Providentia

Mass Hysteria Blamed for Bizarre Possession Epidemic in Peru

"Several children from different classrooms fainted at the same time. I got nauseous and started vomiting. I heard voices. A man in black chased me and wanted to touch me."

With these words, provided in an interview with local media in Peru, an anonymous 15-year-old girl described how she and close to a hundred other students like her have become part of a mystifying epidemic at a school in northern Peru.

Beginning in April, schoolchildren at the Elsa Perea Flores school in Taraponto, Peru have been displaying seizures, muscular contractions, and fainting.  Some of students also report visions of a "man in black" chasing them and trying to strangle them.  Though frightened parents rushed the stricken children to the local hospital, medical doctors have failed to determine any physical cause for the symptoms.   Most of the affected students are between the ages of eleven and fourteen.

Though experts suggest that this is a case of contagious mass hysteria stemming from fear and anxiety over upcoming examinations, there is no shortage of alternative explanations being offered by locals.  One persistent rumour is that the school was built on mass graves of torture victims that were reportedly found as the school was being built.   Other locals suggest that the epidemic is a "demonic attack" caused by some children experimenting with Ouija boards and other occult practices.

According to teachers at the school, the first episodes occurred on April 29 and involved students in several different classes.   In all cases, the affected students were able to return to school shortly afterward.   Media attention on the affected students has likely played a factor as well  with graphic videos showing students convulsing and frothing at the mouth being widely available.   Affected students giving media interviews are telling very similar stories.

One student described a menacing figure chasing her from behind. "It was a tall man all dressed in black and with a big beard and it felt like he was trying to strangle me," she said.  "'My friends say I was screaming desperately, but I don't remember much."    Another student reported having trouble breathing and was holding her neck as if being strangled.  Friends reportedly said that she kept screaming, "Take it out!" 

Cases of mass psychogenic illness involving vulnerable people in a closed group, often young females, have been frequently reported around the world and throughout history.   Epidemic such as this are often fueled by rumours and hysteria surrounding perceived threats that are often exaggerated.   A similar epidemic was reported in Malaysia in April when a school was temporarily closed due to reports from students and teachers of a mysterious "black figure" stalking students and attempting to possess them.   The Malaysian epidemic subsided after a few weeks and the school later reopened.

As for what is happening at the Elsa Perea Flores school in Peru, medical experts and school authorities continue to monitor what is happening and are hoping things will eventually return to normal.

For more information

 

 

 

Raising Gua (Part Two of Three)

Continued from Part One

Raising an infant chimpanzee the human way is not an easy thing to do.

Aside from Gua's fondness for insects, flowers, and whatever else she could stick in her mouth, she was also much more active than her "brother" Donald.  Being constantly thirsty, she became a frequent user of water faucets after learning how a water tap worked.    She also enjoyed baths, except for her tendency to eat the soap, and enjoyed sleeping in a regular bed.   Once, when the bed was removed for cleaning, Gua cried until it was returned.   As for how they behaved while sleeping, the Kelloggs reported that both Donald and Gua looked and acted much the same when sleeping at night including having the same posture and acting the same way on awakening.

But there were still important differences between Donald and Gua.  When it came to picking up a piece of food, for example, Gua often used her mouth since she was incapable of grasping with her hand the way Donald could.   Even when the Kelloggs tried to teach her to grasp objects with her hands, she was often clumsy due to lacking an opposable thumb.  Gua also had trouble with building blocks since she didn't hae the motor precision of a human child.  

In terms of learning to walk, there were other important differences.  Donald took to using his walker to get around and was often "reckless" in trying to walk without it.  As for Gua, she never learned to use the walker though she enjoyed being pushed around by someone else.   She continued to use the walker as a toy even after learning to walk but there were still marked differences in the walking styles they adopted, however.

By the age of eight months, Gua was responding to her reflection in a mirror and she also noticed changes in her environment much faster than Donald did.   At the age of fourteen and a half months, both Donald and Gua were shown a child's alphabet book.   Though Gua was faster at attending to visual content, Donald learned to point to a picture that an adult had just indicated.   Gua, on the other hand, tried to lift pictures from the page suggesting well-developed depth perception. 

Gua's hearing was also much more acute that Donald's (or his human parents) and she often responded to sounds like the newspaper being delivered much sooner than anyone else.  When it came to localizing sounds, Donald and Gua showed no real difference that the Kelloggs could determine.   Another problem was that Donald could signal that he disliked something he tasted by his facial expressions, something they were never able to achieve with Gua.  Not only was Gua's sense of smell much more acute than Donald's, but she also depended on smell to identify people much more than Donald did.  Whenever meeting someone for the first time, Gua would smell them first and rely on her sense of smell to recognize everybody she met.

Gua had a number of overwhelming fears during her time with the Kelloggs.   She was terrified of being left alone and was often anxious whenever her human parents exited the house.  She was also terrified by far-off noises such as planes passing overhead.   Other fears came from learned experiences.  After a small dog snapped at her when she cornered it, Gua became afraid of small animals.   She was also terrified of toadstools after being unintentionally poisoned by one when she ate it.   There were also frequent tantrums, especially when Donald received treatment she didn't get.  

But she was good at learning to be as human as possible.  It took a while but the Kelloggs got her used to being dressed in human clothes and to allowing her nails and teeth to be cleaned.   She also picked up toilet training, how to use a light switch, how to eat with a spoon, and how to drink from a glass.  Donald and Gua were regularly tested using standard test batteries intended for infants.   Though Gua was more advanced than Donald at first, he quickly overtook her.  Since the tests were never designed for infant chimpanzees, it is hard to make any firm conclusions about problem-solving or memory.   Still, Gua's cognitive development was steadily increasing as a result of her enriched upbringing.  

It was trying to teach Gua to speak that generated the most interest from outside observers.   Up until that time, the prevailing scientific consensus was that only humans were capable of true speech (as opposed to mimicry seen in parrots and other birds).  Since the 19th century, brain researchers had known that the human capacity for language was linked to specific regions of the brain that were largely absent in chimpanzees and other non-human primates.   Given their belief in behaviourist theories of language development, the Kelloggs reasoned that Gua could be taught language skills in much the same way that human children were.   And this is where the experiment went sour. 

Through the course of the Kellogg study, Gua learned to use facial expressions and developed her own hand gestures to express what she wanted.  As Winthrop Kellogg later wrote, "Almost from the beginning of her human training, Gua seemed to possess a rudimentary, nonvocal form of communication by means of which her impending actions could be predicted by those who knew her well. "  While Robert Yerkes had actually proposed teaching chimpanzees sign language, the Kelloggs focused on actual spoken language in their experiment.   

What they found was that Gua was capable of a wide range of articulations and grunts.   However, teaching her even simple words like "pa-pa" seemed just about impossible despite repeated efforts.    Though not dismissing the possibility of chimpanzee speech completely, they concluded that Gua would never be capable of speaking more than a handful of words.  As for whether Gua was successful in learning to understand human language, this is something the Kelloggs simply failed to follow up on. 

This was deeply disappointing to the Kelloggs and may have coloured their impression of the other things that Gua had been successfully taught to do.  But it when they saw the effect that all of this was having on Donald that things became, ahem, somewhat hairy.

To be continued.

The Kaspar Hauser Mystery (Part 1)

On May 26, 1828 (Easter Monday), two men were talking together in the Unschlittsplatz near Nuremberg's New Gate when they were approached by a teenaged boy.  By all accounts, he was a fresh-complexioned boy of about seventeen years of age and dressed like a peasant.  Although remarkably short for his age, there was nothing else notable about him except for his dusty clothing and general appearance of having walked a long way.  After asking for directions to New Gate Street, he pulled a letter out of his pocket  addressed to "the Captain of the Fourth Squadron of the Schmollischer Regiment, Neue Thor Strasse (New Gate Street), Nuremberg".  One of the men, a shoemaker named Weichmann, offered to take the boy there as he was heading in that direction.  Along the way, they chatted briefly and Weichman assumed he was just a stable boy based on the Low Bavarian dialect that he used to speak.  After introducing the boy to a regimental corporal, Weichmann went on his way.

After being taken to Captain von Wessenig's house, the boy gave his name as "Kaspar Hauser" and the groom allowed him into the house to await the Captain's return.  Asked where he came from, Kaspar replied that he "must not say" and then burst into tears.  He claimed that he had been forced to travel day and night and the groom, touched by his story, offered him food and a place to sleep.  When the Captain  came home, he opened the Kaspar's envelope which contained two letters, both unsigned.  The first letter was by a "poor day-labourer with ten children of my own" which said  that Kaspar Hauser had been brought to him as an infant on October 7, 1812 by a woman who asked him to raise the child.  The letter further stated that he had raised the boy as best he could, teaching him reading and writing, and finally sending him off to become a soldier (the woman had said that he was a soldier's son).  The second letter was apparently written by the boy's mother and simply stated that he had been baptized and given the first name of Kaspar.  Except that the boy was the son of a Schmollischer trooper, there was no other information.  The Captain couldn't find out anything more from the boy and, not being particularly interested in his story, sent him to the police as a runaway.  The police, not knowing what else to do with him, threw him into a prison cell.

For the next two months, the boy was relatively well treated in prison.  Although he could write his name "Kaspar Hauser", he had difficulty responding to many of the questions asked of him due to his limited vocabulary.  Although his jailors noted that Kaspar was more sharp-witted than he appeared to be, rumours grew about the "half-wild man" imprisoned in the local castle tower. Along with curiosity seekers who wanted to see the "wild man", Kaspar received visits from doctors, scholars, and groups of women bringing him toys and other presents.  Since Kaspar was assumed to be an idiot, these visitors had no hesitation about discussing his case in his presence, along with all sorts of fanciful theories about his origins.  Whether or not hearing these stories inspired Kaspar in his later claims is anybody's guess. 

As Kaspar became more at ease with his imprisonment and frequent visitors, he related an amazing story.  He said that he had spent his entire life in a cell that was six or seven feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high.  The cell was so small that he wasn't even able to stand upright and he lived in almost perpetual darkness since the cell's two small windows had been boarded up.  He had been in the cell as long as he could remember and had only learned to write his name by tracing the letters on paper that had been left in his cell.  Eventually, the man who had first left the paper in his cell brought him a prayer book and taught him how to read a few words.  Eventually, he had been taken out of the cell and told that he would be taken to be a soldier like his father.  Based on his story, he somehow learned to walk and understand what the man said to him surprisingly quickly despite having little previous exposure to language.  The envelope that he later gave the Captain was placed in his hands and he was eventually sent on his way to Nuremberg. 

In November of that same year, Kaspar Hauser repeated his story before a specially appointed Commission of magistrates in Nuremberg (but not under oath).  The fact that he able to walk and speak despite having been kept in one cell all his life with no exposure to language or physical exercise was hardly questioned.  In fairness, some of his defenders explained away the inconsistencies and suggested that Kaspar had been confused in some of the details in his story.  During attempts to cross-examine him or get him to expand on his story, Kaspar would often complain of headaches or deny that he had ever said what he had been heard to say. 

Kaspar Hauser's story became widely believed and made him an object of sympathy throughout Germany.  Although some skeptics questioned the details of the case (and suggested that the letters in his possession were written by the same person), they were discredited.  Doctors who examined him concluded that he was an "animal man" who had been shut away from other people and was only now learning to live as a human being.  Although other cases of feral children (including Victor of Aveyron) were relatively well-known, Kaspar Hauser's case seemed to be unique.  Not only were his eyes acutely sensitive to light, but loud noises including thunderstorms and regimental bands upset him greatly.  He also had an amazing sense of smell and was repelled by the scent of any kind of flower.  His body was covered with old scars on his head and legs which were believed to be the marks of early physical abuse and he preferred to drink only water(he never learned to enjoy drinking wine or beer).

In the meantime, police scoured the country trying to find any trace of Kaspar's origins.  Nobody matching his description was ever found and no missing person's reports that might have established his true identity ever turned up.  By July 1828, Kaspar Hauser was formally adopted by the city of Nuremberg and an annual pension was approved for his maintenance.  Kaspar Hauser was formally placed into the care of George Friedrich Daumer, a schoolmaster and philosopher who tried to educate him.  Daumer had already begun educating Kaspar in his cell and had noted his amazing progress in learning to read and write.  This education didn't go smoothly though and Daumer complained about the steady influx of visitors who were interfering with his pupil's lessons.  The visitors were stopped but Kaspar was still free to go out and socialize, especially since he had become the darling of Nuremberg society. 

Continue to Part Two.

 

Predicting Cyberbullying from Anonymity

Anonymity has been considered one of the constructs that differentiate traditional bullying from cyberbullying; however, few published studies have actually tested how and why anonymity influences cyberbullying behavior longitudinally.  In a new study in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, researchers examine whether aggressor-perceived anonymity predicts cyberbullying behavior and positive attitudes toward cyberbullying. Additionally, positive cyberbullying attitudes would mediate aggressor-perceived anonymity and cyberbullying behavior. The current study used a 4-wave longitudinal design over the course of one academic year on college-aged participants (N = 146 [at Wave 1]; average age = 19.21). Specifically, participants completed measures of anonymity, cyberbullying attitudes, and cyberbullying behavior 4 times approximately every 2 months. Results using path analysis showed (a) strong stability over time for the variables and (b) several mediated paths between Wave 1 anonymity and Waves 3 and 4 cyberbullying behaviors through Wave 2 cyberbullying attitudes. These results remained using both maximum likelihood estimation and bootstrapping techniques. Overall, the results showed that aggressor-perceived anonymity is an important risk factor for later cyberbullying behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Bangladeshi Extremists Using Social Media to Identify Secular Targets

On April 30, Nikil Joarder, a Hindu tailor, was hacked to death while sitting outside his shop in central Bangladesh.  Joarder, who was in his early 50s, had been arrested in 2012 for allegedly making derogatory remarks against Islam though he was later released  after spending weeks in jail.   Just days earlier, Xulhaz Mannan, a prominent LGBT activist and editor of Bangladesh's only LGBT magazine was hacked to death along with another man in his Dhaka flat.   These two killings, along with the brutal hacking murder of a university teacher were all believed to be the work of extremists.  While Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility, government sources dispute this stating that the Islamic terrorist group is not operating in Bangladesh.  Still, the presence of numerous other extremist organizations means that finding those responsible may not be possible. 

In the past few years, many attacks believed to be the work of Islamic extremists have also been carried out.  The victims include secular bloggers, academics, gay rights activists, and members of different religious minorities including Shia, Sufi and Ahmadi Muslims, Christians and Hindus.  Many of the victims were hacked to death by machetes and few of these murders have been solved by police.  There have also been allegations that police are complicit in the killings by not arriving until after the attackers have fled. 

One disturbing similarity among the victims is that they were targeted on social media shortly before their deaths.   Violent extremist groups are openly using Facebook and Twitter to threaten likely victims as well as claim responsibility after the killings occur.    Media critics are also warning about the growing role  of social media in identifying potential targets as well as allowing extremists to spread dangerous misinformation that makes violence more likely.   A September 2012 campaign of attacks directed against Buddhist monasteries, temples, and private homes occurred following the publication of an image of a Quran being desecrated.  The image appeared on a Facebook account under a Buddhist male name that later proved to be fake.   Using bogus accounts like this allows for extremists to promote hatred and violence against minority religious groups.

Extremists are also using information published in mainstream media stories to track secular bloggers, gay activists, and other potential targets and openly inciting violence against them.  They also invite other netizens  to provide information to aid in identifying even anonymous bloggers and celebrating their deaths afterward.   One recent documentary, titled "The Razor's Edge" which was produced by anonymous blogger “Nastiker Dhormokotha” (religious talk of an atheist), describes the often harrowing danger faced by secular bloggers in Bangladesh today.  The documentary has since won  in the Citizen Journalism category at the Deutsche Welle BOBs awards in 2016.  

While Bangladeshi government authorities have regularly come down on Facebook for various "threats to public security,"  they represent only a fraction of the cases in which social media has been used by extremists.   Mainstream media publications are also being encouraged to provide better privacy for individuals who risk being targeted and to avoid inflammatory rhetoric that might lead to violence. 

For more information

 

Raising Gua (Part One of Three)

Is it possible to teach a chimpanzee how to communicate?

With stories  of "feral children" being reported in India and the popularity of books such as Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, the prospect of teaching language skills to chimpanzees or orangutans didn't seem so far-fetched during the 1920s and 1930s.   While early research by such pioneers as Russian primatologist Nadiya Ladygina-Kohts  and American psychologist Lightmer Witmer helped demonstrate the innate problem-solving skills of chimpanzees, they also raised intriguing speculations about whether true communication between humans and non-humans might be possible. 

In 1912, it had been Witmer who  publicly suggested  that "within a few years chimpanzees will be taken early in life and subjected for purposes of scientific investigation to a course or procedure more closely resembling that which is accorded the human child."   But could raising a young chimpanzee in the same way that human children were raised lead to their developing actual language skills?   This was the question that Winthrop and Luella Kellogg would test in a very personal way.

Inspired by stories about Kamala and Amala, the two "wolf-girls" who had been reported in India not long before, Winthrop Kellogg had been newly-hired as a psychology professor at Indiana University when he approached Yale primatologist Robert Yerkes with a unique research proposal in 1930.   By placing an infant ape (whether chimpanzee or orangutan)  in a human home and raising that ape alongside a human child of the same age, Kellogg argued that the ape could be socialized like a human and develop  language skills. 

To make their experiment as realistic as possible, the Kelloggs convinced Yerkes to allow them to conduct their research at the Yale Anthropoid Research Station in Orange Park, Florida.  Established in 1930 and operated by Yale University, the station was one of the main primate research facilities in the United States and had an international reputation for groundbreaking research.  Later rechristened the Yerkes National Primate Center and relocated to Emory University in Georgia, the station was ideal for what the Kelloggs were planning since it had all the facilities they would need.    To fund their research project, the Kelloggs took a leave of absence from Indiana University and arranged for a grant from the Social Science Research Council during their stay in Orange Park.

The first research subject  in the Kelloggs' study happened to be their infant son Donald who  was born on August 31, 1930.   All that remained was to get a suitable infant chimpanzee.  In mid-1931, the Kelloggs received their other research subject.  Gua, an infant chimpanzee, was born in Cuba's Abreu Colony on November 15, 1930 and subsequently shipped to the Yale Station to become part of their permanent collection.   For the course of the planned study, which was intended to cover the first few years of their lives, Donald and Gua would be raised together as siblings so the Kelloggs could monitor how they both developed. 

What followed was what Winthrop Kellogg would later describe as one of the most difficult research projects he and his wife had ever attempted.  "Had we at that time any knowledge of the personal deprivation to be demanded by the undertaking, it is doubtful if we would have persisted further in the endeavor to bring it about,"  he wrote, ruefully.    Not only were they first-time parents, but their experience in raising a chimpanzee was largely theoretical at that point.

"Let us suppose," the Kelloggs wrote,  in their later book describing their experiment, "that by some queer accident a human infant, the child of civilized parents, were abandoned in the woods or jungle where it has had as companions only wild animals. [The comparison to the fictional Tarzan is evident.] Suppose, further, that by some miraculous combination of circumstances it did not die, but survived babyhood and early childhood, and grew up in these surroundings. What would be the nature of the resulting individual who had matured under such unusual conditions, without clothing, without human language, and without association with others of its kind? That this is not so fanciful a conception as to lie altogether outside the realm of possibility is attested by the fact that about a dozen instances of "wild" foundlings of this sort are known to history. To be sure the reports about them are in many cases so garbled and distorted that the true facts are hard to shift out. In some, however, the accuracy of the accounts is well established."

They already knew of similar stories of feral, including Victor the Wild Boy of Aveyron,   Kaspar Hauser, and the wolf girls that had been reportedly found in India.   In providing Gua with the kind of social development human children normally received, the Kelloggs hoped to disprove many of the genetic theories of human behaviour that were already being used to justify the appalling eugenic policies being advocated across the United States.  Instead,  Winthrop Kellogg had a more optimistic view about human nature which he discussed in his book:

"It would be quite possible according to the latter view to take the child of criminal delinquents, provided he was normal at birth, and by giving him the proper training, to make him a great religious or moral leader. Conversely it would be possible to take the child of gifted and upright parents and by placing him in a suitable environment, to produce a criminal of the lowest order. Heredity, in this view, assumes a secondary role and education or training becomes the important item."

Much like John B. Watson and other behaviourists, the Kelloggs insisted that upbringing played an essential role in shaping human development.  While they knew there were limits to how far Gua could progress even if raised like a human child, they did hope to prove that an infant chimpanzee could acquire language skills if the training began early enough.  

Being practical experimenters, the Kelloggs began by taking measurements for both Donald and Gua -  height, weight, blood pressure, etc.   Gua was rated as having the bone structure of a human child twice her age with sixteen of her "baby teeth" at the time she was separated from her mother.    In many ways, she was far in advance of Donald who was a typical human baby with limited motor development.   They then placed both their infants on a daily schedule including waking up at 7 AM,  getting their breakfast, sitting in identical high chairs while the adults were having breakfast, then regular play sessions and naps  (Donald needed more nap time than Gua).   

Both infants received an identical diet including warm milk, cereal, orange juice, and fruit.   There were still a few differences in their diets considering Gua's fondness for eating insects as well as flowers and the leaves of some plants (Donald was a little more particular about what he ate).   Though the Kelloggs noted other differences between Donald and Gua which became more evident over time, they did their best to provide both infants with the same learning opportunities.   They even had a special walker made for Gua which matched the walker used by Donald though Gua never used it for walking the way Donald did.  

In the months that followed, the Kellloggs would carefully record everything they learned about their two subjects.   While Gua never mastered language the way they had hoped, what the Kelloggs  eventually discovered would help rewrite everything psychologists thought they knew about how humans and non-humans developed .

To be continued.

 

 

Profiling Hitler

Formed through an presidential order on June 13, 1942, the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was intended to replace the intelligence gathering operations run by different military and executive departments with a single, centralized operation to aid the American war effort. While It got off to a rocky start (the FBI and and different branches of the military disliked sharing information with the new agency, its new head, Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, was quick to take advantage of all the resources that were available to him.

While the OSS was not actively involved in psychological warfare, Donovan saw another potential role that psychologists could play in the war effort.  To have a better understanding of Adolf Hitler and his role in the German war effort, Colonel Donovan (who would be promoted to Major General by the end of the war) called on William Leonard Langer, then head of the OSS Research and Analysis branch.  Langer, in turn, put together a unique team of psychoanalysts and psychologists led by his brother Walter Charles Langer.

Already a prominent psychoanalyst, Walter Langer had studied with Anna Freud while living in Austria during the 1930s. He also met with Sigmund Freud on a frequent basis and accompanied him to England when he was driven into exile in 1938. At the time that his brother recruited him, Walter Langer was a practicing psychoanalyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts and well respected in the psychoanalytic community. Other members of the team that he put together included Henry A. Murray of Harvard University, Ernest Kris of the New School for Social Research, and Bertram Lawin of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.   Henry Murray had previously prepared a document for the OSS titled Analysis of the Personality of Hitler and much of his conclusions were later absorbed into the Langer report.

Since Adolf Hitler would not be directly available for analysis, psychological profiling proved to be a complex problem.Langer and his team gathered information by interviewing people who had personally known Hitler. These included Ernst Hanfstaengl (a former Hitler confidante who had defected to the Allies), Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe (a Nazi spy in U.S. custody), and Friedlinde Wagner (daughter of Richard Wagner and an anti-Nazi activist). The team also scoured various printed documents about Hitler and eventually put together 11,000 pages of quotations and condensed versions of longer documents into a "Hitler Source Book" which was appended to their actual study.

The final document, titled "A Psychological Profile of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend" was released in 1943. Due to pressure from Donovan and the OSS, Langer and his team only had a limited amount of time to finish the report.  After the report was released, it was quickly declared Top Secret and distributed to different branches of the Allied forces. In addition to the preface, the report was broken down into six sections:

• Hitler - As he believes himself to be
• Hitler - As the German people know him
• Hitler - As his associates know him
• Hitler - As he knows himself
• Psychological Analysis and Reconstruction
• Hitler's Probable Behavior in the Future

Although Langer arranged for three independent psychoanalysts to review the report and their conclusions, he frankly admitted that forming conclusions based on second-hand sources limited the report's usefulness. Despite his misgivings, the report concluded that Adolph Hitler was likely a "neurotic psychopath" whose hold on the German people seemed absolute. The report reviewed Hitler's unhappy childhood, his relationship with both of this parents, and his early psychosexual development.

The team drew heavily on Freudian concepts and made various assumptions about Hitler's sexuality and attitudes towards women in general based on the limited information provided in works such as Mein Kampf. The crux of the report was the final section, Hitler's Probable Behavior in the Future. which described the various possible scenarios of Hitler's response to Allied military advances. After weighing different outcomes, it was suggested that Adolph Hitler would become increasingly neurotic with each German defeat. The authors also concluded that Hitler would probably commit suicide if the Nazis lost the war. In a prophetic line at the end of the report, the authors concluded that "In any case, his mental condition will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency. The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one which seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and at the same time drag the world down in flames."

While it's still an open question on how much, if any, influence the Langer report had on the Allied leaders (probably very little given how late in the war it was released), it marked a radical shift in the role of psychology in military and political strategy.  As one of the first practical applications of psychological profiling (at least as applied to world leaders), the report would remain classified until 1972 when it was finally published and became a bestseller.

Despite critical gaps (many details about Adolph Hitler only became known long after the war ended), the Langer report was considered enough of a success for the OSS (later the CIA) to continue producing psychological profiles to assist political strategy. Psychological profiling would only be used on occasion during the 1950s and 1960s (including an influential report on Nikita Kruschev which was carefully studied by John F. Kennedy). The CIA eventually developed its own in-house psychological profiling section in the late 1960s although most of the reports produced remain classified.

The actual value of psychological profiles based on second-hand information remains controversial.  Older psychodynamic profiling approaches have been abandoned in favour of psycholinguistic and content analysis strategies designed to provide some insight into the thinking processes of foreign leaders and how they might react in stressful situations. Unfortunately, psychological profiles are usually only as good as the factual information that is available and even minor discrepancies in known facts about a leader could completely distort the resulting profile. Reports also tend to downplay situational factors that might play a stronger role in a leader's decisions than long-term personality. As a result, foreign policy experts and psychologists remain divided concerning the actual value of psychological profiles in shaping foreign policy.

As for Walter Langer, he remained convinced of the potential value of psychological profiling until his death in 1981.In the forward to his 1972 book on Adolph Hitler, he was quoted as saying "I may be naive in diplomatic matters, but I like to believe that if such a study of Hitler had been made years earlier, under less tension, and with more opportunity to gather first-hand information, there might not have been a Munich; a similar study of Stalin might have produced a different Yalta; one of Castro might have prevented the Cuban situation, and one of President Diem might have avoided our deep involvement in Vietnam.''

While profiling will certainly continue to be used, the controversy remains.

The Backlash Against Aggressive Women

Previous research suggests that women, more than men, experience negative outcomes when they display dominance. A closer look, however, reveals ambiguity about the specific forms of dominance proscribed for women.  In a new Psychological Bulletin article, authors suggest that negative reactions to women’s dominance, a counter-stereotypical behavior, may require that the behavior be clearly encoded as counter-stereotypical—which is less likely when the behavior is expressed implicitly. This hypothesis was tested with a meta-analysis of studies on the evaluation of individuals behaving dominantly, including articles not directly investigating gender. Results revealed that dominance indeed hurts women’s, relative to men’s, likability (although the overall effect is small, d = −0.19, k = 63), as well as more downstream outcomes such as hireability (d = −0.58, k = 20). More important, however, dominance expressed explicitly (e.g., direct demands) affected women’s likability (d = −0.28) whereas implicit forms of dominance (e.g., eye contact) did not (d = 0.03). Finally, the effect of dominance on men’s and women’s perceived competence did not differ (d = 0.02, k = 31), consistent with the idea that it is interpersonal (rather than instrumental) evaluations that obstruct women leaders. Implications for theory, and for the success of male and female leaders, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

The Road to Retirement (Part One)

Retirement is an issue that everybody worries about when they get older.

We're regularly bombarded with advice about financial security and the need for a diversified portfolio of securities to meet whatever health costs will arise in future.   With the prospect of longer and healthier lives, it's hardly surprising that outliving our money has become a major worry for many people.   In the 2015 White House Conference on Aging, retirement security was one of the most common themes among concerns of older Americans. 

But there is more to retirement planning than building up a nest egg.   For that matter, there are other kinds of security than what financial planners tell you about.   According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, all humans have an innate need to belong and to remain a contributing member of society.   Can this sense of belonging remain even after we have stopped working?  And how well-prepared are many older adults at the prospect of coming home from the office for the last time?

A new review article published in the journal American Psychologist, explores what retirement really means for many people and why retirement planners shouldn't focus on money alone.   Written by Jacquelyn Boone James and Christa Matz-Costa at Boston College and Michael A. Smyer at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, the article examines many of the barriers faced by older adults, particularly when it comes to having their lives "matter" as it did when they were younger.

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

 

Trial Underway in Bizarre Mountie Exorcism Case

"I want my family back.  I've had enough of my punishment. I’ll stop lying … I’ll show you I can change. I’m going to keep my locks as tight as possible on my feet.”

The Ottawa courtroom was completely silent as the videos of a naked and weeping 11-year-old boy pleading with his father were shown.  The father, a 44-year-old Royal Mounted Police officer stationed in Kanata, Ontario, had been systematically torturing the boy in the basement of their house while the rest of the family proceeded with their daily lives upstairs.  The boy had been kept shackled with only a slop bucket to relieve himself.  Unable to be identified to protect the identity of the victim, the boy's father and stepmother are now on trial for aggravated assault, forcible confinement, and failure to provide necessities of life.   The father has also been charged with sexual assault and three counts of assault with a weapon.  They are both out on bail and forbidden to communicate and the father has been suspended without pay.

The abuse came to light on February 12, 2013 when the boy, who weighed only fifty pounds at the time, managed to escape his chains to find water.   After being found by authorities, he was taken to hospital where medical doctors were shocked at his appearance.   According to reports, he was on the verge of starving to death.   Even when questioned by police, the boy continued to defend his father and insist that his own behaviour had provoked the abuse.  "My dad is in the RCMP. He would know," he later said.

The forty-five minutes of video recording the abuse were seized from the father's phone on the day of his arrest, just hours after the boy was found.  The father is heard demanding that the boy confess his "sins", including kissing a girl while they were in a tree together.  "“You haven’t repented yet! You will weep blood for what you have done. I don’t see you on your knees yet,” the father tells his son in the video, excerpts of which have already been presented in court.   The graphic abuse seen on the screen was enough to leave even hardened prosecutors and investigators to tears.

Under cross-examination, the father admitted to confining his son in the basement and subjecting him to abuse such as burning his genitals because he though he was possessed.  "I thought the devil was inside him," he told the court.  "I saw his eyes and heard his voice."  He also said that the abuse began because he had "run out of options" in controlling the boy's unruly behaviour, which apparently included refusing to do his homework.

The defendant also recruited his brother, a priest, to conduct an exorcism on the boy sometime before September, 2012.   The priest has already defended his brother though he admitted not seeing this problem behaviour himself and relying solely on his brother's description.    His testimony contained numerous inconsistencies and he claimed memory problems because of his "professional habit" of flushing away facts heard during confession.

The trial is proceeding.

For more information

For more information