Providentia

Using Your Inner Voice

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.   Steve Jobs

During every waking moment, we carry on an inner dialogue.   Whether you call it inner speech, self-talk, internal dialogue, or thinking to yourself, it seems to be an important part of our daily life.   Even though most of these inner dialogues stay well-hidden (except for the occasionally embarrassing moment), inner speech is far more important than most people realize.    Even from early childhood, inner speech plays a vital role in regulating how we think and behave.   Not only does it often allow us to "rehearse" different scenarios and enables us to avoid rash actions, but research looking at people who seem incapable of inner speech (such as different psychiatric conditions) suggests that inner speech can shape how we see the world around us. 

A new review article published in Psychological Bulletin explores the many different aspects of inner speech and how it can change and develop across our life span.  Written by Ben Alderson-Day and Charles Fernyhough of Durham University,  the article reviews existing research on inner speech and what makes it so important.   As they point out, we often have different definitions of what we mean by inner speech and even refer to it by many different names.   Research studies looking at inner speech use terms such as inner speech, private speech, self-talk, covert speech, silent
speech, verbal thinking, verbal mediation, inner monologue, inner dialogue, inner voice, articulatory imagery, voice imagery, speech imagery, and auditory verbal imagery, etc.   For that matter, researchers have also looked at externalized self-talk, i.e.,, talking to yourself, which can be considered a form of inner speech as well.

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

 

 

 

 

The Vampire of Muy (Part One of Two)

It was one of the most bizarre criminal cases of the early 20th century.  

In September 1901, following complaints from his neighbours of an unpleasant odor coming from the attic of the house that he shared with his common-law wife and son, the owner of the house, Honore Ardisson, blamed the smell on garbage that had likely been deposited there by his wife.    Climbing up to the attic to investigate, he stumbled upon the body of a young girl lying on straw.   Due to the dim light, Honore believed that it was a wild animal and promptly struck the body with a shovel.    After realizing what he had really done, Honore promptly called the police.   In their investigation police found assorted body parts as well as  various religious items that had been stolen from the local graveyard.   While Honore was briefly detained (it was his house, after all), he was released after his son Victor made a full confession. 

Still, the gendarmes of the peaceful village of Le Muy in southeastern France quickly realized that Victor Ardisson wasn't the kind of petty criminal they usually dealt with.   As the lurid details of his crimes unfolded,  the bizarre case of  the "Vampire of Muy" soon became international news.    Having discovered that he had disinterred and had sex with numerous bodies of recently deceased women, Victor was charged  with multiple counts of necrophilia and abuse of corpse.   Though already having a local reputation for odd behaviour, including inappropriate behaviour towards many of the village women, it took a formal forensic examination by some of France's most prominent medical experts to explore the full range of his bizarre sexual appetites.  

Born in Le Muy in 1872, Victor's true father was completely unknown though his mother  later married Honore Ardisson who raised Victor as his own son.   It was not a good childhood for Victor though.    As Honore would later testify, Victor's mother was frequently abusive and once struck her son in the head with enough force to cause long-term problems with his mental functioning.   Some medical authorities even speculated that this may have led to his later bizarre behaviour.   Though his mother soon left home leaving him for Honore to raise, Victor's childhood wasn't much better afterward.   

Honore Ardisson had a history of petty crime and generally had a poor reputation in the village which influenced the kind of treatment his adopted son received.  Though Victor was sent to school, he had significant learning problems and was often laughed at by the other children.   They gave him the nickname of Nigno (boobie) and he had a particularly lonely existence.   Once he hit puberty and became sexually active, the problem grew even worse.   He often chased after the girls in Le Muy but they usually laughed when they rejected him.     His bizarre behaviour began to surface as he often followed the girls to where they urinated and became fond of licking the urine up afterward.     The only sexual liasons he was ever able to maintain was with the beggars that Honore brought home who had agreed to sex in exchange for food or shelter. 

It was with these sexual partners that Victor first began showing many of the qualities that would earn him the name of "Vampire of Muy".    He was often fond of sucking their breasts and clitorises though there was no  indication that he forced himself on any of the women Honore had provided.   His fascination with women's breasts, along with his tendency towards public masturbation gave him a reputation as  a local pervert.

In spite of how the locals felt about him, Victor  still managed to have a history of sporadic employment, mostly doing general labour for local masons.   Since the amount of construction was limited in a town the size of Le Muy, this also meant that he was out of work frequently.   Though he enlisted as a soldier, his military career was particularly undistinguished and he was frequently abused by his fellow soldiers.   After deserting several times, he was eventually discharged and returned home to Le Muy where life went on much as it had before.

Everything changed in 1882 when the old gravedigger died and the job was taken over by Honore and Victor.   Honore didn't last long in the job after an incident in which he injured his foot when he fell into an open grave.    His fright after this experience meant that Victor became the sole gravedigger for Le Muy though he didn't last long either.   Still, with only a handful of deaths each month, this wasn't a particularly lucrative job and Victor likely earned more doing general labour.   He certainly had a lot of free time on his hands and his growing sexual appetites proved to be his undoing.

It was about this time that a local girl died and Victor became fixated on her.   One night, he dug up her corpse and attempted to have sex with it.   He would have carried the body away but decided it was too heavy so he left it at the scene.   Though authorities later noticed the grave had been disturbed, they examined further and concluded that the body had been untouched.    From that point on, Victor became obsessed with finding new bodies to dig up.   Since there were few burials in Le Muy, he is believed to have gone to other cemeteries as well and there is some evidence that he was into necrophilia while he was still in the army.   

Security was never a problem even though the gate to the Le Muy graveyard was supposed to be kept locked at night.   When Honore was still the official gravedigger, Victor simply used his key to open the gate.  Even when he didn't have the key, Victor simply climbed over the low wall surrounding the graveyard whenever he wanted to enter.

As Victor would later state, he became obsessed with all the details surrounding the deaths of likely females, including cause of death.   In one case, he refused to dig up a body when he learned that she had had a leg amputated due to cancer.   Otherwise, age didn't matter to him at all.  They could have have been as young as three or as old as sixty.   Though he would have preferred to take the bodies home with him, they were often too heavy and he contented himself with having sex with the corpse after opening the grave.   He often tried to speak with the corpse and would later say that he had been surprised when they didn't answer.

But there would be even more unsavory revelations to come.

To be continued.

 

Preventing Burnout in Sign Language Interpreters

Maslach (1982) conceptualizes burnout as emotional exhaustion and cynicism, which erodes an individual’s ability to effectively engage in work. A known antecedent to burnout across a variety of occupations, including interpreting, is chronic job stress (Delisle, Lariviere, Imbeau, & Durand, 2005; Swartz, 1999). The multidimensional construct of perfectionism is one personality trait noted in the literature (Flett & Hewitt, 2002) that affects how an individual perceives and manages stressors and it is consistently associated with burnout. Perfectionism is characterized by a tendency to set and strive for high personal standards and has both detrimental and beneficial potential (Stoeber & Otto, 2006). Investigators focusing on sign language interpreters have identified a wide range of cognitive and personality factors that contribute to the effective management of stress, such as perfectionistic traits (Bontempo & Napier, 2011). In contrast, negative appraisals of work, self-doubt and self-criticism are consistently associated with the development of burnout amongst sign language interpreters (Qin, Marshall, Mozrall, & Marschark, 2008; Schwenke, Ashby & Gnilka, 2014). Within the extant literature there is evidence that perfectionistic traits, influence an individual’s personal assessment of work demands and can contribute to the development of burnout. A new literature review in the Journal of the American Deafness and Rehabilitation Association explores the issue of burnout within the field of interpreting by considering the role of perfectionism, stress and coping, and lays the groundwork for additional research.

For the abstract

"Granny Ripper" Arrested in Russia

A 68-year-0ld Russian woman who openly idolized serial killer Andrei Chikatilo has been charged with the brutal murder of numerous of eleven people over a twenty-year period.    Tamara Samsonova, who has been dubbed the "Granny Ripper" by Russian journalists, was first arrested following the discovery of a headless body of an elderly woman near a pond in St. Petersburg.  After the body was identified as that of 79-year-old Valentina Ulanova,  Samsonova, who had been working as her caregiver, was questioned by police and subsequently arrested.

During her interrogation, Samsonova confessed to drugging Ulanova and then dismembering her corpse.   Various internal organs had been removed though police are refusing to say whether Samsonova is believed to have eaten them.  In her diary, which contains entries in Russian, English, and German, Samsonova describes her fascination with Chikatilo, whose reign of terror led to the rape, murder, and cannibalization of fifty-two victims, as well as confessing to ten or more murders modeled after Chikatilo.   The diary also includes song lyrics, poems, and general observations on life.

According to one neighbour, who had been interviewed by a Moscow journalist, Sams0nova had  a local reputation for being odd, likely due to her open fascination with serial murder and her nocturnal lifestyle.   A former hotel worker, Samsonova was often fond of sitting topless and exposing herself to neighbours and was also fascinated by literature on black magic.   In a chilling note, the neighbour also admitted that Samsonova had borrowed a hacksaw from her years before but had never returned it.  

As for actual evidence that any of the numerous murders to which Samsonova confesses to in her diary are true, police are still investigating.  According to one passage in her diary, "I killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife, put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and threw them away in the different parts of Frunzensky district."  Even though no body parts have been found, closed camera television images show her disposing of garbage bags believed to contain body parts.   Her own husband, whom she reported missing in 2005, is feared to be another of her victims.  

Now receiving her day in court, Tamara Samsonova  seems to be reveling in all the media attention she is receiving.   When a judge asked her to make a statement, she asked if she could go outside because the courtroom was too "stuffy."   She also said that she was "getting ready for this court action for dozens of years.  It was all done deliberately."  She also said that she "closed a chapter" with e the final murder and that she deserved punishment for her actions.   She is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.  

 While there have been other serial killers in Russia who idolized  Andrei Chikatilo, Tamara Samsonova is the only female and her case is likely to be followed closely by Russian media in the months  to come.  More revelations are expected are her notorious diary continues to be examined by investigators.  

For more information

Getting Ahead in Life

Can people really go from rags to riches?  

While Horatio Alger's classic stories of poor boys overcoming terrible poverty to rise to great success later in life are legendary, we tend to be more cynical about whether this can happen in real life.  Despite the enduring belief in the classic "American success story", the general belief tends to be that having rich parents guarantees success later in life while children of poor parents tend to be stay poor no matter what they do.  

But is that necessarily true?   While socioeconomic status (SES) does seem to have  a powerful influence on the kind of status children attain later in life, other traits such as intelligence and personality can often be more important.    Children with the right qualities can do very well for themselves no matter how disadvantaged their backgrounds might be.  For that matter, even children of parents who are financially well-off may find themselves doing more poorly than their parents might hope depending on their own abilities or personality traits.  

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

The Rafferty Experiment

Roberts Bartholow was definitely ambitious.

After earning his degree in medicine in 1852, he served as an army physician until 1864 when he took on a position as a professor at the medical college in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition to teaching and treating charity patients at the Good Samaritan Hospital, he also developed a fascination with the vivisection research being done in Europe. Scottish neurologist, David Ferrier, had been publishing research into the use of direct electrical stimulation in mapping motor cortex functioning as well as triggering epileptic-like seizures in his animal subjects. Inspired by Ferrier's research, Bartholow chose to go even further.

At the time that Bartholow began planning his radical experiment, there was little consensus  concerning the ethical use of human subjects in medical experimentation. Although the Hippocratic Oath emphasized the medical requirement that physicians "do no harm", the prospect of using Ferrier's findings to learn more about the human brain was irresistible to Bartholow and his colleagues. It was in 1874, when Mary Rafferty was admitted to the hospital...

There is little information about her early life aside from the permanent scarring that she had received from falling into an open fire as a child. Later described as "feeble minded", Mary Rafferty was a 30-year old domestic servant with an infected ulcer in her scalp that proved to be cancerous. By all accounts, Mary was "cheerful in manner" and eager to please the doctors who had taken an interest in her case. Since she was terminally ill and had no family connections, using her for Bartholow's medical experiments seemed to make perfect sense. While Bartholow would later insist that Mary had given her full informed consent, the fact that she was also (as he described her) "feeble minded" raises the excellent point that she didn't know what would be involved.

The first procedure involved inserting needle electrodes of differing length directly into Mary's brain. The cancerous ulcer had exposed part of her scalp already and there was actually little pain at first. The electrodes were connected to a battery to administer small electric shocks to parts of the brain. As Bartholow would later report, "When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. In order to develop more decided reactions, the strength of the current was increased by drawing out the wooden cylinder one inch. When communication was made with the needles, her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry." Mary's arms began to spasm and she went into convulsions followed by a twenty-minute coma.

Bartholow was enthused to be able to report that he had induced the same type of seizure in a human that Ferrier had achieved in animals. Whatever misgivings that his fellow doctors might have had were dismissed and the procedures continued. Over the course of Bartholow's experimenting, Mary developed increasing motor problems including numbness, paralysis, and motor weakness. Following the final session, Mary became incoherent and slipped into a coma after a convulsive seizure. She died a short time later.

It was Bartholow who conducted the autopsy on Mary (no coroner was required). Although he was quick to blame her death on the cancer, he acknowledged that his experiment had led to "intense vascular congestion" along the tracks of the needles that he had inserted into her brain. Still, his experiment was considered to be enough of a success for Bartholow to publish his research results that same year. In describing his results, he freely admitted that his experimentation had injured his patient and that repeating what he had done "would be in the highest degree criminal."

If Bartholow hoped that being candid would protect him from criticism, he was sadly mistaken. In a scathing letter to the London Medical Record, David Ferrier himself denounced the experiment and pointed out that the "depth of penetration of the needles" and the "inflammatory changes" that they produced clearly accounted for the "epileptic convulsions and ultimate paralysis" in the patient. Although Bartholow defended himself by maintaining that Mary Rafferty was "hopelessly diseased" and gave full informed consent, a declaration was later made at a meeting of the American Medical Association that denounced the experiment as "incompatible with the spirit of our profession and our feelings of humanity".

Despite the condemnation, Bartholow's medical career was hardly affected.  Leaving Cincinnati in 1879, he moved on the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.  He eventually became head of the department and Professor Emeritus until his death in 1904.  Bartolow's obituary and various online biographical entries list many of his professional accomplishments as well as the important medical books that he wrote.  There is no mention of the Rafferty experiment.

Despite the controversy over the Rafferty experiment and other horrendous abuses, it was only in 1946 that the principle of informed consent in human medical experimentation was formally adopted by the AMA. Following a report by an official AMA observer at the Nuremberg Doctor's trial, the AMA House of Delegates adopted a series of principles to protect human medical subjects (these principles were also enshrined into the Nuremberg code in 1947 and the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964). As a result of these initiatives, all medical and social science research proposals are expected to be evaluated by ethics committees to ensure compliance with modern research standards. While the ethical guidelines have generated new problems for researchers (including the use of deception in psychological research and determining competency to give consent), they remain in place to provide fundamental protection for research subjects.

Mary Rafferty would approve.

The French Ripper

We may never know how many victims were killed by Joseph Vacher during his bloody reign of terror in 19th century France.

Born in 1869 to a peasant family in the French town of Beaufort, Joseph Vacher's early life was marked by fairly bizarre behaviour.   According to testimony that came out during his later trial, he had been caught mutilating animals and once fired a gun in the direction of some children his age.  His parents eventually sent him to a strict Catholic school at Saint Genis Laval where he was taught to "obey and fear God".   Just how successful this schooling actually was seems open to debate considering that he was later thrown out for "inappropriate sexual acts" with other boys in the school

With no other options, Vacher began his compulsory military service though his explosive temper and odd appearance marked him as a loner. There is at least some evidence to suggest that he may have responsible for five unsolved murders that occurred between 1884 and 1890 although they remain officially unsolved.  What is known about him was that Vacher fell in love with a pretty maidservant named Louise Barrant. She felt absolutely no attraction for the strange-looking soldier and, after his tour of duty was over, laughed at him when he proposed marriage in 1893. Vacher was enraged and shot her four times before shooting himself.

They both survived although Vacher's face was left partially paralyzed as a result. One of the bullets also remained lodged in his skull and brain damage may have contributed to his later psychiatric issues. He was sent to the Saint Robert Asylum in Dole, France and released as completely "cured" just a year later. The doctors would later regret their optimism.

He then  became a drifter moving from one part of France to another. His facial paralysis added to his already odd appearance and he formed no real community ties wherever he went. Supporting himself through begging and odd jobs, Vacher began a murder spree with at least eleven victims over a three-year period. His known victims included one adult woman, five teenage girls and five teenage boys. Most of the victims were shepherds that Vacher was able to attack while they tended flocks in isolated fields. After raping the victims, Vacher would often disembowel the corpses before leaving them to be found by others.

Despite the trail of bodies, Vacher's murderous career was only stopped in 1897 when he attacked a woman near her home in southern France. The woman fought back and her screams brought her husband and son to her aid. The men took Vacher to the local police. Were it not for Vacher eventually confessing everything, the police might never have been able to link him to the other murders.

Given that he faced the death penalty, Vacher had ample reason to have himself declared insane. In the letter that he wrote to the judge, Vacher stated that he had committed the murders due to a lifelong insanity caused by being bitten by a rabid dog as a child. His insanity caused him to go into a wild frenzy in which he would kill his victims and drink blood from their necks. Vacher also argued that the asylum doctors who released him were the ones who were really at fault for his murders.

As part of the prosecution's case, the legendary forensic pioneer, Alexandre Lacassagne was called in to do an in-depth evaluation of the defendant. After an exhaustive five-month examination of Vacher including exploring his various bizarre symptoms, Lacassagne concluded that Vacher was faking insanity and that he was fit to stand trial.  His comprehensive presentation to the court in which he described his findings were so impressive, even Vacher was heard to murmur, "He's very good." In the end, Joseph Vacher was convicted and sentenced to death in 1898.

The French newspapers of the time trumpeted the news of the Vacher Affair and played up the fact that he had been a homeless vagabond when he committed the murders. Thousands of other drifters were wandering about France and the newspapers used Vacher's case to highlight the danger that homeless beggars posed and the need for action to deal with them. The fact that Vacher's fellow beggars were also his most likely victims seemed irrelevant. Some columnists even expressed a perverse national pride since "their" Ripper had more victims that the English Ripper.

The publicity of the case guaranteed an enormous turnout on December 31, 1898 when Joseph Vacher was sent to the guillotine. Crowds cheered as he was led out and he was heard to shout, "Look, the victim of the asylums" (:Ah voila! La victime des fautes des asiles"). He refused to walk to the guillotine and needed to be carried to his execution.

Public interest in the case faded quickly after the execution but forensic experts and journalists continued to write about Vacher. The body was carefully dissected as researchers tried to learn more about what caused his violent acts. Researchers found nothing unusual about Vacher's brain but his head still went into one of the large criminal anthropology collections of the time.  Forensic authorities including Lacassagne and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing wrote about Vacher's sadism (it was still a new diagnosis at the time), his "inverted" tendencies (homosexuality) and other bizarre sexual behaviour, his psychiatric symptoms, and speculations about his early childhood.

While Joseph Vacher's case was famous for its time, he seems largely forgotten today. Dubbed "the French Ripper" to distinguish him from the more famous Ripper case in England, Joseph Vacher represents one of the first known serial killers. Others would soon follow in his footsteps.

When Seniors Neglect Themselves

 Elder self-neglect is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The objective of a study recently published in the journal Gerontology was to examine the prospective relationship between reported elder self-neglect and the rate of 30-day hospital readmission in a community population. The researchers conducted a prospective population-based study of community-dwelling older adults who participated in the Chicago Health and Aging Project. Of the 7,219 participants in the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a subset of 1,228 participants was reported to the social services agency for suspected elder self-neglect. The primary predictor was elder self-neglect reported to the social services agency. The outcome of interest was the annual rate of 30-day hospital readmission calculated from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid System hospitalization data from 1993 to 2009. Poisson regression models were used to assess these relationships. Results showed that the average annual rate of 30-day hospital readmission for those without elder self-neglect was 0.2 (SD 0.7) and for those with reported elder self-neglect 0.9 (SD 2.8). After adjusting for sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics, medical comorbidities, cognitive function, physical function, and psychosocial well-being, elders who self-neglect had a significantly higher rate of 30-day hospital readmission (rate ratio 2.50, 95% confidence interval 2.02–3.10). Greater self-neglect severity [mild: parameter estimate (PE) 1.09, standard error (SE) 0.19, p < 0.001; moderate: PE 0.84, SE 0.13, p < 0.001; severe: PE 1.24, SE 0.40, p = 0.002] was associated with increased annual rates of 30-day hospital readmission after considering the same confounders. Interaction term analyses suggest that the significant relationship between self-neglect and 30-day hospital readmission was not moderated by medical conditions, cognitive impairment, physical disability, or psychosocial well-being. The researchers concluded that reported elder self-neglect was associated with increased rates of 30- day hospital readmission in this community population. Greater self-neglect severity was associated with a greater increase in the rate of 30-day hospital readmission.

For the abstract

Facebook Blasted Over Allowing Harassment of Indian Women

With over 100 million Facebook users, India remains second only to the United States in total number of active accounts and is soon likely to take the lead due to the rising popularity of social media.   Despite this surge in new users, Indian women on Facebook are routinely complaining about online harassment by "cyber-trolls" who appear to be acting with impunity despite Facebook's own stated policy against cyber-bullying. 

According to Facebook's Community Standards page,  their mission is to "keep users safe" by disabling accounts that post content making threats of physical harm or risk to public safety.    Users seeing any content they deem offensive or abusive are urged to report it to Facebook.  Their Standards page adds that "Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our Community Standards. For this reason, we offer you the ability to customize and control what you see by unfollowing, blocking, and hiding the posts, people, Pages, and applications you don’t want to see – and we encourage you to use these controls to better personalize your experience."

Even though these safeguards are supposed to be in place, misogynistic harassment of women who post openly on Facebook remains disturbingly common in India.   This is especially true for lower-caste women who are frequently targeted by higher-caste Indian men who often post anonymously while making death threats.    When journalist Preetha G. Nair complained online about a misogynistic comment made by a prominent Indian politician last July, many of that politician's political supporters organized a massive campaign against her, including reporting her account to Facebook as being fake (it wasn't) as well as numerous misogynistic comments.   Facebook suspended her account citing "community standards" but restored the account on discovering that she had done nothing wrong.

Not l0ng afterward, she was singled out again after she spoke out against another prominent Indian politician.   This time, a new Facebook profile appeared which accused her of being a prostitute and ran nasty stories about her, complete with graphic content.   Despite numerous complaints to Facebook, the profile remains active as it is not deemed to violate community standards.   An independent complaint to local police failed to be investigated.

When journalist Inji Pennu wrote about Preetha Nair's case online, she was subjected to misogynistic harassment herself.  This included numerous threats of violence (one user threatened to choke her).    On August 4, her Facebook account was suspended, again for violating "community standards".   The complaint alleged that she used a fake name in her profile and she was asked to submit a photocopy of her ID to have her account reinstated, something that she was reluctant to do given that it included her home address.   Many of the same accounts that heaped abuse on her and Preetha Nair are still active.   Though some were suspended, the ones responsible quickly established new profiles and continued with the abuse. 

In a blog post written by Inji Pennu, she wrote:

Many of us women are here [on Facebook] to escape from patriarchy forced down upon our throats by marriage, by family, by caste, by religion. We are shunning all this to exist as a human. Yet Facebook is throwing us back into the dark dungeons asking us to stay where we were. Does Facebook think we rightfully belong there?

Though Inji lives in Miami, Florida, she still has links to Kerala, India where many of the targeted women live.  

Other women activists who announced their support of Inji and Preetha have come under attack as well. Some have had their accounts suspended following complaints of nudity though most were restored soon afterward.  As one woman wrote:

What happens when you complain to Facebook about misogyny and abuse against a woman? The profile of the complainant gets taken down. Inji Pennu's profile is now taken down supposedly for identity verification. Either Facebook is supporting hate mongering and misogyny OR its high time to revise their community standards (Especially for regional language pages) and identity verification practices. I really hope its the latter and they will take action soon!

As a protest against Facebook policies, some women have started a new Facebook page called “Against cyber attacks on women.”   This new page has already generated hundreds of likes and is intended to pressure Facebook to become more vigilant in policing misogynistic trolls.   Since allegations of sexual conduct can be extremely damaging to women and their families in southern Asia,  this kind of harassment has had a chilling effect on women Facebook users.  

And the trolls seem to be winning.   Despite active pleas to Facebook administrators, including open letters to Mark Zuckerberg himself, many of the trolls at the centre of the abuse still have active accounts.  As for the women on the receiving end, they continue to struggle.

 

 

 

Can What You Post Online Reveal Your Personality?

With more than two billion people using the Internet and countless more expected to come online as the world becomes more interconnected, the sheer volume of posts on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social networking sites is overwhelming.   Though many of these posters remain wary about how much of their private lives they are willing to share online, we are often more candid about our feelings and inner lives than we realize.   The written language contained in these billions of posts contains a wealth of psychological information on posters and researchers are beginning to realize that.  

Along with research looking at the use of social media in catching people planning to commit suicide, the possibility of catching the kind of emotional problems that can lead to violence such as the Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech shootings is being taken seriously.  Facebook already has anti-suicide policies in place as well as policies for having users report threats of suicide or violence.  But can what people post online provide real insight into the underlying personalities of posters?

It has long been recognized that the kind of language we use often reflects different personality traits.   For example, people scoring high in neuroticism often make frequently first-person statements using "I, me, mine", while people high in extraversion typically use positive emotion words ("great, happy, amazing").  Other studies linking language to self-report measures of personality have also turned up consistent findings that personality and language are strongly linked.

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