By LESLEY ALDERMAN Take a deep breath, expanding your belly. Pause. Exhale slowly to the count of five. Repeat four times. Congratulations. You’ve just calmed your nervous system. Controlled breathing, like what you just practiced, has been shown to reduce stress, increase alertness and boost your immune system. For centuries yogis have used breath control, or pranayama, to promote concentration and improve vitality. Buddha advocated breath-meditation as a way to reach enlightenment. Science is just beginning to provide evidence that the benefits of this ancient practice are real. Studies have found, for example, that breathing practices can help reduce symptoms associated with anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and attention deficit disorder. “Breathing is massively practical,” says Belisa Vranich, a psychologist and author of the book “Breathe,” to be published in December. “It’s meditation for people who can’t meditate.” How controlled breathing may promote healing remains a source of scientific study. One theory is that controlled breathing can change the response of the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious processes such as heart rate and digestion as well as the body’s stress response, says Dr. Richard Brown, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and co-author of “The Healing Power of the Breath.” Consciously changing the way you breathe appears to send a signal to the brain to adjust the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which can slow heart rate and digestion and promote feelings of calm as well as the sympathetic system, which controls the release of stress hormones like cortisol. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22849 - Posted: 11.09.2016

By Kerry Grens Scientists have observed changes in the human brain as study participants tell lies—specifically, as white lies became outright deception, the amygdalas of the fibbing volunteers became less active. The researchers’ findings, published in Nature Neuroscience yesterday (October 24), offer a possible neural mechanism for a common human failing, that lying can lead to more extensive dishonesty. “The reduction in activity in the amygdala can predict how much people increase dishonesty subsequently,” study coauthor Neil Garrett, a psychologist at University College London, told The Verge. Garrett and colleagues asked 25 volunteers who saw a big image of a jar of pennies to give others (who only saw a small picture of the jar) estimates about the number of pennies. The volunteers were given incentives to lie, and after they had fibbed previously, fMRI data showed reduced activity in the amygdala when people were dishonest again. This brain region is involved in processing emotions. “It’s an intriguing possibility that adaptation of amygdala response might underlie escalation in self-serving dishonesty,” Tom Johnstone, a neuroscientist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the study, told Scientific American, “though the results need to be replicated in a larger sample of participants, in order to examine the involvement of the many other brain regions previously shown to play a role in generating and regulating emotional responses.” © 1986-2016 The Scientist

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22793 - Posted: 10.27.2016

David Brooks We’ve had a tutorial on worry this year. The election campaign isn’t really about policy proposals, issue solutions or even hope. It’s led by two candidates who arouse gargantuan anxieties, fear and hatred in their opponents. As a result, some mental health therapists are reporting that three-quarters of their patients are mentioning significant election-related anxiety. An American Psychological Association study found that more than half of all Americans are very or somewhat stressed by this race. Of course, there are good and bad forms of anxiety — the kind that warns you about legitimate dangers and the kind that spirals into dark and self-destructive thoughts. In his book “Worrying,” Francis O’Gorman notes how quickly the good kind of anxiety can slide into the dark kind. “Worry is circular,” he writes. It may start with a concrete anxiety: Did I lock the back door? Is this headache a stroke? “And it has a nasty habit of taking off on its own, of getting out of hand, of spawning thoughts that are related to the original worry and which make it worse.” That’s what’s happening this year. Anxiety is coursing through American society. It has become its own destructive character on the national stage. Worry alters the atmosphere of the mind. It shrinks your awareness of the present and your ability to enjoy what’s around you right now. It cycles possible bad futures around in your head and forces you to live in dreadful future scenarios, 90 percent of which will never come true. Pretty soon you are seeing the world through a dirty windshield. Worry dims every sunrise and amplifies mistrust. A mounting tide of anxiety makes people angrier about society and more darkly pessimistic about the possibility of changing it. Spiraling worry is the perverted underside of rationality. This being modern polarized America, worry seems to come in two flavors. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22785 - Posted: 10.25.2016

By Virginia Morell Human-produced noise in the ocean is likely harming marine mammals in numerous unknown ways, according to a comprehensive new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. That’s because there are insufficient data to determine how the ill effects of noise created by ships, sonar signals, and other activities interact with other threats, including pollution, climate change, and the loss of prey due to fishing. The report, which was sponsored by several government agencies and released on 7 October, provides a new framework for researchers to begin exploring these cumulative impacts. “There’s a growing recognition that interactions between stressors on marine mammals can’t right now be accurately assessed," said Peter Tyack, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom, in a webinar on the report. Tyack also chaired the committee that prepared the study, "Approaches to Understanding the Cumulative Effects of Stressors on Marine Mammals." Killer whales, for instance, are known to swim away from areas where they have encountered sonar signals of about 142 decibels, a sound level lower than currently allowed by the U.S. Navy for its ships, Tyack said, referring to a 2014 study in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that determined the mammals’ likely response. But scientists don’t yet know how other marine mammals might respond. They also don’t know whether or how other factors, such as encountering an oil spill or colliding with a ship, would—or would not—compound the cetaceans’ response to these sounds; or how or whether such combined stressors matter to the animals’ long-term health and overall population. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 22745 - Posted: 10.12.2016

Alison Abbott Arrival in a foreign, hostile country causes many refugees great stress. On an ice-cold day in January, clinical psychologist Emily Holmes picked up a stack of empty diaries and went down to Stockholm’s central train station in search of refugees. She didn’t have to look hard. Crowds of lost-looking young people were milling around the concourse, in clothes too flimsy for the freezing air. “It struck me hard to see how thin some of the young men were,” she says. Holmes, who works at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, was seeking help with her research — a pilot project on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is all too common in refugees. She wanted to see whether they would be willing to spend a week noting down any flashbacks — fragmented memories of a trauma that rush unbidden into the mind and torment those with PTSD. She easily found volunteers. And when they returned the diaries, Holmes was shocked to see that they reported an average of two a day — many more than the PTSD sufferers she routinely dealt with. “My heart went out to them,” she says. “They managed to travel thousands of kilometres to find their way to safety with this level of symptoms.” Europe is experiencing the largest movement of people since the Second World War. Last year, more than 1.2 million people applied for asylum in the European Union — and those numbers underestimate the scale of the problem. Germany, which has taken in the lion’s share of people, reckons that it received more than a million refugees in 2015, tens of thousands of whom have yet to officially apply for asylum. Most came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many have experienced war, shock, upheaval and terrible journeys, and they often have poor physical health. The crisis has attracted global attention and sparked political tension as countries struggle to accommodate and integrate the influx. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22740 - Posted: 10.11.2016

Richard J. McNally The welcoming letter to the class of 2020 in which Jay Ellison, a dean at the University of Chicago, told incoming students not to expect trigger warnings on campus struck a nerve in a highly polarized debate that is embroiling academia. Trigger warnings are countertherapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains P.T.S.D. Trigger warnings, critics claim, imperil academic freedom and further infantilize a cohort of young people accustomed to coddling by their helicopter parents. Proponents of trigger warnings point out that many students have suffered trauma, exemplified by alarming rates of sexual assault on campus. Accordingly, they urge professors to warn students about potentially upsetting course materials and to exempt distressed students from classes covering topics likely to trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive thoughts about one’s personal trauma. Proponents of trigger warnings are deeply concerned about the emotional well-being of students, especially those with trauma histories. Yet lost in the debate are two key points: Trauma is common, but P.T.S.D. is rare. Epidemiological studies show that many people are exposed to trauma in their lives, and most have had transient stress symptoms. But only a minority fails to recover, thereby developing P.T.S.D. Students with P.T.S.D. are those most likely to have adverse emotional reactions to curricular material, not those with trauma histories whose acute stress responses have dissipated. However, trigger warnings are countertherapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains P.T.S.D. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome P.T.S.D. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22658 - Posted: 09.15.2016

By Jessica Hamzelou After experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder after being raped, Karestan Koenen made it her career to study the condition. Now at Harvard University, Koenen is leading the largest ever genetic study of PTSD, by sifting through the genomes of tens of thousands of people (see Why women are more at risk of PTSD – and how to prevent it”). She tells New Scientist how her experiences shaped her career What was your idea of PTSD before you experienced it yourself? I would have associated it with men who served in the military – the stereotype of a Vietnam veteran who has experienced really horrible combat, and comes back and has nightmares about it. Do you think that is how PTSD is perceived by the public generally? Yes. People know that PTSD is related to trauma, and that people can have flashbacks and nightmares. But they tend to think it is associated with combat. A lot of popular images of PTSD come from war movies, and people tend to associate being a soldier with being a man. They are less aware that most PTSD is related to things that happen to civilians – things like rape, sexual assault and violence, which can affect women more than men. Is this misperception of PTSD problematic? It’s a problem in the sense that women or men who have PTSD from non-combat experiences might not recognise what they have as PTSD, and because of that, may not end up getting help. And if you saw it in a loved one, you may not understand what was going on with them. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22657 - Posted: 09.15.2016

James Hamblin Like ​The Atlantic? Subscribe to ​the Daily​, our free weekday email newsletter. Elite tennis players have an uncanny ability to clear their heads after making errors. They constantly move on and start fresh for the next point. They can’t afford to dwell on mistakes. Peter Strick is not a professional tennis player. He’s a distinguished professor and chair of the department of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute. He’s the sort of person to dwell on mistakes, however small. “My kids would tell me, dad, you ought to take up pilates. Do some yoga,” he said. “But I’d say, as far as I’m concerned, there's no scientific evidence that this is going to help me.” Still, the meticulous skeptic espoused more of a tennis approach to dealing with stressful situations: Just teach yourself to move on. Of course there is evidence that ties practicing yoga to good health, but not the sort that convinced Strick. Studies show correlations between the two, but he needed a physiological mechanism to explain the relationship. Vague conjecture that yoga “decreases stress” wasn’t sufficient. How? Simply by distracting the mind? The stress response in humans is facilitated by the adrenal glands, which sit on top of our kidneys and spit adrenaline into our blood whenever we’re in need of fight or flight. That stress response is crucial in dire circumstances. But little of modern life truly requires it (especially among academic scientists). Most of the time, our stress responses are operating as a sort of background hum, keeping us on edge. Turn that off, and we relax. © 2016 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22599 - Posted: 08.25.2016

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Feeling worried? These days, much of America is. Over the past eight years, Google search rates for anxiety have more than doubled. They are higher this year than they have been in any year since Google searches were first tracked in 2004. So far, 2016 has been tops for searches for driving anxiety, travel anxiety, separation anxiety, anxiety at work, anxiety at school and anxiety at home. Americans have also become increasingly terrified of the morning. Searches for “anxiety in the morning” have risen threefold over the past decade. But this is nothing compared with the fear of night. Searches for “anxiety at night” have risen ninefold. For years, I have confidently pontificated on topics that I think are important but that I have little experience of — child abuse, racism, sexism, sex. Now I am ready to tackle a topic I actually know something about. Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a break from worrying about my own anxiety to studying our country’s. While I am not sure I totally nailed down why anxiety seems to have risen so much during the Obama era, I did learn a lot. The places where anxiety is highest are not where I would have expected. When I was growing up, if you had asked me which people were the most anxious, I would have said New York Jews. And a decade of interacting with our country’s urban intelligentsia, Jewish and otherwise, has confirmed that pretty much all of us are a neurotic mess. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22528 - Posted: 08.08.2016

By PHYLLIS KORKKI Ever experienced a bout of anxiety at work? I just did. One day last week I had several assignments to finish in quick succession. I could feel thoughts pinging around in my brain as I tried and failed to decide what to focus on first. Once I was able to get the pandemonium under control, my brain felt like mush. So what did I do? I breathed deeply from the middle of my body. I imagined the top of my head, and pictured arrows coming out the sides of my shoulders. I stood up for a while and then walked around the newsroom. And went back to work. These simple solutions to anxiety are not so easy to practice in an era of multitasking, multiple screens and mindless distractions. I learned them only after signing a contract to write a book — and becoming so anxious about it that I developed back and stomach pains. Unable to score a prescription for Klonopin (it’s addictive, my doctor said), I was reduced to seeking out natural methods to relieve my anxiety. The methods I learned helped me write the book. But they also made me realize that workers of all stripes could use them to reduce stress, and to think more clearly and creatively. My first stop was Belisa Vranich, a clinical psychologist who teaches — or rather reteaches — people how to breathe. Dimly I sensed that the way I was inhaling and exhaling was out of whack, and she confirmed it by giving me some tests. First off, like most people, I was a “vertical” breather, meaning my shoulders moved upward when I inhaled. Second, I was breathing from my upper chest, where the lungs don’t have much presence. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22527 - Posted: 08.08.2016

By Colby Itkowitz On any given day people face any number of minor annoyances such as being stuck in traffic or spilling coffee on their shirts or forgetting their keys. Then there’s the persistent stressors that come from work, relationships and finances. And there’s the uncontrollable anxieties of global terrorism, mass shootings and Zika-carrying mosquitoes. But why are some people able to deal with it all so calmly, while others freak out? A team of researchers at Yale University may have found the answer in the brain. The scientists studied the brains of 30 adult volunteers with no history of mental or physical health issues as they watched a slideshow of gruesome and terrifying images for six minutes. To compare brain activity, they then showed the participants benign images that would evoke little emotion, such as a photo of a chair. They located three areas of the brain that responded to the stress of seeing photos of people mutilated or at gunpoint or in other harrowing scenarios. But what the researchers found most interesting was how the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which processes risk and emotional response, adapted while viewing the photos. In everyone, activity in that region decreased initially in response to the images, as though their guard was down, but then in some people, it became hyperactive, as if working overtime to control the emotional response, or in other words, to cope. “We have not had a way of breaking that apart to see what the brain is doing,” said Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Stress Center and lead author of the study. “How do we cope in the moment? Here, we said, in the moment under acute threat how does the brain cope and regain control?” © 1996-2016 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22506 - Posted: 08.03.2016

Research supported by the National Institutes of Health has identified brain patterns in humans that appear to underlie “resilient coping,” the healthy emotional and behavioral responses to stress that help some people handle stressful situations better than others. People encounter stressful situations and stimuli everywhere, every day, and studies have shown that long-term stress can contribute to a broad array of health problems. However, some people cope with stress better than others, and scientists have long wondered why. The new study, by a team of researchers at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, is now online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This important finding points to specific brain adaptations that predict resilient responses to stress,” said George F. Koob, Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of NIH and a supporter of the study. “The findings also indicate that we might be able to predict maladaptive stress responses that contribute to excessive drinking, anger, and other unhealthy reactions to stress.” In a study of human volunteers, scientists led by Rajita Sinha, Ph.D., and Dongju Seo, Ph.D., used a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure localized changes in brain activation during stress. Study participants were given fMRI scans while exposed to highly threatening, violent and stressful images followed by neutral, non-stressful images for six minutes each. While conducting the scans, researchers also measured non-brain indicators of stress among study participants, such as heart rate, and levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in blood. The brain scans revealed a sequence of three distinct patterns of response to stress, compared to non-stress exposure.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 22459 - Posted: 07.20.2016

By ROBERT F. WORTH In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust; a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20,000 brains over a four-decade career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this. The brain under Perl’s microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression. Nearly 350,000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible. For years, many scientists have assumed that explosive blasts affect the brain in much the same way as concussions from football or car accidents. Perl himself was a leading researcher on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which has caused dementia in N.F.L. players. Several veterans who died after suffering blast wounds have in fact developed C.T.E. But those veterans had other, nonblast injuries too. No one had done a systematic post-mortem study of blast-injured troops. That was exactly what the Pentagon asked Perl to do in 2010, offering him access to the brains they had gathered for research. It was a rare opportunity, and Perl left his post as director of neuropathology at the medical school at Mount Sinai to come to Washington. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22311 - Posted: 06.11.2016

by Bethany Brookshire Interviewing for a new job is filled with uncertainty, and that uncertainty fuels stress. There’s the uncertainty associated with preparing for the interview — what questions will they ask me? What should I put in my portfolio? And then there’s the ambiguity when you’re left to stew. Did I get the job? Or did someone else? Scientists have recently shown that these two types of uncertainty — the kind we can prepare for, and the kind we’re just stuck with — are not created equal. The uncertainty we can’t do anything about is more stressful than the one we can. The results help show exactly what in our lives freaks us out — and why. But the findings also show a positive side to the stress we feel when not knowing what’s ahead — the closer our stress levels reflect the real ambiguity in the world, the better we perform in it. “There is a bias in the public perception” against stress, says Claus Lamm, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Vienna in Austria. But stress “prepares us to deal with environmental challenges,” he notes, preparing us to fight or flee, and it keeps us paying attention to our surroundings. For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out just what makes us stressed and why. It turns out that unpredictability is a great stressor. Studies in the 1960s and 1970s showed that rats and humans who can’t predict a negative effect (such as a small shock) end up more frazzled than those who can predict when a zap is coming. In a 2006 study, people zapped with unpredictable electric shocks to the hand rated the pain as more unpleasant than when they knew what to expect. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22151 - Posted: 04.27.2016

By Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D Why is it that girls tend to be more anxious than boys? It may start with how they feel about how they look. Some research has shown that in adolescence, girls tend to become more dissatisfied with their bodies, whereas boys tend to become more satisfied with their bodies. Another factor has to do with differences in how girls and boys use social media. A girl is much more likely than a boy to post a photo of herself wearing a swimsuit, while the boy is more likely to post a photo where the emphasis is on something he has done rather than on how he looks. If you don’t like Jake’s selfie showing off his big trophy, he may not care. But if you don’t like Sonya’s photo of herself wearing her bikini, she’s more likely to take it personally. Imagine another girl sitting in her bedroom, alone. She’s scrolling through other girls’ Instagram and Snapchat feeds. She sees Sonya showing off her new bikini; Sonya looks awesome. She sees Madison at a party, having a blast. She sees Vanessa with her adorable new puppy. And she thinks: I’m just sitting here in my bedroom, not doing anything. My life sucks. Boys are at lower risk for the toxic effects of social media than girls are, for at least three reasons. First, boys are less likely to be heavily invested in what you think of their selfies. “Does this swimsuit make me look fat?” is a question asked by girls more often than by boys. Second, boys tend to overestimate how interesting their own life is. Third, the average boy is likely to spend more time playing video games than Photoshopping his selfie for Instagram. And in video games, unlike social media, everybody truly can be a winner, eventually. If you play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty long enough, you will, sooner or later, complete all the missions, if you just keep at it. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22136 - Posted: 04.25.2016

Anna Nowogrodzki There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings — reported in PLoS ONE on 8 April1 — hint that negative results are going unpublished. Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Mental-health treatments that focus on this method include mindfulness-based stress reduction — an 8-week group-based programme that includes yoga and daily meditation — and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. A bias toward publishing studies that find the technique to be effective withholds important information from mental-health clinicians and patients, says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a very important finding,” he adds. “We’ll invest a lot of social and financial capital in these issues, and a lot of that can be misplaced unless we have good data.” © 2016 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22129 - Posted: 04.23.2016

By Nicholas Bakalar Stress in childhood may be linked to hardening of the arteries in adulthood, new research suggests. Finnish researchers studied 311 children 12 to 18 years old, scoring their levels of stress according to a variety of components, including the family’s economic circumstances, the emotional environment in the home, whether parents engaged in healthy behaviors, stressful events (such as divorce, moves or death of a family member) and parental concerns about the child’s social adjustment. Using these criteria, they calculated a stress score. When the members of the group were 40 to 46 years old, they used computed tomography to measure coronary artery calcification, a marker of atherosclerosis and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The study, in JAMA Pediatrics, controlled for sex, cholesterol, body mass index and other factors, but still found that the higher the childhood stress score, the greater the risk for coronary artery calcification. The study is observational, and the data is based largely on parental reports, which can be biased. Still, its long follow-up time and careful control of other variables gives it considerable strength. There are plausible mechanisms for the connection, including stress-induced increases in inflammation, which in animal models have been linked to a variety of ailments. “I think that economic conditions are important here,” said the lead author, Dr. Markus Juonala, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Turku in Finland. “Public health interventions should focus on how to intervene in better ways with people with higher stress and lower socioeconomic status.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22057 - Posted: 04.01.2016

By DAVID FRANK and JAMES GORMAN Social life is good for you, even when your friends have lice — if you’re a Japanese macaque. Whether the same is true for humans hasn’t been tested directly, at least not the way researchers in Japan conducted their experiments with networks of female macaques. Julie Duboscq, a researcher at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan, tracked louse infestation and grooming interactions in about 20 adult female macaques. As she, Andrew J.J. MacIntosh and their colleagues noted in describing their research in Scientific Reports, grooming is known to reduce lice, but such close physical contact can also make it easy for lice to pass from one animal to another. Dr. Duboscq is interested in the costs and benefits of social behavior. For animals that live in social groups, as macaques and people do, the benefits of social life are many, from defense against predators (for wild monkeys, and no doubt for humans at some point in their history) to emotional health and well-being (for humans, and probably monkeys, too). But there are negatives associated with sociality, like the transmission of parasites and diseases. “We don’t fully understand the costs and benefits,” Dr. Duboscq said. In this study, she and her colleagues estimated the degree of louse infestation by the number of nits picked. The more nits, they calculated, the more lice-producing nits. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22038 - Posted: 03.28.2016

By Anahad O'Connor What does it take to live a good life? Surveys show that most young adults believe that obtaining wealth and fame are keys to a happy life. But a long-running study out of Harvard suggests that one of the most important predictors of whether you age well and live a long and happy life is not the amount of money you amass or notoriety you receive. A much more important barometer of long term health and well-being is the strength of your relationships with family, friends and spouses. These are some of the findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a research project that since 1938 has closely tracked and examined the lives of more than 700 men and in some cases their spouses. The study has revealed some surprising – and some not so surprising – factors that determine whether people are likely to age happily and healthily, or descend into loneliness, sickness and mental decline. The study’s current director, , outlined some of the more striking findings from the long-running project in a recent TED Talk that has garnered more than seven million views. “We publish our findings in academic journals that most people don’t read,” Dr. Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said in a recent interview. “And so we really wanted people to know that this study exists and that it has for 75 years. We’ve been funded by the government for so many years, and it’s important that more people know about this besides academics.” The study began in Boston in the 1930s with two very different groups of young men. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22017 - Posted: 03.23.2016

Anxious people perceive the world differently. An anxious brain appears to process sounds in an altered way, ramping up the expectation that something bad – or good – might happen. There’s no doubt that some degree of anxiety is vital for survival. When we learn that something is dangerous, we generalise that memory to apply the same warning signal to other, similar situations to avoid getting into trouble. If you’re bitten by a large, aggressive dog, for instance, it makes sense to feel slightly anxious around similar dogs. “It’s better to be safe than sorry,” says Rony Paz at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The trouble begins when this process becomes exaggerated. In the dog bite example, a person who went on to become anxious around all dogs, even small ones, would be described as overgeneralising. Overgeneralisation is thought to play a role in post-traumatic stress disorder and general anxiety disorder, a condition characterised by anxiety about many situations, leaving people in a state of near-constant restlessness. A study carried out by Paz suggests that overgeneralisation is not limited to anxious thoughts and memories – for such people the same process seems to affect their perception of the world. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 21956 - Posted: 03.05.2016