1. Ethology and Psychiatry By Dr. Rotimi Coker FWACP (Psych.) Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUCOM), Ikeja, Lagos February 2009

2. Introduction The root of ethology lies in zoology. Ethology is the study of behaviour that takes place in natural settings. The study is largely an observational, non-experimental science. Thus, ethnologists are concerned with the study of animal behavior through direct observation in their natural environments. This is important in psychiatry because important findings in animal behavior sometimes explain those of human behaviour. In 1973 the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to three ethologists; Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. Their works have made tremendous contribution to behavioral science.

3. KONRAD LORENZ Konard Lorenz is best known for his studies of imprinting. Imprinting implies that, during a certain short period of development, a young animal is highly sensitive to a certain type of stimulus, but not at other times. He described how newly hatched goslings are programmed (imprinted) to follow a any moving object. Typically, the mother is the first moving object the young gosling sees, but should it observe something else moving first, the gosling will follow it. For instance, a gosling imprinted by Lorenz followed him and refused to follow a goose.

4. Imprinting Imprinting is an important for psychiatrists to understand the link between early developmental experiences with adult behaviors. Imprinting is a specialized form of learning occurring early in life and often influencing behavior later in life. The exposure to the stimulus situation must occur during a particular period, the critical period, and the exposure can be of short duration and without obvious reward. The learning is particularly resistant to change. Thus, innate genetically determined behaviour patterns may not be influenced by experience.

5. He is also known for his study on practical function of aggression, such as the defense of their territory by fish and birds. Aggression among members of the same species is common, but he pointed out that, in normal conditions, it seldom leads to killing or even to serious injury. Although the animals attack one another, a certain balance appears between tendencies to fight and flight, with the tendency to fight being strongest in the center of the territory and the tendency to flight strongest at a distance from the center. Lorenz tired to draw conclusions from his studies on animals that can also be applied to human problems.

6. The postulation of a primary need for aggression in humans is an example. This need might have served a practical purpose at an earlier time when human beings lived in small groups that had to defend themselves from other groups. Competition with neighboring groups became the most important factor of selection..

7. NIKOLAAS TINBERGEN A British Zoologist who analyzed various aspects of animal behavior. He also quantified behavior and the power of different stimuli in eliciting specific behavior. He described “displacement activities” in birds. For example, in a conflict situation, when the need for fight and the need for flight are of toughly equal strength, birds sometimes do neither. Rather, they display behavior that appears to be irrelevant to the situation (e.g., a herring gull defending its territory can start to pick grass). Displacement activities of this kind will vary according to the situation and the species concerned. It is well known that human beings can engage in displacement activities when under stress.

8. Lorenz and Tinbergen described innate releasing mechanisms, animal responses triggered by releasers, which are specific environmental stimuli. Releasers (including shapes, colors, and sounds) evoke sexual, aggressive, or other responses. For example, big eyes in human infants evoke more caretaking behavior than small eyes do. Tinbergen and his wife studied early childhood austism. They began by observing the behavior of autistic and normal children when they met strangers, which is analogous to the techniques used in observing animal behaviors. In particular, they observed in animals the conflict that arises between fear and the need for contact, and noted that it can lead to behavior that is similar to that of autistic children. They hypothesized that in certain specially predisposed children, fear can greatly predominate and can also be provoked by stimuli that normally have a positive social value for most children.

9. This innovative approach to studying infantile autism has opened up new avenues of inquiry. Their conclusions on preventive measures and treatment must be considered tentative. This form of methodology illustrates another way in which ethology and clinical psychiatry can relate to each other. He suggested 3 conditions that contributed to lack of communication between psychiatrists and ethologists. 1 st condition is communication difficulties that arise because of differences in scientific language; 2 nd the obvious differences in the education of students in the two disciplines; 3 rd. Likelihood that the people who study ethology as graduate students are different from those who enter medical school and subsequently train in psychiatry.

10. KARL VON FRISCH Studied changes of color in fish and demonstrated that fish could learn to distinguish among several colour and that their sense of a colour was fairly congruent with that of human beings. He also studied the color vision, communication (language) and behavior of bees, what is known as their dances. It has been suggested that psychiatric research and practice might benefit from the careful observational techniques ethologists employ in describing specific behavioral patterns and the context in which the behaviors occur. Those techniques would be applicable to both nonverbal and verbal behavior, as well as to the communicative aspects of each. One example is the definition of attachment behavior as any behavior that results in an increased proximity between two or more members of a species, rather than it being defined in more global terms that make inferences about the internal states of the individuals involved.

11. Another interface between psychiatry and ethology is the phylogenetic origins of behavior. Ethologists are involved in the comparative study of behavior and derive hypotheses based on phylogenetic assumptions. They believe that behavior can also be studied using the comparative method. The use of cybernetics, control and information theory, in ethology has been paralleled to some extent in psychiatry; thus, cybernetic approach may be a useful theoretical bridge between the two fields. The study on separation and the relationship between separation and depression is a corollary of the work on attachment systems. Aggression in the study of hierarchical and territorial behavior.

12. Ethology and Psychiatry future directions Today psychiatrists study child behavior by using ethological techniques similar to those used during by ethologists. The focus in psychiatry tends to be on the abnormal, whereas ethologists generally study the parameters of normal behavior for a given species. Ethologists and psychiatrists are interested in differences in adaptation Psychiatry often assumes that humans are so different from other species that the study of those species is of little use in understanding human behavior. Although a phylogenetic point of view is acknowledged in human anatomy and physiology, it is certainly not emphasized in psychiatry.

13. Psychiatrists are not concerned about specific measurements of facial expression or difficulties in adaptation human beings are confronting today, but with the general behavior of individuals, families, and groups. Only psychoanalysis has interesting parallels with an ethological perspective. The libidinous and aggressive drives about which Sigmund Freud and others have written could be viewed as analogous to some of the behavioral states studied in ethology. Much ethological literature deals with courtship and mating behavior, as well as aggression, whether expressed in hierarchical behavior or in territoriality.

14. Tinbergen's work deals with the problem of achieving reproductive success with tendencies of aggression between prospective mates. Bowlby studied attachment behaviour and has broadened the understanding of their existence. Brian Kirkpatrick highlighted important interface between psychiatry social behavior. They include: 1.Depression. Loss of significant social bonds increases the risk of major depressive disorders and there are human and animal models associated with early social events. 2. The impairment of social relationships found in autism cannot be fully accounted for by the cognitive impairments found in these patients. 3. The study of social behavior may provide framework for developing animal models relevant to the deficit syndrome of schizophrenia.

15. Animal models are of relevance to psychiatric, they can explain certain specific aspects of human illness but not for all the features of a disorder. As knowledge of the neural basis of social behavior progresses, ethology will assist to provide basis for the development of rational hypothesis that could guide postmortem, pharmacological, And clinical studies related to depression, autism, Certain aspects of schizophrenia, and other human problems.