Practical EQ

Special report on Love from New Scientist magazine

New Scientist magazine has published a special report on love. A lot of the content is premium but there are some interesting free articles - here.

Meditation improves performance and changes brain structure!

Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky found that 40 minutes of meditation brings about an instant improvement in performance of a standard "psychomotor vigilance task" - even though none of his study subjects were experienced meditators.

In a separate study, Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General Hospital used MRI scans to discover that regular meditators had increased neural connectons and a thicker cerebral cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, compared with non-meditators.

More details on the excellent New Scientist site here.

How diet affects mood and behaviour

An interesting website I've just discovered is Food and Behaviour Research (http://www.fabresearch.org) - a UK-based charity which promotes and collects scientific research into the effects of nutrition on:

• Everyday difficulties in behaviour, learning or mood that can affect children and adults - at home, at school or in the workplace.
• Developmental conditions - such as ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autistic spectrum disorders.
• Mental health conditions - such as anxiety, depression, bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder and schizophrenia.

They have some useful factsheets and lots of links to research, as well as popular treatments of the issues (e.g. the recent school dinners series with Jamie Oliver)

West and East have different worldviews - literally

An study at the University of Michigan by psychologist Richard Nisbett tracked how American and Chinese students look at pictures.

The Americans paid more attention to the foreground object, while the Chinese looked more at the background. From the report in New Scientist:

“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,” he says.                                             

By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. “Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,” says Nisbett. “We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see.”

Nisbett describes the focus of the two cultures as "harmony versus goals". He also points out earlier studies showing that Chinese and Korean babies learning to talk pick up verbs more easily, while American children learn nouns first.

In the image (from the Scientific American report of the same study) American eye patterns are shown above, Chinese below.

Loneliness compromises the immune system

A new study at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh confirms   how college challenges both mind and body, by demonstrating that lonely first-year   students mounted a weaker immune response to the flu shot than did other students.

The study suggests that loneliness undermines the immune system. Social isolation (measured by size of social network) also has an effect - but interestingly the two effects were independent, so both objective and subjective aspects   of social life appear related to health.

As one of the researchers said, "You can have very   few friends but still not feel lonely. Alternatively, you can have many friends   yet feel lonely."

Get the full story here. The APA's press releases (the source of this story) are definitely worth watching (www.apa.org/releases/).

The Resilience Of Happiness

More from the British Psychological Digest:

When healthy people imagine the quality of life they would have with a chronic illness, their estimates are much more negative than reports from people who actually have a chronic illness.

A recent study by Jason Riis at the University of Michigan confirms this. He asked chronically ill patients and healthy controls to rate their mood when prompted every 90 minutes or so by a pocket computer. This technique minimises the possibility of biased recall or patients putting on a brave face for their carers.

The average mood ratings made on the pocket computer were equally positive among both the patients and healthy controls. Yet when interviewed, the healthy participants predicted their mood would be negative most of them time if they had a chronic kidney illness. And the patients predicted their mood would be much more positive if they'd never had a kidney illness. That is, both groups of participants appeared to underestimate the resilience of people's mood to illness.

Exercise helps depression

Many studies have found that depression improves with exercise. A study by Lynette C Craft at Michigan State University takes us a step closer to understanding why.

The study set out to examine two proposed explanations for why exercise tends to reduce depression symptoms - self-efficacy (the person's belief that they can cope with their depression) and distraction.

The study followed nine women on a nine-week exercise programme, and a control group of 10 women not on the programme. All the women were diagnosed with 'moderate depression' and were on antidepressants.

The study found that at the end of the programme, the participants had reduced their depression with a strong support for self-efficacy as a causal mechanism. There was less support for distraction as a causal mechanism. The control group's depression levels were unchanged.

I found this in the BPS Research Digest - well worth subscribing to.

I do wonder if the improvement in depression levels could have been due to the physical effects of exercise as well as improved self-efficacy...