Survey asked 7,000 people whether they watched online videos of cute cats.
Survey asked 7,000 people whether they watched online videos of cute cats.
Watching cute videos of cats online can boost energy and positive emotions, a new study finds.
Not only that, but they can decrease negative emotions like sadness, annoyance and anxiety.
The survey asked almost 7,000 people about any cat videos they viewed and their moods.
Dr Jessica Gall Myrick, the study’s author, explained the results:
“Even if they are watching cat videos on YouTube to procrastinate or while they should be working, the emotional pay-off may actually help people take on tough tasks afterward.”
The pleasure people gained from watching the videos outweighed any guilt they felt about procrastinating, the study found.
The survey also revealed that:
36% were exclusively ‘cat people’, while 60% liked both cats and dogs.
Shy, agreeable people were the most likely to watch cat videos.
Dr Myrick is aware some might scoff at the research topic.
She said:
“Some people may think watching online cat videos isn’t a serious enough topic for academic research, but the fact is that it’s one of the most popular uses of the Internet today.
If we want to better understand the effects the Internet may have on us as individuals and on society, then researchers can’t ignore Internet cats anymore.
We all have watched a cat video online, but there is really little empirical work done on why so many of us do this, or what effects it might have on us.
As a media researcher and online cat video viewer, I felt compelled to gather some data about this pop culture phenomenon.”
The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour (Myrick, 2015).
Part 1: Psych tips for how to promote change in yourself.
Part 1: Psych tips for how to promote change in yourself.
Interested in a psychological tune-up — either for yourself or someone else?
Here are 8 tips from recent psych studies covered here on PsyBlog.
The first four tips below are about how to promote change in yourself.
Click through to page 2 to find out how to change other people (link at the bottom).
1. Self-affirmation opens the mind to change
When given advice about how to change, people are often automatically defensive, trying to justify their current behaviour.
A very simple exercise — self-affirmation — can open up people’s minds to behaviour change.
A self-affirmation exercise simply involves thinking about what’s important to you — it could be family, work, religion or anything that has particular meaning.
When people feel self-affirmed, they find it easier to accept the possibility of change.
2. The growth mindset
Believing it’s possible to grow and change is a vital step in promoting change.
Read about this study in which researchers found that adolescents who believe people can change cope better with the challenges of attending high school.
In addition the researchers found that those who more strongly endorsed the idea that people can change also reported:
less stress,
lower anxiety,
feeling better about themselves,
and they were also in better physical health.
Psychologists call this a ‘growth mindset’.
3. Can your personality really change?
For many years personality psychologists gave the same answer as any pessimist: no, people’s personalities don’t change.
In the last 15 years, though, this view has shifted.
Instead of personality being set in stone at 30, now evidence is emerging that there is some change.
This study confirmed that people’s personalities do change, even over a two-year period.
Indeed the degree of personality change in those two years was equivalent to shifts in other demographic variables such as marital status, employment and income.
4. Just say ‘stop’
Here’s a little habit-change tip…
It may be possible to deliberately ‘forget’ long-standing habits, according to recent experiments carried out at Regensburg University in Germany.
They found that merely telling yourself to forget about a habit after performing it may prove helpful.
Two intense emotions that are linked to massive increase in heart attack risk.
Two intense emotions that are linked to massive increase in heart attack risk.
The risk of a heart attack increases by at least 8.5 times in the two hours after the intense emotions of anger and anxiety, a new study finds.
The effect of an anxiety attack is even more pronounced, the study found, increasing the chances of having a heart attack by 9.5 times.
The study’s lead author, Dr Thomas Buckley, said:
“Our findings confirm what has been suggested in prior studies and anecdotal evidence, even in films — that episodes of intense anger can act as a trigger for a heart attack.
The data shows that the higher risk of a heart attack isn’t necessarily just while you’re angry — it lasts for two hours after the outburst.”
Intense anger was classified in the study as at 5 or above on a scale of 1 to 7.
A score of five refers to ‘very angry, body tense, clenching fists or teeth, ready to burst’, while 7 means ‘enraged, out of control, throwing objects’.
Dr Buckley said:
“The triggers for these burst of intense anger were associated with arguments with family members (29 per cent), argument with others (42 per cent), work anger (14 per cent) and driving anger (14 per cent).
The data also revealed that episodes of anxiety can also make you more likely to have heart attack.
High levels of anxiety were associated with a 9.5 fold increased risk of triggering a heart attack in the two hours after the anxiety episode.
Increased risk following intense anger or anxiety is most likely due to increased heart rate, blood pressure, tightening of blood vessels and increased clotting, all associated with triggering heart attacks.”
The researchers interviewed 313 patients who had had heart attacks about any intense emotions in the previous two days.
The results are published in the European Heart Journal: Acute Cardiovascular Care (Tofler et al., 2015).
Dr Buckley cautioned that the absolute risk of suffering a heart attack from intense emotions is low:
“Although the incidence of anger-triggered heart attacks is around 2%, of the sample, those people were 8.5 times more likely to have a heart attack within two hours of the emotional episode.
So while the absolute risk of any one episode triggering a heart attack is low, this data demonstrates that the danger is very present.”
Avoid intense emotions
Professor Geoffrey Tofler, the study’s lead author, said that avoiding intense emotions was particularly important for those at risk:
“Potential preventive approaches may be stress reduction training to reduce the frequency and intensity of episodes of anger, or avoiding activities that usually prompt such intense reactions, for instance, avoiding an angry confrontation or activity that provokes intense anxiety.
Additionally, improving general health by minimising other risk factors, such as hypertension, high cholesterol or smoking would also lower risk.
For those at high risk, it is possible that medication such as beta-blockers and aspirin taken at the time of a trigger may interrupt the link between the stressor and the heart attack.
We are currently recruiting subjects for a study examining this option.”
The dietary supplements that are most effective for treating anxiety.
The three dietary supplements that are most effective for treating anxiety.
Dietary supplements which contain passionflower, kava or combinations of L-lysine and L-arginine can help reduce anxiety, according to a review published in the Nutrition Journal.
The supplements generally had mild to moderate effects without producing any serious side-effects.
The review included results from 24 separate studies with over 2,000 participants.
The researchers also concluded that St John’s Wort and magnesium were not effective in treating anxiety (Lakhan & Vieira, 2010).
Dr Shaheen Lakhan, the study’s first author, said:
“Our review and summary of the literature on herbal remedies and dietary supplements for anxiety should aid mental health practitioners in advising their patients and provide insight for future research in this field.
We found mixed results — while passionflower or kava and L-lysine and L-arginine appeared to be effective, St John’s Wort and magnesium supplements were not.”
Of the supplements included, kava has been the most extensively studied.
The kava plant is originally from the western Pacific and its roots have traditionally been used to make a drink with anaesthetic and sedative effects.
The researchers found that taking kava on its own…
“… significantly reduced anxiety symptoms in a variety of patient types.
This provides good evidence for the use of kava in patients with GAD, non-psychotic anxiety and other anxiety-related disorders.” (Lakhan & Vieira, 2010).
Passionflower was originally discovered in Peru in 1569.
Nowadays it is often found in supplements in combination with kava and other ingredients.
On its own, though, the researchers found:
“All three of these studies showed a positive benefit for treatment with passionflower, providing good evidence of its effectiveness as an anxiolytic agent [anti-anxiety].
However, since each of these studies was conducted in a different patient type, more research is needed to prove its efficacy in each indication.”
Finally, L-lysine and L-arginine are essential amino acids which can reduce the hormonal stress response.
“Combination nutritional supplements containing lysine or magnesium also appear to hold promise as treatments for anxiety symptoms and disorders.
Both RCTs of L-lysine and L-arginine combinations demonstrated positive results, providing good but limited evidence of its usefulness as a treatment for anxiety.”
[Note: Kava is legal in the US and Canada and many other places, but not in the UK. It is has been linked to liver problems. In some people passionflower can cause drowsiness and confusion. As always, articles on PsyBlog do not constitute medical advice.]
How depression and anxiety are connected to bacteria in the gut.
How depression and anxiety are connected to bacteria in the gut.
Consuming a prebiotic can have an anti-anxiety effect, the first ever human study of its kind has found.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have discovered that a prebiotic can reduce levels of anxiety in a clinical trial.
Like foods containing probiotic bacteria, prebiotics are functional foods: they have benefits beyond their purely nutritional value.
While prebiotics are non-digestible, they provide sustenance for healthy probiotic bacteria in the gut.
The study, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, involved 45 women taking either a prebiotic or a placebo for 3 weeks (Schmidt et al., 2014).
The results showed that compared with a control group, those taking the prebiotic had a reduced tendency to pay attention to negative information, which is a key component of anxiety and depression.
Women who took the prebiotic also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has been connected to anxiety and depression.
The positive influence of the prebiotic was similar to that obtained by taking existing anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drugs.
Dr Phil Burnet, who led the study, said:
“The results of these trials add to the expanding body of knowledge on microbiome-behaviour and microbiome-endocrine interactions.
The study makes an important contribution to the existing clinical evidence linking the gut and its microbiota to brain function.”
The gut-brain link
A previous study by researchers at UCLA was the first to find a link between human brain function and bacteria ingested in food (Tillisch et al., 2013).
Dr. Kirsten Tillisch, the first author of that study, said:
“Many of us have a container of yogurt in our refrigerator that we may eat for enjoyment, for calcium or because we think it might help our health in other ways.
Our findings indicate that some of the contents of yogurt may actually change the way our brain responds to the environment.
When we consider the implications of this work, the old sayings ‘you are what you eat’ and ‘gut feelings’ take on new meaning.”
Dr. Tillisch concluded:
“Time and time again, we hear from patients that they never felt depressed or anxious until they started experiencing problems with their gut.
Our study shows that the gut-brain connection is a two-way street.”
This activity has a vital role to play in children’s psychological health.
This activity has a vital role to play in children’s psychological health.
Children who study the piano or violin might also find it easier to control their emotions, focus their attention and reduce their anxiety.
Along with parents, teachers and friends, learning a musical instrument has a vital role to play in children’s psychological health, the largest study of its kind to date argues.
Researchers at the Vermont Center for Children made musical training available to 232 youths between the ages of 6- and 18-years-old.
Their brains were also scanned to see how the cortex changed in size, over up to six years.
The thickness of the cortex — the brain’s outer layer — in different regions has already been linked to various psychological problems, such as lack of attention, high levels of aggression or depression.
The results, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, showed changes in the motor areas as expected, but also more wide-ranging benefits of musical training:
“Playing a musical instrument was associated with more rapid cortical thickness maturation within areas implicated in motor planning and coordination, visuospatial ability, and emotion and impulse regulation.” (Hudziak et al., 2014)
Particularly important changes in the cortex suggested improved…
“…executive functioning, including working memory, attentional control, as well as organization and planning for the future.”
While the standard approach to psychological problems is often to medicate, the study’s first author, Professor James Hudziak, thinks there is a better way:
“We treat things that result from negative things, but we never try to use positive things as treatment.”
Given the findings of these and other similar studies, it’s all the more surprising that three-quarters of all high school students in the US rarely or never take music or art lessons.
The study’s authors write:
“Such statistics, when taken in the context of our present neuroimaging results underscore the vital importance of finding new and innovative ways to make music training more widely available to youths, beginning in childhood.”
New study reveals anxiety’s influence on the chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
New study reveals anxiety’s influence on the chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
People who suffer from moderate to severe anxiety have double the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a new study finds.
Canadian researchers examined 376 people between the ages of 55 and 91 with ‘mild cognitive impairment’, and their chances of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease (Mah et al., 2014).
Participants were followed over three years and their progress was monitored every six months.
The results showed that for people with mild anxiety symptoms, the chances of developing Alzheimer’s increased by 33%, for those with moderate anxiety it was 78% and for those with severe anxiety, the risk increased by 135%.
While depression has already been identified as a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s, this is the first study to implicate anxiety separately.
People with mild cognitive impairment — which can turn into dementia — are regularly screened for depression, but not for anxiety.
Dr. Linda Mah, who led the study, said:
“Our findings suggest that clinicians should routinely screen for anxiety in people who have memory problems because anxiety signals that these people are at greater risk for developing Alzheimer’s.”
Greater levels of anxiety were also linked to shrinkage in areas of the brain that are crucial for the formation of memories (the medial temporal lobe regions).
Dr Mah speculated that treating the anxiety might also reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s:
“While there is no published evidence to demonstrate whether drug treatments used in psychiatry for treating anxiety would be helpful in managing anxiety symptoms in people with mild cognitive impairment or in reducing their risk of conversion to Alzheimer’s, we think that at the very least behavioural stress management programs could be recommended.
In particular, there has been research on the use of mindfulness-based stress reduction in treating anxiety and other psychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s –and this is showing promise.”
Alzheimer’s study finds that one ounce (30g) of this per day was enough to decrease anxiety and boost memory and learning.
Alzheimer’s study finds that one ounce (30g) of this per day was enough to decrease anxiety and boost memory and learning.
A new study finds that a diet which includes walnuts may delay the onset, progression and even the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The animal study, which is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, found that a walnut-rich diet increased memory, learning skills and even reduced anxiety in mice (Chauhan et al., 2014).
The research was inspired by previous findings about the protective effects of walnuts on cognition.
In the study, mice that had been genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s were fed diets supplemented with either 6% or 9% walnuts.
In humans this is equivalent to eating around 1 ounce (6%) or 1.5 ounces (9%) per day (30g and 45g resepectively).
After a year, the mice that were fed walnuts — along with a comparison group that had a walnut-free diet — were given a series of mouse-style cognitive tests.
They had to solve mazes, do tests which involved learning and gaining motor skills.
Both groups of mice fed walnuts showed improvements in learning ability, memory, anxiety and motor development compared to the control group.
The effects of the walnuts may be down to the high antioxidant content of walnuts, which is greater than other types of nuts.
Dr. Abha Chauhan, who led the study, said:
“These findings are very promising and help lay the groundwork for future human studies on walnuts and Alzheimer’s disease — a disease for which there is no known cure.
Our study adds to the growing body of research that demonstrates the protective effects of walnuts on cognitive functioning.”
Currently, one person is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every 67 seconds in the United States.
By 2050 the number of people over 65 with the disease may have tripled, up to 16 million.
The total cost of the disease to the healthcare system is thought to be $214 billion.
At the emotional level, reading literary fiction has been shown to increase our ‘theory of mind’: our ability to simulate the minds of others and empathise with them (Kidd & Castano, 2013).
Now, here is philosopher and popular author Alain de Botton, exploring four psychological benefits of reading.
Here is an edited transcript of the video:
“1. It saves you time
Of course, it looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is ultimately the greatest time-saver, for it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
Literature is the greatest ‘reality simulator’, a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you could ever directly witness.
It lets you – safely: that’s crucial – see what it’s like to get divorced.
Or kill someone and feel remorseful.
Or chuck in your job and take off to the desert.
Or make a terrible mistake while leading your country.
It lets you speed up time: in order to see the arc of a life from childhood old age.
It gives you the keys to the palace, and to countless bedrooms, so you can assess your life in relation to that of others.
2. It makes you nicer
Literature performs the basic magic of showing us what things look like from someone else’s point of view.
It allows us to consider the consequences of our actions on others in a way we otherwise wouldn’t.
And it shows us examples of kindly, generous, sympathetic people.
Literature typically stands opposed to the dominant value system, the one that rewards money and power.
Writers are on the other side, they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but that can’t afford airtime in a commercialised, status-conscious and cynical world.
3. It’s a cure for loneliness
We are weirder than we’re allowed to admit.
We often can’t say what’s really on our minds.
But in books, we find descriptions of who we genuinely are and what events are actually like, described with an honesty quite different from what ordinary conversation allows for.
In the best books it’s as if the writer knows us better than we know ourselves.
They find the words to describe the fragile, weird, special experiences of our inner lives: the light on a summer morning, the anxiety we felt at the gathering, the sensations of a first kiss, the envy when a friend told us of their new business, the longing we experienced on the train, looking at the profile of another passenger we never dare to speak to.
Writers open our hearts and minds – and give us maps to our own selves so that we can travel in them more reliably and with less of a feeling of paranoia and persecution.
4. It prepares you for failure
All of our lives, one of our greatest fears is of failing, of messing up…
Every day, the media takes us into stories of failure.
Interestingly, a lot of literature is also about failure.
In one way or another, a great many novels, plays and poems are about people who’ve messed up, people who slept with mum by mistake, who let down their partner, or who died after running up some debts on shopping sprees.
If the media got to them, they’d make mincemeat out of them.
But great books don’t judge as harshly or as one-dimensionally as the media.
They evoke pity for the hero and fear for ourselves based on a new sense of how near we all are to destroying our own lives.
[…]
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness and sanity.”
2. Why some people only need five hours’ sleep a night
While most people can get by with less than six hours sleep, the majority will suffer physically and psychologically, especially if sleep deprived over the long-term.
However, a gene mutation which means a person can function normally with only five hours’ sleep a night has been identified by a new study of 100 pairs of twins.
Those carrying the target gene variant slept, on average, for five hours, which was one hour shorter than their twins without the gene.
When the twins were given cognitive tests after sleep deprivation, those with the gene variant did better, making 40% fewer errors.
Not only that, but the carriers recovered more quickly from sleep deprivation, only requiring 8 hours recovery sleep, compared with their twins who needed 9.5 hours.
Just believing that you’ve slept better than you really have is enough to boost cognitive performance the next day.
The findings comes from a study of 164 people who were given a lecture on how important sleep quality is and told they would be given a new test of how well they had slept the previous night.
After the test, some were told they’d slept well the previous night, others that they’d slept badly.
This had no relationship to how they had actually slept and were just made up to try and convince one group they’d slept better than the other.
Those told they’d slept better scored higher on tests of attention and memory than those told they’d slept poorly.
How you slept last night isn’t just about how you actually slept, it’s also about how you think you slept.
This study suggests that tweaking your mindset a little could be enough to boost your performance.
Failing to get enough sleep causes low mood in teenagers, along with worse health and poor learning.
But it’s not all down to late night video gaming or TV: the part of the brain which regulates the sleep-wake cycle — the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus — changes in puberty.
Teenage brains also secrete less melatonin so their ‘sleep drive’ reduces.
As a result, being forced to rise the next day at 6am for school or college means teens find it hard to get the 8 to 10 hours sleep that they need.
Although hormonal changes are partly to blame for teenage angst, being short of sleep significantly contributes to lack of motivation and poor mood.
We all know that lack of sleep affects our memory, along with other cognitive abilities.
But now new research shows that not getting enough sleep increases the chances your mind will actually create false memories.
In the study, one group of participants were allowed to get a full nights’ sleep, while another had to stay up all night.
In the morning they were given a load of information about a crime — some true, some false — that had been committed.
The results showed that those who’d missed out on their sleep were the most likely to regurgitate the false information, rather than remembering the ‘true’ crime-scene photos they’d been shown moments beforehand.
The lack of sleep had messed with their heads to the extent that all the evidence — right and wrong — had got mixed up.
A new study has found evidence for a long-suspected danger of sleeping pills: an increased risk of death.
The large study looked at data from over 100,000 patients who had been to their family doctors across seven years.
It found that taking sleeping pills, like zolpidem/Ambien, doubled the risk of death.
Professor Scott Weich, who led the study, said:
“That’s not to say that they cannot be effective.
But particularly due to their addictive potential we need to make sure that we help patients to spend as little time on them as possible and that we consider other options, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, to help them to overcome anxiety or sleep problems.”
9. Sleep drunkenness disorder affects one in seven
As many as one in seven people may be affected by ‘sleep drunkenness disorder’ soon after they’ve woken up or during the morning.
Sleep drunkenness disorder involves severe confusion upon wakening — way more than just the usual morning grogginess — and/or inappropriate behaviour: things like answering the phone instead of turning off the alarm.
Confused awakenings can happen to people when very short of sleep or jet-lagged, but are regular occurrences for those with the disorder.
Researchers have found that 15% of people had experienced at least one episode of sleep drunkenness in the last year.
People who realise they are in a dream while they are dreaming — a lucid dream — have better problem-solving abilities, new research finds.
This may be because the ability to step outside a dream after noticing it doesn’t make sense reflects a higher level of insight.
Around 82% of people are thought to have experienced a lucid dream in their life, while the number experiencing a lucid dream at least once a month may be as high as 37%.
Dr Patrick Bourke, who led the study, said:
“It is believed that for dreamers to become lucid while asleep, they must see past the overwhelming reality of their dream state, and recognise that they are dreaming.
The same cognitive ability was found to be demonstrated while awake by a person’s ability to think in a different way when it comes to solving problems.”
