hair pulling (trichotillomania) - a displacement action?

For anyone who may not have heard of hair pulling in humans, here is what it breaks down to:

1. the hand is raised to the head
2. a hair of a satisfying texture is sought out  - usually from the crown area
3. the hair is plucked out
4. the hair is examined, particularly the white root attached (not to get a root is a failure!)
5. the root is rubbed against the lips and sometimes licked
6. the hair root is combed off using the front teeth or simply bitten off
7. the root is eaten
8. the spent hair is discarded

This process can continue – depending on whether it’s interrupted or not – for hours at a time!

One of the predictable consequences of hair pulling is hair thinning and even baldness in those favoured areas of the scalp where pulling takes place.   It can be a source of great embarrassment and awkwardness and for this reason pullers and psychologists tend to overfocus on symptoms of hair pulling rather than examining its root causes (no pun intended).   This can mean people wearing hats, using hairnets, putting on gloves or keeping their mouths busy with gum, among other barrier techniques.  But to me, this response misses the mark and what’s more these methods are rarely effective.
  The point is that people are pulling their hair out because it is satisfying in some way – it makes them feel good!   There are a number of reasons this may be the case:

a. yanking out a hair can be painful, but like all painful activities after a while (think of jogging or extreme physical exertion) endorphins are released and these raise the pain threshold.

b. The act of rubbing, licking and removing the hair root involves a lot of oral manipulation which may increase saliva production.  If you can imagine anticipating your favourite food when saliva production occurs then you can get something of an idea as to why the 'tasty' lipid fat root is so prized.  It is also made of fat and fat is something that humans tend to enjoy.

My take on hair pulling is that is has homeostatic benefits -  which means that the activity helps the person regulate their internal physiological state in some way.   There has not been too much experimentation on this unfortunately.  (Partly because it can be hard to find subjects who hair pull to participate.)  But it would be interesting to find out:

i. are endorphins released which reduce the effects of pain?

ii. do cortisol levels (i.e. stress levels) decrease during hair pulling bouts?

iii. are there any other hormonal changes related to hair pulling, such as oxytocin release?

The other thing I would like to find out relates to the title of this blog page – is hair pulling a displacement behaviour.?  In other words, do people do it because a motivation or behaviour has otherwise been thwarted.  For example, thwarted attachment seeking (or grooming) due to a neglectful or rejecting parent may precipitate this form of self-grooming.   In this situation, a desire to approach or achieve comfort is constantly sought as an internal state but in an environment in which it cannot be satisfied.  This kind of mismatch, if occurring for a prolonged period and during a sensitive phase of development, may bring on hair pulling.  The final thing to mention is that the 8 stages above are so commonly observed in people who are hair pullers that it cannot be written off as an idiosyncratic behaviour that a few people coincidentally share.  Instead it can be viewed as a species specific behavioural program that emerges under conditions of prolonged frustration - and it also affects animals in captivity too.  So, the plot thickens….

displacement - defining terms

Anyone who has studied psychology to a reasonable extent can tell you that it is not a unified field.  As things currently stand, it is divided up into a number of different areas such as social, developmental, evolutionary and cognitive etc.  This is due to the fact it is very new science (or social science is more apt) and is still finding its way in terms of having a single theoretical foundation and being truly scientific, i.e. not merely a reflection of the researcher's personal value system.  Indeed, psychology did not exist till Freud effectively invented it as a form of treatment for patients suffering from 'hysteria'.  Freud set out to create a complete theory of man - a very ambitious project (to say the least) considering the state of technology at the time.  Even now, with fMRI scans the depths we can probe into the actual workings of the mind is very limited.  But this did not prevent Freud having a go and coming up with some key concepts such as transference, projection and displacement.   

     For Freud, displacement behaviour meant something slightly different to what I mean in my blog.  He was using the term to describe a behaviour that is expressed when the desired behaviour has been repressed and which the individual may not even be conscious of.  So, in the Victorian era when sex was taboo (at the public discourse level - privately, they were at it like no one's business!) Freud came across many cases where sexual desire could not be expressed directly. As a consequence he noted behaviour got channeled into alternative actions and from this he was able to recognise fetishes in his patients.

    In this blog my use of displacement behaviour is derived from ethology (study of animal behaviour) and links to the work of pioneers like Tinbergen.  He was one of the first people to notice that some behaviour does not always fit the context in which it emerges and is therefore hard to explain in terms of its relevance to the situation. An ethological definition does not assume, as does Freud, that all behaviour is merely a spill over from a single repressed drive, such as the sex drive or libido.  Several theories in the field of ethology exist in an attempt to explain behaviour that

seems to have no functional purpose.  This can include spill over theories but also includes:

disinhibition theory - in animals when incompatibility between behaviour patterns occurs, underlying patterns that otherwise are inhibited become expressed e.g. preening, pecking etc.  A variation on this hypothesis (McFarland) is that when frustrated (i.e. an action does not produce the reward or effect on the environment expected) animals switch their attention to stimuli other than that eliciting the ongoing activity.  Displacement behaviour marks this switch of attention and suggests that when an animal is only partially rewarded for an action it is more likely to attend to wider or incidental stimuli.  The displacement behaviour may also indicate the existence of a conflict between the established pattern of behaviour and an environment in which the established behaviour has failed to produce the reward expected or required.  

dearousal theory - my own position is that displacement behaviour is a means of homeostasis.  In other words, the behaviour helps to regulate the internal state of the animal when in a challenging environment.  For example, a hungry cat frustrated by an empty food dish will often start to groom itself.  (I see it as a cat's mode of waiting for its meal.)  The grooming is a displacement behaviour that does not help the cat obtain food but enables it to regulate itself in relation to its non-rewarding environment.  The self-directed behaviour serves to attain a mental state non-dependent on the wider environment but as a consequence of the lack of reward from the said environment.  It is a way of regulating arousal until environmental conditions (or the adaptive effect of behaviour) are more conducive.

Overall, I take an evolutionary approach to displacement behaviour.  This means that I see the brain as an organ that pursues goal states e.g. safety, comfort, sex, food etc.  Each goal state is inextricably related to behaviour patterns which normally are successful in achieving the desired effect of meeting the organism's needs and supporting its well being.  Psychology then is the study of how an organism's evolved mindset or mentality links to its actual behaviour within the modern environment it finds itself.  Indeed, the brain is the organ that is constantly monitoring the state of the organism both internally (e.g. heart rate, oxygen levels) but also in terms of its relationship to the external world (danger, mating opportunities, food availability etc).  In short, its business is to monitor and regulate the ongoing relationship with the world.  From going to the fridge for a drink, to approaching someone at the disco, to putting an extra blanket on the bed - these are all brain state driven actions that man has been pursuing in one way or another since time immemorial.  Again, this marks a different focus from Freud whose theory derived from the immediate socio-historical context of his time and not from evolutionary history.

     The problem for any organism is when the environment does not support its psychological requirements.  In other words, no behaviour can be found that adequately achieves the goal states that constitute the organism's being or its nature. And this is what this blog is really concerned with - the displacement behaviours that emerge to regulate a situation characterised by disharmony or disruption between stimuli and mental states.

The Psychology of Everyday Life

Have you ever found yourself in one of the following everyday situations?

a. you are walking down the street and towards you is heading someone you know and like.  The sight of the person triggers a desire to say hello or wave, but social convention dictates that you refrain from doing so until the correct social distance is attained.  During this period there is a conflict and you find your gaze shifting around a lot and possibly avoiding direct contact with person approaching as a means of mediating the impulse to greet and the need to repress it.

b. you are in your car and are in a hurry.  You come to a junction but are not sure whether to turn right or left.  Behind you someone is bumper to bumper and a decision must be made quickly.  Automatically, your hand rises to your chin and rubs it.  Alternatively, you may touch and rub your forehead as you must put on hold the need to travel forward and re-evaluate your environmental bearings prior to recommencing your journey.

c. you are playing football and you are odds on to score.  The goal keeper has come out but you have rounded him and now the goal gapes.  If you score it will mean a lot.  The game is tied 0 - 0 and there is only 1 minute left to play.  You strike the ball but just before making contact it bobbles slightly on the uneven turf and the trajectory is skewed.  You watch on in the urgent hope of scoring and your body is set to celebrate wildy.  But the ball does not follow the course you want and just goes past the post.  This sudden thwarting of your intention produces a sudden automatic action: your hands rise to your head and your fingers comb back your hair and/or your hands in unison rest on the top of your head.

I would be very surprised if no one out there had ever experienced one of these situations.  In fact I would wager serious money against it.  Because automatic behaviours like these are key to our human experience and serve a very important function.  When a psychological or mental goal state (e.g. I'm hungry and I must eat;  I must find safety;  I want to bond or attach to someone etc.) is suddenly contradicated by social convention or incoming sensory data from the environment the human organism must recalibrate to bring the inner mental state and incoming external information into an adaptive relationship.  The brain of the football star who misses a goal must re-adjust his inner state of excitement that accompanies celebrating his goal in light of the changed situation of the wasted opportunity.  The driver must put on hold the project of moving towards his destination to reassess his current geographical location.  The person who sees his friend in the distance must contain his greeting performance through a displacement behaviour until the appropriate social proximity is attained and he can express his desire to renew a social bond.   So, at a point of social tension or stress a mismatch between an internal state (e.g. an intention, desire) and the environment leads to a displacment behaviour until the time when the moment of mismatch is passed and the desired (or undisturbed species specific) behaviour can recommence.  

   Problems for animals and people arise when this mismatch between inner state and external sensory data is prolonged.  An organism placed in an environment that limits behavioural possibilities so that certain goal states (a mental state that corresponds to a physical state of being e.g. happy - smile) cannot find expression is in a state of extended tension which can lead to stereotypical behaviours.  In humans the situation that prompted the behaviour may be forgotten in time but the action, such as hair pulling, may remain or be easily triggered when any frustration is felt.

   By relating abnormal behaviour to everyday behaviour it is possible to establish the existence of a mechanism that belies the whole spectrum.  What's more, it reveals that animals and humans are not poles apart in their biological and physiological make up.  This is important in improving our understanding of what we are and where we ultimately come from.

Introducing displacement behaviour

This blog is dedicated to the topic of displacement behaviour in humans.   So, what is displacement behaviour?  Well, put most simply it is a kind of fidgeting directed towards oneself. We have all experienced it when caught in two minds about something and we fidget or scratch the forehead or chin.  Technically speaking it is an automatic, self-directed behaviour that people engage in when they are anxious or stressed.   What makes it interesting from ethological and evolutionary points of view is that it is behaviour that very much links humans and animal behaviour together.  But more on that as this blog develops.  

My name is Will and this blog is my way of investigating further into displacement behaviour outside of a formal academic context.  It is a platform for expressing my interest and connecting with people out there who may have a similar fascination.  This started for me when I decided to study psychology in order to find out more about hair pulling behaviour (or trichotillomania) in people.  It led me to understand that animals too when in captivity have been shown to bite at their own hair or the hair of other animals around them.  Findings from the field of ethology (or the study of animal behaviour), have demonstrated that such self-directed behaviors occur when an animal is thwarted in the performance of an action by its environment or when two impluses (e.g. fight versus flight) are in opposition to each other. 

This blog aims to highlight different displacement behaviours, from common ones such as chin rubbing or lip chewing to hair pulling.  If you are interested, as I am, in what makes us human then I hope you will find it worth reading and posting comments on.

Will