic careers, whereas men feel more socially constrained in terms of options and expectations. He viewed this as the most important factor, arguing that the broader range of occupational choices contributes significantly to women leaving the academy. Therefore, the pipeline may be “leaking women” simply because academia is not all that appealing, and while men put up with it, women find it easier to imagine alternative life paths. If so, perhaps the task for the academy is to change how attractive it is to everybody, but especially to women.

A number of issues were raised in the discussion following the talks. Some participants were quick to highlight the progress made by women entering traditionally male-dominated fields, notably in medicine. Conversely, historically feminized professions, such as nursing, are witnessing an increase in men. Yet, even as women’s representation has improved in the field of medicine, there is a further bifurcation along gendered lines, namely between prestigious specialty fields that are overwhelmingly male, and family doctors that are mostly female. Other participants pushed back against the claim that the university is largely free of gender discrimination. They pointed to the gendered politics involved in serving on committees, and even teaching M/W/F classes, as opposed to Tu/Th classes. Still others problematized the very notion of choice when it comes to women “choosing” alternate career tracks.

The conversation shifted to discussing the structure of the academy itself, returning to the issue of how the academic pipeline is designed. There was general agreement that the academy is largely hostile towards work-life balance, and that this circumstance affects both genders. Women (or men) who opt to take time off in order to start a family are not as competitive when they return to apply for jobs. This points to a general flaw in the design of the academic system. While it seems clear that changes are needed to facilitate the successful transition back into the academy after a short leave, it is not obvious what the path forward requires in terms of generating new policies.

Overall, a professorship entails three main spheres of responsibility: teaching, research, and service. Freeman and others pointed out that work related to the service category is valued significantly less than the others, and argued that this situation encumbers women to a greater degree than men. By contrast, research is highly valued and rewarded in the university setting and beyond. Wallen stated that selfishness is a quality that is rewarded in the academic marketplace; to the extent that an individual is service-oriented, he or she will pay a price, regardless of gender. Despite the uncertainty concerning how to effectively address these structural problems, it seems clear that the academy needs to confront the issue of how to better remunerate unseen works of service, such as advising and serving on committees. These remain issues and questions that academia has yet to systematically address in concrete ways.

Gilman: Is Racism a Psychopathology?

Sander Gilman, Is Racism a Psychopathology?

In the third and final CMBC lunch talk of the 2013 fall semester, Dr. Sander Gilman (Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory) treated participants to an engaging presentation on the interconnected history of racism and mental illness in Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The topic of the talk grew out of a CMBC-sponsored undergraduate course and graduate seminar offered by Dr. Gilman last fall, titled “Race, Brain, and Psychoanalysis.”

Gilman opened by citing a 2012 study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of scientists at Oxford. Based on clinical experiments, they reported that white subjects who were given doses of the beta-blocker drug Propranolol showed reduced indicators of implicit racial bias. The authors of the paper wrote that their research “raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs.” Time Magazine soon thereafter ran a headline story with the title “Is Racism Becoming a Mental Illness?” Dismissing these claims as unscientific, Gilman instead posed a different set of questions: at what point, historically, does racism come to be classified as a form of mental illness? Why? And what are the implications of such a “diagnosis”?

The strange marriage of racism and mental illness traces back to the development of the so-called “science of man” in nineteenth century Europe. At this time, notably in Germany, the nascent discipline of psychiatry was attempting to win status as a legitimate science. Psychologists turned their attention to the issue of race and sought to clarify the connection between race and morals on the one hand, and mental illness on the other. Across the ocean, the assumption in America was that African Americans’ desire to escape the bondage of slavery was symptomatic of an underlying insanity. In Europe, by contrast, the intellectual discussion about race and mental illness concerned the population of European Jews, who, unlike African American slaves, were able to participate in public intellectual life. The pressing question facing European scientists had to do with the extremely high rates of mental illness among Jews. Scholars debated whether it was due to inbreeding or a consequence of domestication and self-isolation. More interesting, however, is the fact that even Jewish scholars accepted the basic supposition that Jews displayed high rates of insanity. Indeed, some concluded that such illness could only be explained as the result of 2,000 years of persecution. The main point about this period of history, then, is that minority groups such as European Jews and African American slaves were thought to suffer from a universal form of mental illness, and this theory was now supported by a distinctly “scientific” diagnosis.

Then a major shift occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century as scholars began to focus on the oppressor. If mental illness among Jews was indeed caused by a long history of persecution, then what explains racism itself? The question was especially relevant to Jewish thinkers who were trying to understand the factors that might prompt Jews to leave Europe and found their own Jewish state. Thus, in a proto-Zionist pamphlet written in 1882 and titled “Auto-Emancipation,” the Russian Jewish physician Leon Pinsker coined the term “Judeophobia” to designate the mental illness not of the oppressed minority, but of the persecutor. Pinsker claimed that Judeophobia was not unique to any one race, but was instead the common inheritance of all peoples who had ever interacted with the Jews—in other words, nearly everyone. The term was presented as a disease, a psychic aberration that was hereditary and incurable. This new model of race and mental illness therefore inverted the prevailing view: it was no longer the victim, but the racist who was crazy.

Whereas the apparent madness of the Jews and African Americans was based on their status as races or biological entities, the larger global population of Judeophobes was not based in biology. To classify the madness of this diverse collective entity, psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century invented the notion of the “crowd.” A parallel was thereby established between race and the (German) crowd. In the early part of the twentieth century, Freud adopted the idea of the crowd into his theory of group psychology and claimed that racism was a prime example of such crowd madness. Moreover, he argued that it was universal and fuelled by the tendency of the crowd to see itself as biologically different from other crowds. The idea of racism—and anti-Semitism, in particular—as a form of psychopathology, became a common view by the 1920’s and 30’s.

But the pendulum swung back yet again as scholars in central Europe (many of whom were Jewish) expressed renewed interest in the status of the victim. Scientists speculated that, as a consequence of racial discrimination, there must be a residual aspect of self-hatred among the oppressed. Not only was racism itself a sign of psychopathology, but the response to racism also came to be viewed as a form of mental illness. Anna Freud wrote about the tendency of the victim to identify with the aggressor. For example, in studying Jewish children who had escaped to America after World War II, she noticed that when they played the game of “Nazis and Jews”—the German equivalent of “Cowboys and Indians”—all the Jewish kids wanted to be Nazis. This tendency, scholars argued, pointed to underlying psychological damage.

To summarize the story to this point: we started with the notion that certain oppressed, biological minorities are by definition mad; this hypothesis then proceeded to the idea that the racist perpetrators were the ones who are mentally ill; and finally ended up with the suggestion that the perpetrators’ own psychopathology (i.e. racism) is in fact the cause of the victim’s madness.

Meanwhile in the United States, the debate about these questions became a central issue. Social psychologists, in particular, were among the first to pick up the notion of the victim’s self-hatred as the result of exposure to negative race patterns. Two leading figures in this regard were the American Jewish researchers Eugene and Ruth Horowitz, whose work on black racial identity was adopted by the African American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940’s and early 50’s. The Clarks are perhaps most famous for their “doll studies,” in which children were presented with plastic diaper-clad dolls identical in appearance except for color. The researchers were interested in who selected what color doll and found that black children in segregated schools in the south consistently chose white dolls. The researchers concluded from these experiments that prejudice and segregation cause black children to develop a universal sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

Gilman noted that while the doll studies are problematic in a number of respects, the important point about this line of psychological research is that it moved the discussion in the United States from looking at the politics of prejudice to the psychology of prejudice—what Gilman referred to as the “medicalization of prejudice.” The movement initiated by the Clarks had several important ramifications. On the one hand, the movement played a positive role in the push to end segregation. On the other hand, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations invariably began to make legal arguments via the doll studies by invoking the universal psychological damage caused by segregation and racism. Such damage, for instance, was behind the reasoning in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. In addition, by focusing on the mental injury suffered by the victim, the madness of the perpetrator was forgotten. In short, as psychological evidence was introduced as the primary means to influence jurisprudence in America, the victory of ending segregation came at the cost of defining all African American children raised under segregation as psychologically damaged.     

With his closing remarks, Gilman mentioned a powerful counterargument to the “racism as mental illness” theory, first advanced by the political theorist Hannah Arendt in the 1950’s. Arendt made the simple claim that racists are actually normal people—to be sure, they are bad people, but normal people nonetheless. In agreement with this view, Gilman argued that the medicalization of social phenomena and the intense focus on the damage of the victim is unhelpful because it tacitly exculpates the racists themselves.

During a stimulating discussion following the talk, Gilman went on to highlight the dangers inherent in the claim that victims of racism suffer from universal mental illness. First, the claim is too general; it defines ab initio all members of a group as damaged in exactly the same way, when in reality not all people suffer from psychopathology. Second, the African American researchers who conducted the experiments present an obvious exception to their own rule of universal damage. Lastly, with respect to the doll studies, the theory cannot explain those white children who chose black dolls. In the end, Gilman made a forceful case against psychologically based arguments against racism that invoke the notion of universal damage, for if everyone is “damaged,” then it ceases to be a useful category.

Kozhevnikov: Is There a Place for Cognitive Style?

Maria Kozhevnikov, Is There a Place for Cognitive Style in Contemporary Psychology and Neuroscience? Issues in Definition and Conceptualization

The second CMBC lunch talk of the semester featured a presentation by Dr. Maria Kozhevnikov (Radiology, Harvard School of Medicine; Psychology, National University of Singapore), who has been a visiting scholar of the CMBC this fall. Dr. Kozhevnikov offered a critical perspective on the current state of cognitive style research within different research traditions, such as cognitive neuroscience, education, and business management. Kozhevnikov opted to treat the lunch talk as an opportunity for group discussion, which promoted a lively dialogue among the participants.  

Traditional research on cognitive style began in the early 1950’s and focused on perception and categorization. During this time, numerous experimental studies attempted to identify individual differences in visual cognition and their potential relation to personality differences. The cognitive style concept was thereafter used in the 50’s and 60’s to describe patterns of mental processing which help an individual cope with his or her environment. According to this understanding, cognitive style referred to an individual’s ability to adapt to the requirements of the external world, given his or her basic capacities. Researchers tended to discuss cognitive style in terms of bipolarity—the idea that there are two value-equal poles of style dimensions. For example, a host of binary dimensions were proposed in the literature, such as impulsivity/reflexivity, holist/serialist, verbalizer/visualizer, and so on. No attempt was made, however, to integrate these competing style dimensions into a coherent framework. By the late 1970’s, a standard definition referred to cognitive style as “a psychological dimension representing individual differences in cognition,” or “an individual’s manner of cognitive functioning, particularly with respect to acquiring and processing information” (Ausburn & Ausburn, 1978).         

Kozhevnikov questioned the usefulness of such definitions and pointed to a general lack of clarity with regard to how the term “cognitive style” was employed in early research. Moreover, several participants at the lunch talk noted further problems with the idea of cognitive style. For instance, if the notion of “style” is a distinct cognitive category, how is it different from basic abilities or strategies? What does the concept of style add in this respect? While it is obvious that there exist individual differences in cognition, it was notoriously difficult to determine exactly how styles differed from intellectual and personality abilities. On account of these conceptual difficulties, among others, cognitive style research fell out of favor and virtually disappeared after the late 1970’s, to the point where even mentioning the term in psychology and neuroscience settings has become taboo.

The concept of cognitive style lived on, however, in the field of education, where it quickly became associated with the idea of learning styles. Kolb (1974) defined learning styles as “adaptive learning modes,” each of which offers a patterned way of resolving problems in learning situations. The idea of individual learning styles in turn gave rise to the so-called “matching hypothesis”—the suggestion that students learn better when their learning style is aligned with the style of instruction. Although the hypothesis appeared reasonable, it has not found empirical support; studies have not been able to establish that aligning teaching with student styles confers a discernable benefit. It is worth noting, however, that this observation does not rule out the existence of learning style altogether. Kozhevnikov asked us to consider the martial artist Bruce Lee, who when asked what fighting style is best, responded that the best fighting style is no style. The point is that it pays to be flexible, that is, to be able to use different styles—in either fighting or learning—in different situations. Learning style instruments have become popular in education and tend to use a combination of different style dimensions that can be quite complex.

The business world has also adopted the idea of cognitive style, in the form of professional decision-making styles. In management, researchers have been intensely focused on the “right brain-left brain” idea, which is frequently invoked in style categorization. The most popular bipolarity, for example, is that of analytic/intuitive (thought to correspond to left- and right-brain, respectively). Kozhevnikov was quick to point out, however, that this theory has no basis in neuroscience. Lastly, in parallel to education learning style instruments, business has likewise incorporated its own instruments for identifying personal styles. The most famous of these is the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Beginning in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, recent studies from cross-cultural psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated that culture-specific experiences may affect distinct patterns of information processing. Kozhevnikov reported that these “cultural-sensitive individual differences in cognition” have been identified at cognitive, neural, and perceptual levels, and appear to be shaped in part by socio-cultural experiences. Several studies, for example, have explored these transcultural differences in East Asian and Western populations. Researchers identified greater tendencies among East Asian individuals to engage in context-dependent cognitive processes, as well as to favor intuitive understanding through direct perception rather than an analytic approach involving abstract principles. Moreover, these individual differences appear independent of general intelligence. At least one participant expressed initial reservation about such research, remarking that the talk of the East-West binary tends to postulate artificial groups (e.g. what exactly is “Eastern culture”?).

Nevertheless, the finding that cognitive style can be represented by specific patterns of neural activity—independent of differences in cognitive ability measures—lends support to the validity of the cognitive style concept. According to this picture, then, Kozhevnikov redefines cognitive style as “culture-sensitive patterns of cognitive processing that can operate at different levels of information processing.”

Assuming this research is on the right track, the next question becomes: how many cognitive styles are there? As we have seen, early studies on cognitive style proliferated a large number of styles and dimensions, which further multiplied with the introduction of learning and decision-making styles. A unitary structure, such as the analytical/intuitive binary common in business circles, fails to capture the complexity of styles. More recent theories have therefore proposed multilevel hierarchical models, which include both a horizontal (e.g. analytical/holistic) level and a vertical dimension to reflect different stages of information processing (e.g. perception, thought, memory). Thus, different stages in processing reflect different cognitive styles.

Building upon this important theoretical modeling, Kozhevnikov proposed a model of cognitive style families with orthogonal dimensions. According to this proposal, it would be possible to map all the different proposed styles onto a matrix with 4x4 cells. On the horizontal axis are different dimensions that include context dependency/independency; rule-based/intuitive processing; internal/external locus of processing; and integration/compartmentalization. The cells on the vertical axis correspond to levels of cognitive processing, such as perception; concept formation; higher-order cognitive processing; and metacognitive processing. Kozhevnikov suggested that this theoretical framework offers a means of categorizing and unifying the array of style types and dimensions—from traditional styles to learning and decision-making styles—into a single matrix with multiple cells that accentuate both the relevant horizontal and vertical dimensions.

References

Ausburn, L. J., and Ausburn, F. B. 1978. Cognitive Styles: Some Information and Implications for Instructional Design. Educational Communication and Technology 26: 337-54. 

Kolb, D. A. 1974. On Management and the Learning Process. In Organizational Psychology, ed. D. A. Kolb, I. M. Rubin, and J. M. McInture, 239-52. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.