Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

/pdf/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-480wr4m3kb.pdf

The WEIRDest People in the World

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/90300/j.ejpain.2004.11.001.pdf?sequence=1

Human brain mechanisms of pain perception and regulation in health and disease.

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(07)60111-1.pdf

Huntington's disease.

http://www.cognitiveneuroscience.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Rossini_CliNeuro_2015.pdf

Non-invasive electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain, spinal cord, roots and peripheral nerves: Basic principles and procedures for routine clinical and research application: An updated report from an I.F.C.N. Committee

Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately decode a person's conscious experience based only on non-invasive measurements of their brain activity. Such 'brain reading' has mostly been studied in the domain of visual perception, where it helps reveal the way in which individual experiences are encoded in the human brain. The same approach can also be extended to other types of mental state, such as covert attitudes and lie detection. Such applications raise important ethical issues concerning the privacy of personal thought.

Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans

Motor threshold is a means of quantifying stimulus in transcranial magnetic stimulation. Two methods are used. One involves neurophysiology techniques and the other is visualization of movement. The aim was to compare the percentage of total machine output (PTMO) necessary to achieve motor threshold using these different methods. Neurophysiological and visualization of movement thresholds were determined in six subjects. In all subjects, the two thresholds were achieved with a < 10% difference in PTMO. Determination of motor threshold with a neurophysiological and a visualization of movement method produced similar results.

Motor Threshold in Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Comparison of a Neurophysiological Method and a Visualization of Movement Method

Electroconvulsive Therapy, 4th ed.

There are four main chapters. The fi rst deals with anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. It tells that when Dr Sing Lee, a British trained psychiatrist, went (? returned) to Hong Kong in the mid 1980s, he found few cases of self-starving, and none which featured the pursuit of thinness. However, when the Western diagnosis (and criteria) were introduced, the condition became common. Watters argues that it was not the introduction of Western fashion and values, but the introduction of the diagnosis which accounted for this change. That is, anorexia nervosa became a culturally accepted means of expressing distress.

Crazy like us: the globalization of the American psyche

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a new technology which holds promise as a treatment of psychiatric disorders. Most work to date has been on depression. Superiority to placebo has been indicated in three small blind studies. We compared the antidepressant effects of rTMS and ECT in 32 patients suffering major depressive episode (MDE) who had failed to respond to at least one course of medication. There was no limit to the number of treatment sessions which could be given and treatment was continued until remission occurred or response plateaued. A significant main effect for treatment type was found [Pillai trace = 0.248, F(3,28) = 3.076, p = 0.044; power = 0.656], reflecting an advantage for ECT patients on measures of depression overall, however, rTMS produced comparable results on a number of measures. Blind raters using the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) found the rate of remission (HDRS = ? 8) was the same (68.8%), and the percentage improvement over the course of treatment of 55.6% (rTMS) and 66.4% (ECT), while favouring ECT, was not significantly different. Significant differences were shown (p & 0.03) in percentage improvement on Beck Depression Inventory ratings (rTMS, 45.5%; ECT, 69.1%), but not for improvement in Visual Analogue ratings of mood (rTMS 42.3%; ECT, 57%). rTMS has antidepressant effects of useful proportions and further studies are indicated.

Saxby Pridmore

Papers

Motor Threshold in Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Comparison of a Neurophysiological Method and a Visualization of Movement Method

Electroconvulsive Therapy, 4th ed.

Crazy like us: the globalization of the American psyche

Comparison of unlimited numbers of rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and ECT treatment sessions in major depressive episode.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is efficacious as an add-on to pharmacological therapy in complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) type I.