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One in every two cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers remains undiagnosed. This is the conclusion reached by a working group led by Hans-Ulrich Wittchen et al. They report their study in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109(35): 559), which is a special issue focusing on the prevalence of psychological stress in German army soldiers. In a second original article, results reported by Jens T Kowalski and colleagues show that more female soldiers contact the psychosocial support services provided by Germany's armed forces than their male colleagues (Dtsch Arztbl Int 2012; 109 (35): 559).
© Unknown
Even on the playground, our friends know us better than we know ourselves. New research has revealed that your childhood peers from grade school may be able to best predict your success as an adult.
Lisa Serbin of the Department of Psychology at Concordia University and Alexa Martin-Storey, a recent Concordia graduate and a current post-doctoral student at the University of Texas - both members of the Concordia-based Centre for Research in Human Development - recently published a study online, which reveals that childhood peer evaluation of classmate personalities can more accurately predict adulthood success than self-evaluation at that age.
"This study, known as the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, was started in 1976 by my colleagues in the Department of Psychology, Alex Schwartzman and Jane Ledingham, who is now at the University of Ottawa" says Serbin. "Over two years, Montreal students in grades 1, 4 and 7 completed peer evaluations of their classmates and rated them in terms of aggression, likeability and social withdrawal. The students also did self-evaluations."
Over the next 20 years, these children were closely followed as researchers used the exhaustive longitudinal study to track their progress into adulthood. A follow-up survey was conducted between 1999 and 2003 with nearly 700 of the participants from the initial study. The survey included measurement of adult personality traits, such as levels of neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
© Dreamstime
This research may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear, according to researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden
Thomas Ågren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain.
When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process.
In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened.
By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.
© Current Biology, DiFeliceantonio et alAn opium-like brain chemical prompts rats to gorge themselves on chocolate treats like M&Ms, new research in Current Biology finds.
The brain naturally produces opioids, or chemicals with similarities to the drug. One of these, enkephalin, induced hungry rats to pounce on chocolate treats faster the more of the chemical they produced, researchers report online today (Sept. 20) in the journal Current Biology.
When scientists dosed the rats with a big jolt of enkephalin in a brain region called the neostriatum, the rats became eating machines, downing the equivalent of a 150-pound (68 kilogram) person eating 7 to 8 pounds (3.1 to 3.5 kg) of M&Ms in an hour, said study researcher Alexandra DiFeliceantonio.
"This drug injection causes them to eat just obscene amounts of food," DiFeliceantonio, a graduate student in biopsychology at the University of Michigan, told LiveScience.
© Yahoo
Before a baby can talk, he or she relies on non-verbal cues, especially facial expressions, to communicate. Babies also mirror those cues, and in so doing, discover the emotions the cues are attached to. In a recent study published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology researchers from the University of Wisconsin scientists evaluated over 100 kids and found that that six and seven-year-old boys who had heavily used pacifiers were worse at mimicking emotions expressed by faces on a video. They also interviewed more than 600 college students and discovered that college-age men whose parents reported they had relied on pacifiers scored lower on tests measuring empathy and the ability to evaluate the moods of others. For girls and young women, the researchers found there was no difference in emotional maturity based on pacifier use.
"Females tend to be more precise both in both expressing and reading emotional cues," lead author Paula Niedenthal, PhD, tells Shine. "We don't exactly know how that occurs. One reason might be that be that society encourages girls to read emotions. They might work harder at it." She adds, "Parents talk to girls about emotional processing more than they do to boys. That's not a revolutionary statement." Since boys aren't expected to be as emotional, parents may not compensate for pacifier use by helping them learn in other ways.
© Minerva StudioRemember the telephone game where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It's been altered with each retelling. Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.
Turns out your memory is a lot like the telephone game, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.
Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. The Northwestern study is the first to show this.
"A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it," said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval."
© Ted McGrath
The result can be a situation in which beliefs do not merely harden but migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among like-minded people can ultimately produce violence.
The remedy for easing such polarization, here and abroad, may seem straightforward: provide balanced information to people of all sides. Surely, we might speculate, such information will correct falsehoods and promote mutual understanding. This, of course, has been a hope of countless dedicated journalists and public officials.
Unfortunately, evidence suggests that balanced presentations - in which competing arguments or positions are laid out side by side - may not help. At least when people begin with firmly held convictions, such an approach is likely to increase polarization rather than reduce it.
Indeed, that's what a number of academic studies done over the last three decades have found. Such studies typically proceed in three stages. First, the experimenters assemble a group of people who have clear views on some controversial issue (such as capital punishment or sexual orientation). Second, the study subjects are provided with plausible arguments on both sides of the issue. And finally, the researchers test how attitudes have shifted as a result of exposure to balanced presentations.
© CorbisResearch shows human instinct may be to help each other.
Contrary to popular and pessimistic thought, the discovery suggests that, by default, our gut instincts lead us to be more helpful than selfish. That may explain why door-knocking and phone solicitations, which demand immediate responses, tend to bring in bigger donations than statistics-laden e-mail messages or direct mail, which puts people in a rational frame of mind and allows them to think for a while before deciding whether to give.
Likewise, people who commit heroic acts -- like the man who jumped onto New York City subway tracks in front of an oncoming train to save a young man having a seizure five years ago -- often make split-second decisions to do the altruistic thing.
"If you look at testimony of a lot of people like that describing their decisions, you can see they are heavily weighted towards intuitive thinking," said David Rand, a behavior scientist at Yale who conducted the new study while at Harvard. "People say, 'I didn't think about it. I just did it.'"
In a 2011 best-selling book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel-Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman argued that a lot of decision-making comes out of a tension between two types of brain processes. On the one hand, we have quick and intuitive thoughts, which are often emotional. The other mode is slower, allowing for more controlled and calculated thinking.
Until now, Rand said, researchers had yet to combine the two kinds of thought processes in a way that explained how people actually behaved.
© Allen Institute for Brain ScienceA 3D rendering showing the expression a single gene across the human brain, revealing areas with higher (red) and lower (blue) expression.
The scientists have compiled high-resolution maps of genetic activity in the adult human brain based on the complete brains of two men as well as a hemisphere from a third man's brain, all of the tissue healthy when the men died. The researchers are making their data freely accessible online to aid in studies of normal and abnormal human brain function.
"By themselves these data do not hold all of the answers for understanding how the brain works or what are the genetic underpinnings of disease," researcher Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, told LiveScience.
"However, we hope they serve as a catalyst in human brain research for understanding the brain's complex chemistry and cellular makeup, what goes awry in disease, and how best to design and test treatments for disease."
Identifying where and when genes are active or expressed within the brain is a titanic endeavor. In fact, ever since the human genome was completely sequenced nearly a decade ago, researchers have strived to identify what exactly each gene might do, with great interest focused on any genes related to the brain.
The main challenge when it comes to understanding the human brain is the fact that it is the most powerful computer known. It consists of approximately 100 billion neurons with roughly 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) connections wiring these cells together, and each connection or synapse typically fires about 10 times per second.
© Unknown
"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."
Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.
"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language - "the most musical aspects of speech."
