UPDATES

Welcome to UPDATES, capsules from the scientific front regarding emotional and physical well-being. This site changes on a regular basis and may occasionally have special issues on subjects such as auto-immune diseases, etc. Whenever possible, links are provided. For copies of UPDATES delivered to you via e-mail, please email mentalmakeovers@cox.net and put “Newsletter” in the subject box.

Quote of the day: We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve. Albert Einstein

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Support for parents protecting kids from violent TV! Beaten Unconsciously. By Marilyn Elias, USA Today, April 19, 2001, p. D8 A small Kansas State University study finds that violent film clips seem to stimulate children's brains in regions involved in responding to threat, survival, and traumatic memory. The MRI scans suggested that their brain treats the images as real. Researchers hope that further studies can determine how this stimulation, versus observing real violence, may affect actual behavior.

Dramatic Increases Seen in College Students' Mental Health Problems Over Last 13-Years University counseling center study shows more students seeking help for depression, thoughts of suicide and sexual assault. WASHINGTON - College students frequently have more complex problems today than they did over a decade ago, including both the typical or expected college student problems -- difficulties in relationships and developmental issues -- as well as the more severe problems, such as depression, sexual assault and thoughts of suicide. That is the finding of a study involving 13,257 students seeking help at a large Midwestern university counseling center over a 13-year period. Some of these increases were dramatic. The number of students seen each year with depression doubled, while the number of suicidal students tripled and the number of students seen after a sexual assault quadrupled. http://www.apa.org/releases/student_problems.html http://www.apa.org/journals/pro/press_releases/february_2003/pro34166.html

Blood flow to the right side of the brain increases with focus on emotion. Research from a recent study appearing in the January 03 issue of Neuropsychology indicates that blood flow to the right side of the brain (more associated with emotions) can be increased by focusing on feeling instead of meaning! http://www.apa.org/releases/emotional_brains.html Anxiety enhances spatial performance, humor, verbal A study conducted at Washington University suggest that anxiety enhances visual and special performance while humor leads to improvement in verbal performance: if you are going to play competitive golf, this suggests, see an anxiety enhancing movie just before hand, but if you are taking a test, see a comedy! For more information see the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is an MRI study testing groups of women and men for ability to recall or recognize evocative photographs three weeks after first seeing them. The results indicated that women’s neural responses to emotional scenes are much more active than men’s – leading to the tentative conclusion that a woman’s brain may be better organized to perceive and remember emotions.

More evidence on the amygdala.  The June 10, 2002 issue of Time Magazine reported that overanxious young children had larger amygdalas than those of less anxious peers. There is additional evidence that signals in the amaygdala are more active in those with PTSD than in those without it. In the same issue, connections are drawn between anxiety and depression, though they tend to be treated as very different problems by therapists: adults who suffer from depression were often very anxious as children. Brain scans show that the amygdala is very active in depressed patients even when they are sleeping. Cooke response: since one of the primary activities of sleep is to process emotional material, it would make perfect sense that in the person who is repressing emotion all day long – the depressed person – the amygdala would be particularly active at night.

Kids of single parents at risk for emotional ills.  A study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal reported on a 1 million children who were tracked for a decade into their mid-20’s. the results? Children growing up in single-parent families are twice as likely as their counterparts to develop serious psychiatric illness and addictions later on in life.

Free Will vs. Gut Feeling A new book, The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard reviews research on how we make decisions. Experiments by neuroscientists indicate that when they make patients’ limbs jerk by electrically zapping certain regions of the brain, patients often insist they meant to move that arm and even invent reasons why. Is it possible that the gut feeling that we have is the decision itself, followed by a “rational explanation?” More on this in the future.

Emotions and health – miscellaneous studies In intensive care units, the comforting presence of another person not only lowers the patients blood pressure – it slows the secretion of fatty acids that block arteries Three or more incidents of stress per year triples the death rate in socially isolated men, but has no effect on those with many close relationships. There are evidently very complex interactions between people in a conversation – open loop interactions. One person transmits signals that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, and the immune function in the body of another

Human beings can create new neural tissue as well as new neural connections in London taxi drivers, the part of the brain that handles spatial relationships grows in size and strength of activity. When a limbic emotional) connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to reverse it.

Diseases with higher rates in women in developed than non-developed countries: Major unipolar depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis.

Against Depression, a Sugar Pill is Hard to Beat. By Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, May 7, 2002, p.A1 A new analysis of research found that in major antidepressant drug trials, sugar pills, or placebos, often produce similar short-term results, and often cause changes in the same brain areas as drugs. The study notes that drug companies typically conduct numerous trials to show at least two with positive results, as required by the FDA. Other studies, however, also find that when patients are told they are on placebos, their recovery quickly lessens. Many researchers note that drugs themselves work because of the medication's own effectiveness, as well as an additional placebo effect of an expected positive outcome, and that both placebos and drugs are enhanced by the attention and concern shown during a clinical trial.

Just in time for Valentine's Day - Velcro Relationships - getting them beyond the sticking point.

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