Stress-Influence Tendency

STRESS-INFLUENCE TENDENCY

It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.

—Hans Selye

Everyone recognizes that sudden stress, for instance from a threat, will cause a rush of adrenaline in the human body, prompting faster and more extreme reaction. The familiar Psych 101 connection is that stress can increase reliance on other people’s behavior, linking it to Social-Proof Tendency.

In a phenomenon less well recognized, but still widely known, light stress can slightly improve performance—say, in examinations—whereas heavy stress causes dysfunction.

The account describes severe pessimism and disabling fatigue under the label “acute stress depression”. It points to Winston Churchill and Samuel Johnson as people who achieved a great deal while experiencing depression. Achievement alone does not establish recovery or a prognosis.

Severe stress can also disrupt behavior in ways not described as depression. But there is at least one exception, involving the work of Pavlov when he was in his seventies and eighties. Pavlov had won a Nobel Prize early in life by using dogs to work out the physiology of digestion. Then he became world-famous by working out mere-association responses in dogs, initially salivating dogs – so much so that changes in behavior triggered by mere-association, like those caused by much modern advertisement, are today often said to come from “Pavlovian” conditioning.

What happened to cause Pavlov’s last work was especially interesting. During the great Leningrad Flood of the 1920s, Pavlov had many dogs in cages. Their habits had been transformed, by a combination of his “Pavlovian conditioning” plus standard reward responses, into distinct and different patterns. As the waters of the flood came up and receded, many dogs reached a point where they had almost no airspace between their noses and the tops of their cages. This subjected them to maximum stress. Immediately thereafter, Pavlov noticed that many of the dogs were no longer behaving as they had. For example, the dog that formerly had liked his trainer now disliked him. This result reminds one of modern cognition-reversals in which a person’s love of his parents suddenly becomes hate, as new love has been shifted suddenly to a cult. The unanticipated, extreme changes in Pavlov’s dogs would have driven any good experimental scientist into a near-frenzy of curiosity. That was indeed Pavlov’s reaction. But not many scientists would have done what Pavlov next did.

And that was to spend the rest of his long life giving stress-induced nervous breakdowns to dogs, after which he would try to reverse the breakdowns, all the while keeping careful experimental records. The account attributes these findings to him:

• 1. that he could classify dogs so as to predict how easily a particular dog would break down;
• 2. that the dogs hardest to break down were also the hardest to return to their pre-breakdown state;
• 3. that any dog could be broken down; and
• 4. that he couldn’t reverse a breakdown except by reimposing stress.

Now, practically everyone is revolted by such experimental treatment of man’s friend, the dog. Moreover, Pavlov was Russian and did his last work under the Communists. And maybe those facts account for the present extreme, widespread ignorance of Pavlov’s last work. The two Freudian psychiatrists with whom I tried many years ago to discuss this work had never heard of it. And the dean of a major medical school actually asked me, several years ago, if any of Pavlov’s experiments were “repeatable” in experiments of other researchers. Obviously, Pavlov is now a sort of forgotten hero in medical science.

I first found a description of Pavlov’s last work in a popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist, when I was trying to figure out how cults worked their horrible mischief and what should the law say about what parents could do to “de-program” children who had become brainwashed zombies. Naturally, mainstream law objected to the zombies being physically captured by their parents and subjected to stress that would help to deprogram the effects of the stress they had endured in cult conversions.

I never wanted to get into the legal controversy that existed about this subject. But I did conclude that the controversy couldn’t be handled with maximized rationality without considering whether as Pavlov’s last work suggests, the heavy-handed imposition of stress might be the only reversal method that would work to remedy one of the worst evils imaginable: a stolen mind. I have included this discussion of Pavlov partly out of general antagonism toward taboos, partly to make my talk reasonably complete as it considers stress and partly because I hope some listener may continue my inquiry with more success. The extrapolation from dogs to forced human deprogramming remains the author’s speculation in this passage.