Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Simple technique may help older adults better remember written information
University of Florida researchers have advice for older adults who need to remember detailed written information: Don’t just read it, tell someone about it.
That recommendation comes from a new UF study that showed that older adults who read a text and then described what they had read to someone else remembered more details of the text than older adults who simply re-read the passage multiple times.
The findings appear in the April issue of the journal Aphasiology.
Older adults are better able than younger adults to recall the gist of information they learn, but they have more difficulty remembering details, said lead investigator Yvonne Rogalski, who conducted the research as part of her doctoral dissertation work at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions.
“Older adults can rely on things they’ve learned in the past and they can build on that vast wealth of semantic information that they’ve collected over the years. That works as long as the information is familiar, but where it breaks down is when they have to read something that is unfamiliar and has a lot of details,” said Rogalski, now an assistant professor in the department of speech-language pathology and audiology at Ithaca College.
As a doctoral student Rogalski developed a training technique called Read Attentively, Summarise and Review, or RASR, which requires participants to read a passage aloud and then summarize from memory what they’ve read after each paragraph. The training is designed to help people “encode” information and commit it to memory.
“In the reading aloud portion, attention is heightened because you know you’re going to have to recall something,” she said. “Then retrieving that information through the summaries has the ability to act as a secondary encoding. Reading and recalling the text paragraph by paragraph instead of the whole text is designed to reduce the information processing demands.”
For the UF study, 44 healthy adults ages 60 to 75 used one of two methods to recall details from texts on real — but unusual — animals. Participants who used a technique called Read and Reread Attentively read the entire passage aloud once, and then re-read each paragraph three times aloud in succession. Those in the RASR group read the whole text aloud once, then for each paragraph they read it aloud, summarized it from memory and then re-read it aloud again. Participants in both groups were tested immediately after studying and 24 hours later.
The researchers found that participants who summarized the information aloud remembered more details about the texts than those who just re-read the material. In addition, combining the summarization method with an immediate post-test showed the most benefit for remembering text details after a 24-hour delay.
“We think it is effective because by reading the information and then putting it into your own words you have to do quite a bit of processing of not only the information, but also the relationships among bits of information,” said Lori Altmann, an associate professor in the UF department of speech, language, and hearing sciences, and a study co-author along with John Rosenbek, also a professor in the department. “Picking out the relationships that are important to you as you see them can help to order the information in your own memory.”
Older adults can put the principles of the summarization technique to work for themselves whenever they want or need to learn detailed information, such as a magazine article or medication plan, the researchers say. They suggest that people read the information and then describe it from memory to a partner who can check for accuracy.
“The RASR method is a very functional treatment and it’s something that healthy older adults or even people with mild dementias could use on their own to try and improve their memory,” Altmann said. “It doesn’t involve anything high-tech, and that’s the beauty of it.”
(Source: news.ufl.edu)
Why do we yawn? We tend to yawn before sleep and after waking, when we are bored or under stimulated. We yawn in the anticipation of important events and when we are under stress. What do all of these have in common? Researchers from the University of Vienna, Austria, and the Nova Southeastern University and SUNY College at Oneonta, USA highlight a link with thermoregulation, and in particular, brain cooling. The results of their study have been published in the scientific journal “Physiology & Behaviour”.
Common belief is that yawning helps to increase the oxygen supply. However, previous research has failed to show an association between yawning and blood oxygen levels. New research by a team of researchers led by Psychologist Andrew Gallup of SUNY College at Oneonta, USA now reveals that yawning cools the brain.
Sleep cycles, cortical arousal and stress are all associated with fluctuations in brain temperature, Yawning subsequently functions to keep the brain temperature balanced and in optimal homeostasis. According to this theory, yawning should also be easily manipulated by ambient temperature variation, since exchange with cool ambient air temperature may facilitate lowering brain temperature. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that yawning should only occur within an optimal range of temperatures, i.e., a thermal window.
To test this, Jorg Massen and Kim Dusch of the University of Vienna measured contagious yawning frequencies of pedestrians outdoors in Vienna, Austria, during both the winter and summer months, and then compared these results to an identical study conducted earlier in arid climate of Arizona, USA. Pedestrians were asked to view a series of images of people yawning, and then they self-reported on their own yawning behavior.
Results showed that in Vienna people yawned more in summer than in winter, whereas in Arizona people yawned more in winter than in summer. It turned out that it was not the seasons themselves, nor the amount of daylight hours experienced, but that contagious yawning was constrained to an optimal thermal zone or range of ambient temperatures around 20o C. In contrast, contagious yawning diminished when temperatures were relatively high at around 37o C in the summer of Arizona or low and around freezing in the winter of Vienna. Lead author Jorg Massen explains that where yawning functions to cool the brain, yawning is not functional when ambient temperatures are as hot as the body, and may not be necessary or may even have harmful consequences when it is freezing outside.
While most research on contagious yawning emphasizes the influence of interpersonal and emotional-cognitive variables on its expression, this report adds to accumulating research suggesting that the underlying mechanism for yawning, both spontaneous and contagious forms, is involved in regulating brain temperature. In turn, the cooling of the brain functions to improve arousal and mental efficiency. The authors of this study suggest that the spreading of this behavior via contagious yawning could therefore function to enhance overall group vigilance.
Researchers find ‘Seeing Jesus in toast’ phenomenon perfectly normal
People who claim to see “Jesus in toast” may no longer be mocked in the future thanks to a new study by researchers at the University of Toronto and partner institutions in China.
Researchers have found that the phenomenon of “face pareidolia”– where onlookers report seeing images of Jesus, Virgin Mary, or Elvis in objects such as toasts, shrouds, and clouds — is normal and based on physical causes.
“Most people think you have to be mentally abnormal to see these types of images, so individuals reporting this phenomenon are often ridiculed”, says lead researcher Prof. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto’s Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study. “But our findings suggest that it’s common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognize faces, so that even when there’s only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face,” said Lee.
Although this phenomenon has been known for centuries, little is understood about the underlying neural mechanisms that cause it. In the first study of its kind, researchers studied brain scans and behavioural responses to individuals seeing faces and letters in different patterns. They discovered face paredilia isn’t due to a brain anomaly or imagination but is caused by the combined work of the frontal cortex which helps generate expectations and sends signals to the posterior visual cortex to enhance the interpretation stimuli from the outside world.
Researchers also found that people can be led to see different images — such as faces or words or letters — depending on what they expect to see, which in turn activates specific parts of the brain that process such images. Seeing “Jesus in toast” reflects our brain’s normal functioning and the active role that the frontal cortex plays in visual perception. Instead of the phrase “seeing is believing” the results suggest that “believing is seeing.”
(Source: media.utoronto.ca)
Preparing for parenthood: Study finds pregnant women show increased activity in right side of brain
Pregnant women show increased activity in the area of the brain related to emotional skills as they prepare to bond with their babies, according to a new study by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The research, which will be presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference today (Wednesday 7 May), found that pregnant women use the right side of their brain more than new mothers do when they look at faces with emotive expressions.
“Our findings give us a significant insight into the ‘baby brain’ phenomenon that makes a woman more sensitive during the child bearing process”, said Dr Victoria Bourne, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway. “The results suggest that during pregnancy, there are changes in how the brain processes facial emotions that ensure that mothers are neurologically prepared to bond with their babies at birth.”
Researcher examined the neuropsychological activity of 39 pregnant women and new mothers as they looked at images of adult and baby faces with either positive or negative expressions. The results showed that pregnant women used the right side of their brain more than new mothers, particularly when processing positive emotions.
The study used the chimeric faces test, which uses images made of one half of a neutral face combined with one half of an emotive face to see which side of the participants’ brain is used to process positive and negative emotions.
Dr Bourne said: “We know from previous research that pregnant women and new mothers are more sensitive to emotional expressions, particularly when looking at babies’ faces. We also know that new mothers who demonstrate symptoms of post-natal depression sometimes interpret their baby’s emotional expressions as more negative than they really are.
“Discovering the neuropsychological processes that may underpin these changes is a key step towards understanding how they might influence a mother’s bonding with her baby.”
(Source: alphagalileo.org)
What Our Ancestors Can Teach Us About Exercise, Alzheimer’s and Human Longevity
Our ancient ancestors’ exercise routines could provide important clues about how best to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease and other modern age-related diseases, according to a new paper by two University of Arizona researchers.
The article, featured on the cover of the May issue of the journal Trends in Neurosciences, explores the evolutionary links between physical activity, brain aging and the lifespan of humans, who outlive all other primates.
"This is an effort to try to understand the relationship between exercise and an important genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and vascular disease, and how the human lifespan evolved, which is a fundamental question that’s been considered in the scientific literature for many years," said UA psychology professor Gene Alexander, who co-authored the paper with David Raichlen, a UA associate professor of anthropology.
While many studies today tout the health benefits of exercise, Alexander and Raichlen consider the link between physical activity and health from an evolutionary perspective, beginning about 2 million years ago. It was around that time that humans made the shift from a more apelike, sedentary lifestyle to a highly active hunter-gatherer lifestyle and began living longer.
During that period, humans likely carried two copies of a genotype known as ApoE4, which is directly linked to higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease. Yet, despite the presence of the problematic gene variation, longer lifespans began to evolve.
"Having this risk allele (ApoE4) is our ancestral condition," Raichlen said. "The lower risk alleles evolved relatively recently, so our question was: How do you evolve a long lifespan when you have this ApoE4 risk allele?"
The answer, Raichlen and Alexander believe, lies in humans’ high level of physical activity 2 million years ago.
"To engage in this hunter-gatherer lifestyle you have to be an aerobically active organism. There’s no way around it. You have to go long distances to find your food," Raichlen said.
"We developed a hypothesis that suggests that exercise may be an important modulating factor that helps to compensate for the negative impact of the (genetic) risk factor for Alzheimer’s and vascular disease, and ultimately might help us to understand why humans are able to live much longer than other primate species," said Alexander, who also teaches in the UA Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs in Neuroscience and Physiological Sciences.
As the human lifestyle today has become increasingly sedentary, this evolutionary link may be important in the development of new prevention therapies and treatments for Alzheimer’s and other age-related diseases, Alexander said.
"We are fundamentally endurance athletes, based on our ancestry. Our recent change, to a more sedentary lifestyle, may have led to a situation where this (ApoE4) genotype has become a problem for us, where it might not have been before," he said.
"With our current tendencies towards less active lifestyles, we need to be thinking about exercise as a potentially important intervention. Considering the evolutionary significance of ApoE4 also gives us some clues about why exercise might be especially important for us."
Today, it has been estimated that about 25 percent of the general U.S. population carries the ApoE4 genotype, and only about 2 percent have two copies of it, putting them at even greater risk for Alzheimer’s or vascular disease. However, the prevalence of the genotype in subgroups of the U.S. population and in some other parts of the world is much higher.
"There are parts of equatorial Africa where the frequency of the ApoE4 allele is something like 40 percent of the population," Raichlen said, "so thinking about how to use exercise to alter risk around the world is important."
Raichlen has studied in-depth the evolution and effects of physical activity in humans. His research covers a range of topics, including the effects of exercise on happiness, the link between aerobic activity and brain size, the walking patterns of human hunter-gatherers and the role of the runners’ high in human evolution.
Alexander, a member of the UA’s Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute and the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium, has done extensive research on aging and age-related diseases.
The two came together to explore the connection between their two areas of study by considering research literature in anthropology, brain imaging and neuroscience.
"We’ve generated a new hypothesis from these different scientific literatures that typically don’t cross over," Alexander said. "We are drawing on these different disciplines to look at this question in a new way, and I think it really has important implications for how we understand health issues today. Using what we know about ancestral genotypes, their risks, and how our behaviors evolved over time may help us to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s and age-related cognitive decline."
How Does Stress Increase Your Risk for Stroke and Heart Attack?
Scientists have shown that anger, anxiety, and depression not only affect the functioning of the heart, but also increase the risk for heart disease.
Stroke and heart attacks are the end products of progressive damage to blood vessels supplying the heart and brain, a process called atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis progresses when there are high levels of chemicals in the body called pro-inflammatory cytokines.
It is thought that persisting stress increases the risk for atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease by evoking negative emotions that, in turn, raise the levels of pro-inflammatory chemicals in the body.
Researchers have now investigated the underlying neural circuitry of this process, and report their findings in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry.
“Drawing upon the observation that many of the same brain areas involved in emotion are also involved in sensing and regulating levels of inflammation in the body, we hypothesized that brain activity linked to negative emotions – specifically efforts to regulate negative emotions – would relate to physical signs of risk for heart disease,” explained Dr. Peter Gianaros, Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and first author on the study.
To conduct the study, Gianaros and his colleagues recruited 157 healthy adult volunteers who were asked to regulate their emotional reactions to unpleasant pictures while their brain activity was measured with functional imaging. The researchers also scanned their arteries for signs of atherosclerosis to assess heart disease risk and measured levels of inflammation in the bloodstream, a major physiological risk factor for atherosclerosis and premature death by heart disease.
They found that individuals who show greater brain activation when regulating their negative emotions also exhibit elevated blood levels of interleukin-6, one of the body’s pro-inflammatory cytokines, and increased thickness of the carotid artery wall, a marker of atherosclerosis.
The inflammation levels accounted for the link between signs of atherosclerosis and brain activity patterns seen during emotion regulation. Importantly, the findings were significant even after controlling for a number of different factors, like age, gender, smoking, and other conventional heart disease risk factors.
“These new findings agree with the popular belief that emotions are connected to heart health,” said Gianaros. “We think that the mechanistic basis for this connection may lie in the functioning of brain regions important for regulating both emotion and inflammation.”
These findings may have implications for brain-based prevention and intervention efforts to improve heart health and protect against heart disease.”
“It is remarkable to see the links develop between negative emotional states, brain circuits, inflammation, and markers of poor physical health,” said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “As we identify the key mechanisms linking brain and body, we may be able to also break the cycle through which stress and depression impair physical health.”
(Image: Bigstock)
The Ways to Control Dreaming
In 2008, Isaac Katz, a civil service officer, passed away just before reaching his 78th birthday. He had been struggling with cardiovascular problems for some time. His son, Arnon Katz, now a 47-year-old tech entrepreneur, was beside himself with grief, and frustrated by the fact that he would never speak to his father again.
At the time, the younger Katz had been training himself to lucid dream—a phenomenon in which the dreamer becomes aware they are dreaming and can potentially control their actions as well as the content and context of the dream. But despite keeping a dream journal and diligently practicing other techniques, hadn’t had any success. All that changed, though, a year after his father’s death.
Katz recalled in a recent phone interview that he was mid-dream when his mother suddenly warned him in a voiceover, “Hey, you’re dreaming right now, so don’t take what your father is saying too seriously.”
Katz told me, “Suddenly everything slowed down and became incredibly vivid and real. I knew I was dreaming, but I felt I was with my father and could choose what to say as if I was awake. When I woke up, I realized that our brains are capable of creating an entire reality apart from waking life.” Many other lucid dreamers have said something similar.
Katz said the experience allowed him to finally “close the circle.” The frustration he felt in the year following his father’s death was gone.
Beyond the Damaged Brain
Until the past few decades, neuroscientists really had only one way to study the human brain: Wait for strokes or some other disaster to strike people, and if the victims pulled through, determine how their minds worked differently afterward. Depending on what part of the brain suffered, strange things might happen. Parents couldn’t recognize their children. Normal people became pathological liars. Some people lost the ability to speak — but could sing just fine.
These incidents have become classic case studies, fodder for innumerable textbooks and bull sessions around the lab. The names of these patients — H. M., Tan, Phineas Gage — are deeply woven into the lore of neuroscience.
When recounting these cases today, neuroscientists naturally focus on these patients’ deficits, emphasizing the changes that took place in their thinking and behavior. After all, there’s no better way to learn what some structure in the brain does than to see what happens when it shorts out or otherwise gets destroyed.
Girls called ‘too fat’ are more likely to become obese
Calling a girl “too fat” may increase her chances of being obese in the future, new research suggests.
In a letter published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers at UCLA report that 10-year-old girls who are told they are too fat by people that are close to them are more likely to be obese at 19 than girls who were never told they were too fat.
And that’s regardless of what they weighed at the beginning of the study.
"Making people feel bad about their weight can backfire," said Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA and the study’s senior author. "It can be demoralizing. And we know that when people feel bad, they often reach out to food for comfort."
Study: People Pay More Attention to the Upper Half of Field of Vision
A new study from North Carolina State University and the University of Toronto finds that people pay more attention to the upper half of their field of vision – a finding which could have ramifications for everything from traffic signs to software interface design.
“Specifically, we tested people’s ability to quickly identify a target amidst visual clutter,” says Dr. Jing Feng, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and lead author of a paper on the work. “Basically, we wanted to see where people concentrate their attention at first glance.”
Researchers had participants fix their eyes on the center of a computer screen, and then flashed a target and distracting symbols onto the screen for 10 to 80 milliseconds. The screen was then replaced by an unconnected “mask” image to disrupt their train of thought. Participants were asked to indicate where the target had been located on the screen.
Researchers found that people were 7 percent better at finding the target when it was located in the upper half of the screen.
“It doesn’t mean people don’t pay attention to the lower field of vision, but they were demonstrably better at paying attention to the upper field,” Feng says.
“A difference of 7 percent could make a significant difference for technologies that are safety-related or that we interact with on a regular basis,” Feng says. “For example, this could make a difference in determining where to locate traffic signs to make them more noticeable to drivers, or where to place important information on a website to highlight that information for users.”
The paper, “Upper Visual Field Advantage in Localizing a Target among Distractors,” is published online in the open-access journal i-Perception. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Ian Spence of the University of Toronto. The work was supported, in part, by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.