Psyche, Science, and Society

It’s torture when others do it, according to Washington Post

In a major exposure of media hypocrisy, Jason Linkins points out that the Washington Post Finally Describes Waterboarding As Torture (When Someone Else Does It):

Here’s some unique writing from the Washington Post, in an article about a man named Kaing Khek Lev, or “Duch,” a notorious genocidaire of the Khmer Rouge, who this week took responsibility for his crimes, namely running “the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh,” where an “estimated 16,000 men, women and children died.” Now, we’ve read a lot of descriptions of torture in the Washington Post, but some editor allowed reporter Tim Johnston to file an extraordinary rendition:

The prosecution described a chain of death operated by Duch. His victims — most of whom were either disgraced members of the Khmer Rouge or their families — were tortured with electric shocks, waterboarding or beating to extract a confession, which would implicate new victims. After confessing, the victims would be killed, most often by a sharp blow to the back of the head.

“There were autopsies carried out on live persons, there was medical experimentation, and people were bled to death: These were all crimes against humanity admitted by Duch,” the prosecutors charged in the indictment. Among the four forms of torture he officially condoned, they said, was pouring water up victims’ noses.
Wow. You see what Johnston did there, right? He called waterboarding “torture.” He specifically called “pouring water up victims’ noses”…torture.

It’s a break from typical media traditions, obviously. See, when outfits like the WaPo typically talk about waterboarding, it’s referred to as “a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime” or “harsh interrogation tactics” or an “interrogation tactic” or “harsh interrogation practices” or “a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill.” But unless you are in possession of whatever gland produces honesty, like Dan Froomkin, you never, never, ever just come right out and say that waterboarding is torture.
I guess it becomes “torture” when it’s being done by genocidal Communist madmen, whose political ideology lacks the beautiful exceptionalism that normally transforms an abhorrent and inhumane act into a patriotic gesture. At least I think that’s the equation. I’m willing to revisit this position if, say, Ruth Marcus puts on her Inanity Cap and pens a piece about how we should give Duch a break because SURELY, when he was torturing and killing people in Phnom Penh, he was acting “not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.”…

For, as we now know, the US government never tortures.

1 comment March 31st, 2009

Stress a biological link between childhood poverty and adult cognition

A new study provides evidence that childhood poverty may affect adult cognitive functioning at least partly through biological mechanisms [elevated stress hormones in childhood]. At a time when poverty of all types is rapidly rising across the world, this is deeply disturbing. We need to get elimination of poverty higher on the overly-crowded reform agenda:

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

By Brandon Keim

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.

“Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

Evans and Schamberg’s findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete. In addition to poverty’s many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too.

“A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood,” they wrote.

To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students’ blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It’s in these brain regions that working memory is centered. Evans and Schamberg didn’t scan their human subjects’ brains, but the test results suggest that the same basic mechanisms operate in kids.

“Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models,” said Rockefeller University neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen. “Now there are beginnings of work on our own species. The Evans paper is an important step in that direction.”

McEwen also noted that, at least in animals, the effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty’s effects could be hereditary.

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. “They’re not really saying which causal events were stressful. They’re just measuring biological markers of stress,” said Kim Noble, a University of Pennsylvania psychobiologist who studies the relationship between child poverty and cognition. Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured.

“I think that different cognitive outcomes have different causes,” said Noble. “Something like working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be associated with hours spent reading to your children.”

But Noble still said the study “was very well-done. They have an impressive data set.” And though some details remain incomplete, she said, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.

“Policy changes that affect environments that might affect cognitive development and brain change — that’s the ultimate future of the field,” she said.

**********

Citation: “Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory.” By Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 13, March 30, 2009.

March 31st, 2009

Two views on the bank bailout

Two alternative views on the baking crisis.  At TPMCafe, Bernard Avishai is unconvinced by Paul Krugman’s concerns, and asks Two Lingering Questions for Krugman:

So the first question is this: Given how much faster financial capital and entrepreneurial information move today than they did in the 1930s, or even in Japan in the 1990s, can we not assume that the pace, not only of decline, but recovery, too, will be much faster than any historical precedent? The president implied that he thought so in his “Sixty Minutes” interview last week, when he spoke of how “wired” the world has become….

So the second question is this: Do bankers, for all their faults and grotesque enrichment, know some important, subtle things about managing risk, assessing business plans, providing financial services, and so forth that we dare not lose during the process of recovery? Is there not real know-how here, not just know-about (that is, insider stuff, like ways of betting against “AIG’s book”)?

At the Atlantic, however, in The Quiet Coup, former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson sees strong similarities between major crises in developing countries and the US crisis:

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Johnson concludes, rather pessimistically:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

March 31st, 2009