Facade3

Faca DE VOLUME III

CONTINEO ISSUE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LOVE CAN CAUSE PAIN Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D.

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SCIENCE VS RELIGION Robert N. McCauley, Ph.D.

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ARE HUMANS GOOD OR EVIL Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D.

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DARKNESS AND LIGHT Dr. Dorothy Firman, Ed.D.

THE PLEASURE OF PAIN Marianne Apostolides

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IDENTICAL TWINS Berit Brogaard, Ph.D.

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NATURE VS NURTURE Howard C. Samuels, Psy.D

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Facade is a magazine that challenges the human’s persona. Looking at the inner workings of a diamond we can see that there are many layers, like that of the Human interior. A fake diamond on the other hand still mirrors these qualities but has less value given to it because it doesn’t fit into society’s need for rarity. A fake diamond shares the outer appearance of a diamond but lacks that of its internal core, essentially it is pretending to be something it’s not, hence the idea of a “Facade.”

This magazines attempts to deconstruct and analyze the layers that are built within, as well as the outside assisting to gain awareness of ones self. The sections are divided into three authenticity, value, and reflection all things that are relevant for a diamond but are less knowingly relevant for ones self by pealing back the layers that make us we are and paying attention. By turning the pages of “Facade” we hope it emulates the Shedding of ones layers like that of a diamond.

Contineo: con- (“together”) + teneō (“I hold”).

The Contineo issue is a about the latin word which means together I hold. This issue deals with the idea of symbiotic relationships and the need for one to have the other. The issue is divided into three sections Body, Spirit, Mind which deals with the three main points of a persons being and the connections between them. The publication has a constant strand of movement of images connection all three sections. This is representative of the connection between connections themselves and how the world is intertwined through it’s differences as well as the relations, everything is held together.

CONTRIBUTORS

MARIANNE APOSTOLIDES

DR. DOROTHY FIRMAN, ED.D

RONALD E. RIGGIO, PH.D

BERIT BROGAARD, PH.D

ROBERT N. MCCAULEY, PH.D

HOWARD C. SAMUELS, PSY.D

RONALD E. RIGGIO, PH.D

SPIRIT

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D.

LOVE CAN CAUSE PAIN

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For centuries, poets and songwriters have made a connection between love and pain. We all know what a broken heart means, and crying is a common reaction to a lost love. But does lost love, or the loss of a loved one, cause actual physical pain? What is the exact connection between physical pain and emotional pain?

Research reported in the APS Observer examined the neural connections between physical pain and the social pain associated with abandonment and lost love. Physical pain consists of two components: the sensory component, which is tied to the damage of a physical wound; and an affective component that is related to distress. But what is the connection between the two components?

In an ingenious study, researchers put participants in a brain imaging machine and had them view pictures

of former romantic partners who had broken up with them. At the same time, they received intense heat on their arms (or a mere warm sensation). When participants were thinking about their ex, the neural cortex reactions were quite similar to those induced by physical pain.

So, if heartache causes physical pain, can it be alleviate by aspirin? Research suggests that participants who were given Tylenol experienced less pain from heartache than those given a placebo.

The researchers qualify that physical and emotional pain are quite similar, but not identical. An interesting finding, however, is that while physical pain diminishes as tissues are repaired, emotional pain can continue, and can be recalled and re-experienced for a long time.

Robert N. McCauley, Ph.D.

SCIENCE VS RELIGION

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It has long been argued that people utilize religion as a coping mechanism. Loss, uncertainty, and feelings of meaninglessness have all been linked to religiosity. When people are facing difficult life experiences and emotions, their faith offers comfort, provides a sense of order, and bolsters the belief that everything happens for a reason.

What about non-believers? When life throws them a curveball are they destined to experience an existential crisis because they have no religious faith to turn to? Considering that there is no compelling evidence that non-believers are at greatest risk of mental health problems or more prone to maladaptive coping strategies such as drug use or excessive drinking, these folks must be able to successfully cope with life’s challenges.So what do they do? There are of course many cultural and social resources that people can turn to in order to

manage stress and anxiety: family, friends, exercise, and many other hobbies or personal interests.

However, a recent set of studies suggests that the belief in science might work for secular individuals the way religious beliefs work for religious individuals. That is, when secular people are under stress or grappling with existential concerns, they may turn to science for comfort. In this research, Dr. Miguel Farias, a professor at Oxford University, and some of his colleagues first created a belief in science scale that contained items such as “The scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge” and “Science tells us everything there is to know about what reality really consists of.” Participants would then rate their agreement with these items.

In one study, the researchers compared two groups of rowers. One group was labeled as high stress because they were about to compete in a rowing

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regatta. The other group was labeled as low stress because they were about to practice, but not compete. Indeed, the group about to compete reported greater levels of stress than the group that was just going to practice. Both groups were asked to complete the belief in science scale. The high stress group of rowers scored significantly higher on the belief in science scale than the low stress group of rowers. Both groups were equally quite low in religiosity. These findings suggest that the stress of an upcoming competition motivated an increased belief in science.

In a second study, the researchers conducted an experiment to more carefully test this idea. They randomly assigned people to one of two conditions.

In one condition, participants were asked to think about their own mortality (an existential threat). The other group was asked to think about dental pain.

Dental pain is unpleasant to think about but is not an existential threat, at least not at the level of thinking about death. All participants then completed the belief in science scale. As predicted, participants who thought about death reported significantly higher levels of belief in science than participants who thought about dental pain.

Future research is needed to determine if turning to science in the face of stress and existential threat offers the same type of psychological benefits to secular individuals that religion offers to believers.

These two studies, however, provide a foundation for thinking about science in a new way. Science helps us understand our world and, ideally, improve our lives. Turns out, science might also help people cope with life challenges and existential anxiety.

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D.

ARE HUMANS GOOD OR EVIL

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One hundred and fifty years in prison. Shame brought to his family for bankrupting so many friends. Suicide by his son. These are the costs Bernie Madoff incurred for running a decades-long Ponzi scheme that appropriated an estimated $18 billion from investors. If Madoff was just maximizing his income, then why did so many cheer when he did the "perp walk"?

On the other end of the spectrum is Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, who at age 18 left her comfortable home to become a missionary, never to see her family again. Agnes, better known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, devoted 45 years of her life to helping the impoverished. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and after her death was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, a critical step toward sainthood. In 2010, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there was a worldwide celebration of

her service to humanity. Why did people across the planet praise her selflessness? Human beings are highly social creatures. Because of this we are intensely interested in what others are doing, and why. We need to know who is good and bad and therefore who we want to avoid and who we can tolerate.

All of us recognize virtue and vice when we see it, with virtues generally being actions that benefit others and vices entailing selfish acts. The moral philosopher Adam Smith (also the “father� of economics) argued in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments that virtue derives from our innately social nature in which we cannot help but share in the joy and pain of those around us.

Smith argued that when we do things that cause others pain, we also feel pain. Because our biology causes us to avoid pain, we typically avoid such

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causes us to avoid pain, we typically avoid such actions. Similarly, we enjoy pleasure and vicariously experience pleasure when we do something that brings happiness to others. This “fellow-feeling,” or what we would now call empathy, is what maintains us in the community of humans. This is a critical requirement for a social creature. Smith was the first to clearly make the case that it is our social nature that motivates human virtue and is the reason why we vilify vice.

For the last ten years my lab has put this Smithian idea to the test by searching for a neurochemical basis for virtue and vice. We have focused on the chemistry behind behaviors because people seldom offer clear explanations for why they are doing what they are doing. Motivations matter because they ascribe meaning to actions. So, we have people make decisions that are virtuous or

selfish while measuring their brain activity. This research has largely confirmed Smith’s argument for why humans can be virtuous. We have shown that virtuous behaviors are caused by the brain’s release of the neurotransmitter and hormone oxytocin.

When oxytocin is high, costly caring and helping behaviors follow. When we inhibit oxytocin release (for example, in experiments where I’ve administered testosterone to volunteers), virtue wanes and selfishness dominates. Oxytocin release makes us feel empathy and by doing so increases our sensitivity to the feelings of those around us. I recently published an article reviewing these findings By finding the brain mechanisms driving virtue and vice, we have also added subtlety to Smith’s views.

For example, we have identified why variations in a women’s menstrual cycle affect her trustworthiness, and why high social status males are less likely to be

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be cooperative and more likely to violate sharing norms. We have also shown that context matters.

We are a highly adaptive species and what is appropriate in Guadalajara may be inappropriate in Kansas City.

So are humans moral or immoral? The biological answer is that we have evolved behaviors that increase our chances of survival and reproduction.

When in a stable and safe environment with enough food in our bellies, having a biology of morality sustains our place in the community of humans who help ensure our biological imperatives. In highly stressful, resource poor environments, we’ll step on whoever is in front of us if it helps us survive.

The exceptions to this rule are the five percent of the population who I’ve found do not have an oxytocin response and are pathologically selfish like Madoff, and another few percent who are nearly

pathologically virtuous like Mother Teresa. The rest of us vacillate between good and evil. We’re a complicated species--both moral and immoral as our environment and physiology dictate. But, mostly the moral dominates. Not so bad for a complicated bigbrained mammal.

Dr. Dorothy Firman, Ed.D.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT

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Darkness, be it the lack of sunshine or the lack of joy in life, is inevitable and appropriate. Too much of it is a problem, but settling in for a long winter’s night or settling in, without fear, to our own emotional darkness, will allow us to move gracefully from darkness to light. The light returns, in the physical world, with an inevitability we wish we could assure ourselves of emotionally. We can’t be fully sure that the inner light will return, but for most people, most of the time, it does. And if the night is too long, there is help and every one of us needs help sometimes.

So as we find ourselves, from time to time, in a dark space, we might start by recognizing it, then checking on it to make sure it is safe for us, and if it is, we could then allow it. Just sad tonight. Feeling blue. Disconnected. Grieving. Confused. Anxiety creeping in a bit. Had a fight. Lost my wallet. Bored with my job. Tired. Hungry. Achy. Everybody ends

up in these places. If we find ourselves in these darkened places, we can fight against them—and sometimes we should— but we can also breathe into them, relax our bodies and feelings, have a good cry or a short pity party. We don’t have to run or fight.When the monk is hungry, the monk eats. When the monk is tired, the monk sleeps. When the monk is having a bad day, that’s just what is. And as we allow ourselves to know the dark spaces in our inner (and outer) world, we will also see the path that will take us out. Just as we know that the sunrise foretells the day, our own awareness of what is hard for us will help us see the coming of our own inner light.

What do I need when I am sad or lonely or angry or scared?Is there an action that needs to happen?

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If my wallet is lost, there are probably a few actions to take. If I am grieving the loss of a loved one, there is probably no action, other than the grief itself, which needs to be taken.Awareness is our responsibility for knowing what we are experiencing rather than projecting it outwards, stuffing it or letting it leak out unconsciously.Acceptance is the deep self-love that allows us to be okay even when we are experiencing some very yucky things.

Discernment is moving from our most mature Self into an assessment of our situation. Is something needed?

Can I stay in this experience? What framework do I need to put around this? Choice is where we either move to a solution or allow ourselves (and this is a gift when we can do it) to simply be with our experience.Everything I’ve said could be said equally about the light! Too much is trouble, whether it is sunshine or naïve optimism. And our formula

works as readily with light. Aware of our experience of joy, we accept ourselves, note that this experience needs nothing and choose to dwell peacefully in it… for awhile. It too will change.

BODY

Marianne Apostolides

THE PLEASURE OF PAIN

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Bind my ankles with your white cotton rope so I cannot walk. Bind my wrists so I cannot push you away. Place me on the bed and wrap your rope tighter around my skin so it grips my flesh. Now I know that struggle is useless, that I must lie here and submit to your mouth and tongue and teeth, your hands and words and whims. I exist only as your object. Exposed.

Of every 10 people who reads these words, one or more has experimented with sadomasochism (S & M), which is most popular among educated, middle- and upper-middle-class men and women, according to psychologists and ethnographers who have studied the phenomenon. Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D., of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, has researched S & M to learn the motivation behind it--to understand why in the world people would ask to be bound, whipped

and flogged. The reasons are as surprising as they are varied. For James, the desire became apparent when he was a child playing war games--he always hoped to be captured. “I was frightened that I was sick,” he says. But now, he adds, as a well-seasoned player on the scene, “I thank the leather gods I found this community.”

At first the scene found him. When he was at a party in college, a professor chose him. She brought him home and tied him up, told him how bad he was for having these desires, even as she fulfilled them. For the first time he felt what he had only imagined,

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what he had read about in every S & M book he could find. James, a father and manager, has a Type A personality--in-control, hard-working, intelligent, demanding. His intensity is evident on his face, in his posture, in his voice. But when he plays, his eyes drift and a peaceful energy flows through him as though he had injected heroin. With each addition of pain or restraint, he stiffens slightly, then falls into a deeper calm, a deeper peace, waiting to obey his mistress. “Some people have to be tied up to be free,� he says.

As James’ experience illustrates, sadomasochism involves a highly unbalanced power relationship established through role-playing, bondage, and/or the infliction of pain. The essential component is not the pain or bondage itself, but rather the knowledge that one person has complete control over the other, deciding what that person will hear, do, taste, touch,

smell and feel. We hear about men pretending to be little girls, women being bound in a leather corset, people screaming in pain with each strike of a flogger or drip of hot wax. We hear about it because it is happening in bedrooms and dungeons across the country.

For over a century, people who engaged in bondage, beatings and humiliation for sexual pleasure were considered mentally ill. But in the 1980s, the American Psychiatric Association removed S & M as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This decision--like the decision to remove homosexuality as a category in 1973--was a big step toward the societal acceptance

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Bind my ankles with your white cotton rope so I cannot walk. Bind my wrists so I cannot push you away. Place me on the bed and wrap your rope tighter around my skin so it grips my flesh. Now I know that struggle is useless, that I must lie here and submit to your mouth and tongue and teeth, your hands and words and whims. I exist only as your object. Exposed.

Of every 10 people who reads these words, one or more has experimented with sadomasochism (S & M), which is most popular among educated, middle- and upper-middle-class men and women, according to psychologists and ethnographers who have studied the phenomenon. Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D., of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, has researched S & M to learn the motivation behind it--to understand why in the world people would ask to be bound, whipped

and flogged. The reasons are as surprising as they are varied.For James, the desire became apparent when he was a child playing war games--he always hoped to be captured. “I was frightened that I was sick,” he says. But now, he adds, as a well-seasoned player on the scene, “I thank the leather gods I found this community.”

At first the scene found him. When he was at a party in college, a professor chose him. She brought him home and tied him up, told him how bad he was for having these desires, even as she fulfilled them.

For the first time he felt what he had only imagined, what he had read about in every S & M book he could find. James, a father and manager, has a Type A personality--in-control, hard-working, intelligent, demanding. His intensity is evident on his face, in his posture, in his voice. But when he plays, his eyes drift and a peaceful energy flows through him as

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In her work on sexual exploration among children, Reynolds has shown that while childhood experiences can indeed influence adult sexuality, the effects usually “wash out” as a person gains more sexual experience. But they can linger in some people, causing a connection between childhood memories and adult sexual play. In that case, Reynolds says, “the childhood experiences have affected something in the personality, and that in turn affects adult experiences.”

Reynolds’ theory helps us develop a greater understanding of the desire to be a whip-bearing mistress or a bootlicking slave. For example, if a child has been taught to feel shame about her body and desires, she may learn to disconnect herself from them. Even as she gets older and gains more experience with sex, her personality may retain some part of that need for separation. S & M play

may act as a bridge: Lying naked on a bed bound to the bedposts with leather restraints, she is forced to be completely sexual. The restraint, the futility of struggle, the pain, the master’s words telling her she is such a lovely slave--these cues enable her body to fully connect with her sexual self in a way that has been difficult during traditional sex.

Marina is a prime example. She knew from the time she was 6 years old that she was expected to succeed in school and sports. She learned to focus on achievement as a way to dismiss emotions and desires. “I learned very young that desires are dangerous,” she says. She heard that message in the behavior of her parents: a depressive mother who let her emotions overtake her, and an obsessively health-conscious father who compulsively controlled his diet. When Marina began to have sexual desires,

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his diet. When Marina began to have sexual desires, her instinct, cultivated by her upbringing, was to consider them too frightening, too dangerous. “So I became anorexic,” she says. “And when you’re anorexic, you don’t feel desire; all you feel in your body is panic.”

Marina didn’t feel the desire for S & M until she was an adult and had outgrown her eating disorder.

“One night I asked my partner to put his hands around my neck and choke me. I was so surprised when those words came out of my mouth,” she says. If she gave her partner total control over her body, she felt, she could allow herself to feel like a completely sexual being, with none of the hesitation and disconnection she sometimes felt during sex. “He wasn’t into it, but now I’m with someone who is,” Marina says. “S & M makes our vanilla sex better, too, because we trust each other more sexually,

and we can communicate what we want.” People often confuse the fact that they feel good after S & M with the idea that S & M is therapy, says psychology Professor Roy Baumeister. “But to prove that something is therapeutic, you have to prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health...and it’s hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic.”

In mental health terms, S & M doesn’t make you better and it doesn’t make you worse.

MIND

Berit Brogaard, Ph.D.

IDENTICAL TWINS

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When I was a child one of my favorite books was about a pair of identical twins who decided to switch clothes. They looked so much alike that their parents had had to dress one in blue and the other in green.

The twin boys fooled their parents for a long long time. An obedient 3-year old, I was thrilled by their ingenuity and boldness.

Though parents can usually tell the difference between their identical twins, grandparents, teachers, neighbors and peers sometimes cannot. And for good reasons. Identical twins very often look almost exactly alike. No surprise there, if identical twin share all of their DNA.

or monozygotic, twins come from the same fertilized egg. So, at some point during cell division (before 14 days post-conception), identical twin embryos share virtually all of their DNA. During early fetal development, however, identical twins undergo more than 300 genetic mutations, or copy errors, on average. As human cells divide trillions of times during their lifespan, a few hundred genetic mutations could lead to millions or trillions of genetic differences in the DNA of identical twins over the years. Chemical factors can furthermore activate or suppress gene expression, which means that the same subset of genetic material can lead to the formation of different proteins.

Recent research presented at the 2012 American Society of Human Genetics meeting, however, suggests that identical twins may not be as genetically similar as hitherto suggested. Identical,

The results, which were presented by McGill University epidemiologist Rui Li, could have drastic consequences for what we know about the heritability of diseases, addictions, personality and

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intelligence—or what is more popularly known as the nature versus nurture debate.A good chunk of the information we have about whether traits are passed down from parent to child through genes or whether they are a result of the environment comes from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. The Minnesota Twin Study is a project originally led by Minnesota Professor of Psychology Thomas Joseph Bouchard, Jr. The initial project took place from 1979 to 1999 and consisted in periodical educational, psychological, medical and dental testing of individuals in an extensive population of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and their families.

Starting around 1990 Professor Bouchard and his team published numerous results from the twin study project. The majority of the conclusions of the twin studies are based on answers to the question

of whether identical twins (who were thought to share all their genes) are more similar than those of fraternal twins (who share an average of 50 percent of their genes). It was concluded, among many other things, that identical twins are about 85 percent similar for IQ, whereas fraternal twins are about 60 percent similar. This would seem to indicate that half of the variation in intelligence is due to genes.

So, genetic differences in brain-based traits, such as personality and intelligence, may not be as austere as differences elsewhere.

Howard C. Samuels, Psy.D

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Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you that I'm a die-hard Yankees and baseball fan which is why, despite the other amazing films that have saturated the marketplace, I took my wife and kids to see the movie "42" (the Jackie Robinson story), a real crowd-pleaser that turned the kaleidoscope on our conversations about race relations and left my kids wanting more while setting me to thinking about another baseball legend: Mickey Mantle.

Mantle was a baseball legend, no doubt, but he was born beneath an angry star, to say the least. He was entrenched in a bloodline that was beset upon with disease. His father died of a form of cancer known colloquially as Hodgkin's Disease; his son Mickey Jr. would later be taken by liver cancer and his second of four sons would go on to battle prostate cancer.

If we step back from the tragedies of the illnesses that ravaged this family, it becomes clear that they

all had a genetic predisposition for cancer.In 1994, Mickey Mantle checked into The Betty Ford Clinic after being told by doctors that his liver was on its last leg. His wife and sons had already completed treatment for their alcoholism and drug addiction, and they urged him to go. And that fascinates me because here was this man -- this legend -- who’d survived Osteomyelitis in his youth and had gone on to set world records in baseball, yet here he was getting sober with his family. A family which consisted of two alcoholic parents and their four children!

In addition to her alcoholism, my mother had a chemical imbalance, and this expressed itself in the fact that I and several of my siblings also have chemical imbalances and are, to this day, on some form of antidepressant (I, myself, went on Lexapro at 55 to treat my chemical imbalance). Are any of

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my siblings alcoholics or drug addicts? No. That, my friends, is my cross to bear; mine and mine alone.

Now, looking back over my life, it seems as if I was this ticking time bomb just sitting there, waiting for the right configuration of events to set me off, but I’ve got to tell you, once that sucker detonated, I was off and running and, literally, out of control.

Now, it’s an interesting possibility that one or all of my children may, regrettably, have to follow in my footsteps, or the footsteps of my wife; I might not be able to prevent that from happening no matter how hard I try. Mickey Mantle’s son Billy died from heart problems brought about from years of substance abuse. It’s a horrifying notion, but my wife and I also have faith that, no matter what our children will go through, we will Be There For Them in a very healthy way (which -- like it or not, want it or not -- may be why I own a treatment center).The

genetic component is a huge factor in what creates the addict or the alcoholic. But, in the same way that you will see a cancer tear through a family tree and destroy generation after generation (because the cancer gene, like the alcoholic gene, is passed from family member to family member), you will also see families gathering around their wounded and helping them and supporting them and loving them and walking through the nightmare of addiction together.

Because drinking and drugging medicates them so that they don’t have to deal with these feelings that they’re being bombarded with as teenagers.

And, if you don’t intervene on that quickly, they will never learn how to deal with these feelings -- or any feelings -- because they will always run to drugs to self-medicate them away.

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