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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 10:04AM
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TITLE:
1 in 3 Trans Masculine People Taking Testosterone Can Still Ovulate
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177625&url=https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-02-23/1-in-3-trans-masculine-people-taking-testosterone-can-still-ovulate-study

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://www.usnews.com/" rel="tag" target="_blank">U.S. News and World Report</a></p>A third of trans masculine people who have undergone testosterone therapy and have stopped menstruating are still ovulating, a new study suggests. That means they remain at risk for an unwanted pregnancy, despite the absence of periods, so contraceptives might be advisable during this stage of their treatment, depending on the person's partner. The study was published Feb. 22 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 10:02AM
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TITLE:
AI Outperforms Eye Doctors in Managing Glaucoma
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177624&url=https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-02-23/ai-outperforms-eye-docs-in-managing-glaucoma

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://www.usnews.com/" rel="tag" target="_blank">U.S. News and World Report</a></p>Artificial intelligence can match and even outperform human eye doctors in diagnosing and treating glaucoma, a new study finds. The GPT-4 system from OpenAI did as well or better than ophthalmologists in assessing 20 patients for glaucoma and retinal disease, researchers report February 22 in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. The results suggest that AI could play an important support role for ophthalmologists as they try to manage patients'...</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 10:00AM
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TITLE:
Attachment avoidance and selective sharing: Revealing the relationship dynamics of personal disclosure
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/attachment-avoidance-and-selective-sharing-revealing-the-relationship-dynamics-of-personal-disclosure/

<p>The decision to share our triumphs and tribulations with others appears to be a reflection of deeper psychological orientations. A recent study published in the journal <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pere.12537"><em>Personal Relationships</em></a> indicates that our level of attachment avoidance plays a pivotal role in our willingness to share personal experiences.</p>
<p>The new research sheds light on the selective sharing strategies individuals employ, especially in the context of relationship dynamics, offering insights into the mechanisms that facilitate or hinder the development of intimacy and trust within our closest connections.</p>
<p>Attachment theory suggests that the way we connect and relate to others is rooted in early experiences with caregivers, which then manifest in two primary dimensions: attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety. Attachment avoidance is characterized by a hesitance towards closeness, emotional distancing, and a strong emphasis on independence.</p>
<p>In contrast, attachment anxiety involves a fear of abandonment and an excessive reliance on others for emotional support. These dimensions give rise to various attachment styles—avoidant, anxious, secure, and fearful—that influence our interpersonal behaviors and relationship dynamics.</p>
<p>The new study distinguishes between global attachment orientation, which reflects our general tendencies across all close relationships, and relationship-specific attachment, which focuses on our attachment behaviors within a particular relationship. This distinction is crucial as it allows for a nuanced understanding of how attachment influences our interactions in different contexts.</p>
<p>While previous research has established a link between attachment styles and the propensity for self-disclosure, this study ventures further by investigating how attachment avoidance influences the likelihood of sharing personal events. The researchers hypothesized that individuals with higher levels of attachment avoidance would exhibit a selective sharing pattern, preferring to share positive events over negative ones, to minimize vulnerability and maintain a facade of competence.</p>
<p>&#8220;While sharing personal experiences is vital for building and sustaining close interpersonal connections, the presence of attachment avoidance significantly impedes self-disclosure,&#8221; said Elina R. Sun, a graduate student, who co-authored the work along with Syracuse University associate professor <a href="https://bkjakubi.expressions.syr.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brett Jakubiak</a>. &#8220;Hence, our interest lies in understanding when (under what conditions) people self-disclose personal experiences in relationships characterized by higher attachment avoidance.&#8221;</p>
<p>The researchers drew participants from two distinct pools: a sample of undergraduate students from a private university in the United States and participants from an online research platform, Prolific.com, resulting in a final sample of 609 individuals.</p>
<p>Participants engaged in a 30-minute survey administered via the Qualtrics platform, which included measures for personal network mapping, event experiences, sharing behavior, perceived vulnerability upon sharing, and attachment orientation.</p>
<p>In the personal network mapping segment, individuals identified their closest relationships by placing the names of three primary attachment figures within the inner circle of a bullseye diagram, and up to five additional significant others in the middle circle. Following this, participants were asked to recall and list up to four recent positive and negative events in their lives, detailing the impact and competence conveyed by each event.</p>
<p>The crux of the study&#8217;s inquiry was participants&#8217; sharing behavior — whether they chose to share each listed event with their identified close others. Additionally, participants rated the extent to which sharing each event with their primary attachment figures would make them feel vulnerable.</p>
<p>Attachment orientation was assessed through the Experiences in Close Relationships–Relationship Structures scale, which participants completed with reference to both their general attachment tendencies (global attachment orientation) and their attachment orientations towards each of the listed primary figures (relationship-specific attachment).</p>
<p>The researchers found that higher levels of attachment avoidance were associated with a lower likelihood of sharing personal events. This was observed across both samples and regardless of whether attachment avoidance was measured globally or in relation to specific relationships.</p>
<p>Specifically, for relationship-specific attachment avoidance, each one-point increase on the scale was linked to a substantial decrease in the odds of sharing personal events with a particular attachment figure. This finding was mirrored in the global attachment context, where higher levels of attachment avoidance similarly predicted a reduced propensity for sharing across the board.</p>
<p>Sun and Jakubiak also found evidence of selective sharing strategies, but with an interesting twist: the pattern was more pronounced when attachment was assessed within specific relationships rather than globally. In relationships marked by higher relationship-specific attachment avoidance, there was a distinct tendency to share positive events more frequently than negative ones.</p>
<p>This selective sharing strategy was not merely about the valence of the events shared (positive versus negative) but also related to the perceived vulnerability and competence associated with these events. Events that were perceived as less vulnerable and more competence-revealing were more likely to be shared.</p>
<p>&#8220;People in more avoidant relationships (characterized by emotional distancing and excessive self-reliance) exhibit significant selectivity when sharing personal events,&#8221; Sun told PsyPost. &#8220;We found that people in more avoidant relationships prioritize sharing positive events (rather than negative events) and share events that demonstrate their competence while avoiding showing vulnerability. &#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;By engaging in this selective sharing strategy, these individuals can engage in social interactions while maintaining their sense of independence. This sharing strategy allows people in avoidant relationships to balance the risks and rewards of disclosure, aligning with their cautious approach to establishing intimate relationships.&#8221;</p>
<p>While the primary focus of the investigation was on attachment avoidance, the researchers also explored the role of attachment anxiety in the sharing process. The results indicated that higher levels of relationship-specific attachment anxiety were associated with an increased likelihood of sharing personal events.</p>
<p>This suggests that individuals with higher levels of attachment anxiety may be more inclined to seek closeness and support through sharing, possibly as a way to alleviate fears of abandonment and reinforce their bonds with others.</p>
<p>&#8220;Attachment anxiety also plays an important role in self-disclosure,&#8221; Sun said.</p>
<p>But the study, like all research, is not without its limitations. Its correlational design means that causality cannot be inferred, and the moderate levels of attachment avoidance observed suggest caution in generalizing these findings to individuals with extreme attachment avoidance. Future research could benefit from experimental designs and a broader exploration of theoretical frameworks to further unravel the complexities of attachment and sharing behaviors.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the research offers valuable insights into the nuanced ways in which attachment avoidance shapes our willingness to share personal experiences. By highlighting the selective sharing strategy employed by individuals with higher attachment avoidance, it provides a pathway for developing interventions aimed at enhancing intimacy and trust in relationships.</p>
<p>&#8220;Now that we have a better sense of the types of personal experiences that individuals in high-avoidant relationships are willing to share, we aspire to leverage these sharing opportunities to help individuals in avoidant relationships to disclose more frequently (including eventually disclosing more vulnerable experiences),&#8221; Sun said.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pere.12537" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Attachment avoidance predicts limited and selective sharing of personal events in close relationships</a>,&#8221; was published January 22, 2024.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 08:00AM
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TITLE:
Psychology study: Men are more likely to choose riskier tasks, especially when paired with women
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/psychology-study-men-are-more-likely-to-choose-riskier-tasks-especially-when-paired-with-women/

<p>In various professions and educational fields, there’s an imbalance between men and women. For instance, fewer women are found in STEM careers and top positions in hospitals. While women often hit a “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier that blocks them from high-paying roles, men might encounter a “glass cellar,” pushing them into more dangerous jobs.</p>
<p>A study published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-023-00381-0"><em>Evolutionary Psychological Science</em></a> points to the possibility that personal choices, influenced by physical and psychological differences between the sexes, play a significant role in shaping career paths and opportunities.</p>
<p>While some argue that men might not promote women into high-status jobs, the concept of the “glass cellar” suggests that job choices and risks are also influenced by the nature of the work itself and the voluntary preferences of individuals. Researcher Ryushin Iha recruited a diverse sample of 5,279 participants from 14 countries. This sample was balanced in terms of gender, with 2,608 men and 2,671 women participating, and a broad age range from 18 to 110 years.</p>
<p>Participants engaged in an online experiment where they were randomly assigned to either an opposite-sex or same-sex condition. They were presented with a camping trip scenario and had to choose between two task lists: List A, which included physically demanding and potentially injurious tasks, or List B, which was less demanding and safer.</p>
<p>Iha found that men, when paired with a partner of the opposite sex, were significantly more inclined to opt for riskier and more physically demanding tasks compared to women. This preference aligns with evolutionary theories that suggest men may exhibit riskier behavior as part of mate acquisition strategies. Notably, this gender-specific choice pattern was consistent across different cultures, underscoring the universal aspect of these behavioral tendencies.</p>
<p>Further, the experiment illuminated how, in same-sex pairings, both men and women displayed similar propensities in task selection, indicating that the presence of an opposite-sex partner uniquely influences decision-making processes related to labor division. This finding suggests that gender differences in the workplace and other settings may, in part, stem from innate preferences rather than solely societal or discriminatory practices.</p>
<p>This perspective challenges the conventional discourse on gender equality by highlighting underlying factors, such as evolved physical and psychological differences, that influence individual choices regarding roles and occupations.</p>
<p>A limitation of the study is the lack of verification on whether participants perceived the task lists according to the intended risk and physical demand, which could affect the interpretation of the findings.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-023-00381-0">Let Me Take the Risk so You Won’t Have To: An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis of Spontaneous Occurrence of Division of Labor Across 14 Countries</a>”, was authored by Ryushin Iha.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 07:00AM
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TITLE:
Female Trump supporters exhibit slightly elevated subclinical psychopathy, study finds
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/trump-supporters-exhibit-slightly-elevated-subclinical-psychopathy-study-finds/

<p>Can women&#8217;s hormonal cycle influence their voting preferences? A recent study aimed to replicate and expand upon earlier research, which had suggested that women&#8217;s fertility could sway their support for political candidates. The findings, published <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941241233209">Psychological Reports</a></em>, failed to find much evidence for a connection between fertility and political preferences. However, the research did uncover a weak relationship between psychopathic personality traits and support for Donald Trump.</p>
<p>The original study, <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-09990-006" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published in 2010</a>, was grounded in the broader ovulatory shift hypothesis, which posits that hormonal changes across a woman&#8217;s menstrual cycle can influence various preferences and behaviors, including mate selection. The research provided initial evidence that during fertile periods, women might favor Barack Obama over John McCain in the 2008 U.S. presidential election due to perceived cues of genetic fitness.</p>
<p>But why revisit this research? Jessica L. Engelbrecht of the New School for Social Research noted that the initial study, though innovative, had important methodological limitations, including a small sample size and a homogenous participant group of young, white women. Moreover, subsequent research has provided mixed evidence regarding the ovulatory shift hypothesis, with some studies finding no significant effect of fertility on women&#8217;s mate preferences or sexual desires.</p>
<p>This context set the stage for a rigorous replication attempt under the <a href="https://www.cos.io/score">Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program</a>, aiming to clarify these contentious findings within the field of evolutionary psychology.</p>
<p>Conducted between July and August 2020, Engelbrecht and her colleagues recruited a sample of 549 female participants from the United States, who were carefully selected to ensure a representative sample in terms of age, ethnicity, and other demographic factors. These participants were chosen based on their menstrual cycle regularity, absence of pregnancy, non-use of hormonal birth control, and lack of chronic health issues affecting fertility, aiming to isolate the impact of natural hormonal fluctuations on political preferences.</p>
<p>Participants provided detailed information about their menstrual cycles, including the average length and the start date of their last period. This information was crucial for calculating each participant&#8217;s conception risk at the time of the survey.</p>
<p>The survey then presented participants with a series of hypothetical electoral matchups featuring a mix of Democratic and Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others. These matchups were designed to replicate the conditions of the original study, while also reflecting the contemporary political landscape and testing the hypothesis in a new context. Participants indicated their preferred candidate in each matchup and rated each candidate on attributes such as physical attractiveness, perceived intelligence, and potential for sexual coercion.</p>
<p>In addition to political preferences, the survey collected data regarding political orientation, self-assessed mate value, and the Dark Triad personality traits — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. These measures aimed to explore how individual personality characteristics and self-perception might influence political preferences, providing a comprehensive view of the factors at play.</p>
<p>The researchers discovered that the conception risk, calculated based on participants&#8217; menstrual cycle information, had a minimal impact on voting preferences in the majority of the electoral matchups tested. Notably, the only significant relationship between conception risk and voting preference emerged in the matchup between Trump and Obama.</p>
<p>In this case, a weak but statistically significant correlation indicated that higher conception risk was associated with a slightly increased likelihood of preferring Donald Trump over Barack Obama. However, this effect was small, suggesting that factors beyond fertility might play a more crucial role in shaping political preferences.</p>
<p>When examining the influence of candidates&#8217; perceived intelligence, attractiveness, and potential for sexual coercion, the researchers found that perceptions of intelligence were more predictive of voting preference than attractiveness. This challenges the hypothesis that visual cues of genetic fitness significantly influence voter preferences, suggesting instead that intellectual competence may be a more critical factor for voters.</p>
<p>When examining Dark Triad personality traits, Engelbrecht and her colleagues found that psychopathy showed a significant, albeit weak, relationship with a preference for Trump in the matchups where he was featured. This finding suggests that women with higher levels of subclinical psychopathy, characterized by impulsivity and remorselessness, were slightly more inclined to support Trump, irrespective of the specific electoral matchup.</p>
<p>&#8220;Overall, the current manuscript offers no substantive support to the first study of Navarrete et al. (2010). We were unable to replicate their key finding&#8230; Rather, our results suggest that women’s perception of the candidates’ intelligence, and their own personalities, have some relationship to their stated voting preferences,&#8221; the researchers concluded. &#8220;Although the comparability of our findings must be considered in light of the impossibility of a direct replication of the original, we contend that hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle are unlikely to tip the scale for female voters.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00332941241233209" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fertility Fails to Predict Voter Preference for the 2020 Election: A Pre-Registered Replication of Navarrete et al. (2010)</a>,&#8221; was authored by Jessica L. Engelbrecht, Matthew Duell, and John E. Edlund.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 06:00AM
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TITLE:
Harvard scientists just revealed a remarkable fact about brain development
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/neuroscience-harvard-scientists-just-revealed-a-remarkable-fact-about-brain-development/

<p>In a study that could revolutionize our understanding of brain development, researchers at Harvard University have discovered that the complex neural circuitry responsible for specific behaviors in zebrafish can form without the need for sensory experiences, suggesting that genetic programming alone is sufficient to establish functional neural connections.</p>
<p>This finding challenges long-held beliefs about the role of sensory-driven activity in shaping the brain&#8217;s wiring and opens new doors to exploring the innate capabilities of the brain. The research was recently published in <em><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44681-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nature Communications</a></em>.</p>
<p>Historically, neuroscience has leaned on the idea that while genetic mechanisms lay down the basic framework of the brain&#8217;s network, functional connections are honed through sensory experiences and environmental interactions. Seminal experiments with cats and primates, where sensory inputs were manipulated, supported this view by showing how such inputs influence brain development. Additionally, computational models have shown how neural networks can learn and adapt, further emphasizing the role of experience in brain development.</p>
<p>However, these models and experiments have not definitively answered whether sensory experiences during development are essential for the emergence of complex behaviors or to what extent the brain&#8217;s wiring is pre-determined by genetics. Recent observations of spontaneous neuronal activity in early brain development have highlighted its potential role in shaping neural circuits before sensory inputs come into play, suggesting a more nuanced interplay between genetic programming and sensory experience in brain development.</p>
<p>&#8220;I began my PhD focused on a seemingly simple theoretical question: what processes underlie the wiring of the brain, and how precise can these influences be in generating robust, reproducible neural connectivity underlying innate behaviors?&#8221; explained study author <a href="http://Barabasi.me">Dániel Barabási</a>, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our calculations led to a surprising prediction: There is sufficient information in neural development to specify the connections and weights of every neuron, even in the human brain. To test this striking statement, I aimed to show that the neural circuitry that underlies a complex, well-studied behavior in zebrafish can emerge without any learning.&#8221;</p>
<p>Zebrafish are widely used in scientific research due to their transparent embryos, rapid development, and genetic similarity to humans (sharing roughly 70 percent of the same genes), making them an ideal model for studying developmental biology, genetics, and neuroscience. Their unique characteristics allow researchers to observe developmental processes in real time and to manipulate genes to study their effects on growth, behavior, and disease.</p>
<p>For their new study, Barabási and his colleagues employed a novel method, using a sodium channel blocker called tricaine to pharmacologically inhibit all neural activity during the critical period of brain development in zebrafish larvae. This approach allowed the team to investigate whether complex behaviors and the neural circuitry that supports them could develop in the absence of any neural activity.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, even after a four-day period of complete neural inactivity, the zebrafish were capable of performing complex visuomotor behaviors akin to those observed in normally reared fish. This includes the optomotor response (OMR), a behavior that requires the integration of visual information with motor output to coordinate swimming in response to visual stimuli.</p>
<p>Remarkably, after the blockade of neural activity was lifted, the zebrafish exhibited fully functional and appropriately tuned neuronal cell types, whose response properties mirrored those found in fish that developed under normal conditions.</p>
<p>The findings suggest that the fundamental architecture and functionality of neural circuits in zebrafish can develop independently of sensory-driven neural activity. This indicates that genetic and molecular mechanisms alone are sufficient to establish the basic wiring and operational principles of the brain, a revelation that significantly departs from the previously held belief that sensory experience is essential for the maturation of functional neural circuits.</p>
<p>Moreover, the study revealed that the behavioral performance of zebrafish, in terms of their ability to perform the OMR, improved progressively after the tricaine-induced neural activity blockade was removed, reaching levels comparable to control fish. This improvement occurred even though the initial exposure to visual stimuli for these fish came post-developmentally, suggesting a rapid adaptation or calibration of their neural circuits to environmental stimuli once the blockade was lifted.</p>
<p>&#8220;In the age-old question of nature versus nurture, we land decisively on the side of nature,&#8221; Barabási told PsyPost. &#8220;We challenge recent focuses on learning, from artificial intelligence to self-improvement, showcasing the remarkable contribution of development to our innate capacities. This suggests that certain elements of our behavior and personality are &#8216;baked in,&#8217; or part of our developmental package, and a growth mindset can expand and empower this innate potential.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44681-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Functional neuronal circuits emerge in the absence of developmental activity</a>,&#8221; was authored by Dániel L. Barabási, Gregor F. P. Schuhknecht, and Florian Engert.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 11:26AM
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TITLE:
American Views on Teaching About Race and LGBTQ Issues in School
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177597&url=https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiW2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnBld3Jlc2VhcmNoLm9yZy9zb2NpYWwtdHJlbmRzLzIwMjQvMDIvMjIvcmFjZS1hbmQtbGdidHEtaXNzdWVzLWluLWstMTItc2Nob29scy_SAQA?oc=5

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=m" rel="tag" target="_blank">Google News - Health</a></p>Amid debates over schooling in the U.S., a national poll asked teachers, teens, and the public about teaching K-12 students facts on race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Although the results varied across topics and grade level, 64% of teachers said students should learn that the legacy of slavery still affects the position of Black people in U.S. society, and 60% said that parents should not be able to opt their kids out of learning...</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 11:25AM
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TITLE:
Experts in AI and Child Safety Call for Deepfake Crackdown
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177582&url=https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2024/02/22/Experts-call-for-deepfake-crackdown/4401708577374/

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://www.upi.com/Health_News/" rel="tag" target="_blank">United Press International - Health News</a></p>Experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and child safety in the entertainment industry called on officials to combat the danger of deepfake content, which is becoming commonplace in politics. Some 300 experts in various fields issued an open letter calling on governments, lawmakers, and politicians to address deepfake content&mdash;which can contain sexual content, fraud, or political disinformation&mdash;as the 2024 presidential campaign...</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 11:25AM
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TITLE:
U.S. Justice Department Appoints First Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177604&url=https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2024/02/22/justice-department-jonathan-mayer-chief-ai-officer/3681708648632/

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://www.upi.com/Health_News/" rel="tag" target="_blank">United Press International - Health News</a></p>The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday named its first official focused on artificial intelligence as the department grapples with the potentially transformative affects of AI on federal law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Jonathan Mayer, a professor at Princeton University who researches technology and law, will serve as chief science and technology adviser and chief AI officer, the department said.</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 23, 2024 at 11:24AM
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TITLE:
Denmark Records Highest Number of Antisemitic Incidents Since WWII
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177586&url=https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/denmark-records-highest-number-antisemitic-incidents-wwii-part-107441213

<div><p>Source: <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/international" rel="tag" target="_blank">ABC News - International</a></p>The number of antisemitic incidents registered in Denmark since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the war in Gaza has reached levels not seen since 1943, the head of the Scandinavian country's small Jewish community said Thursday. That was the year when roughly 7,200 Danish Jews were evacuated to neutral Sweden to prevent their deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, leaving almost no Jews in Denmark.</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 06:00PM
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TITLE:
Traumatic brain injuries trigger neural network reorganization
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/neuroscience-traumatic-brain-injuries-trigger-neural-network-reorganization/

<p>In a new study from Tufts University School of Medicine, scientists have unveiled new insights into the brain&#8217;s response to traumatic injuries, suggesting that the effects of a head injury extend far beyond the initial site of impact. Through advanced imaging techniques, the research team discovered that in the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury (TBI), the brain&#8217;s hemispheres collaborate to form new neural pathways, compensating for lost connections.</p>
<p>This research, recently published in the journal <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/34/2/bhae038/7607167"><em>Cerebral Cortex</em></a>, suggests that the impact of a TBI extends far beyond the immediate area of damage, affecting the entire brain and altering its function in unforeseen ways.</p>
<p>For decades, the focus of TBI research has predominantly been on the site of injury, with the broader effects on the brain often overlooked. Previous studies have laid the groundwork by demonstrating the immediate and long-term consequences of TBIs, including cognitive and motor dysfunction, increased risk of epilepsy, and even a predisposition to neurodegenerative diseases.</p>
<p>However, these studies primarily looked at the molecular and cellular aftermath of TBIs, leaving a gap in our understanding of how these injuries affect the overall network and function of the brain. This latest study by Samantha Bottom-Tanzer and her colleagues fills this crucial gap, offering new insights into the brain&#8217;s ability to rewire itself post-injury.</p>
<p>The researchers employed a novel imaging technique that integrates fluorescent sensors of neuronal activity with electrodes to investigate the brain&#8217;s response to TBI in a mouse model. This approach allowed them to observe and record the interactions between different regions of the brain following injury, capturing the formation of new neural pathways as the brain worked to compensate for lost connections.</p>
<p>The team conducted their observations over a three-week period, during which the mice were allowed to engage in activities such as running on an exercise wheel and resting, enabling the researchers to assess changes in neural activity across different states of motion and stillness. This methodology provided unprecedented insights into the dynamic and adaptive processes the brain undergoes after a traumatic injury, highlighting the extensive impact of TBI beyond the immediate site of damage.</p>
<p>The research team discovered that TBIs, typically resulting from severe impacts like car accidents or falls, provoke a widespread brain response that extends well beyond the immediate area of injury. Notably, the brain initiates a remarkable process of self-repair and adaptation, creating new neural pathways across both hemispheres in an effort to restore lost connections. This adaptive response indicates a level of plasticity and resilience in the brain that was previously underappreciated in TBI research.</p>
<p>This indicates that the brain&#8217;s response to injury involves a complex, whole-brain reorganization process, rather than being confined to the damaged area.</p>
<p>&#8220;Even areas far away from the injury behaved differently immediately afterward,&#8221; remarked first author Samantha Bottom-Tanzer, an MD/PhD student in neuroscience at the School of Medicine. &#8220;Traumatic brain injury research tends to focus on the region of injury, but this study makes a good case that the entire brain can be affected, and imaging in distal regions can provide valuable information.&#8221;</p>
<p>One of the most striking findings was the altered pattern of brain activity in injured mice, which differed markedly from the expected distinct patterns of movement and rest seen in healthy brains. Instead, injured brains exhibited a uniform pattern of activity regardless of whether the mice were moving or stationary.</p>
<p>This homogenization of brain activity patterns suggests a disruption in the brain&#8217;s ability to switch states based on the task at hand, an essential aspect of normal brain function. Despite this impairment, the mice retained the ability to perform tasks such as running on an exercise wheel, indicating that the brain can find new ways to accomplish tasks despite its altered state.</p>
<p>&#8220;Whether paying attention or walking, brains switch states depending on the task you’re doing,&#8221; explained senior author Chris Dulla, professor and interim chair of neuroscience at the School of Medicine. &#8220;After traumatic brain injury, this ability is not as robust, indicating such events are impairing how the brain switches states in a way that we don’t yet understand.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;What we can see from the data is that the brain has new solutions for how to do all these complex tasks,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>The clinical implications of these findings are substantial. With TBIs being a major cause of disability and death, understanding the brain&#8217;s capacity for adaptation and recovery opens new avenues for treatment. The study suggests that imaging techniques that capture the brain&#8217;s activity during various tasks could provide valuable insights into the specific impacts of an injury, enabling more personalized and effective therapeutic interventions. This approach could significantly improve outcomes for individuals suffering from TBIs by tailoring treatments to the unique ways in which their brains are compensating for injury.</p>
<p>&#8220;This study underscores the complexity of how injury affects a dynamic and always-changing brain,” said Bottom-Tanzer. &#8220;Most people think of the brain in one state, but our data indicates there are fluctuations, and it might offer opportunities to explore different interventions for physical therapy, speech therapy, and more.&#8221;</p>
<p>The team at Tufts University School of Medicine plans to extend their research to examine the long-term effects of brain injuries and explore how these findings could be translated into clinical practice. By further understanding the brain&#8217;s adaptability, scientists hope to develop more effective treatments that can mitigate the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae038" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Traumatic brain injury disrupts state-dependent functional cortical connectivity in a mouse model</a>,&#8221; was authored by Samantha Bottom-Tanzer, Sofia Corella, Jochen Meyer, Mary Sommer, Luis Bolaños, Timothy Murphy, Sadi Quiñones, Shane Heiney, Matthew Shtrahman, Michael Whalen, Rachel Oren, Michael J. Higley, Jessica A. Cardin, Farzad Noubary, Moritz Armbruster, and Chris Dulla.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 04:00PM
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TITLE:
Sleep: The unsung hero of complex memory consolidation
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/psychology-sleep-the-unsung-hero-of-complex-memory-consolidation/

<p>In a new study published in the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2314423121"><em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)</em></a>, researchers have unveiled a fascinating aspect of how our brains process and store complex memories during sleep. The study shows that sleep plays a crucial role not just in storing simple memories but in weaving together the intricate tapestry of complex multielement events that make up our daily experiences.</p>
<p>For years, scientists have understood that sleep is essential for memory consolidation—the process through which our brains convert new information into long-term memories. Previous studies, however, have primarily focused on how sleep affects simple associations, such as the connection between two elements we might encounter when learning new vocabulary.</p>
<p>&#8220;But in real life, events are generally made up of numerous components – for example, a place, people, and objects – which are linked together in the brain,&#8221; explained study author Nicolas D. Lutz of the Institute of Medical Psychology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. These elements are interconnected in our brains, forming a network of associations that enable us to recall an entire event from a single cue, a phenomenon known as pattern completion.</p>
<p>Lutz and his team embarked on this study to fill a gap in our understanding of how sleep contributes to the consolidation of these complex, multielement memories. They were particularly interested in whether sleep could strengthen the associative structure of these memories, thereby enhancing our ability to recall interconnected elements of an event from a single memory cue.</p>
<p>At the heart of the experiment was a verbal associative learning task, which aimed to simulate the complexity of real-life experiences through the use of word pairs. These pairs were crafted to represent different elements of hypothetical events, such as animals, locations, objects, and foods, thereby creating a network of associations similar to those we form in everyday life.</p>
<p>Participants in the study were 14 healthy volunteers, who underwent a within-subjects, cross-over design to eliminate individual differences in memory performance. This design meant that each participant experienced both the sleep and wake conditions, allowing for direct comparisons of memory consolidation across these states.</p>
<p>Initially, participants engaged in the learning task, memorizing word pairs linked in specific patterns to mimic the associative structure of real-world events. Some associations were designed to be strong, others weak, and some were not directly encoded, testing the brain&#8217;s ability to infer connections.</p>
<p>After the encoding phase, participants underwent a pre-intervention recall test to establish a baseline for their memory of the associations. Following this, they were assigned to either a night of sleep or a period of wakefulness in a controlled laboratory environment. The sleep condition was designed to investigate the natural process of memory consolidation during sleep, while the wake condition served as a control to assess the impact of merely the passage of time on memory.</p>
<p>Importantly, the wake condition also controlled for potential confounding factors such as time-of-day effects, ensuring any observed differences in memory performance could be attributed to sleep itself rather than circadian rhythms or other variables.</p>
<p>The next evening, after a recovery night that allowed participants in the wake condition to sleep and avoid the effects of sleep deprivation, a post-intervention recall test was conducted. This test assessed how well participants remembered the complex associations they had learned, with a particular focus on whether sleep had enhanced their ability to recall weakly encoded associations, form new connections between indirectly related elements, and improve overall memory performance for complex events.</p>
<p>The study demonstrated that sleep significantly enhances the consolidation of weak associations between the elements of an event. Participants who slept after the learning phase showed improved retention of these weakly encoded associations compared to those who remained awake.</p>
<p>This suggests that sleep actively strengthens the more tenuous links in our memory networks, potentially making it easier to recall less prominent details of an event. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that sleep aids in stabilizing and enhancing memories that might otherwise fade away.</p>
<p>Moreover, the research uncovered that sleep not only bolsters existing associations but also facilitates the formation of new connections between elements that were not directly associated during the initial learning. This aspect of the findings points to a remarkable capability of sleep to reorganize and integrate memories, allowing for a more cohesive and comprehensive recollection of complex events.</p>
<p>Another significant discovery was the enhanced ability of participants to recall multiple elements of an event based on a single cue after a period of sleep. This improvement in what the study terms &#8220;joint remembering&#8221; underscores the role of sleep in pattern completion—the brain&#8217;s ability to reconstruct a memory from partial or fragmented cues. This function is essential for episodic memory, enabling people to remember complete events from limited information.</p>
<p>&#8220;We were able to demonstrate that sleep specifically consolidates weak associations and strengthens new associations between elements that were not directly connected with each other during learning. Moreover, the ability to remember multiple elements of an event together, after having been presented with just a single cue, was improved after sleep compared to the condition in which the participants had stayed awake,&#8221; Lutz said.</p>
<p>The study also established a link between these memory consolidation benefits and sleep spindles—short bursts of brain activity characteristic of sleep. The correlation between the density and amplitude of sleep spindles and the improved memory performance for weak associations and joint remembering suggests that these neural oscillations play a pivotal role in the memory-enhancing effects of sleep.</p>
<p>Sleep spindles are thought to facilitate the transfer of memories from the hippocampus, where immediate memories are formed, to the neocortex, where long-term memories are stored, thus supporting the integration and strengthening of memory networks.</p>
<p>&#8220;This finding suggests that sleep spindles play an important role in the consolidation of complex associations, which underlie the completion of memories of whole events,” explained study author Luciana Besedovsky.</p>
<p>While the study&#8217;s findings are significant, the researchers are careful to note its limitations. The sample size was relatively small, though it was based on power calculations from existing literature. Additionally, the study design could not entirely rule out the possibility that the observed benefits were due to the absence of sleep deprivation rather than an active effect of sleep itself.</p>
<p>However, the controlled conditions of the experiment, including the careful monitoring of participants&#8217; sleep and wake cycles and the exclusion of factors like vigilance and subjective sleepiness, lend strength to the conclusions drawn.</p>
<p>This study opens up new avenues for research into how sleep shapes our memory of complex events. Future studies with larger sample sizes and different methodologies could provide further insights into the mechanisms behind sleep&#8217;s role in memory consolidation. Understanding these processes in greater detail could have profound implications for educational practices, memory enhancement strategies, and even the treatment of memory-related disorders.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our results reveal a new function by which sleep can offer an evolutionary advantage,&#8221; Besedovsky remarked. &#8220;Furthermore, they open up new perspectives on how we store and access information about complex multielement events.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2314423121" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sleep shapes the associative structure underlying pattern completion in multielement event memory</a>,&#8221; was authored by Nicolas D. Lutz, Estefanía Martínez-Albert, Hannah Friedrich, Jan Born, and Luciana Besedovsky.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 02:00PM
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TITLE:
Psychologists have discovered a surprisingly simple technique to reduce political polarization
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/psychologists-have-discovered-a-surprisingly-simple-technique-to-reduce-political-polarization/

<p>Political polarization can be reduced when people are told to think about the personal relevance of issues they might not care about at first glance.</p>
<p>We, <a href="https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/Rebecca-Dyer">a social psychologist</a> and <a href="https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/keelah-williams">an evolutionary psychologist</a>, decided to investigate this issue with two of our undergraduate students, and recently published <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296177">our results</a> in the science journal <em>PLOS One</em>.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141">Previous research</a> has found that conservatives tend to judge “disrespecting an elder” to be more morally objectionable behavior than liberals do. But when we had liberals think about how “disrespecting an elder” could be personally relevant to them – for example, someone being mean to their own grandmother – <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296177">their immorality assessments increased</a>, becoming no different than conservatives’.</p>
<p>When people consider how an issue relates to them personally, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000567">an otherwise neutral event seems more threatening</a>. This, in turn, increases someone’s perception of how morally objectionable that behavior is.</p>
<p>The pattern was different with conservative participants, however. When conservatives considered the personal relevance of what is typically considered a more “liberal” issue – a company lying about how much it is contributing to pollution – their judgments of how immoral that issue is did not significantly change.</p>
<p>Contrary to what we expected, both conservatives and liberals cared relatively equally about this threat even without thinking about its personal relevance. While some people did focus on the environmental aspect of the threat, as we intended, others focused more on the deception involved, which is less politically polarized.</p>
<p>All participants, no matter their politics, consistently rated more personally relevant threats as more immoral. The closer any threat feels, the bigger – and more wrong – someone considers it to be.</p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>In the United States today, it can feel like conservatives and liberals are <a href="https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/political-divide-america-beyond-polarization-tribalism-secularism">living in different realities</a>. Our research speaks to a possible pathway for narrowing this gap.</p>
<p>People often think of moral beliefs as relatively fixed and stable: Moral values feel ingrained in who you are. Yet our study suggests that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296177">moral beliefs may be more flexible</a> than once thought, at least under certain circumstances.</p>
<p>To the extent that people can appreciate how important issues – like climate change – could affect them personally, that may lead to greater agreement from people across the political spectrum.</p>
<p>From a broader perspective, personal relevance is just one dimension of something called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963">psychological distance</a>.” People may perceive objects or events as close to or far away from their lives in a variety of ways: for example, whether an event occurred recently or a long time ago, and whether it is real or hypothetical.</p>
<p>Our research suggests that psychological distance could be an important variable to consider in all kinds of decision-making, including financial decisions, deciding where to go to college or what job to take. Thinking more abstractly or concretely about what is at stake might lead people to different conclusions and improve the quality of their decisions.</p>
<h2>What still isn’t known</h2>
<p>Several important questions remain. One relates to the differing pattern that we observed with conservative participants, whose assessments of a stereotypically “liberal” threat did not change much when they considered its relevance to their own lives. Would a different threat – maybe gun violence or mounting student loan debt – lead to a different pattern? Alternatively, perhaps conservatives tend to be more rigid in their beliefs than liberals, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000446">as some studies have suggested</a>.</p>
<p>In addition, how might these findings contribute to actual problem-solving? Is increasing the personal relevance of otherwise-neutral threats the best way to help people see eye to eye?</p>
<p>Another possibility might be to push things in the opposite direction. Making potential threats seem less personally relevant, not more, might be an effective way to bring people together to work toward a realistic solution.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/making-it-personal-considering-an-issues-relevance-to-your-own-life-could-help-reduce-political-polarization-222831">original article</a>.</em></p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 12:00PM
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TITLE:
Sleep bruxism research: Grinding teeth is unaffected by insomnia and stress levels
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/sleep-bruxism-research-grinding-teeth-is-unaffected-by-insomnia-and-stress-levels/

<p>The<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13827"> <em>Journal of Sleep Research</em></a> has published a study showing that researchers have found that insomnia and the level of emotional distress in a person does not significantly affect the occurrence of sleep bruxism — a condition characterized by teeth grinding or clenching during sleep. Contrary to previous beliefs, the present study, which involved a thorough sleep analysis using polysomnography, indicates that individuals with insomnia are no more likely to experience sleep bruxism than those without sleep disorders, regardless of their stress levels.</p>
<p>Sleep bruxism has long been a subject of interest among sleep researchers due to its potential to cause dental damage and affect sleep quality. Prior studies have suggested a link between sleep bruxism and various factors — including stress and sleep disorders like insomnia.</p>
<p>Insomnia, affecting about 10% of the population, is namely associated with difficulties in falling asleep, maintaining sleep, and experiencing non-restorative sleep, which could potentially either exacerbate or be affected by sleep bruxism. However, these earlier investigations may not have provided an accurate picture of sleep bruxism&#8217;s occurrence and its association with insomnia.</p>
<p>The motivation behind the present study was to explore the relationship between sleep bruxism and insomnia with a more objective lens — particularly focusing on whether the stress and distress associated with insomnia could influence the prevalence of sleep bruxism. Researchers aimed to provide clearer insights that could aid in the clinical management of sleep bruxism, especially among patients with insomnia, by employing polysomnography — a sleep study that measures brain waves, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing, and leg and eye movements throughout the night.</p>
<p>To conduct their investigation, the team enlisted 86 participants, split between 44 with insomnia and 42 without sleep complaints. All were recruited through advertisements and averaged an age of 47 for females and 51 for males.</p>
<p>Participants with insomnia were categorized based on their levels of distress. Using polysomnography over two nights, researchers meticulously recorded each participant&#8217;s sleep architecture and instances of rhythmic masticatory muscle activity (RMMA) &#8212; the technical term for the jaw muscle movements indicative of sleep bruxism. This approach allowed the researchers to objectively measure and compare the presence and severity of sleep bruxism among the different groups.</p>
<p>The findings were quite revealing: there was no significant difference in the occurrence of RMMA between individuals with and without insomnia, nor was there a notable difference between insomnia sufferers with varying levels of distress. This suggests that, contrary to previous assumptions, insomnia and associated emotional distress do not have a direct impact on sleep bruxism&#8217;s prevalence.</p>
<p>In essence, the study challenges the notion that insomnia exacerbates or is linked to increased rates of teeth grinding during sleep, offering a new perspective on the relationship between these common sleep issues.</p>
<p>The study&#8217;s authors acknowledge certain limitations that should be considered when interpreting the results. For instance, the participant selection process and the unequal ratio of female to male participants might limit the generalizability of the findings to the entire population.</p>
<p>Additionally, the study&#8217;s secondary analysis nature means it relies on previously collected data, which may not cover all relevant aspects of sleep bruxism and insomnia. Regardless, this study is deeply useful in how it emphasizes the complexity of sleep bruxism&#8217;s etiology and its relation to insomnia and stress.</p>
<p>Boyuan Kuang, Ghizlane Aarab, Yishul Wei, Tessa Blanken, Frank Lobbezoo, Eus J. W. Van Someren, Jennifer Ramautar, and Rick Wassing authored this study, published as “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jsr.13827">Associations between signs of sleep bruxism and insomnia: A polysomnographic study</a>.&#8221; They research and publish from the University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Taikang Bybo Dental, the University of Sydney, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 10:21AM
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TITLE:
How to Manage Shame in Supervision
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URL:
https://ct.counseling.org/2024/02/how-to-manage-shame-in-supervision/

<p>Learn how supervisors can sometimes be the source of a supervisee’s shame and 10 ways to avoid it.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://ct.counseling.org/2024/02/how-to-manage-shame-in-supervision/">How to Manage Shame in Supervision</a> appeared first on <a href="https://ct.counseling.org">Counseling Today</a>.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 10:00AM
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TITLE:
Depressive symptoms are a key link between ADHD and hypersexuality, study suggests
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/depressive-symptoms-are-a-key-link-between-adhd-and-hypersexuality-study-suggests/

<p>How does our mental health affect our behaviors, particularly those related to our most basic human desires, like sexuality? A recent study sheds light on the complex relationship between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and hypersexual behavior, offering new insights into how these conditions intersect and influence individuals&#8217; lives. The findings were published in the <span class="anchor-text"><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915324000155"><em>Journal of Affective Disorders Reports</em></a>.</span></p>
<p>ADHD is a condition that typically emerges in childhood and is characterized by difficulties in maintaining attention, impulsive behavior, and excessive activity. These challenges often persist into adulthood, affecting daily functioning and social relationships. On the other hand, hypersexuality is defined by an excessive preoccupation with sexual thoughts, urges, or behaviors that cause distress or impairment in various aspects of life. While seemingly unrelated, a growing body of research suggests a complex connection between these two conditions.</p>
<p>The motivation behind this study stemmed from the observation that individuals with ADHD often exhibit higher rates of hypersexual behavior compared to the general population. This association suggests that ADHD-related characteristics, such as impulsivity and difficulties in emotional regulation, could predispose individuals to seek out sexual activities as a means of coping with psychological distress or as a manifestation of their impulsive tendencies.</p>
<p>Recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of this relationship, researchers embarked on a comprehensive analysis to explore the underlying mechanisms that link ADHD to hypersexual behavior.</p>
<p>&#8220;Hypersexuality is a very relevant topic in clinical sexology,&#8221; said study authors Giacomo Ciocca, an associate professor of sexual psychopathology at Sapienza University of Rome, and Davide Doroldi, a clinical psychologist.</p>
<p>The study involved 309 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 79 (average age 34.5), who were recruited through social media platforms using a method known as snowball sampling. After consenting to participate, individuals completed an online questionnaire that assessed various aspects of their lives, including ADHD symptoms, hypersexual behavior, depression, impulsivity, and other related factors. The questionnaire utilized validated scales such as the Hypersexual Behavior Inventory and the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, ensuring the reliability of the measurements.</p>
<p>The analysis revealed several key insights into the relationship between ADHD and hypersexual behavior. Firstly, in line with previous research, a significant positive correlation was found between ADHD symptomatology and hypersexual behavior, indicating that individuals with higher levels of ADHD symptoms are more likely to engage in hypersexual activities.</p>
<p>Furthermore, impulsivity, a core feature of ADHD, was closely linked to both ADHD symptoms and hypersexual behavior, suggesting that impulsivity plays a critical role in this association.</p>
<p>Depressive symptoms, hypomanic symptoms, and signs of psychotic prodromes (e.g. perceptual disturbances and delusional thoughts) also emerged as significant predictors of hypersexual behavior. Notably, the study revealed that the relationship between ADHD and hypersexuality is largely mediated by depressive symptoms, psychotic prodromes and &#8212; to a lesser extent &#8212; hypomanic symptomatology, suggesting that psychological distress stemming from ADHD may drive individuals towards hypersexual behavior.</p>
<p>&#8220;We would not have expected depressed and manic mood states to be better mediators of the relationship between ADHD and hypersexuality than impulsivity,&#8221; Ciocca and Doroldi told PsyPost.</p>
<p>The findings suggest that hypersexual behavior in individuals with ADHD could be partially explained by their tendency to use sexual activity as a means of alleviating negative emotions and psychological distress. This &#8220;self-medication&#8221; hypothesis suggests that engaging in hypersexual activities serves as an attempt to regulate mood and cope with the challenges posed by ADHD.</p>
<p>&#8220;Hypersexual symptomatology tends to occur in response to dysphoric emotional states,&#8221; the researchers explained. &#8220;Strong negative emotions and difficulties in emotional regulation trigger sexual behavior, which is used as an emotion-based coping strategy. Individuals with ADHD, partly because of the problems due to the condition, are particularly vulnerable to dysphoric emotional states.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite its insightful findings, the study has some limitations that warrant consideration. The reliance on self-reported data and the gender imbalance (67.31% female) within the sample could affect the generalizability of the results. These limitations highlight the need for future research to explore these variables in larger, more diverse clinical and non-clinical samples.</p>
<p>&#8220;Hypersexual behavior often characterizes many psychopathological conditions,&#8221; the researchers added. &#8220;It is a consequence of some major mental diseases.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915324000155">ADHD and hypersexual behaviors: The role of impulsivity, depressive feelings, hypomaniacal symptoms and psychotic prodromes</a>,&#8221; was authored by Davide Doroldi, Tommaso B. Jannini, Mimma Tafà, Antonio Del Casale, and Giacomo Ciocca.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 08:00AM
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TITLE:
New study reveals how common ayahuasca-induced death experiences are and their link to personal transformation
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/new-study-reveals-how-common-ayahuasca-induced-death-experiences-are-and-their-link-to-personal-transformation/

<p>Two studies of ayahuasca ceremony participants found that at least 50% of these individuals had an ayahuasca-induced personal death experience. These experiences were associated with an increased sense that consciousness will continue after death and increased concerns for the environment. The paper was published in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1287961"><em>Frontiers in Psychiatry</em></a>.</p>
<p>Ayahuasca is a traditional South American psychedelic brew made from the <em>Banisteriopsis caapi</em> vine and the <em>Psychotria viridis</em> shrub, or from other ingredients containing similar psychoactive compounds. The primary active ingredient in ayahuasca is N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful hallucinogen. The vine also contains specific chemicals that allow DMT to be active after drinking the brew.</p>
<p>Ayahuasca is typically consumed in a ceremonial setting, led by a shaman or an experienced facilitator. This individual prepares the brew by boiling or soaking the plant materials. Typically, participants drink the bitter, earthy-tasting liquid in a ritual that involves singing, drumming, and guided meditation, with the intention of spiritual healing and self-discovery.</p>
<p>The effects of ayahuasca can last several hours and often result in intense emotional, psychological, and physical experiences. These include vivid visions, introspection, and a sense of connectedness to the natural and spiritual worlds. A commonly reported occurrence is also the experience of personal death.</p>
<p>Ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences, often referred to as &#8220;ego death&#8221; or &#8220;psychological death,&#8221; are experiences where individuals perceive the dissolution of their sense of self. During these experiences, users may feel as though they are dying or have died, leading to a loss of personal identity and a sense of merging with a greater consciousness or the universe.</p>
<p>This can be accompanied by intense emotional reactions, including fear, joy, and a sense of liberation, as well as profound insights into one&#8217;s life, relationships, and existence. Such experiences are considered significant in the context of ayahuasca ceremonies, as they are believed to facilitate deep healing, spiritual growth, and a greater understanding of one&#8217;s place in the world.</p>
<p>In their new study, Jonathan David and his colleagues wanted to explore how prevalent personal death experiences are among ayahuasca users. They also wanted to explore their characteristics and long-term outcomes. These researchers conducted two studies.</p>
<p>The first study was a preliminary examination of veteran ayahuasca users. The aim was to see how many of these individuals had a personal death experience and what was it like. They also wanted to know whether it was associated with death-related beliefs of these individuals, their attitudes, and feelings of connection with the extended world and the environment.</p>
<p>This study involved 44 experienced ayahuasca users who were recruited through social media and personal networks. These individuals completed assessments of personality (the Big Five Inventory), ayahuasca use habits (age of first consumption, time since last consumption, lifetime use etc.), ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences (four questions about whether they had it, how often and how intense was it), and past ego dissolution experiences (the Ego Dissolution Inventory).</p>
<p>They also completed assessments of death anxiety (the Death Anxiety Scale), beliefs in the afterlife (questions designed by the researchers), death transcendence attitudes (the Death Transcendence Scale), depression (the Beck Depression Inventory), anxiety (the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), depersonalization (the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale), relation to nature (the New Ecological Paradigm Revised), and relation to others (the Self Prioritization Task).</p>
<p>The subsequent study aimed to confirm the preliminary findings regarding the prevalence of ayahuasca-induced death experiences and examine their association with stress coping mechanisms and life values.</p>
<p>This study surveyed 306 ayahuasca users from Israel, who were found through ayahuasca contact groups and psychedelic social media. They completed assessments of ayahuasca use habits, personal death experiences and afterlife beliefs from study 1, but also assessments of coping strategies (the Coping Strategies Scale) and values in life (the Engaged Living Scale).</p>
<p>Results of the first study showed that 67% of study participants had an ayahuasca-induced personal death experience at least once in their life. Most participants with this experience reported experiencing it more than once, two participants even more than 10 times. Most participants saw it as an experience of extreme intensity. 78% of these individuals reported an extreme change in their attitude towards death after it. However, these experiences and their number were not associated with death-related anxiety.</p>
<p>Individuals with personal death experiences had stronger death transcendence views (beliefs that consciousness or the essence of an individual continues or transforms in some way beyond physical death) compared to those without these experiences. Individuals with personal death experiences also reported a higher concern for the environment on average.</p>
<p>In the second study, 49% of participants reported having personal death experiences, with 80% experiencing them between one and five times, while 7% reported experiencing it more than 10 times. These participants also reported that personal death experience changed their attitude towards death.</p>
<p>The researchers also found that 93% of participants in both groups believed that soul/consciousness continues after death.</p>
<p>Looking at coping strategies, participants with personal death experiences were somewhat more prone to using problem-focused coping strategies i.e., approaches that directly address the source of stress or a problem in order to reduce or eliminate its impact. These individuals also tended to have higher scores on fulfilled living i.e., to see their lives as more fulfilled.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our findings indicate that APDs [ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences] are a common experience among those participating in ayahuasca ceremonies, being reported by at least half of the participants. Having such experiences was not related to gender, age, education, personality, or ontological belief,&#8221; the study authors concluded.</p>
<p>&#8220;However, while prevalent, these experiences were not very frequent with participants mostly experiencing them no more than 5 times over their lifetime, and very rarely more than 10 times. As expected, these experiences are perceived as powerful and impacted people’s attitudes toward death. In both studies, most participants rated APD experiences at the maximum intensity afforded by the scale, and most participants reported APDs to have significantly changed their attitudes toward death.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;These reports were further validated by other measures showing that lifetime APDs predicted having a stronger sense of having transcended death, and more certainty in the continuation of the soul/consciousness after death (in Study 2). However, in contrast to our expectations APDs did not influence death anxiety levels, and neither were they predictive of psychopathology including depression, anxiety, and depersonalization.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study sheds light on characteristics of ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences. However, it should be noted that the study was based on self-reports and exploring an experience that is highly socially desirable among ayahuasca users, leaving lots of room for reporting bias. Additionally, the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect inferences to be made from the results.</p>
<p>The paper “<a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1287961">Ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences: prevalence, characteristics, and impact on attitudes toward death, life, and the environment</a>” was authored by Jonathan David, José Carlos Bouso, Maja Kohek, Genís Ona, Nir Tadmor, Tal Arnon, Yair Dor-Ziderman, and Aviva Berkovich-Ohana.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 06:00AM
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TITLE:
Breakthrough study reveals how antidepressants during pregnancy may affect brain development
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/breakthrough-study-reveals-how-antidepressants-during-pregnancy-may-affect-brain-development/

<p>In a new study published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45734-w"><em>Nature Communications</em></a>, researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered preliminary evidence suggesting that the use of antidepressants during pregnancy can have significant effects on brain development, specifically impacting the development of connections within the brain&#8217;s prefrontal cortex. This region of the brain is crucial for complex cognitive functions such as decision-making, personality expression, and social behavior.</p>
<p>The study, conducted on rodents, sheds light on the role that serotonin, a key neurotransmitter affected by antidepressants, plays in brain maturation during early development.</p>
<h3>Understanding SSRIs and the Motivation Behind the Study</h3>
<p>Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of drugs commonly prescribed to treat depression, including during pregnancy. They work by increasing the levels of serotonin in the brain, a chemical thought to have a good influence on mood, emotion, and sleep. Given the prevalence of their use, understanding the implications of SSRIs on pregnancy and fetal development is of paramount importance.</p>
<p>Previous research has hinted at potential risks, yet definitive evidence on how these drugs affect the developing brain at a cellular level has been scarce. Motivated by this gap in knowledge, the researchers aimed to explore the direct impact of SSRIs on the brain&#8217;s prefrontal cortex during critical periods of development.</p>
<p>&#8220;Given the high levels of the serotonin in early brain development in animals including humans, coinciding with the period of intense brain maturation, we hypothesized that serotonergic activity is important for proper development of the prefrontal cortex that receives dense serotonergic innervation throughout development,&#8221; explained study author <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/wonchanoh">Won Chan Oh</a>, an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.</p>
<p>&#8220;The prefrontal cortex, the most evolved brain region, plays a central role in highest-order cognition, which is why we focused our study on finding the answer from this brain area.&#8221;</p>
<h3>Investigating the Effects of SSRIs on Brain Development</h3>
<p>To examine the effects of altered serotonin signaling in mice, which share critical periods of brain development with humans, the researchers employed both chemogenetic and pharmacological manipulations.</p>
<p>Chemogenetics involves the use of engineered receptors, known as Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs), which can be selectively activated or inhibited by specific, otherwise pharmacologically inert, small molecules. In this study, DREADDs were used to selectively control the activity of serotonin-producing neurons in a precise manner.</p>
<p>This method relies on genetic engineering to express these synthetic receptors specifically in target neuron populations—in this case, serotoninergic neurons. By employing DREADDs, researchers could mimic the effects of increased or decreased serotonin levels without the need for pharmacological SSRIs.</p>
<p>For the pharmacological manipulation, the researchers orally administered fluoxetine (commonly known by brand names such as Prozac and Sarafem) to mouse pups shortly after birth. The timing was chosen to coincide with a significant phase of brain development in rodents.</p>
<h3>Serotonin&#8217;s Impact on Dendritic Spine Density</h3>
<p>One of the study’s core findings was the bidirectional modulation of dendritic spine development by serotonin signaling. Dendritic spines are small, protruding structures on neurons that form synaptic connections, facilitating communication between neurons. The density and maturity of these spines are critical for brain function, impacting everything from learning and memory to decision-making.</p>
<p>In chemogenetic experiments where serotonin signaling was diminished, researchers observed a significant reduction in spine density on layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This suggests fewer synaptic connections, potentially leading to impaired cognitive functions.</p>
<p>Conversely, when serotonin signaling was enhanced—mimicking the effect of fluoxetine administration—there was an increase in spine density and synaptic strength, indicating more robust neural connections.</p>
<h3>SSRIs and Postnatal Prefrontal Cortex Development</h3>
<p>The researchers also found that fluoxetine exposure leads to an increase in spine density and synaptic strength in the prefrontal cortex, effects that were dependent on the activation of 5-HT2A and 5-HT7 receptors. This suggests that elevated serotonin levels, as a result of SSRI use, can lead to changes in the architecture and function of neural circuits.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our research uncovers the specific mechanisms at the synaptic level that explain how serotonin may contribute to the development of the prefrontal cortex during early-life fluoxetine exposure,&#8221; Oh told PsyPost. &#8220;Our experimental evidence shows the direct impact of serotonin on the developing prefrontal cortex in mice.&#8221;</p>
<p>The timing of fluoxetine exposure during postnatal development was found to be crucial; administering the drug during the first two weeks of life led to significant effects. However, when fluoxetine treatment was delayed until the third week of postnatal development, these changes in synaptic density and strength were not observed.</p>
<p>The study suggests that SSRI use during pregnancy could alter offspring brain development. But the consequences of this &#8212; whether positive or negative &#8212; are unclear.</p>
<p>&#8220;We provided experimental evidence of the direct impact of enhanced serotonin signals on the developing prefrontal cortex in mice,&#8221; Oh explained. &#8220;Fluoxetine not only crosses the placenta but also passes into breast milk, leading to increased serotonin in the fetus. <em>However, pregnant women who are currently taking antidepressants SHOULD NOT stop taking it.</em> They should discuss with their providers the benefits and side effects of antidepressants and possible non-pharmacological interventions for postpartum depression.&#8221;</p>
<h3>Limitations and Future Directions</h3>
<p>While this study represents a significant leap in understanding the effects of SSRIs on fetal brain development, it also underscores the complexity of brain development and the need for caution in interpreting these results. The research was conducted on mice, and while these models provide invaluable insights into human biology, differences between species mean that further research is necessary to fully understand the implications for human development.</p>
<p>&#8220;Although we discovered that serotonin has a specific role in influencing how individual connections between neurons change and adapt, contributing to the brain&#8217;s ability to learn and adjust, <em>we CANNOT generalize our findings from mice to human brain development</em>,&#8221; Oh emphasized.</p>
<p>The study opens up several avenues for future research. Investigating the long-term behavioral and cognitive outcomes of altered serotonin signaling during development is crucial. Additionally, exploring the impact of SSRIs on the brain during other critical developmental windows, such as adolescence, will provide a more comprehensive understanding of these drugs&#8217; effects.</p>
<p>&#8220;We want to study the long-term effects of deficiency and surplus of serotonin on mouse behaviors, specifically behaviors observed in mouse ASD (autism spectrum disorder) models,&#8221; Oh said.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45734-w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Serotonin modulates excitatory synapse maturation in the developing prefrontal cortex</a>,&#8221; was authored by Roberto Ogelman, Luis E. Gomez Wulschner, Victoria M. Hoelscher, In-Wook Hwang, Victoria N. Chang, and Won Chan Oh.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 22, 2024 at 05:00AM
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TITLE:
¿Te sientes estancado? Esto te ayudará a darle un empujón a tu vida
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URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/es/2024/02/22/espanol/ejercicio-mental-metas.html

Es normal que de vez en cuando sintamos que no podemos avanzar. Los expertos en salud mental recomiendan estos ejercicios para recuperar tu sensación de logro.
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 05:15PM
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TITLE:
Watch: Scientists create fascinating “brain movies” using neuroimaging data
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/watch-scientists-create-fascinating-brain-movies-using-neuroimaging-data/

<p>Have you ever imagined listening to the brain&#8217;s activity as it unfolds in real-time? Researchers from Columbia University have pioneered a technique that transforms complex neuroimaging data into a captivating audiovisual experience, akin to watching a movie with a musical soundtrack. This novel approach allows scientists to &#8216;see&#8217; and &#8216;hear&#8217; the brain&#8217;s intricate workings, offering fresh insights into its behavior during various tasks.</p>
<p>The details of their work have been published in the journal <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297435" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PLOS One</a></em>.</p>
<p>The motivation behind this study stems from a growing challenge in neuroscience: the vast amount of data generated by advanced brain imaging techniques. Technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and wide-field optical mapping (WFOM) capture the dynamic, multi-dimensional activities of the brain, revealing patterns of neurons firing and blood flow changes.</p>
<p>Yet, the sheer volume and complexity of this data can be overwhelming, making it difficult to discern the underlying biological mechanisms. Researchers sought to bridge this gap by creating an intuitive way to explore these vast datasets, aiming to unveil the hidden stories of brain function and behavior.</p>
<p>The Columbia team employed a multi-step process to translate brain activity into audiovisual narratives. First, they used dimensionality reduction techniques, such as principal component analysis and k-means clustering, to simplify the complex data into manageable components. This process distilled the essence of the brain&#8217;s activity patterns into a format that could be visually and audibly represented.</p>
<p>Next, they generated videos that visually depicted brain activity using color-coding techniques. Each color in the video represented a different component of brain activity, mapped out over time. To accompany these visuals, the researchers created soundtracks by converting the temporal components of brain activity into musical notes. Different aspects of the data, such as the pitch, volume, and timbre of notes, were used to represent various dimensions of brain activity, including its location and intensity.</p>
<p>The researchers showcased this technique with data from three different types of brain imaging experiments. They demonstrated how neuronal activity and blood flow changes, corresponding to different mouse behaviors, could be represented by distinct musical instruments, such as piano and violin sounds. This approach not only made the data more accessible but also highlighted the relationship between neuronal activity, blood flow, and behavior in a novel and engaging way.</p>
<p>The audiovisual representations allowed researchers to observe patterns of brain activity that might have been overlooked using traditional analysis methods. For instance, the synchronized piano and violin sounds demonstrated the coupled dynamics between neuronal firing and blood flow, underscoring the brain&#8217;s complex interplay of elements in real-time. This method also revealed specific brain activity patterns associated with different behaviors, such as running or grooming in mice, providing a new perspective on the neural basis of behavior.</p>
<div class="well">
<p><em>Audiovisualization of neural activity from the dorsal surface of the thinned skull cortex of the ketamine/xylazine anesthetized mouse:</em></p>
</div>
<div class="jeg_video_container jeg_video_content"><iframe title="Brain Movie 1" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4t4XD6mwCVY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<div class="well">
<p><em>Audiovisualization of SCAPE microscopy data capturing calcium activity in apical dendrites in the awake mouse brain:</em></p>
</div>
<div class="jeg_video_container jeg_video_content"><iframe title="Brain Movie 2" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G31ggZ2_5qo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<p>The authors explained: “Listening to and seeing representations of [brain activity] data is an immersive experience that can tap into this capacity of ours to recognize and interpret patterns (consider the online security feature that asks you to “select traffic lights in this image” – a challenge beyond most computers, but trivial for our brains).&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;[It] is almost impossible to watch and focus on both the time-varying [brain activity] data and the behavior video at the same time, our eyes will need to flick back and forth to see things that happen together. You generally need to continually replay clips over and over to be able to figure out what happened at a particular moment. Having an auditory representation of the data makes it much simpler to see (and hear) when things happen at the exact same time.”</p>
<p>The audiovisual technique, while insightful, is not intended to replace quantitative analysis but rather to complement it by highlighting patterns worth further investigation.</p>
<p>Looking forward, the research team sees numerous possibilities for expanding this technique. They suggest that future studies could explore different ways of encoding data to capture more nuanced aspects of brain activity or to represent other types of biological data beyond neuroimaging. Additionally, integrating more sophisticated machine learning algorithms could further enhance the ability to identify significant patterns in complex data sets.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0297435" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Audiovisualization of real-time neuroimaging data</a>,&#8221; was authored by David N. Thibodeaux, Mohammed A. Shaik, Sharon H. Kim, Venkatakaushik Voleti, Hanzhi T. Zhao, Sam E. Benezra, Chinwendu J. Nwokeabia, and Elizabeth M. C. Hillman.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 03:45PM
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TITLE:
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning
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URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/

<p>Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 04:15PM
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TITLE:
Political Ads Can Target Your Personality. Here's What Could Go Wrong
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URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/political-ads-can-target-your-personality-heres-what-could-go-wrong/

<p>This banner year for elections worldwide may witness the arrival of advertising tailored to your personality</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 02:15PM
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TITLE:
People with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome May Have an "Exhausted" Immune System
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URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-myalgic-encephalomyelitis-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-may-have-an-exhausted-immune-system/

<p>A long-awaited study of people with ME/CFS revealed differences in their immune and nervous system. The findings may offer clues about long&nbsp;COVID</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 02:00PM
.
TITLE:
How to Close the 'Orgasm Gap' for Heterosexual Couples
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URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/how-to-close-the-orgasm-gap-for-heterosexual-couples/

<p>Researchers once faced death threats for asking women what gives them pleasure. Now they&rsquo;re helping individuals and couples figure it out themselves.</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 02:00PM
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TITLE:
Does size matter? New study provides insight into women’s preferences
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/does-size-matter-new-study-provides-insight-into-womens-preferences/

<p>What factors influence the popularity of sex toys, specifically those designed for vaginal insertion? A study published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2175193" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Journal of Sex Research</a></em> delved into this question, revealing that women&#8217;s preferences might not align with common assumptions.</p>
<p>The research was conducted by analyzing data from Lovehoney, the United Kingdom&#8217;s largest online sex toy retailer. The study focused on a sample of 265 phallic-shaped products, assessing various characteristics such as size, material, presence of realistic features (like veins or a skin-like texture), and whether the toy included a vibrating function.</p>
<p>These products were evaluated using detailed onsite specifications, customer reviews, and visual assessments from product photographs, aiming to understand which features aligned with higher popularity and consumer preference.</p>
<p>The analysis found that the most popular products among the sample had an average circumference of 4.85 inches, which is slightly above the average erect penis circumference but still within what might be considered a moderate size range.</p>
<p>This preference suggests that consumers prioritize comfort and usability over the novelty of larger sizes. It indicates a practical approach to sex toy use, where the physical experience of using the toy is more important than the visual appeal of larger dimensions.</p>
<p>The finding that smaller circumferences were preferred challenges the notion that bigger is inherently better, highlighting a preference for sizes that perhaps better align with the natural anatomy and personal comfort levels of the user base.</p>
<p>Regarding length, the study found that the insertable length of the toys in the sample was significantly larger than the average human erect penis length, with an average of 7.07 inches. However, insertable length was not a significant predictor of a toy&#8217;s popularity.</p>
<p>This suggests that while the products available on the market often exceed average penis sizes in terms of length, this characteristic does not necessarily influence consumer preferences. Consumers may not prioritize length as a deciding factor in their purchases, possibly due to the understanding that the full length of a toy does not need to be utilized during use.</p>
<p>Apart from the presence of veins, other realistic characteristics such as the color, the researchers found that the presence of a scrotum, and the detailing of a glans or coronal ridge did not significantly influence a toy&#8217;s popularity.</p>
<p>Contrary to expectations, the addition of vibration did not predict a toy&#8217;s popularity. This result is surprising given the widespread acknowledgment of the benefits of vibration for women&#8217;s sexual pleasure. It suggests that consumers may distinguish between the purposes of different types of toys.</p>
<p>However, the study also notes several caveats and areas for further inquiry. Despite the careful analysis, the research primarily reflects the preferences of British consumers due to the geographic focus on a UK-based retailer.</p>
<p>Additionally, the study acknowledges potential limitations in accurately comparing toy sizes to real human anatomy and suggests that future research could benefit from a broader data set from multiple retailers and regions to gain a more comprehensive understanding of global consumer preferences.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2175193" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What Drives Sex Toy Popularity? A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products Sold by the World’s Largest Sexual Wellness Company</a>,&#8221; was authored by Sarah E. Johns and Nerys Bushnell.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 09:30AM
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TITLE:
Anger Can Help You Meet Your Goals
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URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anger-can-help-you-meet-your-goals/

<p>This emotion can push people to overcome obstacles, though results are best when people keep their long-term aims in mind</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 10:00AM
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TITLE:
Perceived sex ratios influence women’s body image and dieting motivation, study finds
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/perceived-sex-ratios-influence-womens-body-image-and-dieting-motivation-study-finds/

<p>The journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02644-0"><em>Archives of Sexual Behavior</em></a> recently published a study showing that women&#8217;s dissatisfaction with their body image and their motivations for weight loss are significantly influenced by how they perceive the local sex ratio — specifically, the number of women compared to men in their environment. This investigation, involving five studies, found that a higher ratio of women to men intensifies competition among women and leads to increased body dissatisfaction — and, as such, a stronger desire to lose weight.</p>
<p>The concept of sex ratio, the balance between the number of males and females in a given population, has long fascinated scientists. Sex ratio itself is a crucial aspect of mating competition across various species — including humans.</p>
<p>Previous studies have shown that skewed sex ratios can affect individuals&#8217; behavior and preferences in the mating market, and this latest research builds on these findings by exploring how perceived sex ratios impact women&#8217;s body image and dieting intentions, using a mix of real-world observations and experimental manipulations to shed light on this complex phenomenon.</p>
<p>The team embarked on this study to understand the underlying mechanisms of how women&#8217;s perceptions of their mating environment—particularly the abundance or scarcity of men relative to women—affect their feelings of competitiveness, perceived mating prospects, and, ultimately, their body image and weight loss behaviors.</p>
<p>&#8220;We hypothesized that women perceiving a greater number of female competitors would feel a need to enhance their physical attractiveness, leading to heightened body dissatisfaction and dieting motivations,&#8221; explained the researchers.</p>
<p>To test their hypotheses, the researchers employed a variety of methods with 1,776 total participants recruited from Amazonʼs Mechanical Turk. These ranged from surveys assessing women&#8217;s perceptions of the sex ratio in their local environments to experimental setups that manipulated these perceptions.</p>
<p>For instance, some participants were shown profiles representing a skewed sexratio in a dating context to see how this influenced their body satisfaction and dieting intentions. This multifaceted approach allowed the team to meticulously examine the relationship between sex ratio perceptions, competitive feelings among women, and their implications for body image and dieting behaviors.</p>
<p>The findings were striking. Women who perceived a higher ratio of women to men in their surroundings reported greater dissatisfaction with their bodies and an increased drive to diet. Experimental studies reinforced these results, showing that women in scenarios suggesting a female-skewed sex ratio felt less satisfied with their weight and shape and exhibited a stronger desire to lose weight. These effects were partly mediated by women&#8217;s perceptions of their mating prospects, with unfavorable views leading to increased body dissatisfaction and dieting motivations.</p>
<p>While the research sheds light on factors influencing women&#8217;s body image, the study includes some limitations. The reliance on self-reported data could introduce bias, and the focus on heterosexual women may limit the generalizability of the findings. In addition, the weak correlation between perceived and actual sex ratios based on participants&#8217; zip codes suggests that personal perceptions may not fully reflect demographic realities.</p>
<p>Despite these caveats, the study provides invaluable insights into how social environments may shape women&#8217;s body image and weight loss motivations.</p>
<p>&#8220;Interventions that adjust women&#8217;s perceptions of their mating prospects or reduce the emphasis on competitiveness could be particularly effective,&#8221; suggests the research team. It is evident that understanding the role of sex ratio dynamics offers a critical piece of the puzzle in fostering environments that support positive body image and self-esteem.</p>
<p>Tania Reynolds, Jon Maner, David Frederick, K. Jean Forney, and Justin Garcia at the University of New Mexico, Indiana University, Florida State University, Chapman University, and Ohio University authored this study, published under &#8220;<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02644-0">A Slim Majority: The Influence of Sex Ratio on Womenʼs Body Dissatisfaction and Weight Loss Motivations</a>.&#8221;</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 09:00AM
.
TITLE:
How Sleep Engineering Could Help Heal the Brain
.
URL:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sleep-engineering-could-help-heal-the-brain/

<p>Stimulating the sleeping brain may ease suffering from memory loss, stroke or mental health problems</p>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 07:00AM
.
TITLE:
Married individuals are less prone to phubbing others
.
URL:
https://www.psypost.org/married-individuals-are-less-prone-to-phubbing-others/

<p>New research shows that married individuals and those more open to experience are less prone to phubbing others. The paper was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060915"><em>Healthcare</em></a>.</p>
<p>Phubbing is a term that combines &#8220;phone&#8221; and &#8220;snubbing,&#8221; referring to the act of ignoring someone in a social setting by focusing on one&#8217;s smartphone instead of engaging in conversation. It can occur in various contexts, such as during meals, meetings, or any social gathering. Phubbing can lead to feelings of exclusion and reduced interpersonal connection in those exposed to it.</p>
<p>Phubbing has become increasingly prevalent with the widespread use of smartphones and social media, impacting the quality of face-to-face interactions. Research suggests that phubbing can negatively affect relationships, contributing to lower levels of relationship satisfaction and increased feelings of social isolation.</p>
<p>An important factor that increases the likelihood that a person will phub others is problematic smartphone use. Problematic smartphone use is the inability to control mobile phone use. Studies have linked this phenomenon to psychological characteristics such as proneness to experience negative emotions, impulsivity, difficulties in regulating emotions, and sleep impairment. Other studies have found that people may be more likely to engage in excessive use of mobile phones when they are bored.</p>
<p>Study author Carla Abi Doumit and her colleagues wanted to explore the association between phubbing behavior and personality traits. They were also interested in investigating whether this association is affected by proneness to boredom and loneliness i.e., by how prone to the feeling of boredom people are and by how lonely they feel. They conducted an online survey.</p>
<p>The study included 461 participants aged between 18 and 29 from Lebanon, with 71% being female, 91% single, and 94% possessing a university education. The average age was 22 years. Participants were recruited through student networks and social media.</p>
<p>Participants were asked to complete assessments measuring phubbing behavior (using the Generic Scale of Phubbing), the Big Five personality traits (via the Big Five Inventory, BFI-2), boredom (through the Boredom Proneness Scale), and loneliness (using the Jon-Gierveld Loneliness Scale).</p>
<p>The results indicated that both men and women were equally likely to phub others. However, single individuals were more prone to phubbing compared to their married counterparts. People more susceptible to boredom and those feeling lonelier were also more likely to engage in phubbing.</p>
<p>In terms of personality traits, there was a slight negative correlation between phubbing and traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. In other words, those more inclined to phub others tended to be less extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, and more conservative, while also being more prone to experiencing negative emotions.</p>
<p>When controlling for boredom proneness, only openness to experience remained significantly associated with phubbing. Openness to experience denotes an individual&#8217;s readiness to explore new ideas, experiences, and creative endeavors, reflecting their level of curiosity and imagination.</p>
<p>Further analysis showed that extraversion was positively associated with phubbing among individuals with low levels of loneliness and boredom, but negatively associated among those with moderate to high levels of loneliness and boredom. In summary, extraverted individuals were more likely to phub others if they were neither lonely nor bored, but less likely if they experienced boredom or loneliness.</p>
<p>“We have been able to show a significant association between marital status, boredom proneness, and open-mindedness with phubbing behavior. Moreover, in people with moderate to high boredom proneness levels, high extraversion is significantly associated with less phubbing behavior,&#8221; the study authors concluded.</p>
<p>The study sheds light on the links between phubbing and personality. However, it should be noted that the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect inferences to be drawn from the data. Additionally, study participants were young people only. Results might not be the same on other age groups.</p>
<p>The paper, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060915">Association between Personality Traits and Phubbing: The Co-Moderating Roles of Boredom and Loneliness,</a>” was authored by Carla Abi Doumit, Diana Malaeb, Marwan Akel, Pascale Salameh, Sahar Obeid, and Souheil Hallit.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 21, 2024 at 06:00AM
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TITLE:
Recent presidential elections triggered religious and spiritual struggles, study finds
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/recent-presidential-elections-triggered-religious-and-spiritual-struggles-study-finds/

<p>Have you ever felt that a political election not only tested your patience but also your faith? A recent study published in <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rel0000449"><em>Psychology of Religion and Spirituality</em></a> examines this very question, revealing that the high stakes and polarized nature of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections had notable effects on individuals&#8217; religious and spiritual struggles. The research suggests that the tumultuous atmosphere of these elections stirred significant religious and spiritual conflicts for many, indicating a profound intersection between political beliefs and spiritual well-being.</p>
<p>Prior studies have highlighted the intense emotions and societal divisions that can arise from political elections, with outcomes often evoking strong feelings of hope, anger, anxiety, or despair among the electorate. In their new study, researchers aimed to explore the specific impact of political elections on religious and spiritual (R/S) struggles.</p>
<p>&#8220;I wanted to extend our research on spiritual struggles into topics related to current events. In this study, my team and I wanted to understand whether and why U.S. adults might experience spiritual struggles in response to Presidential election results,&#8221; said study author <a href="https://psychsciences.case.edu/faculty/julie-exline/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Julie J. Exline</a>, a professor of psychological sciences at Case Western Reserve University.</p>
<p>To conduct this investigation, the researchers utilized Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to recruit two separate cohorts of U.S. adults for surveys conducted after each election but before the inauguration of the president-elect. The 2016 portion of the study had 504 participants. For the 2020 election, the study included 618 participants. The surveys inquired about participants&#8217; reactions to the election outcomes and their political and religious affiliations.</p>
<p>The study employed the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS-14) scale to measure six domains of R/S struggle in response to the election results:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Divine Struggles</strong>: This domain involves conflicts or negative feelings toward God or a higher power. It includes feelings of anger, abandonment, or punishment by God, questioning God&#8217;s love or fairness, and struggles with understanding God&#8217;s presence in the face of suffering.</li>
<li><strong>Demonic Struggles</strong>: These struggles relate to perceptions of being tempted, attacked, or influenced by demonic forces or evil spirits. It encompasses fears of demonic possession or oppression and concerns about spiritual warfare.</li>
<li><strong>Interpersonal Struggles</strong>: This area covers conflicts with others about religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. It includes feeling judged, misunderstood, or rejected by a religious community, tensions with family or friends over religious differences, and negative experiences with religious leaders or institutions.</li>
<li><strong>Moral Struggles</strong>: Moral struggles involve internal conflicts about right and wrong, guilt over moral failings, and difficulties in living up to one&#8217;s moral or ethical standards. This can include wrestling with religious teachings on morality that conflict with personal beliefs or societal norms.</li>
<li><strong>Ultimate Meaning Struggles</strong>: These struggles pertain to questions about life&#8217;s purpose, the meaning of suffering, and existential doubts. Individuals may grapple with finding a sense of direction or meaning in life, especially in the face of adversity or life transitions.</li>
<li><strong>Doubt</strong>: This domain includes doubts about religious or spiritual beliefs, teachings, and practices. It involves questioning the existence of God or a higher power, the validity of religious texts, and the authenticity of one&#8217;s own or others&#8217; religious experiences.</li>
</ol>
<p>The findings of the study indicated that presidential elections can indeed trigger or exacerbate R/S struggles among individuals. Participants reported a variety of R/S struggles related to the outcomes of the elections, with interpersonal struggles being the most commonly endorsed. This suggests that the divisive and polarizing nature of these elections not only affected societal and communal relationships but also deeply impacted individuals&#8217; internal spiritual and moral landscapes.</p>
<p>The research highlighted specific predictors that were associated with increased R/S struggles. Notably, those who voted for the losing candidate in both elections reported experiencing more R/S struggles, indicating that the disappointment and distress of electoral defeat extended into the realm of personal religious and spiritual turmoil.</p>
<p>Other significant predictors of R/S struggle included negative reactions to the election outcomes, higher levels of religious engagement, political anger, and attributions of the election results to divine or demonic forces. These findings suggest that the way individuals interpret and emotionally respond to political events can profoundly influence their spiritual well-being.</p>
<p>&#8220;Many people experience spiritual struggles in their daily lives: These might include religious doubts, anger at religious people, moral challenges, feeling punished or disappointed by God, feeling tempted by the devil, or questioning whether life has any deeper meaning,&#8221; Exline told PsyPost. &#8220;This study, which focused on the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections, showed that election results can trigger spiritual struggles for some people.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;In response to both elections, people reported more spiritual struggles when they were disappointed with election outcomes and had politically-focused anger at other people. Spiritual struggles were also greater for people who saw the devil or God playing some type of harmful role in the election results.&#8221;</p>
<p>Demographic factors also played a role in the intensity and nature of R/S struggles. The study found differences in R/S struggles based on religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. For instance, Christians and African American participants reported more R/S struggles compared to their non-religious and White counterparts, respectively. This underscores the complex ways in which identity factors intersect with political and spiritual experiences, potentially heightening vulnerability to R/S struggles for certain groups.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Exline and her colleagues found no overall difference in the level of R/S struggles between the two election years, despite the unique contexts and outcomes of each election. This suggests a consistent pattern of how divisive political climates can impact spiritual and religious experiences across different political cycles. However, the specific nature of these struggles varied, reflecting the changing political and social dynamics surrounding each election.</p>
<p>However, the study is not without its limitations. The cross-sectional nature of the study means it cannot definitively show how these struggles evolve over time.</p>
<p>&#8220;Although we had surveys from both 2016 and 2020, the surveys drew from two different groups of U.S. adults,&#8221; Exline said. &#8220;A longitudinal study, where we could survey the same group of people in response to multiple elections, would be ideal (though expensive and difficult). Also, these were convenience samples of U.S. adults who had Internet access. An important next step will be to apply these spiritual struggle ideas to political polarization in our country more broadly, vs. focusing only on election results.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-10715-001?doi=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Religious and Spiritual Struggles Around the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections</a>,&#8221; was authored by Julie J. Exline, Nick Stauner, Joshua A. Wilt, and Joshua B. Grubbs.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 04:00PM
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TITLE:
Brain on fire: New research identifies neural connectivity patterns in anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/brain-on-fire-new-research-identifies-neural-connectivity-patterns-in-anti-nmda-receptor-encephalitis/

<p>Scientists have taken a significant step forward in understanding a mysterious and debilitating brain disease known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, often referred to as the &#8220;Brain on Fire&#8221; disease. By examining the way different parts of the brain communicate with each other in patients suffering from this condition, researchers at Guangdong Second Provincial General Hospital have identified specific patterns of disrupted connectivity, particularly involving the hippocampus, a region crucial for memory and cognitive function.</p>
<p>The findings have been published in <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-024-00852-3" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brain Imaging and Behavior</a></em>.</p>
<p>Anti-NMDAR encephalitis is a type of autoimmune disorder that primarily affects the central nervous system. It was first identified and reported in 2007 by Josep Dalmau and his team. This condition occurs when the body&#8217;s immune system mistakenly targets and attacks NMDARs on the surface of brain cells. NMDARs are critical for controlling synaptic plasticity and memory function, playing a pivotal role in the transmission of electrical signals within the brain and are essential for learning and memory.</p>
<p>Its moniker, &#8220;Brain on Fire,&#8221; comes from a bestselling autobiography and a 2017 movie detailing journalist Susannah Cahalan&#8217;s harrowing journey with the illness. The disease manifests through a complex array of symptoms, which can vary significantly among patients. Initially, individuals may experience flu-like symptoms, which then progress to more severe neurological and psychiatric manifestations. These can include memory deficits, hallucinations, severe mood swings, aggressive behavior, confusion, seizures, and, in some cases, a catatonic state.</p>
<p>Motivated by the urgent need to better understand the diseases, researchers embarked on a study to explore the changes in brain connectivity in patients with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Their goal was to understand the underlying neurological disruptions that contribute to the disease&#8217;s cognitive and psychological manifestations, hoping to uncover clues that could lead to better diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.</p>
<p>For their study, the researchers recruited 23 patients who had progressed past the acute stage of anti-NMDAR encephalitis and compared them with a control group of 23 healthy individuals. Participants underwent a series of cognitive tests and brain scans using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), a tool that maps brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This approach allowed the researchers to observe how different regions of the brain communicate under the shadow of the disease.</p>
<p>The findings revealed significant disruptions in the way the hippocampus connects with other brain areas in patients with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. For example, the study found reduced connectivity between the left rostral (front) part of the hippocampus and the left inferior orbitofrontal gyrus, a region involved in decision-making and emotional responses. Conversely, increased connectivity was observed between the right rostral hippocampus and the left superior temporal gyrus, associated with processing sounds and language.</p>
<p>These changes in connectivity correlated with patients&#8217; cognitive performance. Specifically, alterations in connectivity were linked to deficits in verbal and spatial memory, suggesting that the disrupted communication within the brain plays a significant role in the cognitive impairments characteristic of the disease.</p>
<p>The study&#8217;s detailed analysis extends our understanding of the &#8220;Brain on Fire&#8221; disease beyond the presence of antibodies attacking NMDA receptors, highlighting the complex network disruptions that contribute to the condition&#8217;s severe symptoms.</p>
<p>This research opens new avenues for understanding and treating anti-NMDAR encephalitis. By pinpointing specific areas of the brain that are affected by the disease, medical professionals can develop more targeted approaches to diagnosis and therapy.</p>
<p>Future research directions highlighted by the study include the need for longitudinal studies to track patients over time, providing insights into how these brain network changes evolve and potentially reverse with treatment. Additionally, expanding the sample size and incorporating biological markers into the research could offer more detailed understandings of the disease&#8217;s mechanisms.</p>
<p>Moreover, the study suggests that treatments focusing on restoring normal brain communication could hold the key to alleviating the cognitive deficits caused by anti-NMDAR encephalitis. The findings also underscore the potential for rs-fMRI to serve as a valuable tool in diagnosing the disease more accurately and monitoring the effectiveness of treatments.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-024-00852-3">Functional connectivity changes of the hippocampal subregions in anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor encephalitis</a>,&#8221; was authored by Yujie Yang, Shishun Fu, Guihua Jiang, Guang Xu, Junzhang Tian, and Xiaofen Ma.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 02:00PM
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TITLE:
How does climate-related anger influence public engagement?
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/how-does-climate-related-anger-influence-public-engagement/

<p>Research recently published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102738"><em>Global Environmental Change</em></a> revealed that while anger often spurs activism and supports policy change, it does not necessarily lead to personal actions to mitigate climate change.</p>
<p>Climate change has long been a subject of emotional debate. Prior studies have focused on emotions like fear and hope, but the role of anger in driving climate change engagement has been less explored. Anger, as this study reveals, is not a monolithic emotion — but varies in its source and target. In many cases, the emotion itself is caused by moral outrage over perceived injustices — or, in the case of this study, empathy towards those unfairly affected by climate change.</p>
<p>The motivation behind this research was to delve deeper into the specific nature of climate anger among the public, and its relationship with various forms of climate change engagement. The driving force behind this study was the recognition that anger, evident in movements like Greta Thunberg’s speeches and the Yellow Vests protests, might play a significant role in shaping public response to climate change.</p>
<p>The methodology of the study involved a detailed survey asking 10,160 participants, drawn from the National Population Registry of Norway, about their emotions related to climate change, with a particular focus on anger. Participants rated the intensity of their feelings and provided open-ended responses on what aspects of climate change triggered their anger, which allowed researchers to quantify the strength of climate anger and to understand its qualitative aspects.</p>
<p>The findings were multifaceted. Results found that climate anger, especially when directed at human actions and behaviors, is a powerful motivator for climate activism and somewhat positively influences support for climate policies. However, this anger does not significantly predict individual efforts to reduce carbon footprint.</p>
<p>The study also identified a subset of responses, about 10%, expressing &#8216;contrarian&#8217; anger, which reflects skepticism about climate change severity, or dissatisfaction with mitigation measures. This discovery is crucial as it points to the diverse, and sometimes contradictory, nature of climate-related emotions. In other words, people who are angry about climate change are not always angry for the same reasons or motivated towards the same goals.</p>
<p>&#8220;The current study supports that climate anger is related to climate change engagement, but that its effect depends on the specific outcome,&#8221; the researchers wrote. &#8220;While anger was the strongest emotional predictor of activism and positively related to policy support, other emotions, such as sadness or fear, were more relevant for individual behaviors.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We also find that climate anger can stem from various sources &#8211; not all equally motivating. Anger directed at human qualities or (the lack of) human actions was consistently related to climate change engagement, while referring to responsible (external) actors did not have a unique effect on any of the outcomes. Further, differences in anger content can relate to different types of engagement: anger directed at climate change denial, or the prioritization of money was related to climate activism, but not to the other outcomes.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Overall, our results support that &#8216;even ‘basic’ human emotions such as anger do not generally operate as simple mechanisms that reflexively turn specific responses on or off&#8217; (Chapman et al., 2017, p. 851). Not all types of anger correlate positively with engagement, and the strength of the effects varies.&#8221;</p>
<p>Crucially, this study’s cross-sectional design only captures a snapshot moment that does not establish causality between climate anger and engagement. The focus on a Norwegian cohort limits the generalizability of the findings to other cultural contexts, and the use of self-reported data could introduce biases. Still, this study provides a nuanced understanding of how climate-related anger influences different types of climate change engagement.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378023001048">The strength and content of climate anger</a>,” was authored by Thea Gregersen, Gisle Andersen, and Endre Tvinnereim at the Norwegian Research Centre and the University of Bergen.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 10:06AM
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TITLE:
First U.S. Federal Gender-Based Hate Crime Trial Begins
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177537&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-gender-based-hate-crime-trial-south-carolina-daqua-lameek-ritter-dime-doe/

<div><p>Source: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/us/" rel="tag" target="_blank">CBS News - U.S. News</a></p>The first U.S. federal trial over a hate crime based on gender identity is set to begin Tuesday in South Carolina, where a man faces charges that he killed a Black transgender woman and then fled to New York. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Daqua Lameek Ritter coaxed the woman into driving to a sparsely populated area in South Carolina and shot her three times in the head, according to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of...</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 10:06AM
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TITLE:
Five Tips When Asking for a Pay Raise
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177531&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64288791

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/" rel="tag" target="_blank">BBC News - Top Headlines</a></p>If you feel like you're not getting paid enough, you're probably not alone. Increases in average wages have finally overtaken the pace of price rises in some countries, but many workers still feel the impact of inflation. Last year, tens of thousands of workers held strikes and walk-outs over pay, jobs, and conditions. Here are five tips on how to negotiate for more money, based on advice from recruiters, a manager, and a workplace psychologist.</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 08:00AM
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TITLE:
Having more friends in school appears to have a protective effect against mental health issues
.
URL:
https://www.psypost.org/having-more-friends-in-school-appears-to-have-a-protective-effect-against-mental-health-issues/

<p>A study of young adolescents in the Netherlands found that having more reciprocated friendships among classmates might be protective against internalizing mental health symptoms. Adolescents with more unreciprocated friendships, on the other hand, tended to be more anxious and to have a stronger desire for more friends. The paper was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01780-z"><em>Journal of Youth and Adolescence</em></a>.</p>
<p>Adolescence is a critical period of transition from childhood to adulthood, characterized by rapid physical, cognitive, emotional, and social changes. One of the most important developmental tasks in this period is the formation of a coherent identity. To achieve this, adolescents explore different roles and integrate various aspects of themselves.</p>
<p>They also strive for autonomy and independence, seeking to establish their own values and make decisions separate from their parents. Adolescents also face the challenge of developing a sense of purpose and direction in life, which can involve exploring career options and making decisions about their future.</p>
<p>Peer relationships become increasingly important in adolescence compared to childhood and instrumental for most of the other developmental goals. These relationships provide social support and critical opportunities for developing social skills. While executive functions and social cognition continue to mature, adolescents become particularly sensitive to social rewards.</p>
<p>However, social experiences are not always rewarding. In this sensitive period, social experiences can dramatically influence adolescents’ vulnerability to internalizing mental health symptoms (psychological issues that are directed inward, such as anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal).</p>
<p>Study author Reubs J. Walsh and his colleagues wanted to better explore the links between the number of school friends an adolescent has and the severity of internalizing mental health symptoms. Internalizing mental health symptoms refer to psychological issues that are directed inward, such as anxiety and depression. Previous studies already indicated that adolescents with more friends in their school environment tended to have a much lower risk of developing internalizing symptoms and disorders.</p>
<p>However, the authors of this study believed that this link depended on the adolescent’s emotional and cognitive response to the number of friends, not on the objective number of friends. They hypothesized that if an adolescent has a stronger desire to have more classroom friends than he/she has, he/she would adopt social goals and behaviors that would undermine the protective effects of the existing friendships.</p>
<p>The study involved 423 first- and second-year high-school students from the Netherlands, aged between 11 and 15, including 209 girls from 19 different classes. Initially, a larger pool of participants was considered, but the methodology for mapping friendship links required the inclusion of most class members in the study. Consequently, classes with less than 70% of students consenting to participate were excluded, resulting in the current participant count.</p>
<p>Participants were asked to complete sociometric nomination questions, identifying classmates they preferred for various activities, and to list up to 15 classmates they considered friends. The researchers compared responses to identify reciprocated friendships (where pairs of adolescents listed each other as friends) and unreciprocated friendships (where one adolescent listed another as a friend without reciprocation).</p>
<p>Participants also completed assessments on social goals, perception of their social network (including the desire to have more friends, be more popular, and be liked more), social anxiety (using the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adolescents), and depression (using the Beck Youth Inventory Depression Scale).</p>
<p>Results showed that adolescents with more reciprocated friendships tended to have a lower desire for more friends, lower anxiety, and lower depression symptoms. In contrast to that, a higher number of unreciprocated friendships was associated with a higher desire to have more friends and more severe symptoms of anxiety and depression.</p>
<p>The study authors tested a statistical model suggesting that a higher number of reciprocated friendships leads to a reduced desire to make more friends. This reduced desire then leads to stronger social goals (such as developing social skills, demonstrating them to others, or avoiding situations where one&#8217;s social incompetence would be exposed), which, in turn, lead to higher levels of depression and anxiety. The results supported the possibility of this relationship model.</p>
<p>However, of the social goals, only the desire to avoid situations where one’s social incompetence would become visible was associated with anxiety and depression symptom severity. On the other hand, the social goals were associated with each other, so the more an adolescent felt the need to avoid situations where his/her social incompetence would show, the more likely he/she was to also seek situations where others would see his/her social skills and to develop these skills.</p>
<p>The authors concluded, “As predicted, the link between numbers of friendships and internalizing symptoms was mediated in two steps. First, adolescents with fewer reciprocated classmate friendships expressed a stronger desire for more classmate friendships. Second, adolescents who expressed a stronger desire for more friendships endorsed more demonstration-avoidance goals, which in turn predicted more internalizing symptoms.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;This may reflect a tendency toward status-oriented social behavior in adolescents with a strong desire for more friends, and increased attention to social status may come at the expense of cultivating interpersonal intimacy in extant friendships, and promote psychosocially maladaptive attention allocation in social situations. However, not all predictions were supported; no beneficial effect of development goals was observed, and number of unreciprocated friendship nominations was positively associated with desire for more friendships and social anxiety.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of the links between mental health and one’s social network. However, the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect inferences to be made from the results. While it is indeed possible that the number of mutual or unreciprocated friendships affects the symptoms of social anxiety and depression through the proposed mechanism, it is also possible that adolescents with higher social anxiety and more depressive symptoms experience more difficulty in making friends (the reverse direction of the causal chain). These are not the only possibilities.</p>
<p>The paper, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01780-z">A Few Close Friends? Adolescent Friendships’ Effect on Internalizing Symptoms Is Serially Mediated by Desire for More Friends and Social Goal Orientation,</a>” was authored by Reubs J. Walsh, Nikki C. Lee, Imke L. J. Lemmers-Jensen, Miriam Hollarek, Hester Sijtsma, Mariët van Buuren, and Lzdia Karbbendam.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 20, 2024 at 06:00AM
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TITLE:
New neuroscience research uncovers the brain’s unique musical processing pathways
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/new-neuroscience-research-uncovers-the-brains-unique-musical-processing-pathways/

<p>A new study by researchers at UC San Francisco provides new insight into how the brain processes musical melodies. Through precise mapping of the cerebral cortex, the study uncovered that our brains process music by not only discerning pitch and the direction of pitch changes but also by predicting the sequence of upcoming notes, each task managed by distinct sets of neurons. The findings have been published in <em><a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk0010" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Science Advances</a></em>.</p>
<p>Previous research had established that our brains possess specialized mechanisms for processing speech sounds, particularly in recognizing pitch changes that convey meaning and emotion. The researchers hypothesized that a similar, perhaps specialized, set of neurons might exist for music, dedicated to predicting the sequence of notes in a melody, akin to how certain neurons predict speech sounds.</p>
<p>&#8220;Music is both uniquely human and universally human. Studying the neuroscience of music can therefore reveal something fundamental about what it means to be human,&#8221; said lead author <a href="https://nsankaran.github.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Narayan Sankaran</a>, a postdoctoral fellow in the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at UC Berkeley, who conducted the study while a researcher in <a href="https://changlab.ucsf.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the lab of UCSF&#8217;s Edward Chang</a>.</p>
<p>&#8220;In particular, we understand little about how the auditory cortex extracts musical information from a sound signal arriving at the ears. We were especially interested in the question of whether music is special in the brain – is the brain’s hardware for music specialized for music alone? Or does music rely on general-purpose machinery for sound processing? This question has been hotly debated in auditory-neuroscience over the past decade, but it has lacked a clear answer.&#8221;</p>
<p>To test their hypothesis, the researchers utilized an innovative approach to delve into the intricacies of how the human brain processes music. By recruiting eight participants who were already undergoing clinical monitoring for epilepsy treatment, the researchers were able to use high-density electrocorticography (ECoG) to achieve direct and precise recordings of brain activity. This method involves placing electrodes directly on the surface of the brain, offering a rare and detailed view of the neural dynamics at play during auditory processing.</p>
<p>The participants were exposed to a carefully curated set of 208 monophonic musical phrases, designed to encapsulate a wide range of pitch, pitch-change, and expectancy variations. These musical phrases, drawn from Western music, were complemented by spoken English sentences, allowing the researchers to compare the brain&#8217;s processing of music and speech in a controlled setting.</p>
<p>The researchers focused on three fundamental aspects of musical perception: the pitch of notes, the change in pitch between consecutive notes, and the predictability of each note within a sequence. By manipulating these variables across the musical phrases and analyzing the corresponding neural responses, the study aimed to dissect the auditory cortex&#8217;s role in parsing complex acoustic signals.</p>
<p>The researchers identified distinct neural populations within the superior temporal gyrus (STG) that are specialized for different components of musical perception. One set of neurons was responsive to the pitch of notes, aligning with the fundamental frequency of the sound.</p>
<p>Another group of neurons was tuned to detect changes in pitch, distinguishing between ascending and descending shifts.</p>
<p>Perhaps most intriguingly, a third set of neurons was found to be specifically involved in predicting the next note in a musical sequence, based on the notes that had preceded it. This predictive mechanism was more pronounced for music than for speech, suggesting a unique specialization within the brain for anticipating musical structures.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the researchers uncovered that while some aspects of music processing share mechanisms with speech — such as the encoding of pitch and pitch change — other aspects, notably the prediction of note sequences, are uniquely attuned to music. This delineation between shared and specialized processing pathways provides new insights into the brain&#8217;s auditory processing capabilities.</p>
<p>The findings indicate that &#8220;our brain extracts important musical information by recruiting both generalist and music-specialist neural populations,&#8221; Sankaran told PsyPost.</p>
<p>&#8220;The generalists detect properties of sound, regardless of whether that sound is music. When we hear melody, these generalists detect the pitch of notes, or whether a melody rises or falls from one note to the next.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Intriguingly, a different set of neurons are music-specialists that are only active during music-listening. These neurons detect the extent to which notes in melody are statistically expected, which is thought to be related to how music induces emotion.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Music is therefore special in our brains,&#8221; Sankaran explained. &#8220;However, we should remember that general sound-processing mechanisms are also doing a lot of the groundwork that ultimately allows us to appreciate music.&#8221;</p>
<p>The researchers also found that the neural populations responsible for encoding different musical features were not segregated into isolated regions but were instead interspersed within the superior temporal gyrus, indicating a complex, distributed network for music perception.</p>
<p>&#8220;Prior work has found a dedicated &#8216;music&#8217; region in the auditory cortex,&#8221; Sankaran said. &#8220;However, we found no evidence of such a region. Instead, music-specific neural populations were scattered throughout the auditory cortex, intermixed with other sound-responsive neurons.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite these insights, the study has its limitations. The sample size was relatively small, and participants were individuals undergoing clinical treatment, which may not fully represent the general population. Additionally, the study focused on Western music and English speech, raising questions about whether these findings are universally applicable across different cultures and languages.</p>
<p>&#8220;We were limited to presenting Western music to Western listeners,&#8221; Sankaran said. &#8220;I hope that future research extends to non-Western contexts, including listeners who possess a knowledge of multiple musical systems that span cultures.&#8221;</p>
<p>The research opens up numerous avenues for further exploration. Key questions remain about how these neural mechanisms develop over time, how they vary across individuals with different levels of musical training, and how they might be affected by hearing impairments or other neurological conditions.</p>
<p>&#8220;Detecting the statistical likelihood of notes requires knowledge about the statistical structure of music,&#8221; Sankaran added. &#8220;We still don’t know how exactly these neurons acquire such knowledge. This will be important for future research to solve.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adk0010">Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex</a>,&#8221; was authored by Narayan Sankaran, Matthew K. Leonard, Frederic Theunissen, and Edward F. Chang.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 20, 2024
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TITLE:
Self-Care A-Z: Self-Care During Poopy Times
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URL:
https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/self-care/self-care-poopy-times/

We all experience poopy times. With a good enough focus and some gratitude, this, too, shall pass.
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 10:30PM
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TITLE:
New research exposes an alarming trend in rates of suicide among Black women
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/new-research-exposes-an-alarming-trend-in-rates-of-suicide-among-black-women/

<p>A new study published in the <a href="https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.20230254"><em>American Journal of Psychiatry</em></a> sheds light on an alarming trend: the increasing rates of suicide among Black women in the United States, particularly among the younger generation. The study, the first of its kind to explore the epidemiology of suicide among Black females by geographical region in the U.S., points to an urgent need for targeted interventions and increased access to mental health care.</p>
<p><em>If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) or visit the </em><a href="https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>NSPL site</em></a>.</p>
<p>In their study, Victoria A. Joseph and her colleagues analyzed data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Multiple Cause of Death database, encompassing years 1999 through 2020. This database provided the researchers with detailed information on suicide deaths across various demographics, including race, sex, age, and U.S. census region.</p>
<p>By focusing on Black or African American females within the 15 to 84 age bracket — carefully excluding data points from those under 15 or over 84 due to reliability concerns — the study covered an expansive dataset of 9,271 suicide deaths.</p>
<p>To dissect the data, the researchers employed visualization techniques and statistical models that delineate age, period, and cohort (APC) effects. Hexagonal maps and modified Poisson regression models illuminated the relationships between these factors, revealing how suicide rates fluctuate across different generations, time periods, and ages. This analytical framework allowed for a precise identification of the populations at greatest risk, facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play.</p>
<p>The study&#8217;s findings paint a troubling picture: a significant increase in suicide rates among Black females, from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1999 to 3.4 per 100,000 in 2020. Alarmingly, this rise was most pronounced among young women aged 15–24, whose suicide rates soared from 1.9 to 4.9 per 100,000.</p>
<p>“Suicides are rapidly increasing among young, Black females in the U.S.,” said Joseph, an analyst in the <a href="https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/academics/departments/epidemiology">Department of Epidemiology </a>at Columbia Mailman School.</p>
<p>“These findings are in line with evidence that suicidal behaviors are increasing among minoritized youth. While the reasons why remain under investigation, it could be that cyberbullying and online racial attacks toward Black female youth may be on the rise, in particular, and therefore interventions targeting certain stressors are particularly critical for young Black women,&#8221; added Katherine Keyes, a professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School, and senior author.</p>
<p>The study&#8217;s age-period-cohort (APC) analysis further delineates three critical effects that contribute to this trend. Firstly, the age effect highlights higher suicide rates at younger ages, indicating an age-specific vulnerability. Secondly, the period effect suggests an overall increase in suicide rates over time, with a notable acceleration post-2010. Lastly, the cohort effect reveals the highest suicide rates among individuals born after 2002, pointing to a generational shift in the risk of suicide.</p>
<p>Moreover, the study sheds light on geographical variations in suicide rates among Black women in the U.S. The highest rates were observed in the West, while the most significant number of deaths occurred in the South, reflecting the region&#8217;s larger Black population. These geographical insights suggest that location-specific factors, possibly including access to mental health resources, socio-economic conditions, and community support systems, play a critical role in suicide trends.</p>
<p>The study by Joseph and her team not only underscores the growing issue of suicide among Black women but also opens several avenues for future research. Among the critical areas for exploration are the specific stressors that disproportionately affect young Black women, such as cyberbullying, online racial attacks, and systemic barriers to accessing mental health care.</p>
<p>The findings also call for a closer examination of the impact of racism, workplace discrimination, maternal health stressors, and violence on the mental health of Black women.</p>
<p>&#8220;Intimate partner violence, neighborhood violence, and lack of investment into federal and state support systems also contribute to poor mental health outcomes and limited treatment access,” said Joseph, and “are overrepresented risk factors among Black girls and women in some areas.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.20230254" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Trends in Suicide Among Black Women in the United States, 1999–2020</a>,&#8221; was authored by Victoria A. Joseph, Gonzalo Martínez-Alés, Mark Olfson, Jeffrey Shaman, Madelyn S. Gould, Catherine Gimbrone, and Katherine M. Keyes.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

.
DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 04:00PM
.
TITLE:
The surprising dynamics of conspiracy theory beliefs
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/the-surprising-dynamics-of-conspiracy-theory-beliefs/

<p>Many people <a href="https://theconversation.com/was-phar-lap-killed-by-gangsters-new-research-shows-which-conspiracies-people-believe-in-and-why-158610">believe at least one</a> conspiracy theory. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – conspiracies <em>do</em> happen.</p>
<p>To take just one example, the CIA really did engage in <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/13/cia-mind-control-1266649">illegal experiments</a> in the 1950s to identify drugs and procedures that might produce confessions from captured spies.</p>
<p>However, many conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence, yet still attract believers.</p>
<p>For example, in a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12746">previous study</a>, we found about 7% of New Zealanders and Australians agreed with the theory that <a href="https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/on-the-trail-of-contrails">visible trails behind aircraft</a> are “chemtrails” of chemical agents sprayed as part of a secret government program. That’s despite the theory being <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084011">roundly rejected</a> by the scientific community.</p>
<p>The fact that conspiracy theories attract believers despite a lack of credible evidence remains a puzzle for researchers in psychology and other academic disciplines.</p>
<p>Indeed, there has been a great deal of research on conspiracy theories published in the past few years. We now know more about how many people believe them, as well as the psychological and political factors that <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25617-0">correlate with that belief</a>.</p>
<p>But we know much less about how often people change their minds. Do they do so frequently, or do they to stick tenaciously to their beliefs, regardless of what evidence they come across?</p>
<h2>From 9/11 to COVID</h2>
<p>We set out to answer this question using a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-51653-z">longitudinal survey</a>. We recruited 498 Australians and New Zealanders (using the <a href="http://prolific.com">Prolific</a> website, which recruits people to take part in paid research).</p>
<p>Each month from March to September 2021, we presented our sample group with a survey, including ten conspiracy theories, and asked them how much they agreed with each one.</p>
<p>All of these theories related to claims about events that are either ongoing, or occurred this millennium: the September 11 attacks, the rollout of 5G telecommunications technology, and COVID-19, among others.</p>
<p>While there were definitely some believers in our sample, most participants disagreed with each of the theories.</p>
<p>The most popular theory was that “pharmaceutical companies (‘Big Pharma’) have suppressed a cure for cancer to protect their profits”. Some 18% of the sample group agreed when first asked.</p>
<p>The least popular was the theory that “COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ contain microchips to monitor and control people”. Only 2% agreed.</p>
<h2>Conspiracy beliefs probably aren’t increasing</h2>
<p>Despite contemporary concerns about a “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7320252/">pandemic of misinformation</a>” or “<a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30461-X/fulltext">infodemic</a>”, we found no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time.</p>
<p>This was despite our data collection happening during the tumultuous second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were still happening occasionally in both <a href="https://www.timeout.com/melbourne/things-to-do/a-timeline-of-covid-19-in-australia-two-years-on">Australia</a> and <a href="https://covid19.govt.nz/about-our-covid-19-response/history-of-the-covid-19-alert-system/">New Zealand</a>, and anti-government sentiment was building.</p>
<p>While we only tracked participants for six months, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270429">other studies</a> over much longer time frames have also found little evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories are increasing over time.</p>
<hr />
<p><iframe class="flourish-embed-iframe" style="width: 100%; height: 600px;" title="Interactive or visual content" src="https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16665395/embed" width="100%" height="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-scripts allow-downloads allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation"></iframe></p>
<div style="width: 100%!; margin-top: 4px!important; text-align: right!important;"><a class="flourish-credit" href="https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/16665395/?utm_source=embed&amp;utm_campaign=visualisation/16665395" target="_top" rel="noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/made_with_flourish.svg" alt="Made with Flourish" /></a></div>
<hr />
<p>Finally, we found that beliefs (or non-beliefs) in conspiracy theories were stable – but not completely fixed. For any given theory, the vast majority of participants were “consistent sceptics” – not agreeing with the theory at any point.</p>
<p>There were also some “consistent believers” who agreed at every point in the survey they responded to. For most theories, this was the second-largest group.</p>
<p>Yet for every conspiracy theory, there was also a small proportion of converts. They disagreed with the theory at the start of the study, but agreed with it by the end. There was also a small proportion of “apostates” who agreed with the theory at the start, but disagreed by the end.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the percentages of converts and apostates tended to balance each other pretty closely, leaving the percentage of believers fairly stable over time.</p>
<h2>Inside the ‘rabbit hole’</h2>
<p>This relative stability is interesting, because <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2564659">one criticism</a> of conspiracy theories is that they may not be “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/criterion-of-falsifiability">falsifiable</a>”: what seems like evidence against a conspiracy theory can just be written off by believers as part of the cover up.</p>
<p>Yet people clearly <em>do</em> sometimes decide to reject conspiracy theories they previously believed.</p>
<p>Our findings bring into question the popular notion of the “rabbit hole” – that people rapidly develop beliefs in a succession of conspiracy theories, much as Alice tumbles down into Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11">famous story</a>.</p>
<p>While it’s possible this does happen for a small number of people, our results suggest it isn’t a typical experience.</p>
<p>For most, the <a href="https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2023/opinion/how-to-talk-to-someone-about-conspiracy-theories">journey into</a> conspiracy theory belief might involve a more gradual slope – a bit like a <a href="https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1985.tb05649.x">real rabbit burrow</a>, from which one can also emerge.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Mathew Ling (<a href="https://www.neaminational.org.au/">Neami National</a>), Stephen Hill (Massey University) and Edward Clarke (Philipps-Universität Marburg) contributed to the research referred to in this article.</em><!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img decoding="async" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222507/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/out-of-the-rabbit-hole-new-research-shows-people-can-change-their-minds-about-conspiracy-theories-222507">original article</a>.</em></p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 01:49AM
.
TITLE:
Israel Outraged After Brazil's President Likens Gaza War to the Holocaust
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177513&url=https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israels-netanyahu-slams-brazilian-presidents-comparison-gaza-war-107331257

<div><p>Source: <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/international" rel="tag" target="_blank">ABC News - International</a></p>Israel on Sunday condemned Brazil's president for comparing the war in Gaza to the Holocaust, accusing him of being antisemitic and trivializing the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Speaking to reporters at the African Union summit in Ethiopia, President Luiz In&aacute;cio Lula da Silva said that &quot;what is happening in the Gaza Strip and to the Palestinian people hasn't been seen in any other moment in history. Actually, it did when Hitler decided to...</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 02:00PM
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TITLE:
Social support linked to lower risk of compulsive sexual behaviors among sexual minorities
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/social-support-linked-to-lower-risk-of-compulsive-sexual-behaviors-among-sexual-minorities/

<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2245399"><em>The Journal of Sex Research</em></a> recently published findings that show how cisgender sexual minorities with higher levels of social support exhibit fewer symptoms of compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) and problematic pornography use (PPU). Conversely, those facing discrimination due to their sexual orientation and engaging in sexualized drug use tend to report increased severity of these conditions.</p>
<p>Understanding CSBD, a condition recently classified in the International Classification of Diseases, is crucial in addressing sexual health comprehensively. CSBD is an individual&#8217;s persistent inability to control intense sexual urges — leading to distressing or disruptive behaviors. Problematic pornography use, a significant manifestation of CSBD, involves excessive consumption of pornography to the point of causing interpersonal or individual distress.</p>
<p>Previous studies have highlighted a heightened vulnerability among sexual minorities, hypothesized to stem from the unique stressors this group faces. However, comprehensive studies exploring these associations within sexual minorities are not as common.</p>
<p>The motivation behind this study was to explore the under-researched area of CSBD and PPU within the sexual minority population. Researchers aimed to understand how factors such as minority stress, perceived social support, and sexualized drug use may contribute to the possibility of these conditions. Mainly, this study was driven by a desire to develop targeted therapeutic interventions and refine diagnostic criteria to be inclusive of the experiences of sexual minorities.</p>
<p>The study employed a cross-sectional survey methodology by recruiting 198 cisgender individuals, averaging 27 years of age, who identified as part of the sexual minority. Participants provided insights into their experiences with CSBD and PPU, alongside reporting their levels of social support, encounters with discrimination, and engagement in sexualized drug use. Researchers analyzed their input to understand the impact of these variables on the severity of CSBD and PPU symptoms.</p>
<p>Results suggested a protective role of social support against CSBD and PPU suggesting that stronger social networks may mitigate the severity of these conditions. At the same time, experiences of discrimination were directly linked to higher CSBD symptoms — while internalized stigma concerning one&#8217;s sexual orientation was particularly associated with greater PPU severity. Moreover, the study identified sexualized drug use as a significant predictor of increased CSBD symptoms.</p>
<p>However, the study&#8217;s cross-sectional design limits the ability to establish causality between the explored factors and the severity of CSBD and PPU symptoms. Additionally, the research&#8217;s focus on Polish cisgender sexual minorities raises questions about the generalizability of the findings across different cultures and non-cisgender identities.</p>
<p>Still, regardless of these considerations, the study advances our understanding of CSBD and PPU within the sexual minority community — highlighting the necessity of supportive environments free from discrimination to foster better mental health outcomes.</p>
<p>The study, “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2245399">Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder and Problematic Pornography Use in Cisgender Sexual Minority Individuals: The Associations with Minority Stress, Social Support, and Sexualized Drug Use</a>,ˮ was authored by Karol Lewczuk, Magdalena Wizła, Agnieszka Glica and Aleksandra Diana Dwulit — from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Sensusmed Psychotherapy and Neurorehabilitation Centre.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 12:00PM
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TITLE:
Smash or pass? AI could soon predict your date’s interest via physiological cues
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/smash-or-pass-ai-could-soon-predict-your-dates-interest-via-physiological-cues/

<p>In a world where technology touches almost every aspect of our lives, it&#8217;s not surprising that researchers are now exploring how it can help us understand the nuances of human interaction, particularly in the realm of conversation. A recent study by engineers at the University of Cincinnati has made a fascinating leap in this direction, suggesting that soon, artificial intelligence could potentially tell you if your first date is really into you — or not — based on physiological responses alone.</p>
<p>By analyzing data from wearable technology that tracks heart rates, respiration, and perspiration, the study has managed to classify the type of conversation two people are having with notable accuracy. This research, published in the journal <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10015779"><em>IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing</em></a>, not only opens up new possibilities for enhancing interpersonal communication but also paves the way for applications in mental health counseling and education.</p>
<p>The inspiration for this study stemmed from a keen interest in physiological synchrony — a phenomenon where individuals&#8217; physiological responses, such as heart rate and breathing patterns, become synchronized during conversation or collaboration. This synchrony is believed to be a marker of how engaged or in tune two people are with each other during an interaction.</p>
<p>Previous studies have shown that the degree of physiological synchrony can predict how well individuals collaborate on tasks, the empathy patients feel from their therapists, and the engagement students experience with their teachers.</p>
<p>Researchers embarked on this study to explore whether technology could leverage physiological synchrony to infer the dynamics of a conversation without needing verbal feedback or observation. In a world increasingly reliant on digital communication, understanding the underlying emotional connections between individuals could significantly enhance virtual interactions, making this research both timely and relevant.</p>
<p>Eighteen pairs of participants were initially recruited, with the final analysis focusing on sixteen dyads due to data quality issues.</p>
<p>These pairs, encompassing friends, roommates, coworkers, relationship partners, and strangers, engaged in four distinct conversation scenarios: two-sided positive, two-sided negative, one-sided with the person on the left talking, and one-sided with the person on the right talking. These scenarios were crafted to elicit a range of emotional and physiological responses, which were then recorded using wearable sensors measuring heart rate, skin conductance, and respiration.</p>
<p>Participants were also asked to report their feelings using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and the Interpersonal Interaction Questionnaire (IIQ) to provide a comprehensive picture of each conversation&#8217;s emotional landscape.</p>
<figure id="attachment_221618" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-221618" style="width: 1280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-221618" src="https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014.jpeg" alt="" width="1280" height="853" srcset="https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014.jpeg 1280w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014-300x200.jpeg 300w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014-1024x682.jpeg 1024w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014-768x512.jpeg 768w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014-750x500.jpeg 750w, https://www.psypost.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/230210asynchrony014-1140x760.jpeg 1140w" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-221618" class="wp-caption-text">University of Cincinnati engineering students demonstrate how they taught a computer to distinguish types of conversations based only on physiological cues. (Photo credit: Andrew Higley/University of Cincinnati)</figcaption></figure>
<p>The researchers applied advanced data processing techniques to filter and analyze the signals, extracting features related to both individual responses and the synchrony between participants. This rich dataset served as the input for machine learning algorithms, which were tasked with classifying the type of conversation based on physiological data alone.</p>
<p>The researchers found that a two-stage classification approach, which first distinguished between one-sided and two-sided conversations before further classifying them, achieved the highest accuracy of 75%. This indicates a strong potential for technology to understand conversation dynamics through physiological signals.</p>
<p>However, when the researchers relied solely on physiological data without the additional context provided by synchrony features, the accuracy dropped to 65.6%, highlighting the importance of these features in capturing the nuances of human interaction.</p>
<p>Interestingly, incorporating personality traits into the analysis did not improve the classification accuracy, suggesting that the structured nature of the conversation scenarios may have limited the impact of individual personality differences. The most successful classifications came from using a combination of physiological signals, with heart rate variability, skin conductance responses, and respiration rates among the most informative features.</p>
<p>The potential applications of this research are varied. Lead author and University of Cincinnati doctoral student Iman Chatterjee <a href="https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2023/02/this-computer-can-tell-if-you-should-smash-or-pass.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">suggested</a> that the technology developed through their study could serve as a tool for honest feedback in social interactions, effectively playing a &#8220;smash or pass&#8221; role in evaluating the dynamics of a date or any conversation.</p>
<p>&#8220;The computer could tell if you’re a bore,&#8221; he explained, highlighting how a modified version of their system might measure a person&#8217;s interest level, compatibility, and engagement in a conversation.</p>
<p>But despite the study&#8217;s significant achievements, the researchers are quick to acknowledge its limitations and the need for further exploration. One major consideration is the high accuracy (96.9%) achieved using self-report data, raising questions about the added value of physiological measures in contexts where individuals are already aware of their interaction dynamics. This suggests that future research should focus on more spontaneous conversation scenarios that might offer new insights into the role of physiological synchrony.</p>
<p>Moreover, the study&#8217;s structured conversation scenarios, while useful for initial exploration, may not fully capture the complexity of natural human interactions, which are often more nuanced and less predictable. Future studies could benefit from incorporating additional data types, such as speech patterns, gestures, and even EEG signals, to enrich the analysis and potentially improve classification accuracy.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10015779">Automated Classification of Dyadic Conversation Scenarios using Autonomic Nervous System Responses</a>,&#8221; was authored by Iman Chatterjee, Maja Goršič, Mohammad S. Hossain, Joshua D. Clapp, and Vesna D. Novak.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 10:00AM
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TITLE:
Men’s physical attractiveness shapes venture capital investment, study finds
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/psychology-physical-attractiveness-shapes-venture-capital-investment-study-finds/

<p>Have you ever wondered if being attractive gives entrepreneurs an edge in securing venture capital funding? A new study led by <a href="https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/marc-d-bahlmann" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marc D. Bahlmann</a> of VU University Amsterdam sheds light on this intriguing question, revealing that the physical attractiveness of male entrepreneurs and venture capitalists significantly impacts financial decision-making in the high-stakes world of venture capital investment. This research uncovers the subtle yet powerful influence of looks in determining the flow of millions of euros within the European Information Technology (IT) industry.</p>
<p>The study was published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1259143"><em>Frontiers in Psychology</em></a>.</p>
<p>Bahlmann embarked on this research journey to explore the evolutionary underpinnings of risk-taking behaviors, particularly in the context of innovation and venture capital funding. &#8220;Recently, I’ve become fascinated by evolutionary psychology in general, and how embodied qualities affect our behavior, perspectives, and risk-taking in particular. I&#8217;m particularly interested in the evolutionary nature of our risk-taking behaviors in innovation decision-making contexts,&#8221; explained Bahlmann, an assistant professor of management and organization.</p>
<p>Prior studies have documented the effects of opposite-sex stimuli on behaviors such as financial risk-taking and decision-making. However, the realm of same-sex stimuli, especially among males, remained less explored, particularly in real-world settings.</p>
<p>Bahlmann aimed to bridge this gap, focusing on the venture capital sector—a field where high-growth potential ventures attract substantial financial risks and where decisions have traditionally been attributed to rational analysis. Yet, evidence suggests that these decisions are also susceptible to the &#8216;attractiveness halo effect,&#8217; where good looks are often subconsciously associated with positive traits such as intelligence or trustworthiness.</p>
<p>To conduct this research, Bahlmann compiled a dataset of 341 male-led European IT ventures by leveraging information from AngelList and Crunchbase, complemented by LinkedIn profiles to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the ventures, their entrepreneurial teams, and associated investors. The focus was specifically on ventures with male entrepreneur-investor dyads that provided clear information on entrepreneurial team composition and funding processes across these platforms, ensuring the data&#8217;s reliability and relevance.</p>
<p>Physical attractiveness was assessed by having ten graduate students rate LinkedIn profile photos of the entrepreneurs and investors. The study measured venture capitalists&#8217; financial risk-taking by examining the amounts invested in the first and second funding rounds of the startups. Various control variables, such as venture age, team size, and market orientation, were included to ensure the accuracy of the findings.</p>
<p>Bahlmann found evidence that the physical attractiveness of both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists played a significant role in the initial funding rounds.</p>
<p>Venture capitalists of average or below-average attractiveness were more inclined to invest higher amounts in startups led by attractive entrepreneurs during the first funding round. This suggests that perceptions of physical attractiveness can sway investment decisions, potentially as venture capitalists seek to align themselves with entrepreneurs who exhibit desirable traits symbolized by their attractiveness.</p>
<p>This effect, however, did not hold for venture capitalists considered above average in attractiveness, who showed a more consistent risk-taking behavior irrespective of the entrepreneur&#8217;s looks.</p>
<p>The findings indicate that &#8220;an entrepreneur’s physical attractiveness acts as a subconscious cue for a venture capitalists investment decisions, but that the way in which this occurs is dependent on a venture capitalist&#8217;s own physical attractiveness,&#8221; Bahlmann told PsyPost. &#8220;This implies that evolutionary, upward social comparison effects that originally serve to inspire a male’s mating strategies, also generalize to the context of financial risk-taking.&#8221;</p>
<p>As the funding process progressed to the second round, the Bahlmann observed a change in how the physical attractiveness of entrepreneurs influenced investment decisions. For venture capitalists of below-average attractiveness, the attractiveness of entrepreneurs had a negative relationship with second-round risk-taking.</p>
<p>This shift might be indicative of a &#8220;beauty penalty&#8221; effect, where initial positive biases based on attractiveness could reverse if the entrepreneurs do not meet the high expectations set by their physical appearance. Alternatively, it suggests a complex interplay where the initial attractiveness-driven biases wane as more substantive venture performance data become available, altering the risk assessment landscape.</p>
<p>&#8220;I was somewhat surprised by the notion that the positive effect of entrepreneur’s physical attractiveness on venture capitalist risk-taking turned negative during the second round of risk-taking, but only for venture capitalists of below-average attractiveness,&#8221; Bahlmann said. &#8220;This effect was not established for venture capitalists of average or above-average attractiveness.&#8221;</p>
<p>While Bahlmann&#8217;s study offers important insights into the role of physical attractiveness in venture capital decision-making, it also has some limitations. One of the study&#8217;s constraints is its reliance on archival and observational data, which did not include information on individual psychological dispositions that could influence financial risk-taking.</p>
<p>&#8220;The research is based on correlational data,&#8221; Bahlmann noted. &#8220;This means we need to be cautious with causality claims, even though several statistical techniques were used to create more robust cause-effect relationships.&#8221;</p>
<p>Future research could explore the impact of same-sex attractiveness in other industries or contexts, examine the long-term effects of physical attractiveness on venture success, and investigate how other personal attributes interact with physical appearance to influence professional and financial decisions. There&#8217;s also a growing need to understand how these findings apply to female entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, as the representation of women in the tech industry and venture capital continues to increase.</p>
<p>&#8220;In the end, I hope to better understand the evolutionary mechanisms in innovation decision-making contexts,&#8221; Bahlmann said. &#8220;This ranges from venture capitalists&#8217; investment decisions in startups to CEOs’ and TMTs’ decision-making on which new technological trajectories to follow.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1259143/full" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Physical attractiveness, same-sex stimuli, and male venture capitalists’ financial risk-taking</a>,&#8221; was published January 11, 2024.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 08:00AM
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TITLE:
Is Alzheimer’s disease transmissible? Experiments with gut microbiota yield surprising results
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/is-alzheimers-disease-transmissible-experiments-with-gut-microbiota-yield-surprising-results/

<p>A study in Italy found that symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease can be transferred to young rats via the gut microbiota of Alzheimer’s patients. Transplanting gut microbiota from feces of Alzheimer’s patients into guts of healthy rats induced cognitive deficits in these rats. The paper was published in the journal <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad303"><em>Brain</em></a>.</p>
<p>Alzheimer&#8217;s disease is a progressive neurological disorder that leads to the atrophy and death of brain cells, causing a decline in memory and cognitive functions. It is the most common cause of dementia among older adults. Main symptoms are memory loss, confusion, difficulty with language and problem-solving, and changes in personality and behavior.</p>
<p>At the moment, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease and treatments only focus on managing symptoms and improving the quality of life of affected individuals. Its exact causes are unknown, although it generally starts in advanced age and various genetic and environmental factors have been linked to its development in younger individuals.</p>
<p>Recently, studies have pointed to associations between gut microbiota properties to the Alzheimer’s disease. They indicated that transplanting gut-microbiota to mice can cause adverse cognitive changes in these mice. This venue of research became particularly important with the recent discovery of the microbiota gut-brain axis. The microbiota-gut-brain axis is a bidirectional communication pathway through which microorganisms living in the gut (the gut microbiota) and the brain can affect each other.</p>
<p>The authors of this study wanted to verify the findings of previous studies and investigate whether the transplantation of gut microbiota from Alzheimer’s patients can cause the development of cognitive deficits in rats. These researchers also wanted to investigate the mechanisms through which this is achieved. They suspected that gut microbiota of Alzheimer’s patients might somehow disrupt adult hippocampal neurogenesis in healthy rats.</p>
<p>Adult hippocampal neurogenesis refers to the capacity of neural stem cells in the hippocampus region of the brain to generate new neurons throughout an individual&#8217;s life, including during adulthood. This process is vital for cognitive functions such as spatial learning, distinguishing between similar events and environments, and emotion regulation. The hippocampus&#8217;s vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease may be partly due to its role in these processes.</p>
<p>The study involved 69 Alzheimer’s patients and 64 healthy individuals as controls, all recruited from the IRCCS Centro San Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli in Brescia, Italy. Participants provided blood samples for analysis, and most also contributed stool samples for rat transplantation.</p>
<p>The primary experiments were conducted on male Sprague-Dawley rats, 11 weeks old. After adapting to the laboratory environment, the rats were treated with a potent antibiotic cocktail for 7 days to eliminate their own microbiota (ampicillin (1 g/l), vancomycin (500 mg/l), ciprofloxacin HCL (200 mg/l), and imipenem (250 mg/l)). This treatment destroyed rats’ own microbiota and prepared them to readily accept those transplanted from humans.</p>
<p>Following the depletion of their gut microbiota, the rats were divided into two groups. One group received gut microbiota from human Alzheimer’s patients, while the other group received it from healthy participants. The transplantation was performed by force-feeding the rats a homogenized fecal slurry from human participants through a tube directly inserted into their esophagus (oral gavage) for three days. Behavioral tests were conducted 10 days later to assess the rats&#8217; cognitive functioning.</p>
<p>Additionally, the researchers conducted experiments on undifferentiated human cells from the hippocampus region of the brain, obtained from medically terminated female human fetuses. They treated these cells with serum (the liquid component of blood that remains after coagulation) taken from the two groups of human study participants and observed the effects.</p>
<p>The results indicated that transplantation of gut microbiota from healthy human participants did not affect the recipient rats. However, rats with microbiota from Alzheimer’s patients exhibited impaired recognition of familiar locations and decreased performance in memory-reliant tasks, highlighting the importance of hippocampal neurogenesis in these functions.</p>
<p>Further analyses confirmed that hippocampal neurogenesis was disrupted in rats receiving gut microbiota from Alzheimer’s patients, as these rats produced significantly fewer new neurons compared to the control group.</p>
<p>The experiment with human hippocampal progenitor cells revealed that treatment with serum from Alzheimer’s patients reduced the cells&#8217; proliferation capacity. This reduction varied with the severity of the Alzheimer’s symptoms in the blood donors, with cells maintaining better proliferation capacity when treated with serum from participants with less severe symptoms.</p>
<p>In a press release, study author Yvonne Nolan, a professor at University College Cork, explained: &#8220;The memory tests we investigated rely on the growth of new nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain. We saw that animals with gut bacteria from people with Alzheimer&#8217;s produced fewer new nerve cells and had impaired memory.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;People with Alzheimer&#8217;s are typically diagnosed at or after the onset of cognitive symptoms, which may be too late, at least for current therapeutic approaches. Understanding the role of gut microbes during prodromal &#8212; or early stage- dementia, before the potential onset of symptoms may open avenues for new therapy development, or even individualised intervention.&#8221;</p>
<p>In their paper, the study authors concluded: “Our results demonstrate that colonization of healthy young adult rats with gut microbiota from Alzheimer’s patients induced behavioral and neurogenic alterations typical of Alzheimer’s disease. We show that the expression of caecal metabolites [substances produced during the fermentation of undigested food by the microbiota in the cecum, part of the large intestine] involved in the neurogenic and cognitive function are altered after FMT [fecal microbiota transplantation] from Alzheimer’s patients, and report a direct and negative impact of serum from Alzheimer’s patients on neurogenesis in vitro.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Overall, our findings reveal that Alzheimer’s symptoms can be transferred to a healthy young organism via the gut microbiota, confirming a causal role of gut microbiota in Alzheimer’s disease. Furthermore, AHN [adult hippocampal neurogenesis] is established as a converging central cellular process for cognitive changes influenced by both systemic circulatory and gut-mediated factors in Alzheimer’s disease.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study sheds light on the role of gut microbiota in Alzheimer’s disease. It makes a very valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of this disease and how it can be transmitted. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on rats with depleted gut microbiota. Effects might not be equal on humans with their gut microbiota intact.</p>
<p>Sandrine Thuret, a professor of neuroscience at King&#8217;s College London and one of the study&#8217;s senior authors said, &#8220;Alzheimer&#8217;s is an insidious condition that there is yet no effective treatment for. This study represents an important step forward in our understanding of the disease, confirming that the make-up of our gut microbiota has a causal role in the development of the disease. This collaborative research has laid the groundwork for future research into this area, and my hope is that it will lead to potential advances in therapeutic interventions.&#8221;</p>
<p>The paper, ”<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad303">Microbiota from Alzheimer’s patients induce deficits in cognition and hippocampal neurogenesis,</a>” was authored by Stefanie Grabrucker, Moira Marizzoni, Edina Silajdžić, Nicola Lopizzo, Elisa Mombelli, Sarah Nicolas, Sebastian Dohm-Hansen, Catia Scassellati, Davide Vito Moretti, Melissa Rosa, Karina Hoffmann, John F. Cryan, Olivia F. O’Leary, Jane A. English, Aonghus Lavelle, Cora O’Neill, Sandrine Thuret, Annamaria Cattaneo, and Yvonne M. Nolan.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 19, 2024 at 06:00AM
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TITLE:
New psychology study sheds light on music’s role in maladaptive daydreaming
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-study-sheds-light-on-musics-role-in-maladaptive-daydreaming/

<p>A new study published in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356231222290"><em>Psychology of Music</em></a> delves into the captivating world of maladaptive daydreaming, providing evidence that music plays a crucial role in shaping these vivid and immersive experiences.</p>
<p>The study suggests that for many, music is not just a background noise but a powerful catalyst that enhances the depth, emotion, and creativity of their daydreams. While music breathes life into these elaborate fantasies for most, it acts as a trigger for others, indicating a complex relationship between the mind&#8217;s wanderings and the melodies that accompany them.</p>
<p>Maladaptive daydreaming is a relatively recent concept in psychology, identified by Eli Somer in the early 2000s. It describes a condition where individuals engage in extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and interferes with academic, social, and vocational activities. Unlike the occasional daydreams that everyone experiences, maladaptive daydreaming is vivid, extensive, and often accompanied by elaborate scenarios that offer an escape from reality.</p>
<p>Somer embarked on this new study out of a fascination with how some individuals could become so engrossed in their inner worlds, driven by a quest to understand the mechanisms behind this intense form of daydreaming. With an existing body of research suggesting the powerful role of music in evoking emotions and memories, Somer sought to explore how music might interact with maladaptive daydreaming, potentially serving as a catalyst for these immersive mental experiences.</p>
<p>&#8220;As a clinical psychologist specializing in treating and researching childhood trauma, dissociation, and imagination, I have been intrigued by how some of my patients become deeply immersed in elaborate dream worlds within their minds, to the extent that it disrupts their daily functioning,&#8221; explained Somer, a clinical psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Haifa, and founder of <a href="https://daydreamresearch.wixsite.com/md-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The International Consortium for Maladaptive Daydreaming Research</a>.</p>
<p>&#8220;Initially, I believed maladaptive daydreaming to be a dissociative response to trauma. However, subsequent studies revealed that individuals with a natural propensity for immersive daydreaming can develop an addiction to this gratifying experience, regardless of any childhood trauma.&#8221;</p>
<p>To explore the connection between music and maladaptive daydreaming, Somer conducted asynchronous email interviews with 41 individuals who scored high on the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale (MDS-16), a tool designed to assess the severity of daydreaming. Participants were asked to describe their experiences with music during daydreaming, comparing it to times when music wasn&#8217;t involved, and to reflect on how music affected their daydreaming intensity and content.</p>
<p>The asynchronous nature of the email interviews allowed participants to provide detailed and reflective responses about their experiences with music and daydreaming, free from the time pressures typical of synchronous interviews.</p>
<p>Somer&#8217;s analysis of the responses revealed a multifaceted role of music in the context of maladaptive daydreaming. The majority of participants reported that music significantly enhances the daydreaming experience. It acted as a catalyst for creativity, allowing individuals to construct detailed and emotionally charged narratives in their minds.</p>
<p>&#8220;Music can transport maladaptive daydreamers away from external reality into their inner envisioned worlds by evoking emotions and creativity that make the daydreamed plots more vivid and compelling,&#8221; Somer told PsyPost. &#8220;The music becomes part of the actual storyline.&#8221;</p>
<p>Participants described how music could dictate the pace, direction, and emotional depth of their daydreams, effectively acting as the soundtrack to their inner narratives. This underscores the powerful and immersive influence of music on the daydreaming experience, enhancing the vividness and emotional intensity of the daydreams.</p>
<p>&#8220;Just as a film score invisibly shapes emotions, themes, and storytelling, I was surprised to learn that music in maladaptive daydreaming evokes emotions and becomes integral to the overall emotional journey of the fantasy,&#8221; Somer said.</p>
<p>Music served not only as a background to these daydreams but also as a trigger that could spontaneously initiate the daydreaming process. This finding is particularly noteworthy, as it highlights the automatic and sometimes uncontrollable nature of maladaptive daydreaming in response to musical stimuli.</p>
<p>&#8220;For some with maladaptive daydreaming, music is an unavoidable trigger that compromises their sense of control or agency over when they slide into excessive, interfering daydreaming,&#8221; Somer explained. &#8220;This suggests a concerning addictive or dependent relationship.&#8221;</p>
<p>However, the study also uncovered variability in the role of music in maladaptive daydreaming. A minority of participants found music to be a distraction or even incompatible with their daydreaming, indicating that the influence of music on maladaptive daydreaming can be highly individualized. This highlights the complexity of maladaptive daydreaming and the subjective nature of music&#8217;s impact on the daydreaming process.</p>
<p>But Somer&#8217;s study, like any scientific inquiry, comes with its caveats. The reliance on self-reported data through email interviews, while rich and detailed, may introduce biases based on participants&#8217; memory and self-awareness. Additionally, the study&#8217;s qualitative nature means its findings are not broadly generalizable but offer deep insights into the experiences of those with maladaptive daydreaming.</p>
<p>&#8220;To avoid memory bias and to enhance ecological validity, future studies should employ prospective designs that include standardized musical stimulations and in vivo experience sampling,&#8221; Somer said. &#8220;To allow a broader generalizability of the finding of this qualitative study, future. Future controlled quantitative research would help broaden the generalizability of this qualitative study that was based on interviews with 41 respondents.&#8221;</p>
<p>Regarding the long-term objectives for this line of research, Somer outlined three key directions: &#8220;1. Conducting further research to develop diagnostic criteria and gain recognition for maladaptive daydreaming as a distinct mental health condition, potentially for inclusion in psychiatric diagnostic manuals. 2. Performing large-scale epidemiological studies to determine the prevalence of maladaptive daydreaming in different populations and its impact on individuals&#8217; daily functioning and well-being. 3. Exploring the underlying neurobiological and psychological mechanisms of maladaptive daydreaming.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03057356231222290" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Calling the tune in maladaptive daydreaming: The impact of music on the experience of compulsive fantasizing</a>,&#8221; was published online January 22, 2024.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 18, 2024 at 04:00PM
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TITLE:
Cannabis and addiction: New research suggests a role in combating stimulant cravings
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/psychology-cannabis-and-addiction-new-research-suggests-a-role-in-combating-stimulant-cravings/

<p>Can cannabis offer a lifeline in the battle against drug addiction, particularly for those grappling with the perils of stimulants like crystal methamphetamine? New research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) suggests it might. The study, published in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460323002629"><em>Addictive Behaviors</em></a>, found that cannabis use is linked to a decrease in the use of crystal methamphetamine among individuals at high risk of overdose in Vancouver&#8217;s Downtown Eastside, an area severely impacted by illegal drug use.</p>
<p>With the rise of cannabis legalization, scientists have been keenly debating its impacts, particularly concerning the use of high-risk substances such as opioids and stimulants. Previous studies have pointed to cannabis as a potential harm reduction tool, suggesting that it could substitute more dangerous, unregulated drugs.</p>
<p>This concept is especially relevant given the alarming rates of drug toxicity and overdose deaths, exacerbated by the contamination of illicit drug supplies with potent opioids like fentanyl. The research aimed to explore this potential further, focusing on whether cannabis could help manage cravings and reduce the use of stimulants, specifically crystal methamphetamine</p>
<p>To delve into these questions, researchers gathered data from three prospective cohorts of people who use unregulated drugs (PWUD) in Vancouver, Canada: the At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS), the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study (VIDUS), and the AIDS Care Cohort to Evaluate Exposure to Survival Services (ACCESS).</p>
<p>These cohorts included individuals from diverse backgrounds, including street-involved youth, adults with a history of injection drug use, and adults living with HIV, who all reported using cannabis in addition to other unregulated drugs. Participants were invited to complete a supplementary cannabis questionnaire, which probed into their frequency and motives for cannabis use, especially regarding its effects on other substance use.</p>
<p>Among the 297 participants, 45% reported using cannabis to manage stimulant cravings, and a significant majority of these individuals observed a reduction in their stimulant use when they used cannabis. This association was particularly strong for those using crystal methamphetamine, with daily cannabis use also showing a significant link to reduced stimulant consumption.</p>
<p>Interestingly, this effect was more pronounced among females and younger participants, suggesting nuanced dynamics in how cannabis affects stimulant use across different demographics.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our findings are not conclusive but do add to the growing scientific evidence that cannabis might be a beneficial tool for some people who want to better control their unregulated stimulant use, particularly for people who use crystal meth,&#8221; said Hudson Reddon, the study&#8217;s lead researcher. &#8220;This suggests a new direction for harm reduction strategies among people who use drugs.&#8221;</p>
<p>However, the study was not without its limitations. Its cross-sectional design and reliance on self-reported data mean that causal relationships cannot be definitively established, and the findings might not be generalizable to all drug users. Moreover, the potential for social desirability and recall bias could have influenced participants&#8217; responses.</p>
<p>Despite these challenges, the study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that cannabis could serve as a valuable tool in harm reduction strategies, particularly for individuals at risk of stimulant-related harms.</p>
<p>Looking forward, the researchers call for more comprehensive studies to further explore the therapeutic potential of cannabis, including its use as a harm reduction strategy amidst the broader context of polysubstance use. Clinical trials and longitudinal studies are needed to better understand the long-term outcomes of cannabis use for managing stimulant cravings and its role in reducing the harm associated with unregulated stimulant use.</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107867">Cannabis use to manage stimulant cravings among people who use unregulated drugs</a>,&#8221; was authored by Hudson Reddon, Maria Eugenia Socias, Kora DeBeck, Kanna Hayashi, Zach Walsh, and M.-J. Milloy.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

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DATE:
February 18, 2024 at 02:00PM
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TITLE:
Narrative elements may enhance the intensity of physical activity during active VR gameplay
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URL:
https://www.psypost.org/narrative-elements-may-enhance-the-intensity-of-physical-activity-during-active-vr-gameplay/

<p>A recent study published in the journal <em><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10055-023-00754-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Virtual Reality</a></em> provides evidence that adding story elements to virtual reality (VR) exercise games can make physical activity more engaging, potentially offering a new avenue to encourage exercise among young adults. While the study found that these narrative elements didn&#8217;t increase the overall time spent playing, they did lead to a higher quality of physical activity, with participants moving more vigorously during gameplay.</p>
<p>The motivation behind this innovative study stemmed from a pressing public health concern: the high prevalence of sedentary lifestyles among U.S. adults and the associated risk of diseases. With the advent of VR technology, researchers saw an opportunity to make exercise more appealing by incorporating it into VR gaming—a form of entertainment already popular among young adults.</p>
<p>This interest was particularly piqued during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a decrease in physical activity levels due to restrictions on access to traditional exercise facilities. By investigating the potential of narrative-driven VR games to promote physical activity, the researchers aimed to find alternative ways to combat sedentary lifestyles, especially during times when access to physical activity might be limited.</p>
<p>&#8220;I have always been fascinated by the power of stories. The advent of emerging media technologies offers an excellent opportunity to explore the narrative impact,&#8221; said study author <a href="https://www.amyshironglu.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Amy S. Lu</a>, an associate professor and director of the Health Technology Lab at Northeastern University.</p>
<p>The study recruited participants through web advertisements and posters on a university campus, focusing on individuals aged 18-29 with low levels of physical activity. Out of 252 students who expressed interest, 36 met the criteria and completed the study, which involved playing both active and sedentary VR games using a HTC Vive Pro headset under conditions with and without added narrative elements.</p>
<p>Participants were randomly assigned to either a narrative or a non-narrative condition and played both an active VR game, which required physical movement, and a sedentary VR game, which did not. The active VR game selected was Beat Saber, a rhythm-based game requiring players to move in sync with music, while Thumper, another rhythm-based game but with minimal physical activity, served as the sedentary counterpart.</p>
<p>Prior to playing the active VR games, participants in the narrative condition watched a five-minute video introducing a storyline related to the game they were about to play. Researchers measured the physical activity levels of participants using wrist-worn accelerometers and gathered data on their game experience through questionnaires.</p>
<p>Adding a story element did not significantly extend the duration of gameplay. The researchers noted that the narrative&#8217;s theme, based on the Star Wars universe, might not have resonated with all participants, suggesting that future studies should consider a wider range of narrative themes and formats.</p>
<p>&#8220;Star Wars Franchise Fatigue could be real! Perhaps we should have considered a different plot design,&#8221; Lu told PsyPost. &#8220;But who does not think of Star Wars while playing Beat Saber?&#8221;</p>
<p>Participants in the narrative condition engaged in a higher percentage of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity compared to those in the non-narrative condition, suggesting that narratives might motivate players to put more effort into their movements. Additionally, active VR games were found to promote significantly more physical activity than sedentary VR games, highlighting their potential as an effective tool for increasing physical activity levels.</p>
<p>Furthermore, active VR games, particularly those with narrative elements, provided a more positive game experience, as indicated by higher scores in flow, positive affect, and physical activity enjoyment compared to sedentary VR games. This suggests that integrating stories into VR games could not only help in promoting physical activity but also enhance the overall enjoyment of the exercise.</p>
<p>&#8220;Integrating narrative elements into active virtual reality games can motivate people to exercise more,&#8221; Lu said. &#8220;This approach could serve as an effective strategy to counteract the sedentary lifestyle exacerbated by the pandemic.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite these promising findings, the study faced several limitations. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the research had to navigate challenges such as physical distancing, which might have influenced participants&#8217; willingness to engage fully in physical activity.</p>
<p>&#8220;Conducting in-person VR research during the pandemic was not fun, especially regarding research assistant and participant scheduling,&#8221; Lu explained. &#8220;However, we were impressed by the enthusiastic response from our participants.&#8221;</p>
<p>Additionally, the narrative videos were not professionally produced and might not have been as immersive as possible, potentially limiting their impact on engagement.</p>
<p>&#8220;Due to budget constraints, we could not create narrative clips to be played directly into the VR headset,&#8221; Lu said. &#8220;Instead, we displayed the story on a TV screen before participants switched to VR play mode. Future studies should aim to eliminate such significant modality shifts to preserve the immersive experience.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study underscores the need for further research to explore more immersive and interactive narrative designs and assess their impact immediately after viewing. There&#8217;s also a call for investigating different narrative themes and delivery methods to maximize player engagement and physical activity. By continuing to explore the intersection of VR technology, storytelling, and exercise, researchers hope to unlock new strategies for combating sedentary lifestyles and promoting physical health.</p>
<p>&#8220;It would be fun to further investigate effective methods for adding narratives into active VR games,&#8221; Lu said. &#8220;It would be intriguing to see if we can truly merge storytelling with VR.&#8221;</p>
<p>The study, &#8220;<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10055-023-00754-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The effect of narrative element incorporation on physical activity and game experience in active and sedentary virtual reality games</a>,&#8221; was authored by Amy Shirong Lu, Victoria Pelarski, Dar Alon, Aleksandra Baran, Emma McGarrity, Neha Swaminathan, and Caio Victor Sousa.</p>

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psychbot , 5 months ago to psychology

Psychology News Robot
DATE:
February 18, 2024 at 12:28AM
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TITLE:
Experts Warn About the Risk of Cannabis-Induced Psychosis
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URL:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=177503&url=https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/cannabis-induced-psychosis-bad-trip-1.7116217?cmp=rss

<div><p>Source: <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/health/" rel="tag" target="_blank">Canadian Broadcasting Company - Health News</a></p>Researchers are sounding the alarm that cannabis products with high-potency THC&mdash;the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana&mdash;can have harmful health effects, particularly among young men. &quot;For men aged 14 to 24, the risk of developing schizophrenia rises to over 40 percent within three years&quot; of showing up in an ER for cannabis-induced psychosis, said Dr. Daniel Myran, senior author of a study published in JAMA Psychiatry.</div><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6><br /><a href="https://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?action=rssHomepage" target="_blank"><img title="Brought to you by Social Psychology Network" alt="Brought to you by SocialPsychology Network" src="https://www.socialpsychology.org/images/rss-footer-large.png" border="0" width="400" height="45" /></a><br><br>
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