“The Psychology of Destroying Belief” plus 2 more

The Psychology of Destroying Belief
Challenging Stereotypes: culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 1 of 2)
Study finds similar personality types in male and female domestic violence perpetrators

Posted: 10 Aug 2010 10:32 AM PDT

China's social scientists use methods learned from psychology to compel Falun Gong adherents to renounce their beliefs. (Wikimedia Commons)

On July 1, the American Family Foundation's International Cultic Studies Association held its annual meeting at Fort Lee, Jersey City. That evening, three scholars from China participated. They left after their presence met with strenuous protest from other participants.

These three scholars were the secretary-general of the China Anti-Cult Association, a research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Science's Psychological Research Institute, and a professor from Shanxi Normal University's psychology department. They had all received financial assistance from the Chinese state for their work, which was devoted to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Specifically, they had researched using methods learned from psychology to compel Falun Gong adherents to renounce their beliefs. One assumes they were able to participate in the meeting because the organizers did not know about the nature of their research.

The three scholars who surfaced in New Jersey are examples of a general trend: the perversion of scientific research in China for the sake of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners.

The Greatest Harm

Anyone who reads reports on the persecution of Falun Gong will be shocked at the abuses inflicted on the practitioners. From the perspective of the practitioners themselves, the most serious harm done to them is psychological.

Research tells us that the longest time a person can stay awake is 11 days; crossing this line will cause irreversible mental and physical harm. But Zhang Yijie, a female Falun Gong practitioner and former employee of the Ministry of Commerce, was persecuted and made to stay awake for 42 days because she refused to renounce her belief.

Every time she would start to fall asleep, a policeman would seize her collar and pour cold water down her clothes. It being the depth of winter, she was soaked and freezing to the bone.

During the time she was isolated and tortured, suffering all manner of physical and mental torment, the police played a song for her. It was one of the more famous in China at the time: "Mother's Kiss." The song tells of the deep longing a daughter feels for her mother.

Ms. Zhang herself was the mother of a son and daughter, both school-age. When the melody started playing, she could do nothing but feel inconsolable pain.

When Ms. Zhang first got to jail, she was put through a psychological evaluation. The destruction of body and mind she suffered was meticulously designed by experts. In a few short months, the cruel methods of persecution had changed Ms. Zhang's appearance from an energetic, healthy professional in her prime, into an old, withered-looking woman with graying hair and a face full of wrinkles.

The treatment Ms. Zhang suffered is a glimpse into the persecution inflicted on large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners. The Falun Dafa Information Center estimates that hundreds of thousands of practitioners are currently in China's Labor Camps.

Disgrace of Science

Looking at the direction of social science research in China over the last 10 years, particularly in the two or three years after the persecution against Falun Gong started in 1999, an enormous amount of the funding for social science research has been devoted to this topic.

The Social Science Foundation Research Guide, published by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science, determines which topics will be awarded research grants. Year after year, it has included the categories "anti-cultism," "atheism," and "the relationship between religion and the socialist system." In the early years, Falun Gong was directly mentioned, but beginning in 2001, more general language, such as "evil cults" and the like, was adopted.

A large number of scholars in China have been lured into joining the ranks of those who persecute Falun Gong using scientific research as the weapon. All sorts of pretexts have been used for funding these studies—many of which focus from the perspective of psychology on how to "transform" Falun Gong practitioners.

Each province and city has under its control universities, think tanks, and other research institutes, and the scholars affiliated with these bodies must follow government orders when given a political task. The number of studies commissioned on the topic is, therefore, sizable.

On Dec. 18, 2007, Communist Party boss Hu Jintao, after listening to the report of two scholars of religion, told the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political bureau, "From strategic heights, under new circumstances, we must fully grasp the importance of religious work."

This means that the CCP will continue to use the whole nation's strength to comprehensively "transform" the beliefs of social groups. The CCP's dread of freedom of belief goes right to its marrow, and at this moment, a major spiritual group in Chinese society is being put through a grim test.

Dr. Sun Yanjun was an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Capital Normal University in Beijing. In 2008, he was sent to the University of Hawaii as a visiting scholar. In 2009 he publicly renounced the Chinese Communist Party and now lives in the United States. He considers himself lucky that during his time in China, he was never asked to do research on persecuting others. This article was first published in New Epoch Weekly.

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Challenging Stereotypes: culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 1 of 2)

Posted: 09 Aug 2010 10:18 PM PDT

Natasha Mitchell: It's All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Natasha Mitchell delighted to be with you.

What defines how you feel about yourself, the dimensions of your inner world? How much of it do you think is moulded and massaged throughout your life by the culture into which you're born? For example you might think of Westerners as being more individualistic, where notions of I, me, and my frame how you think about the self. If you live in an Eastern culture you're often seen as being more collectivist, where the self is expressed more as we, our or us, and intertwined deeply with family and social relationships.

Well as the East and West do big business across boardroom tables, there's growing interest in understanding how culture influences the way people think in business, you've seen it in the titles in airport bookshops, but also in psychology. It was a hot topic at the recent international conference in Cross Cultural Applied Psychology held in Melbourne.

Corinne Podger was there for All in the Mind and over the next two shows brings us compelling research and debate over the nature of the East Asian self, starting today with controversy over the fundamental question of self-esteem.

Corinne Podger: In 1999 a Canadian psychologist gave a self-esteem test to people in the United States and Japan. Steven Heine found East Asians -- Japanese, Chinese and Koreans -- scored lower on the test than Westerners. Their self-esteem wasn't poor, it was neutral. The take-home in his landmark paper was that self-esteem wasn't necessary in collectivist cultures. How you're seen by other people is more important than how you see yourself.

The paper kicked off a debate that's still very much alive today -- raising questions about how different cultures conceptualise 'the self', and what it means to be 'a self' in today's globalised, multicultural world -- including how those concepts are processed in the brain.

Steven Heine: I'm interested in people's motivations to feel good about themselves. We had a number of reasons to suspect that the kinds of motivations that people have to feel good about themselves vary quite a bit across cultures. In particular a lot of things suggest that many in East Asian cultures people are motivated to attend to their weaknesses, because attending to their weaknesses directs their attention at how they can work harder to become better. And so there's a number of sources of evidence that reveal this. One is that if you ask people to complete a self-esteem scale, you find a substantial difference in overall levels of self-esteem. Whereas in my University in Canada 93% of European Canadians score above the midpoint in self-esteem. Most European Canadians have high self-esteem. Our same data from Japan with thousands of participants shows that most Japanese have moderate self-esteem; they cluster towards the middle of the scale, whereas European Canadians are at the very high end of the scale.

Another way of looking at this is people having unrealistically positive views of themselves, these biases, these self-serving biases. And one example of this is 94% of American college professors think they are better than the average American college professor, and of course averages can't work that way. But you see these biases, they are very pronounced in the Western context with almost anything that you ask people to evaluate themselves on, in North America people will round up when they get the chance. As long as it's something that you can't hold them to, so they don't think they're taller than they really are, but they think they're kinder than they are, they think they're smarter than they are. And when we compare those tendencies with people living in China, Japan and Korea, on average across all of the studies -- there's been 133 studies that have been published on this -- and if you look across all of those on average the East Asian pattern is showing zero bias. Whereas the North Americans' is consistently showing a very pronounced bias.

Corinne Podger: These provocative findings upset, even angered, some cultural psychologists in East Asia. Even though Steven Heine's results stood up in subsequent tests it sounded like cultural imperialism, an attempt to use Western science to justify stereotypes of modest, inscrutable Asians.

Masaki Yuki: There were people who thought that claim to be offending or looking down upon the Asians by saying that you don't have self-esteem. Some East Asian psychologists were actually very angry emotionally, and they tried to refute that claim, but evidence shows that actually North Americans have higher self-esteem than East Asians.

Huarian Cai: Most people from the West have some stereotypes about people from the East: they are usually modest and self-effacing and self criticising.

Susumu Yamaguchi: Some Western researchers have a romantic view or exotic view about East Asians. They have preconceptions that Asians are different. I agree, Asians are different from Westerners to some extent but we are all human beings and we share a lot of things universally. I don't mind talking about the difference between the East and West, but what they are arguing is too fundamental to be true.

Corinne Podger: Steven Heine's key argument was that in collectivist settings you don't need to boost your sense of self-worth or achievement; other people do that for you as long as you keep your side of the social bargain; a complex social interaction known as 'face'.

Steven Heine: Face is very different from self-esteem. So a self-esteem is 'I think I'm good', that's what is important, I think that I am confident and competent and that will enable me to do well. When you are concerned about face, what face is that that is the public reputation that you have, held in other people's eyes, whether they think you're living up to the standards that they have for you performing in your role. And when you're concerned about face, you have to watch out for where you might lose face, because it's far more problematic. It's much easier to lose face than it is to gain face. The amount of face you have is tied with your role, so you don't usually get an increase in face until you get a promotion, but any screw up and you've lost face. So if you're worried about face you're going to attend very carefully to your shortcomings: where you might jeopardise other people's approval and to work hard towards correcting those.

Corinne Podger: And while for a Westerner having 'neutral self-esteem' might imply feeling diffident or a bit average, Steven Heine believes it's a safe default position in the East, where displays of high self-esteem are regarded as arrogant or showing off.

Steven Heine: It can feel good thinking positively about yourself, and I think that's one reason why people in many Western societies do show these self-enhancement biases, it does feel good. And I think it actually universally feels good, I think in East Asia it feels good when you have a positive thought about yourself. But there's a cost to it, that in research conducted both in the West and in East Asia, people who show these self-enhancing biases, the cost that they entail is that they alienate others. People don't like others who are going around thinking they are so great they don't need anyone else and so it might feel good but you pay the cost of alienating others, and depending on what is a bigger concern to you, whether you're concerned more about do I feel good, do I have confidence; or are you more concerned with am I maintaining good relationships, are people approving me? You're going to either try to self-enhance and build self-esteem or to attend to your weaknesses and try to improve -- we call it self-improvement -- and be concerned with face.

Corinne Podger: That theory has support from Masaki Yuki, professor of behavioural psychology at Japan's Hokkaido University. He's studied social relationships in Japan which are traditionally more tightly defined than in the West. And he's found displays of high self-esteem can have serious consequences.

Masaki Yuki: From the view of Western people, it may look like Japanese or East Asians, have a lower self-esteem, but that's not correct. We have neutral actually. There's no need for us to have high self-esteem because if you have high self-esteem it's kind of problematic. You feel that you are better than others, you are superior than people around you. First you want to get out of it: do I have to stay with these dumb people? Second, if you express that self-esteem to others, others will hate you because you look down upon them, but they have to stay with you, right? So definitely you will be disliked by people around you.

Corinne Podger: And in cultural settings where it's neither appropriate or necessary to talk yourself up, achievements and failures can be experienced differently. Professor Yuri Miyamoto at the University of Wisconsin has been comparing how students in Japan and the United States react to exam results. While North Americans say they'll go out and celebrate good marks, their Japanese counterparts put a lid on their exuberance.

Yuri Miyamoto: They try to think about something that will make them less excited and to calm down a little bit. So Westerners are more likely to say that they, after experiencing a very positive event, they will go out and drink, or go out to a party with others, or go to watch a really fun movie, whereas East Asians are more likely to sleep because they're tired, or to eat something.

Corinne Podger: So less inclined to celebrate achievement?

Yuri Miyamoto: Yes, compared to Westerners. Of course it doesn't mean that they will never celebrate, they will celebrate, but if you compare the degree to which they do so Westerners seems to do that more, because they have a goal to maximise their positive emotions and savour those positive emotions. But it's hard to tell whether the reason why Japanese, or Asians, dampen their positive emotions: is it because they're consciously trying to dampen it, or because they do nothing about it? They're not interested in regulating emotions. So we need to study that more.

Corinne Podger: Professor Miyamoto says this cultural behaviour is reinforced by traditional stories which praise the so-called middle way rather than ending 'happily ever after'.

Yuri Miyamoto: There's an interesting Chinese anecdote on Sai Weng and Horse. In this story Sai Weng is an old wise guy and something negative first happens to him and a neighbour came to console him. But he says who knows whether this isn't a blessing? And then in fact it turns out to be a blessing. The neighbour comes to congratulate him and he says who knows that this isn't a disaster? Don't be too happy. And then in fact it turns out to be actually a disaster and this goes on and on and on. And this is a story that is well known across all the East Asian cultures and it's a story we hear from our parents. And that really reminds us, especially when you're feeling positive, to think about the next step. I'm happy right now but the negative thing is coming, or might be coming, so we should be careful to be 'middle way' a little bit and possibly to dampen it.

Corinne Podger: So there's evidence that failure isn't a personal disaster for the Eastern self because there's less emphasis on I, me and my. But there's more to it according to psychologist Deborah Ko, from the University of Hong Kong. She says the way failures are experienced suggests self-esteem is important in collectivist cultures; it's just that the road taken to get there is different.

Deborah Ko: In Western cultures the self is considered stable so we talk about ourselves in traits like I'm a good person, he's a bad person, whatever. So they'll usually choose things that they're very good at, they're not likely going to be seeking out failure because they don't think they can change those things as easily. Whereas in Steve Heine's work he talks about self-criticism in the East and so the idea of the self is actually malleable over time. So understanding that the self can be improved upon and constantly improved upon, it's in the way that you get to that improvement that you're going to derive perhaps your self-esteem. So maybe I think I'm great, but that doesn't really mean that much if everyone else thinks that I'm not. So working towards making sure that you are a good citizen in your society, making sure that you please those that are important to you is probably going to be more important in self-esteem.

Corinne Podger: Deborah Ko, teasing out the debate in psychology over whether Asians need self-esteem less than Westerners, and I'm Corinne Podger with you here on ABC Radio National's All in the Mind broadcast through Asia on Radio Australia and online.

Now what about self-esteem and your mental health, does culture play a role there? In the West, if your self-esteem is lower, you can be at risk of depression. Studies in Japan and China however have produced conflicting results.

Yuri Miyamoto: In the Western culture there is this correlation between how much positive emotion you feel and how mentally healthy you are, and even how physically healthy you are. Whereas that correlation tends to be smaller in East Asia culture. And actually in our recent studies we compared Americans and Japanese and found that those Americans who feel they're both positive and negative to the same degree, they actually have worse physical symptoms compared to Japanese who are experiencing both positive and negative emotions equally frequently. Which suggests that being the 'middle way' is actually functional, at least has a physical function in East Asian culture compared to Western culture.

Corinne Podger: It's been suggested that people from East Asia don't need self-esteem. It's an extraordinary statement for a Westerner. What's your understanding of that kind of work and your view on it?

Yuri Miyamoto: The empirical answer is well for self-esteem, in our study we also measured how much belief in the self, like lack of confidence that's the opposite of self-esteem in a sense explained these cultural differences. And we found that of course Japanese have a lower belief or confidence in themselves but that wasn't necessarily related to how they regulate emotions. So there seems to be cultural differences but the reason why Japanese or Asians are dampening their positive emotion is not necessarily because they have lower self-esteem. But we believe that it's because they believe more in this dialectical nature of the world and that seems to be useful for them. So it's possible that the focus on the self, and how much you believe in the self, and how much you maximise the positive aspect of the self is especially important in the Western culture. Whereas belief in yourself itself may not be so important in the East Asian cultural context but rather focusing on the nature of the world and if the world has ups and downs, adjusting, figuring out how to adjust to that might have more meanings and functions in an East Asian cultural context.

Corinne Podger: But a very different view is taken by psychologist Professor Huajian Cai from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He's convinced self-esteem is just as important in East Asian or collectivist settings as it is in the West.

Huajian Cai: In the west it is very well established that self-esteem is critical to people's mental health. People with high self-esteem are usually less likely to be depressed. So we have done a study in China and we found a similar finding, similar results could be generalised to Eastern cultures. We found Chinese people with high self-esteem less likely to experience depression and anxiety and usually experience more higher subjective wellbeing or psychological wellbeing. To deal with people from the East, one way to enhance their mental health is to improve their self-esteem.

Corinne Podger: Huajian Cai is one of a number of Asian psychologists who believe Steve Heine was asking the right question about self-esteem in collectivist settings but using the wrong tools.

Susumu Yamaguchi: I don't know how other people felt about it but I felt at the time it was wrong because his review was not thorough and based upon superficial evidence. Yes, there's no room for indication that Japanese express low self-esteem as compared with North Americans, but what Japanese express on Rosenberg's self-esteem scale is on the average neutral, and Japanese do not show on the average negative self-esteem.

Corinne Podger: Susumu Yamaguchi from Tokyo University. He's referring there to Rosenberg's self-esteem scale, a series of questions used in Steven Heine's research in 1999. They're designed to reveal attitudes towards the self; whether you're satisfied with yourself, whether you feel worthy compared to others, and so on. It relies on a person's self-report and only captures what you're willing to tell someone else about how you feel, your explicit self-esteem. But Professor Yamaguchi argues that this approach runs into trouble in Eastern cultures.

Susumu Yamaguchi: We have data showing that modest people are especially liked, or immodest people who show high self-esteem are perceived as arrogant and selfish. People do not want to generate that kind of impression, so people tend to control their expression of self-esteem. That is their explicit self-esteem. But when it comes to implicit self-esteem it's located much deeper in the mind and it's difficult to control it.

Corinne Podger: Professor Yamaguchi's been studying East Asian concepts of the self for 30 years. He says in cultures where you don't want to be seen showing off in front of a professor, it's hard to draw out what a person really feels. He's using a different tool -- the Implicit Association Test. It measures implicit self-esteem, how you actually feel, regardless of what you say. And his results are very different.

Susumu Yamaguchi: Implicit Association Test is a computer based test to measure your association between two concepts. We asked people to associate self, or best friend with pleasant or unpleasant things and we found that people can easily, more easily associate the self with pleasant things as compared with best friend with pleasant things. If you can associate your self with positive traits it would mean you have a high opinion, positive opinion about yourself. We published an article on the universality of implicit self-esteem across cultures. Japanese and Chinese showed the same level or higher level of implicit self-esteem as compared to North Americans. We published it and we did a press release and our article was covered by all the major newspapers in Japan. In one of those papers they covered it on the front page. That means that self-esteem is very important to Japanese.

Corinne Podger: Professor Yamaguchi is one of a number of Asian psychologists whose data suggests self-esteem is a universal human need irrespective of culture. Another is Professor Huajian Cai.

Huajian Cai: In the West people usually express their self-esteem directly. They will say I'm unique, I'm special, I'm smart. But in China or Japan people can't do it directly. They usually express it indirectly. They may not say they are good, they are smart by themselves, but they hope others for example their parents, their friends, their classmates, their teachers will say they are good. So they try to elicit positive evaluation about themselves from others but they don't say it directly.

Corinne Podger: Professor Cai has found that in Chinese settings even if a person does feel proud of themselves, with so much pressure to be modest, their self-esteem can plummet if they put it into words. So he's using rapid response tests forcing people to describe their feelings before they can check if that's modest enough for public consumption.

Huajian Cai: We don't ask them to evaluate themselves directly, but we ask them to respond to stimuli appearing on the monitor. We assess their reaction time to a different kind of stimuli about the self and positive words and negative words. Their response to positive words and the self is faster than people's response to self and negative words. That suggests they have high implicit self-esteem and have a stronger association between self and the positive words and the positive things than between negative words and negative things.

Corinne Podger: So by using a reaction time experiment basically you were tricking them.

Huajian Cai: Yes, you can say that. They just treat is as a kind of video game.

Corinne Podger: Presumably then, looking at your results, returning to a quote from one of your papers, the problem can't be expressed as simply as East Asians like themselves less than Westerners.

Huajian Cai: Actually they like themselves at least equally to people in the West, sometimes maybe even more. Our research suggests that when people try to make conclusions from research findings you should be very careful. The cultural difference in behaviours may not suggest a difference in underlying process. People could behave in different ways but they may still reflect the same underlying process but the manifestation of the underlying process could be very different.

Corinne Podger: So back to Steven Heine whose work first triggered this debate in psychology. He admits there are problems testing self-esteem in the East with techniques developed in the West.

Steven Heine: This is a minefield, this topic of research when you're studying culture and psychology that people identify very strongly with their culture. So I find that when I give a talk comparing East Asians and Westerners and I try my hardest to be as neutral as possible, I find that the Westerners are upset thinking that I've made it sound like East Asians are better than Westerners and many East Asians are upset thinking that I made it sound like Westerners are better than East Asians.

Corinne Podger: And he welcomes efforts to find ways to better understand self-esteem and the self as experienced in East Asian cultures, although he's not convinced there's anything new to say.

Steven Heine: We did a review of all the published work on this topic with 31 different methods. 30 of the methods show the pattern I'm talking about but one method doesn't, and that's the implicit self-esteem. And I think that's very interesting and I think that what remains to be seen is what this implicit self-esteem is which is largely an open question in the literature. I think it's always important to have culturally sensitive methodologies and there are many methods that are out there but I haven't yet seen evidence that these other kinds of methods tell us a better story about self-esteem. They tell a different story: if you change the methods and change the measures, you're often measuring something different, and I think a lot of the debate here is about people talking about different things and what is it that we are measuring. The measures of self-esteem so this difference, the other measures I think are showing something other than self-esteem.

Corinne Podger: Chinese American psychologist Deborah Ko recently moved from California to Hong King and says she's realised new tools are needed if these questions are to be answered.

Deborah Ko: Much of the material, much of the instruments that are used to measure self-esteem are very Western focused; so things like I think I am good at doing these types of things. And in moving to Hong Kong and trying to translate a lot of my material, I realise a lot of my research assistants say, you know when I look at this item I have no idea what it means. It's not something that we can translate because we just don't think that way. So I think some of the problem as well, in terms of making a lot of conclusions about self-esteem, is that we need to refine our materials in order to fully kind of grasp a more culturally inclusive definition of what self-esteem is.

Corinne Podger: Today the search for better techniques is going beyond external observation and inside the brain, to sidestep some of the cultural filters than can distort or hide underlying emotions.

Taka Masuda: The reason that many researchers put importance on the self-report measurement is that they have a mindset already that everybody should be able to have an idea and clear opinions. But if you want to study not only North Americans and Westerners but also many people in the world, you really have to pay attention to the fact that people behave without any thought because it's so automatic, because your parents did so I just follow. Right? It's time for us to develop a new type of measurement to better capture a variety of human behaviour in cultural contexts.

For example modesty is a necessary and important virtue in East Asian society so if you're being assertive in front of the experimenters it's not going to be seen as appropriate behaviour. So in this case you have to think about another strategy. Direct questioning is OK in North American and Western societies but Asians, if you want to get their real ideas and real thoughts, you have to spend a couple of weeks and go to drink beer and then create a better relationship.

Shihui Han: If we understand that people from different cultures their brains work in a different way, then it might be easier for us to accept that people from different cultures behave differently. And we know your brain might work differently from mine then it's natural to understand each other, to accept each other. Maybe in this sense it can help reduce the conflict between people -- that's my personal idea.

Corinne Podger: So you don't have a concern for example that the process of understanding what makes us different might feed into or support existing prejudices?

Shihui Han: I think actually the difference does exist in the world, right? People from one culture are different from the other cultures. We speak different languages, they behave differently and they think about things differently. We try to understand why from a psychological point of view, from a neuroscience point of view why there are such cultural differences. And if you understand all these psychological and neurological mechanisms, then I think it is helpful for us to really make people build up a harmonious relationship.

Natasha Mitchell: That's Professor Shihui Han from Peking University and before him Taka Masuda from the University of Alberta in Canada speaking to reporter Corinne Podger. And they are both working on more ambitious, possibly contentious efforts to get inside the cultural brains of you and I, we'll hear about that from Corinne in the next show: brain scans no less, and also about how our cultural mindsets are in fact quite plastic and malleable -- think of all those people born in one culture who live in another.

And we're really keen for your thoughts on this one; what's your experience of living or working across multiple cultures? Do you think differently, or see yourself differently in each? Head to the All in the Mind website and add your comments directly on this week's program page there abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind lots of extra info, the transcript and audio there too.

I want to also let you know that National Science Week kicks off 12 August, and we want you to be a citizen scientist -- it's easy, all you have to do is sleep, it's that blissful, and then be part of the ABC's Big Sleep Survey that's live online now. Head to sleepsurvey.net.au and lie down and be counted. Also don't miss Four Corners this week a critically important investigation into mental health services in Australia.

Thanks to studio engineer Nic Mierisch, I'm Natasha Mitchell -- off to sleep on it.

Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.

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Posted: 10 Aug 2010 01:42 PM PDT

Public release date: 10-Aug-2010
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Contact: Bud Mortenson
bud.mortenson@ubc.ca
250-807-9255
University of British Columbia

New research published in the August edition of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is providing a better picture of the roles played by gender, personality and mental illness in domestic violence.

"Intimate partner violence is a major public health concern," says the study's lead author Zach Walsh, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Okanagan campus. "Examining subtypes of perpetrators is an important way of learning more about why people are violent in close relationships. Understanding why different people are violent may be crucial for developing new ways to reduce violence in relationships. "

Walsh and colleagues Marc Swogger (University of Rochester), Brian O'Connor (UBC), Yael Schonbrun (Brown University), Tracie Shea (Brown University), and Gregory Stuart (University of Tennessee-Knoxville) analyzed data drawn from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study to examine normal personality, psychopathic characteristics, and mental illness among 567 civil psychiatric patients, including 138 women and 93 men with histories of domestic violence.

"Although both men and women engage in substantial levels of domestic violence, fewer studies have examined female perpetrators," says Walsh. "These new findings are among the first to highlight similarities between subtypes of domestically violent men and women."

Prior studies of domestically violent men have found that perpetrators can be categorized into three groups. The study provides preliminary evidence that the following three subtypes also exist among female perpetrators:

Antisocial perpetrators are often violent outside the relationship and have high levels of psychopathic personality traits
Dysphoric perpetrators may have high levels of anxiety, depression and other forms of mental illness
Low Pathology perpetrators have generally normal personalities and are rarely violent outside of intimate relationships

The findings also suggest that subtypes from studies of domestic violence perpetrators in the community can be applied to perpetration by psychiatric patients. Learning more about psychiatric patients who perpetrate domestic violence is important, as they engage in higher levels of domestic violence than do the general population.

Walsh encourages caution in generalizing from psychiatric patients to the larger community, and is currently working with his students to examine these subtypes among other group

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