Is TV Harming Our Children's Health?

A UK scientist says too much television and computer screen watching is damaging children's health and development.

Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist surveyed 30 scientific papers on television and computer screen viewing.

His findings are to be published in the next issue of the journal Biologist, which will be available on the internet on Friday.

Dr Sigman, who is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Member of the Institute of Biology, says that the research shows too much TV can contribute to a range of childhood physiological and mental health problems.

By the age of 6, the average British child has spent one complete year in front of a screen, mostly the TV.

And the average adult will have spent 12 solid years in front of the box by the time he or she reaches 75.

Dr Sigman has found evidence that too much TV watching causes short-sightedness and disrupts hormonal balance and leads to increased risk of cancer and premature puberty. It also slows down the metabolism which is linked to increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Mental problems linked to too much TV viewing include autism, poor concentration and Alzheimer's in adulthood.

Dr Sigman's advice is that children under 3 years old should not watch any television, while those aged 3 to 5 should only watch half an hour a day at the most. Older kids should be limited to no more that one hour a day.

He mentions one research paper from Florence University where scientists found that screen based computer games and TV watching reduced levels of melatonin in the children's blood, a condition that is thought to trigger early puberty.

Dr Sigman has called for TV viewing to be restricted before. In October 2005 there were reports in the media that he was calling for recommended daily allowances for TV viewing. Teenagers should watch no more than one and a half hours a day and adults two hours, he said.

His recommendations were criticized by experts as being unworkable and unrealistic.

On the other hand, there are experts who argue that TV can help with learning and even promote health through giving people information that they might not otherwise come across.

For instance, last year researchers at the University of Chicago found that preschool television exposure had no negative effect on school performance and earnings in later life and may even enhance these factors. Their study was called "Does Television Rot your Brain?"

They found a slight increase in school test scores occurred for an additional year of preschool television. And this was particularly marked in families where English was not the first language, where mothers had less than a high school education, and for non-white children.

Their conclusion was that "the introduction of television in the 1940s and 1950s had, if anything, positive effects on the achievement of students exposed to television as preschoolers."

Alarmed parents burdened with yet more conflicting advice on how to raise children, and wondering how they are going to manage in a world where TV and the screen dominates every day life, may take comfort in the advice of many psychologists and experts. They say yes, be sensible and by all means limit your child's viewing, but the most harmful thing you can do is leave a child to watch TV on his or her own for hours on end.

They would encourage you to use TV and computers to enlarge your child's experience, and to develop a healthy curiosity about the world around them. They would say supervise what they watch and help them to make sense of it. Try not to use TV as a "parent substitute", although even the best intentioned parents are guilty of that sometimes.

Click here for the journal Biologist.

Click here for University of Chicago study "Does Television Rot your Brain" (PDF).

Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today

Research Paper Examines Depression In Three Cities In Pakistan

A paper authored by two Memorial University faculty members was published Feb. 14 in PLoS ONE, the international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Drs. Amin A. Muhammad Gadit and Gerry Mugford are the authors of the paper, entitled, "Prevalence of depression among house holds in three capital cities of Pakistan: Need to revise the mental health policy."

Dr. Muhammad Gadit explained that Pakistan, among the other developing countries, has a higher prevalence rate of depression because of the current social adversities. "There is thus a great need for systematic studies on the prevalence of depression. Our study aims to explore the prevalence of depression among households in three capital cities of Pakistan."

A sample of 820 people was randomly selected and a cross sectional telephone based study was conducted for a duration of six months. "It was found that there was a regional variation in prevalence rates for depression among the three cities. Lahore had the highest number of depressives (53.4 per cent), as compared to Quetta (43.9 per cent) and Karachi (35.7 per cent). Middle age, female gender and secondary school level of education were significantly associated with depression among the study group."

Dr. Muhammad Gadit said the different rates of prevalence rate among three cities could be attributed to local cultural influence, geographical locations and social adversities and point to a need for revision of existing health policy by the government.

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Disclaimer

The following press release refers to an article in PLoS ONE. The release has been provided by the article authors and/or their institutions. Any opinions expressed in these releases or articles are the personal views of the contributors, and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of PLoS. PLoS expressly disclaims any and all warranties and liability in connection with the information found in the releases and articles and your use of such information.

Citation: Muhammad Gadit AA, Mugford G (2007) Prevalence of Depression among Households in Three Capital Cities of Pakistan: Need to Revise the Mental Health Policy. PLoS ONE 2(2): e209. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000209

PLEASE ADD THE LINK TO THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT

CONTACT:

Dr. Amin Muhammad Gadit
Professor of Psychiatry
Memorial University

Sharon Gray
Public Library of Science

Alternative Treatments For Depression: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) May Improve Mood, But Awaits FDA Approval

While common treatments for depression such as prescription drugs, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy usually provide relief from even the most severe cases for depression, there are people who do not feel they benefit from these treatments, and because of such look for alternative means to combat this serious medical condition.

One other option is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which hasn't yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat depression, but may be available through a clinical trial.

This non-invasive method excites neurons in the brain by using weak electric currents, which are delivered to the brain by rapidly changing magnetic fields, also known as electromagnetic induction.

It is believed that this nerve stimulation improves mood and there's some evidence it may make nerve-cell connections more efficient. Because of this, TMS has shown promise as a non-invasive treatment of depression.

Alternative to Electroconvulsive Therapy?

For people who cannot find relief from traditional treatments for depression, TMS may seem to be a more desirable treatment than electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which it has been compared to, simply because it is non-invasive, does not require anesthesia, and is not associated with convulsions, all of which are associated with ECT.

TMS also appears to have fewer and less serious side effects, such as memory loss and confusion, both of which are associated with ECT.

How TMS Works

Completely non-invasive and painless, TMS involves placing an electromagnetic coil against the patient's scalp. An electric current passes through this coil that creates a magnetic pulse, which causes small electrical currents in the brain.

These currents stimulate nerve cells in the region of the brain involved in mood regulation and depression.

Why It Works

Physicians and medical researchers are not yet exactly clear on why this nerve cell stimulation works; however, it is believed that stimulating the brain can change how it works and that by stimulating the regions associated with mood regulation, mood can be improved.

In some types of TMS, brain activity is suppressed. In other types, brain activity is increased. In either case, the changes may be associated with improved mood. These improvements in symptoms may last for days or weeks, according to the Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical practice with locations in Minnesota, Arizona and Florida.

Keep in mind that researchers are still trying to determine the best dosage of stimulation and the best area of the brain to stimulate.

Who May Benefit

Remember, TMS remains experimental, which means it is not to be used as a first-line treatment against depression. Currently, it is only available in the United States through clinical trials.

In countries where TMS has been approved to treat depression, it's generally used to treat people who haven't experienced improvements with standard treatments.

To determine if you or someone you know is a candidate for this experimental procedure, you will need talk to your doctor to see if it may be a good option for you or for a loved one who is suffering from depression.

Who Should Not Undergo TMS

Certain people should not undergo TMS because of increased or unknown risks to their health. These include anyone with: metal implants in the head, who may be pregnant or who has a pacemaker.

Additionally, TMS is not suited for patients who suffer from recurring migraines, who has had a stroke or who has a family history of seizures. And, if you have had neurosurgery, TMS is not for you.

TMS Side Effects

Despite being non-invasive, TMS does pose a risk of adverse side effects, with the most concerning being the increased risk of seizure. Because of that risk, the International Society for Transcranial Stimulation (ISTS) advises "that the procedure be performed only when medical help is quickly available and that those who administer it be trained as first responders who can provide emergency medical help," according to the Mayo Clinic.

According to the ISTS, other common side effects and adverse health problems associated with TSI include lightheadedness, headache, pain at the site where the electromagnetic coil is placed against the scalp, tingling, spasms or contractions of facial muscles.

The Long-Term Outlook

Because TMS prompts changes in brain function, it is important to understand that there may be unknown long-term adverse side effects associated with the treatment.

While research has not yet determined any negative long-term side effects, it is important to talk to your medical doctor or mental health specialist to understand the possibilities here and to weigh these carefully with your medical professional.

Remember, TMS is currently available through clinical trials only, so your treating physician or mental health professional will have to help you find a clinical trial that will work for you and your unique situation.

About the Author Kellie Fowler is an award-winning writer and has written for Associated Press, PR Newswire, Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, national business and healthcare magazines. She is regular contributor to http://www.depression-help-resource.com, a website providing information about types of depression, treatment options and depression related articles and resources.

http://www.depression-help-resource.com

Value Of Schizophrenia-Related Gene Variation

University of Iowa researchers have learned more about a genetic variation that is a small risk factor for a mild form of schizophrenia yet also is associated with improved overall survival.

The findings, which appear online in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, could help lead to treatments for schizophrenia and even other illnesses, and ways to leverage the gene variation's advantages. An abstract of the article is available here.

This HOPA12pb gene variation advance drew on a genetic database that was about five times larger than sample sizes used in previous research, said Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and the study's co-author.

"The study used the National Institute of Mental Health's largest publicly available sample, and thus it provides even more convincing evidence that the gene variation is worth studying," Philibert said.

The genetic variation causes a change in the portion of the protein that regulates the development of dopamine-releasing neurons. Antipsychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine, but drug treatments have limited success, and so scientists seek other ways to treat patients.

The team analyzed the genetic data of 900 European-Americans and found the HOPA gene variation in 22 individuals. Although the gene variation accounts for only an estimated .3 percent of all schizophrenia, nearly three of every 100 Caucasians have the gene variation.

"Most mutations associated with psychosis are found in only one in 10,000 or one in 100,000 individuals, and so these mutations do not lend themselves as study models," Philibert said. "HOPA is a relatively common mutation and that makes it valuable to study."

Philibert said that because HOPA often is a helpful gene variant, the fact that it sometimes is not reveals that it can react with environmental or other genetic factors to result in illness.

"If we can find a way to intervene in those interactions, then we may be able to avert disease and harness how this gene variation may help us," Philibert added.

In a current phase I, or safety, clinical trial, UI researchers are treating an individual who has a HOPA gene variation for symptoms of underactive thyroid.

"We don't know if this hypothyroidism is a direct effect of the gene or a genetic-environmental interaction," Philibert said. "We are using thyroid hormone supplementation to target the symptoms."

The UI Research Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) share a patent for HOPA12pb, which is found on the X-chromosome. Men are more likely than women to have this form of schizophrenia because it is X-linked. However, only about one in 30 men with the HOPA gene variation has schizophrenia.

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The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. Donald Black, M.D., UI professor of psychiatry, was a co-author, and other UI experts in psychiatry and neurosciences also contributed to the research.

HOPA stands for Human Opposite Paired Element (the last two letters in the abbreviation are taken from the first two letters in the word "Paired.")

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa Health Science Relations, 5137 Westlawn, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1178

Contact: Becky Soglin
University of Iowa

Physiologic Measurements Suggest Biologic Component To Feelings Of Empathic Connection

Empathy is well known to be an important component of the patient-therapist relationship, and a new study has revealed the biology behind how patients and therapists "connect" during a clinical encounter. In the February Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) report the first physiologic evidence of shared emotions underlying the experience of empathy during live psychotherapy sessions. The researchers found that, during moments of high positive emotion, both patients and therapists had similar physiologic responses and that greater levels of similarity were related to higher ratings of therapist empathy by patients.

"This research supports brain imaging data that shows humans are literally 'wired to connect' emotionally," says Carl Marci, MD, director of Social Neuroscience in the MGH Department of Psychiatry and the paper's lead author. "There is now converging evidence that, during moments of empathic connection, humans reflect or mirror each other's emotions, and their physiologies move on the same wavelength."

As part of an ongoing study of the role of empathy in psychotherapy, the MGH researchers videotaped therapeutic sessions of 20 unique patient-therapist pairs. The patients were being treated as outpatients for common mood and anxiety disorders in established therapeutic relationships. The participating therapists practiced psychodynamic therapy, an approach that uses the therapeutic relationship to help patients develop insight into their emotions.

Throughout the therapy sessions, patients and therapists were "wired up" to record their physiologic responses using skin conductance recordings. Skin conductance is a commonly used measure of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which controls human arousal and provides a physiologic context for emotional experiences. Following the sessions, the videotapes were edited to focus on moments of high and low physiologic concordance - that is, when patients' and therapists' levels of nervous system activity were most and least similar. Independent observers, blinded to the study's goals and methods, reviewed randomly presented video segments to identify the types of emotions being expressed by both patients and therapists.

The observers' data showed that both patients and therapists expressed significantly more positive emotions during moments of high physiologic concordance than during low concordance. In addition, patient's ratings of therapist empathy corresponded to levels of physiologic concordance during the therapy sessions. Overall, the findings suggest that shared positive emotions and shared physiologic arousal contribute to an empathic connection during psychotherapy.

"We were pleased to find evidence for a biological basis to that feeling of connection," Marci says. "Taken together with current neurobiological models of empathy, our findings suggest that therapists perceived as being more empathic have more positive emotional experiences in common with patients during the therapy session." He adds another finding not reported in the published report - that there was much less physiologic concordance when therapists were talking than listening. "That suggests it is hard for clinicians to be empathic when they are talking."

The researchers' next step is a longer-term study of how physiologic concordance relates to empathy over the course of psychotherapy. The ultimate goals of the project are to improve therapeutic techniques and to develop resources for teaching medical students and clinicians to be more empathic. Marci is an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and his co-authors are Jacob Ham, PhD, now at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, Erin Moran of MGH, and Scott Orr, PhD, of MGH and the VA Medical Center in Manchester, N.H. The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the MGH Endowment for the Advancement of Psychotherapy.

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Massachusetts General Hospital, established in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of nearly $500 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, transplantation biology and photomedicine. MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital are founding members of Partners HealthCare System, a Boston-based integrated health care delivery system.

Contact: Sue McGreevey
Massachusetts General Hospital

Boosting Brain Power With Chocolate

Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found.

A study led by Professor Ian Macdonald found that consumption of a cocoa drink rich in flavanols a key ingredient of dark chocolate boosts blood flow to key areas of the brain for two to three hours.

Increased blood flow to these areas of the brain may help to increase performance in specific tasks and boost general alertness over a short period.

The findings, unveiled at one of the biggest scientific conferences in America, also raise the prospect of ingredients in chocolate being used to treat vascular impairment, including dementia and strokes, and thus for maintaining cardiovascular health.

The study also suggests that the cocoa flavanols found in chocolate could be useful in enhancing brain function for people fighting fatigue, sleep deprivation, and even the effects of ageing.

Ian Macdonald, professor of metabolic physiology at The University of Nottingham, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect increased activity in specific areas of the brain in individuals who had consumed a single drink of flavanol-rich cocoa. The effect is linked to dilation of cerebral blood vessels, allowing more blood and therefore more oxygen to reach key areas of the brain.

Flavanols are not only found in chocolate with a high cocoa content they are also present in other substances such as red wine, green tea and blueberries.

He presented his research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the biggest annual gatherings of scientists from all over the world. This year's meeting takes place in San Francisco from February 15вЂ"19.

Professor Macdonald said: "Acute consumption of this particular flavanol-rich cocoa beverage was associated with increased grey matter flow for two to three hours.

"The demonstration of an effect of consuming this particular beverage on cerebral blood flow raises the possibility that certain food ingredients may be beneficial in increasing brain blood flow and enhancing brain function, in situations where individuals are cognitively impaired such as fatigue, sleep deprivation, or possibly ageing."

He emphasised that the level of cocoa flavanol used in the study is not available commercially. The cocoa-rich flavanol beverage was specially formulated for the purpose of the study.

Co-authors on the research were Dr Susan Francis, research associate Kay Head, and Professor Peter Morris, all from The University of Nottingham's School of Physics and Astronomy.

Professor Macdonald is a member of the Food Standards Agency's Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, and is President-Elect of the UK Nutrition Society. His main research interests are concerned with the functional consequences of metabolic and nutritional disturbances in health and disease, with specific interests in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and exercise.

The AAAS, founded in 1848, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the prestigious international journal Science. Its annual conference draws up to 10,000 attendees.

NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY
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http://www.nottingham.ac.uk

Germany & Portugal Come Near Bottom Of New Blood Pressure Based Happiness League

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found a direct connection between a nation's overall happiness and its citizens' blood pressure problems. Sweden, Denmark and the UK come top of this blood pressure based happiness league while Germany, Portugal and Finland come bottom.

The research by economists Professor Andrew Oswald of the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and Professor David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College USA is about to be published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Massachusetts.

Doctors have known for a long time that blood pressure is one measure of an individual's health. This research is the first to demonstrate that there a connection between nations' happiness and blood-pressure levels. The researchers believe that it could offer a way for policy makers to move away from simply focusing on maximizing the amount of money produced by a country its Gross Domestic Product.

University of Warwick Economist Professor Andrew Oswald said: "We found that a measure of a nation's rate of hypertension is a good predictor of its overall happiness. That surprised us.

"Although it sounds strange to suggest it in 2007, perhaps blood-pressure readings will one day replace or augment GDP as a measure of the success of a country. Maybe economists and doctors are going to have to work together in the design of future economic policies."

The researchers drew a random sample of 15,000 people from across the European countries. These people were interviewed about all aspects of their lives, including their levels of satisfaction with life, their mental health, and whether they had had problems of hypertension (high blood pressure). Reported hypertension is known to be a good indicator of actual blood-pressure problems.

Countries such as Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands turn out to top the European league table of happiness, with nations like Germany and Portugal at the bottom. What the study's authors then go on to show is that exactly the equivalent pattern is found in reported hypertension in these populations.

Happy countries have fewer blood-pressure problems. Mental health in each country, they show, is also inversely correlated with its rate of hypertension. The study ranks countries in this order:

-- Sweden
-- Denmark
-- UK
-- Netherlands
-- Ireland
-- France
-- Luxembourg
-- Spain
-- Greece
-- Italy
-- Belgium
-- Austria
-- Finland
-- Germany
-- Portugal

WARWICK UNIVERSITY
Coventry
http://www.warwick.ac.uk

Surgeons With Video Game Skill Appear To Perform Better In Simulated Surgery Skills Course

In a study involving 12 surgeons and 21 surgical residents, video game skill was correlated with laparoscopic surgery skill as assessed during a simulated surgery skills course, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

James C. Rosser Jr., M.D., of Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, and colleagues asked 33 surgeons (21 residents and 12 attending physicians) about their video game playing habits, then assessed their performance at the Rosser Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program, a one-and-a-half day course that scores surgeons on time and errors during simulated surgery drills. During the study, conducted from May through August, 2002, the surgeons also played three video games for 25 minutes while the researchers assessed their gaming skills.

Of the surgeons who participated in the study, 15 reported never playing video games, nine reported playing zero to three hours per week, and nine reported playing more than three hours per week at the height of their video game playing. "Surgeons who had played video games in the past for more than three hours per week made 37 percent fewer errors [in the Top Gun course], were 27 percent faster and scored 42 percent better overall than surgeons who never played video games. Current video game players made 32 percent fewer errors, were 24 percent faster and scored 26 percent better overall than their non-player colleagues," the authors write. Those in the top one third of video gaming skill made 47 percent fewer errors, performed 39 percent faster and scored 41 percent better on the overall Top Gun score than those in the bottom one-third.

"Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," the authors conclude. "Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons." (Arch Surg. 2007;142:181-186. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://www.jamamedia.org)

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Psychiatric And Neurologic Conditions May Underlie Many Cases Of Chronic Dizziness

Chronic dizziness may have several common causes, including anxiety disorders, migraine, traumatic brain injury and disorders in the part of the nervous system governing involuntary activities, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

One particular type of chronic dizziness not related to vertigo (a feeling of turning or whirling usually associated with inner ear problems) has long vexed physicians, according to background information in the article. "Patients with this syndrome have chronic nonspecific dizziness, subjective imbalance and hypersensitivity to motion stimuli, which are exacerbated in complex visual environments (e.g., walking in a busy store, driving in the rain)," the authors write. Some researchers have proposed the term chronic subjective dizziness for this condition.

Jeffrey P. Staab, M.D., M.S., and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, studied 345 men and women age 15 to 89 (average age 43.5) who had dizziness for three months or longer due to unknown causes. From 1998 to 2004, the patients were tracked from their referral to a balance center through multiple specialty examinations until they were given a diagnosis.

"All but six patients were diagnosed as having psychiatric or neurologic conditions, including primary or secondary anxiety disorders, migraine, traumatic brain injury and neurally mediated dysautonomias," or abnormal functioning of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary actions. Anxiety disorders were associated with 60 percent of the chronic dizziness cases and central nervous system conditions (including migraine, brain injuries and autonomic nervous system disorders) with 38.6 percent. Six patients (1.7 percent) had irregular heartbeats.

"The results of this investigation provide some insight into pathophysiologic mechanisms that may precipitate and perpetuate chronic dizziness," the authors write. "Two-thirds of patients had medical conditions associated with the onset of dizziness, whereas one-third had anxiety disorders as the initial cause. Therefore, chronic subjective dizziness may be triggered by either neurotologic [ear-related] or psychiatric conditions."

"Key diagnostic features were identified in the clinical history for each illness," they continue. For example, those with migraines often had nausea or vomiting, anxiety disorders were associated with fear and worry, and those with autonomic nervous system disorders tended to become dizzy when they exerted themselves. "Careful inquiry about these key features during otologic evaluations may increase diagnostic precision and lead to more specific treatment recommendations for these perplexing patients."

American Medical Association (AMA)
515 N. State St.
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http://www.ama-assn.org

Study Links Attempted Suicide With Genetic Evidence Identified In Previous Suicide Research

A Johns Hopkins-led study has found evidence that a genetic tendency toward suicide has been linked to a particular area of the genome on chromosome 2 that has been implicated in two additional recent studies of attempted suicide.

"We're hoping our findings will eventually lead to tests that can identify those at high risk for attempting suicide," says Virginia Willour, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. An estimated 4.6 percent of Americans ages 15 to 54 have tried to take their lives, according to Willour.

The investigators conducted a family linkage study in which they searched for commonalities in the genomes of family members with bipolar disorder and a history of attempted suicide. The same gene region on chromosome 2 that was identified by this bipolar disorder and attempted suicide study was recently identified by two complementary family studies that looked at attempted suicide in families with major depression and alcohol dependence.

"Family linkage studies are not always consistent, so the fact that all three studies, including ours, point to the same region of the genome is a good indication that we are on the right track toward identifying a gene or genes that play a role in why a person chooses to take his or her own life," says Willour.

In the multi-institutional study, results of which appear in the March issue of Biological Psychiatry, the researchers examined data from 162 families with bipolar disorder. They looked at attempted suicide in this sample because it is an important clinical problem that tends to occur more often in some of these families than in others, suggesting a distinctive genetic basis, according to senior author James B. Potash, M.D., M.P.H., of the Department of Psychiatry at Hopkins. This technique, of looking at sub-types of illness, is used by genetic researchers as a way to reduce genetic complexity.

From the 162 families, the researchers selected 417 subjects who were diagnosed with schizoaffective/bipolar disorder, bipolar I disorder or bipolar II disorder.

These subjects were asked whether they had ever attempted suicide and the degree of intent of the most serious attempt. One hundred fifty-four subjects said they had attempted suicide, and 122 stated that they had "definite" intent. For the purpose of this study, the latter were considered to have a history of attempted suicide.

Data for all 417 subjects was entered into a computer program that looks for genetic similarities between subjects with similar psychological profiles. Results indicated that family members with a history of attempted suicide and bipolar disorder showed a high degree of genetic similarity at a specific area DNA marker D2S1777 on a section of chromosome 2 referred to as 2p12. This is the same marker implicated in a 2004 study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine that looked at attempted suicide and major depression. And it is close to another marker, D2S1790, located in the 2p11 region of chromosome 2, which was identified in a 2004 study from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine that looked at alcoholism and attempted suicide.

Willour says that although the Hopkins-led study does not pinpoint a specific gene responsible for attempted suicide, it does suggest a "neighborhood" in which the gene might be found. She adds that the next step is to further narrow the search and find the "address." "Once we have located the specific gene," she says, "we can better identify people who might be at risk of suicide and offer drug companies a target for possible therapies."

The data used by Willour and her team DNA samples, medical histories and psychiatric evaluations came from an independent study, CHIP, conducted at the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Intramural Program. The purpose of CHIP, initiated in 1988 and funded through at least 2010, is to find genes that predispose people to developing bipolar disorder or particular subtypes of the illness.

Other Johns Hopkins researchers who contributed to this study are Peter P. Zandi, Ph.D., from the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., M.D.; Dean F. MacKinnon, M.D.; and Francis M. Mondimore, M.D., from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Additional researchers include Elliot S. Gershon, M.D., and Judith A. Badner, M.D., Ph.D., from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago; Francis J. McMahon, M.D., from the NIMH Intramural Program; and Melvin G. McInnis, M.D., from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Funding for this study came from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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North Carolina Mental Health Officials Cap Admissions At State Psychiatric Hospitals

North Carolina mental health officials have placed a cap on admissions at the four psychiatric hospitals administered by the state as the number of mentally ill patients continues to increase, the AP/Winston-Salem Journal reports. According to Mike Moseley -- director of the North Carolina Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services -- state psychiatric hospitals no longer will accept mentally ill patients from community hospitals after they reach 110% capacity in their short-term wards (AP/Winston-Salem Journal, 2/14). Community hospitals will have to continue to house mentally ill patients until state psychiatric hospitals can admit them, Moseley said. Community hospitals have raised concerns about the cap because emergency departments have become the "first stop" for many mentally ill patients, according to Mike Vicario, vice president of regulatory affairs for the North Carolina Hospital Association. Deby Dihoff, executive director of the North Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that the cap "very much scared" her. She said, "Crises are going to happen. There (have) to be beds to serve people with mental illness," adding, "I think the division is doing a good job planning for the future. It's the present we're all a little worried about" (Bonner, Raleigh News & Observer, 2/13).

"Reprinted with permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

Geting The Facts Straight In Statistical Psychological Research

New research published in the March issue of Psychological Science suggests that efforts to advocate improved statistical practices in psychological research may be paying off.

Geoff Cumming, Fiona Fidler and colleagues at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia sought to examine whether guidelines set forth in 1999 by the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Statistical Inference (TSFI) had been implemented in psychological research.

The authors analyzed articles from 10 leading international psychology journals from 1998 to 2006, focusing on three practices central to the statistical reform debate: Null hypothesis significance testing, confidence intervals and figures with error bars. The results demonstrate that psychologists still rely on traditional null hypothesis significance testing but are also using considerably more graphs with error bars to report their research.

"For more than 50 years, statistical significance testing has been psychologists' main statistical method" Fidler explains, "but there's evidence it's widely misunderstood and leads to dreadful research decisions."

According to the authors, the shift towards using graphs with error bars signals a step forward in data interpretation. "Error bars," says Fidler, "can give a clear impression of a study's precision and lead to better conclusions."

The consensus of many academic psychologists and editors of psychology journals echoed the findings of the study. Results from a survey sent by the authors indicated that statistical reform was necessary in the field. But in spite of the apparent readiness to contemplate change, reform was not regarded as a priority, with a few editors noting resistance to change from some article authors.

Cumming and Fidler insist that changes in statistical practices in psychological research are needed for researchers, and readers of journal articles to have a more accurate understanding of experimental results. They strongly recommend that scientific psychology "change its emphasis from the dichotomous decision making of null hypothesis significance testing to estimation of effect sizes."

"To achieve this goal" say the authors, "researchers need further detailed guidance, examples of good practice, and editorial or institutional leadership."

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Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science, is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Contact: Geoff Cumming
Association for Psychological Science

Sexualization Of Girls In The Media Is Harmful

The American Psychological Association (APA) suggests that the proliferation of sexual images of girls and young women in the media is harming their self-image and development.

An APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls examined research papers covering the effect of all kinds of media content including television, music videos, magazines, video games, the Internet, movies, and music lyrics. They also looked at the way products are sold and advertised to young girls.

The Task Force described sexualization as: "when a person's value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another's sexual use."

The report suggests that the volume of sexualized images has increased as more media content exists over a wider range of accessible technologies, leading to increased exposure and pressure on young girls. Attitudes of family members and friends can also increase the pressure.

"We have ample evidence to conclude that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development," said Dr Eileen Zurbriggen, Chair of the APA Task Force.

"The consequences of the sexualization of girls in media today are very real and are likely to be a negative influence on girls' healthy development," she said.

They gave examples of images from advertising. One featured a well known female pop star, Christina Aguilera, advertising a trainer. She was dressed in school uniform, with an unbuttoned shirt and licking a lollipop.

The report suggests that the sexualization of girls impedes the healthy development of a girl or young woman in several different areas. For example by undermining her confidence and making her feel dissatisfied with her body, this can result in negative self-image and lead to feelings of shame and anxiety.

Also, a body of evidence now links sexualization with several of the most common mental health problems in young women and girls: eating disorders, low self -esteem and depression. And there is also the increased chance that it will impact a girl's ability to develop a healthy sexual self-image.

The Task Force suggests that parents have a strong influence in this area. They could wittingly or unwittingly be contributing to the problem, or they could protect their daughters by educating them and supporting them to overcome the effects of the negative images they come across in their everyday lives.

They call on all members of the community - parents, teachers, school staff, health professionals to look out for the impact that sexual images might be having on the young girls and women in their care. Schools should teach media literacy and include sexualization topics in sex education, they say.

Among their specific recommendations the APA Task Force suggests that:

- More research is done that focuses on girls. Most research focuses on women. An example would be to examine the effects of interventions that promote positive images of girls.
- Practitioners such as psychologists and teachers are given resources to help them teach young girls how to access more positive images of themselves and counteract the negative effects that the sexual images might be having.
- Media literacy programs are developed and that public health reports include sexualization in their agenda.
- Federal agencies support programs that help girls feel powerful in ways other than to look sexy, for example Web zines and extra-curricular activities.
- Develop media awards for positive portrayal of girls as powerful, able and non-sexualized, for example for the best toy or television image.
- Convene partnerships between government, leading experts and the media to work on the issue.
- All members of communities from school staff to business people promote extra-curricular programs that help young people develop self-esteem based on ability and character and not on appearance.

"As a society, we need to replace all of these sexualized images with ones showing girls in positive settings - ones that show the uniqueness and competence of girls," said Dr Zurbriggen.

"The goal should be to deliver messages to all adolescents - boys and girls - that lead to healthy sexual development," she added.

Click here for the full APA report (PDF).

Click here fo article and resources on helping your daughter build confidence (kaboose.com).

Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today

Rewarding Fat Rats

We all remember a time when we were paralyzed in the face of a tough decision. For animals in the natural world, making the right choice can mean the difference between life and death.

When rats and other animals choose the thing that leads to a "reward," such as food, changes happen in the body and the brain. Describing and understanding those changes has been the focus of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grantee Peter Shizgal for most of his career.

Shizgal was recently recognized for his contributions by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was inducted as a fellow during its annual conference in San Francisco.

"It's an honour to receive this sort of recognition from one's peers, and I do feel proud," says Shizgal, a Concordia University professor of psychology. "That pride should be shared. Achievements like this in the natural sciences often reflect the work of a team, and that is certainly true in my case. I have been privileged to have terrific trainees and faculty colleagues as research collaborators, many of whom have been supported by NSERC scholarships and grants."

In their studies of food reward, Shizgal's team investigated the role of leptin, a hormone that the body produces in proportion to the amount of stored fat. A person who eats a lot during holidays, for example, will make more leptin than a person who sticks to a stricter diet.

In work carried out by Shizgal's team, chubby lab rats were put on a diet to reduce their fat mass and, hence, their leptin levels. They found that restricting the rats' diet to one meal per day not only made them lose weight, but also made reward sensations stronger. Conversely, increasing the level of leptin in the brain weakened the reward sensation. Their work has appeared in notable journals such as Science and Behavioral Neuroscience.

"Trying to understand the brain mechanisms of motivation in animals - and also in humans - is not only fascinating for me, but also highly rewarding. More broadly, there is an exciting confluence of work emerging from both major branches of NSERC-supported research: natural science and engineering," says Shizgal.

"While natural scientists use concepts and technologies developed by engineers to try to understand what makes animals tick, certain computer scientists and engineers look to the natural world for inspiration and guidance as they build intelligent machines. Ongoing research has already produced some computer programs and robots that can learn from experience and adapt their behaviour to a complex, constantly changing environment. We can expect that this technology will be greatly improved in the near future."

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Peter Shizgal
Department of Psychology
Concordia University

Contact: DorГ© Dunne
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

Fixed Versus Growth Intelligence Mindsets

When psychology Professor Carol Dweck was a sixth-grader at P.S. 153 in Brooklyn, N.Y., she experienced something that made her want to understand why some people view intelligence as a fixed trait while others embrace it as a quality that can be developed and expanded.

Dweck's teacher that year, Mrs. Wilson, seated her students around the room according to their IQ. The girls and boys who didn't have the highest IQ in the class were not allowed to carry the flag during assembly or even wash the blackboard, Dweck said. "She let it be known that IQ for her was the ultimate measure of your intelligence and your character," she said. "So the students who had the best seats were always scared of taking another test and not being at the top anymore."

Asked what seat number Dweck occupied during that memorable year, the professor paused, and silently raised her right index finger. "But it was an uncomfortable thing because you were only as good as your last test score," she said. "I think it had just as negative an effect on the kids at the top [as those at the bottom] who were defining themselves in those terms."

From that experience, Dweck became fascinated with intelligence, convinced that IQ tests are not the only way to measure it. "I also became very interested in coping with setbacks, probably because being in that classroom made me so concerned about not slipping, not failing," she said.

Dweck, a soft-spoken, elegantly attired woman, joined Stanford's faculty in 2004 as the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor. Before that, she taught at Columbia for 15 years, as well as at Harvard and the University of Illinois. A native New Yorker, Dweck earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia and a doctorate in psychology from Yale.

According to Dweck, people's self-theories about intelligence have a profound influence on their motivation to learn. Students who hold a "fixed" theory are mainly concerned with how smart they are - they prefer tasks they can already do well and avoid ones on which they may make mistakes and not look smart. In contrast, she said, people who believe in an "expandable" or "growth" theory of intelligence want to challenge themselves to increase their abilities, even if they fail at first.

Dweck's research about intelligence and motivation, and how they are variously influenced by fixed and growth mindsets, has attracted attention from teachers trying to help underperforming students, parents concerned with why their daughters get turned off math and science, and even sports coaches and human-resources managers intent on helping clients reach higher levels of achievement.

The journal Child Development released a paper co-authored by Dweck titled "Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention." The research shows how at one New York City junior high school students' fixed and growth theories about intelligence affected their math grades. Over two years, she said, students with a fixed mindset experienced a downward academic trend while the others moved ahead.

The psychologists then designed an eight-week intervention program that taught some students study skills and how they could learn to be smart - describing the brain as a muscle that became stronger the more it was used. A control group also learned study skills but they were not taught Dweck's expandable theory of intelligence. In just two months, she said, the students from the first group, compared to the control group, showed marked improvement in grades and study habits.

"What was important was the motivation," Dweck said. "The students were energized by the idea that they could have an impact on their mind." Dweck recalled a young boy who was a ringleader of the troublemakers. "When we started teaching this idea about the mind being malleable, he looked up with tears in his eyes, and he said, 'You mean, I don't have to be dumb?'" she said. "A fire was lit under him."

Later on, the researchers asked the teachers to single out students who had shown positive changes. They picked students who were in the growth mindset group, even though they didn't know two groups existed. Among them was the former troublemaker, who "was now handing in his work early so he could get feedback and revise, plus study for tests, and had good grades," Dweck said. The research showed how changing a key belief - a student's self-theory about intelligence and motivation - with a relatively simple intervention can make a big difference. Since then, Dweck and her colleagues at Columbia have developed a computer-based version of the intervention, dubbed "Brainology," that has been tested in 20 New York City schools.

Although "Brainology" is not yet commercially available, Dweck has brought her work to public attention with her latest book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The author of many academic books and articles, Dweck noted Mindset was her first foray into mainstream publishing. "My students [at Columbia] kept saying to me, 'You write for these professional journals and that's important, but what about people in the world?' We are in a profession that talks to each other and writes for each other. That's what we're rewarded for. But my students kept saying, 'Everybody should know this.'"

Mindset certainly resonated with Ross Bentley, a world-renowned car racing coach based in Seattle. Unlike coaches who stress technical skills, Bentley focuses on teaching mental competitiveness. He said great drivers strive to attain "a state of flow - a moment when you lose yourself in the act of driving, when it becomes effortless and time slows down. When you get into the flow, or the zone, you're at your peak."

Bentley was thrilled to learn that Dweck's research confirmed his personal approach to coaching. "One of the things that's fascinating for me is that someone with her knowledge has verified things I've known," he said. "She brings a scientific approach, and we're able to give her real-world experience. The majority of champion racing drivers have a growth mindset."

This month, Dweck and Bentley are launching a study of about 40 racing-car drivers to learn how applying a growth mindset approach improves their speed times during the 2007 racing season. Bentley explained that car races can last hours and drivers may lose their concentration at pivotal points, making it possible to lose a race by only a few seconds. The objective of coaching is to help drivers recover quickly and maintain an optimal state of flow, he said. The research, carried out by psychology graduate student Fred Leach, will use surveys to gauge the mindset of drivers before, during and after races to see if there is a correlation with their race results, Bentley said. "The goal is to build a growth mindset," he said.

In addition to sports coaches, parents and teachers have written to Dweck to say that Mindset has given them new insight into their children and students. "One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they're praised so often that it's what they want to live as - brilliant - not as someone who ever makes mistakes," she said. "It really stunts their motivation. Parents and teachers say they now understand how to prevent that - how to work with low-achieving students to motivate them and high-achieving students to maximize their efforts." The point is to praise children's efforts, not their intelligence, she said.

Last year, Dweck taught a freshman seminar based on Mindset. She chose 16 students from more than 100 who applied, selecting those who expressed personal motivation rather than intelligence. "You can impress someone with how smart you are or how motivated you are, and I picked students who expressed their motivation," she said.

It turned out that embracing a growth mindset was critical to the students' transition to Stanford. The freshmen loved being on campus and quickly became involved in activities, Dweck said, but failed to anticipate the approach of midterm exams. "They were just really overwhelmed," she said. "How did they deal with it? They told me they would have dealt with it poorly, thinking they weren't smart or were not meant to be at Stanford. But knowing about the growth mindset allowed them to realize that they hadn't learned how to be a college student yet. They were still learning how to be successful as a Stanford student." Dweck described the seminar as a "peak experience" in her long teaching career. "The students were fantastic," she said.

Dweck continues to conduct research into what motivates people and what holds them back. Based on the success of Mindset, which is being published in nine countries, Dweck has been asked to collaborate on other non-academic projects involving business and sports. "I'm such an egghead," she said with a smile. "My book was my first foray into the real world. Articles go out into the [academic] field and it's very gratifying, but a book goes to all corners of the earth. People take a lot from it, and they introduce themselves into your life."

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Other scheduled participants in the AAAS panel are Susan Carey from Harvard University and Marcia Linn from the University of California-Berkeley.

Contact: Lisa Trei
Stanford University

ADHD Drug Makers To Notify Patients About Health Risks

Makers of drugs approved to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been instructed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to notify patients of certain health risks.

The manufacturers affected include Eli Lilly and Co, Novartis AG, Johnson & Johnson, and Shire plc.

The ADHD drug manufacturers have been instructed to produce Patient Medication Guides that tell patients about possible risks of adverse cardiovascular and psychiatric symptoms and the precautions they should take.

Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), Dr Steven Galson, said that "Medicines approved for the treatment of ADHD have real benefits for many patients but they may have serious risks as well."

"In our ongoing commitment to strengthen drug safety, FDA is working closely with manufacturers of all ADHD medicines to include important information in the product labeling and in developing new Patient Medication Guides to better inform doctors and patients about these concerns," he added.

According to the FDA, ADHD affects around 3 to 7 per cent of schoolchildren and 4 per cent of adults. The main symptoms are hyperactive behaviour, difficulty paying attention, and low impulse control.

Children and adults with ADHD tend to have low self-esteem, problems at school and work, and difficult relationships with family and peers.

Patient Medication Guides are leaflets that accompany the drug when it is given to the patient. They are aimed at patients, their families and caregivers. The information is FDA approved and is intended to prevent potentially serious side-effects.

The FDA advises doctors to look carefully at patients' health history (including family history) and current status to assess cardiovascular or psychiatric symptoms and risk before recommending a treatment plan that includes ADHD drugs.

The Patient Medication Guide should be read fully before the medication is taken, and any questions or concerns should be discussed with the doctor.

The FDA has reviewed reports of a small number of patients with underlying serious heart conditions on normal doses of ADHD drugs who have suffered strokes and heart attacks, which in a few cases have been fatal.

The FDA has also conducted a separate review that showed a small increased risk of 1 in 1,000 of adverse psychiatric events linked to ADHD drugs. The adverse psychiatric events include hearing voices, becoming manic, or becoming suspicious for no reason. These events have even happened to people with no history of psychiatric conditions.

In 2006 the FDA directed manufacturers to revise their labelling to take into account these concerns about cardiovascular and psychiatric risks. This new notification is to help patients understand these risks via the Patient Medication Guide.

The new instruction affects 15 products, including various forms of Adderall, Concerta, Daytrana, Dexedrine, Focalin, Metadate, Methylin, Ritalin, and Strattera.

The FDA has been criticized for failing to notify the public sooner. On the other hand, there also fears that this action will stop people who need the drugs from taking them.

Click here to view exact products affected and their relevant draft Patient Medication Guides.

Click here for CDC's "Learn the Signs, Act Early" Campaign on ADHD.

Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today

Highly Accomplished People More Prone To Failure Than Others When Under Stress

Talented people often choke under pressure because the distraction caused by stress consumes their working memory, a psychologist at the University of Chicago has found.

Highly accomplished people tend to heavily rely on their abundant supply of working memory and are therefore disadvantaged when challenged to solve difficult problems, such as mathematical ones, under pressure, according to research by Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

People with less adequate supplies of working memory learn other ways of problem solving to compensate for their deficiencies and although these alternative problem solving strategies are not highly accurate, they are not impacted additionally by working under pressure, the research found.

Beilock found that when put under pressure, the talented people with larger amounts of working memory began using short-cuts to solve problems, such as guessing and estimation, strategies similar to those used by individuals with less adequate working memories. As a result of taking those shortcuts, the accuracy of the talented people was undermined.

"These findings suggest that performance pressure harms higher working memory individuals by consuming the cognitive resources that they rely on for their superior performance - and as a result, higher working memory individuals respond by switching to the less accurate problem solving strategies normally used by lower working memory students," Beilock said.

The results have implications for the evaluation of performance on high stakes tests, such as those needed to advance in school and college entrance examinations, she said.

Working memory is a short-term memory system that maintains a limited amount of information in an active state. It functions by providing information of immediate relevance while preventing distractions and irrelevant thoughts from interfering with the task at hand.

People with a high level of working memory depend on it heavily during problem solving. "If you've got it, flaunt it" Beilock said.

However, that same advantage makes them particularly susceptible to the dangers of stress.

"In essence, feelings of pressure introduce an intrusion that eats up available working memory for talented people," Beilock said.

In order to study the impact of stress on working memory, Beilock and her colleagues tested roughly 100 college undergraduates. They gave them tests to determine the strength of their working memory and then subjected them to a series of complicated, unfamiliar mathematics problems.

Students were given pressure by being told they would be paid for their correct answers, but that they would only receive the money if a partner, chosen randomly who they did not know, would also win. Then they were told that their partner had solved the problem correctly, thus increasing the pressure.

The study showed that as a result of the pressure, the performance of students with strong working memory declined to the same level as those with more limited working memory. Those with more limited working memory performed as well under added pressure as they did without the stress.

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Contact: William Harms
University of Chicago

Children Living In Extremes

Bombs and Bodies: Children Living in Extremes

WHAT:

Bombings in Baghdad, bodies floating in New Orleans. Television and computer screens filled with graphic images of death, contorted bodies, and people, especially kids, suffering. Even as these events numb adult minds, they have left children insecure and frightened. At the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), researchers, several from UCLA, discussed the variety of dangerous domains that impact child development in a symposium entitled "Ecologies of Danger and Cultures of Resilience: Children in Extreme Situations." They will use this framework to describe the effects of danger and trauma on children, and examine the factors that promote child resilience and well-being.

WHO:

Symposium Organizer
Carl A. Maida, UCLA

Symposium Co-Organizer and Moderator
Robert S. Pynoos, UCLA

The Ecology of Danger: Transgenerational Impact among Vervet Monkeys
Lynn A. Fairbanks, UCLA

Responses to Danger in Infants and Toddlers: The Moderating Influence of Family Relationships
Alicia F. Lieberman, UC San Francisco

Katrina's Children: Crisis, Trauma, and Resilience
Howard J. Osofsky, Louisiana State University, New Orleans

Moral Development and Pathological Interference with Conscience Functioning Among Adolescents after Catastrophic Disaster
Alan M. Steinberg, UCLA

Discussant
Thomas S. Weisner, UCLA

BACKGROUND:

Developmental and ecological dimensions of danger to children were discussed. This included aspects of any physical environment that lends itself to a social ecology of danger; behavioral data on the impact of danger on mother and infant interactions; effects of danger on child and adolescent development and on parent and child interactions; the ways major catastrophic events affect children's schematization of the world, self, and others; disturbances in moral development and conscience functioning; post-catastrophe ecological factors that promote resilience and recovery of children and families; and cultural pathways and community settings that mitigate the impact of dangerous events and promote resilience.

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Contact: Mark Wheeler
University of California - Los Angeles

Smart Enough To Make Ourselves Sick

Why do humans and their primate cousins get more stress-related diseases than any other member of the animal kingdom? The answer, says Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, is that people, apes and monkeys are highly intelligent, social creatures with far too much spare time on their hands.

"Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out," he said. "But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick."

A professor of biological sciences and of neurology and neurological sciences, Sapolsky has spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health. His pioneering work includes ongoing studies of laboratory rats and wild baboons in the African wilderness.

He discussed the biological and sociological implications of stress in a lecture titled "Stress, Health and Coping" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Stress response

All vertebrates respond to stressful situations by releasing hormones, such as adrenalin and glucocorticoids, which instantaneously increase the animal's heart rate and energy level. "The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily," Sapolsky said. "Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates."

To understand why, he said, "just look at the dichotomy between what your body does during real stress--for example, something is intent on eating you and you're running for your life--versus what your body does when you're turning on the same stress response for months on end for purely psychosocial reasons."

In the short term, he explained, stress hormones are "brilliantly adapted" to help you survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth and reproduction," he said. "You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if you're dealing with an acute physical stressor--a real one."

But non-life-threatening stressors, such as constantly worrying about money or pleasing your boss, also trigger the release of adrenalin and other stress hormones, which, over time, can have devastating consequences to your health, he said: "If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult onset diabetes and high blood pressure. If you're chronically shutting down the digestive system, there's a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you're more at risk for as well."

In children, the continual release of glucocorticoids can suppress the secretion of normal growth hormones. "There's actually a syndrome called stress dwarfism in kids who are so psychologically stressed that growth is markedly impaired," Sapolsky said.

Studies show that long-term stress also suppresses the immune system, making you more susceptible to infectious diseases, and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles.

"Furthermore, if you're chronically stressed, all sorts of aspects of brain function are impaired, including, at an extreme, making it harder for some neurons to survive neurological insults," Sapolsky added. "Also, neurons in the parts of the brain relating to learning, memory and judgment don't function as well under stress. That particular piece is what my lab has spent the last 20 years on."

The bottom line, according to Sapolsky: "If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you're dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for heart disease and some of the other leading causes of death in Westernized life."

Baboon studies

In addition to numerous scientific papers about stress, Sapolsky has written four popular books on the subject--Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, The Trouble with Testosterone, A Primate's Memoir and Monkeyluv. Many of his insights are based on his 30-year field study of wild African baboons, highly social primates that are close relatives of Homo sapiens. Each year, he and his assistants follow troops of baboons in Kenya to gather behavioral and physiological data on individual members, including blood samples, tissue biopsies and electrocardiograms.

"We've found that baboons have diseases that other social mammals generally don't have," Sapolsky said. "If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression."

The same may be true for elephants, whales and other highly intelligent mammals that have complex emotional lives, he added.

"The reason baboons are such good models is, like us, they don't have real stressors," he said. "If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other."

It turns out that unhealthy baboons, like unhealthy people, often have elevated resting levels of stress hormones. "Their reproductive system doesn't work as well, their wounds heal more slowly, they have elevated blood pressure and the anti-anxiety chemicals in their brain, which have a structural similarity to Valium, work differently," Sapolsky said. "So they're not in great shape."

Among the most susceptible to stress are low-ranking baboons and type A individuals. "Type A baboons are the ones who see stressors that other animals don't," Sapolsky said. "For example, having your worst rival taking a nap 100 yards away gets you agitated."

But when it comes to stress-related diseases, social isolation may play an even more significant role than social rank or personality. "Up until 15 years ago, the most striking thing we found was that, if you're a baboon, you don't want to be low ranking, because your health is going to be lousy," he explained. "But what has become far clearer, and probably took a decade's worth of data, is the recognition that protection from stress-related disease is most powerfully grounded in social connectedness, and that's far more important than rank."

Coping with stress

What can baboons teach humans about coping with all the stress-inducing psychosocial nonsense we encounter in our daily lives?

"Ideally, we have a lot more behavioral flexibility than the baboon," Sapolsky said, adding that, unlike baboons, humans can overcome their low social status and isolation by belonging to multiple hierarchies.

"We are capable of social supports that no other primate can even dream of," he said. "For example, I might say, 'This job, where I'm a lowly mailroom clerk, really doesn't matter. What really matters is that I'm the captain of my softball team or deacon of my church'--that sort of thing. It's not just somebody sitting here, grooming you with their own hands. We can actually feel comfort from the discovery that somebody on the other side of the planet is going through the same experience we are and feel, I'm not alone. We can even take comfort reading about a fictional character, and there's no primate out there that can feel better in life just by listening to Beethoven. So the range of supports that we're capable of is extraordinary."

But many of the qualities that make us human also can induce stress, he noted. "We can be pained or empathetic about somebody in Darfur," he said. "We can be pained by some movie character that something terrible happens to that doesn't even exist. We could be made to feel inadequate by seeing Bill Gates on the news at night, and we've never even been in the same village as him or seen our goats next to his. So the realm of space and time that we can extend our emotions means that there are a whole lot more abstract things that can make us feel stressed."

Pursuit of happiness

The Founding Fathers probably weren't thinking about health when they declared the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right, but when it comes to understanding the importance of a stress-free life, they may have been ahead of their time.

"When you get to Westernized humans, it's only in the last century or two that our health problems have become ones of chronic lifestyle issues," Sapolsky said. "It's only 10,000 years or so that most humans have been living in high-density settlements--a world of strangers jostling and psychologically stressing each other. But being able to live long enough to get heart disease, that's a fairly new world."

According to Sapolsky, happiness and self-esteem are important factors in reducing stress. Yet the definition of "happiness" has less to do with material comfort than Westerners might assume, he noted: "An extraordinary finding that's been replicated over and over is that once you get past the 25 percent or so poorest countries on Earth, where the only question is survival and subsistence, there is no relationship between gross national product, per capita income, any of those things, and levels of happiness."

Surveys show that in Greece, for example, one of Western Europe's poorest countries, people are much happier than in the United States, the world's richest nation. And while Greece is ranked number 30 in life expectancy, the United States--with the biggest per capita expenditure on medical care--is only slighter higher, coming in at 29.

"The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth," Sapolsky noted. "We're also ranked way up in stress-related diseases."

Japan is number one in life expectancy, largely because of its extremely supportive social network, according to Sapolsky. He cited similar findings in the United States. "Two of the healthiest states are Vermont and Utah, while two of the unhealthiest are Nevada and New Hampshire," he noted. "Vermont is a much more left-leaning state in terms of its social support systems, while its neighbor New Hampshire prides itself on no income tax and go it alone. In Utah, the Mormon church provides extended social support, explanations for why things are and structure. You can't ask for more than that. And next door is Nevada, where people are keeling over dead from all of their excesses. It's very interesting."

Typically, observant Mormons and other religious people are less likely to smoke and drink, he noted. "But once you control for that, religiosity in and of itself is good for your health in some ways, although less than some of its advocates would have you believe," Sapolsky said. "It infuriates me, because I'm an atheist, so it makes me absolutely crazy, but it makes perfect sense. If you have come up with a system that not only tells you why things are but is capped off with certain knowledge that some thing or things respond preferentially to you, you're filling a whole lot of pieces there--gaining some predictability, attribution, social support and control over the scariest realms of our lives."

New research

From a neuroscience perspective, Sapolsky pointed to several exciting new areas of research. "It's becoming clear that in the hippocampus, the part of the brain most susceptible to stress hormones, you see atrophy in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression," he said. "There's a ton of very exciting, very contentious work as to whether stress is causing that part of the brain to atrophy, and if so, is it reversible. Or does having a small hippocampus make you more vulnerable to stress-related traumas? There's evidence for both sides."

He also cited new studies suggesting that chronic stress causes DNA to age faster. "Over time, the ends of your chromosomes fray, and as they fray your DNA stops working as well, and eventually that could wind up doing in the cell," he said. "There are now studies showing that chromosomal DNA aging accelerates in young, healthy humans who experience something incredibly psychologically stressful. That's a huge finding."

According to Sapolsky, the most important new area of neuroscience research may be the effort to understand differences in the way individuals respond to stress. "This gets you into the realm of why do some people see stressors that other people don't, and why, in the face of something that is undeniably a stressor to everybody, do some people do so much worse than others?" he said. "Genes, no doubt, have something to do with it, but not all that much. However, there is evidence about development beginning with fetal life--prenatal stress, stress hormones from the mom getting through fetal circulation--having all sorts of long-term effects.

"We're now about 70 years into thinking that sustained stress can do bad things to your health. The biggest challenge for the next 70 years is figuring out why some of us are so much more vulnerable than others."

In the meantime, Sapolsky suggested that people do whatever they can to reduce stress in their daily lives. "Try stress management, change your priorities or go into therapy," he said. "It takes work. Some people clearly never can overcome it. But the same things that make us smart enough to generate the kind of psychological stress that's unheard of in other primates can be the same things that can protect us. We are malleable."

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Professor Robert Sapolsky delivered the topical lecture, "Stress, Health and Coping," at the AAAS annual meeting.

RELEVANT WEB URLS:
ROBERT SAPOLSKY WEB PAGE

STANFORD REPORT: GENE THERAPY
Contact: Mark Shwartz
Stanford University

Don't Advertise During Sexy Programmes - The Viewer Won't Remember

People are less able to recall the brand of products advertised during programmes with a lot of sexual content, than if the advert is placed in similar programme that has no sexual content.

This was the key message that came from research carried out at the Department of Psychology at University College London by Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham. The research is published in this month's edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

The implication is that advertisers do not spend their money well if they buy space during programmes with high sexual content.

A second, less surprising, finding was that men recalled the brand of products whose adverts contained sexual images, than they did if the adverts were sex-free. Women on the other hand were actively put off by sexual content in adverts.

The studies involved 60 university students (30 men and 30 women) aged 18 to 31, mean age 21, who were divided into four groups. One group saw an overtly sexual episode of "Sex and The City", which had sexy adverts running during the programme breaks. Another saw the same episode with non-sexual adverts. The other two groups saw an episode of "Malcolm in the Middle" which contained no sexual references, with either sexual or non-sexual adverts.

"The fact that recall of adverts was hindered by sexual content in the programmes suggests that there is something particularly involving or disturbing about sexual programmes. Interestingly this is something that is also found in programmes with aggressive content," says Furnham.

"Sex seems to have a detrimental effect on females recall for an advertisement," says Parker. "Sex is only a useful advertising tool when selling to men."

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Contact: Julia Lampam
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Best Practice Guidelines On Identifying And Treating ADHD

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) is proud to announce its new Practice Parameter and Pocketcard on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The Practice Parameter represents best practices in evaluating and treating ADHD and the pocketcard is the document's portable summary. Both the Parameter and Pocketcard were designed to teach health care professionals about the disorder.

AACAP's Practice Parameter shows that ADHD is a medical illness on par with diabetes or asthma. Like these conditions, ADHD can be successfully managed, but not cured. Left untreated, children with ADHD often experience failure at school, problems at home, substance abuse, and depression.

AACAP's Practice Parameter presents the effects, including the long-term data, of treating ADHD with and without medication. Although medications must be balanced against rare adverse reactions, the safety of ADHD medicinal treatment is equal to other pediatric conditions.

In addition to updating mental health professionals, the Practice Parameter and Pocketcard will teach health care professionals who do not specialize in mental health about ADHD. As there is a shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists, most youth with ADHD who receive treatment obtain it from their pediatricans or general practictioners.

The AACAP is a medical association committed to supporting its members' research on ADHD. Families interested in learning about the disorder should view the video, ADHD, A Guide for Families, and read the AACAP Facts for Families, The Child Who Can't Pay Attention.

Representing over 7,500 child and adolescent psychiatrists nationwide, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) is the leading authority on children's mental health.

Mission of the AACAP

Promote mentally healthy children, adolescents and families through research, training, advocacy, prevention, comprehensive diagnosis and treatment, peer support and collaboration.

http://www.aacap.org

Virtual Activities: Virtuous Or Perilous?

Three University Of Southern California experts discussed at AAAS 2007 in San Francisco.

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

JOSHUA FOUTS, director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, discussed: the first competition to develop an online game that promotes public diplomacy; the center's use of its island in Second Life as a laboratory for experiments in virtual public diplomacy by the State Department, foreign ministries of state, and prominent think-tanks; and the advantages of virtual worlds over web sites or other media for public diplomacy and cultural exchanges.

VIRTUAL THERAPY FOR MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES

SKIP RIZZO, research scientist in the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and clinical psychologist, plans to take a cautious position on the ethics of virtual therapy. While acknowledging the value of virtual worlds for support groups and other applications, Rizzo discussed the possible consequences of patients choosing to forego professional care in favor of self-diagnosis and treatment in-world. Rizzo has developed several virtual reality applications that extend rather than replace conventional therapy, such as a game-based treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

EXPANDING THE LITERARY MIND BY VIRTUAL PLAY

DOUGLAS THOMAS, associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication, argues that massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), such as World of Warcraft, provide a fundamentally different type of learning than available through traditional education. A longtime MMOG player and scholar, as well as editor of the journal Games and Culture, Thomas believes MMOGs allow players to form "conceptual blends" that provide a better understanding of both the physical and virtual world.

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BACKGROUND
Recent coverage

Contact: Carl Marziali
University of Southern California

Youth's Lives In Virtual Societies

As interest grows among academics and parents in youth's participation in virtual societies, Danah Boyd, a USC Annenberg Center graduate fellow and expert on the topic, spoke on "Virtual Publics: Youth's Lives in Emergent Social Worlds" at AAAS 2007.

Boyd presented in "Virtual Worlds Seminar Part I: Education, Learning, and Public Diplomacy."

An important issue she wanted to address in this year's presentation is the blurring of boundaries between online and offline worlds -- a trend that continues to grow.

"'Virtual' is a problematic concept because most people are not separating the digital from the physical," says Boyd. "MySpace is primarily a public articulation of offline social networks. It is complementary to the offline, not separate from it. Thus, when we fetishize purely online stuff, we do ourselves a disservice. This is not where the majority of people are going."

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Boyd is a social media researcher at Yahoo!, a graduate student fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication of the University of Southern California, and a PhD candidate in the School of Information at University of California-Berkeley. She is an expert on youth culture, digital publics, identity negotiation, ethnography, blogging, and social media including MySpace and Friendster. Her current doctoral dissertation is titled "Why American Youth/MySpace: Identity Production and Socialization in Digital Publics."

Contact: Bryan Schneider
University of Southern California

Belief About Neighbor's Conservation Is Stealthily Influential, ASU Researcher Finds

If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you? Probably not, but according to a study by Arizona State University researchers, peer influence plays a greater role in people's behavior than is generally acknowledged.

The study, which was presented by ASU Regents' Professor of Psychology Robert Cialdini at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, suggests that peer influence is an under-recognized factor in energy conservation. Cialdini studies persuasion and influence in the decision making process.

Cialdini and his team conducted a telephone survey of more than 2,000 California residents asking them to identify major reasons why they try to conserve energy. The residents responded with three overwhelming reasons: protecting the environment, being responsible citizens and saving on energy costs. The lowest-rated reason was because their neighbors were doing it.

"However, what we found was that the lowest-rated factor - the belief that their neighbors were engaging in energy conservation - had the highest correlation with reported energy conservation on the part of the people surveyed," Cialdini said. "They were fooling themselves. What their neighbors were doing turned out to be a powerful message."

Cialdini and his colleagues further strengthened their claim when they studied the responses of hotel guests to a variety of techniques to get them to reuse towels.

Researchers placed cards in hotel rooms encouraging residents to reuse their towels, each displaying one of three reasons: respect for the environment, the sake of future generations, and a message stating that the majority of guests reused their towels. The third message generated 30 percent more towel reuse than the other two messages.

Cialdini said the results represent an easy, effective way to increase energy conservation simply by publicizing conservation efforts that otherwise would go unnoticed.

"Peer influence is a powerful and fundamental rule of adult social influence, but it's an under-recognized rule," Cialdini said.

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Source:
Robert Cialdini

Contact: Skip Derra
Arizona State University

Eating Disorders Increasing In Women Of Childbearing Age

Remuda Ranch Programs for Eating Disorders, the nation's leading eating disorder treatment center, reports eating disorders are increasing in women of childbearing age. It's estimated that eating disorders affect approximately four percent of women of childbearing age. February 25 to March 3, 2007 is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and Remuda Ranch hopes to increase awareness and prevent eating disorders among people of all ages.

"Pregnancy is a time when body image concerns are more prevalent, and for those who are struggling with an eating disorder, the nine months of pregnancy can cause the disorder to worsen," said Dena Cabrera, PsyD, a psychologist at Remuda Ranch Programs for Eating Disorders. "Instead of celebrating the joy associated with carrying a child, women with eating disorders often experience a period of extreme distress and fear as they gain weight."

While an eating disorder poses a strong threat to the health of the mother, the negative effects eating disorders have on the unborn child are far reaching, ranging from a lower birth weight, to premature birth, to potential miscarriage.

"Even after childbirth, a mom's eating disorder still impacts her interaction with her child," adds Cabrera. "The child can be confused by the mom's distorted view of food, not knowing what and how much to eat. Moms with eating disorders often don't have the energy to engage with their child because of their preoccupation with their eating disorder."

Remuda Ranch believes pregnancy is a perfect time for family members and loved ones to intervene and seek help. Expectant mothers will often be more open to seeking help because of concern for the unborn child.

"Eating disorders are very treatable and help is available," adds Cabrera.

About Remuda Ranch Programs for Eating Disorders

Remuda Ranch is a caring place for women and girls who are suffering from eating disorders and related issues. Remuda Treatment Programs offer Christian inpatient and residential treatment for women and girls of all faiths suffering from an eating disorder. Each patient is treated by a multi-disciplinary team including a Psychiatric and a Primary Care Provider, Registered Dietitian, Masters Level therapist, Psychologist and Registered Nurse. The professional staff equips each patient with the right tools to live a healthy, productive life.

Remuda Ranch
http://www.remudaranch.com/

Buidling On Parental Memories Of Loving Care Best Treats Childhood Trauma

Infants and preschool-aged children who live in daily circumstances of potential trauma and danger can develop the resilience to cope through treatment that focuses on strengthening parent-child bonds, according to a national expert in child development.

Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco, Alicia Lieberman, PhD, explored how children's emotional and moral development is affected by catastrophes in the news and in their own lives. She is founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center.

Her presentation was part of a panel on "Ecologies of Danger and Cultures of Resilience: Children in Extreme Situations," organized by leaders in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Randomized studies by Lieberman and others have shown that a treatment method developed at UCSF, called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, improves normal development for small children traumatized by the violence and abuse that they witness at home and in their communities.

One key element for these traumatized children and their parents, Lieberman says, is to step beyond traditional treatment that focuses primarily on the parents' own experiences of helplessness and fear. "It is important to focus on trauma, but we have learned that it is more effective to simultaneously help parents to focus on events in their lives that give them pleasure, fulfillment and hope as they raise their children," Lieberman says.

She credits Bill Harris, chairman of the Children's Research and Education Institute of Belmont, Mass., for coining the phrase "angels in the nursery" to describe the shared effect of moments when the child feels understood, accepted and loved.

By helping parents recall their own "angels" -- childhood moments when they felt unconditionally loved and accepted by benevolent caregivers -- CPP helps them break their own generations-long cycles of maltreatment. By helping parent and child build a new shared experience of love and trust, CPP helps develop the child's core sense of security and self-worth, and the mother's competence and confidence in her ability to meet her child's needs.

Young children experience normal anxieties about danger and normal fears of losing the protection and love of their parents, but traumatic events can shatter the child's sense of safety and well-being, setting the stage for behavioral problems in childhood and sometimes for mental illness as adults, Lieberman says. This can occur even when the child himself is not directly harmed.

Other speakers at the AAAS session discussed the effects of fears generated by news coverage of danger and by children's experience of large-scale catastrophes.

Trauma is an everyday experience, hardship is the everyday norm, and danger persists in the past and the present for most of the 400 infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their parents who are served each year by the UCSF Child Trauma Research Project, in the CTRP clinic and in a variety of community settings.

"While we serve all types of families, the majority are minorities, underserved, with low incomes - those with the most life stresses and the fewest resources. One has to understand the ecology of these families' lives in order to treat them effectively," says Lieberman.

Most of the parents are mothers, often living in violent relationships or fleeing domestic violence. While they are referred to the CTRP clinic because of the infant's or child's behavioral or developmental problems, most mothers also have life histories of trauma and abuse.

"Trauma has a very disruptive effect in people's lives, leading them to be aggressive, to be depressed, to not feel effective in coping with the stresses of daily life, including the stresses of raising children," Lieberman says. Yet research shows that traumatized mothers often draw on inner stores of resilience to help their children cope with difficult circumstances. The CPP program supports parents in a range of situations by taking advantage of the natural attachment between parents and infants, and the infant's reliance on that attachment to develop effective responses to danger and safety.

CPP treatment typically lasts between 6 months and a year. A psychotherapist works with parent and child, often in their homes. Parents may also have treatment sessions on their own as needed.

In a study published in 2005, Lieberman and colleagues treated 75 children aged 3 to 5 and their mothers, who were randomized to receive a year's course of CPP treatment or to receive care from a case manager who arranged individual psychotherapy and social services in the community. Children who received CPP showed significantly better results than the controls in behavior problems, traumatic stress symptoms and other measures, while mothers showed significant improvement in PTSD-related avoidance symptoms and a trend towards improvement in other measures of mental health.

A follow-up study published in 2006 showed that mothers continued to improve after the termination of treatment, showing significantly better scores in overall symptoms than mothers in the control group. Children's improvements were maintained six months after the end of treatment.

"We interpret these findings to mean that help for mothers improved their pleasure and competence in raising their children, and was beneficial to their own mental health," Lieberman says. "Our results support the notion that healthy relationships are the building blocks for individuals' mental health."

At UCSF, Lieberman holds the Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair in Infant Mental Health and is vice chair for academic affairs in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry.

She also is director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a collaborative of four university sites funded by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration. ETTN is part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a 40-site national initiative with the mission of increasing the access and quality of services for children exposed to trauma in the United States.

Lieberman is active in several major national organizations involved with mental health in infancy and early childhood. She is president of the board of directors of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families.

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The CTRP is supported by SAMHSA, the Irving Harris Foundation and other private foundations and individual donors.

UCSF is a leading university that advances health worldwide by conducting advanced biomedical research, educating graduate students in the life sciences and health professions, and providing complex patient care.

Contact: Janet Basu
University of California - San Francisco