Body Movements Help Problem-Solving

Body Movements Help Problem-Solving | Psych Central News

As most exercisers have experienced, performance of physical activity is often accompanied by clarity of thought. A new study supports this premise as investigators demonstrated that the brain can use bodily cues to help understand and solve complex problems.

The study, appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person’s ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

“Our manipulation is changing the way people think,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who conducted the study with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas.

“In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them – directing the way they think about the problem.”

Even after successfully solving the problem, almost none of the study subjects became consciously aware of any connection between the physical activity they engaged in and the solution they found.

“The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem,” Lleras said.

The new findings offer new insight into what researchers call “embodied cognition,” which describes the link between body and mind, Lleras said.

“People tend to think that their mind lives in their brain, dealing in conceptual abstractions, very much disconnected from the body,” he said.

“This emerging research is fascinating because it is demonstrating how your body is a part of your mind in a powerful way. The way you think is affected by your body and, in fact, we can use our bodies to help us think.”

In the study, the researchers asked study subjects to tie the ends of two strings together. The strings dangled from ceiling rafters and were so far apart that a person grasping one could not reach the other. A few tools were also available: a paperback book, a wrench, two small dumbbells and a plate.

Subjects were given a total of eight, two-minute sessions to solve the problem, with 100 seconds devoted to finding a solution, interrupted by 20 seconds of exercise.

“Our cover story was that we were interested in the effects of exercise on problem-solving,” Lleras said.

Some subjects were told to swing their arms forward and backward during the exercise sessions, while others were directed to alternately stretch one arm, and then the other, to the side.

To prevent them from consciously connecting these activities to the problem of the strings, the researchers had them count backwards by threes while exercising.

The subjects in the arm-swinging group were more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem, which required attaching an object to one of the strings and swinging it so that it could be grasped while also holding the other string.

By the end of the 16-minute deadline, participants in the arm-swinging group were 40 percent more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem.

“By making you swing your arms in a particular way, we’re activating a part of your brain that deals with swinging motions,” Lleras said. “That sort of activity in your brain then unconsciously leads you to think about that type of motion when you’re trying to solve the problem.”

Previous studies of embodied cognition have demonstrated that physical movements can aid in learning and memory or can change a person’s perceptions or attitudes toward information, Lleras said.

Other studies by Lleras and his colleagues also have shown that directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems, but this is the first study to show that directed movements of the body can, outside of conscious awareness, guide higher-order cognitive processing, he said.

“We view this as a really important new window into understanding the complexity of human thought,” he said. “I guess another take-home message is this: If you are stuck trying to solve a problem, take a break. Go do something else. This will ensure that the next time you think about that problem you will literally approach it with a different mind. And that may help!”

Psyched Out By Stereotypes: Research Suggests Thinking About The Positive

Psyched Out By Stereotypes: Research Suggests Thinking About The Positive

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2009) — In a new study, cognitive scientists have shown that when aware of both a negative and positive stereotype related to performance, women will identify more closely with the positive stereotype, avoiding the harmful impact the negative stereotype unwittingly can have on their performance.

The study, led by Robert J. Rydell, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, focused on women and math ability. While studies -- including this one -- have shown that women will perform worse on mathematical tasks if simply made aware of the negative stereotype that women are weaker at math than men, this is the first study to examine the influence of concurrent and competing stereotypes, one negative and one positive.

The study also demonstrates how the negative stereotype encroached on working memory, thus leaving less brain power for the mathematical task at hand. The positive stereotypes had no such effect, however, and when coupled with the negative stereotype erased its drain on working memory.

"This research shows that because people are members of multiple social groups that often have contradictory performance stereotypes (for example, Asian females in the domain of math), making them aware of both a positive group stereotype and a negative stereotype eliminates the threat and underperformance that is usually seen when they dwell only on their membership in a negatively stereotyped group," Rydell said. "People seem motivated to align themselves with positively stereotyped groups and, as a byproduct, can eliminate the worry, stress and cognitive depletion brought about by negative performance stereotypes, increasing actual performance."

Stereotype threat -- where just the awareness of a stereotype can influence performance regardless of actual ability -- has been demonstrated in many domains, from driving cars to cooking. In academics, high-stakes tests, such as college entrance exams, often ask test-takers to select demographic information, such as gender and level of education, before beginning the test.

One of the experiments in Rydell's study followed this format, with some test-takers asked to identify only their gender -- all were women -- before working on the math problems. These study participants did not perform as well as the students who were asked to provide additional demographic information, such as their education level, which was considered a positive stereotype.

"A stereotype that might be positive for one person could be considered negative to another," Rydell said. "The easiest fix would be to ask for demographic information after the test."

The study involved four experiments in which female undergraduate college students were asked to perform difficult math problems. Some were given no information about the stereotypes before working on the problems. Some students were made aware only of the negative stereotype, that men were better at math than women. Some students were only made aware of the positive stereotype, that college students performed better at math than non-college students. Some of the students were made aware of both stereotypes.

Each experiment involved between 57 and 112 college students, using new students with each experiment. Here are some of the findings:

* In all four experiments, the women who learned only of the negative stereotype performed worse than the women in the other three groups, who on average showed no difference in performance level.
* One experiment used a word association exercise to gauge which social group the study participants identified with more strongly -- being female or a college student. When presented with both stereotypes, the women identified more with their college student identity and less with their gender identity.
* One of the experiments measured the students' working memory once they learned of one or both stereotypes. The women who learned only of the negative stereotype demonstrated less available working memory.

Rydell said people become aware of stereotypes in different ways. For women, simply sitting between two men while taking a math test can activate the negative gender stereotype.

"The activation of the stereotype is relatively automatic and hard to control," he said. "Whether you choose to endorse or believe the stereotype, however, is under your control. One option is to think about the positive groups you're associated with that are related to the task at hand."

Co-authors include Allen R. McConnell, Miami University; and Sian L. Beilock, University of Chicago.

Bowel gene linked to a type of autism

Bowel gene linked to a type of autism - health - 11 March 2009 - New Scientist

ON TOP of dealing with social and learning difficulties, people with autism also run an unusually high risk of bowel disorders. Now a gene variant has been found that may explain this link.

A large proportion of people with autism also have problems such as chronic diarrhoea, constipation or food intolerance. The MET gene, which has been linked to autism, is known to play a role in the repair of damaged gut tissue, so Daniel Campbell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, thought this gene might be involved.

Sure enough, in 118 families in which at least one child had both autism and gut disorders, his team found that a particular variant of the MET gene was more common in the child with autism than in its parents, suggesting the gene played a role in their autism. By contrast this was not the case in 96 families where the children with autism did not have gut problems, suggesting their autism had a different cause (Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0819).

Knowing the underlying genetic cause of an individual's autism could eventually lead to better ways of treating the condition.

How people can think themselves sick

How people can think themselves sick - opinion - 13 March 2009 - New Scientist

Can people think themselves sick? This is what psychiatrist Simon Wessely explores. His research into the causes of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf war syndrome has led to hate mail, yet far from dismissing these illnesses as imaginary, Wessely has spent his career developing treatments for them. Clare Wilson asks what it's like to be disliked by people you're trying to help

How might most of us experience the effects of the mind on the body?

In an average week you probably experience numerous examples of how what's going on around you affects your subjective health. Most people instinctively know that when bad things happen, they affect your body. You can't sleep, you feel anxious, you've got butterflies in your stomach... you feel awful.

When does that turn into an illness?

Such symptoms only become a problem when people get trapped in excessively narrow explanations for illness - when they exclude any broader consideration of the many reasons why we feel the way we do. This is where the internet can do real harm. And sometimes people fall into the hands of charlatans who give them bogus explanations.

Is that how chronic fatigue syndrome can start?

Often there is an organic trigger like glandular fever. That's the start, and usually most people get over it, albeit after some weeks or months. But others can get trapped in vicious circles of monitoring their symptoms, restricting their activities beyond what is necessary and getting frustrated or demoralised. This causes more symptoms, more concerns and more physical changes, so much so that what started it all off is no longer what is keeping it going.

One of the enigmas is why certain infections, like glandular fever, have an increased likelihood of triggering chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), while others, such as influenza, do not. We also don't know why people who have had depression are twice as likely to develop CFS. I get cross with people who want to explain one and not the other. Some people take too psychiatric a view of CFS and ignore the infective trigger, whereas others want to think only about the infection.

So how do you treat CFS?

The first thing you have to do is engage people. I see them for 2 hours, which enables me to take a proper history to ensure I understand their symptoms and how the illness is affecting them. This helps people to open up, as they can see I am interested in their problems and taking them seriously.

With many people I genuinely do not know why they are ill. Or if I do, if they had glandular fever five years ago, say, I tell them there is nothing I can do about the original trigger. What makes a difference is what happens next. Then we get on to the practical stuff, such as finding out how people deal with the condition. Are there things they are doing that may not be the best for recovery? Then I recommend cognitive behavioural therapy and tailored programmes of gradually increasing activity levels.

How successful is your treatment of CFS?

Roughly a third of people completely recover and a third show good improvement. About a third we can't do much for.

What about those people who have such severe CFS they are bedridden?

In that kind of disability, psychological factors are important and I don't care how unpopular that statement makes me. We also have to consider what those years of inactivity have done to their muscles. People know that if you break your leg, when you take the plaster off there's nothing much left. If you've been in a wheelchair for some years, the laws of physiology haven't stopped.

Your most cited paper claims that conditions such as CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia are all the same illness.

If you ask people with irritable bowel syndrome whether they suffer from fatigue, they all say yes. It's just gastroenterologists don't ask that question. Likewise, if you talk to someone with CFS, you find that nearly all of them have gut problems. If you systematically interview people with these illnesses, you find that a big proportion of these so-called discrete syndromes have a large overlap with the others. You have to think that we have got the classifications wrong.

So do you think these syndrome labels are arbitrary?

Each country has different syndromes. They don't have CFS in France; they have a strange one, spasmophilia, where a person has unexplained convulsions. In Sweden they have dental amalgam syndrome, which hasn't really caught on here. In Germany they believe low blood pressure is bad.

Where does Gulf war syndrome fit in?

I'd read about people with Gulf war syndrome in newspapers. They looked incredibly like my CFS patients except they were in uniform. Behind them was an interesting scientific conundrum calling out for epidemiological research. Someone had to ask: "What are the rates of illness in those we sent to the Gulf compared with those we haven't?" And that's what we did. We showed that serving in the Gulf had definitely affected the health of a proportion of those personnel, even though this was not a new "syndrome".

Is looking into Gulf war syndrome how you came to focus on military health?

Yes. I like dealing with military personnel - I admire what they do. Looking back on my career, it is military research that has given me the most straightforward pleasure, and the satisfaction of knowing we have had a positive impact on policy.

What kind of input has your team had on military policy?

We have provided information on rates of psychiatric disorders in troops. For example, alcohol is a bigger problem than post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We've shown that extending operational tour length has a bad effect on people's morale and mental health. We also did a comprehensive review of prior research into PTSD and concluded that psychological debriefing after a traumatic incident doesn't help. Normal soldiers need to keep away from people like me - psychiatrists and counsellors.
Alcohol is a bigger problem than post-traumatic stress disorder in troops

Your recent research is on people who claim that mobile phones make them ill. What's going on there?

My colleague James Rubin and I showed that people who believe they are sensitive to mobile phones aren't able to tell the difference between sham and real phone signals. So are these people all making it up? Of course not. They've got themselves into a situation where a mobile phone triggers symptoms, but it doesn't do so through electromagnetic radiation.

What is it like to receive hate mail?

There have been times when it has been pretty unpleasant. But it goes with the territory. I'm not targeted by my own patients. If I ever thought that my patients or peer group thought I was a bad person, I would be worried. What matters is that the research we do is good quality. That's what you stand or fall by.

Humans Can Sense 'Smell Of Fear' In Sweat

Humans Can Sense 'Smell Of Fear' In Sweat, Psychologist Says

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2009) — When threatened, many animals release chemicals as a warning signal to members of their own species, who in turn react to the signals and take action. Research by Rice University psychologist Denise Chen suggests a similar phenomenon occurs in humans.

Given that more than one sense is typically involved when humans perceive information, Chen studied whether the smell of fear facilitates humans’ other stronger senses.

Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou collected “fearful sweat” samples from male volunteers. The volunteers kept gauze pads in their armpits while they were shown films that dealt with topics known to inspire fear.

Later, female volunteers were exposed to chemicals from the "fearful sweat” when they were fitted with a piece of gauze under their nostrils. They then viewed images of faces that morphed from happy to ambiguous to fearful. They were asked to indicate whether the face was happy or fearful by pressing buttons on a computer.

Exposure to the smell of fear biased women toward interpreting facial expressions as more fearful, but only when the expressions were ambiguous. It had no effect when the facial emotions were more discernable.

Chen’s conclusion is consistent with what’s been found with processing emotions in both the face and the voice. There, an emotion from one sense modulates how the same emotion is perceived in another sense, especially when the signal to the latter sense is ambiguous.

“Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings,” Chen said. “They also demonstrate that social smells modulate vision in an emotion-specific way."

Smell is a prevalent form of social communication in many animals, but its function in humans is enigmatic. Humans have highly developed senses of sight and hearing. Why do we still need olfaction? Findings by Chen and Zhou offer insight on this topic. “The sense of smell guides our social perception when the more-dominant senses are weak,” Chen said.

Mental Fatigue Can Affect Physical Endurance

Mental Fatigue Can Affect Physical Endurance

Findings could become research model to help those with chronic fatigue

BETHESDA, Md. (Feb. 24, 2009) − When participants performed a mentally fatiguing task prior to a difficult exercise test, they reached exhaustion more quickly than when they did the same exercise when mentally rested, a new study finds.

The study also found that mental fatigue did not cause the heart or muscles to perform any differently. Instead, our “perceived effort” determines when we reach exhaustion. The researchers said the next step is to look at the brain to find out exactly why people with mental fatigue perceive exercise to be more difficult.

Samuele M. Marcora, Walter Staiano and Victoria Manning of Bangor University, Wales, the United Kingdom, did the study, “Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans.” The study will appear in the March print edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology. The American Physiological Society published the study.

The study

The 16 participants rode a stationary bicycle to exhaustion under two conditions: once when they were mentally fatigued and once when they were mentally rested. The trials took place in the laboratory on different days. The participants got the same amount of sleep, drank the same amount and had the same meal before each of the sessions.

The mental fatigue sessions began with a challenging 90-minute mental task that required close attention, memory, quick reaction and an ability to inhibit a response. After undergoing this session, participants reported being tired and lacking energy. The control session consisted of watching neutral documentaries for 90 minutes and was not mentally fatiguing.

After each of the 90-minute sessions – mentally fatiguing or non-fatiguing – the participants did an intense bout of exercise on a stationary bicycle. They rode until exhaustion, defined as the point when they could not maintain a cadence of at least 60 revolutions per minute for more than five seconds.

Throughout both exercise sessions, the researchers tracked a variety of physiological measures, such as oxygen consumption, heart rate, cardiac output, blood pressure, ventilation, and blood lactate levels. The participants completed surveys to measure their motivation and perceived effort. The researchers offered monetary prizes for the best performance on the exercise and mental tasks as a way to keep motivation high.

Results

*

The participants stopped exercising 15% earlier, on average, when they were mentally fatigued.
*

The participants stopped at the same perceived effort level in both the fatigued and non-fatigued trial. However, mentally fatigued participants started at a higher level of perceived effort and reached the endpoint sooner.
*

The cardio-respiratory and musculo-energetic measurements did not vary between the two trials when compared at specific points in time. However, because the non-fatigued trials went longer, heart rate and blood lactate levels were higher at the end of those trials.
*

Motivation was the same in both trials and was not a factor.

The researchers speculate that the perception of effort occurs in the brain. Dr. Marcora said his team is considering two possibilities:

*

mental fatigue lowers the brain’s inhibition against quitting, or
*

mentally fatigue affects dopamine, a brain chemical that plays a role in motivation and effort

One interesting note is that demanding mental tasks activate the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain. Previous research has shown that rats with a lesion in the anterior cingulate cortex would not work as hard for a reward compared to rats with no lesion. This area of the brain may be where perception of effort originates, Dr. Marcora said.

Applying the results

This research could provide a way to study chronic fatigue syndrome, Dr. Marcora said. People with chronic fatigue report they lack energy and experience “brain fog,” just like the mentally fatigued participants in this study. In addition, as in this study, people with chronic fatigue perceive exercise to be more difficult despite physiological responses considered normal during exercise.

The research model may also be helpful for military personnel. They do physically demanding tasks after long period of vigilance. Vigilance produces mental fatigue.

Finally, the study suggests that people doing high intensity training, such as competitive athletes, should do their training while mentally rested. However, people who exercise after work should continue doing so, even if mentally fatigued. Most people work out at a moderate intensity, which still gives plenty of physiological and psychological benefit, including relief from stress and improved mental performance.

NOTE TO EDITORS: To interview Dr. Marcora, please contact Christine Guilfoy at (301) 634-7253 or at cguilfoy@the-aps.org.

Funding: School of Sport, Health and Exercise Science, Bangor University, Wales, U.K.

Time Pressure Is What You Make It

Time Pressure Is What You Make It | Psych Central News

Wednesday, Feb 11 (Psych Central) --

Ask anyone working on a project, and the biggest complaint one hears is, “There’s not enough time.”

But instead of more time, maybe what they need is a change of perception.

“Research has shown that it’s not necessarily the time pressure, but it’s the perception of that time pressure that affects you,” says Michael DeDonno, from Case Western Reserve University.

“If you feel you don’t have enough time to do something, it’s going to affect you.”

DeDonno recently studied 163 subjects performing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a popular psychological assessment tool, to investigate the effect of perceived time pressure on a learning-based task.

His study, the first to look at the relationship between perceived time pressure and IGT performance, was published in the December issue of Judgment and Decision Making.

He divided the study’s participants into two groups: an experimental group that was informed the time allotted to perform the task was insufficient and the control group which was told they had typically sufficient time to complete the task.

In the IGT, participants choose from among four decks of cards with the goal of making as much money as possible. Two of the decks are “good decks,” yielding a positive utility, and two are “bad decks,” with a negative utility.

The idea is to figure out which decks are good decks in the quickest amount of time to maximize profit over the course of the task.

Both groups were actually given sufficient time to complete the task, which involved 100 trials for each participant. However, each of the two groups was further broken down into subgroups, with one subgroup being given less time between card selections to think about the task.

But results show that participants who were advised the time was insufficient performed worse than those who were told they had enough time, regardless of the actual time allotted.

“If I told you that you didn’t have enough time, your performance was low regardless if you had ample time or not,” DeDonno says. “If you were told you had enough time, in both scenarios, they out performed those who were told they didn’t. ”

DeDonno says there are plenty of real-world benefits to understanding the effects of perceived time pressure on decision-making performance. He cited project team members who perceived a high degree of time pressure had lower job satisfaction. He also noted standardized tests, like the ACT or LSAT, have a high rate of test anxiety by test takers due mostly to time constraints.

He also wants to further the study to examine time perception with HMO physicians in relation to time spent with patients and diagnostic accuracy. Will a perception of time being insufficient by HMO physicians lead to inappropriate medications or an increase in diagnostic error?

While it remains to be determined why perceived time pressure can impair performance, DeDonno says that there are ways to combat it.

“Decision-making can be emotion based, keep your emotions in check. Have confidence in the amount of time you do have to do things. Try to focus on the task and not the time. We don’t control time, but we can control our perception. It’s amazing what you can do with a limited amount of time.

“Time is relevant. Just have the confidence with the time you’re given. I tell my students ‘Do the best you can in the time allotted. When it ends, it ends.’”

Color Wars: Do Hues Enhance Performance?

Color Wars: Do Hues Enhance Performance?

For those who think people who worry about color schemes are fussy decorator types, think again. New research has shown that certain colors can inspire caution or creativity in problem solving.

"Everybody has a hunch about how color affects our behavior and cognition," said Juliet Zhu, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. "But there is not much research done in a scientific manner."

Zhu and co-author Ravi Mehta tested more than 600 participants over one year on a variety of problem-solving tasks, including solving anagrams and memorizing lists of words. The tasks were done against either a red, blue or white (neutral) screen, usually on computers.

When presented with a red background, the participants solved tasks that required attention to detail faster than when presented with a blue background.

Conversely, when presented against a blue background, participants offered superior solutions to problems that required a high degree of creativity, such as building a toy out of small parts or the many ways to use a brick.

Previous research on color and cognition often show conflicting results in which either red or blue is shown to enhance performance on cognitive tasks. Zhu and Mehta's efforts to reconcile that conflict led them to divide the cognitive tasks into those that required attention and those that required creativity.

Get Your Questions Answered at the ABCNews.com OnCall+ Wellness Center
Zhu and Mehta's results suggested that a red background enhances performance on detail-oriented tasks and a blue background enhances performance on tasks that require creative thinking. The study appeared today in Science Express.

Seeing Red, Blue

Mehta, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, said they picked red and blue because they were at opposite ends of the color spectrum, in the warmest and coolest color groups, respectively. But red and blue also have strong meanings, or learned associations, attached to them.

Red is often associated with danger and mistakes -- stop signs, for example -- and promotes avoidance behavior. Consequently, people become more alert and detail oriented.

"That is part of being careful," Mehta said.

Blue, on the other hand, is associated with calmness, openness and images of oceans and sky, giving the perception of safety. In a safe environment, people are more comfortable taking risks and exploring creative ideas while solving problems.

For example, when asked to come up with different ways to use a brick, those in the blue group suggested an animal scratching post, chalk or an object in a museum to symbolize hard work.

Participants in the red group, on the other hand, offered suggestions such as using the brick as part of a house or a road or a wall.

When presented with a neutral, white background, Mehta said participant performance fell in between that of the red and blue groups, proving that certain colors can be beneficial, depending on the task.

Color Wars

But Zhu and Mehta's study showed that people are largely unaware of the impact color can have on cognitive ability.

"There are no common cultural expectations about what those colors are gong to do for them," said Ronald Friedman, assistant professor of psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, who has researched creativity and was not associated with this study. "People do not have any lay theories [that could make this] a placebo effect."

When participants were told they would be presented with a task that either required attention or creativity, and to select the color they believed would enhance their performance on that task, the participants overwhelmingly chose blue. Some 66 percent of participants chose blue when confronted with a creative task, and 74 percent chose blue when confronted with a detail-oriented task.

"That was the most surprising finding," Zhu said. "People are totally unaware of this effect."

Zhu said this outcome was likely the result of a general preference for blue over red in the population, and that people do not realize that red will, in some cases, enhance their performance more than blue.

Mehta pointed out that further research on colors and cognition could have practical implications, for example, using a red background when filing out tax forms -- a detail oriented task.

Zhu said further research could explore how cognitive responses to color can change depending on the cultural context, in other countries, for example, or as part of athletics.

"Despite the fact that we have these intuitive feelings that environmental cues will affect our behavior, little research has been done," Zhu said.

Cognitive Training Can Alter Biochemistry Of The Brain

Cognitive Training Can Alter Biochemistry Of The Brain

ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2009) — Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown for the first time that the active training of the working memory brings about visible changes in the number of dopamine receptors in the human brain. The study, which is published in the journal Science, was conducted with the help of PET scanning and provides deeper insight into the complex interplay between cognition and the brain's biological structure.


"Brain biochemistry doesn't just underpin our mental activity; our mental activity and thinking process can also affect the biochemistry," says Professor Torkel Klingberg, who led the study. "This hasn't been demonstrated in humans before, and opens up a floodgate of fascinating questions."

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key part in many of the brain's functions. Disruptions to the dopamine system can impair working memory, making it more difficult to remember information over a short period of time, such as when problem solving. Impaired working memory has, in its turn, proved to be a contributory factory to cognitive impairments in such disorders as ADHD and schizophrenia.

Professor Klingberg and his colleagues have previously shown that the working memory can be improved with a few weeks' intensive training. Through a collaborative project conducted under the Stockholm Brain Institute, the researchers have now taken a step further and monitored the brain using Positron Emission Tomography (PET scans), and have confirmed that intensive brain training leads to a change in the number of dopamine D1 receptors in the cortex.

Their results can be of significance to the development of new treatments for patients with cognitive impairments, such as those related to ADHD, stroke, chronic fatigue syndrome and ageing.

"Changes in the number of dopamine receptors in a person doesn't give us the key to poor memory," says Professor Lars Farde, one of the researchers who took part in the study. "We also have to ask if the differences could have been caused by a lack of memory training or other environmental factors. Maybe we'll be able to find new, more effective treatments that combine medication and cognitive training, in which case we're in extremely interesting territory."

Positron Emission Tomography is a medical imaging technique based on the decay of radioactive isotopes that is able to produce three-dimensional pictures of the movement of signal substances in the living body. Karolinska Institutet has been able to invest in the world's most powerful PET scanner for brain imaging thanks to a financial contribution by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

A good cry isn't for everyone

A good cry isn't for everyone - International Herald Tribune

They're considered a release, a psychological tonic, and to many a glimpse of something deeper: the heart's own sign language, emotional perspiration from the well of common humanity.

Tears lubricate love songs and love, weddings and funerals, public rituals and private pain, and perhaps no scientific study can capture their many meanings.

"I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I'm sad, I may cry when I'm sharing something that's of great significance to me," said Nancy Reiley, 62, who works at a women's shelter in Tampa, Florida, "and for some reason I sometimes will cry when I'm in a public speaking situation.

"It has nothing to do with feeling sad or vulnerable. There's no reason I can think of why it happens, but it does."

Now, some researchers say that the common psychological wisdom about crying — crying as a healthy catharsis — is incomplete and misleading. Having a "good cry" can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone, argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Placing such high expectation on a tearful breakdown most likely sets some people up for emotional confusion afterward.

Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy

Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy: Scientific American

Lousy day? Don’t try to think happy thoughts—just think fast. A new study shows that accelerated thinking can improve your mood. In six experiments, researchers at Princeton and Harvard universities made research participants think quickly by having them generate as many problem-solving ideas (even bad ones) as possible in 10 minutes, read a series of ideas on a computer screen at a brisk pace or watch an I Love Lucy video clip on fast-forward. Other participants performed similar tasks at a relaxed speed.

Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful. Activities that promote fast thinking, then, such as whip­ping through an easy crossword puzzle or brain-storming quickly about an idea, can boost energy and mood, says psychologist Emily Pronin, the study’s lead author.

Pronin notes that rapid-fire thinking can sometimes have negative consequences. For people with bipolar disorder, thoughts can race so quickly that the manic feeling becomes aversive. And based on their own and others’ research, Pronin and a colleague propose in another recent article that although fast and varied thinking causes elation, fast but repetitive thoughts can instead trigger anxiety. (They further suggest that slow, varied thinking leads to the kind of calm, peaceful happiness associated with mindfulness meditation, whereas slow, repetitive thinking tends to sap energy and spur depressive thoughts.)
Also in this issue of Mind

It is unclear why thought speed affects mood, but Pronin and her colleagues theorize that our own expectations may be part of the equation. In earlier research, they found that people generally believe fast thinking is a sign of a good mood. This lay belief may lead us to instinctively infer that if we are thinking quickly we must be happy. In addition, they suggest, thinking quickly may unleash the brain’s novelty-loving dopamine system, which is involved in sensations of pleasure and reward.

The kind of rush that a person gets from rapid-fire thinking may be transient, but “these little bursts of positive emotion add up,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside. Studies have demon­strated that happiness yields myriad benefits, including greater productivity, stronger social support and improved immune function, she explains, adding that “even brief periods of heightened mood can lead to upward spirals.”

STRESS MAY HASTEN THE GROWTH OF MELANOMA TUMORS

Stress May Hasten The Growth Of Melanoma Tumors But Common Beta-Blocker Medications Might Slow That Progress

COLUMBUS, Ohio – For patients with a particularly aggressive form of skin cancer – malignant melanoma – stress, including that which comes from simply hearing that diagnosis, might amplify the progression of their disease.

But the same new research that infers this also suggests that the use of commonly prescribed blood pressure medicines might slow the development of those tumors and therefore improve these patients’ quality of life.
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The study, the third by Ohio State University scientists in the last two years that looked for links between stress hormones and diseases like cancer, is published in the the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

Eric V. Yang, a research scientist at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research (IBMR), exposed samples of three melanoma cell lines to the compound norepinephrine, a naturally occurring catecholamine that functions as a stress hormone. In times of increased stress, levels of norepinephrine increase in the bloodstream.

Yang and colleague Ronald Glaser were looking for changes in the levels of three proteins released by the cells. Glaser is a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics, member of the university’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the IBMR.

One of the proteins – vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF – plays a key role in stimulating the growth of new blood vessels needed to feed a growing tumor, a process called angiogenesis. The other two proteins, Interleukin-6 and Interleukin-8, are both involved in fostering tumor growth.

All three of the cell lines were grown from tissues taken from secondary tumors that had metastasized from a primary site and they signify aggressive forms of cancer. But one of them – C8161 – represented the most aggressive and advanced form of melanoma.

“We noticed that all three of these proteins increased in response to the norepinephrine,” Yang explained, adding that in the C8161 cells, “we got a 2,000 percent increase in IL-6. In untreated samples from this cell line, you normally can’t detect any IL-6 at all.

“What this tells us is that stress might have a worse effect on melanoma that is in a very aggressive or advanced stage, and that one marker for that might be increased levels of IL-6,” he said.

The researchers ruled out cell proliferation – an increase in the number of cells present – as a reason for the increase in all three proteins. That meant that the only other answer was that the cells were increasing their expression of the genes responsible for producing these compounds.

The researchers showed that the norepinephrine molecule binds to receptors on the surface of cancer cells and once this linkage occurs, it stimulates the release of the proteins that support angiogenesis and tumor growth.

Yang and Glaser first confirmed that the receptors were present on cells in all three cell lines and then tested what would happen when the receptors were blocked by common blood pressure medicine – the so-called “beta-blockers.”

When the beta-blockers did bind to the receptors, the production of the three proteins reduced significantly, suggesting that in patients with melanoma, using these types of medications might be used to slow the progression of the disease in patients.

While the study was restricted to tumor cell lines, rather than using animal models or human patients, the findings are still exciting. The researchers found strong evidence that the same receptors are expressed on the surface of tumor cells from biopsies that were taken from melanoma patients. That supports the clinical importance of the results.

Two earlier studies on different tumor cell lines – one prepared from a multiple myeloma and the other from a nasopharyngeal carcinoma – also showed that exposure to norepinephrine increased the levels of proteins responsible for accelerating tumor growth.

The research is showing not only that different forms of cancer react differently to stress hormones but also that those reactions can vary within a specific form of the disease, with the possibility of a more aggressive form of the disease reacting more strongly to the stressors.

For melanoma patients, that can be very important since these tumors are able to metastasize, or spread, when they are much smaller than most other solid cancers. The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 48,000 cases of melanoma are diagnosed each year and nearly 8,000 people are killed each year by the disease.

This research was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute. Other collaborators in the study included Sanford Barsky, professor and chair of pathology; and IBMR members Elise Donovan, Min Chen, Amy Gross, Jeanette Webster Marketon and Seung-jae Kim.

Stress disrupts human thinking, but the brain can bounce back

The Rockefeller University - Newswire

Stress disrupts human thinking, but the brain can bounce back

A new neuroimaging study on stressed-out students suggests that male humans, like male rats, don’t do their most agile thinking under stress. The findings, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that 20 male M.D. candidates in the middle of preparing for their board exams had a harder time shifting their attention from one task to another than other healthy young men who were not under the gun.

Previous experiments had found that stressed rats foraging for food had similar impairments and that those problems resulted from stress-induced changes in their brain anatomy. The new study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the stressed students’ brains, is a robust example of how basic research in an animal model can lead to high-tech investigations of the human brain.

“It’s a great translational story,” says Bruce S. McEwen, head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University, who worked on the project with colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The research in the rats led to the imaging work on people, and the results matched up remarkably well.”

The work holds good news too, for both rats and humans: Their brains recuperate quickly. Less than a month after the stress goes away, they are back to normal. “The message is that healthy brains are remarkably resilient and plastic,” McEwen says.

To probe the effects of stress, the researchers scanned the brains of volunteers, some stressed and others relatively relaxed, performing two subtly different kinds of mental tasks, either an attention-shift or a response-reversal. Lying inside the scanner, the subjects looked at two discs: one red and one green, with one moving up and the other down. In a series of trials, they were prompted to choose a disc according to motion or color. By ordering when the subjects did which tasks, they challenged their volunteers’ brains to either switch focus from color to motion, or to suddenly reverse their choice of a disc in the same category.

“It’s like the old story about the American crossing the road in England,” says Conor Liston, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Rockefeller and Cornell, who led the research. A response-reversal requires the brain to override the habitual impulse to first look left instead of right for oncoming cars. An American in Venice might require an attention-shift, by contrast, to seek out boats instead of evading cars.

In earlier research on rats, neuroscientists found that these two tasks place demands on different circuits in the brain, and the circuits are affected in different ways by stress. In particular, collaborative work by McEwen and John Morrison at Mount Sinai Medical Center have shown that repeated stress on rats shriveled nerve cells of the medial prefrontal cortex, and that a shrunken prefrontal cortex is linked to slower performance on attention-shifting tasks. In those experiments, rats learned to dig through a certain texture, like sawdust, in the presence of an irrelevant odor to find food; then the researchers made odor, rather than texture, the clue for finding the food and measured how long it took the rats to switch their foraging strategies. But while the restricted prefrontal cortex — a larger version of which is thought to play a role in the “executive function” in humans — slowed the rats’ performance on attention-shifts, it did not change their performance on response-reversal tasks. In fact, neurons in a different part of the brain thought to be involved in response-reversals, the orbital frontal cortex, actually grew larger from the stress.

The new research suggests that something very similar may happen to distressed humans. Liston, working with B.J. Casey at the Sackler Institute at Weill Cornell, used fMRI to explore his hunch that the brains of rats and men have some basic processes in common — that stress would also impair performance on attention-shifting tasks and diminish activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

He found that male med students who said they were stressed out one month before they were to take their boards fared much worse on attention-shifting tasks than similar healthy adults who claimed to be taking it easy. The high stress levels, gauged by an established measure called the perceived stress scale, were also tightly associated with diminished activity in the prefrontal cortex. But their performance on response-reversals was unimpaired. Finally, as was found in the rats, when Liston scanned the students again one month after the test, he discovered that their attention-shifting performance had returned to normal along with their brains.

The uncanny similarities surprised even the researchers. “I certainly don’t want to say that rat brains are just like human brains,” Liston says. “But it does show that you can use research in animal models to help interpret human neuroimaging results.”

Liston plans to next explore how stress impacts the rest of the brain. He also wants to investigate whether or not there are differences in how the brains of men and women respond to stress. “Stress is doing a whole lot of things in your brain that we don’t understand yet, but we know that it is intimately involved in a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders,” Liston says. A mechanistic understanding of stress could lead to insights into associated psychiatric problems, he says.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online: January 12, 2009

Mellow Demeanor May Stave Off Dementia | LiveScience

Mellow Demeanor May Stave Off Dementia | LiveScience

Results showed that among people who were socially isolated, those who were calm and relaxed were 50 percent less likely to develop dementia compared with individuals who were prone to distress. Also, among the outgoing extroverts, the dementia risk was also 50 percent lower for people who were calm compared with those who were prone to distress.

The researchers say the ability to handle stress without anxiety could help to explain the findings.

Neuroscientists Find That Men And Women Respond Differently To Stress

Men Are From Mars -- Neuroscientists Find That Men And Women Respond Differently To Stress

Neuroscientists Find That Men And Women Respond Differently To Stress

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of men and women under stress
showed neuroscientists how their brains differed in response to
stressful situations. In men, increased blood flow to the left
orbitofrontal cortex suggested activation of the "fight or flight"
response. In women, stress activated the limbic system, which is
associated with emotional responses.

Facial expressions and the regulation of emotions.

Facial expressions and the regulation of emotions. [J Pers Soc Psychol. 1990] - PubMed Result

In the two decades since contemporary psychologists produced strong evidence confirming Darwin's century-old hypothesis of the innateness and universality of certain facial expressions of emotions, research on expressive behavior has become well established in developmental, social, and personality psychology and in psychophysiology. There are also signs of increased interest in emotions in clinical psychology and the neurosciences. Despite the success of the work on emotion expression and the upward trend of interest in emotions in general, the fundamental issue of the relation between emotion expression and emotion experience or feeling state remains controversial. A new developmental model of expression-feeling relations provides a framework for reevaluating previous research and for understanding the conditions under which expressions are effective in activating and regulating feeling states. The model has implications for research, socialization practices, and psychotherapy.

Facial expressions of emotion: an old controversy and new findings.

Facial expressions of emotion: an old controversy ...[Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1992] - PubMed Result

Evidence on universals in facial expression of emotion and renewed controversy about how to interpret that evidence is discussed. New findings on the capability of voluntary facial action to generate changes in both autonomic and central nervous system activity are presented, as well as a discussion of the possible mechanisms relevant to this phenomenon. Finally, new work on the nature of smiling is reviewed which shows that it is possible to distinguish the smile when enjoyment is occurring from other types of smiling. Implications for the differences between voluntary and involuntary expression are considered.

Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity

Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific...[Psychophysiology. 1990] - PubMed Result

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether voluntarily produced emotional facial configurations are associated with differentiated patterns of autonomic activity, and if so, how this might be mediated. Subjects received muscle-by-muscle instructions and coaching to produce facial configurations for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise while heart rate, skin conductance, finger temperature, and somatic activity were monitored. Results indicated that voluntary facial activity produced significant levels of subjective experience of the associated emotion, and that autonomic distinctions among emotions: (a) were found both between negative and positive emotions and among negative emotions, (b) were consistent between group and individual subjects' data, (c) were found in both male and female subjects, (d) were found in both specialized (actors, scientists) and nonspecialized populations, (e) were stronger when the voluntary facial configurations most closely resembled actual emotional expressions, and (f) were stronger when experience of the associated emotion was reported. The capacity of voluntary facial activity to generate emotion-specific autonomic activity: (a) did not require subjects to see facial expressions (either in a mirror or on an experimenter's face), and (b) could not be explained by differences in the difficulty of making the expressions or by differences in concomitant somatic activity.

micro expression muscles

Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes am...[Science. 1983] - PubMed Result

Emotion-specific activity in the autonomic nervous system was generated by constructing facial prototypes of emotion muscle by muscle and by reliving past emotional experiences. The autonomic activity produced distinguished not only between positive and negative emotions, but also among negative emotions. This finding challenges emotion theories that have proposed autonomic activity to be undifferentiated or that have failed to address the implications of autonomic differentiation in emotion.

Smile your mood

How to Lift Your Mood? Try Smiling - TIME

I was skeptical until I read a paper in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Psychological Association. That paper led me to other papers, and it turns out the trainer is right: The face isn't a pressure-relief valve. It is more like a thermostat. When you turn down the setting, the machinery inside has to do less work.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper, David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University and Bob Willingham of the Center for Psychological Studies in Berkeley, Calif., present the results of the first study ever conducted comparing the facial expressions of blind people with those of sighted people in a natural, nonlaboratory setting. Those studied were all judo athletes — blind ones who competed in the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens and sighted ones who competed in the 2004 Olympics in the same competition hall a few weeks earlier. (See pictures of "Second Place: Faces of Defeat.")

Matsumoto conceived the paper to investigate one of the oldest dilemmas in the study of physiology. We have known for many years that people all over the world, even those from remote cultures, use the same facial expressions to convey basic emotions like grief or joy. Charles Darwin noted this phenomenon in the 19th century, and Matsumoto's mentor, a famous psychologist named Paul Ekman who traveled the globe in the 1960s, proved that both isolated tribesmen and urban Westerners identified pictures of facial expressions in the same way. Ekman demonstrated that a frown means unhappiness the world over; wide eyes mean fright or surprise; a wrinkled nose means disgust. But no one has yet found the source of these universal expressions: Do we all learn the expressions through our culture, or are facial configurations genetically coded for everyone?

This question has occupied many scientists. Darwin wrote a long, highly entertaining 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, that came to the conclusion — unsurprising, given the author — that the universality of facial expressions owed to their evolutionary origin.

In his concluding chapter, Darwin noted that a pastor who ran a school for the blind told him that "those born blind" and "those gifted with eyesight" display facial expressions equally well. But somehow it took more than 130 years for someone to test this hypothesis scientifically. Matsumoto has finally proved the hypothesis. He examined 123 photographs taken by Willingham, a professional photographer, and carefully coded all the expressions on the athletes' faces. The authors found that regardless of whether the athletes could see, the gold-medal winners were significantly more likely to display real, joyful smiles — those that engage not just the muscles around the mouth but also those around the eyes — than those athletes who got silver medals. The ones who received silvers, whether blind or sighted, were significantly more likely to display social or lying smiles — those in which only the mouth muscles are engaged. (You can tell the difference between real and social smiles after training in facial movements; once you have the training, it's impossible not to study the eyes whenever someone smiles at you.)

Because blind people can't learn cultural cues from looking at others, Matsumoto and Willingham conclude that all of us are born with the ability to express both real and social emotions through our facial expressions. The fact that blind people display fake smiles shows that the skill is probably one we acquired through evolution in order to get along with others. (See pictures of facial yoga.)

Beyond that, what the genetic origin of facial expressions suggests is that the way your face looks is strongly related to what you are feeling inside. What I began to wonder was whether the train might run in the opposite direction: Could you change what you're feeling inside by pulling your face into a different expression? This is what the trainer had suggested: my exercises would be easier if I kept my face passive rather than twisted.

The possibility that your expression could affect your mood was first suggested to me by Marsha Linehan, a University of Washington psychologist who treats suicidal patients. She has found that helping patients modulate their facial expressions — relaxing the face when angry, for instance — can help them control their emotions. Ekman and his colleagues provided evidence of this in a Science paper back in 1983. They found that those instructed to produce certain facial movements showed the same physiological responses as those asked to recall a highly emotional experience. Later, a study showed that if you hold a pencil between your teeth — causing your mouth to approximate a smile — it will be easier for you to find cartoons funny.

In short, the emotional train does run in two directions: between your brain, which may be screaming from the pain that your trainer is causing, and your face, which can — if you draw it into a relaxed expression — inform your brain that it shouldn't be protesting so much. So next time you're working out and grimacing, push your facial muscles into submission. Look blank. You will find it's easier to get through one more rep.