Providentia

Michael Boatwright Mystery Continues

Nearly six months after a Florida man was found unconscious in a Palm Springs Motel, doctors are still slowly helping Michael Boatwright regain his identity.   Boatwright, a 61-year old U.S. veteran, has no memory of his name or past after waking up in Palm Springs' Desert Regional Medical Center.   He also seemed incapable of speaking English at all, preferring to speak in Swedish instead.    Even when seeing his face in a mirror, he was incapable of recognizing his own face and insisted that his name was Johann Ek.  

Police and a social worker were able to confirm his identity using several pieces of identification in his room, including his passport.   There were also family photographs in his duffel bag, including pictures of his ex-wife and son though he had no memory of them.  Locating family members and friends who had known Boatwright in the past took longer.   Despite his having a cellphone in is possession when he was found,  none of the numbers listed were still being used.  One sister, living in Louisiana, described her brother as a wanderer who "just disappeared" years before and she was unable to provide details of his recent life.  She also stated that she had been unable to contact him when their mother died more than a year ago.   

Internet searches determined that Boatwright had worked as a 3D graphics designer and had also taught English overseas for a number of years.   An online portfolio describes him as having a Bachelor's degree from Michigan State University and a Master's degree from Stockholm University.    His social worker, Linda Hunt-Vasquez, discovered a testimonial to him on the website of a TPR English school in Zhuhai, China where he had been teaching English one year before his catastrophic memory loss.   As for the mystery of his speaking Swedish, members of the local Swedish community speculate that he lived in Sweden for a time and may have learned the language there.     His lack of any regional accent or actual memories of Sweden provide no real clues about when he might have been in Sweden.

After medical testing ruled out alternative medical explanations, Boatwright was diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia which is apparently psychogenic in nature.   Also known as  a  psychogenic fugue,   it is classified as a dissociative disorder under the DSM-IV-TR and is potentially linked to trauma.   Fugue states can last from a few hours to many years in length.  In one famous case, opthalmologist William Bates (best known for "Perfect Sight Without Glasses"), vanished without a trace in 1902 and was later found many years later living under another name with no memory of his former life.   

While his case is still being investigated, skeptics have raised questions about Michael Boatwright's story.   According to staff at the JW Marriott in Palm Springs, Michael Boatwright had asked for a job as a tennis coach there on February 26 shortly before being found at the nearby motel.    The hotel's tennis director, Jim Leupold, described him as extremely desperate when asking for a tennis position or help getting to Peru where he claimed to have a job waiting for him.   Though Leupold tried to help him, there were no tennis jobs available and Boatwright told him he would call back later to see if any new jobs became available.    As this was two days  before he was found in the motel, it remains unclear whether his amnestic state is genuine or an elaborate fraud.  

As for Michael Boatwright, the question of what can be done with him still needs to be answered.   Since he is physically healthy, remaining at the hospital is not an option and his social worker is trying to find an alternative to avoid becoming homeless.    Despite Boatwright's previous skills as a graphics designer, he is unable to access any of the memories that might help him support himself and he describes his amnestic life as being "a living hell."    "Walk in my shoes for one day," he said.  "You'll experience the nighmare of a lifetime."

 

 

 

U.N. Report Says "Legal Highs" on the Rise

A new report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states that the production and abuse of new psychoactive substances is increasing rapidly while violence stemming from the cocaine trade in Central American remains high.  

"The multitude of new psychoactive substances and thespeed with which they have emerged in all regions of the world is one of the most notable trends in drug markets over the past five years,"   according to the report.    Despite concerns over new drugs, the overall drug picture has remained stable with the increased number of drug users keeping step with the increased world population.   Opioids, such as heroin and morphine, remain the most common cause of drug deaths but there still  a major gap in drug treatment with only one in six users worldwide receiving treatment.

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

The Double Life of Dr. Clarence King (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One

A nationally known figure who frequently consulted with prominent politicians, including the President of the United States,  Clarence King also served as the first director of the United States Geological Survey.     Along with his being famous as an explorer, he was also a popular writer whose books about his travels were bestsellers.    It was hardly remarable that he would be honoured for his work including being the youngest person ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1879.  By then, he was firmly established in New York City and belonged to some of the most exclusive gentlemen's clubs and New York's literary community.   During the course of his travels, he also became a legendary art collector despite most of his acquisitions ending up in the large steamer trunks he kept in the hotel suites where he stayed. 

Racial barriers during the post-Civil War era were virtually insurmountable across the United States.   Though African-Americans were avaialable for menial jobs, any kind of social interaction between them and "respectable" society was unthinkable.   While segregation is mostly associated with southern states, New York had its fair share of race incidents as well.   Jim Crow legislation designed to prevent any form of "racial mixing" would make life even more difficult for former slaves and many of the people in Clarence King's social circle wholeheartedly approved. 

For Clarence King, the double life he established for himself became amazingly easy.  After experimenting with living in his own upscale apartment with servants, he decided that living in residential hotels was much simpler.   From his various suites in exclusive hotels,  he could travel anywhere he wished, go visit his mother in Newport, or tend to business in other parts of the city with nobody being the wiser.   He also became acquainted with many members of New York's African American community although it is unclear when he first adopted the name of James Todd.  

Keeping his two lives separate meant avoiding any places where "Clarence King" or "James Todd" might be recognized by the wrong people.   That was not especially difficult in racially segregated New York though his courtship of Ada Copeland must have raised awkward questions.   What made it work was that nobody ever suspected that a respected geologist might try "passing" for a member of the African-American community.    King's Caucasian features were no drawback either with the "one drop of blood" rule in place.  Many light-skinned people were identified as African-American (or Negro using the terminology of the time) and any passing that occurred typically went in the opposite direction.

Marrying Ada in September of 1888 meant a permanent commitment to maintaining his double life.  For his friends and family, Clarence King's odd lifestyle and mysterious comings and goings raised few questions.   Still, of all the people in his old life that he tried to keep separate from his other life, the most important one was his twice-widowed mother,  Florence King.   Left destitute by the death of her second husband, Caroline had few options but to depend on her famous son for financial assistance.  

Supporting his mother and a secret family in New York City left him strained for money and he was continually on the lookout for new financial investment schemes based on his geological knowledge.    Unfortunately, most of these investment schemes failed miserably and Clarence was forced to borrow large sums of money as a result.   That he had expenses nobody else knew about, including a common-law wife and family, was carefully hidden. 

In many ways, marrying Ada allowed Clarence King to put his own ideas about racial and ethnic mixing into practice.  He genuinely believed that race did not matter and described "miscegenation" as being "the hope of the white race."     As far as he was concerned, the United States was a divided society, where different ethnic groups might constitute a nation, but not a race as such.     In a controversial 1885 essay he wrote in North American Review, he predicted that a true American culture would only be possible, "when the composite elements of American populations are melted down into one race alloy, when there are no more Irish or Germans, Negroes and English but only Americans belonging to one defined American race."   This was a provocative idea in an era when miscegenation laws banned interracial marriage in many states.   

While interracial marriages were not exactly illegal in New York, they were hardly encouraged either.   King's decision to only enter into a common-law marriage with Ada likely stemmed from the need to provide witnesses attesting to their names and racial identities, something he would have been unable to do without giving away his secret.   Still, his marriage to Ada and the birth of his children was a way of helping to foster the raceless America he supported all his life.    That Ada herself had no idea her husband was anything else beside the light-skinned porter she had married seemed beside the point. 

It still must have been a strange existence for Clarence King/James Todd.    Simply by traveling from one part of the city to another, he could switch between identities with only a few awkward incidents to mar his married life with Ada.  That she had no idea of her husband's double life was testimony enough to his success.   Even a brief psychiatric hospitalization for King in 1893 did nothing to disturb his double life.    Despite wide publicity over Clarence King's public breakdown and the months he spent in hospital as a result, Ada was unaware that the man described as an eccentric bachelor was actually her husband.   When he finally returned home to them, things seemed to be back to normal.   For a little while, anyway.

It was only with King's death that everything changed.   All the official obituaries described his numerous achievements and listed his mother as next of kin.   Nobody had any idea that Ada and her children even existed.

Continue to Part Three

 

 

The Trial of George Spencer

For George Spencer, the legal woes that led to his execution began with the birth of a piglet in 1642.  

Life in 17^th century New England was hard enough for servants, but Spencer’s odd physical appearance made him even more suspect. Described in historical accounts as ugly and balding, he also had “butt one eye for use, the other hath (as it is called) a pearle in itt, is whitish & deformed” which gave him an even more sinister appearance. Spencer was also notorious for his use of profanity, vulgar behaviour, and generally being a “habitual troublemaker.” Perhaps even more unforgivably for the time, he was also an open atheist and only read the Bible when ordered to by his employer. Still, despite being charged with assorted crimes, the worst punishment he ever got was a flogging. It was this flogging that likely led to his moving to the New Haven Colony in what is now Connecticut.

Not that George Spencer managed to keep out of trouble for long. Between his sinister appearance and his reputation for immoral behaviour (the exact nature of the “immorality” he engaged in being left up to the fevered imagination of his neighbours). Regularly accused of various illegal and depraved sexual acts, it was probably not surprising that he had difficulty keeping a job for long.

And then came the birth of the piglet in question…

Belonging to one of Spencer’s former employers, the piglet was described as being a “prodigious monster” with only one eye. When spectators commented on how much the piglet resembled Spencer, the accusations began. While sex between humans and animals has always been illegal in most places, what made it a capital crime was the strange belief that such a “crime against nature” could produce bizarre hybrids with human and animal traits. Though no actual cases of such hybrids were ever reported, enough examples of deformed livestock and children happened to keep the rumours alive. People accused of bestiality were prosecuted just as harshly as witches and the animals believed to be “tainted” by the crime were executed along with them.

To read more, check out my new Swift blog post on the James Randi Educational Foundation site.

How Well Did You REALLY Do?

People often hold inflated views of their performance on intellectual tasks, with poor performers exhibiting the most inflation. What leads to such excessive confidence? A research papers published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology suggests that the more people approach such tasks in a “rational” (i.e., consistent, algorithmic) manner, relative to those who use more variable or ad hoc approaches, the more confident they become, irrespective of whether they are reaching correct judgments. In 6 studies , participants completed tests involving logical reasoning, intuitive physics, or financial investment. Those more consistent in their approach to the task rated their performances more positively, including those consistently pursuing the wrong rule. Indeed, completely consistent but wrong participants thought almost as highly of their performance as did completely consistent and correct participants. Participants were largely aware of the rules they followed and became more confident in their performance when induced to be more systematic in their approach, no matter how misguided that approach was. In part, the link between decision consistency and (over)confidence was mediated by a neglect of alternative solutions as participants followed a more uniform approach to a task.

For the abstract

Can Studying A Baby's Cries Provide Health Clues?

“There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics.  For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy or birth or babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects. Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies.”

Stephen Sheinkopf, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University.

Though a baby's cries can alert parents that the infant needs to be changed or fed,  detecting minutes changes in baby cries that can signal disease is a far more difficult challenge. 

Researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island's Women and Infants Hospital have developed a computerized tool to carry out acoustic analyses of baby cries.  Using this tool, researchers hope to investigate possible signs of neurological problems and identify children at risk for developmental disorders.     Developed over a two-year collaboration between the hospital and Brown's School of Engineering, the research results are currently in press in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.    Working in two phases, the baby cry analyser first records cries into 12.5 millisecond frames which are then analysed in terms of sound qualities such as frequency, volume, and voice production.   The second phase takes the initial data and examines using eighty different parameters, each of which could provide clues about the baby's health.  

Research into how a baby's cries can provide insight into health dates back to the 1960s.   There are well-known neurological disorders that can be diagnosed by how a baby cries, including the Cri du Chat syndrome in which affected babies can be identified by their characteristic cry which is similar to a mewing cat.    Though the Cri du Chat is easy to recognize, the researchers who developed the baby cry analyser are hoping that measuring slight variations in a baby's cries, which are often undetectible to the human ear, can help identify infants at risk for other diseases.  

Though early attempts at a baby cry analyser have often been clumsy due to lack of available technology, the new automatic analyser is much easier to use and provides far greater detail.   The team at Brown University is already planning to make the analyser available to researchers around the world to expand baby cry research. 

According to Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, how a baby cries can be a windon into the brain.  Lester had studied baby cries for years and worked to develop the baby cry analyser along with Harvy Silverman, professor of engineering and director of Brown’s Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems as well as Stephen Sheinkopf and a team of graduate students.    In explaining why a baby's cries could provide medical clues, Lester stated that neurological deficits can affect how babies control their vocal cords and his research has already shown that differences in crying can be linked to malnutrition, prenatal substance exposure, and other health risks.

And that can include developmental disorders such as autism.  Though identifiying signs of autism in infants has been impossible up to now, Stephen Sheinkopt is already planning to use the baby cry analyser to search for diagnostic clues that might allow for early detection.    “We’ve known for a long time that older individuals with autism produce sounds or vocalizations that are unusual or atypical,” Sheinkopf said. “So vocalizations in babies have been discussed as being useful in developing early identification tools for autism. That’s been a major challenge. How do you find signs of autism in infancy?”  

The Dartmouth research has been funded by e National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

 

 

 

 

 

 

Television, Commercials and Your Child

How much television do you, or your children, watch in an average day?   According to a 2010 research study looking at television watching in young children,  American children spend about 4.5 hours each day watching television.   While researchers have been looking at how television watching affects children for as long as television has existed, we still don’t have clear about what impact it actually has.  

There have always been concerns over the potentially harmful effects of media violence on children   Frederic Wertham’s crusade against violence in comic books led to the creation of the Comics Code and a major overhauling of the entire printing industry.   Ironically, Wertham’s attempts to do the same with television violence led to his downfall as a media critic.   Even then, television violence was a can of worms nobody felt inclined to open.

Can watching violence on television actually influence how children behave?   Even since Albert Bandura’s classic Bobo doll experiments in 1961 and 1963, the role of social modeling in influencing violent behaviour in children has been a controversial topic for researchers and parents alike.    Ethical concerns have limited the kind of research that can be done with children to test the impact of media violence on them.  Still, the link between televisionwatching and violence seems strong even when alternative explanations are ruled out. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today post. 

The Double Life of Dr. Clarence King (Part 1 of 3)

When Ada Copeland met the man she knew only as James Todd sometime in 1877 or 1888 (the record seems unclear on that point),  it marked the beginning of what would be one of the strangest romances in the turbulent racial atmosphere that marked New York society in the late 19th century.    The legal nightmare it would later spawn would drag on for years.

Certainly Ada Copeland's life story was humble enough.   A former slave who had gained her freedom after the U.S. Civil War,  she was working as a domestic in Manhattan when she first met the man who would become her husband.    Being light-skinned herself due to her mixed race heritage, she apparently had no suspicion when James Todd told her his own life story of being a Pullman porter who spent considerable time on the road.   There were few other jobs available to African-American men during that era and the prospect of settling down with a man with a good job and a steady income certainly appealed to Ada.

James Todd was also a born storyteller (and his skill at spinning stories would be apparent enough after his death).   Even among African-Americans who shunned interracial relationships, marrying a light-skinned man like James seems like a step up on the social ladder.    That he managed to court her without ever once introducing Ada to his friends or family somehow failed to set off alarm bells for her.   She had little free time and James seemed like a good enough catch despite his being twenty years older than she was.

Under the Jim Crow laws governing most U.S. states at the time, the "one drop of blood" principle dominated racial politics.   Having even a single African-American grandparent or great-grandparent meant that you were "colored" yourself.   While many light-skinned people of African descent often escaped the racial prejudice facing former slaves by "passing" for white, there was nothing remarkable about James Todd being considered "colored" despite his clear Caucasian features.    Why would anyone claim to be a Negro unless he really was?   The idea of a Caucasian passing for African-American was so unheard-of that nobody would have considered it possible. 

In September 1888, James Todd and Ada Copeland were married in a quiet ceremony at the home of Ada's aunt.   Only Ada's friends and family attended and they were too polite to ask why not a single person from James' side of the family came to the wedding.   Since there was no formal marriage licence, the marriage of James and Ada Tod was purely common-law but still recognized as legally valid by the state of New York.  After their wedding, James and Ada settled into an apartment on Hudson Avenue in Brooklyn in a largely African-American neighbourhood.   Though the apartment was decent enough, the area where their building was located was particularly run-down.  Still, Ada had more freedom than she  ever did before.  

That James was frequently away on business was a drawback though the marriage was happy enough.  They would eventually have five children together.  Given the high infant mortality rate among African-American families of the time, they were particularly fortunate to lose only one of those children at the age of two.    Considering the time he spent away from her, James managed to conceal many things from Ada and he was a virtual stranger to their children.   He also managed to conceal one brief psychiatric hospitalization from her since it occurred during one of his long absences.  Despite financial problems, of which Ada knew nothing, James Todd managed to see his family moved into a new home in 1897.  Along with moving to a better neighbourhood in Flushing, New York, it also meant a middle class existence for Ada and her children, something that the former slave likely saw as a dream fulfilled  

By 1901, James Todd's health had taken a turn for the worse although Ada had been carefully shielded from most of the details relating to his declining condition, including his heart attack.    After leaving his family for what would prove to be the last time, he left a letter for Ada instructing her to sell the house and move the family to Toronto.    Considering the recent racial rioting in New York, Ada likely had few objections.   The move was finalized in May, 1901, but James Todd, probably suspectig that he was close to death, wrote Ada a letter in which he finally confessed his true name:  Clarence King.   Aside from this one revelation though, Ada had no idea who Clarence King/James Todd really was but the confusion was only just beginning.

On December 23, 1901, Ada Todd celebrated her 41st birthday with her children.   Her husband, by whatever name he used, died the next day at the age of 59 of complications from tuberculosis.   Although Ada received a telegram from his doctor providing her with the news, that was the only concession she received.    It was only through the many obituaries on Clarence King that she learned exactly who the father of her children really was.

Born in 1842, Clarence R. King was born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island.   His father died when he was just six years old and his mother, Florence, threw herself into overseeing her son's education.    Though she remarried when Clarence was eighteen, she would remain a dominant force in her son's life.   Clarence, for his part, excelled at his studies and and later graduated from Yale University with a Ph.B. in chemistry.  Establishing himself as a geologist, he joined the California Geological Society (and, not incidentally, avoiding taking part in the U.S. Civil War).    and became one of the best-known American geologists of the 19th century.     Through numerous surveys of the then-unexplored western territories, he established himself as an adventurer, mountaineer, and palaeontologist by unearthing some of the best fossil deposits up to that time.    Becoming U.S. Geologist for the Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, he spent the next six years exploring Wyoming and much of California.    He earned additional fame by exposing a major diamond hoax which saved numerous businessmen from being swindled. 

Cultivating a wide circle of friends, all of whom thought of King as an eccentric bachelor,  nobody had a clue that the distinguished geologist frequently chafed at the restrictions of his academic life.   He certainly had a jaundiced view of society matrons and the hopeful debutantes, all of whom viewed him as a prize catch.   He frequently escaped into less respectable parts of New York City to spend time in clubs and hangouts which he turned into his private sanctuary.   Being able to move among different classes in society became a well-established habit for him and he did much the same whenever he traveled abroad, whether to Europe or South America.

But the full extent of his double life would only become apparent after his death.

To be continued

How Strong is the Link Between Psychopathy and Violence?

The Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 1991, 2003) is often used to assess risk of violence, perhaps based on the assumption that it captures emotionally detached individuals who are driven to prey upon others. A study published recently in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology assessed the relation between (a) core interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy and impulsive antisociality on the one hand and (b) the risk of future violence and patterns of motivation for past violence on the other.  A research team reliably assessed a sample of 158 male offenders for psychopathy, using both the interview-based PCL–R and the self-report Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI: Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). Then, a second independent research team assessed offenders’ lifetime patterns of violence and their motivation. After these baseline assessments, offenders were followed in prison or the community for up to 1 year to assess their involvement in 3 different forms of violence. Baseline and follow-up assessments included both interviews and reviews of official records. Results showed that the PPI manifested incremental validity in predicting future violence over the PCL–R (but not vice versa)—and most of its predictive power derived solely from impulsive antisociality. Second, impulsive antisociality—not interpersonal and affective traits specific to psychopathy—were uniquely associated with instrumental lifetime patterns of past violence. The latter psychopathic traits are narrowly associated with deficits in motivation for violence (e.g., lack of fear or lack of provocation).  These findings and their consistency argue against making broad generalizations about the relation between psychopathy and violence.

For the abstract

California Man Faces Life Sentence over Vigilante Slaying

On December 1, 2011, 36-year old Robert Vasquez waited in the bushes outside the Orange County, California trailer home that his intended victim, Bobby Ray Rainwater Jr. shared with his parents.  When the 54-year old Rainwater stepped outside the trailer to smoke a cigarette, Vasquez punched the back of his head.  He then stabbed him multiple times in the neck before fleeing the scene.  When police later arrived, they found that Rainwater had been nearly decapitated.   

Vasquez hid out at the home of a friend, Lance Lyons.   After warning Vasquez not to enter his grandmother's room without permission,  Lyons was then savagely attacked with a metal mallet.   He was saved from further injury when his brother intervened.    After police charged Robert Vasquez with assault, he was linked to the Rainwater murder.

Before being charged with first-degree murder, Vasquez told investigators that he killed Rainwater to protect his girlfriend since his mother told him the victim was a pedophile. ‘I like to try to protect my family. ... He's not going to go in there and rape my [expletive] chick," he said in describing his actions.     While Rainwater had been previously convicted of a sexual assault on an adult woman, he had never assaulted a child although neighbours expressed concern over a registered sexual offender in the area.

During the subsequent trial, Vasquez' defense attorney attempted to avoid his being convicted for first-degree murder although prosecutors described it as a clear act of vigilantism.    As part of the defense testimony,  the court heard from a UCLA psychology professor who stated that the accused had a history of mental problems including paranoia, schizoaffective disorder, and Asperger's syndrome.   In the year leading up to the murder, he was also abusing methamphetamine drugs.

On June 28 of this year, Robert Vasquez was found guilty of first-degree murder and is scheduled to be sentenced this August.   He is likely to receive a life sentence with no possibility of parole. 

For more information