Worrying almost destroyed her life.

I could tell Elizabeth was a worrier before she opened her mouth: she had a haunted look and wrung her hands together so compulsively I thought the skin would come off. With a loving, supportive husband, healthy children, a good job, and sufficient income, what did she have to worry about?

Everything, it turned out. In the first session it was a headache she was sure signalled a brain tumor. In the next session, she'd moved on to the polar ice caps melting ("shouldn't we relocate to higher ground?"). Her inner world was a hellish place where incessant worries bound her in a web of doom.

You might not worry like Elizabeth. But most of us suffer from some version of negative thinking. For you it might be complaints about life or self-criticism. Whatever the content, repetitious thoughts create a negative energy that envelopes you. We call this the Black Cloud.

The Black Cloud screens out everything positive. All you can see is what's wrong with life. Pretty soon you can't enjoy anything. Elizabeth couldn't settle in with a good book, take in a movie, or meet a friend for lunch. The Black Cloud also alienates people. Elizabeth's husband was losing patience with her, and her college-bound daughter complained, "When you help me with my applications it feels like you aren't doing it for me - you're doing it to quell your own anxiety about me getting into a good school."

Before she came to me, Elizabeth had tried to solve her problem by thinking positively. "For three days I tried to substitute a positive thought for every negative one. But I ended up feeling like I was just sticking my head in the sand. I don't know why they call it the power of positive thinking - the negative thoughts have all the power."

"We want to be free! We want to be free to do what we want to do!" ~ Heavenly Blues in the film The Wild Angels

You're probably familiar with reverse psychology: it's when you try to get someone to do something by telling them to do the opposite.

In theory people don't like to have their freedom restricted so they rebel. But what does the psychological research tell us? Do people really react to restrictions on their freedom by wanting the restricted object more?

Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin - and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders. The results provide new insight into the mechanisms behind depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, and could offer researchers a novel target for drugs to treat those conditions.

Research has shown that mood disorders take a toll on patients' brains as well as on their lives. Postmortem studies and brain scans have revealed that the hippocampus (the brain's memory center) can shrink and atrophy in people with a history of depression and other mood disorders. People who live with mood disorders are also known to have low levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a growth factor that keeps neurons healthy. They also have low activity in the neuritin gene, which codes for a protein of the same name that may protect the brain's plasticity: its ability to reorganize and change in response to new experiences.

Ronald Duman, a neurobiologist at Yale University, and colleagues wondered if the poorly understood neuritin might play an important -- and heretofore overlooked -- role in depression and other mood disorders. They induced depression in a group of rats by subjecting them to chronic, unpredictable stress. Depriving them of food and play, isolating them, and switching around their day/night cycles for about 3 weeks left the rats with little interest in feeding or enjoying a sweetened drink. The rats also gave up and became immobile instead of swimming when placed in a tub of water - another measure of rodent depression.

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Japan have uncovered two brain signals in the human prefrontal cortex involved in how humans predict the decisions of other people. Their results suggest that the two signals, each located in distinct prefrontal circuits, strike a balance between expected and observed rewards and choices, enabling humans to predict the actions of people with different values than their own.

Every day, humans are faced with situations in which they must predict what decisions other people will make. These predictions are essential to the social interactions that make up our personal and professional lives. The neural mechanism underlying these predictions, however, by which humans learn to understand the values of others and use this information to predict their decision-making behavior, has long remained a mystery.

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Japan have now shed light on this mystery with a paper to appear in the June 21st issue of Neuron. The researchers describe for the first time the process governing how humans learn to predict the decisions of another person using mental simulation of their mind.

A longstanding question in brain research is how information is processed in the brain. Neuroscientists at the Charité -- Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Cluster of Excellence NeuroCure and University of Newcastle have made a contribution towards answering this question. In a new study, they have shown that signals are generated not only in the cell body of nerve cells, but also in their output extension, the axon. A specific filter cell regulates signal propagation.

These findings have now been published in the journal Science.

Until now it has been assumed that information flow in nerve cells proceeds along a "one-way street." Electrical impulses are initiated at the cell body and propagate along the axon to the next neuron, where they are received by extensions, the dendrites, acting as antennae. However, the team around Charité researchers Tengis Gloveli and Tamar Dugladze has demonstrated that this model needs to be revised. They discovered that signals can also be initiated in axons, i.e. outside the cell body. This happens during highly synchronous neuronal activity as, for example, in a state of heightened attention. Moreover, these axonally generated signals flow bidirectionally and represent a new principle of information processing: on the one hand, impulses propagate from their origin towards other nerve cells; on the other hand, the signals also backpropagate towards the cell body, i.e. in the "wrong direction" down the one-way street. A potential problem is that backpropagating signals could lead to excessive cell activation.

The Vancouver-based Dr. Gabor Maté argues that too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption - that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness and in the restoration of health. Based on medical studies and his own experience with chronically ill patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, where he was the medical coordinator for seven years, Dr. Gabor Maté makes the case that there are important links between the mind and the immune system. He found that stress and individual emotional makeup play critical roles in an array of diseases. [includes rush transcript]

Most of us assume that confidence and certainty are preferred over uncertainty and bewilderment when it comes to learning complex information. But a new study led by Sidney D'Mello of the University of Notre Dame shows that confusion when learning can be beneficial if it is properly induced, effectively regulated, and ultimately resolved.

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Learning and Instruction.

Notre Dame Psychologist and Computer Scientist D'Mello, whose research areas include artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and the learning sciences, together with Art Graesser of the University of Memphis, collaborated on the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems.

In a series of experiments, subjects learned scientific reasoning concepts through interactions with computer animated agents playing the roles of a tutor and a peer learner. The animated agents and the subject engaged in interactive conversations where they collaboratively discussed the merits of sample research studies that were flawed in one critical aspect. For example, one hypothetical case study touted the merits of a diet pill, but was flawed because it did not include an appropriate control group. Confusion was induced by manipulating the information the subjects received so that the animated agents' sometimes disagreed with each other and expressed contradictory or incorrect information. The agents then asked subjects to decide which opinion had more scientific merit, thereby putting the subject in the hot-spot of having to make a decision with incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.

A feel-good brain chemical called dopamine has been linked to everything from laziness and creativity to impulsivity and a tendency to partake in one-night stands. Now, we can add sleep regulation to that list.

When dopamine latches onto its receptor in a special part of the brain, it seems to signal the body to "wake up" by turning down levels of the sleepiness hormone melatonin, the researchers found.

The first clue to this new discovery came when researchers noticed that dopamine receptor 4, a protein on the outside of certain cells that binds to dopamine, was active in the part of the brain called pineal gland.

This gland regulates our internal clock, known as our circadian rhythm, by releasing melatonin in response to light.

Interestingly, the presence of this dopamine receptor on pineal gland cells seemed to cycle with the time of the day - the receptor numbers were higher at night and lower during the day.

SF State study suggests consumer motivation affects happiness gained from experiential purchases

Spending money on activities and events, such as concert tickets or exotic vacations, won't make you happier if you're doing it to impress others, according to findings published in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Research has shown that consumers gain greater happiness from buying life experiences rather than material possessions, but only if they choose experiences for the right reasons says the new study.

"Why you buy is just as important as what you buy," said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. "When people buy life experiences to impress others, it wipes out the well-being they receive from the purchase. That extrinsic motivation appears to undermine how the experiential purchase meets their key psychological needs."

The study builds on Howell's previous findings, which suggest that people who buy life experiences are happier because experiential purchasing helps fulfill psychological needs that are vital for human growth and well-being. These include the need to feel competent, autonomous -- or self-directed -- and connected to others.

Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of seeking serenity: the quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times.

Google "the aging brain" and you will find a largely sobering landscape of cognitive deterioration.

("Funny," said the dashing older gentleman I tried to interview for this piece. "I don't remember being absent-minded.")

But turn the kaleidoscope of our knowledge about the aging brain and a far more interesting picture emerges.