Captivity and self-directed behaviour

With so many self-directed behaviours in animals associated with captivity it is worth considering what captivity means. Mostly we associate captivity with the simple fact of being caged behind bars or enclosed within a limited and secure area. But these images do not capture the real meaning of captivity because they fail to focus on the meaning of freedom itself.

Why do organisms under certain conditions, often related to laboratory captivity, fall back upon themselves and manifest behaviours, such as hair pulling, bar sucking and self-biting? I would argue it is because their environment is unnatural and the normal expression of species typical behaviour has been thwarted.

To be thwarted means that you have been deprived of satisfaction despite your best efforts to attain it. We may feel thwarted when our lottery ticket raises our hopes of winning a nice cash prize, only to see that the next drawn ball shows the wrong number. Of course, we get over such disappointments quickly;  not only will there be another lottery next week but nearly all of us lose and losing does not threaten our presently understood sense of place in the world.

But imagine being thwarted in ways that disrupt the social continuity of your experience or deprive you of connection to your environment. Prolonged isolation or being placed in a sterile environment with no way of gratifying yourself would not be like taking a fish out of water and placing it on a slab whilst still keeping it artificially respirated. The animal would have no use for itself – no way of being a fish, despite being a fish. This paradox for me goes to the root of why organisms perform self-directed behaviours.

More concrete examples of how captivity disrupts the continuity of species specific experience and makes an animal redundant unto itself include the following:

artificial food products that do not allow the animal to engage in species specific eating patterns or provide a sense of satiation following digestion – bar sucking is often noticed in such cases.

Cage conditions that limit an animals movements or access to materials (such as straw or 'house' building materials) so that it cannot complete species specific fixed action patterns of behaviour – stereotypical repeated movements are common in these instances.

A restricted visual field (e.g. a 180+ degree vista blocked) or limited space for movement so that foregrounded dangers or approaching threats cannot be properly evaded and a suitable proximity achieved that allows for a sense of safety and comfort – feather plucking in parrots has been noted in this respect.

Peer group separation, such as housing mice with their siblings only – this has produced fur pulling behaviour.

These are just a few of the situations that have been found to produce self-directed behaviours in animals. Ultimately, if you take an animal out of its natural habitat, you risk placing it in a world in which its being no longer has meaning in a social or biological sense. Animals are finely tuned to their natural environment and must be or they would not survive in the wild! Once this environment is changed, often unaccountable changes are produced in the animal as a result.

Animals, like humans, are free when they have control over their own internal physiological states. When they are hungry they are can eat the food they want to eat; when they are frightened they are free to flee danger or fight their corner; when they are in open spaces they can roam etc. Freedom is homeostasis in operation - the preservation of one's continuity of experience by control over the internal environment through a free response to environmental conditions.

As a final point, it is worth noting that animals born in the wild and brought into captivity do not manifest self-directed behaviours. It is only those organisms that develop in unnatural conditions that are forced to fall back upon the body and develop behaviours that offer them some way of coping with the situation they have been born into.

I believe humans who display self-directed behaviours are suffering in a similar way.

What drama can teach psychology

I have always found it strange that the education system separates arts and sciences so rigidly when there is so much that one can give to the other.  If science is about learning how mechanisms operate, then the arts is about how to employ those mechanisms to create particular effects.

   One area (among others) where the arts have a lot to offer social science is the world of theatre.  Drama creates situations where people must work closely together within a limited and controlled space to communicate human interactions and intensity of emotion. It means actors are in a unique position to experience reactions and feelings that highlight the presence of mechanisms of behaviour that go unnoticed or unrecognised in everyday life.

   I am interested in how modern social situations can produce problematic responses in people because humans are evolved adaptations to a hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Our ancestors would have lived in small tribal bands where everyone knew each other and would have been in constant social contact.  But in modern life we are surrounded by strangers.  A person approaching you as you walk along the street may provoke a whole mixture of sensations - fear, recognition, desire to greet, desire to avoid etc.  These are all sensations that actors explore in the course of rehearsing and performing.

   In the world of acting it is a well known fact that approaching someone produces sensations or even impulses that the actor must learn to use and control on stage.  The closer one actor moves towards another actor the greater is their involvement as the visual reference to the surrounding environment decreases.  In other words, the other person dominates the visual field and attention becomes focused on them and not the wider picture.  Certain feelings come into play now, depending on whether the other person is friend, foe or stranger - love, anger, fear etc.  So it appears that humans have evolved to experience strong physical reactions at crucial points of distance.

    According to Clive Barker's Theatre Games, crucial distances are at 11 meters, 4.5 meters and 1.8 meters respectively.  At each distance point there is a transition that moves through certain stages and which the actor experiences as critical moments of decision.  Barker notes that at each transition point the "body re-coordinates slightly and this causes breaks and changes in rhythm, faltering steps and often a missed beat in the rhythm of walking."  In his own case Barker says he experiences, "sudden tensions and relaxations between the shoulder blades" as he crosses each of the three transition points.  Two  points to add here are that (1) eye contact must be maintained during the approach and (2) these sensations are only experienced if the approaching person blocks out the surrounding visual field - but they are not experienced if 180 degree vision (or a balance between the world and the other) is maintained.

   Barker calls these transition points degrees of involvement and the closer we come towards another person the greater our involvement or expectation of involvement becomes.  This means the body and mind must prepare itself for action and engagement - whether that be fight or flight, acknowledge or ignore etc.

   In a separate activity Barker asked his acting students to approach a partner but to do so quickly and if they felt their safety threatened to move to the right.  He found that most of his students broke to the right at a distance of 4.5 meters (5 yards) from the partner.  There was also some resistance at 11 meters (12 yards) too, but this was easily overcome.  This activity reveals there is a distance at which hostility and fear of violence begins and it is just before the regular distance of social interaction (1.8 meters or 2 yards) is entered.  

   Knowing about these distances is important for actors who must work in close proximity to others, often on tiny stages, but at the same time seek detachment, e.g. Othello.   But knowing about these distances is equally important for a psychologist, and especially in relation to displacement behaviour.  If we know there is a transition point at which flight versus fight behaviour can become most activated, then we can limit a person's natural response and see what other behaviour emerges when we do this.  Film directors do this all time to their audiences - a horror film puts us in a situation of imagined danger but does not give us a way out and forces us to go through transition points we might otherwise not choose to experience.  Self-directed behaviour, such as nail biting or displacement gaze averting may occur where an audience member is neither able to entirely avoid the scary action on screen nor confront it bravely either.

   For me this sort of information is crucial.  In family life and social life there are many situations where people are living in close proximity with each other.  This inevitably means that transition points will be felt. I believe that self-directed behaviours may emerge when close confined proximity produces sensations that cannot be expressed or acted upon and must be repressed or where impulses produce conflict with one another.  This is an area that I would love to research - it would seem the arts knows certain things that the social sciences need to catch up with!

Reference:

Barker, Clive (1977) Theatre Games (Eyre Methuen London) pp.123-4

Unnatural environments

photo by Dave Adams

Evolution tells us that all life is in competition to be the best adapted to its environment in order to obtain the most resources and leave behind offspring. In this respect we can say that all life is programmed to function to these ends (physical growth and reproduction) under normal conditions. But conditions can change and are not always optimal for survival – just think of the dinosaurs!

I am interested in what happens when conditions are unnatural.  In other words, what happens when you take an organism that has evolved to thrive under certain conditions and place it in ones that it has not evolved to cope with.

One scientist who did just this with monkeys was Harry Harlow.  He took these highly social animals as infants and placed them in prolonged states of isolation and other forms of sensory deprivation.  The aim of the experiments were to see what would happen and whether any negative behaviours could be rectified once the  monkeys were returned to normal environmental conditions (i.e. back with their social group).

The effects of Harlow’s experiments were most disturbing.  Keeping young, developing animals in conditions that they were not genetically programmed to cope with led to a lot of self-directed behaviours such as prolonged self-rocking, self-biting, hair pulling and eye poking.  When returned to their peer group they were developmentally behind and found it impossible to re-integrate themselves.  Later, impregnated females who produced offspring displayed little or no interest in their young, whereas males did not manifest mounting behaviours towards fertile females.   In short, the early unnatural environment had led to the inhibition of genetic expression.  Brain rewiring in an attempt to cope with being placed in such an unnatural situation was also evident.

One of the things that makes me interested in self-directed behaviour is because it tells us that something is wrong with the environment of the person who displays them.  We know that someone who sucks their thumb has been weaned too quickly or been forced to separate from the mother before they have had the chance to emerge fully from behaviours directed towards the mother’s body. But  I believe environments that directly contradict genetic programming are particularly damaging – such as placing a social animal in isolation!

The point is that the body and all behaviour requires a supportive environment if it is to fully develop.  No animal lives in a vacuum; a species is what it is because it is a response to a particular environment that it has taken millions of years to become successfully adapted to.  For a social animal, its environment is other members of its species too.  Take these away and the animal loses its raison d’etre.  Eye poking suggests to me that without a proper environment from which the body part in question can derive and fulfil its functions, it is experienced as something superfluous, bothersome and even aggravating.  Imagine having a limb attached to your body that you do not know how to use and which you feel has no purpose.  Wouldn’t you resent it and attack it too? 

I think that when an environment is damaged then an organism must be damaged too because it cannot grow and realise itself fully.  This means that certain types of behaviours just can’t happen.  You cannot develop speech without someone talking to you.  You cannot develop a healthy self-image without someone who experiences pleasure in how you appear and behave.  The (nurturing) Other is your natural environment!

For me hair pulling suggests that something must be wrong too.  A child left alone too much, with no one to relieve feelings of loneliness is forced to compensate in some way to ward off a sense of abandonment that brings stress that s/he has no adaptive way of dealing with, i.e. by approaching a carer and seeking physical contact. Hair pulling may be an effective strategy for obtaining relief from an environment that is permanently deprived because it promotes tactile engagement and oral comfort from combing off the hair roots.

 A person denied any way of developing a healthy self-image may well cut or hurt themselves as an act of repudiation of those aspects of themselves for which there is no apparent function.   As a by-product self cutting or self-hitting may promote the release of hormones or opioids that would otherwise be released through regular social mechanisms. Ultimately, an environment that points an organism away from itself, or makes an organism seek flight from others, or doesn't allow goal states of safety, or comfort to be attained will inevitably produce undesirable behaviours.

In my last post I asked people to get in touch who had experienced hair pulling.  To find out about the kinds of environmental factors that produce this kind of behaviour is something I would like to do.

Appeal for hair pullers to get in touch

hair pulling - a permanent sense of being caught between green & amber?

This post is to appeal for people who pull hair to get in touch and tell me their story.

I believe that hair pulling (trichotillomania) is a repetitive behaviour that indicates conflict (e.g. between 2 opposing impulses - a bit like the stop vs. go feeling when traffic lights suddenly change) or frustration (when you are motivated to do something but prevented in some way).  Conflict or frustration when prolonged in animals can lead to odd (sometimes body-directed) behaviours emerging and I think the same may be true in humans.

My aim is to try and create a collection of case studies on the situations and circumstances in which hair pulling behaviour arises to see if any patterns or common themes emerge. But I would expect some of the following:

1. Lack of control over the social/family environment, with inconsistency in familial interactions which may reflect the absence of a clear social structure.
2. Symbiotic relationships to parents/caregivers.  This may include hazy and unclear boundaries relating to personal space or property (territory).

3. Sense of being captive or imprisoned or restricted. This may include an inability to attach or communicate with a parent; a problem of bringing peers into the home environment; an inability to confide in others.  A feeling of being cut off from one's peer group or socially isolated and a prolonged state of loneliness may be felt.

4. An incestuous or an inverted parent-child relationship in which the child is in a constant state of high stress around its supposed caregivers.
5. Where alternative forms of self-comfort have been denied or thwarted e.g. children who eat for comfort may be placed on a diet and turn to hair pulling as an alternative coping strategy.

(Note: Where a child has been brought up within a conflict or high stress situation, brain wiring will be affected early on to the point that a child may not even be conscious of the cause of its distress because it cannot detach itself from being embedded within the situation.)

In all of the above, conflict and frustration are involved at some level.  For example, a child motivated to approach a caregiver may also experience the simultaneous need to withdraw if the carer is threatening or a source of stress. Hair pulling may emerge as a way of using a body directed action to compensate for an environment that fails to meet a person's needs.  The kinds of things I am interested in learning are:

a. age hair pulling started

b. recollection of when/where/situation it first happened

c. how you felt when the first hair was pulled

d. a description of the pulling sequence e.g. pluck hair, examine root, raise to lips etc.

e. why you feel you pull your hair e.g. conflict with a parent/ isolation/ a need for stimulation

f. what benefit you get from doing it

Any data from the information I receive will be used in such a way that you will not be identified from it.  To leave a public message simply click on the heading of this post (Appeal for hair pullers to get in touch) and you can leave a message in the box that will appear beneath this post. To send a private message that only I will see, you can email caughtintwominds@gmail.com .

So far this blog has been read by people all over the world (US, Russia, Europe, South America, South East Asia) so I can only assume there are a lot of people out there who have an interest in hair pulling and why it happens and who may have a story to tell. 

Thanks to everyone who checked out this site out in 2013 and hope you will carry on visiting in 2014 - Will.