Glaucoma is one of the major causes of blindness. Glaucoma is due to increased eye pressure. In conventional medicine, most eye doctors would recommend surgeries and eye drops to relieve high ocular pressure in the eye.
However, there is one problem: surgeries and eye drops would create a chronic condition, ironically enough, leading to ultimate blindness.
Dr. Leslie Salov, M.D., O.D. Ph.D., in his book “Secrets for Better Vision”, says most glaucoma patients are highly intelligent professionals who lead very stressful, busy lives. This finding led Dr. Salov to believe that to improve vision or eye health, you need to improve the health of your entire person simultaneously because your body is a set of interlocking systems that affect one another. Given that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, your eyes are only a small part of your whole person. Accordingly, to heal the eyes, you must heal the body first. It is just that simple!
To have healthy vision, even as you age, you must employ not only the sciences of physiology, biology, and chemistry, but also the healing powers of philosophy and even spirituality. This is no exception when it comes to treating glaucoma. In other words, to treat glaucoma, you need to examine not just your eyes, but every aspect of your life.
The methods of glaucoma treatment recommended by Dr. Salov include the following:
Visualization is the use of meditative exercise by your mind to control your body in order to heal itself. Specifically, visualization relaxes the muscles in the walls of your canal of Schlemm (circular channel in the eye that collects watery substance between the lens and the cornea). By relaxing these muscles, extra fluid can be excreted to relieve the glaucoma pressure. The use of eye drops serves a similar function, but the only difference is that chronic use of eye drops may have adverse long-term effects. These effects include pieces of iris falling off, causing blockage, and thereby instrumental in increasing eye pressure over the long haul. Without using eye drops with chemicals, visualization can relax eye muscles so that your pupils become small enough to open up the canal of Schlemm to excrete the fluid for eye pressure relief.
So, what exactly is visualization?
Visualization is the use of guided imagery to direct blood, oxygen, and leukocytes (immunity cells) to the eye through a mental image of a healthy eye. Essentially, your conscious mind controls the involuntary processes that occur automatically inside your body. However, it must be pointed out that visualization works only when you use it with dedication and consistency. In other words, you have to practice visualization diligently.
Another therapy recommended by Dr. Salov is meditation, which removes your everyday stresses and worries. When you are under duress and stress, you body produces chemical changes within your body, which decrease blood flow and oxygen level. Practice meditation, which is the art of thinking of nothing.
Deep and slow breathing using your diaphragm, aided by good posture, is deep cleansing for the body and mind. Deep breathing promotes better vision health through relaxation and detoxification.
According to Dr. Salov, your diet may also help you heal your glaucoma. A no-meat diet is strongly recommended because the antibiotics, chemical dyes, and growth hormones in supermarket meat damage not only you immune system but also your eye health. Without strong immunity, your eyes cannot utilize their natural healing elements.
To conclude, your body has its own curative forces, but the problem is how to harness these forces. For better vision health, you must be prepared to change your environment, lifestyle, and living habits. Vision health cannot be accomplished without total health. There is a Chinese saying: “The eye is the window of the soul.” Your vision health mirrors your physical health. If you believe that glaucoma can be healed naturally, then look beyond your eyes.
Watch the video related to Healthy Lifestyle Art
Stay Healthy www.personaltrainersimon.com Singapore personal trainer Simon aims to help his personal training clients maintain a healthy lifestyle through proper nutrition and exercise. His healthy and natural approach is about helping them to achieve their fitness goals without sacrificing their health. His personal training clients will learn how to use stress as a source of motivation to exercise and also discover healthier choices they can make in their daily life. In order to enjoy a high quality lifestyle, one must master the art of staying healthy.
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Did someone on Collins project meet this checklist ?PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist Revised) Test: What's Wrong with Psychological Tests
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited"
The second edition of the PCL-R test, originally designed by the controversial maverick
Canadian criminologist Robert Hare in 1980 and again in 1991, contains 20 items designed to
rate symptoms which are common among psychopaths in forensic populations (such as prison
inmates or child molesters). It is designed to cover the major psychopathic traits and
behaviours: callous, selfish, remorseless use of others (Factor 1), chronically unstable and
antisocial lifestyle (Factor 2), interpersonal and affective deficits, an impulsive
lifestyle and antisocial behaviour.
The twenty traits assessed by the PCL-R score are: glib and superficial charm; grandiose
(exaggeratedly high) estimation of self; need for stimulation; pathological lying; cunning
and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (superficial emotional
responsiveness); callousness and lack of empathy; parasitic lifestyle; poor behavioral
controls; sexual promiscuity; early behavior problems; lack of realistic long-term goals;
impulsivity; irresponsibility; failure to accept responsibility for own actions; many
short-term marital relationships; juvenile delinquency; revocation of conditional release;
and criminal versatility.
Psychopaths score between 30 and 40. Normal people score between 0 and 5. But Hare himself
was known to label as psychopaths people with a score as low as 13. The PCL-R is, therefore,
an art rather than science and is leaves much to the personal impressions of those who
administer it.
The PCL-R is based on a structured interview and collateral data gathered from family,
friends, and colleagues and from documents. The questions comprising the structured
interview are so transparent and self-evident that it is easy to lie one's way through
the test and completely skew its results. Moreover, scoring by the diagnostician is highly
subjective (which is why the DSM and the ICD stick to observable behaviours in its criteria
for Antisocial or Dissocial Personality Disorder).
The hope is that information gathered outside the scope of the structured interview will
serve to rectify such potential abuse, diagnostic bias, and manipulation by both testee and
tester. The PCL-R, in other words, relies on the truthfulness of responses provided by
notorious liars (psychopaths) and on the biased memories of multiple witnesses, all of them
close to the psychopath and with an axe to grind.
The PCL-R is not the only bad apple in an otherwise healthy crop. Psychological tests are
far from scientifically rigorous.
Personality assessment is perhaps more an art form than a science. In an attempt to render
it as objective and standardized as possible, generations of clinicians came up with
psychological tests and structured interviews. These are administered under similar
conditions and use identical stimuli to elicit information from respondents. Thus, any
disparity in the responses of the subjects can and is attributed to the idiosyncrasies of
their personalities.
Moreover, most tests restrict the repertory of permitted of answers. "True" or
"false" are the only allowed reactions to the questions in the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory II (MMPI-2), for instance. Scoring or keying the results
is also an automatic process wherein all "true" responses get one or more points
on one or more scales and all "false" responses get none.
This limits the involvement of the diagnostician to the interpretation of the test results
(the scale scores). Admittedly, interpretation is arguably more important than data
gathering. Thus, inevitably biased human input cannot and is not avoided in the process of
personality assessment and evaluation. But its pernicious effect is somewhat reined in by
the systematic and impartial nature of the underlying instruments (tests).
Still, rather than rely on one questionnaire and its interpretation, most practitioners
administer to the same subject a battery of tests and structured interviews. These often
vary in important aspects: their response formats, stimuli, procedures of administration,
and scoring methodology. Moreover, in order to establish a test's reliability, many
diagnosticians administer it repeatedly over time to the same client. If the interpreted
results are more or less the same, the test is said to be reliable.
The outcomes of various tests must fit in with each other. Put together, they must provide a
consistent and coherent picture. If one test yields readings that are constantly at odds
with the conclusions of other questionnaires or interviews, it may not be valid. In other
words, it may not be measuring what it claims to be measuring.
Thus, a test quantifying one's grandiosity m
.ust conform to the scores of tests which
measure reluctance to admit failings or propensity to present a socially desirable and
inflated facade ("False Self"). If a grandiosity test is positively related to
irrelevant, conceptually independent traits, such as intelligence or depression, it does not
render it valid.
Most tests are either objective or projective. The psychologist George Kelly offered this
tongue-in-cheek definition of both in a 1958 article titled "Man's construction of
his alternatives" (included in the book "The Assessment of Human Motives",
edited by G.Lindzey):
"When the subject is asked to guess what the examiner is thinking, we call it an
objective test; when the examiner tries to guess what the subject is thinking, we call it a
projective device."
The scoring of objective tests is computerized (no human input). Examples of such
standardized instruments include the MMPI-II, the California
Psychological Inventory (CPI),
and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory II. Of course, a human finally gleans the
meaning of the data gathered by these questionnaires. Interpretation ultimately depends on
the knowledge, training, experience, skills, and natural gifts of the therapist or
diagnostician.
Projective tests are far less structured and thus a lot more ambiguous. As L. K.Frank
observed in a 1939 article titled "Projective methods for the study of
personality":
"(The patient's responses to such tests are projections of his) way of seeing life,
his meanings, signficances, patterns, and especially his feelings."
In projective tests, the responses are not constrained and scoring is done exclusively by
humans and involves judgment (and, thus, a modicum of bias). Clinicians rarely agree on the
same interpretation and often use competing methods of scoring, yielding disparate results.
The diagnostician's personality comes into prominent play. The best known
of these
"tests" is the Rorschach set of inkblots.
Here are a few examples:
I. MMPI-2 Test
The MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), composed by Hathaway (a
psychologist) and McKinley (a physician) is the outcome of decades of research into
personality disorders. The revised version, the MMPI-2 was published in 1989 but was
received cautiously. MMPI-2 changed the scoring method and some of the normative data. It
was, therefore, hard to compare it to its much hallowed (and oft validated) predecessor.
The MMPI-2 is made of 567 binary (true or false) items (questions). Each item requires the
subject to respond: "This is true (or false) as applied to me". There are no
"correct" answers. The test booklet allows the diagnostician to provide a rough
assessment of the patient (the "basic scales") based on the first 370 queries
(though it is recommended to administer all of 567 of them).
Based on numerous studies, the items are arranged in scales. The
responses are compared to
answers provided by "control subjects". The scales allow the diagnostician to
identify traits and mental health problems based on these comparisons. In other words, there
are no answers that are "typical to paranoid or narcissistic or antisocial
patients". There are only responses that deviate from an overall statistical pattern
and conform to the reaction patterns of other patients with similar scores. The nature of
the deviation determines the patient's traits and tendencies – but not his or her
diagnosis!
The interpreted outcomes of the MMPI-2 are phrased thus: "The test results place
subject X in this group of patients who, statistically-speaking, reacted similarly. The test
results also set subject X apart from these groups of people who, statistically-speaking,
responded differently". The test results would never say: "Subject X suffers from
(this or that) mental health problem".
There are three validity scales and ten clinical ones
in the original MMPI-2, but other
scholars derived hundreds of additional scales. For instance: to help in diagnosing
personality disorders, most diagnosticians use either the MMPI-I with the
Morey-Waugh-Blashfield scales in conjunction with the Wiggins content scales – or (more
rarely) the MMPI-2 updated to include the Colligan-Morey-Offord scales.
The validity scales indicate whether the patient responded truthfully and accurately or was
trying to manipulate the test. They pick up patterns. Some patients want to appear normal
(or abnormal) and consistently choose what they believe are the "correct" answers.
This kind of behavior triggers the validity scales. These are so sensitive that they can
indicate whether the subject lost his or her place on the answer sheet and was responding
randomly! The validity scales also alert the diagnostician to problems in reading
comprehension and other inconsistencies in response patterns.
The clinical scales are dimensional
(though not multiphasic as the test's misleading
name implies). They measure hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviation,
masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania, and social
introversion. There are also scales for alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and
personality disorders.
The interpretation of the MMPI-2 is now fully computerized. The computer is fed with the
patients' age, sex, educational level, and marital status and does the rest. Still, many
scholars have criticized the scoring of the MMPI-2.
II. MCMI-III Test
The third edition of this popular test, the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-III),
has been published in 1996. With 175 items, it is much shorter and simpler to administer and
to interpret than the MMPI-II. The MCMI-III diagnoses personality disorders and Axis I
disorders but not other mental health problems. The inventory is based on Millon's
suggested multiaxial model in which long-term characteristics and traits interact with
clinical symptoms.
The questions in the MCMI-III reflect the diagnostic criteria of the DSM. Millon himself
gives this example (Millon and Davis, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, 2000, pp.
83-84):
"… (T)he first criterion from the DSM-IV dependent personality disorder reads
'Has difficulty making everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and
reassurance from others,' and its parallel MCMI-III item reads 'People can easily
change my ideas, even if I thought my mind was made up.'"
The MCMI-III consists of 24 clinical scales and 3 modifier scales. The modifier scales serve
to identify Disclosure (a tendency to hide a pathology or to exaggerate it), Desirability (a
bias towards socially desirable responses), and Debasement (endorsing only responses that
are highly suggestive of pathology). Next, the Clinical Personality Patterns (scales) which
represent mild to moderate pathologies of personality, are: Schizoid, Avoidant, Depressive,
Dependent, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Antisocial, Aggressive (Sadistic), Compulsive,
Negativistic, and Masochistic. Millon considers only the Schizotypal, Borderline, and
Paranoid to be severe personality pathologies and dedicates the next three scales to them.
The last ten scales are dedicated to Axis I and other clinical syndromes: Anxiety Disorder,
Somatoform Disorder, Bipolar Manic Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Alcohol Dependence, Drug
Dependence, Posttraumatic Stress, Thought Disorder, Major Depression, and
Delusional
Disorder.
Scoring is easy and runs from 0 to 115 per each scale, with 85 and above signifying a
pathology. The configuration of the results of all 24 scales provides serious and reliable
insights into the tested subject.
Critics of the MCMI-III point to its oversimplification of complex cognitive and emotional
processes, its over-reliance on a model of human psychology and behavior that is far from
proven and not in the mainstream (Millon's multiaxial model), and its susceptibility to
bias in the interpretative phase.
III. Rorschach Inkblot Test
The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach developed a set of inkblots to test subjects in his
clinical research. In a 1921 monograph (published in English in 1942 and 1951), Rorschach
postulated that the blots evoke consistent and similar responses in groups patients. Only
ten of the original inkblots are currently in diagnostic use. It was John Exner who
systematized the administration and scoring of the test, combining the best of several
systems in use at the time (e.g., Beck, Kloper, Rapaport, Singer).
The Rorschach inkblots are ambiguous forms, printed on 18X24 cm. cards, in both black and
white and color. Their very ambiguity provokes free associations in the test subject. The
diagnostician stimulates the formation of these flights of fantasy by asking questions such
as "What is this? What might this be?". S/he then proceed to record, verbatim, the
patient's responses as well as the inkblot's spatial position and orientation. An
example of such record would read: "Card V upside down, child sitting on a porch and
crying, waiting for his mother to return."
Having gone through the entire deck, the examiner than proceeds to read aloud the responses
while asking the patient to explain, in each and every case, why s/he chose to interpret the
card the way s/he did. "What in card V prompted you to think of an abandoned
child?". At this phase, the patient is allowed to add details and expand upon his or
her original answer. Again, everything is noted and the subject is asked to explain what is
the card or in his previous response gave birth to the added details.
Scoring the Rorschach test is a demanding task. Inevitably, due to its "literary"
nature, there is no uniform, automated scoring system.
IV. TAT Diagnostic Test
The Thematic Appreciation Test (TAT) is similar to the Rorschach inkblot test. Subjects are
shown pictures and asked to tell a story based on what they see. Both these projective
assessment tools elicit important information about underlying psychological fears and
needs. The TAT was developed in 1935 by Morgan and Murray. Ironically, it was initially used
in a study of normal personalities done at Harvard Psychological Clinic.
The test comprises 31 cards. One card is blank and the other thirty include blurred but
emotionally powerful (or even disturbing) photographs and drawings. Originally, Murray came
up with only 20 cards which he divided to three groups: B (to be shown to Boys Only), G
(Girls Only) and M-or-F (both sexes).
The cards expound on universal themes. Card 2, for instance, depicts a country scene. A man
is toiling in the background, tilling the field; a woman partly obscures him, carrying
books; an old woman stands idly by and
watches them both. Card 3BM is dominated by a couch
against which is propped a little boy, his head resting on his right arm, a revolver by his
side, on the floor.
Card 6GF again features a sofa. A young woman occupies it. Her attention is riveted by a
pipe-smoking older man who is talking to her. She is looking back at him over her shoulder,
so we don't have a clear view of her face. Another generic young woman appears in card
12F. But this time, she is juxtaposed against a mildly menacing, grimacing old woman, whose
head is covered with a shawl. Men and boys seem to be permanently stressed and dysphoric in
the TAT. Card 13MF, for instance, shows a young lad, his lowered head buried in his arm. A
woman is bedridden across the room.
With the advent of objective tests, such as the MMPI and the MCMI, projective tests such as
the TAT have lost their clout and luster. Today, the TAT is administered infrequently.
Modern examiners use 20 cards or less and select them
according to their
"intuition" as to the patient's problem areas. In other words, the
diagnostician first decides what may be wrong with the patient and only then chooses which
cards will be shown in the test! Administered this way, the TAT tends to become a
self-fulfilling prophecy and of little diagnostic value.
The patient's reactions (in the form of brief narratives) are recorded by the tester
verbatim. Some examiners prompt the patient to describe the aftermath or outcomes of the
stories, but this is a controversial practice.
The TAT is scored and interpreted simultaneously. Murray suggested to identify the hero of
each narrative (the figure representing the patient); the inner states and needs of the
patient, derived from his or her choices of activities or gratifications; what Murray calls
the "press", the hero's environment which imposes constraints on the
hero's needs and operations; and the thema, or the motivations developed by the hero in response to all
of the above.
Clearly, the TAT is open to almost any interpretative system which emphasizes inner states,
motivations, and needs. Indeed, many schools of psychology have their own TAT exegetic
schemes. Thus, the TAT may be teaching us more about psychology and psychologists than it
does about their patients!
Methodologically, the scorer notes four items for each card:
I. Location – Which parts of the inkblot were singled out or emphasized in the subject's
responses. Did the patient refer to the whole blot, a detail (if so, was it a common or an
unusual detail), or the white space.
II. Determinant – Does the blot resemble what the patient saw in it? Which parts of the blot
correspond to the subject's visual fantasy and narrative? Is it the blot's form,
movement, color, texture, dimensionality, shading, or symmetrical pairing?
III. Content – Which of Exner's 27 content categories was selected by the patient (human
figure, animal detail, blood, fire, sex, X-ray, and so on)?
IV. Popularity – The patient's responses are compared to the overall distribution of
answers among people tested hitherto. Statistically, certain cards are linked to specific
images and plots. For example: card I often provokes associations of bats or butterflies.
The sixth most popular response to card IV is "animal skin or human figure dressed in
fur" and so on.
V. Organizational Activity – How coherent and organized is the patient's narrative and
how well does s/he link the various images together?
VI. Form Quality – How well does the patient's "percept" fit with the blot?
There are four grades from superior (+) through ordinary (0) and weak (w) to minus (-).
Exner defined minus as:
"(T)he distorted, arbitrary, unrealistic use of form as related to the content offered,
where an answer is imposed on the blot area with total, or near total, disregard for the
structure of the area."
The interpretation of the test relies on both the scores obtained and on what we know about
mental health disorders. The test teaches the skilled diagnostician how the subject
processes information and what is the structure and content of his internal world. These
provide meaningful insights into the patient's defenses, reality test, intelligence,
fantasy life, and psychosexual make-up.
Still, the Rorschach test is highly subjective and depends inordinately on the skills and
training of the diagnostician. It, therefore, cannot be used to reliably diagnose patients.
It merely draws
attention to the patients' defenses and personal style.
V. Structured Interviews
The Structured Clinical Interview (SCID-II) was formulated in 1997 by First, Gibbon,
Spitzer, Williams, and Benjamin. It closely follows the language of the DSM-IV Axis II
Personality Disorders criteria. Consequently, there are 12 groups of questions corresponding
to the 12 personality disorders. The scoring is equally simple: either the trait is absent,
subthreshold, true, or there is "inadequate information to code".
The feature that is unique to the SCID-II is that it can be administered to third parties (a
spouse, an informant, a colleague) and still yield a strong diagnostic indication. The test
incorporates probes (sort of "control" items) that help verify the presence of
certain characteristics and behaviors. Another version of the SCID-II (comprising 119
questions) can also be self-administered. Most practitioners administer both the
self-questionnaire and the standard test and use the former to screen for true answers in
the latter.
The Structured Interview for Disorders of Personality (SIDP-IV) was composed by Pfohl, Blum
and Zimmerman in 1997. Unlike the SCID-II, it also covers the self-defeating personality
disorder from the DSM-III. The interview is conversational and the questions are divided
into 10 topics such as Emotions or Interests and Activities. Succumbing to
"industry" pressure, the authors also came up with a version of the SIDP-IV in
which the questions are grouped by personality disorder. Subjects are encouraged to observe
the "five year rule":
"What you are like when you are your usual self … Behaviors. cognitions, and feelings
that have predominated for most of the last five years are considered to be representative
of your long-term personality functioning …"
The scoring is again simple. Items are either present, subthreshold, present, or strongly
present.
VI. Disorder-specific Tests
There are dozens of psychological tests that are disorder-specific: they aim to diagnose
specific personality disorders or relationship problems. Example: the Narcissistic
Personality Inventory (NPI) which is used to diagnose the Narcissistic Personality Disorder
(NPD).
The Borderline Personality Organization Scale (BPO), designed in 1985, sorts the
subject's responses into 30 relevant scales. These indicates the existence of identity
diffusion, primitive defenses, and deficient reality testing.
Other much-used tests include the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-IV, the Coolidge Axis
II Inventory, the Personality Assessment Inventory (1992), the excellent, literature-based,
Dimensional assessment of Personality Pathology, and the comprehensive Schedule of
Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality and Wisconsin Personality Disorders Inventory.
Having established the existence of a personality disorder, most diagnosticians proceed to
administer other tests intended to reveal how the patient functions in relationships, copes
with intimacy, and responds to triggers and life stresses.
The Relationship Styles Questionnaire (RSQ) (1994) contains 30 self-reported items and
identifies distinct attachment styles (secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing). The
Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) (1979) is a standardized scale of the frequency and intensity
of conflict resolution tactics and stratagems (both legitimate and abusive) used by the
subject in various settings (usually in a couple).
The Multidimensional Anger Inventory (MAI) (1986) assesses the frequency of angry responses,
their duration, magnitude, mode of expression, hostile outlook, and anger-provoking
triggers.
Yet, even a complete battery of tests, administered by experienced professionals sometimes
fails to identify abusers with personality disorders. Offenders are uncanny in their ability
to deceive their evaluators.
APPENDIX: Common Problems with Psychological Laboratory Tests
Psychological laboratory tests suffer from a series of common philosophical, methodological,
and design problems.
A. Philosophical and Design Aspects
1.. Ethical – Experiments involve the patient and others. To achieve results, the subjects
have to be ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and their aims. Sometimes even the
very performance of an experiment has to remain a secret (double blind experiments). Some
experiments may involve unpleasant or even traumatic experiences. This is ethically
unacceptable.
2.. The Psychological Uncertainty Principle – The initial state of a human subject in an
experiment is usually fully established. But both treatment and experimentation influence
the subject and render this knowledge irrelevant. The very processes of measurement and
observation influence the human subject and transform him or her – as do life's
circumstances and vicissitudes.
3.. Uniqueness – Psychological experiments are, therefore, bound to be unique,
unrepeatable, cannot be replicated elsewhere and at other times even when they are conducted
with the SAME subjects. This is because the subjects are never the same due to the
aforementioned psychological uncertainty principle. Repeating the experiments with other
subjects adversely affects the scientific value of the results.
4.. The undergeneration of testable hypotheses – Psychology does not generate a sufficient
number of hypotheses, which can be subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with the
fabulous (=storytelling) nature of psychology. In a way, psychology has affinity with some
private languages. It is a form of art and, as such, is self-sufficient and self-contained.
If structural, internal constraints are met – a statement is deemed true even if it does not
satisfy external scientific requirements.
B. Methodology
1. Many psychological lab tests are not blind. The experimenter is fully aware who among
his subjects has the traits and behaviors that the test is supposed to identify and predict.
This foreknowledge may give rise to experimenter effects and biases. Thus, when testing for
the prevalence and intensity of fear conditioning among psychopaths (e.g., Birbaumer, 2005),
the subjects were first diagnosed with psychopathy (using the PCL-R questionnaire) and only
then underwent the experiment. Thus, we are left in the dark as to whether the test results
(deficient fear conditioning) can actually predict or retrodict psychopathy (i.e., high
PCL-R scores and typical life histories).
2. In many cases, the results can be linked to multiple causes. This gives rise to
questionable cause fallacies in the interpretation of test outcomes. In the aforementioned
example, the vanishingly low pain aversion of psychopaths may have more to do with
peer-posturing than
with a high tolerance of pain: psychopaths may simply be too
embarrassed to "succumb" to pain; any admission of vulnerability is perceived by
them as a threat to an omnipotent and grandiose self-image that is sang-froid and,
therefore, impervious to pain. It may also be connected to inappropriate affect.
3. Most psychological lab tests involve tiny samples (as few as 3 subjects!) and
interrupted time series. The fewer the subjects, the more random and less significant are
the results. Type III errors and issues pertaining to the processing of data garnered in
interrupted time series are common.
4. The interpretation of test results often verges on metaphysics rather than science.
Thus, the Birbaumer test established that subjects who scored high on the PCL-R have
different patterns of skin conductance (sweating in anticipation of painful stimuli) and
brain activity. It did not substantiate, let alone prove, the existence or absence of
specific mental states or
psychological constructs.
5. Most lab tests deal with tokens of certain types of phenomena. Again: the fear
conditioning (anticipatory aversion) test pertains only to reactions in anticipation of an
instance (token) of a certain type of pain. It does not necessarily apply to other types of
pain or to other tokens of this type or any other type of pain.
6. Many psychological lab tests give rise to the petitio principii (begging the
question) logical fallacy. Again, let us revisit Birbaumer's test. It deals with people
whose behavior is designated as "antisocial". But what constitute antisocial
traits and conduct? The answer is culture-bound. Not surprisingly, European psychopaths
score far lower on the PCL-R than their American counterparts. The very validity of the
construct "psychopath" is, therefore, in question: psychopathy seems to be merely
what the PCL-R measures!
7. Finally, the "Clockwork Orange" objection: psychological lab tests have
frequently
been abused by reprehensible regimes for purposes of social control and social
engineering.
About Author
Stephen Lau -
About the Author:
For more information on visualization therapy, optimal breathing, and meditation techniques, visit Stephen Lau’s webpage: Vision Health. Stephen Lau is a writer and researcher. For more information, go to his website: http://www.stephencmlau.com
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