by Peter Aldhous Women abused in childhood are more likely to have children with autism, a new epidemiological study suggests. The finding adds a disturbing new dimension to the heated debate over the condition's underlying causes. Andrea Roberts of the Harvard School of Public Health suspected that there might be a link between childhood abuse and having an autistic child: women abused early in life are more likely to smoke, suffer from gestational diabetes and have premature babies – all factors that may affect fetal brain development. To investigate, Roberts and her colleagues turned to the Nurses' Health Study II, which includes almost 55,000 women who had indicated if they had a child with autism spectrum disorder and also answered a questionnaire about their experience of abuse as a child. This allowed the researchers to develop a scale rating all the women for the intensity of abuse in their childhood. There was a clear link between the "dose" of abuse received and the risk of having an autistic child. "The associations get stronger as the level of abuse increases," Roberts says. After accounting for demographic factors such as age and socioeconomic status, the 2 per cent of women who reported the most serious childhood abuse – who were frequently hit and also sexually abused – were about 3.5 times as likely to have a child with autism as those who reported no abuse at all. "I think it's a really interesting, innovative and well-conducted study," says Hannah Gardener at the University of Miami in Florida. "There aren't a lot of risk factors with that magnitude." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism; Aggression
Link ID: 17932 - Posted: 03.23.2013

By Bruce Bower Malnutrition in the first year life, even when followed by a good diet and restored physical health, predisposes people to a troubled personality at age 40, new research suggests. The study of 77 formerly malnourished people represents the first evidence linking malnutrition shortly after birth to adult personality traits. The traits in some cases may foretell psychiatric problems, says a team led by psychiatrist Janina Galler of Harvard Medical School in Boston and psychologist Paul Costa of Duke University Medical Center in Durham. Compared with peers who were well-fed throughout their lives, formerly malnourished men and women reported markedly more anxiety, vulnerability to stress, hostility, mistrust of others, anger and depression, Galler’s team reports March 12 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Survivors of early malnutrition also cited relatively little intellectual curiosity, social warmth, cooperativeness and willingness to try new experiences and to work hard at achieving goals. Previous studies of people exposed prenatally to famine have reported increased rates of certain personality disorders and schizophrenia. Another investigation found that malnutrition at age 3 predisposed youngsters on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to delinquent and aggressive behavior at ages 8, 11 and 17. As is true in the new study, distrust of others, anxiety and depression often accompany high levels of anger, says psychologist Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who directed the Mauritius research. “Poor nutrition early in life seems to predispose individuals to a suspicious personality, which may then fuel a hostile attitude toward others,” Raine proposes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Aggression
Link ID: 17930 - Posted: 03.23.2013

by Sara Reardon When she returned from serving in the Gulf conflict in 1991, US Air Force nurse Denise Nichols experienced sudden aches, fatigue and cognitive problems, but had no idea 'what was causing them. They grew worse: even helping her daughter with multiplication tables became difficult, she says, and eventually she had to quit her job. Nichols wasn't alone. About a third of Gulf war veterans – possibly as many as 250,000 – returned with a similar set of symptoms. Now an imaging study has found that these veterans have what appear to be unique structural changes in the wiring of their brains. This fits with the scientific consensus that Gulf War syndrome (GWS) is a physical condition rather than a psychosomatic one, and should be treated with painkilling drugs instead of counselling. The military in various countries has in the past consistently denied that there is a physical basis to GWS. Although the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) now officially accepts that the disorder is physical, the issue has been mired in controversy. Earlier this month, Steven Coughlin, a former senior epidemiologist at the VA, testified to a Congressional panel that the VA had suppressed and manipulated research data so as to suggest that the disorder was psychosomatic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Aggression
Link ID: 17928 - Posted: 03.23.2013

US researchers have found a link between working night shifts and the risk of ovarian cancer. A study of more than 3,000 women suggested that working overnight increased the risk of early-stage cancer by 49% compared with doing normal office hours. One possible explanation was disruption of the sleep hormone melatonin, the researchers said. But experts warned more work was needed and there might be other explanations. It does however follow an earlier association made between shift work and breast cancer. The International Agency for Cancer Research has previously identified working shift patterns that disrupt the body's natural "clock" as a probable cause of cancer. In the latest investigation, researchers looked at 1,101 women with advanced ovarian cancer, 389 with borderline or early disease and 1,832 women without the condition. Overall, a quarter with advanced cancer said they had worked night shifts, compared with a third of those with borderline disease and one in five of the control group. Analysis of the data showed a 24% increased risk of advanced cancer and 49% increased risk of early-stage disease for night workers compared with those who worked during the day. But the results were only significant for women over the age of 50, the researchers reported in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. And the risk did not seem to increase for those who had worked night shifts for the longest. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Aggression
Link ID: 17913 - Posted: 03.18.2013

By Scicurious I think we can all say that we prefer praise. I’d much rather be told that I was peerless and perspicacious than that I was a pathetic peripatetic. But whether we get praise or censure, as social humans we receive a lot of social feedback. People are always telling us, either directly or indirectly, how we are ‘doing’ socially, and how we are perceived. But getting that information, and what you do with it, are very different things indeed. And while we all like to think that we see our own good and bad points for what they are and take in criticism as well as praise….well, it turns out we’re a little biased in our own favor. When most studies want to look at things like social feedback or social processing, they often do fMRI studies with “games” that you play with other “people” (who aren’t real people, just a computer, but you don’t know that). But this has several disadvantages. First, you can’t rate people on various personality traits, you only know if you get socially accepted or rejected. And secondly, you can’t really get good social feedback from a computer. So to look at social feedback, the authors of this study had people meet each other in PERSON. On the first day, a group of five people who had never met before met in the lab to play an hour or so of Monopoly (hopefully if you’re only in the first hour you avoid a lot of the social rancor that I associate with my family’s Monopoly games). © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17903 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By Jon Lieff Traditionally, we have understood the immune system and the nervous system as two distinct and unrelated entities. The former fights disease by responding to pathogens and stimulating inflammation and other responses. The latter directs sensation, movement, cognition and the functions of the internal organs. For some, therefore, the recent discovery that left-sided brain lesions correlate with an increased rate of hospital infections is difficult to understand. However, other recent research into the extremely close relationship between these two systems makes this finding comprehensible. A study, published in the March 2013 issue of Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, looked at more than 2,000 hospital patients with brain lesions from either stroke or traumatic brain injury. They looked at how many of these brain-injured patients contracted infections within 2 to 3 days of admission. Of those patients who developed infections, 60% had left-sided lesions. The authors concluded that an unknown left-sided brain/immune network might influence infections. But why would the left side of the brain affect immunity? The nervous and immune systems are quite different in their speed and mode of action. The two major immune systems, innate and adaptive, are both wireless—they communicate through cell-to-cell contact, secreted signals, and antigen-antibody reactions. The innate system is the first responder, followed by the slower adaptive response. The nervous system, on the other hand, is wired for much more rapid communication throughout the body. It turns out that the two work surprisingly closely together. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Aggression
Link ID: 17901 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS For most people, exercise elevates mood. Repeated studies with humans and animals have shown that regular workouts can increase stress resistance, decrease anxiety, lessen symptoms of depression and generally leave people cheerful. But what if someone sincerely dislikes exercise and works out only under a kind of emotional duress, deeming that he or she must do so, perhaps because a doctor or worried spouse has ordered it? In that case, which is hardly uncommon, does the stress of being, in effect, forced to exercise reduce or cancel out the otherwise sturdy emotional benefits of physical activity? That issue has been of considerable interest to exercise scientists for some time, particularly those who work with animals, since in some experiments, animals are required to exercise at intensities or for durations that they don’t control. Such intense exercise greatly increases their stress, as measured by certain behaviors and by physiological markers like increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But no study had directly compared the emotional effects of forced and voluntary exercise on anxiety and emotional resilience. So scientists at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder recently decided to conduct one. They began by gathering a group of healthy adult male rats of a type that generally enjoys running. Then they gave some of the animals access to unlocked running wheels and let them exercise whenever and for as long as they liked. The exercise was fully under the animals’ control. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17899 - Posted: 03.13.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Some studies have suggested that the risk factors for violence by people with mental illness are the same as those in the general population. But a new study finds that anger, coupled with psychotic delusions, may be the most significant factor in violence committed by people with mental illness. British researchers, writing online last week in JAMA Psychiatry, studied 458 patients ages 18 to 64 who had had a first episode of psychosis. Most patients were nonviolent, 26.4 percent were involved in minor violence, and 11.8 percent in violent acts using weapons or resulting in injury. Those who were violent were more likely to be younger men and to use illicit drugs, but they did not differ from the nonviolent in social class, unemployment or alcohol use. The researchers found no difference between violent and nonviolent patients with regard to feelings of elation, fear or anxiety. People with depression were less violent. But after adjusting for other health and socioeconomic variables, the researchers found that delusions accompanied by anger were present far more often among the violent patients. “If patients are not angry, the delusions themselves don’t cause a problem,” said the lead author, Dr. Jeremy W. Coid, a professor of psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London. “An area for future research is, ‘What do you need to do to make your patient safe again? Do you treat the delusions, the anger or both?’ ” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17892 - Posted: 03.12.2013

by John Bohannon Every day, millions of people click on Facebook "Like" buttons, boldly declaring their preferences for a variety of things, such as books, movies, and cat videos. But those "likes" may reveal more than they intend, such as sexual orientation, drug use, and religious affiliation, according to a study that analyzed the online behavior of thousands of volunteers. Your preferences define you. Researchers have known for decades that people's personal attributes—gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and personality type—correlate with their choice of products, concepts, and activities. Just consider the different populations at an opera and a NASCAR race. This is why companies are so eager to gather personal information about their consumers: Advertising is far more effective when it is targeted to groups of people who are more likely to be interested in a product. The only aspect that has changed is the increasing proportion of personal information that is available as digital data on the Internet. And Facebook has become a major hub for such data through its like button. A team led by Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom as well as at Microsoft Research, wondered just how much people's likes reveal about them. The Likes data are public information. The hard part was getting the data on intelligence and other such attributes to compare with the likes. For that, Kosinski and his Cambridge colleague David Stillwell created a Facebook app called myPersonality. After agreeing to volunteer as a research subject, users of the myPersonality app answer survey questions and take a series of psychological tests that measure things such as intelligence, competitiveness, extraversion versus introversion, and general satisfaction with life. Kosinski and Stillwell not only get those data but also data from the user's Facebook profile and friends network. In return, users get a peek at their own information. More than 4 million people have volunteered already. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17890 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By Neuroskeptic “Layered Voice Analysis” (LVA) is a controversial technology promoted as a tool for helping detect stress and other emotions by analysis of the human voice. According to the company behind the method, Nemesysco: LVA technology enables better understanding of your suspect’s mental state and emotional makeup at a given moment by detecting the emotional cues in his or her speech. The technology identifies various types of stress levels, cognitive processes, and emotional reactions that are reflected in different properties of the voice… it provides the professional user easy access to truth verification in real time or from recorded data, during face to face and over the phone, during a free or structured investigation session. Long-term Neuroskeptic readers will remember LVA and Nemesysco from way back in 2009. That was when I blogged about the company’s legal moves against two Swedish academics who had published a paper critical of LVA. That contentious article is still available online. Now, a newly published study evaluated whether LVA is an effective truth verifying tool: The Accuracy of Auditors’ and Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) Operators’ Judgments of Truth and Deception During Police Questioning. The authors, led by Michigan Professor Frank Horvath, studied 74 suspects who were interviewed by the Michigan State Police. Audio recordings of the interviews were made. Which of the suspects were being deceptive? Two investigators used LVA (after receiving the manufacturer’s recommended 40 hours of training) to try to judge deception from the records. Three other investigators just listened to the recordings, and formed an opinion based on their own intuition and experience.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17885 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press Stress does bad things to the heart. New studies have found higher rates of cardiac problems in veterans with PTSD, New Orleans residents six years after Hurricane Katrina and Greeks struggling through that country's financial turmoil. Disasters and prolonged stress can raise "fight or flight" hormones that affect blood pressure, blood sugar and other things in ways that make heart trouble more likely, doctors say. They also provoke anger and helplessness and spur heart-harming behaviors like eating or drinking too much. "We're starting to connect emotions with cardiovascular risk markers" and the new research adds evidence of a link, said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center and an American Heart Association spokeswoman. She had no role in the studies, which were discussed Sunday at an American College of Cardiology conference in San Francisco. The largest, involving 207,954 veterans in California and Nevada ages 46 to 74, compared those with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, to those without it. They were free of major heart disease and diabetes when researchers checked their Veterans Administration medical records from 2009 and 2010. Checked again about two years later, 35 percent of those with PTSD but only 19 percent of those without it had developed insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes and hardening of the arteries. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17884 - Posted: 03.11.2013

By JAN HOFFMAN Physically active children generally report happier moods and fewer symptoms of depression than children who are less active. Now researchers may have found a reason: by one measure, exercise seems to help children cope with stress. Finnish researchers had 258 children wear accelerometers on their wrists for at least four days that registered the quality and quantity of their physical activity. Their parents used cotton swabs to take saliva samples at various times throughout a single day, which the researchers used to assess levels of cortisol, a hormone typically induced by physical or mental stress. There was no difference in the cortisol levels at home between children who were active and those who were less active. But when the researchers gave the children a standard psychosocial stress test at a clinic involving arithmetic and storytelling challenges, they found that those who had not engaged in physical activity had raised cortisol levels. The children who had moderate or vigorous physical activity showed relatively no rise in cortisol levels. Those results indicate a more positive physiological response to stress by children who were more active, the researchers said in a study that was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The children who were least active had the highest levels. “This study shows that children who are more active throughout their day have a better hormonal response to an acute stressful situation,” said Disa Hatfield, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17882 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By Meghan Rosen Zombies aren’t the only things that feast on brains. Immune cells called microglia gorge on neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains, researchers report in the March 6 Journal of Neuroscience. Chewing up neuron-spawning stem cells could help control brain size by pruning away excess growth. Scientists have previously linked abnormal human brain size to autism and schizophrenia. “It shows microglia are very important in the developing brain,” says neuroscientist Joseph Mathew Antony of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research. Scientists have long known that in adult brains, microglia hunt for injured cells as well as pathogens. “They mop up all the dead and dying cells,” Antony says. And when the scavengers find a dangerous intruder, they pounce. “These guys are relentless,” says study coauthor Stephen Noctor, of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento. “They seek and destroy bacteria — it’s really quite amazing.” Microglia also lurk in embryonic brains, but the immune cells’ role there is less well understood. Previous studies had found microglia near neural stem cells — tiny factories that pump out new neurons. When Noctor’s team examined slices of embryonic human, monkey and rodent brains, he was struck by just how many microglia crowded around the stem cells and how closely the two cell types touched. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Glia; Aggression
Link ID: 17872 - Posted: 03.07.2013

By Helen Shen When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently. Given the choice between accepting goodies from helpful, neutral or unhelpful people, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) tend to avoid individuals who refuse aid to others, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. “Humans can build up an impression about somebody just based on what we see,” says author James Anderson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Stirling, UK. The capuchin results suggest that this skill “probably extends to other species”, he says. Anderson chose to study capuchins because of their highly social and cooperative instincts. Monkeys in the study watched as a person either agreed or refused to help another person to open a jar containing a toy. Afterwards, both people offered a food pellet to the animal. The monkey was allowed to accept food from only one. When help was given, the capuchins showed little preference between the person requesting help and the one providing aid. But when help was denied, the seven monkeys tended to accept food less often from the unhelpful person than from the requester. To try to understand the monkeys’ motivations, Anderson and his team tested different scenarios. The animals showed no bias against people who failed to help because they were busy opening their own jar. But they tended to avoid people who were available to help but did not do so. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 17871 - Posted: 03.07.2013

by Emily Underwood No single cause has yet been discovered for schizophrenia, the devastating neuropsychiatric syndrome characterized by hallucinations, disordered thoughts, and other cognitive and emotional problems, typically beginning in early adulthood. Although schizophrenia runs in families, in many cases no genetic risk is apparent, leading many researchers to look for environmental explanations. Now, research in mice provides support for a long-held hypothesis: that the syndrome, and other neurological disorders, can emerge when multiple environmental insults such as prenatal infection and adolescent trauma combine. Environmental stressors such as infection and abuse were long ago shown to be risk factors for schizophrenia. Large studies of children whose mothers were infected with influenza during the last months of their pregnancy, for example, have a roughly twofold increase in risk of developing the syndrome compared with the general population. That doesn't explain why a few people who are exposed to an infection in the womb go on to develop schizophrenia while most don't, however, says Urs Meyer, a behavioral neurobiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and co-author of the study reported online today in Science. One long-held hypothesis, he says, is that early infection creates a latent vulnerability to schizophrenia that is only "unmasked" by later insults, such as physical injury or psychological trauma. Such stressors are thought to be particularly damaging during critical periods of brain development such as early puberty, he says. Although the "multiple-hit" hypothesis has been prominent in the literature for some time, it is difficult to test the idea with human epidemiology studies, he says. "You need huge, huge data sets to see anything." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17864 - Posted: 03.02.2013

By Kali Tal A few weeks ago an article in the Scientific American Twitter stream caught my eye. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) once again debuted as a “promising new treatment” for PTSD. EMDR, which has been repeatedly called “promising” over the last two decades, works only about as well for PTSD as other psychological treatment modalities with which it competes, primarily cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy. These so-called trauma focused treatments (TFT) all garner similar results. TFT have large effects in clinical trials, with two important caveats: 1) the enthusiasm of their various advocates bias the study results towards the treatment the researchers prefer; and, 2) they are effective for a significant number of carefully selected PTSD patients. The sad truth, however, is that current short-term treatments are not the solution for most patients with PTSD. Trial criteria often exclude those with comorbid disorders, multiple traumas, complex PTSD, and suicidal ideation, among others. Even when they are included, comorbid patients drop out of treatment studies at a much higher rate than those with simple PTSD, a problem that has implications for clinical practice. The large majority of those with PTSD also have other psychological disorders (commonly, substance abuse, depression, and anxiety disorders) and many of these patients have complex PTSD, which is both harder to treat, and more prone to relapse (see Fig. 1). Those who suffer from both PTSD and substance abuse (64%-84% of veterans, for example) often perceive the disorders as “functionally correlated.” Similarly, depression and PTSD are mutually reinforcing; each compounds the symptoms of the other. Both substance abuse and depression are notoriously difficult to treat, and harder to treat when comorbid with PTSD. Multiple studies document the long-term failure of PTSD treatment for veterans, but there are fewer on the effectiveness of therapies in treating comorbid PTSD in civilian populations. Existing studies challenge the assumption that PTSD treatments effective for simple PTSD, are also effective for combined PTSD and substance abuse, or PTSD and depression. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17857 - Posted: 02.27.2013

By Stephanie Pappas, People infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, have a harder time than healthy individuals recognizing fear in the faces of others. This trouble with emotional recognition may reveal subtle cognitive deficits caused by the disease, researchers wrote today (Feb. 26) in the open-access journal BMC Psychology. Previous studies have found that HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is linked with abnormalities in the frontostriatal region of the brain, communications corridors that link the frontal lobes to deeper brain structures. "Frontostriatal structures are involved in facial emotion recognition, so we expected that HIV-positive subjects were impaired in facial emotion recognition tasks," said study researcher Eleonora Baldonero of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. Baldonero and her colleagues recruited 49 HIV-positive adults from a clinic, making sure that none of the volunteers had a history of psychiatric or neurological disorders. HIV itself can affect the brain, Baldonero told LiveScience, but better drug therapies have made neurological problems less of an issue. Nevertheless, the team wanted to find out if there were any subtle deficits in the brains of patients. [The 10 Most Stigmatized Health Disorders] For comparison, the researchers also recruited 20 healthy adults chosen to be similar to the 49 HIV patients in age, gender and education. Both groups underwent a battery of neurological tests, including a facial emotion recognition task. In this test, patients saw male and female faces displaying disgust, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and sadness and had to match the name of the emotion to the face. © 2013 Yahoo! Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17853 - Posted: 02.27.2013

—By Chris Mooney It is still considered highly uncool to ascribe a person's political beliefs, even in part, to that person's biology: hormones, physiological responses, even brain structures and genes. And no wonder: Doing so raises all kinds of thorny, non-PC issues involving free will, determinism, toleration, and much else. There's just one problem: Published scientific research keeps going there, with ever increasing audacity (not to mention growing stacks of data). The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes. First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17841 - Posted: 02.25.2013

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Depression may lower the effectiveness of the shingles vaccine, a new study found. The research showed that adults with untreated depression who received the vaccine mounted a relatively weak immune response. But those who were taking antidepressants showed a normal response to the vaccine, even when symptoms of depression persist. Shingles, an acute and painful rash, strikes a million Americans each year, mostly older adults. Health officials recommend that those over 60 get vaccinated against the condition, which is caused by reactivation of the same virus that causes chickenpox, varicella-zoster. In the new study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers followed a group of 92 older men and women for two years. Forty of the subjects had a major depressive disorder; they were matched with 52 control subjects of similar age. The researchers measured their immune responses to the shingles vaccine and a placebo shot. Compared with the control patients, those with depression were poorly protected by the vaccine. But the patients who were being treated for their depression showed a boost in immunity — what the researchers called a “normalization” of the immune response. It is unclear why that was the case. The authors of the study speculated that treatment of older people with depression might increase the effectiveness of the flu shot and other vaccines as well. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17836 - Posted: 02.23.2013

Changing the channel on what TV children watch could improve their behaviour, but watching too much regular programming may have harmful long-term consequences, new research suggests. In Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers reported that preschoolers spent less time watching violent programming when they were randomly assigned to participate in a program that encouraged aggression-filled shows to be replaced with educational or empathy-building viewing compared with a control group. Muppets Bert, left, and Ernie, from the children's program Sesame Street, were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves, which builds empathy. "We demonstrated that an intervention to modify the viewing habits of preschool-aged children can significantly enhance their overall social and emotional competence and that low-income boys may derive the greatest benefit," Dr. Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children's Research Institute and his co-authors concluded. "Although television is frequently implicated as a cause of many problems in children, our research indicates that it may also be part of the solution." There was no difference in total viewing time between the 820 families involved in the study. The educational or "prosocial" programs included Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer and Super Why. A second category of shows also promoted co-operative problem-solving and non-violent conflict resolution but inconsistently, such as on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Aggression; Aggression
Link ID: 17815 - Posted: 02.18.2013