The Segmentation Clock and Forensic Psychology

Scientists have been studying cellular clocks for some time, and these biological timepieces are thought to be responsible for many of the differences between species. For example, as the clocks of mice run faster than the clocks of humans, this might explain why mice are small and live less long. The clocks of bigger animals, such as elephants and whales, have much slower ticking clocks. In a recent article in nature it is written, "These differences affect how big an animal gets, how its parts are arranged and perhaps even how long it will live."

As Olivia Newton-John sang, let's get metaphorical. If we think of the humble wristwatch, it has a fairly basic role, to give us a sense of hours and minutes. Some give us seconds, some dates, some lap times, international time zones, alarms, address books, notifications of emails, heart rate, daily steps, quality of sleep - and so it goes on. 

Which is the wristwatch? In some ways it doesn't matter, if it fits on your wrist and will give you the time, the extra bits are just extra bits. The extra bits impact upon us in interesting ways. 

If my watch tells me I have an email and I can read it on my watch, then if I am having a pleasant chat with you  my attention might shift to my watch, I check the email, whilst you are unloading a story that demands my attention, but you've lost it. Imagine that this happens on the street and I am paying attention to my watch and inadvertently walk into you and because I am reading from my watch my hands are both up at chest height and, equally inadvertently, my hands come into contact with your chest. 

If my watch tells me I have 1500 steps left to reach my 10,000 at 9pm I might leave Line of Duty until it's on i-Player and go for a wander. Do my neighbours think my 9pm wanders to be unusual? 

I am in the pub scrolling through the news on my watch, oblivious to my surroundings, perhaps even protected from them.

The slightly torturous analogy I am making is that could these clocks underlie much of the behaviour that concerns forensic psychology? Not so much the how big we get or how long we live, more how parts are arranged. Our brains have parts, and if your brain and my brain are arranged in different ways, tiny different ways (not that your frontal lobes are at the back), does that help explain why I don't like aubergines, football, and suffer from mild-but-sweary road rage, and you play the flute and get angry at Bruce Willis' films? 

Our physical arrangements impact us (I knew we would get back to Olivia). At the most gross level the differences of male and female, that impact upon how the world reacts to us and thus how we are allowed to behave. But what about the clichés of gentle-giantness and Napoleon-complexes? Research shows a relationship between physical attributes and offending of various sorts (1, 2), so is this the work of our clocks that gets expressed both physically and in those factors that can drive offending behaviour?

If the clocks are important then what role can psychology play? Firstly, if we can't change the functioning of the clocks at all, and certainly not by the time someone has offended, it doesn't mean that we can't give people the skills to reduce the expression of those behaviours. 

Secondly, going back to the watch metaphor, you can change your watch. In an analogue watch you could pull off the hands, so the mechanism keeps working but it communicates nothing, or you could stop the hands turning, or you can move the time backwards so that it is not in line with actual time. Is it possible that psychology might be able to impact on the functioning of cellular clocks? Maybe. There is research that demonstrates that CBT produces similar changes as selective serotonin uptake inhibitors. In one paper, the authors write, "SSRI and CBT treatments similarly attenuated insula and amygdala activity during emotion perception, and greater treatment-related decrease in insula and amygdala activity was correlated with greater reduction in anxiety symptoms." I think this is a bit like changing your watch. I think it's an interesting idea, although I confess I am not sure what I am going to do with it.

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