Researchers Identify Risk-Factors for Addictive Video-Game Use among Adults

New research from the University of Missouri indicates escapism, social interaction and rewards fuel problematic video-game use among “very casual” to “hardcore” adult gamers. Understanding individual motives that contribute to unhealthy game play could help counselors identify and treat individuals addicted to video games.

“The biggest risk factor for pathological video game use seems to be playing games to escape from daily life,” said Joe Hilgard, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. “Individuals who play games to get away from their lives or to pretend to be other people seem to be those most at-risk for becoming part of a vicious cycle. These gamers avoid their problems by playing games, which in turn interferes with their lives because they’re so busy playing games.”

Problematic video game use is more than just excessive use of video games; it also includes a variety of unhealthy behaviors, such as lying to others about how much time is spent playing games and missing work or other obligations to play games.

“People who play games to socialize with other players seem to have more problems as well,” Hilgard said. “It could be that games are imposing a sort of social obligation on these individuals so that they have to set aside time to play with other players. For example, in games like World of Warcraft, most players join teams or guilds. If some teammates want to play for four hours on a Saturday night, the other players feel obligated to play or else they may be cut from the team. Those play obligations can mess with individuals’ real-life obligations.”

Problematic video game use isn’t all that different from other types of addictive behavior, such as alcohol or drug abuse, which can be spurred by poor coping strategies, Hilgard said.

“Gamers who are really into getting to the next level or collecting all of the in-game items seem to have unhealthier video-game use,” Hilgard said. “When people talk about games being ‘so addictive,’ usually they’re referring to games like Farmville or Diablo that give players rewards, such as better equipment or stronger characters, as they play. People who are especially motivated by these rewards can find it hard to stop playing.”

Understanding individuals’ motives for playing video games can inform researchers, game developers and consumers about why certain games attract certain individuals, Hilgard said.

“Researchers have suspected that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are the most addictive genre of video games,” Hilgard said. “Our study provides some evidence that supports that claim. The games provide opportunities for players to advance levels, to join teams and to play with others. In addition, the games provide enormous fantasy worlds that gamers can disappear into for hours at a time and forget about their problems. MMORPGs may be triple threats for encouraging pathological game use because they present all three risk factors to gamers.”

“Consistent with previous research, we did not find a perfect relationship between total time spent playing games and addictive video game behaviors,” said study co-author Christopher Engelhardt, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Psychology in the MU School of Health Professions and the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. “Additionally, other variables, such as the proportion of free time spent playing video games, seem to better predict game addiction above and beyond the total amount of time spent playing video games.”

The open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychology, published the article, “Individual differences in motives, preferences, and pathology in video games: the gaming attitudes, motives, and experiences scales (GAMES),” earlier in September.

Why humans are musical

Why don’t apes have musical talent, while humans, parrots, small birds, elephants, whales, and bats do? Matz Larsson, senior physician at the Lung Clinic at Örebro University Hospital, attempts to answer this question in the scientific publication Animal Cognition.

In his article, he asserts that the ability to mimic and imitate things like music and speech is the result of the fact that synchronised group movement quite simply makes it possible to perceive sounds from the surroundings better.

The hypothesis is that the evolution of vocal learning, that is musical traits, is influenced by the need of a species to deal with the disturbing sounds that are created in connection with locomotion. These sounds can affect our hearing only when we move.

“When several people with legs of roughly the same length move together, we tend to unconsciously move in rhythm. When our footsteps occur simultaneously, a brief interval of silence occurs. In the middle of each stride we can hear our surroundings better. It becomes easier to hear a pursuer, and perhaps easier to conduct a conversation as well,” explains Larsson.

A behaviour that has survival value tends to produce dopamine, the “reward molecule”. In dangerous terrain, this could result in the stimulation of rhythmic movements and enhanced listening to surrounding sounds in nature. If that kind of synchronized behaviour was rewarding in dangerous environments it may as well have been rewarding for the brain in relative safety, resulting in activities such as hand- clapping, foot-stamping and yelping around the campfire. From there it is just a short step to dance and rhythm. The hormone dopamine flows when we listen to music.

Addiction: Can You Ever Really Completely Leave It Behind?

A new study in Biological Psychiatry suggests the answer is no

It is often said that once people develop an addiction, they can never completely eliminate their attraction to the abused substance. New findings provide further support for this notion by suggesting that even long-term abstinence from cocaine does not result in a complete normalization of brain circuitry.

Scientists are currently trying to answer some of the ‘chicken and egg’ questions surrounding the abuse of drugs. In particular, one of those questions is whether individuals who abuse psychostimulants like cocaine are more impulsive and show alterations in brain reward circuits as a consequence of using the drug, or whether such abnormalities existed prior to their drug use. In the former case, one might expect brain alterations to normalize following prolonged drug abstinence.

To address these questions, Krishna Patel at Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital and colleagues compared neural responses between three groups of people who were asked to complete a task that resembles bidding on eBay items. The 3 groups consisted of 47 healthy controls, 42 currently drug-abusing cocaine users, and 35 former cocaine users who had been abstinent an average of 4 years. They also compared all three groups on their levels of impulsivity and reward responding.

They found that active users showed abnormal activation in multiple brain regions involved with reward processing, and that the abstinent individuals who were previously cocaine dependent manifested differences in a subset of those regions. Both current and former cocaine users displayed similarly elevated impulsivity measures compared to healthy controls, which may indicate that these individuals had a pre-existing risk for addiction. Indeed, the degree of impulsivity correlated with several of the brain activation abnormalities.

These findings suggest that prolonged abstinence from cocaine may normalize only a subset of the brain abnormalities associated with active drug use.

"The knowledge that some neural changes associated with addiction persist despite long periods of abstinence is important because it supports clinical wisdom that recovery from addiction is a lifelong process," says Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "Further, it is the start of a deeper question: How do these persisting changes develop and how can they be reversed?"

The authors agree that further studies will be needed to investigate such questions, including the continued attempt to determine the extent to which differences in former cocaine users reflect aspects of pre-existing features, exposure to cocaine, or recovery.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Propofol Discovery May Aid Development of New Anesthetics

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Imperial College London have identified the site where the widely used anesthetic drug propofol binds to receptors in the brain to sedate patients during surgery.

Until now, it hasn’t been clear how propofol connects with brain cells to induce anesthesia. The researchers believe the findings, reported online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, eventually will lead to the development of more effective anesthetics with fewer side effects.

“For many years, the mechanisms by which anesthetics act have remained elusive,” explained co-principal investigator Alex S. Evers, MD, the Henry E. Mallinckrodt Professor and head of the Department of Anesthesiology at Washington University. “We knew that intravenous anesthetics, like propofol, act on an important receptor on brain cells called the GABA-A receptor, but we didn’t really know exactly where they bound to that receptor.”

Propofol is a short-acting anesthetic often used in patients having surgery. It wears off quickly and is less likely to cause nausea than many other anesthetics. But the drug isn’t risk-free. Its potentially dangerous side effects include lowering blood pressure and interfering with breathing.

In an attempt to understand how propofol induces anesthesia during surgery, scientists have tried to identify its binding site within the gamma-aminobutyric acid type A (GABA-A) receptor on brain cells. Activating these receptors — with propofol, for example — depresses a cell’s activity.

Researchers have altered the amino acids that make up the GABA-A receptor in attempts to find propofol’s binding site, but Evers said those methods couldn’t identify the precise site with certainty.

“In previous work to directly identify anesthetic binding sites, GABA-A receptors had to be extracted from membranes and purified prior to performing the binding studies,” he said. “Our method allowed us to study propofol binding to the intact receptor in its native membrane environment.”

Having developed the techniques to analyze the interactions between anesthetics and GABA-A receptors in their native environment, Evers’ laboratory teamed up with a group at Imperial College that had been taking the same approach. Led by Nicholas P. Franks, PhD, professor of biophysics and anaesthetics, the group has spent years creating a photoanalogue of propofol that both behaves in precisely the same way as propofol and contains a labeling group that permanently attaches to its binding site on the GABA-A receptor when exposed to a specific wavelength of light.

In creating the analogue of propofol, it’s as if the researchers put a tiny hook onto the molecule so that when it binds to the GABA-A receptor, it grabs onto the receptor and won’t let go.

“Normally, an anesthetic drug binds to the GABA-A receptor transiently,” Franks explained. “But for the purposes of this research, we wanted to create an analogue that behaved exactly like propofol except that we could activate this chemical hook to permanently bind the drug to the receptor. The next step was then to extract the receptor, cut it into pieces and identify the precise piece of the protein where the propofol analogue had attached to the receptor. This was the tricky step that the Evers group at Washington University had perfected.”

Evers and Franks believe this technique has implications beyond propofol and other anesthetics.

“Anesthetics have desirable effects — they induce anesthesia, for example — but they also have undesirable effects,” Evers said. “Propofol can lower blood pressure or interfere with breathing, for example. By understanding precisely what the binding sites look like on the proteins that induce those potential problems, we eventually hope to design and select for drugs that have the benefits we want without dangerous side effects.”

Using the techniques they have developed, Evers and Franks now plan to identify binding sites of other anesthetic agents. They believe their approach also can be used to study other types of drugs, such as psychiatric agents and anti-seizure drugs.

Calming fear during sleep

First evidence that fear memories can be reduced during sleep

A fear memory was reduced in people by exposing them to the memory over and over again while they slept. It’s the first time that emotional memory has been manipulated in humans during sleep, report Northwestern Medicine® scientists.

The finding potentially offers a new way to enhance the typical daytime treatment of phobias through exposure therapy by adding a nighttime component. Exposure therapy is a common treatment for phobia and involves a gradual exposure to the feared object or situation until the fear is extinguished.

"It’s a novel finding," said Katherina Hauner, a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We showed a small but significant decrease in fear. If it can be extended to pre-existing fear, the bigger picture is that, perhaps, the treatment of phobias can be enhanced during sleep."

Hauner did the research in the lab of Jay Gottfried, associate professor of neurology at Feinberg and senior author of the paper.

The study will be published Sept. 22 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Previous projects have shown that spatial learning and motor sequence learning can be enhanced during sleep. It wasn’t previously known that emotions could be manipulated during sleep, Northwestern investigators said.

In the study, 15 healthy human subjects received mild electric shocks while seeing two different faces. They also smelled a specific odorant while viewing each face and being shocked, so the face and the odorant both were associated with fear. Subjects received different odorants to smell with each face such as woody, clove, new sneaker, lemon or mint.

Then, when a subject was asleep, one of the two odorants was re-presented, but in the absence of the associated faces and shocks. This occurred during slow wave sleep when memory consolidation is thought to occur. Sleep is very important for strengthening new memories, noted Hauner, also a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

"While this particular odorant was being presented during sleep, it was reactivating the memory of that face over and over again which is similar to the process of fear extinction during exposure therapy," Hauner said.

When the subjects woke up, they were exposed to both faces. When they saw the face linked to the smell they had been exposed to during sleep, their fear reactions were lower than their fear reactions to the other face.

Fear was measured in two ways: through small amounts of sweat in the skin, similar to a lie detector test, and through neuroimaging with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The fMRI results showed changes in regions associated with memory, such as the hippocampus, and changes in patterns of brain activity in regions associated with emotion, such as the amygdala. These brain changes reflected a decrease in reactivity that was specific to the targeted face image associated with the odorant presented during sleep.

Is this my finger? Sensory illusion study provides new insight for body representation brain disorders

People can be easily tricked into believing an artificial finger is their own, shows a study published today [23 September] in The Journal of Physiology. The results reveal that the brain does not require multiple signals to build a picture body ownership, as this is the first time the illusion has been created using sensory inputs from the muscle alone.

The discovery provides new insight into clinical conditions where body representation in the brain is disrupted due to changes in the central or peripheral nervous systems e.g. stroke, schizophrenia and phantom limb syndrome following amputation.

Professor Simon Gandevia, Deputy Director of Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), says:

“It may seem silly to ask yourself whether your index finger is part of your body. However, our current findings demonstrate that this question has led to important insights into key brain functions.

“These findings could lead to new clinical interventions where the addition or the removal of specific sensory stimuli is used to change someone’s body image.”

In the experiment, subjects held an artificial finger with their left hand that was located 12 cm above their right index finger. Vision was eliminated and anaesthesia was used to numb the skin and remove feelings of joint movement. When the artificial finger and the right index finger were moved synchronously, subjects reported they were holding their own index finger: the brain incorrectly incorporated the artificial finger into its internal body representation.

The human brain uses sensory signals to maintain and update internal representation of the body, to plan and generate movements and interact with the world. The study gives new understanding as to how the brain decides what is part of our own body and where it is located. Contrary to previous theories which used multiple sensory inputs including touch and vision, these results demonstrate that messages coming from muscle receptors are enough to change the internal body representation.

The team additionally found a new type of sensory ‘grasp illusion’ in which perceived distances between index fingers decreases when subjects hold an artificial finger. This implies that the brain generates possible scenarios and tests them against available sensory information.

Professor Gandevia says:

“Grasping the artificial finger induces a sensation in some subjects that their hands are level with one another, despite being 12 cm apart. This illusion demonstrates that our brain is a thoughtful (yet at times gullible!) decision maker: it uses available sensory information and memories of past experiences to decide what scenario is most likely (i.e. ‘my hands are level’).”