Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples' mental states, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published March 26 in the Public Library of Science One, the study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

The research suggests that individuals - from children who may engage in bullying to people prone to recurring depression - and society in general could benefit from such meditative practices, says study director Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UW-Madison and an expert on imaging the effects of meditation. Davidson and UW-Madison associate scientist Antoine Lutz were co-principal investigators on the project. The study was part of the researchers' ongoing investigations with a group of Tibetan monks and lay practitioners who have practiced meditation for a minimum of 10,000 hours. In this case, Lutz and Davidson worked with 16 monks who have cultivated compassion meditation practices. Sixteen age-matched controls with no previous training were taught the fundamentals of compassion meditation two weeks before the brain scanning took place.

Many contemplative traditions speak of loving-kindness as the wish for happiness for others and of compassion as the wish to relieve others' suffering. Loving-kindness and compassion are central to the Dalai Lama's philosophy and mission," says Davidson, who has worked extensively with the Tibetan Buddhist leader. "We wanted to see how this voluntary generation of compassion affects the brain systems involved in empathy."

Various techniques are used in compassion meditation, and the training can take years of practice. The controls in this study were asked first to concentrate on loved ones, wishing them well-being and freedom from suffering. After some training, they then were asked to generate such feelings toward all beings without thinking specifically about anyone. Each of the 32 subjects was placed in the fMRI scanner at the UW-Madison Waisman Center for Brain Imaging, which Davidson directs, and was asked to either begin compassion meditation or refrain from it. During each state, subjects were exposed to negative and positive human vocalizations designed to evoke empathic responses as well as neutral vocalizations: sounds of a distressed woman, a baby laughing and background restaurant noise.

"We used audio instead of visual challenges so that meditators could keep their eyes slightly open but not focused on any visual stimulus, as is typical of this practice," explains Lutz. The scans revealed significant activity in the insula - a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion - when the long-term meditators were generating compassion and were exposed to emotional vocalizations. The strength of insula activation was also associated with the intensity of the meditation as assessed by the participants. "The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion - such as heart rate and blood pressure - and making that information available to other parts of the brain," says Davidson, also co-director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute.

Activity also increased in the temporal parietal juncture, particularly the right hemisphere. Studies have implicated this area as important in processing empathy, especially in perceiving the mental and emotional state of others. "Both of these areas have been linked to emotion sharing and empathy," Davidson says. "The combination of these two effects, which was much more noticeable in the expert meditators as opposed to the novices, was very powerful."

The findings support Davidson and Lutz's working assumption that through training, people can develop skills that promote happiness and compassion. "People are not just stuck at their respective set points," he says. "We can take advantage of our brain's plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities." The capacity to cultivate compassion, which involves regulating thoughts and emotions, may also be useful for preventing depression in people who are susceptible to it, Lutz adds. "Thinking about other people's suffering and not just your own helps to put everything in perspective," he says, adding that learning compassion for oneself is a critical first step in compassion meditation.

The researchers are interested in teaching compassion meditation to youngsters, particularly as they approach adolescence, as a way to prevent bullying, aggression and violence. "I think this can be one of the tools we use to teach emotional regulation to kids who are at an age where they're vulnerable to going seriously off track," Davidson says. Compassion meditation can be beneficial in promoting more harmonious relationships of all kinds, Davidson adds. "The world certainly could use a little more kindness and compassion," he says. "Starting at a local level, the consequences of changing in this way can be directly experienced."

Lutz and Davidson hope to conduct additional studies to evaluate brain changes that may occur in individuals who cultivate positive emotions through the practice of loving-kindness and compassion over time.

Stories about the “terrible twos” abound in parenting lore. New research published in the March/April 2008 issue of the journal Child Development finds that the way mothers and their 2-year-olds relate to each other affects the quality but not the frequency of conflicts when children are two, and that children’s temperament also plays a role.

Researchers at Lehigh University and the University of California-Davis recruited 60 mothers and their children through birth announcements in local newspapers, then observed them in two sessions: one 50-minute lab visit when the children were 30 months old, and one 90-minute home visit when the children were 36 months. During each observation, the researchers looked at all episodes of conflict, and examined whether they contained compromise, justification, or aggravation (i.e., simple insistence without explanation or threats) by both mothers and children. They also examined whether the conflicts were resolved. Mothers provided information about the children’s temperament and attachment security, or the degree of trust that children have in their mothers’ responsiveness and availability.

The study found that mother-child conflict during both observations was frequent (about 20 times an hour), and there was a lot of variation in the frequency of conflict (from as many as 55 times an hour to as few as 5 times an hour) and in the quality of conflict between mothers and children.

Furthermore, children’s temperament was related to the frequency and quality of conflict, that is, children who were highly active and who had problems controlling their behavior had more conflict with mothers than less active children and children who did not have trouble controlling their behavior. In addition, highly active children and children who frequently and intensely experienced negative emotions had less constructive conflict with their mothers, involving less resolution, more aggravation, and less justification, than children who did not have these qualities.

Attachment security was not related to the frequency of conflict between mothers and their children, but to the quality, the study found. Mothers and children who had secure relationships had constructive conflict involving high levels of resolution, compromise, and justification. In sum, both the quality of children’s relationships with their mothers and children’s personality types were found to shape the nature of conflict between mothers and their children at age two.

“Children with difficult temperaments tend to have more frequent and less constructive conflict with mothers,” according to Deborah Laible, associate professor of psychology at Lehigh University and the lead author of the study. “High-quality relationships between mothers and children were associated with more constructive conflict between mothers and children. In secure relationships, both mothers and children seem committed to maintaining relational harmony by resolving conflict, compromising, and justifying their side of an argument.”

Students who bully others tend to have difficulties with other relationships, such as those with friends and parents. Targeting those relationships, as well as the problems children who bully have with aggression and morality, may offer ideas for intervention and prevention. Those are the findings of a new study that was conducted by scientists at York University and Queens University. It appears in the March/April 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at 871 students (466 girls and 405 boys) for seven years from ages 10 to 18. Each year, they asked the children questions about their involvement in bullying or victimizing behavior, their relationships, and other positive and negative behaviors.

Bullying is a behavior that most children engage in at some point during their school years, according to the study. Almost a tenth (9.9 percent) of the students said they engaged in consistently high levels of bullying from elementary through high school. Some 13.4 percent said they bullied at relatively high levels in elementary school but dropped to almost no bullying by the end of high school. Some 35.1 percent of the children said they bullied peers at moderate levels. And 41.6 percent almost never reported bullying across the adolescent years.

The study also found that children who bullied tended to be aggressive and lacking in a moral compass and they experienced a lot of conflict in their relationships with their parents. In addition, their relationships with friends also were marked by a lot of conflict, and they tended to associate with others who bullied. The findings provide clear direction for prevention of persistent bullying problems, according to Debra Pepler, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Senior Associate Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Pepler, who is the study’s lead author, calls bullying “a relationship problem.”

“Interventions must focus on the children who bully, with attention to their aggressive behavior problems, social skills, and social problem-solving skills. A focus on the child alone is not sufficient. Bullying is a relationship problem that requires relationship solutions by focusing on the bullying children’s strained relationships with parents and risky relationships with peers,” according to Pepler. “By providing intensive and ongoing support starting in the elementary school years to this small group of youth who persistently bully, it may be possible to promote healthy relationships and prevent their ‘career path’ of bullying that leads to numerous social-emotional and relationship problems in adolescence and adulthood.”

Rofé, Yacov (2008). Does repression exist? Memory, pathogenic, unconscious and clinical evidence. Review of General Psychology, 12 (1), 63-85.

Abstract: The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a multidimensional construct, which, in addition to the memory aspect, consists of pathogenic effects on adjustment and the unconscious. Accordingly, in order to arrive at a more accurate decision regarding the existence of repression, studies relevant to all three areas are reviewed. Moreover, since psychoanalysis regards repression as a key factor in accounting for the development and treatment of neurotic disorders, relevant research from these two domains are also taken into account. This comprehensive evaluation reveals little empirical justification for maintaining the psychoanalytic concept of repression. (emphasis added)

Hundreds of thousands of Australians count snakes and spiders among their fears, and while scientists have previously assumed we possess an evolutionary predisposition to fear the unpopular animals, researchers at UQ's School of Psychology look to have proved otherwise. According to Dr Helena Purkis, the results of the UQ study could provide an unprecedented insight into just why the creepy creatures are so widely feared.

“Previous research shows we react differently to snakes and spiders than to other stimuli, such as flowers or mushrooms, or even other dangerous animals….or cars and guns, which are also much more dangerous,” Dr Purkis said. “[In the past, this] has been explained by saying that people are predisposed by evolution to fear certain things, such as snakes and spiders, that would have been dangerous to our ancestors. [However], people tend to be exposed to a lot of negative information regarding snakes and spiders, and we argue this makes them more likely to be associated with phobia.”

In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience with snakes and spiders, to that of snake and spider experts.

“Previous research has argued that snakes and spiders attract preferential attention (they capture attention very quickly) and that during this early processing a negative (fear) response is generated… as an implicit and indexed subconscious [action],” Dr Purkis said. “We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response.”

The study is the first to establish a clear difference between preferential attention and the accompanying emotional response: that is, that you can preferentially attend to something without a negative emotional response being elicited. Dr Purkis said the findings could significantly increase understanding about the basic cognitive and emotional processes involved in the acquisition and maintenance of fear.

“If we understand the relationship between preferential attention and emotion it will help us understand how a stimulus goes from being perceived as potentially dangerous, to eliciting an emotional response and to being associated with phobia,” she said. “[This] could give us some information about the way people need to deal with snakes and spiders in order to minimise negative emotional responses.”

UQ News Online

Scientists have revealed what may well be the first pervasive ‘rule’ of evolution. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex.

Looking back through the last 550 million years of the fossil catalog to the present day, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree. They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors. Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.

“If you start with the simplest possible animal body, then there’s only one direction to evolve in – you have to become more complex,” said Dr Matthew Wills from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath who worked with colleagues Sarah Adamowicz from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and Andy Purvis from Imperial College London.

“Sooner or later, however, you reach a level of complexity where it’s possible to go backwards and become simpler again. What’s astonishing is that hardly any crustaceans have taken this backwards route. Instead, almost all branches have evolved in the same direction, becoming more complex in parallel. This is the nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that’s been found. Of course, there are exceptions within the crustacean family tree, but most of these are parasites, or animals living in remote habitats such as isolated marine caves. For those free-living animals in the ‘rat-race’ of evolution, it seems that competition may be the driving force behind the trend. What’s new about our results is that they show us how this increase in complexity has occurred. Strikingly, it looks far more like a disciplined march than a milling crowd.”

Dr Adamowicz said: “Previous researchers noticed increasing morphological complexity in the fossil record, but this pattern can occur due to the chance origination of a few new types of animals. Our study uses information about the inter-relatedness of different animal groups – the ‘Tree of Life’ – to demonstrate that complexity has evolved numerous times independently.”

Like all arthropods, crustaceans’ bodies are built up of repeating segments. In the simplest crustaceans, the segments are quite similar - one after the other. In the most complex, such as shrimps and lobsters, almost every segment is different, bearing antennae, jaws, claws, walking legs, paddles and gills.

The American biologist Leigh Van Valen coined the phrase ‘Red Queen’ for the evolutionary arms race phenomenon. In Through the Looking-Glass Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen advises Alice that: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

“Those crustacean groups going extinct tended to be less complex than the others around at the time,” said Dr Wills. “There’s even a link between average complexity within a group and the number of species alive today. “All organisms have a common ancestor, so that every living species is part of a giant family tree of life.”

Dr Adamowicz added: “With a few exceptions, once branches of the tree have separated they continue to evolve independently. Looking at many independent branches is similar to viewing multiple repeated runs of the tape of evolution. Our results apply to a group of animals with bodies made of repeated units. We must not forget that bacteria – very simple organisms – are among the most successful living things. Therefore, the trend towards complexity is compelling but does not describe the history of all life.”

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight

Counterproductive Cameras At Traffic Lights
Researchers in Florida contend that cameras for catching drivers who run red lights actually increase accidents and injuries.

60-Second Science from Scientific American podcasts
12 March 2008

Workplace bullying, such as belittling comments, persistent criticism of work and withholding resources, appears to inflict more harm on employees than sexual harassment, say researchers who presented their findings at a conference today. “As sexual harassment becomes less acceptable in society, organizations may be more attuned to helping victims, who may therefore find it easier to cope,” said lead author M. Sandy Hershcovis, PhD, of the University of Manitoba. “In contrast, non-violent forms of workplace aggression such as incivility and bullying are not illegal, leaving victims to fend for themselves.” This finding was presented at the Seventh International Conference on Work, Stress and Health, co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and the Society for Occupational Health Psychology.

Hershcovis and co-author Julian Barling, PhD, of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, reviewed 110 studies conducted over 21 years that compared the consequences of employees’ experience of sexual harassment and workplace aggression. Specifically, the authors looked at the effect on job, co-worker and supervisor satisfaction, workers’ stress, anger and anxiety levels as well as workers’ mental and physical health. Job turnover and emotional ties to the job were also compared. The authors distinguished among different forms of workplace aggression. Incivility included rudeness and discourteous verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Bullying included persistently criticizing employees’ work; yelling; repeatedly reminding employees of mistakes; spreading gossip or lies; ignoring or excluding workers; and insulting employees’ habits, attitudes or private life. Interpersonal conflict included behaviors that involved hostility, verbal aggression and angry exchanges.

Both bullying and sexual harassment can create negative work environments and unhealthy consequences for employees, but the researchers found that workplace aggression has more severe consequences. Employees who experienced bullying, incivility or interpersonal conflict were more likely to quit their jobs, have lower well-being, be less satisfied with their jobs and have less satisfying relations with their bosses than employees who were sexually harassed, the researchers found. Furthermore, bullied employees reported more job stress, less job commitment and higher levels of anger and anxiety. No differences were found between employees experiencing either type of mistreatment on how satisfied they were with their co-workers or with their work. “Bullying is often more subtle, and may include behaviors that do not appear obvious to others,” said Hershcovis. “For instance, how does an employee report to their boss that they have been excluded from lunch? Or that they are being ignored by a coworker? The insidious nature of these behaviors makes them difficult to deal with and sanction.”

From a total of 128 samples that were used, 46 included subjects who experienced sexual harassment, 86 experienced workplace aggression and six experienced both. Sample sizes ranged from 1,491 to 53,470 people. Participants ranged from 18 to 65 years old. The work aggression samples included both men and women. The sexual harassment samples examined primarily women because, Hershcovis said, past research has shown that men interpret and respond differently to the behaviors that women perceive as sexual harassment.

A team of researchers from Canada and Japan have uncovered some remarkable results on how eastern and western cultures assess situations very differently. Across two studies, participants viewed images, each of which consisted of one centre model and four background models in each image. The researchers manipulated the facial emotion (happy, angry, sad) in the centre or background models and asked the participants to determine the dominant emotion of the centre figure.

The majority of Japanese participants (72%) reported that their judgments of the centre person’s emotions were influenced by the emotions of the background figures, while most North Americans (also 72%) reported they were not influenced by the background figures at all. “What we found is quite interesting,” says Takahiko Masuda, a Psychology professor from the University of Alberta. “Our results demonstrate that when North Americans are trying to figure out how a person is feeling, they selectively focus on that particular person’s facial expression, whereas Japanese consider the emotions of the other people in the situation.” This may be because Japanese attention is not concentrated on the individual, but includes everyone in the group, says Masuda.

For the second part of the study, researchers monitored the eye movements of the participants and again the results indicated that the Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than the westerners when judging the situation. While both the Japanese and westerners looked to the central figure during the first second of viewing the photo, the Japanese looked to the background figures at the very next second, while westerners continued to focus on the central figure.

"East Asians seem to have a more holistic pattern of attention, perceiving people in terms of the relationships to others," says Masuda. "People raised in the North American tradition often find it easy to isolate a person from its surroundings, while East Asians are accustom to read the air "kuuki wo yomu" of the situation through their cultural practices, and as a result, they think that even surrounding people's facial expressions are an informative source to understand the particular person's emotion.”

The theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is often presented in the media as fact even though there is little scientific evidence to support it, according to a new study co-authored by a Florida State University visiting lecturer. Jeffrey Lacasse, an FSU doctoral candidate and visiting lecturer in the College of Social Work, and Jonathan Leo, a neuroanatomy professor at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, found that reporters who included statements in news articles about depression being caused by a chemical imbalance, or a lack of serotonin in the brain, were unable to provide scientific evidence to support those statements.

Lacasse and Leo spent about a year in late 2006 and 2007 monitoring the daily news for articles that included statements about chemical imbalances and contacting the authors to request evidence that supported their statements. Several reporters, psychiatrists and a drug company responded to the researchers' requests, but Lacasse and Leo said they did not provide documentation that supported the chemical imbalance theory. Their findings were published in the journal Society.

"The media's presentation of the theory as fact is troublesome because it misrepresents the current status of the theory," Lacasse said. "For instance, there are few scientists who will rise to its defense, and some prominent psychiatrists publicly acknowledge that the serotonin hypothesis is more metaphor than fact. As the current study documents, when asked for evidence, reporters were unable to cite peer-reviewed primary articles in support of the theory." Moreover, the researchers said, several of the responses received from reporters seem to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory's scientific status. The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," which almost all psychiatrists use to diagnose and treat their patients, clearly states that the cause of depression and anxiety is unknown, according to Lacasse and Leo.

The Society article builds on the pair's 2005 study, which focused on pharmaceutical advertisements that claim depression is caused by an imbalance of serotonin—an imbalance the drug companies say can be corrected by a class of antidepressants called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). "The chemical imbalance theory, which was formulated in the 1960s, was based on the observation that mood could be artificially altered with drugs, rather than direct observation of any chemical imbalances," Leo said. "Since then there has been no direct evidence to confirm the theory and a significant number of findings cast doubt on the theory."

The researchers said the popularity of the theory is in large part based on the presumed efficacy of the SSRIs, but they say that several large studies now cast doubt on this efficacy. A review of a full set of trial data published in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine last month concluded that much of the perceived efficacy of several of the most common SSRIs was due to the placebo effect. Other studies indicate that for every 10 people who take an SSRI, only one to two people are truly receiving benefit from the medication, according to Lacasse and Leo.

Still, the National Center for Health Statistics found that antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the United States, with doctors writing more than 31 million prescriptions in 2005. Both Lacasse and Leo emphasized the importance of patients being given factual information so they can make informed decisions about medications and the role of other potentially useful interventions, such as psychotherapy, exercise or self-help strategies. "Patients might make different choices about the use of medications and possibly use alternative approaches to their distress if they were fully informed," Lacasse said. "We believe the media can play a positive role by ensuring that their mental health reporting is congruent with scientific literature."

FSU News
March 2008

Cochlear implant recipients experience a significant improvement in their quality of life, and have improved speech recognition, according to new research published in the March 2008 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.

The German study evaluated the quality of life of 56 cochlear implant recipients using the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire (NCIQ), a self-administered assessment that asks responders about sound perception, speech, self-esteem, and social interaction. Responders reported significant improvements in all areas, with especially large gains observed in the areas of sound perception and social interaction. The study also gauged participants using the Medical Outcome Study Short Form 36 (SF36). While the results provided by this tool are not specific to hearing loss or cochlear implants, they nonetheless indicated significant improvements in the areas of social functioning and mental health.

A cochlear implant is an electronic device that restores partial hearing to the deaf. It is surgically implanted in the inner ear and activated by a device worn outside the ear. Unlike a hearing aid, it does not make sound louder or clearer. Instead, the device bypasses damaged parts of the auditory system and directly stimulates the hearing nerve, allowing individuals who are profoundly hearing-impaired to receive sound.

Brain imaging reveals drivers are distracted even if they don't talk

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have shown that just listening to a cell phone while driving is a significant distraction, and it causes drivers to commit some of the same types of driving errors that can occur under the influence of alcohol. The use of cell phones, including dialing and texting, has long been a safety concern for drivers. But the Carnegie Mellon study, for the first time, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. This can cause drivers to weave out of their lane, based on the performance of subjects using a driving simulator.

The findings, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Brain Research, show that making cell phones hands-free or voice-activated is not sufficient in eliminating distractions to drivers. “Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel; they also have to keep their brains on the road,” said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. Other distractions, such as eating, listening to the radio or talking with a passenger, also can divert a driver. Though it is not known how these activities compare to cell phone use, Just said there are reasons to believe cell phones may be especially distracting. “Talking on a cell phone has a special social demand, such that not attending to the cell conversation can be interpreted as rude, insulting behavior,” he noted. A passenger, by contrast, is likely to recognize increased demands on the driver’s attention and stop talking.

The 29 study volunteers used a driving simulator while inside an MRI brain scanner. They steered a car along a virtual winding road at a fixed, challenging speed, either while they were undisturbed, or while they were deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false. Just’s team used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to measure activity in 20,000 brain locations, each about the size of a peppercorn. Measurements were made every second.

The driving-while-listening condition produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain’s parietal lobe, which is associated with driving. This portion of the brain integrates sensory information and is critical for spatial sense and navigation. Activity was also reduced in the occipital lobe, which processes visual information. The other impact of driving-while-listening was a significant deterioration in the quality of driving. Subjects who were listening committed more lane maintenance errors, such as hitting a simulated guardrail, and deviating from the middle of the lane. Both kinds of influences decrease the brain’s capacity to drive well, and that decrease can be costly when the margin for error is small.

“The clear implication is that engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardize judgment and reaction time if an atypical or unusual driving situation arose,” Just said. “Heavy traffic is no place for an involved personal or business discussion, let alone texting.” Because driving and listening draw on two different brain networks, scientists had previously suspected that the networks could work independently on each task. But Just said this study demonstrates that there is only so much that the brain can do at one time, no matter how different the two tasks are.

The study emerges from the new field of neuroergonomics, which combines brain science with human-computer interaction studies that measure how well a technology matches human capabilities. Neuroergonomics is beginning to be applied to the operation of vehicles like aircraft, ships and cars in which drivers now have navigation systems, iPods and even DVD players at their disposal. Every additional input to a driver consumes some of his or her brain capacity, taking away some of the resources that monitor for other vehicles, lane markers, obstacles, and sudden changes in conditions.

“Drivers’ seats in many vehicles are becoming highly instrumented cockpits,” Just said, “and during difficult driving situations, they require the undivided attention of the driver’s brain.”

Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control
In a preschool in Bridgeton, New Jersey, children are learning to develop important cognitive and self-regulation skills -- through play.

NPR Morning Edition (28 Feb 2008)
by Alix Spiegel

Some of the oldest tales and wisest mythology allude to the snake as a mischievous seducer, dangerous foe or powerful iconoclast; however, the legend surrounding this proverbial predator may not be based solely on fantasy. As scientists from the University of Virginia recently discovered, the common fear of snakes is most likely intrinsic.

Evolutionarily speaking, early humans who were capable of surviving the dangers of an uncivilized society adapted accordingly. And the same can be said of the common fear of certain animals, such as spiders and snakes: The ancestors of modern humans were either abnormally lucky or extraordinarily capable of detecting and deterring the threat of, for example, a poisonous snake.

Psychologists Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache were able to show this phenomenon by examining the ability of adults and children to pinpoint snakes among other nonthreatening objects in pictures. “We wanted to know whether preschool children, who have much less experience with natural threats than adults, would detect the presence of snakes as quickly as their parents,” LoBue explained. “If there is an evolved tendency in humans for the rapid detection of snakes, it should appear in young children as well as their elders.”

Preschool children and their parents were shown nine color photographs on a computer screen and were asked to find either the single snake among eight flowers, frogs or caterpillars, or the single nonthreatening item among eight snakes. As the study surprisingly shows, parents and their children identified snakes more rapidly than they detected the other stimuli, despite the gap in age and experience.

The results, which appear in the March 2008 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, may provide the first evidence of an adapted, visually-stimulated fear mechanism in humans.

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)