Perfectionist fathers can reinforce tendencies
Perfectionist fathers can reinforce disordered eating among college-age young people already preoccupied over their physical looks and subject to the demanding expectations of peers and media, according to a Penn State study.

A survey of 424 college students revealed that, with sons and daughters alike, the father, not the mother, is more likely to create pressures leading college-age children to indulge in erratic eating habits that in turn can lead to anorexia, bulimia and other clinical illnesses, says Dr. Michelle Miller-Day, associate professor of communication arts and sciences.

"Another finding was that food itself was not the issue with students who reported disordered eating behaviors," Miller-Day notes. "Personal perfectionism, reinforced by peer and parental expectations of perfection in combination with the allure of advertising, may cause many young people to feel that they are not in control of their own lives and bodies. Eating then becomes an area in which they DO have a sense of personal control."

"These findings make clear that treatment for maladaptive eating must extend to a patient's relational network and not just focus on the individual patient," she adds. "A specific focus on the patient's history of communication with parents might provide insights into the development of negative eating behaviors. Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa have a very high mortality rate. The mortality rate associated with anorexia is 12 times higher than the death rate of other causes of death for females 15-24 years old."

Miller-Day and Jennifer D. Marks, a doctoral student at Penn State, presented their fdinings in the paper, "Perceptions of Parental Communication Orientation, Perfectionism and Disordered Eating Behaviors of Sons and Daughters," in the spring issue of the journal Health Communication.

In a survey of 424 college students, the Penn State researchers measured the relationship between self- and parentally-prescribed perfectionism and perceptions of personal control and maladaptive eating behavior. Their data revealed that 17 percent of the overall sample participated in maladaptive eating patterns including such behaviors as vomiting because of feeling uncomfortably full.

The Penn State study indicated that father-child communicative interaction marked by high paternal standards might increase young people's risk of unwholesome eating behaviors, in part, perhaps, by socializing the adolescent to be compliant with externally imposed messages of what is considered "ideal." In this way, adolescents may become more vulnerable to media and peer group portrayals of ideal body images.

"Our analysis also suggested that perceived loss of personal control might lead to negative eating patterns," say the researchers. "If an individual feels out of control of his or her life, focusing on food intake may be one of the few arenas where he or she can assert personal control. The more young people felt in control of their lives, particularly when positively reinforced by fathers, the less likely they were to engage in maladaptive eating behaviors."

EurekAlert
1 May 2006

Cosgrove, L., Krimsky, S., Vijayaraghavan, M. & Schneider, L. (2006). Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75, 154-160.

ABSTRACT
Background: Increasing attention has been given to the transparency of potential conflicts of interest in clinical medicine and biomedical sciences, particularly in journal publishing and science advisory panels. The authors examined the degree and type of financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of panel members responsible for revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Methods: By using multimodal screening techniques the authors investigated the financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of 170 panel members who contributed to the diagnostic criteria produced for the DSM-IV and the DSM-IV-TR.

Results: Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on 'Mood Disorders' and 'Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders' had financial ties to drug companies. The leading categories of financial interest held by panel members were research funding (42%), consultancies (22%) and speakers bureau (16%).

Conclusions: Our inquiry into the relationships between DSM panel members and the pharmaceutical industry demonstrates that there are strong financial ties between the industry and those who are responsible for developing and modifying the diagnostic criteria for mental illness. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders. Full disclosure by DSM panel members of their financial relationships with for-profit entities that manufacture drugs used in the treatment of mental illness is recommended.

Copyright © 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Bad judgments about people can affect memories of them, Cornell study finds
By Susan S. Lang

Viewing a person as dishonest or immoral can distort memory, a Cornell study suggests. So much so, that when we attempt to recall that person's behavior, it seems to be worse than it really was.

"In other words, our study shows that morally blaming a person can distort memory for the severity of his or her crime or misbehavior," said David Pizarro, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell.

Pizarro and three colleagues gave 283 college students a story about a man who walked out on a restaurant bill, including what the man ate and drank and the amount of his bill. Half the participants read that the man walked out on the bill because he "was a jerk who liked to steal," and half read that the man left without paying because he received an emergency phone call.

"One week later the people who were told he was a jerk remembered a higher bill -- from 10 to 25 percent more than the bill actually was. Those who were told he had an emergency phone call remembered a slightly lower-than-actual bill," said Pizarro, the first author of a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Memory and Cognition. His co-authors include University of California (UC)-Irvine's Elizabeth Loftus, whose groundbreaking work put memory distortion on the map in the late 1980s when she showed that subjects viewing a film clip of a car accident estimated the speed of the cars differently depending on whether such words as hit, collided or mashed were used in the question.

Previous studies have found that leading questions can influence memory of an incident, and that thinking that someone is good (or bad) in one area tends to influence judgments about them in other areas.

"But this is the first study that we know of that looked at how blame might affect memory regarding objective facts, which you usually think of as less susceptible to distortion," Pizarro said. "It suggests that negative evaluations are capable of exerting a distorting effect on memory as well."

The findings have particular implications for eyewitness testimonies, Pizarro noted. "Spontaneous evaluations made by an eyewitness about a defendant may influence their memories about the event in question -- memories that often serve as the very data that judges and juries use as input into their judgments of guilt."

In addition, eyewitnesses who hear information about the moral character of a defendant, "even long after the events have occurred," may misremember the events in question, such as the severity of the crime, putting perpetrators at greater risk.

Cornell Chronicle Online
13 March 2006

Teenage girls with symptoms of depression may have a higher risk of subsequent physical abuse by their partners than those who don't have symptoms of depression, according to a study in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Major depressive disorder affects about 21 percent of girls and women aged 15 to 24 years, and an additional 10 percent experience minor depression, according to background information in the article. Depressive symptoms and disorders during adolescence have been linked to a number of negative outcomes later in life, including low self-esteem, interpersonal difficulties, divorce, impaired social functioning and problems at work. Depression is understood to often occur as a consequence of partner violence, but few studies have examined whether depression early in life puts women at an increased risk for subsequent exposure to such violence. [read more]

EurekAlert
6 March 2006

Do you think using a hands-free device makes it okay to talk on a cell phone while driving? Despite the well-intended laws requiring the use of hands-free devices, a driver's performance is impaired when distracted by even the simplest tasks, whether or not both hands are on the steering wheel.

Until now, the slowing of reaction time under multitasking conditions, referred to as the psychological-refractory-period (PRP) effect, has been studied mainly with simple tasks in laboratory settings. But a new research study presents a unique perspective of how the PRP effect pertains to driving, perhaps the most ubiquitous real-world task where non-optimal performance can have serious consequences.

EurekAlert
9 March 2006

First evidence for altruistic behaviours in human infants and chimpanzees

According to a Yiddish proverb, ‘if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm’. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany offers another place to find one - children and chimpanzees. Researchers developed several helping scenarios in which an adult was struggling with a problem and needed help. In one such scenario, an adult accidentally dropped objects on a floor and was unable to reach them. Human infants at 18 month of age helped spontaneously in several of the tasks. Also, chimpanzees displayed similar helping behaviours, although only in easier tasks. These new findings show that rudimentary forms of altruistic behaviours are present in our closest evolutionary relatives. As recent findings by other researchers from the same institute show, these seem to be restricted to particular situations.

2 March 2006

Chimpanzees recognized when collaboration was necessary and chose the best collaborative partner
    
In the animal kingdom cooperation is crucial for survival. Predators hunt in prides and prey band together to protect themselves. Yet no other creature cooperates as successfully as we do. But where did this ability come from, and is it uniquely human? In a new study to be published in Science on 3 March 2006, Alicia Melis and co-authors from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany show that our close relatives, chimpanzees, are much better cooperators than we thought.

2 March 2006

Debate simmers over popular antidepressant ad claims
28 February 2006

Summary: Despite claims by pharmaceutical companies and contrary to popular belief, there is no research evidence that depression is caused by serotonin deficiency in the brain. In fact, there are numerous reasons to question this "chemical imbalance" theory of depression altogether:

• There is currently no way to measure levels of neurochemicals in the living brain, so chemical imbalance theories are speculative;
  
• Research indicates that psychotherapy, particularly cognitive therapy, is as or more effective as meds in treating depression and preventing relapse, and does so without the side effects associated with medications;
  
• Research also demonstrates the benefits of exercise in improving mood;
  
• Just because SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] can alleviate some depressions doesn't necessarily mean low serotonin levels caused the depression to begin with. "The fact that aspirin cures headache does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain," researchers note. The same may be true for SSRIs and depression.

Nonetheless, pharmaceutical companies' various direct-to-consumer ads, specifically Pfizer's Zoloft ad, have convinced the general population of this oversimplified biochemical explanation for depression, which may be preventing people from getting the "more comprehensive care" they need.

See also:
Advertisements for SSRIs May Be Misleading

Following up the sleep paralysis article I posted last July is a web video I recently found -- Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. This is a 50 minute informal presentation by Susan Clancy, a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Harvard University, who interviewed "alien abductees" and researched alien abductions for six years. She wrote a book detailing her research findings, which she discusses in this presentation.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A ribbon-like cochlear implant
developed at the University of Michigan could greatly
improve hearing for profoundly deaf patients, and simplify insertion to help surgeons minimize damage to healthy ear tissue.

A team led by U-M's Kensall D. Wise, director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS), made the implant using thin-film electrode sites that directly stimulate the auditory nerve.

The implant is currently being tested in guinea pigs and cats, said Wise, who has appointments in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The device may be available in four to five years for use in humans, Wise said, and could be used in current cochlear patients—removing the old device first—to improve their hearing. Additionally, the FDA approves implants for wider use as the technology improves.

Approximately 100,000 patients today have received cochlear implants worldwide. The current technology, Wise said, is bulky, difficult for surgeons to insert, and doesn't allow a great range of perceived frequencies. The present implants use electrodes formed from a bundle of wires fed into the snail-shaped cochlea of the inner ear, but difficulties in inserting such devices make it tough to achieve the deep insertion needed to stimulate lower-frequency sounds, and collisions with the cochlear wall can damage any residual hearing that still exists.  

"The range of frequencies that can be stimulated depends on how far into the cochlea the implant can go, with the lower frequencies located further up toward the apex of the spiral canal," Wise said. In current technology, each implant has anywhere from 16 to 22 stimulating sites along its length. By contrast, the U-M implant will host up to 128 stimulating sites.

"More sites mean greater tonal range and better frequency perception," Wise said, "and the implant's flexibility will minimize damage to existing hearing."

The ribbon film technology lets researchers embed other functions in the implant, such as position sensors that allow surgeons to watch the implant's progress on a monitor as they're feeding it into the cochlea.

"With the position sensors, doctors can see, on a screen, a silhouette of the ribbon against the shape of the cochlea," Wise said. "Eventually the idea is to be able take the signals from the position sensors and use them to control actuators in an insertion tool, so that the electrode array can achieve deep insertion and navigate around any obstacles in its path.

"The idea is to use a pneumatic insertion tool that can be inflated or deflated, similar to a spiral party favor, and is pre-stressed to hug the inner wall of the cochlea," Wise said. "The position sensors set the stage for doing that because they give you feedback on what's happening when you insert these devices."

Researchers make the implant with the same processes used to make integrated circuits, which means they can be made in batch. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation and was to be presented on Feb. 6 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. Doctoral student Pamela Bhatti was to present the paper, which is co-authored by Wise and by research fellow Sangwoo Lee.

Univeristy of Michigan News Service
6 February 2006

UCI researchers have found that a single brief memory is actually processed differently in separate areas of the brain – an idea that until now scientists have only suspected to be true. The finding will influence how researchers examine the brain and could have implications for the treatment of memory disorders caused by disease or injury. [read article]

Today@UCI (Press Release)
2 February 2006

Traditional polygraph tests to determine whether someone is lying may take a back seat to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), according to a study appearing in the February issue of Radiology. Researchers from Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia used fMRI to show how specific areas of the brain light up when a person tells a lie. [read the article]

EurekAlert
31 January 2006

People suffering generalised social phobia experience increased brain activity when confronted with threatening faces or frightening social situations, new research shows. The finding could help identify how severe a person's generalised social phobia is and measure the effectiveness of pharmacological and psychological treatments for the condition. [read article]

PsychDaily
23 January 2006

Revenge 'more satisfying for men'
Men appear to get greater satisfaction than women when witnessing retribution, research suggests.

Scientists monitored brain activity in people while they watched someone they either liked, or disliked apparently suffering pain. While women showed signs of empathy with people they both liked and disliked, men appeared to enjoy pain being inflicted on their foes. [read more]

BBC News
19 January 2006

Balding, Wrinkled, and Stoned
The '60s are gone, but for some baby boomers, the drugs aren't. A guide to the cost of a 40-year high. [read the article]

Time Online Edition
15 January 2006

A brain chemical recently found to boost trust appears to work by reducing activity and weakening connections in fear-processing circuitry, a brain imaging study at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered. Scans of the hormone oxytocin's effect on human brain function reveal that it quells the brain's fear hub, the amygdala, and its brainstem relay stations in response to fearful stimuli. The work at NIMH and a collaborating site in Germany suggests new approaches to treating diseases thought to involve amygdala dysfunction and social fear, such as social phobia, autism, and possibly schizophrenia, report Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., NIMH Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program, and colleagues, in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. [read more]

NIMH Press Release
7 December 2005

How to Get Smarter, One Breath at a Time
Scientists find that meditation not only reduces stress but also reshapes the brain

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
Time Online Edition

Drug Prescriptions for Teens Surge 250 Percent Over Seven Years
Waltham, MA - Psychotropic drug prescriptions for teenagers skyrocketed 250 percent between 1994 and 2001, rising particularly sharply after 1999, when the federal government allowed direct-to-consumer advertising and looser promotion of off-label use of prescription drugs, according to a new Brandeis University study in the journal Psychiatric Services.

This dramatic increase in adolescent visits to health care professionals which resulted in a prescription for a psychotropic drug occurred despite the fact that few psychotropic drugs, typically prescribed for ADHD, depression and other mood disorders, are approved for use in children under 18. The study is one of the first to focus on prescriptions to adolescents, rather than children in general.

3 January 2006
Brandeis News

Your Sweet Tooth May Really Be in Your Brain's 'Pleasure Hotspot'
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—What makes those holiday candies and Christmas cookies look so tempting? University of Michigan researchers have discovered a "pleasure spot" in the brains of rats, helping neuroscientists understand where and how pleasure is generated in humans.

20 December 2005
University of Michigan News Service

Ellis kicked off board of institute he founded
A man who was once proclaimed the second most influential psychologist in the past 100 years has been summarily dumped from the board of the psychotherapy institute he founded nearly a half-century ago.

By Richard E. Gill, Assistant Editor
The National Psychologist
November/December 2005

The relationship between the size of a brain structure and the ability to recover from traumatic experiences also may influence overall personality type, according to a study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers. In a followup to earlier findings that an area of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) appears thicker in those who can better control their emotional response to unpleasant memories, the investigators found that study participants who exhibited better fear inhibition also score higher in measures of extraversion – an energetic, outgoing personality. The report appears in the Nov. 28 issue of NeuroReport.

"Some studies have demonstrated links between extraversion or the trait of neuroticism and the overall activity of brain regions that include the mOFC. But this is the first time anyone has looked at the potential relation of both brain structure and fear extinction to personality traits," says Mohammed Milad, PhD, of the MGH Department of Psychiatry, a co-lead author of the study.

Most individuals initially respond with physical and emotional distress to situations that bring back memories of traumatic events, but such responses usually diminish over time, as the situations are repeated without unpleasant occurrences. The ability to suppress those negative responses is called "extinction memory," and its deficiency may lead to anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder. In their previous study, the MGH team focused on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – an area on the lower surface of the brain that includes the mOFC and is believed to inhibit the activity of the amygdala, a structure known to be involved with fear. The current report combined the data analyzed in that study – published in the July 26, 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – with the results from a standard personality test. Since earlier research has associated levels of extraversion and neuroticism – oversensitivity and emotional instability – with vulnerability to anxiety disorders, the current experiment focused on those traits.

As described in the PNAS study, over two days 14 study participants viewed a series of digital photos that featured lamps with either a red or a blue light shining. On the first day, participants viewed the photos several times with a mild electric shock – described as annoying but not painful – delivered to their hands after one, but not the other, colored light appeared. They then viewed the photos again with no shocks administered. On the second day, participants' anxiety levels, determined by perspiration on the palm of the hand, were measured while they once again viewed the photos with both colors displayed but no shocks given. Structural magnetic resonance (MR) images of the volunteers' brains showed that those who responded with less anxiety on the second day also had a thicker mOFC, and no other areas of the brain appeared to be correlated with extinction retention.

Combining the results of the personality tests with the previously reported data revealed that both improved extinction retention and a thicker mOFC were associated with higher levels of extraversion and lower neuroticism. Using a statistical tool that analyzes whether one specific factor influences the relationship between the two other factors, the researchers found that while the relation between mOFC thickness and increased extraversion is mediated by extinction retention, the association between mOFC thickness and extinction retention does not seem to directly affect neuroticism.

"This study illustrates how measurement of a brain structure can be linked to a complex character trait like extraversion through a simpler behavioral measure like extinction retention," says Scott Rauch, MD, director of the Psychiatric Neuroscience Research Division in MGH Psychiatry and co-lead author of the paper. "Understanding how personality is based in the brain is important both for insights into personality disorders and for conditions in which personality may confer vulnerability, such as anxiety disorders."

Rauch adds, "We are in the process of studying the link between extinction retention and regional brain function and hope to investigate how developmental factors may govern the structure and function of the mOFC. The ability to modify mOFC activity may eventually prove to be of therapeutic value." Rauch is an associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

EurekAlert
28 November 2005

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati have found that eating or drinking sweets may decrease the production of the stress-related hormone glucocorticoid—which has been linked to obesity and decreased immune response.

“Glucocorticoids are produced when psychological or physical stressors activate a part of the brain called the ‘stress axis,’” said Yvonne Ulrich-Lai, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry. “These hormones help an individual survive and recover from stress, but have been linked to increased abdominal obesity and decreased immune function when produced in large amounts.

“Finding another way to affect the body’s response to stress and limit glucocorticoid production could alleviate some of these dangerous health effects.”

The laboratory findings were presented during a poster session Tuesday, Nov. 15, at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Ulrich-Lai and a team of researchers from the department of psychiatry showed that when laboratory rats chose to eat or drink sweet snacks their bodies produced lower levels of glucocorticoid.

She said that sweets—especially those made from sugar, not artificial sweetener—might do the trick.

"The sweets we are talking about are not the low-calorie, sugar-substitute variety,” said Dr. Ulrich-Lai. “We actually found that sugar snacks, not artificially sweetened snacks, are better ‘self-medications’ for the two most common types of stress—psychological and physical.”

Psychological stress could involve things such as public speaking, being threatened, or coping with the death of a loved one. Examples of physical stress are injury, illness, or prolonged exposure to cold.

During the study, researchers gave adult male rats free access to food and water and also offered them a small amount of sugar drink, artificially sweetened drink, or water twice a day. After two weeks, the rats were given a physical and psychological stress challenge. Following both types of stress, rats that had consumed the sugar drink had lower glucocorticoid levels than those that drank the water. Those drinking the artificially sweetened drink showed only slightly reduced glucocorticoid levels.

Dr. Ulrich-Lai noted that although her team was not studying the health effects of the sweetened drinks, they did not notice a body-weight increase in the rats consuming the sugar drinks.

James Herman, PhD, co-author, professor and stress neurobiologist in the department of psychiatry, said the next step will be to determine how these sweetened drinks are decreasing glucocorticoid production.

“We need to find out if there are certain parts of the brain that control the response to stress, then determine if the function of these brain regions are changed by sugar snacking,” he said.

Co-authors also included Dennis Choi and Michelle Ostrander, PhD, both of UC’s psychiatry department.

University of Cincinnati Medical Center News
15 November 2005

BOSTON - November 11, 2005 - The regular practice of meditation appears to produce structural changes in areas of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing. An imaging study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers showed that particular areas of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, were thicker in participants who were experienced practitioners of a type of meditation commonly practiced in the U.S. and other Western countries. The article appears in the Nov. 15 issue of NeuroReport, and the research also is being presented Nov. 14 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC.

"Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's lead author. "We also found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related atrophy of certain areas of the brain."

Studies have shown that mediation can produce alterations in brain activity, and meditation practitioners have described changes in mental function that last long after actual meditation ceases, implying long-term effects. However, those studies usually examined Buddhist monks who practiced mediation as a central focus of their lives.

To investigate whether meditation as typically practiced in the U.S. could change the brain's structure, the current study enrolled 20 practitioners of Buddhist Insight meditation - which focuses on "mindfulness," a specific, nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind. They averaged nine years of mediation experience and practiced about six hours per week. For comparison, 15 people with no experience of meditation or yoga were enrolled as controls.

Using standard MRI to produce detailed images of the structure of participants' brains, the researchers found that regions involved in the mental activities that characterize Insight meditation were thicker in the meditators than in the controls, the first evidence that alterations in brain structure may be associated with meditation. They also found that, in an area associated with the integration of emotional and cognitive processes, differences in cortical thickness were more pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation could reduce the thinning of the cortex that typically occurs with aging.

"The area where we see these differences is involved in both the modulation of functions like heart rate and breathing and also the integration of emotion with thought and reward-based decision making - a central switchboard of the brain," says Lazar. An instructor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, she also stresses that the results of such a small study need to be validated by larger, longer-term studies.

Massachusetts General Hospital News Release
11 November 2005

When someone in our social group makes friends with someone from another background, the chances are that our own prejudices will break down, according to new ESRC-funded research.

A study led by Dr. Adam Rutland, of the University of Kent, backs claims that the more we learn about others, the better we are likely to get on with them.

It found that what is termed the 'extended contact' approach, could effectively change children's attitudes and intended behaviour towards refugees, across the entire age range from six to 11.

Extended contact works on the idea that when a member of one group has a close relationship or contact with someone from another, this can lead to more positive attitudes all round.

Best results of all came when children were encouraged to see their own and other groups as sharing a common identity – their school – in addition to retaining their separate one as, say, English or a refugee. In other words, having a 'dual' identity.

To test this theory, researchers presented English children with one of their group who had made friends with a refugee youngster. Exercises over several weeks also included getting children to read adventure stories in which both English and refugee youngsters were shown in a positive light, and as friends.

Dr Rutland said: "Our findings testify to the value of extended contact as an approach to reducing prejudice. In particular, we found that including characters from other backgrounds in the stories read at school was very effective." The project examined various theories about childhood prejudice, and the effectiveness of various processes, or interventions, used by those trying to encourage friendship and co-operation.

The area studied was East Kent, which includes Dover and Folkestone, and contains a high proportion of immigrants or refugees as the main port of entry into the UK. Tension has arisen between the majority community and immigrants. One intervention technique examined - multiple classification skills training - is based on the belief that children are prejudiced because they cannot cope with more than one concept – for instance, that someone is Afro-Caribbean British and friendly. Nor, it is thought, can they take into account other people's points of view.

However, researchers found that though this sort of training improved children's ability to handle multiple concepts, it had no effect on attitudes towards others. Alternative approaches, all found effective, derive from theories that, under a given set of conditions, contact between members of different groups reduces existing prejudices.

Dr Rutland said: "It seems that extended contact leads children to 'include the other in the self' and this in turn leads to more positive attitudes."

EurekAlert
10 November 2005

CHICAGO – Bullying by elementary school children was associated with increased odds of lacking a feeling of safety while at school, having lower academic achievement, and feeling sad most days, according to an article in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

According to background information in the article, "Bullying is defined as any repeated negative activity or aggression intended to harm or bother someone who is perceived by peers as being less physically or psychologically powerful than the aggressor(s)." In a 2000 survey of more than 15,000 U.S. students, researchers found the prevalence of bullying involvement among teens and preteens was approximately 30 percent. Concerns about the role of bullying in school violence, depression, and health concerns have grown over the past decade.

Gwen M. Glew, M.D., of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues surveyed 3,530 third, fourth, and fifth grade students to determine prevalence of bullying and its association with attendance, academic achievement, suspension or expulsion, and self-reported feelings of sadness, safety and belonging. Students were classified as victims, bullies, bully-victims (those who were both victimized and bullied others), bystanders (children who did not bully others and were not bullied by others) and nonresponders.

Twenty-two percent of the children surveyed reported being involved in bullying, either as a victim, bully, or both. Six percent of the children reported being bullied "always," 14 percent said they bullied others, and two percent said they both bullied and were bullied. All three bullying-involved groups--either as a victim, bully or bully-victim--were significantly more likely than bystanders to feel unsafe at school. Among students who reported feeling as though they did not belong at school, their odds of being a victim were 4.1 times higher than those who felt they belonged at school; their odds of being a bully was 3.1 times higher than those saying they belonged. Bullies and victims were more likely than bystanders to feel sad most days. Both bullies and bully-victims were more likely to be male.

"The prevalence of frequent bullying among elementary school children is substantial. Associations between bullying involvement and school problems indicate this is a serious issue for elementary schools," the authors write. "The take-home message is that elementary school-aged children who are psychologically distressed are more likely to be involved in some form of bullying, and children who struggle academically are more likely to be victims and bully-victims."

EurekAlert
7 November 2005

Men behave in certain ways to retain their partner and to continue their relationship with her. Sometime it's sweet, like holding hands or giving flowers, and sometimes it's a harbinger of danger. A study published in the latest issue of Personal Relationships identifies several specific acts and tactics that lead to the possibility of violence. Vigilance over a partner's whereabouts was the highest-ranking tactic predicting violence across the researchers' three-study investigation. Emotional manipulation, such as a man saying he would "die" if his partner ever left also was predictive of violence. Monopolization of time and the threat to punish for infidelity also were signals of violence. Showing love and care was among the tactics not associated with violence. "Mate retention behaviors are designed to solve several adaptive problems, such as deterring a partner's infidelity and preventing defection from the mating relationship," author Todd K. Shackelford explains.

In the first two studies, the researchers asked independent samples of men and women to report on men's retention behaviors and men's violence against their partners. In the third study, they asked husbands and their wives to report on men's retention behaviors and violence against wives. The highest-ranking correlations between single acts and violence were not consistent across the three studies. But acts such as "dropped by unexpectedly to see what my partner was doing" and "called to make sure my partner was where she said she would be" were the overall third and fifth highest predictors of violence. These acts fall into Vigilance, which the couples reported as the highest–ranking tactic leading to violence and the only tactic across all three studies that uniquely predicts violence. "At a practical level, results of these studies can potentially be used to inform women and men, friends and relatives, of danger signs-- the specific acts and tactics of mate retention that portend the possibility of future violence in relationships in order to prevent it before it has been enacted," the authors conclude.

EurekAlert
27 October 2005

The hippocampus's role in memory may help explain why we cannot remember our early childhood, and why stress affects our memory later in life. [read the article]

APA Monitor
November 2005

Visual information can be processed unconsciously when the area of the brain that records what the eye sees is temporarily shut down, according to research at Rice University in Houston.

The research, published the week of Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' (PNAS) online Early Edition, suggests the brain has more than one pathway along which visual information can be sent.

For the study, the researchers induced temporary, reversible blindness lasting only a fraction of a second in nine volunteers with normal vision. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a harmless noninvasive technique using brief magnetic pulses, was applied to the volunteers' visual cortex -- the area at the back of the brain that processes what the eye sees - to interrupt the normal visual pathway. The volunteers looked at a computer screen, and during their momentary blindness, either a horizontal or a vertical line or a red or a green dot flashed on the screen.

Researchers then asked the study participants whether they had seen a horizontal or a vertical line; because their primary visual pathway had been shut down, the participants reported that they saw nothing. However, when forced to guess which line had appeared on their computer screen, the participants gave the correct answer 75 percent of the time. When the participants had to guess whether a red or a green dot had flashed on the screen, they gave the correct answer with 81 percent accuracy.

"This high degree of accuracy for both the directional orientation and color tasks was significantly above chance," said Tony Ro, associate professor of psychology and principal investigator for the study. "Even though the human primary visual cortex activity was temporarily shut down, it's clear that detailed visual information was still being processed unconsciously."

Because only a certain region of the thalamus - the area of the brain where all sensory information is relayed -- can process color, the study provides evidence that there must be a pathway that goes through this region of the thalamus to the higher visual centers of the brain, Ro said.

"In addition to providing direct evidence that unconscious processing takes place within the brain - a controversial claim that was advanced by the likes of Sigmund Freud and William James - our results suggest that multiple pathways relay visual input into the central nervous system for different types of processing," Ro said. "And our study also begins to shed light on the brain structures that are necessary for consciousness, with the primary visual cortex playing an essential role for visual awareness."

The phenomenon of "blindsight" has been reported in patients with brain damage who report not seeing something but correctly identify the shape and location when forced to guess. Ro noted that his study demonstrates that TMS can be used successfully to induce blindsight in people with normal vision.

Rice University News Release
31 October 2005

When's the last time you were happy to hear the phrases "some assembly required" or "your call is important to us?" And for that matter, what exactly is an economic adjustment, a broad abstraction or sound science?

According to Dr. Paul Wasserman, professor emeritus and founding dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, these deceptive phrases are good examples of what can be called doublespeak, weasel words, or even gobbledygook.

Wasserman says we are bombarded with examples of doublespeak ranging from the politically correct to the downright annoying from corporations, the media and politicians.

He has parlayed his interest in gobbledygook into a new book co-authored with Don Hausrath, who also has ties to the university as a former adjunct faculty member at the College of Information Studies. Wasserman and Hausrath have translated over 1,200 examples of doublespeak in Weasel Words: The Dictionary of American Doublespeak,(Capital Books) scheduled for release in November (2005).

University of Maryland News
19 October 2005

In a study designed to isolate the root causes of violent behavior, Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers found that young teens who witnessed gun violence were more than twice as likely as non-witnesses to commit violent crime themselves in the following years. The study will appear in the May 27 issue of Science.

"Based on this study's results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease," says Felton Earls, MD, HMS professor of social medicine and principal investigator of the study and of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.

"Preventing one violent crime may prevent a downstream cascade of infections. And the lessons learned in Chicago should be broadly applicable. Generalizing this to any large city should be valid," Earls said.

The study, a five-year project that included interviews of over 1,500 children and teenagers from 78 Chicago neighborhoods, used statistical advances and extremely detailed information about the study subjects to go beyond the correlations and associations typically used by social scientists to determine violent behavior.

"We have a broad range of factors, and a long course of study, so we can tease out the causal mechanisms," said first author Jeffrey Bingenheimer, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan who will be joining the Harvard School of Public Health in September as Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar.

Previous work has shown that a large network of factors pushes or pulls young people away from or into violent crime. Researchers suspected that exposure to violence in the community played a role, but many argued that a common factor, perhaps in family structure or personality, might be the common cause of both exposure to violence and later acts of violence. Demonstrating cause and effect with a controlled experiment, deliberately exposing some children to mayhem, would be ethically impossible.

But by grouping together and comparing teens with similar likelihood of exposure, some of whom were and some of whom were not actually witnesses to violence, the researchers were able to isolate the independent contribution made by seeing gun violence. And it turned out to be large, swamping other single factors like poverty, drug use, or being raised by a single parent.

The researchers studied the subject teens at three points in their adolescence. Initially they and their caregivers were intensively interviewed and data was collected about their families, personalities, neighborhoods, school performance, and many other factors; this allowed the researchers to group the teens by their propensity to witness gun violence. Two years later, the subjects were interviewed to see which of them had actually seen someone being shot, or shot at. Finally, almost three years further on, they were interviewed again to determine who had participated in gang violence or other violent actions.

After finding that witnessing violence more than doubled the risk that teens would violently offend, the team looked at their statistics to check whether an unknown factor could be hiding from them. They found that something significant would have to be at work to change the findings substantially, and it would have to be uncorrelated with the factors they did examine. "And honestly, it's very difficult to think what we might have left out," Earls said, pointing to the 153 variables that were embraced in the study.

There is no shortage of medical ways to view urban violence, but the challenge for social medicine researchers is to choose the best one - is violence a product of families, akin to a hereditary disorder? Or is violence like an environmental contaminant, lurking in some communities and leaving others unscathed? Based this study's results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, Earls feels the best model may be an socially contagious disease.

This study was part of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a major interdisciplinary study aimed at deepening society's understanding of the causes and pathways of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, substance abuse, and violence. The firearm violence study was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Harvard Medical School News Release
26 May 2005

First-ever images of living human retinas have yielded a surprise about how we perceive our world. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people--by up to 40 times--yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week's journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.

"We were able to precisely image and count the color-receptive cones in a living human eye for the first time, and we were astonished at the results," says David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the Center for Visual Science. "We've shown that color perception goes far beyond the hardware of the eye, and that leads to a lot of interesting questions about how and why we perceive color."

Williams and his research team, led by postdoctoral student Heidi Hofer, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston, used a laser-based system developed by Williams that maps out the topography of the inner eye in exquisite detail. The technology, known as adaptive optics, was originally used by astronomers in telescopes to compensate for the blurring of starlight caused by the atmosphere.

Williams turned the technique from the heavens back toward the eye to compensate for common aberrations. The technique allows researchers to study the living retina in ways that were never before possible. The pigment that allows each cone in the human eye to react to different colors is very fragile and normal microscope light bleaches it away. This means that looking at the retina from a cadaver yields almost no information on the arrangement of their cones, and there is certainly no ability to test for color perception. Likewise, the amino acids that make up two of the three different-colored cones are so similar that there are no stains that can bind to some and not others, a process often used by researchers to differentiate cell types under a microscope.

Imaging the living retina allowed Williams to shine light directly into the eye to see what wavelengths each cone reflects and absorbs, and thus to which color each is responsive. In addition, the technique allows scientists to image more than a thousand cones at once, giving an unprecedented look at the composition and distribution of color cones in the eyes of living humans with varied retinal structure.

Each subject was asked to tune the color of a disk of light to produce a pure yellow light that was neither reddish yellow nor greenish yellow. Everyone selected nearly the same wavelength of yellow, showing an obvious consensus over what color they perceived yellow to be. Once Williams looked into their eyes, however, he was surprised to see that the number of long- and middle-wavelength cones--the cones that detect red, green, and yellow--were sometimes profusely scattered throughout the retina, and sometimes barely evident. The discrepancy was more than a 40:1 ratio, yet all the volunteers were apparently seeing the same color yellow.

"Those early experiments showed that everyone we tested has the same color experience despite this really profound difference in the front-end of their visual system," says Hofer. "That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism--some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is."

In a related experiment, Williams and a postdoctoral fellow Yasuki Yamauchi, working with other collaborators from the Medical College of Wisconsin, gave several people colored contacts to wear for four hours a day. While wearing the contacts, people tended to eventually feel as if they were not wearing the contacts, just as people who wear colored sunglasses tend to see colors "correctly" after a few minutes with the sunglasses. The volunteers' normal color vision, however, began to shift after several weeks of contact use. Even when not wearing the contacts, they all began to select a pure yellow that was a different wavelength than they had before wearing the contacts.

"Over time, we were able to shift their natural perception of yellow in one direction, and then the other," says Williams. "This is direct evidence for an internal, automatic calibrator of color perception. These experiments show that color is defined by our experience in the world, and since we all share the same world, we arrive at the same definition of colors."

Williams' team is now looking to identify the genetic basis for this large variation between retinas. Early tests on the original volunteers showed no simple connection among certain genes and the number and diversity of color cones, but Williams is continuing to search for the responsible combination of genes.

University of Rochester Press Release
25 October 2005

What difference does it make if a prosecutor describes a defendant as a “murderer” or as “someone who commits murder?” In some cases, those few words could mean the difference between life and death.
   
New research by Vanderbilt University psychologist Jessica Giles reveals that beliefs about people who have committed violent acts are strongly influenced by the words used to describe those people.

“Noun labels have a powerful influence on our thoughts and beliefs about others. In the criminal justice system, potential jurors who repeatedly hear a defendant being called a ‘strangler’ in the press might be more likely to support a death sentence for that defendant,” Giles, assistant professor of psychology in the Vanderbilt Peabody College of Education and Human Development, said. “That these labels might also be used to manipulate, inflame or prejudice the general public is of substantial interest in light of recent political rhetoric concerning ‘terrorists’ and ‘evildoers.’”

Giles’ recent research found that both children and adults are more likely to have a negative, fixed view of people described with a noun, such as “evildoer” or “murderer,” than a person described as “someone who does evil things” or “someone who commits murder.” Giles presented the research at the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in San Diego Oct. 21.
 
 “We use nouns generally to describe things whose essential nature does not change: brick, house, dog,” Giles said. “We learn at a very early age that nouns are used to describe something’s fundamental character. As a result, when we hear a person being described with a noun—murderer, sex offender, criminal—we tend to automatically infer that that person cannot and will not change.”

Giles has conducted multiple studies examining the impact on adults and children of using nouns to describe violence and aggression. In a recent study, 90 adults were given surveys about what they believe causes violence, their perceptions of the effectiveness of criminal rehabilitation and their attitudes toward legal sanctions. In one version, the survey questions used the word “murderer”; questions in the other version used “people who commit murder.” She found that participants whose surveys used the term  “murderer” were more likely to respond that the person described is inherently violent and will not change, more likely to endorse punitive legal sanctions and less likely to view rehabilitation as effective.

Giles then looked at the impact of noun labels on participants’ attitudes toward Megan’s Law, which mandates that people convicted of certain classes of sex crimes register their whereabouts when released from prison. She found that participants were significantly more likely to endorse the law when questions were posed using the noun label “sex offender” than when using the phrase “commits sex offenses.”

Giles found that the effect of noun labels is also strong in children. In one study, preschoolers who heard a character described as an “evildoer” were more likely to infer stability over time and resistance to intervention than were children who heard a character described as someone who “who does evil things whenever he can.” The same held true in additional work using the label “bully.”

The research strongly suggests that children use nouns as powerful cues for making sense of people and their behavior.

“In addition to demonstrating that noun labels can influence adults’ beliefs and attitudes, this study also indicates that the way we talk to our children about violence and aggression has an early and lasting impact,” Giles said. “We know that the use of labels like “bully” to describe children who have misbehaved can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to focus on changing the behavior and building the child’s strengths as opposed to pigeonholing him or her based on a label.”

Vanderbilt News Service
21 October 2005

A synthetic substance similar to ones found in marijuana stimulates cell growth in regions of the brain associated with anxiety and depression, pointing the way for new treatments for these diseases, according to University of Saskatchewan medical research published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Xia Zhang, an associate professor in the U of S neuropsychiatry research unit, led the team that tested the effects of HU-210, a potent synthetic cannabinoid similar to a group of compounds found in marijuana. The synthetic version is about 100 times as powerful as THC, the compound responsible for the high experienced by recreational users.

The team found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. This region of the brain is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.

The effect is the opposite of most legal and illicit drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine.

“Most ‘drugs of abuse’ suppress neurogenesis,” Zhang says. “Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis.”

Current theory states that depression may be sparked when too few new brain cells are grown in the hippocampus. It is unclear whether anxiety is part of this process, but if true, HU-210 could offer a treatment for both mood disorders by stimulating the growth of new brain cells.

But Zhang cautions that HU-210 is only one of many cannabinoids. His previous work with marijuana shows that while the plant may contain medicinal compounds, they come in the same package as those that cause symptoms such as acute memory impairment, addiction, and withdrawal. Also, the HU-210 used in the study is highly purified.

“This is a very potent cannabinoid oil,” Zhang says. “It’s not something that would be available on the street.”

Marijuana has been used for recreational and medicinal purposes for centuries, evoking public interest and controversy along the way. As a medicine, the plant is used to ease pain in multiple sclerosis patients, combat nausea in cancer patients, and stimulate appetite in people afflicted with AIDS. It has also been used to treat epilepsy and stroke.

Zhang’s work is the latest product of the U of S Neural Systems and Plasticity Research Group (http://www.usask.ca/neuralsystems/group.htm), a multidisciplinary effort by researchers from the Colleges of Arts and Science, Engineering, Kinesiology, Medicine, Pharmacy and Nutrition, and Veterinary Medicine. The group collaborates to study the function of neural systems, from nerves to brain, in living organisms. In particular, they look at how these systems change over time with experience.

Press Release
Univ. of Saskatchewan
13 October 2005

A new Memorial-based study is the first to systematically mark the onset of "childhood amnesia" in children rather than adults. The research shows that by our tenth birthday our early pre-school memories have receded into an inaccessible past.

It's a result, the lead researcher says, that further deepens the mystery around the fate of our earliest autobiographical memories.

"I expected that they would differ, but there's a striking similarity in the age of the earliest memory for adults and ten-year-olds," says Dr. Carole Peterson, a psychologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her study, funded by NSERC, was published in the August issue of the journal Memory.

The results extend what Dr. Peterson calls the paradox of surrounding childhood amnesia – adults’ inability to recall autobiographical events that occurred before the age of four. Four- and three-year-olds can readily recall events from their second year. Yet, by the age of ten these earliest memories have receded behind what's been dubbed the "reminiscence bump."

"We don't have any good models to explain this. The memories were there and had been verbally accessible. So, why aren't they there any more?" says Dr. Peterson, who since the 1970s has explored the dynamics of children's autobiographical memories.

For this study, Dr. Peterson and undergraduate students Valerie Grant and Lesley Boland asked 136 participants ages six to 19 for their earliest memories. It's a sample size that Dr. Peterson says provides statistically significant results.

The researchers found that six- to nine-year-olds recalled earlier events (from when they were about three) than did older children. However, there were no differences in the age of earliest memory among the older groups. Their earliest memories were from about three and a half years of age. Thus, by ten years old, participants’ memories had entered an "adult" state of remembering.

So what are our earliest memories?

While previous researchers have found that a large number of adults' earliest memories are emotion laden, Dr. Peterson's group "found that the majority of the early memories were about relatively mundane experiences." These ranged from the memory of looking at a flower growing out of a crack in the pavement to walking across a narrow bridge over a river. Only teenaged girls 14 to 19 had a preponderance (about 40 per cent) of negative first memories.

"It's not at all clear why some things get into long-term memory and some do not," says Dr. Peterson.

The researchers also found few differences between age groups in how earliest events are remembered. All of the participants recalled events with about the same level of narrative complexity, generally describing a "snapshot of a moment in time."

"Perhaps it’s the level of narrative skill possessed at the age at which the memory was encoded, not the current narrative skill, that determines the structure of a recollection," write the authors.

The research is part of Dr. Peterson's larger, ongoing research on children's autobiographical memories. The present findings have prompted a collaborative study exploring the earliest memories of autistic children to determine the role of self-awareness – one possible factor put forward by some researchers – in determining the onset of childhood amnesia. Autistic children are thought to lack a strong sense of self.

While the bulk of our pre-school memories will surely slip over the memory threshold, Dr. Peterson says that parents can play a role in determining which of their children's memories become lifelong ones. The more parents talk to children about particular experiences, the greater the chance that this verbal reinforcement will extend early memories.

"Talking a lot about your experiences, encoding them in language, has an impact on preserving the memory, there's no doubt about that," says Dr. Peterson. "But this doesn't solve the mystery of why it is that something that you could remember and talk about at one stage, disappears later."

Memorial University of Newfoundland
4 October 2005

Commuting is never fun, and is almost always stressful, in part because we often have no control over what happens to us. But everyday we get in our car, or board the train or bus, and make our way to work, having become accustomed to this stress, not realizing that this stress may have a measurable affect on our brain.

Although we do not yet know if this is the case for humans, new research in rats from the laboratory of Rockefeller University’s Bruce McEwen, Ph.D., shows that chronic, uncontrollable stress of repeated confinement leads to gradual changes in brain structure over weeks. Yet, even a single acute stress of putting a rat in a tube where it cannot move freely also causes a structural change in the brain, not immediately but over days, along with higher levels of anxiety. These results may help scientists understand what is happening in the human brain during post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders and depressive illness.

In earlier studies, McEwen and colleagues had looked at changes in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that respond to repeated, confinement stress and which are important in memory storage and retrieval. Turning to a different area of the brain called the amygdala, which is thought to play a role in fear and anxiety memories, they wanted to see if it too was involved in processing stressful experiences. Indeed they found that repeated stress increased anxiety as well as a form of aggression.

“Understanding how the whole nervous system functions, how the different areas of the brain interact, is vital to understanding the neurological basis of depressive illness and anxiety disorders,” says McEwen, who is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller. “And we knew of some evidence that the neurons in the amygdala are more active in depression and anxiety disorders.”

“The new paper, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Sumantra Chattarji’s laboratory in Bangalore, India, and MIT, shows that even a single stressful event in these animals can have a measurable and delayed influence on the architecture of their brains, and on their behavior,” adds McEwen. “We would like to think that these findings might become relevant in understanding conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.”

The follow-up of this paper is under investigation in collaborative studies with investigators at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and New York University under a National Institute of Mental Health Conte Center Grant for the Neurobiology of Fear and Anxiety. Further studies in the McEwen lab seek to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms for these changes, including the role of stress hormones.

The research, published in the June 28 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was supported by The Wellcome Trust.

The figure is famous: a deceptively simple line drawing that at first glance resembles a vase and, at the next, a pair of human faces in profile. When you look at this figure, your brain must rapidly decide what the various lines denote. Are they the outlines of the vase or the borders of two faces? How does your brain decide?

It does so in a fraction of a second via special nerve circuits in the brain's visual center that automatically organize information into a "whole" even as an individual's gaze and attention are focused on only one part, according to Johns Hopkins researchers writing in a recent issue of the journal Neuron.

"Our paper answers the century-old question of the basis of subconscious processes in visual perception, specifically, the phenomenon of figure-ground organization," said Rudiger von der Heydt, a professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute. "Early in the 20th century, the Gestalt psychologists postulated the existence of mechanisms that process visual information automatically and independently of what we know, think or expect. Since then, there has always been the question as to whether these mechanisms actually exist. They do. Our work suggests that the system continuously organizes the whole scene, even though we usually are attending only to a small part of it."

The report, based on recordings of nerve cells in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys, suggests that this automatic processing of images is repeated each time an individual looks at something new, usually three to four times per second. What's more, the brain provides what von der Heydt calls "a sophisticated program" to select and process the information that is relevant at any given moment.

"The result of this organization is an internal data structure, quite similar to a database, that allows the attention mechanism to work efficiently," von der Heydt said. "An image can be compared with a bag of thousands of little Lego blocks in chaotic order. To pay attention to an object in space, the visual system first has to arrange this bag of blocks into useful 'chunks' and provide threads by which one or the other chunk can be pulled out for further processing."

He noted that the research provides the theoretical foundation that might one day lead to better diagnosis and treatment of human brain disorders.

"The last decades have seen rapid progress in the neurosciences at a very broad front, particularly at the molecular and cellular levels, and this progress makes it increasingly clear that we still lack sufficient understanding of brain function at the 'system level,'" he said. "We need to understand the basis of mental processes. Single cell recording in animals is only one approach to this formidable task. It is complemented by new brain imaging techniques, traditional psychophysics, psychology and computational and theoretical neuroscience. ... Understanding the function of the visual cortex will help to interpret neurological symptoms in diseases that produce disorders of vision."

This work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The paper, "Figure and Ground in Visual Cortex: V2 Combines Stereoscopic Cues with Gestalt Rules" appeared in the July 7, 2005, issue of Neuron (Volume 47).