What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (44 page)

10
I volunteered to be a subject for David Rosenhan’s classic study “On Being Sane in Insane Places,”
Science
179 (1973): 250–58. Rosenhan and I went into Norristown State Hospital together. He was ill-treated, as expected. I was wonderfully treated. This tale is worth a whole chapter itself—but in some other volume.

11
J. Wegner, F. Catalano, J. Gibralter, and J. Kane, “Schizophrenics with Tardive Dyskinesia,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
42 (1985): 860–65; ACNP-FDA Task Force, “Medical Intelligence—Drug Therapy,”
New England Journal of Medicine
130 (1973): 20–24. Fine recent coverage of tardive dyskinesia is in C. Gualtieri,
Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Pharmacology
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991).

12
G. Cooper, “The Safety of Fluoxetine—An Update,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
153 (1988): 77–86; J. Wernicke, “The Side-Effect Profile and Safety of Fluoxetine,”
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
46 (1985): 59–67; M. Teicher, C. Glod, and J. Cole, “Emergence of Intense Suicidal Preoccupation During Fluoxetine Treatment,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
147 (1990): 207–10.

For a recent review of antidepressant side effects generally, see G. Beaumont, “Adverse Effects of Antidepressants,”
International Clinical Psychopharmacology
5 (1990): 61–66, and S. Preskorn and G. Jerkovich, “Central Nervous System Toxicity of Tricyclic Antidepressants: Phenomenology, Course, Risk Factors, and the Role of Drug Monitoring,”
Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology
10 (1990): 88–95.

The jury is still out on both the safety and the relative effectiveness of Prozac.

13
. P. Tyrer, S. Murphy, D. Kingdon, et al., “The Nottingham Study of Neurotic Disorder: Comparison of Drug and Psychological Treatment,”
Lancet
, 30 July 1988, 235–40, contends that the anti-anxiety drugs are clinically useless for neurotic disorders. A useful general review of rate of effectiveness is in Spiegel,
Psychopharmacology
, 15–19, 25–29.

14
. J. Roache, “Addiction Potential of Benzodiazepines and Non-Benzodiazepine Anxiolytics,” in
Advances in Alcohol and Substance Abuse
9 (1990): 103–28, provides a balanced view. For an alarmist view, see S. Olivieri, T. Cantopher, and J. Edwards, “Two Hundred Years of Anxiolytic Drug Dependence,”
Neuropharmacology
25 (1986): 669–70. For a more complacent view of the safety of anti-anxiety drugs, see A. Nagy, “Possible Reasons for a Negative Attitude to Benzodiazepines as Antianxiety Drugs,”
Nordisk Psykiatrisk Tidsskrift
4 (1987): 27–30. My best guess is that taken regularly, the anti-anxiety drugs tend to become impotent and addictive.

J. Tinklenberg, “Anti-Anxiety Medications and the Treatment of Anxiety,” in Barchas et al.,
Psychopharmacology
, 226–42, provides useful descriptive data.

15
. For a recent upbeat review of lithium and its side effects, see J. Jefferson, “Lithium: The Present and the Future,”
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
5 (1990): 4–8. Lithium is being used more and more on unipolar depression as well as on manic-depression. The data are suggestive, but the side effects are still definitely a danger.

16
. K. Dodge, J. Bates, and G. Pettit, “Mechanisms in the Cycle of Violence,”
Science
250 (1990): 1678–83, is a “politically correct” article notable for the completeness of its environmental theorizing on the cycle of abuse, and its complete absence of genetic theorizing.

17
. D. Buss, “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
12 (1989): 1–49, discusses cogently the evolution of sexual attractiveness. See especially the quoted comment within by N. Thorn-hill on the evolution of feminine beauty. See also D. Buss, “Evolutionary Personality Psychology,”
Annual Review of Psychology
42 (1991): 439–91, for related theorizing.

18
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in
Philosophical Investigations
(London: Blackwell, 1953), paragraphs 77–83, sets the stage for this argument by showing that nouns in ordinary language have no
necessary
feature that defines them. Rather, nouns like
games
consist of a family resemblance of overlapping elements. Inasmuch as evolution selects traits like beauty, intelligence, and motor coordination, which have no necessary defining feature, the problem of finding their underlying genetic structure will be identical to the problem of finding a necessary condition defining a word. To say that these traits
are polygenic
(determined by many genes) is to miss the point.

On my analysis, then, these traits are not interestingly genetic—the combination of genes that underlie them is too large and overlapping. But they are heritable, nonetheless.

19
. One quibble concerning personality traits in identical twins reared apart rises from selective placement by adoption agencies. When identical twins are separated and put up for adoption, agencies might place them similarly. So the offspring of religious parents might go to religious homes, and the offspring of rich parents to rich homes. When similarity of placement is quantified, however, this doesn’t seem to count for much of the observed similarity.

Another quibble concerns how long the twins were reared together before separation. If they are not put up for adoption until late in childhood, the whole argument falls, and similarity could result either from genes or rearing. Most good twins-reared-apart studies, therefore, look only at twins separated early in the first year of life.

What is not a quibble is the possibility that personality is only indirectly heritable—that “nature works via nurture.” So we will see below that optimism is heritable: Identical twins are more concordant for it than fraternal twins. But optimism is produced by lots of success (and pessimism by lots of failure) in life. Success and failure, in turn, are caused by characteristics like looks, strength, and motor coordination, all of which are physical and heritable. Identical twins are more concordant for these characteristics (both twins are similar on massiveness or runtiness) than are fraternal twins. So what might be directly heritable are physical characteristics that produce the personality trait, with the personality trait actually wholly caused by the environment. This argument applies to all molar personality characteristics.

T. Bouchard, D. Lykken, M. McGue, N. Segal, A. Tellegen, “Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart,”
Science
250 (1990): 223–28, apart from being a classic experiment, is also articulate on this point. While these findings are sometimes dismissed as “gene-environment covariation,” such dismissal misses the point. It is the environment that is primarily causal here, not the genes—and intervening to break the gene-environment covariation shows this.

Much of the future of environmental treatments for biologically loaded problems may be discovering ways
to break the gene-environment covariation
.

20
. The best source for the details of this monumental study is Bouchard, et al., “Sources of Human Psychological Differences.” I highly recommend it to the curious reader. It is of high scope and quality.

Some people still have the preconception that IQ is not at all genetic. They are wrong. If someone tells you this, they are either scientifically illiterate or ideologically blinded. Don’t buy a used car from them. The identical-twin and adoptive data on IQ are massive and compelling: At least half (and in the Bouchard study, 75 percent) of the variance in IQ is genetic. What “intelligence” means, however, and what it predicts about achievement in life is much murkier.

The television-viewing study is R. Plomin, R. Corley, J. DeFries, and D. Fulker, “Individual Differences in Television Viewing in Early Childhood: Nature as Well as Nurture,”
Psychological Science
1 (1990): 371–77. The religiosity study is N. Waller, B. Kojetin, T. Bouchard, D. Lykken, and A. Tellegen, “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values,”
Psychological Science
1 (1990): 138–42. The last four personality factors are from an analysis of the California Personality Inventory: T. Bouchard and M. McGue, “Genetic and Rearing Environmental Influences on Adult Personality: An Analysis of Adopted Twins Reared Apart,”
Journal of Personality
58 (1990): 263–92.

21
. See N. Pedersen, G. McClearn, R. Plomin, J. Nesselroade, J. Berg, and U. DeFaire, “The Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging: An Update,”
Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae
40 (1991): 7–20. R. Plomin, M. Scheier, C. Bergeman, N. Pedersen, J. Nesselroade, and G. McClearn, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Mental Health: A Twin/Adoption Analysis,”
Personality and Individual Differences
13 (1992): 921–30, presents the optimism piece of it.

22
. See B. Hutchings and S. Mednick, “Criminality in Adoptees and Their Adoptive and Biological Parents: A Pilot Study,” in S. Mednick and K. Christiansen, eds.,
Biosocial Bases of Criminal Behavior
(New York: Gardner, 1977), 127–42.

For similar logic applied to divorce, see M. McGue and D. Lykken, “Genetic Influence on Risk of Divorce,”
Psychological Science
3 (1992): 368–73. Divorce is partly heritable and seems to result partly from heritable characteristics that the two parties bring to their union.

23
. It is not only the nonheritable half of personality that can change. The heritable half is made up of both directly genetic effects and “gene-environment covariance.” This last bit of jargon is very important. “Gene-environment covariance” refers to the effective events in the environment that produce a trait but that are correlated with genes, and so do not appear to be environmental effects. So, for example, being very tall is heritable. Playing basketball professionally is also heritable. This is because tall people get into environments-eighth-grade basketball teams, for example—in which they excel and that reward them. They go on to become top basketball players. The genes don’t directly get you to the NBA; success at basketball does. Success at basketball is the effective environmental cause—but it is correlated with the genes for tallness.

Gene-environment covariance can be broken by intervention
, allowing change to occur even in the heritable fraction of personality. Tall people who don’t get the opportunity to play basketball in high school don’t get into the NBA. Another example of gene-environment covariance is crime. Crime is partly heritable, and psychopathic kids tend to alienate their parents and teachers. Their parents and teachers usually give up on them because they are so nasty. The kids, lacking a relationship with an adult, turn to the streets. This makes them street-smart criminals. If the parents persist and don’t reject the kid—breaking the covariance—they may prevent the kid from becoming a criminal.

I thank David Lykken for this example. Its implications are profound.

CHAPTER
4
Everyday Anxiety

1
. Judith Rapoport, in
The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing
(New York: Dutton, 1989), calls attention to trichotillomania—the disorder of pulling at your hair, twirling it, picking pimples, and extreme self-grooming. When severe, baldness and skin irritation result. She argues that it is a biological disorder related to obsessive-compulsive disorders and that it can be relieved with an antidepressant drug, Anafranil (clomipramine), that also relieves obsessive-compulsive disorder. While I don’t agree that either trichotillomania or obsessive-compulsive disorder is a “brain” disorder, both do have biological
correlates
. I believe that the two are related to each other, and that both are related to the evolution of grooming, in the large sense.

2
. Randolph Nesse uses the oil-light metaphor in “What Good Is Feeling Bad? The Evolutionary Benefits of Psychic Pain,”
The Sciences
(1991): 30–37.

3
. Developed by Charles Spielberger in collaboration with G. Jacobs, R. Crane, S. Russell, L. Westberry, L. Barker, E. Johnson, J. Knight, and E. Marks. I have selected the trait-anxiety questions, inverting some of the scoring of the negatively worded items for easy self-scoring. Dr. Spielberger has kindly provided comparison norms as well.

4
. Benson’s suggested technique (as explained in
The Relaxation Response
[New York: Morrow, 1975]) combines progressive relaxation, nasal breathing, and meditation. See E. Jacobson’s classic
Progressive Relaxation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938) for the original technique. Neither of these is a quick “how to” manual, however.

The single best quick technique is called
applied relaxation training
. It is based on a therapy developed by Lars Goren-Ost (“Applied Relaxation: Description of a Coping Technique and Review of Controlled Studies,”
Behaviour Research and Therapy
25 [1987]: 397–410). A simple five-page “how to do it” is found in the appendix of D. Clark, “Anxiety States: Panic and Generalized Anxiety,” in K. Hawton, P. Salkovskis, J. Kirk, and D. Clark, eds.,
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Psychiatric Problems: A Practical Guide
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92–96. This technique takes you from progressive relaxation to relaxing while engaged in everyday activities.