Primer describes current understanding of human taste perception and biology

Despite the significance of taste to both human gratification and survival, a basic understanding of this primal sense is still unfolding. Taste provides both pleasure and protection. Often taken for granted, the sense of taste evaluates everything humans put into their mouths. Taste mediates recognition of a substance and the final decision process before it is either swallowed and taken into the body, or rejected as inappropriate.

A new primer written by scientists at the Monell Center and Florida State University and published in the February 26 issue of Current Biology, provides a clear and accessible overview of recent advances in understanding human taste perception and its underlying biology.

Within the past few years, identification of receptors for sweet, bitter and umami (savory) taste has led to new insights regarding how taste functions, but many questions remain to be answered. The Current Biology primer reviews the current state of knowledge regarding how taste stimuli are detected and ultimately translated by the nervous system into the perceptual experiences of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami.

Such perceptual evaluations are related to the function and ultimately, the consequences, of taste evaluation. These can range from pleasurable emotional reactions, for example the delight a child receives from a sweet candy, to the critical life-dependent response that causes a person to spit out a bitter potential toxin.

Author Paul A.S. Breslin, PhD, a sensory scientist at the Monell Center, observes, “For all mammals, the collective influence of taste over a lifetime has a huge impact on pleasure, health, well being, and disease. Taste’s importance to our daily lives is self-evident in its metaphors – for example: the ‘sweetness’ of welcoming a newborn child, the ‘bitterness’ of defeat, the ‘souring’ of a relationship, and describing a truly good human as the ‘salt’ of the earth.”

25 February 2008

Eric Chudler at Neuroscience for Kids has recently added Neuroscience on Stamps.

Scientific American -- Science Talk
(6 February 2008)

In this episode, University of California, Berkeley, linguist Alice Gaby talks about the relationships among language, culture, cognition and perception.

Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) scientists have found another important clue to why nerve cells die in neurodegenerative diseases, based on studies of the developing brain. Neuroscientists at The University of Queensland have just published findings, which add more weight to the "use it or lose it" model for brain function.

QBI's Dr Elizabeth Coulson said a baby's brain generates roughly double the number of nerve cells it needs to function; with those cells that receive both chemical and electrical stimuli surviving, and the remaining cells dying. In research published in the "Journal of Neuroscience", Dr Coulson and her colleagues have identified a crucial step in the cell-death process. "It appears that if a cell is not appropriately stimulated by other cells, it self-destructs," Dr Coulson said.

This self-destruct process is also known to be an important factor in stroke, Alzheimer's and motor neuron diseases, leading to the loss of essential nerve cells from the adult brain. "We know that a lack of both chemical and electrical stimuli causes the cells to self-destruct," Dr Coulson said. "But we believe that nerve cells will survive if appropriate electrical stimuli are produced to block the self-destruct process that we have identified." The researchers' next step is to test whether dying cells receiving only electrical stimulation can be rescued.

More than three years' research has gone into understanding these crucial factors regulating nerve cell survival, but it is a major step in the long process of discovery needed to combat neurodegeneration. QBI Director, Professor Perry Bartlett said the research is an extremely exciting finding because it also provides the missing piece of information as to how the brain likely keeps alive the new neurons it generates in some brain areas as an adult. "Combining this with our knowledge of how to stimulate new neurons in the brain of adults following to disease processes such as stroke, it provides new mechanisms for the treatment of a variety of diseases from depression to dementia," he said.

Very young brains process memories of fear differently than more mature ones, new research indicates. The findings appear in the Feb. 6 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The work significantly advances scientific understanding of when and how fear is stored and unlearned, and introduces new thinking on the implications of fear experience early in life.

“This important paper raises questions that are the ‘tip of the iceberg’ related to the very complex series of events that occur as we learn to fear something. In the real world, we become fearful, extinguish that fear, reacquire it at another time, and then conquer it yet again,” says John Krystal, MD, of Yale University and director of the clinical neuroscience division of the VA National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Typically, we think about long-term, negative impact of fear learning, such as lifelong problems with anxiety. But this work highlights an avenue for adapting to early stresses that apparently can occur only early in life: to erase a learned fear from memory.” Krystal was not affiliated with the research.

Study co-authors Jee Hyun Kim and Rick Richardson, PhD, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, homed in on the amygdala, using anesthesia to temporarily inactivate it and therefore isolate its role. The amygdala is critical for emotional learning and plays a central role in dulling the memory of a fear. Kim and Richardson trained rats that were 16 and 23 days old—the human equivalent of children and budding adolescents—to associate a specific sound with a mild shock to the foot. After subsequent training, when the sound was not followed by a shock, the animals’ fearful reaction to hearing the sound faded. Technically, this is known as “extinction,” and depended on the function of the amygdala.

In a second round of training, the researchers reintroduced the fear and tried to re-extinguish it. This time around, they found, only the older rats were able to do so without the amygdala. The researchers concluded that the age at which the initial extinction training occurred was critical to whether or not the rats’ fear faded the second time independently of the amygdala. The authors suggest that in the very young, it is primarily the amygdala that extinguishes fearful memories, but that mechanisms independent of the amygdala develop later.

This raises the possibility that fears unlearned at an early enough age are, in fact, erased. As brains develop, however, and related structures near the amygdala mature, these structures take on a greater role. Thus, fear in adolescence and later in life may not be erased, but instead be, for example, inhibited by a process of overlaying neutral memories on top of the initial fear reaction. The initial memory could still exist and be called on again. “Extinction in the young brain might forever erase early traumatic learning—but accepting this hypothesis will have to wait for more research,” says Mark Bouton, PhD, of the University of Vermont, who did not participate in the esearch. “What might change as the brain develops is where and how fear learning and extinction are stored and how they can be retrieved.”

In the first study to use imaging technology to see what goes on in the brain when we scratch, researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have uncovered new clues about why scratching may be so relieving – and why it can be hard to stop. The work is reported online in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and will appear in a future print issue.

"Our study shows for the first time how scratching may relieve itch,” said lead author Gil Yosipovitch, M.D., a dermatologist who specializes in itch. “It’s important to understand the mechanism of relief so we can develop more effective treatments. For some people, itch is a chronic condition that affects overall health.” The study involved 13 healthy participants who underwent testing with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology that highlights areas of the brain activated during an activity. Participants were scratched on the lower leg with a small brush. The scratching went on for 30 seconds and was then stopped for 30 seconds – for a total of about five minutes.

“To our surprise, we found that areas of the brain associated with unpleasant or aversive emotions and memories became significantly less active during the scratching,” said Yosipovitch. “We know scratching is pleasurable, but we haven’t known why. It’s possible that scratching may suppress the emotional components of itch and bring about its relief.” The reduced brain activity occurred in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with aversion to unpleasant sensory experiences, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with memory. When participants reported that the scratching felt most intense, activation in these areas was lowest.

Yosipovitch said patients occasionally report that intense scratching – to the point of drawing blood – is the only thing that relieves chronic itch. “This is the first real scientific evidence showing that itch may be inhibited by scratching,” he said. “Of course, scratching is not recommended because it can damage the skin. But understanding how the process works could lead to new treatments. For example, drugs that deactivate this part of the brain might be effective.”

The imaging studies also showed that some areas of the brain were made more active by the scratching, including the secondary somatosensory cortex, a sensory area involved in pain, and the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with compulsive behavior. “This could explain the compulsion to continue scratching,” said Yosipovitch.

One drawback to the study is that the scratching occurred in the absence of itch. Yosipovitch’s team is continuing the research by evaluating whether the findings will apply to chronic itch. Understanding more about chronic itch is important, Yosipovitch said, noting that more than 30 million Americans suffer from eczema and that almost half (42 percent) of kidney dialysis patients are bothered by moderate to severe itch. In fact, those kidney dialysis patients with itch have a 17 percent higher mortality rate, likely from a loss of sleep, according to a report in Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation.


Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center News
31 January 2008

Another crack at non-addictive opioids? Why we don't get hooked on our own endorphins.
by Maia Szalavitz at 60-Second Science
29 January 2008

Four days’ exposure to a REM sleep deprivation procedure reduces cell proliferation in the part of the forebrain that contributes to long-term memory of rats, according to a study published in the February 1 issue of the journal SLEEP. [abstract] The study, authored by Dennis McGinty, PhD, of the V.A. Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, focused on male Sprague-Dawley rats.

REM sleep deprivation was achieved by a brief treadmill movement initiated by automatic online detection of REM sleep. A yoked-control (YC) rat was placed in the same treadmill and experienced the identical movement regardless of the stage of the sleep-wake cycle. According to the results, REM sleep was reduced by 85 percent in REM sleep deprived rats and by 43 percent in YC rats. Cell proliferation was reduced by 63 percent in REM sleep deprived rats compared with YC rats. Across all animals, cell proliferation exhibited a positive correlation with the percentage of REM sleep.

“Several studies have shown that sleep contributes to brain plasticity in general, and to adult neurogenesis, in particular,” said Dr. McGinty. “Neurogenesis is a concrete example of brain plasticity, suppression of adult neurogenesis is thought to be important in pathologies such as depression. One current question has to do with the relative contribution of the two sleep states, non-REM and REM, which have very different, even opposite, physiological properties. This study showed that REM sleep has a critical role in facilitating brain plasticity. The study does not exclude an equally important role for non-REM sleep. In other recent work, we have shown that sleep fragmentation can also suppress adult neurogenesis. How sleep affects the molecular mechanisms underlying neurogenesis remains to be explored.”

It is recommended that older adults get between seven and eight hours of nightly sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) offers the following tips on how to get a good night’s sleep:

• Follow a consistent bedtime routine.
• Establish a relaxing setting at bedtime.
• Get a full night’s sleep every night.
• Avoid foods or drinks that contain caffeine, as well as any medicine that has a stimulant, prior to bedtime.
• Do not bring your worries to bed with you.
• Do not go to bed hungry, but don’t eat a big meal before bedtime either.
• Avoid any rigorous exercise within six hours of your bedtime.
• Make your bedroom quiet, dark and a little bit cool.
• Get up at the same time every morning.

In a study that may significantly advance the understanding of how cognitive-behavioral therapy affects the brain, researchers have shown that significant changes in activity in certain regions of the brain can be produced with as little as four weeks of daily therapy in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The discovery could have important clinical implications, according to principal investigator Sanjaya Saxena, M.D., Director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, whose findings are published on line this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

“The study is exciting because it tells us more about how cognitive-behavioral therapy works for OCD and shows that both robust clinical improvements and changes in brain activity occur after only four weeks of intensive treatment," said Saxena.

OCD is an anxiety disorder in which individuals have unreasonable fears or worries that they try to manage through ritualized compulsive behaviors to reduce the anxiety. For example, a patient may experience the urgent need to engage in certain rituals, such as hand washing or repeatedly checking that the oven is off or the front door is locked.

Past studies using functional brain imaging studies of patients with OCD have demonstrated that elevated activity along the frontal-subcortical circuits of the brain decreases in response to treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) medications or cognitive-behavioral therapy. However, clinical improvement of OCD symptoms was expected to require up to 12 weeks of behavioral therapy or medication treatment, the standard treatments for OCD. Only a handful of studies have looked at how therapy affects brain function, and all previous studies had examined changes over several months of treatment.

Saxena and colleagues at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA made two novel discoveries in their study of 10 OCD patients and 12 control subjects. “First of all, we discovered significant changes in brain activity solely as the result of four weeks of intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy,” said Saxena. “Secondly, these changes were different than those seen in past studies after a standard 12-week therapeutic approach using SRI medications or weekly behavioral therapy.” The researchers obtained positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the ten OCD patients both before and after they received four weeks of a therapy known as “exposure and response prevention,” which gradually desensitizes patients to things that provoke obsessional fears or worries. “This is the primary kind of therapy used for OCD. It teaches patients to pay attention to their internal experiences and tolerate scary thoughts without having to act on them,” said Saxena. “They learn that nothing terrible happens if they refrain from their usual compulsive behaviors.”

The normal control subjects received no treatment and were scanned twice, several weeks apart, and metabolic changes in the brain were compared between the two groups. After four weeks of therapy and without any changes in medication, the OCD patients showed significant improvements in OCD symptoms, depression, anxiety and overall functioning. The PET scans of OCD patients demonstrated significant decreases in glucose metabolism – a measure of brain cell activity – in the right and left thalamus after treatment. These are areas of the brain involved in OCD and where changes have been seen in numerous past studies after longer-term treatment.

However, the PET scans in this study also showed a significant increase in activity in an area of the brain called the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in reappraisal and suppression of negative emotions. Increasing activity in this region corresponded to the OCD patients’ improvement in clinical symptoms after the four-week course of intensive therapy. Activity in this area had previously been found to increase after cognitive-behavioral therapy for major depression. Therefore, the researchers theorize that response to cognitive-behavioral therapy across a variety of disorders may require activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, according to Saxena.

Turner, E.H., Matthews, A.M., Linardatos, E., Tell, R.A., & Rosenthal, R. (2008). Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy. New England Journal of Medicine, 358(3). 252-260.

ABSTRACT
Background: Evidence-based medicine is valuable to the extent that the evidence base is complete and unbiased. Selective publication of clinical trials — and the outcomes within those trials — can lead to unrealistic estimates of drug effectiveness and alter the apparent risk–benefit ratio.

Methods: We obtained reviews from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for studies of 12 antidepressant agents involving 12,564 patients. We conducted a systematic literature search to identify matching publications. For trials that were reported in the literature, we compared the published outcomes with the FDA outcomes. We also compared the effect size derived from the published reports with the effect size derived from the entire FDA data set.

Results: Among 74 FDA-registered studies, 31%, accounting for 3449 study participants, were not published. Whether and how the studies were published were associated with the study outcome. A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published. Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies). According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive. Separate meta-analyses of the FDA and journal data sets showed that the increase in effect size ranged from 11 to 69% for individual drugs and was 32% overall.

Conclusions: We cannot determine whether the bias observed resulted from a failure to submit manuscripts on the part of authors and sponsors, from decisions by journal editors and reviewers not to publish, or both. Selective reporting of clinical trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, health care professionals, and patients.

NEJM: 17 January 2008

"No Clowning for Hospitalized Kids"
60-Second Science from Scientific American podcasts
January 17, 2008

Researchers spoke to 255 kids between the ages of 4 and 16.  And none of them liked clowns. 

According to the magazine Nursing Standard, one researcher said, “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them frightening and unknowable.”

Find topical links to information resources that may be of interest to victims of crime. For additional information on available services in your area, visit OVC's Directory of Crime Victim Services.

BIDEN, COLLINS Resolution Designates January as National Stalking Awareness Month

Washington, DC – U.S. Senators Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE) and Susan Collins (RME) introduced a resolution designating January as National Stalking Awareness Month. This is the fifth consecutive year the Senate has considered the resolution, which applauds the efforts of policymakers, law enforcement officers, victim service providers, and other groups that currently promote stalking awareness.

“Stalking is not a one-time occurrence; this is a crime that leaves its victim fearful 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No place – not even home – is safe if a stalker knows where the victim lives. Victims spend their days and nights looking over their shoulder, often changing jobs, relocating their homes, and even changing their appearance to escape the stalker,” said Sen. Biden, author of the landmark Violence Against Women Act. In many instances, victims usually know their stalkers and 81 percent of women victims are also physically assaulted by their stalker. “January is National Stalking Awareness Month – the perfect opportunity for parents, lawmakers and community leaders to carefully review state and local laws on stalking and insist that laws keep pace with technology and protect victims.”

“I am pleased to join my colleague, Senator Biden, in introducing a Resolution marking January as National Stalking Awareness Month,” said Sen. Collins. “In my home state of Maine, domestic violence is a widespread problem. Many experts have concluded that there is a strong connection between stalking and violence toward women. Efforts, such as National Stalking Awareness Month, help raise awareness about this serious and potentially deadly crime.”

According to the National Center for Victims of Crime and the Stalking Resource Center, approximately 1 million women and 400,000 men are victims of stalking in this country annually. 1 in 12 women and 1 in 45 men will be stalked at some point in their lives, as well as close to 13 percent of female college students. Moreover, today’s technology has made stalking much easier, as stalkers can design websites to encourage others to monitor or harm their victim, install spyware on their victim’s computer or plant global positioning systems (GPS) in their victim’s car to track their victim’s travels. Other technologies, including social networking websites, such as Facebook and MySpace, cell phones with surveillance devices meant for parents monitoring their children, and running shoes implanted with GPS devices, may provide additional opportunities for stalkers to harm their victims. While all fifty states have laws against stalking, only one third of states have included language relating to stalking via electronic means.

“Stalking is a serious and potentially lethal crime,” said Mary Lou Leary, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. “We thank Senators Biden and Collins for introducing this National Stalking Awareness Month resolution, which will raise awareness about the impact of stalking on more than 1.4 million Americans each year.”

“We can – and we must – do more to ensure that stalking victims are not forced to live in constant fear and that stalkers are brought to justice,” added Sen. Biden. For victim assistance, call the National Crime Victim Helpline at 1-800-FYICALL. Visit www.ncvc.org/src for a map of activities planned around the country for National Stalking Awareness Month and for more information.

QuickStats: Life Expectancy at Birth, by Race* and Sex --- United States, 1970--2005
Center for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (4 January || 56(51);1347)


* Races include non-Hispanics and Hispanics.

Longer commutes due to fewer lane changes, slower speeds

Motorists who talk on cell phones drive slower on the freeway, pass sluggish vehicles less often and take longer to complete their trips, according to a University of Utah study that suggests drivers on cell phones congest traffic.

“At the end of the day, the average person’s commute is longer because of that person who is on the cell phone right in front of them,” says University of Utah psychology Professor Dave Strayer, leader of the research team. “That SOB on the cell phone is slowing you down and making you late.”

“If you talk on the phone while you’re driving, it’s going to take you longer to get from point A to point B, and it’s going to slow down everybody else on the road,” says Joel Cooper, a doctoral student in psychology.

Cooper is scheduled to present the study in Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 16 during the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting. The board is part of the National Academies, parent organization of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine.

Cooper and Strayer conducted the study with Ivana Vladisavljevic, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering, and Peter Martin, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the University of Utah Traffic Lab. Martin says that, combined with Strayer’s previous research, the new study shows “cell phones not only make driving dangerous, they cause delay too.” [read more]

Bored? Don't blame your job, the traffic or your mindless chores. Battling boredom, researchers say, means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for.

Anna Gosline || Scientific American Mind || December 2007

Newly published research in the journal Science confirms that institutionalized orphans placed into foster care have much better intellectual development than those who remain behind. The authors say the results have implications for countries "grappling with how best to care for abandoned, orphaned and maltreated young children."

A team of researchers including Nathan Fox, a professor of human development (College of Education) at the University of Maryland, has been studying a randomly chosen group of 136 abandoned children from six institutions in Bucharest, Romania for a number of years. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) tracked the children out to 54 months of age. Also involved in the study are Charles Nelson of Harvard University; Dr. Charles Zeanah and Anna Smyke of Tulane University, and Peter Marshall of Temple University. The research was supported by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on "Early Experience and Brain Development."

The Importance of Early Intervention
Earlier evidence from the intervention project showed that young children who remain institutionalized suffered intellectual, emotional, psychiatric and brain development problems. Prof. Fox says, "They are deprived of typical social and emotional stimulation and interaction, as well as typical cognitive and language stimulation." Knowing this, the primary question researchers had was, is there a "best time" when intervention can help prevent these children from becoming psychologically deprived - when damage can be prevented. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project was designed to look at this issue of timing as it related to early deprivation.

The study accomplished this by randomly assigning children into two groups of children that were abandoned at or shortly after birth. "Children at the time of entry into the study ranged in age from 6-29 months of age," says Fox. Half the children remained in the institution, the other half were placed into foster care. All children were the subject of follow-up assessments that included not only cognitive development, but also standardized intelligence tests. Timing related to the intervention was looked at closely. A third group of children - who were being reared by their biological families in Bucharest - served as a base group.

The study was conducted with the full approval of the Government of Romania and was conducted as a way to help guide that nation's child welfare policy. Before this study, there was a bias in the child welfare community towards institutionalized care. In fact, the BEIP had to create its own foster care program as part of the study because the government of Romania's foster care program was limited to "about one family." As part of the study's ethical guidelines, no child placed into foster care was returned to an institution.

Methodology and Results
Fox and the other American researchers wanted to see if they could show there was improvement through specific tests of these institutionalized children.

After random assignment, the average age of children placed into foster care was 21 months of age. Testing was conducted prior to placement, at 30 months and 42 months using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID II), and at 54 months with the Weschsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-R) test. The BSID II test looks at a wide range of abilities, while the WPPSI-R test is more focused assessment of a child's cognitive abilities. Romanian psychologists administered these tests.

The main findings from the study confirmed earlier results that "children reared in institutions showed greatly diminished intellectual performance relative to children reared in their families of origin." Further, children who were randomly assigned to foster care experienced "significant gains in cognitive function." Finally, on the importance of timing when pursuing intervention, Prof. Fox says, "the results show that the age point where things mattered was 24 months of age." The report adds that "there was a continuing 'cost' to children who remained in the institution over the course of the study. The findings say it would take a larger study to really determine if there is a true "sensitive period" for intervention.

Media presentations of terrorism contribute to posttraumatic stress disorder

20 December 2007 – A new report published in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice reveals that children exposed to terrorist attacks show elevated symptoms of mental health problems, including posttraumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety disorder, and general anxiety disorder.

Statistically speaking, it is unlikely that the majority of youth will ever experience direct exposure to a terrorist attack. Following a terrorist attack, however, youth are exposed to a substantial amount of attack-related media coverage. Within this present climate of heightened awareness about terrorism, many children are exposed to what the authors termed “second-hand terrorism,” in which media disproportionately focus on the possibility of being a direct victim of future terrorism. This sets the stage for insecurity, countless false alarms, and persistent anxiety. Technological advances provide a stage from which terrorist acts can reach a truly vast audience, and news networks further afford unprecedented coverage of terrorism on a global scale. Media-based contact with terrorism can result in substantial amounts of distress in exposed youth.

“Researching youth in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, as well as youth exposed to media presentations about terrorism, is critical to inform service delivery and public policy, and to ensure that the mental health needs of youth are afforded ample resources,” the authors note.

9 December 2007 — You study the menu at a restaurant and decide to order the steak rather than the salmon. But when the waiter tells you about the lobster special, you decide lobster trumps steak. Without reconsidering the salmon, you place your order—all because of a trait called “transitivity.”

“Transitivity is the hallmark of rational economic choice,” says Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, a postdoctoral researcher in HMS Professor of Neurobiology John Assad’s lab. According to transitivity, if you prefer A to B and B to C, then you ought to prefer A to C. Or, if you prefer lobster to steak, and steak to salmon, then you will prefer lobster to salmon.

Padoa-Schioppa is lead author on a paper that suggests this trait might be encoded at the level of individual neurons. The study, which appears online Dec. 9 in Nature Neuroscience, shows that some neurons in a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex encode economic value in a “menu invariant” way. That is, the neurons respond the same to steak regardless if it’s offered against salmon or lobster.

“People make choices by assigning values to different options. If the values are menu invariant preferences will be transitive. The activity of these neurons does not vary with the menu options, suggesting that these neurons could be responsible for transitivity,” Padoa-Schioppa explains.

“This study provides a key insight into the biology of our frontal lobes and the neural circuits that underlie decision-making,” Assad adds. “Despite the maxim, we in fact can compare apples to oranges, and we do it all the time. Camillo’s research sheds light on how we make these types of choices.”

Frontal lobe damage has been linked to “choice deficits” such as eating disorders, compulsive gambling and abnormal social behavior. For example, in the first documented case of brain injury impacting behavior, the infamous railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage became unsociable after a tamping iron passed through his skull in 1848, damaging his frontal lobes. This area of the brain has also been implicated in drug abuse.

Labs are just beginning to probe normal decision-making at the level of individual neurons, venturing into a new field called neuroeconomics. Such research might eventually help to explain choice deficits associated with frontal lobe functions.

The new study builds on an April 2006 Nature paper in which Padoa-Schioppa and Assad identified neurons that encode the value macaque monkeys assign to juice they choose independent of its type, providing a common currency of comparison for the brain.

In that study, the scientists found that although monkeys generally prefer grape juice to apple juice, sometimes they choose the latter, if it is offered in large amounts. When presented with 3 units of apple juice and 1 unit of grape juice, for example, a monkey might take the grape juice only 50 percent of the time. This indicates that the value of the grape juice is 3 times that of the apple juice. A particular group of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex fire at roughly the same rate, regardless of the monkey’s decision because the animal values both choices equally. These neurons also fire at the same rate if the monkey chooses 6 units of apple juice or 2 units of grape juice. Thus, these neurons encode the value the monkey receives in each trial.

Now, by adding a third juice to the mix, the team has tested whether these neurons reflect transitivity. The three juices were offered to a monkey in pairs dozens of times over the course of a session, the quantity of each juice varying from trial to trial.

In general, monkeys preferred 1 unit of juice A to 1 unit of juice B, 1B to 1C, and 1A to 1C. During each session, Padoa-Schioppa recorded the activity of a handful of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, and he discovered their firing rate did not depend on whether B was offered against A or against C, indicating that these neurons respond in a menu invariant way.

“The stability of these neurons could help to explain why we make decisions that are consistent over the short term,” Padoa-Schioppa says. “In our study, the neural circuit was not influenced by the short-term behavioral context.”

Padoa-Schioppa is now examining the possibility that value-encoding neurons may adapt to different value scales over longer periods of time.

Albert Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor, has been awarded the 2008 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, a $200,000 prize. He was selected from among 31 nominations in five countries for his groundbreaking work in social cognitive theory and self-efficacy.

Bandura's ideas have helped define the way today's psychologists understand the mind and human behavior, the judges said. He was the first to prove that self-efficacy, a belief in one's capabilities, affects the tasks one chooses, how much effort is put into them and how one feels while doing them. Bandura also found that people learn not only as a result of their own beliefs and expectations but also by "modeling" or observing others, an idea that led to the development of modern social cognition theory. "He has had enormous impact not only on psychology, but on other disciplines as well," the award committee stated. In 2002, a survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked Bandura as the fourth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, behind B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud.

The Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville in Kentucky annually awards $1 million—divided equally into five prizes—for accomplishments in psychology, music composition, ideas improving world order, education and religion. The prize recognizes powerful ideas or creative works in the sciences, arts and humanities. Bandura will receive the award next spring and deliver a public lecture about his work in Louisville.

Charles Grawemeyer, who died in 1993, was an industrialist, entrepreneur and University of Louisville alumnus.

Stanford Report, 5 December 2007

"When the Virtual You Changes the Real You"
60-Second Psych from Scientific American podcasts
November 22, 2007

Children learn by imitating adults—so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a Yale study today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Even when you add time pressure, or warn the children not to do the unnecessary actions, they seem unable to avoid reproducing the adult’s irrelevant actions,” said Derek Lyons, doctoral candidate, developmental psychology, and first author of the study. “They have already incorporated the actions into their idea of how the object works.”

Learning by imitation occurs from the simplest preverbal communication to the most complex adult expertise. It is the basis for much of our success as a species, but the benefits are less clear in instances of “over-imitation,” where children copy behavior that is not needed, Lyons said.

It has been theorized that children over-imitate just to fit in, or out of habit. The Yale team found in this study that children follow the adults’ steps faithfully to the point where they actually change their mind about how an object functions.

The study included three-to-five-year-old children who engaged in a series of exercises. In one exercise, the children could see a dinosaur toy through a clear plastic box. The researcher used a sequence of irrelevant and relevant actions to retrieve the toy, such as tapping the lid of the jar with a feather before unscrewing the lid.

The children then were asked which actions were silly and which were not. They were praised when they pinpointed the actions that had no value in retrieving the toy. The idea was to teach the children that the adult was unreliable and that they should ignore his unnecessary actions.

Later the children watched adults retrieve a toy turtle from a box using needless steps. When asked to do the task themselves, the children over-imitated, despite their prior training to ignore irrelevant actions by the adults.

“What of all of this means,” Lyons said, “is that children’s ability to imitate can actually lead to confusion when they see an adult doing something in a disorganized or inefficient way. Watching an adult doing something wrong can make it much harder for kids to do it right.”

Columbia scientists use fMR technology, find brain changes when viewing violent media

Violence is a frequent occurrence in television shows and movies, but can watching it make you behave differently? Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

In a paper in the Dec. 5 on-line issue of PLoS ONE (published by the Public Library of Science), Columbia scientists show that a brain network responsible for suppressing behaviors like inappropriate or unwarranted aggression (including the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, or right ltOFC, and the amygdala) became less active after study subjects watched several short clips from popular movies depicting acts of violence. These changes could render people less able to control their own aggressive behavior. Indeed the authors found that, even among their own subjects, less activation in this network was characteristic of people reporting an above average tendency to behave aggressively. This characteristic was measured through a personality test.

A secondary finding was that after repeated viewings of violence, an area of the brain associated with planning behaviors became more active. This lends further support to the idea that exposure to violence diminishes the brain’s ability to inhibit behavior-related processing.None of these changes in brain activity occurred when subjects watched non-violent but equally engaging movies depicting scenes of horror or physical activity.

“These changes in the brain’s behavioral control circuits were specific to the repeated exposure to the violent clips,” said Joy Hirsch, Ph.D., professor of Functional Neuroradiology, Psychology, and Neuroscience and Director of the Center for fMRI at CUMC, and the PLoS ONE paper’s senior author. “Even when the level of action in the control movies was comparable, we just did not observe the same changes in brain response that we did when the subjects viewed the violent clips.”

“Depictions of violent acts have become very common in the popular media,” said Christopher Kelly, the first author on the paper and a current CUMC medical student. “Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression. This is an important finding, and further research should examine very closely how these changes affect real-life behavior.”

From the List Universe -- Top 10 Bizarre Mental [/neurological] Disorders

The theory explains how the brain compensates for damage from injuries such as stroke

Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Marcel Just and Stanford postdoctoral fellow Sashank Varma have put forward a new computational theory of brain function that provides answers to one of the central questions of modern science: How does the human brain organize itself to give rise to complex cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving and spatial reasoning? Just and Varma's theory, called 4CAPS, is described in the fall issue of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

More than a decade of research involving functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans in hundreds of laboratories has yielded a tremendous amount of information about what parts of the brain are activated when a person performs various tasks. Some researchers have been tempted to conclude that a simple one-to-one relationship exists between high-level mental tasks and brain areas. For example, some believe that a specific brain area is responsible for a specific cognitive task, such as identifying a face.

Just and Varma, however, propose that the evidence reveals a more complex picture in which thinking is a network function - a collaboration of several brain areas that is constantly adapting itself, based on the task at hand and the brain's own resources and biological limitations. The collaborating parts of the brain, according to Just, are like members of a sports team whose players substitute in and out of the action. 4CAPS (an acronym for Capacity Constrained Concurrent Cortical Activation-based Production System), proposes a decentralized process by which members of the cortical team volunteer themselves when their strengths are called for, but also permits less efficient but capable members to step forward when the primary player is injured or disabled, as might occur as a result of a stroke. Just and Varma have constructed a number of computational models to demonstrate this process, such as a model that understands English sentences.

A unique characteristic of the theory is that it can accurately predict the change in brain activation that results from some types of brain damage or disease. For example, if a stroke damages the part of the brain known as Broca's area - which is located in the left prefrontal cortex and is involved in language processing - the corresponding site on the right side of the brain often becomes activated during language processing, even within hours after a stroke. According to 4CAPS, the same dynamic allocation mechanism that allows brain areas to volunteer themselves on a moment-by-moment basis would also come into play if Broca's area were damaged, and would allow any excess computational load to spill over to the right hemisphere mirror site on a more permanent basis. Another example occurs with Alzheimer's disease, where the damage to some brain areas causes additional "helper" areas to be recruited to perform a task, additional areas that are not typically used by control subjects who do not have the disease.

"Many brain-imaging studies have shown as the nature of the task changes, so does the set of activating brain areas," said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology. "It is as though substitutions of team players are being made dynamically in response to changes in the game."

"We credit this dynamic mechanism with the fluidity or adaptability of human intelligence, and with much of the plasticity that occurs with learning or with recovery from brain damage," Just said.

4CAPS provides a framework for scientists and medical researchers to better understand nascent topics in neuroscience, such as how brain areas communicate and collaborate with one another during the thought process and how this can go awry. For example, Just and his colleagues have proposed an influential theory of autism, called the underconnectivity theory, that attributes the disorder to poor connectivity and hence communication between frontal areas of the brain and more posterior areas. The individual areas still have their specializations, according to the theory, but they cannot communicate as well with each other, and may develop a tendency to operate more independently of each. The theory also provides an account of what limits our ability to do multitasking.

"The thousands of facts that scientists have learned from brain imaging studies cry out for some sort of organization, some way to impose coherence, and ultimately to understand the brain system that is producing the results," Just said. "The theory provides a new conceptual framework for understanding how the fluidity of thought arises from the dynamics of brain activity.

"As neurological issues arise in education, aging and development, and as a basis for a knowledge-based economy, it will become increasingly important that human brain function be understood by students, parents and educators, patients and doctors, trainees and managers, citizens and policy-makers."

Carnegie Mellon Press Release
15 November 2007

The correlation between car and driver

Imagine a leisurely drive on a Sunday morning. As you make your way down the scenic country road, a car comes speeding behind you. The driver remains as close to you as possible. But you’re not surprised seeing as the driver is at the wheel of an electric blue Honda Civic. Is that prejudicial?

“Not really,” answers Amélie Auger. The undergrad psychology student studied, along with her classmate Marie-Hélène Lemyre, the influence one’s perception of their vehicle has on their aggressiveness at the wheel following a stressful situation on the road. They discovered that people who perceive their cars as big or performing take on riskier behavior at the wheel. They get angry faster and feel personally targeted by the behavior of other drivers.

“We wanted to demonstrate that what we believe to be a stereotype, for instance, that Mustang drivers are more aggressive, is sometimes founded,” explains Auger. The results are a part of a broader study conducted within the framework of a course given by Professor Jacques Bergeron. Students had to choose a theme linked to dissatisfaction at the wheel. Bergeron finds the results obtained by Auger and Lemyre to be “very interesting” despite being preliminary and partial.

The students surveyed 380 men and women between 18 and 78-years-old with the help of two questionnaires. The first questionnaire measured the reaction of people facing stressful situations at the wheel. The second questionnaire addressed perception of the vehicle. Is it perceived as high-performance or luxurious? Is the driver embarrassed by his or her vehicle? What importance is attributed to the vehicle?

These results bring up many more questions according to Bergeron who is faced with the paradox of the chicken or the egg. “Is it our personality that dictates our car choice or vice versa?” he asks. Auger intends to answer these types of questions within the framework of her master’s degree.


University of Montreal News Digest
17 September 2007

Scientists are finding new evidence that a good night's rest plays a crucial role in cementing memories formed during the day.

One new study has identified a brain region involved, along with the hippocampus, in creating memories of the day's activities during sleep. Another study suggests melatonin, a hormone involved in regulating our day-night cycle, or "circadian rhythm," acts to suppress the formation of new memories as bedtime nears, perhaps in an effort to give memories made earlier in the day a chance to be prepared for long-term storage.

Both studies are detailed in the Nov. 16 issue of the journal Science.

Duke University Medical Center neuroscientists say the places a memory is processed in the brain may determine how someone can be absolutely certain of a past event that never occurred. These findings could help physicians better appreciate the memory changes that accompany normal aging or even lead to tools for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, according to Duke neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza, Ph.D.

Information retrieved from memory is simultaneously processed in two specific regions of the brain, each of which focuses on a different aspect of an past event. The medial temporal lobe (MTL), located at the base of the brain, focuses on specific facts about the event. The frontal parietal network (FPN), located at the top of the brain, is more likely to process the global gist of the event. The specific brain area accessed when one tries to remember something can ultimately determine whether or not we think the memory is true or false, the researchers found.

"Human memory is not like computer memory -- it isn't completely right all the time," said Cabeza, senior author of a paper appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience. "There are many occasions when people feel strongly about past events, even though they might not have occurred." Cabeza wanted to understand why someone could have such strong feelings of confidence about false memories. In his experiments, he scanned the brains of healthy volunteers with functional MRI as they took well-established tests of memory and false memory. Functional MRI is an imaging technique that shows what areas of the brain are used during specific mental tasks.

During the brain scans, Cabeza found that volunteers who were highly confident in memories that were indeed true showed increased activity in the fact-oriented MTL region. "This would make sense, because the MTL, with its wealth of specific details, would make the memory seem more vivid," Cabeza said. "For example, thinking about your breakfast this morning, you remember what you had, the taste of the food, the people you were with. The added richness of these details makes one more confident about the memory's truth."

On the other hand, volunteers who showed high confidence in memories that turned out to be false exhibited increased activity in the impressionistic FPN. The people drawing from this area of the brain recalled the gist or general idea of the event, and while they felt confident about their memories, they were often mistaken, since they could not recall the details of the memory.

These findings, coupled with the findings of other studies, can help explain what happens to the human brain as it ages, Cabeza said. "Specific memories don't last forever, but what ends up lasting are not specific details, but more general or global impressions," Cabeza said. "Past studies have shown that as normal brains age, they tend to lose the ability to recollect specifics faster than they lose the ability recall impressions. However, patients with Alzheimer's disease tend to lose both types of memories equally, which may prove to be a tool for early diagnosis."

Cabeza's colleague for this research was Hongkeun Kim at Daegu University in South Korea. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Daegu University.

By activating multiple fluorescent proteins in neurons, neuroscientists at Harvard University are imaging the brain and nervous system as never before, rendering their cells in a riotous spray of colors dubbed a "Brainbow."

The technique, described in the cover story of the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature, has been developed by a team led by Harvard's Jean Livet, Joshua R. Sanes, and Jeff W. Lichtman and  allows researchers to tag neurons with roughly 90 distinct colors, a huge leap over the mere handful of shades possible with current fluorescent labeling. (read article; view slide show)

Without sleep, the emotional centers of the brain dramatically overreact to negative experiences, reveals a new brain imaging study in the October 23rd issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The reason for that hyperactive emotional response in sleep-deprived people stems from a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe—a region that normally keeps emotions under control.

The new study from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley is the first to explain, at the neural level, what seems to be a universal phenomenon: that sleep loss leads to emotionally irrational behavior, according to the researchers. The findings might also offer some insight into the clinical connection between sleep disruptions and psychiatric disorders.

“This adds to the critical list of sleep’s benefits,” said Matthew Walker, from the University of California, Berkeley. “Sleep appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, and in doing so prepares us for the next day’s challenges and social interactions. Most importantly, this study demonstrates the dangers of not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation fractures the brain mechanisms that regulate key aspects of our mental health. The bottom line is that sleep is not a luxury that we can optionally choose to take whenever we like. It is a biological necessity, and without it, there is only so far the band will stretch before it snaps, with both cognitive and emotional consequences.”

Scientists have known that sleep deprivation impairs a range of bodily functions, including the immune system and metabolism, as well as brain processes, such as learning and memory, the researchers explained. Yet, evidence for the role of sleep in governing our emotional brain state had remained surprisingly scarce, they noted.

In the new study, Walker’s team assigned 26 healthy people to either a sleep-deprivation group—in which participants were kept awake for about 35 hours—or a normal sleep group. On the following day, the study subjects’ brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity on the basis of blood flow, while viewing 100 images. The images were at first emotionally neutral, but became increasingly aversive over time.

“We had predicted a potential increase in the emotional reaction from the brain [in people deprived of sleep], but the size of the increase truly surprised us,” Walker said of the study’s findings. “The emotional centers of the brain were over 60% more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep. It is almost as though, without sleep, the brain reverts back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.

“While it is early days,” he added, “clinical evidence has shown that some form of sleep disruption is present in almost all psychiatric disorders. These findings may offer new mechanisms as to why, and provide novel insights into how we can understand and even treat these disorders at a brain level.”

A tendency to extract messages from meaningless noise could be an early sign of schizophrenia, according to a study by Yale School of Medicine researchers.

The study this month in the British Journal of Psychiatry reported on 43 participants diagnosed with “prodromal symptoms”— meaning they exhibited early warning signs of psychosis such as social withdrawal, mild perceptual alterations, or misinterpretation of social cues. Participants in the study were randomly assigned to take the anti-psychotic medication olanzapine or a placebo, and then symptoms and neuropsychological function were assessed for up to two years.

During the “babble task,” participants listened with headphones to overlapping recordings of six speakers reading neutral texts, which made the words virtually incomprehensible. The participants were asked to repeat any words or phrases that they heard. Only four words—“increase,” “children,” “A-OK,” and “Republican”—were consistently reproduced.

Eighty percent of the participants who “heard” phrases of four or more words in length went on to develop a schizophrenia-related illness during times that they were not taking olanzapine, said the lead author, Ralph Hoffman, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry. In contrast, only six percent of those in the study converted to schizophrenia-related illness if the phrases “heard” were less than three words in length. “A tendency to extract message-like meaning from meaningless sensory information can, over time, produce a ‘matrix of unreality’ that triggers the initial psychotic phase of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders,” Hoffman said.

He said further research is needed because of the small size of this study. However, if these findings are verified, Hoffman added, they could provide an inexpensive tool for identifying those individuals with early warning signs of schizophrenia who would most likely benefit from preventive drug therapy.

You may not be fully dressed without a smile, but a look of horror will make a faster first impression. Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that the brain becomes aware of fearful faces more quickly than those showing other emotions. "There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear," David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. "We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment." Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which will appear in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.

The researchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others. To do this, they needed to find a way to slow down the speed at which subjects processed facial information -- which usually takes less than 40 milliseconds. At those high speeds it is difficult to tell which images rise to awareness the fastest.

Yang, the lead author of the study, realized that a technique being used in Blake's lab might provide a solution to the problem. The technique, continuous flash suppression, keeps people from becoming aware of what they are seeing for up to 10 seconds. Using this technique, the team had research subjects look at a screen through a viewer, similar to the eyepieces on a microscope, which allowed different images to be presented to each eye. Many images were rapidly presented to one eye while a static image of a face was presented to the other. The multiple images served as visual 'noise,' suppressing the image of the face. The subjects indicated when they first became aware of seeing a face, enabling the researchers to determine if the expression on the face had any impact on how quickly the subject became aware of it.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, which shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images, is responsible. "The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on," Zald said.

Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role. "Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing," he said."That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it's only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that's relatively hardwired in there."

A surprising finding was that subjects perceived happy faces the slowest. "What we believe is happening is that the happy faces signal safety. If something is safe, you don't have to pay attention to it," Zald said.

Next, the researchers will explore how this information influences our behavior. "We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior," Yang said. "Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?"

What's wrong with being shy, and just when and how did bashfulness and other ordinary human behaviors in children and adults become psychiatric disorders treatable with powerful, potentially dangerous drugs, asks a Northwestern University scholar in a new book that already is creating waves in the mental health community.

In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (October 2007), Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the "highly unscientific and often arbitrary way" in which widespread revisions were made to "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers.

"The number of mental disorders the general population might exhibit leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994," notes Lane, Northwestern's Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor. In a book that calls into doubt the facade of objective research behind psychiatry's revolution, Lane questions the rationale for the changes, and whether all of them were necessary and suitably precise.

By labeling shyness and other human traits as mental conditions with a biological cause, the doors were opened wide to a pharmaceutical industry ready to provide a pill for every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem, the author says.

Lane, who meticulously and systematically researched the archives of the American Psychiatric Association, uses social anxiety disorder (first dubbed social phobia) as the lens through which to analyze American psychiatry's extraordinary shift in the last 30 years from a psychoanalytic orientation relying on talk therapy to its current emphasis on neuroscience and drugs.

He draws on previously neglected letters and memos written by the framers of the new disorders to argue that DSM revisions to social phobia or social anxiety disorder placed the diagnostic bar too low, turning social anxiety into a mental illness common enough to be considered, according to recent studies, third only to alcoholism and major depression.

The DSM continues to stipulate that social anxiety disorder (SAD) must be "impairing" for a diagnosis to occur. The problem, Lane argues, is that DSM-defined symptoms of impairment in 1980 included fear of eating alone in restaurants, concern about hand trembling while writing checks, fear of public speaking and avoidance of public restrooms.

By 1987 the DSM had removed the key phrase "a compelling desire to avoid," requiring instead only "marked distress," and signs of that could include concern about saying the wrong thing. "Impairment became something largely in the eye of the beholder, and anticipated embarrassment was enough to meet the diagnostic threshold," says Lane.

"That's a ridiculous way to assess a serious mental disorder, with implications for the way we also view childhood traits and development," Lane adds. "But that didn't stop SAD from becoming what Psychology Today dubbed 'the disorder of the 1990s.'"

In addition to providing extensive documentation from the American Psychiatric Association archives, Lane includes previously confidential material from the drug companies themselves that present a worrisome history of the antidepressant Paxil.

That drug came onto the marketplace in 1996 despite the fact that its makers earlier had considered shelving it because of poor performance and early signs of side effects in clinical trials. Using a memo circulated among drug company executives, Lane presents evidence that a lot of information about the drug's poor track record was withheld from the public.

When Paxil became the first drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of social anxiety disorder in 1999, however, its makers launched a $92 million awareness campaign on the theme "Imagine Being Allergic to People." This and other advertising campaigns helped change the way Americans think about anxiety and its treatment.

"Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder," a product director for the drug told Advertising Age magazine. In 2001, with 25 million new prescriptions written for Paxil, the drug's U.S. sales alone increased by 18 percent from the year before.

Although psychiatrists insist that the line between ordinary shyness and social anxiety disorder (SAD) is sharply defined, Lane points to psychiatric literature that repeatedly confuses them, putting patients at risk of over-diagnosis and unnecessary, sometimes harmful treatment.

A professor of English in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Lane previously directed a psychoanalytic studies program in Emory University's psychiatry department.

Long interested in psychology, he presents evidence of a burgeoning backlash to psychiatry's current trends in the form of analyses of novels including "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen and "The Diagnosis" by Alan Lightman, as well as the film "Garden State" by Zach Braff.

Lane was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study psychopharmacology and ethics, and audited medical courses.

He invited psychiatrists and pharmacologists to review his book, particularly a chapter on rebound syndrome. That term refers to a boomerang effect experienced by some patients on discontinuing Paxil that is more intense and dangerous than the turmoil that caused them to take the drug in the first place.

In examining the American Psychiatric Association archives, Lane -- who argues that psychiatry is using drugs with poor track records to treat growing numbers of normal human emotions -- even came across a proposal to establish "chronic complaint disorder," in which people moan about the weather, taxes or the previous night's racetrack results.

"It might be funny," he says, save for the fact that the DSM's next edition, due to be completed in 2012, is likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior. Don't look for road rage, however. It's already in the DSM, under intermittent explosive disorder.

The combination of extended wakefulness [[e.g., lack of sleep]] and low-dose alcohol has significant adverse effects on a person’s ability to drive, and elevates the risk of getting into a vehicular accident, according to a study published in the October 1 issue of the journal SLEEP.

The study, authored by Mark E. Howard, PhD, of the Institute for Breathing and Sleep in Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia, focused on 19 volunteer professional drivers, who participated in a driving simulation and the Psychomotor Vigilance Task. The subjects were measured in a rested state (12-15 hours awake) and after extended wakefulness (18-21 hours awake) during two sessions. Alcohol was administered during one session, with performance measured at blood alcohol concentrations (BAC) of 0.00 percent, 0.03 percent and 0.05 percent in a non-sleep deprived state, and at 0.03 percent after extended wakefulness (at 1 a.m. and at 3 a.m.). During the second session, tests were performed at the same times without alcohol.

According to the results, extended wakefulness, combined with low-dose alcohol (0.03 percent BAC), resulted in more lapses and greater variation in lane position and speed than did a BAC of 0.05 percent in a rested state.

“In addition to alcohol, sleepiness also increases the risk of road crashes. It is estimated that 15 to 30 percent of traffic accidents are directly related to driver sleepiness, as determined by crash circumstances. Although there are conclusive data regarding the separate effects of alcohol and sleepiness on driving, in real-life situations it is common for these two conditions to occur simultaneously (alcohol-related accidents occur more commonly in the early hours of the morning). The combination of legal low-dose alcohol and extended wakefulness results in impairment worse than that at an alcohol level known to increase accident risk. Avoiding alcohol when driving after extended wakefulness may reduce accident risk,” said Dr. Howard.

Those who think they might have a sleep disorder are urged to discuss their problem with their primary care physician, who will issue a referral to a sleep specialist.

Timing of media exposure plays a vital role in outcomes

Daily television viewing for two or more hours in early childhood can lead to behavioral problems and poor social skills, according to a study of children 2.5 to 5.5 years of age conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Hopkins researchers found that the impact of TV viewing on a child’s behavior and social skills varied by the age at which the viewing occurred. More importantly, heavy television viewing that decreased over time was not associated with behavior or social problems. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 watch no television while children age 2 and older are limited to no more than two hours of daily viewing. The study is published in the October 2007 issue of Pediatrics.

“A number of studies have demonstrated negative effects of heavy television viewing. However, timing of exposure is an important consideration as reducing viewing to acceptable levels can reduce the risk of behavioral and social problems,” said Kamila Mistry, MPH, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health.

For the study, the research team analyzed data for 2,707 children collected from the Healthy Steps for Young Children national evaluation. Parents were surveyed about their child’s television viewing habits and behavior at 2.5 and at 5.5 years of age.

Sixteen percent of parents reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at 2.5 years of age (early exposure), while 15 percent reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at 5.5 years of age (concurrent exposure). One in five parents reported that their children watched two hours or more of television daily at both 2.5 years and at 5.5 years of age (sustained exposure). Sustained exposure to television was associated with behavioral problems. However, early exposure that was subsequently reduced was not a risk for behavior problems. Concurrent viewing was associated with fewer social skills, while sustained and early viewing had less of an impact on social skill development.

The study also found that having a television in the child’s bedroom at 5.5 years of age was associated with behavioral problems, poor social skills and poor sleep. Forty-one percent of the children included in the study had a television in his or her bedroom.

“Children who reduced their viewing by 5.5 years of age were not at greater risk for behavior and social problems,” said Cynthia Minkovitz, MD, MPP, senior author of the study and associate professor with the School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. “It is vital for clinicians to emphasize the importance of reducing television viewing in early childhood among those children with early use.”

UC-Davis researcher urges healthcare providers to look for signs of intimate partner violence

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Seven years ago, Elizabeth Miller was a volunteer physician in a community-based clinic in Boston, Mass., which offered confidential services to teens. She is still haunted by the memory of a 15-year old girl who asked her for a pregnancy test. It was negative, but two weeks later the girl was treated for a severe head injury in a nearby emergency room. The girl’s boyfriend had pushed her down a flight of stairs.

“I assumed all she needed was to be educated about her contraceptive options,” Miller recalled. “Later, I wondered what I had missed. Could I have asked a question that would have identified that she was in an abusive relationship"”

That nagging question inspired Miller, now a pediatrician with UC Davis Children’s Hospital, to dedicate her career to trying to understand the unique characteristics of adolescent partner violence.

In a new qualitative clinical study published in the September-October issue of the journal Ambulatory Pediatrics, Miller and her research colleagues report that a quarter of the teenage girls interviewed for the study – all of whom had histories of abusive relationships – say their partners were actively trying to get them pregnant. The study, available online today, is the first in the general adolescent health literature to document the role of abusive partners in promoting teen pregnancy.

“Physicians are trained to think about domestic violence in adult terms,” said Miller, a physician trained in both adult and pediatric medicine who specializes in treating adolescents. “Our study suggests that health-care providers who come in contact with teens, especially those seeking pregnancy testing and emergency contraception, should ask about the possibility of abuse in the relationship and specifically whether the young woman’s partner may be trying to get her pregnant.”

Miller’s study is based on interviews with 61 girls from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds with a known history of intimate partner violence living in the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. The analysis included 53 girls between the ages of 15 and 20 who reported being sexually active and involved in relationships that included recurring patterns of physical, sexual or emotional abuse from a male partner. Twenty-six percent of these girls reported that their partners were actively trying to get them pregnant by manipulating condom use, sabotaging birth control use and making explicit statements about wanting them to become pregnant.

“We were floored by what these girls told us,” Miller recalled. “You think of forced sex as an aspect of abusive relationships, but this takes that abuse a step further to reproductive control of a young woman’s body.”

Despite the small sample size, Miller describes the current study as a critically important first step toward understanding the nuances of control in intimate relationships and its role in teen pregnancy.

“Our study suggests that those providing care, especially reproductive care, to adolescent girls need to ask questions that reveal the complexities of partner violence, specifically whether a partner is actively trying to get her pregnant when she doesn’t want to be,” Miller said. “Historically, assessments in clinical settings have focused on physical and sexual violence – and for good reasons. However, our data argues for including questions, for instance, about whether a boyfriend is flushing birth control pills down the toilet or saying he used a condom when he didn’t. And pregnancy prevention programs should include discussions about reproductive control as a form of abuse in relationships.”

“This study demonstrates for the first time that abusive boys and men often actively promote pregnancy including contraceptive nonuse in their relationships,” said Jay Silverman, director of Violence Preventions Programs for the Harvard School of Public Health and senior author on the study. “The implications are clear – when we see girls who cannot consistently use contraception, who are requesting frequent emergency contraception or who seek repeat pregnancy testing, we need to be asking very directly about abuse from male partners and find ways to support them and promote their safety.”

Miller added that she and her colleagues will next look at the phenomenon of reproductive control in a larger study and at the population level. They just completed a clinic-based survey of 825 youth in the Boston area designed to address the prevalence of intimate partner violence and related behaviors among boys and girls seeking confidential care, and they are in the process of designing a national study to address these same issues.

Miller has also designed a study that would test interventions for partner violence in family planning clinics among women ages 16 to 24 years, and she is planning a study of dating violence intervention to be conducted in school-based clinics in California and Massachusetts. These interventions involve identifying intimate partner violence through screening questions and include a protocol for providing referrals to appropriate resources, such as advocacy groups, shelters, counseling and agencies that can address safety.

“Our work is aimed at documenting the severity and prevalence of intimate partner violence in teens,” Miller said. “Ultimately, we want to reduce teen pregnancy and the devastating effects of partner violence.”

Caring for Your Introvert
by Jonathan Rauch

An article in The Atlantic (March 2003)

When trying to understand someone's intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University.

The findings appear in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal of Science. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University.

“A dominant view has been that non-human primates attend only to what actions 'look like' when trying to understand what others are thinking," says Wood. "In contrast, our research shows that non-human primates infer others' intentions in a much more sophisticated way. They expect other individuals to perform the most rational action that they can, given the environmental obstacles that they face."

The scientists studied the behavioral response of over 120 primates, including cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques and chimpanzees. These species represent each of the three major groups of primates: New World monkeys, Old World monkeys and apes. All three species were tested in the same way, and the results showed the same responses among the different types.

In the first experiment, the primates were presented with two potential food containers, and the experimenter either purposefully grasped one of the containers, or flopped their hand onto one of the containers in an accidental manner. For all three species, the primates sought the food container that was purposefully grasped a greater number of times than the container upon which the hand was flopped. This indicates that the primate inferred goal-oriented action on the part of the experimenter when he grasped the container, and was able to understand the difference between the goal-oriented and accidental behavior.

In the second experiment, the researchers asked if the primates infer others' goals under the expectation that other individuals will perform the most rational action allowed by the environmental obstacles. Again, the primates were presented with two potential food containers. In one scenario, an experimenter touched a container with his elbow when his hands were full, and in another scenario, touched a container with his elbow when his hands were empty. The primates looked for the food in the container indicated with the elbow more often when the experimenter's hands were full. The primates considered, just as a human being would, that if someone's hands are full then it is rational for them to use their elbow to indicate the container with food, whereas if their hands are empty it is not rational for them to use their elbow, because they could have used their unoccupied hand.

Developmental psychologists have long understood that young children are able to engage in this type of rational action perception, but scientists have not understood if this ability is unique to human beings, or shared with other animals. This study suggests that this ability evolved as long as 40 million years ago, with non-human primates.

“This study represents one of the broadest comparative studies of primate cognition, and the significance of the findings is reinforced by the fact that these results were consistent across three different species of primates,” says Wood. “The results have significant implications for understanding the evolution of the processes that allow us to make sense of other people's behavior.”

ABSTRACT: Disgust is a basic emotion characterized by revulsion and rejection, yet it is relatively unexamined in the literature on prejudice. In the present investigation, interpersonal-disgust sensitivity (e.g., not wanting to wear clean used clothes or to sit on a warm seat vacated by a stranger) in particular predicted negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups, even after controlling for concerns with contracting disease. The mechanisms underlying the link between interpersonal disgust and attitudes toward immigrants were explored using a path model. As predicted, the effect of interpersonal-disgust sensitivity on group attitudes was indirect, mediated by ideological orientations (social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism) and dehumanizing perceptions of the out-group. The effects of social dominance orientation on group attitudes were both direct and indirect, via dehumanization. These results establish a link between disgust sensitivity and prejudice that is not accounted for by fear of infection, but rather is mediated by ideological orientations and dehumanizing group representations. Implications for understanding and reducing prejudice are discussed.

Hodson, G. & Costello, K. (2007). Interpersonal disgust, ideological orientations, and dehumanisation as predictors of intergroup attitudes. Psychological Science, 18, 691-698.

Horowitz, A.V. and Wakefield, J.C. (2007). The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. NY: Oxford University Press. (link to Amazon.com)

Suggests that loss of treatment response is likely due to loss of placebo response

Providence, RI – A new study by Rhode Island Hospital researchers indicates that a relapse during antidepressant continuation treatment may be due to a relapse in patients who were not true drug responders. The loss of drug response may be due to loss of placebo response (a positive medical response to taking a placebo as if it were an active medication.). The study was published in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Historically, the treatment of depression is divided into three phases – initial/acute, continuation and maintenance. During the initial phase, the goal is to reduce symptoms and psychosocial impairment. During the continuation phase, usually six months to one year after initial treatment response, the goal is to maintain the gains and prevent a relapse. In the maintenance phase, which occurs after a sustained period of improvement, the goal is to further maintain the gains and prevent recurrence of the disorder.

Mark Zimmerman, MD, director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, is the paper’s lead author. Zimmerman, along with his colleague Tavi Thongy, MD, also of Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University, conducted a meta-analysis of continuation studies of new generation antidepressants that began as placebo-controlled acute phase studies. Treatment studies of depression have found that approximately 50 to 65 percent of patients respond to medication and that approximately 25 to 35 percent respond to placebo.

Past studies have indicated that a number of patients who respond to treatment in the initial phase experience a relapse or recurrence despite ongoing pharmacotherapy during the two latter phases of treatment. This return of symptoms is often interpreted as a loss of efficacy of antidepressant activity, and is referred to as tachyphylaxis or the “poop-out” effect. Zimmerman says, “When a patient improves after being prescribed an antidepressant medication you do not know if they got better because of the medication or because they had a placebo response.”

The researchers used formulas developed by Quitkin and colleagues more than a decade ago to calculate the relapse rate attributable to relapse in presumptive placebo responders. “Our study suggests that the return of symptoms despite ongoing treatment during the continuation and maintenance phases of treatment may not represent a loss of drug effect because the patient may not have experienced a true drug response in the first place.” Zimmerman also notes, “While our conclusion is limited to the continuation phase of treatment, our results suggest that these findings probably also apply to the maintenance phase of treatment.”

The researchers note that these findings are not inconsistent with conclusions that continuation and maintenance studies of antidepressants have clearly established the benefit of ongoing treatment beyond the acute phase.

Dollinger, S.J. (2007). Creativity and conservatism. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, 1025-1035.

Abstract
Across a range of disciplines it is assumed that conservatism and creativity are polar opposites. Although conservatism correlates negatively with appreciation of certain art forms, are conservatives in fact less creative? Four hundred and twenty-two undergraduates completed a Creative Behavior Inventory and creative products judged by the consensual assessment technique. Compared to more liberal college students, those endorsing more conservative positions on a brief version of the Conservatism scale had fewer creative accomplishments and devised photo essays and drawings judged as less creative. Results for accomplishments and drawing products held true when controlling for verbal ability and openness.