Anxiety Symptoms, Types, Causes and Treatments

Loving Touch is Critical for Premature Infants

The psychological benefits to premature babies of receiving loving touch can be measured 10 years later.

Like many mammals, human babies need maternal contact from birth to help both their physical and mental development.

Usually, though, when infants are born prematurely, they are mostly kept in an incubator, away from this vital human contact.

A new study, published in Biological Psychiatry, has followed 73 premature infants who were given a ‘kangaroo care’ intervention (Feldman et al., 2014).

This simply involves the mother holding her baby close to her skin for one hour a day over two weeks. As long as the infant is medically stable, this is perfectly safe.

Better cognitive development

The infants receiving kangaroo care were compared with 73 matched infants who followed the usual procedure of being mostly kept in incubators.

The results of the study showed that the benefits for both mothers and children from such a simple intervention were remarkable:

Mothers showed more sensitivity and more maternal behaviour towards their children.
Mothers had reduced anxiety.
Children had stronger cognitive and executive skills.
Children slept better.
Children had a lower stress response.

The effects on the child were still evident ten years later.

Profound implications

This is the first ever study to show the long-term benefits of skin-to-skin contact for infants born prematurely.

John Krystal, Biological Psychiatry’s editor said:

“This study reminds us once again of the profound long-term consequences of maternal contact. The enhanced level of stimulation provided by this contact seems to positively influence the development of the brain and to deepen the relationship between mother and child.”

The study’s first author, Ruth Feldman, added:

“Kangaroo Care is an easy-to-apply intervention with minimal cost and its multi-dimensional long-term impact on child development calls to integrate this intervention in the care-practices of premature infants across the world.”

Kangaroo care was developed in Bogota, Colombia were the shortage of incubators forced doctors to improvise.

It seems that sometimes it takes a deprived environment to remind us of a fundamental truth: a baby needs its mother, a premature baby even more so.

Image credit: Jim Lynch.

Meditation is an Effective Treatment for Depression, Anxiety and Pain

Data from 47 different clinical trials finds meditation is as effective as antidepressants.

A medical journal review has found that just 30 minutes daily meditation can improve the symptoms of depression, anxiety and pain.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, included studies with a total of 3,515 participants (Goyal et al., 2014).

All of the research involved active control groups so it was possible to discount the placebo effect.

The placebo effect occurs when people expect to get better–sometimes simply as a result of being in a study–and so they do.

Studies with active control groups, though, can help discount the placebo effect as the treatment can be compared with a group who have similar expectations.

Meditation is more than relaxation

Participants in this review had had at least 4 hours of instruction in a form of meditation, such as mindfulness or mantra-based programs.

Typically, though, participants were given 2.5 hours instruction per week over 8 weeks.

Many of the participants also had physical problems, like lower back pain, heart disease and insomnia, which were likely heavily involved in their depression and/or anxiety.

The control groups contained matched participants who did things that were similar to meditation, but without actually being meditation.

For example, people in the control group in some of the studies performed progressive muscle relaxation. This has some of the physical requirements of meditation–i.e. you’re relaxed–but doesn’t involve the cognitive aspect.

Madhav Goyal M.D. explained:

“A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing. But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.”

The meditation conditions, though, consistently outperformed the control conditions, suggesting meditation is effective.

And, when the researchers compared the magnitude of the gains with those taking medications, the effectiveness was similar.

No side-effects

On top of these findings for depression and anxiety, the review also found that meditation was an effective treatment for those experiencing pain.

When you consider that meditation has no side-effects in comparison to many medications, it starts to look even better.

→ Read on: Meditation Benefits: 10 Ways It Helps Your Mind

→ 10 Signs of Anxiety Everyone Should Know.

Image credit: c_liecht

High Emotional Intelligence Dramatically Improves Decision-Making

High emotional intelligence is about knowing which emotions are relevant.

A new study finds that people with high emotional intelligence make smarter decisions because they aren’t swayed by their current emotional state.

The emotions can provide very useful information, but sometimes they are not related to the decisions we are trying to make.

Being able to tell one from the other is part of what constitutes emotional intelligence.

Stéphane Côté, the co-author of a new article published in Psychological Science explained:

“People are driving and it’s frustrating. They get to work and the emotions they felt in their car influences what they do in their offices. Or they invest money based on emotions that stem from things unrelated to their investments.”

Yip and Côté (2013) ran two experiments to test how different people deal with spurious emotional states that are not related to the decision at hand.

In one, participants were made to feel anxious by being asked to prepare an impromptu speech. Then they were asked whether they wanted to sign up to a flu clinic.

The results showed that people with higher emotional intelligence were more aware that the experimentally-induced anxiety they felt was not related to the decision about the flu clinic.

While only 7% of those of low emotional intelligence signed up for the flu clinic, fully 66% of those with higher emotional intelligence did so.

This was in comparison to around a 50% take-up rate for the flu clinic in both groups who hadn’t been made anxious.

A second experiment confirmed these findings.

Crucially, great decision-making is not about eliminating all emotions: they are a vital source of information.

Those with high levels of emotional intelligence are more likely to ignore those emotions that have nothing to do with their decision.

For those who find it problematic making sense of their emotions, the easiest solution is simply stated (although not always easy to execute): wait until later.

Image credit: Saad Faruque

Fearful ‘Memories’ Passed Between Generations Through Genetic Code

New study on mice suggests parents’ fears can be passed on to their grandchildren.

A frankly mind-blowing new study suggests traumatic events that happen to a parent could be passed down through their genes onto their children.

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, was carried out on mice, which were conditioned to become afraid of a particular smell: in fact a smell not unlike cherry blossom (Dias & Ressler, 2013).

Soon the mice began to shudder in its presence.

When their offspring were born and tested, they were also shown to be afraid of the cherry blossom smell, despite never having been exposed to it before.

Even the grandchildren showed the fearful response. So the fearful response towards this smell was passed down two generations.

Epigenetics

The reason this study is so potentially exciting is that evolution is thought to occur mostly through random genetic mutations across many generations.

However, if behaviour could be inherited in this way, it might suggest another route by which creatures could have changed and adapted.

The mechanism for the transmission of this response across generations appears to be through the mice’s sperm.

Although the mice’s DNA sequence remained unchanged, a process is thought to have occurred that changes the way these genes are expressed (DNA methylation).

This is a highly controversial idea and many scientists are skeptical about whether these results can really be true.

But, if they did hold in humans, it could help explain how conditions like phobias, alcoholism or anxiety could affect later generations.

A geneticist at UCL, Professor Marcus Pembrey, commented:

“It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously. I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”

→ Continue reading: Memory and Recall: 10 Amazing Facts You Should Know

Image credit: DeeAshley

10 Smart Studies that Help Unlock the Mysteries of Intelligence

Reveals the links between intelligence and sleep, mental illness, politics, atheism, happiness and more…

The benefits of being smart are hardly a mystery.

Clever people have all kinds of advantages in life: they have better educations, better jobs, earn more and even live longer.

Naturally, then, if you could set your child’s intelligence, you’d probably opt for smart (although maybe not too smart).

Still, being smart is more of a mixed blessing than many imagine.

Here are ten studies that provide vital insights into the psychology of intelligence.

1. The myth of a single intelligence

Some have argued that the idea of intelligence as a single thing is a myth.

According to a recent study of over 100,000 participants, IQ is actually made up of three components (Hampshire et al., 2012).

Analysing the results, they found that IQ split up into short-term memory, reasoning and a verbal component.

In other words: some people could have strong short-term memories but be poor reasoners. Or: some people could be good with language but have poor short-term memory.

Your overall intelligence is a result of how these three subsystems work–and they might not all be at the same level.

2. Intelligence linked to mental illness

Being intelligent isn’t all gravy.

Studies now suggest a link between intelligence and mental illness that may go back into our evolutionary past.

The increased intelligence of Homo sapiens was originally a result of gene mutations. The cost of these gene mutations, however, may have been an increase in mental illness (Nithianantharajah et al., 2012).

The human brain may be the most advanced and complicated object in the universe, but some people pay a heavy price for this gift.

3. Smarts can transcend poor start in life

It’s well-known that being smart helps you get ahead, but what about if you’re smart and disadvantaged? Will your background keep you from achieving?

A study of 12,868 Americans found that while a better background helped people start off with a better job, it was smarts that helped them progress from there (Ganzach, 2011).

Yoav Ganzach explained:

“Your family can help you launch your career and you do get an advantage, but it doesn’t help you progress. And once you start working, you can go wherever your abilities take you.”

4. Clever but worried

They say that ignorance is bliss, and ‘they’ may well be on to something.

That’s because people of high intelligence are more prone to anxiety than those of moderate intelligence.

Indeed, anxiety may have co-evolved with intelligence–worrying may have given early humans a survival benefit in the ancient past (Coplan et al., 2012).

It’s just a pity that it’s left intelligent people with higher levels of anxiety disorders.

5. New ideas

Set against the higher levels of mental illness and anxiety, is the fact that more intelligent people are more likely to come up with new ideas.

Historically, that might mean rejecting superstition and finding new ways of organising society.

One study argues that this explains why more intelligent people are more likely to be atheists and more likely to be politically liberal (Kanazawa et al., 2010).

This study found that young adults who described themselves as ‘very conservative’ had an average IQ of 95, while those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’ had an average IQ of 106.

6. Motivation can trump IQ

Although intelligence can be a wonderful asset to have, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Take maths, that bastion of nerd achievement. It’s true that being intelligent will give you a good start, but for real achievement you’ve got to be motivated.

A German study of 3,520 children found that after they got started at maths, their intelligence became less important than their motivation to succeed and how much they studied (Murayama et al., 2012).

7. Intelligence is in the eyes

Literally, that is.

A study by Shalev et al. (2013) has found that people who have wider blood vessels at back of the eye have higher levels of intelligence.

This is because retinal blood vessels are similar to those in the brain. So, wider blood vessels here may mean a better supply of oxygen to the brain.

This finding could even be important in diagnosing and treating brain diseases:

“Increasing knowledge about retinal vessels may enable scientists to develop better diagnosis and treatments to increase the levels of oxygen into the brain and by that, to prevent age-related worsening of cognitive abilities.” Shalev et al. (2013)

8. The intelligent sleep later

This is no longer a feeble excuse for hitting snooze.

Evidence has now been published that people who are more intelligent tend to go to bed later and get up later (Kanazawa & Perina, 2009).

The study examined the sleep habits of 20,745 adolescent Americans and found that on a weekday the ‘very dull’ went to bed at an average of 11:41 and woke up at 7:20.

In contrast, the ‘very bright’ went to bed at 12:29 and got up at 7:52. At the weekend the differences were even more pronounced.

We don’t know the nature of the connection from this study, but perhaps bright people find it more difficult to get to sleep because of all the worrying they’re doing.

9. Are smart people less racist?

Well, smart people certainly sound less racist. They know what they are supposed to think and say.

But, when they are tested on actual political policies, their views turn out not to be as enlightened as they might like.

These findings are based on a study by Geoffrey Wodtke, who explained:

“…although nearly all whites with advanced cognitive abilities say that ‘whites have no right to segregate their neighborhoods,’ nearly half of this group remains content to allow prejudicial real estate practices to continue unencumbered by open housing laws.”

So it seems smart people are better at concealing their views.

10. Smarter societies are happier

Are smarter people happier? Overall, probably not.

Studies which have looked for a connection between how happy people feel and how intelligent they are have mostly found no connection (e.g. Veenhoven & Choi, 2012).

However, when you look across nations, those that are, on average, smarter, are also happier.

So being smart might not benefit people’s happiness individually, but it may help contribute to everyone’s happiness.

Image credit: Kris Kesiak

Teen Myth: Marijuana is a ‘Safe Drug’

New research challenges the common teenage view that marijuana is a ‘safe drug’ in comparison to alcohol and tobacco.

Especially among teens, there is perception that, in comparison to ‘dangerous’ legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is relatively safe.

Surveys suggest that one-third of high school seniors have tried pot in the last year and less than half of 17-year-olds believe the drug is harmful.

A new review of the evidence, however, to be published in Neuropharmacology, suggests the drug may have harmful consequences for the growing adolescent brain.

Hurd et al. (2013) reviewed data from more than 120 studies to examine the relationship between marijuana use and the teenage brain.

They find that marijuana may be harmful for a particular type of vulnerable adolescent, possibly leading to behavioural problems and addiction.

One of the study’s authors, Didier Jutras-Aswad explained:

“It is now clear from the scientific data that cannabis is not harmless to the adolescent brain, specifically those who are most vulnerable from a genetic or psychological standpoint. Identifying these vulnerable adolescents, including through genetic or psychological screening, may be critical for prevention and early intervention of addiction and psychiatric disorders related to cannabis use.”

While the research on the long-term effects of marijuana use, especially in vulnerable populations, is still relatively young, the warning signs are mounting:

A study of 1,037 individuals followed from birth found that persistent cannabis use was associated with cognitive decline over the years. More worryingly these problems continued even after drug use ceased (Meier et al., 2012).
A review of many studies on marijuana use has found that it can damage the encoding, storage, manipulation and retrieval mechanisms of memory (Solowij & Battisti, 2008).

Teenagers should be aware that, for those with particular vulnerabilities, like neuroticism and anxiety, marijuana is not as harmless as many assume.

Image credit: miggslives

Psychology in Brief: 6 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week (5 July 2013)

Make kids eat veg–How to be happy–Women sidestep maths stereotypes–Exercise protects brain from stress–The secrecy heuristic–Creative power of death.

Six things we didn’t know last week from the world of psychology:

1. Make kids eat veg

The answer to getting kids to eat more veg, according to this study, is to have them read specially designed books on nutrition:

“These children […] more than doubled their voluntary intake of vegetables during snack time after the three-month intervention, whereas the amount that the control group ate stayed about the same.”

The books even outperformed more traditional approaches:

“When the conceptual program was pitted against a more conventional teaching strategy focused on the enjoyment of healthy eating and trying new foods, the results showed that both interventions led to increased vegetable consumption. Yet, the children in the conceptual program showed more knowledge about nutrition and a greater overall increase in vegetable consumption.”

2. How to be happy

What can we do to make ourselves happier? Some standard answers to this age-old question are in this BBC article which rounds up research from the World Happiness Database. Here are a few of the more eye-catching facts:

Men tend to be happier in a society where women enjoy greater equality.
Being considered good looking increases men’s happiness more than it does women’s.
You tend to be happier if you think you’re good looking, rather than if you actually, objectively speaking, are.
Having children lowers your happiness levels, but your happiness increases when they grow up and leave home.

For a more nuanced response, check out this Psychology Today article which praises being curious, finding meaning, celebrating success, taking risks and even embracing negative emotions:

“Happy, flourishing people don’t hide from negative emotions. They acknowledge that life is full of disappointments and confront them head on, often using feelings of anger effectively to stick up for themselves or those of guilt as motivation to change their own behavior. This nimble mental shifting between pleasure and pain, the ability to modify behavior to match a situation’s demands, is known as psychological flexibility.”

3. Women sidestep maths stereotypes

Neat research reported by the BPS Research Digest suggests women can get better at maths by pretending to be someone else. It’s all about sidestepping the stereotype that women are worse then men at maths:

“Overall, men outperformed women on the maths task. But women who took the test under someone else’s name, be it male or female, performed better than women who performed under their own name, and they did just as well as the men. The effect was stronger for women who cared more about maths.”

It would be interesting to see if the same effect held true for other types of stereotypes as well. Also, can we avoid our bugbears by pretending to be someone else?

4. Exercise protects brain from stress

A study on mice suggest another advantage of exercise: it makes the brain more resilient to stress. When researchers compared ‘runner’ mice with lazy-old-sit-around-the-house-doing-nothing-all-day-long-mice, they found that:

“…when mice allowed to exercise regularly experienced a stressor — exposure to cold water — their brains exhibited a spike in the activity of neurons that shut off excitement in the ventral hippocampus, a brain region shown to regulate anxiety.”

5. The secrecy heuristic

In a week when secret information once again hit the headlines, the NYT has a piece explaining the psychological shortcut or ‘heuristic’ that we tend to overvalue secret information. Psychological studies show that we automatically assume that information which is secret is more useful, important and accurate, although this isn’t necessarily the case.

“There are several reasons people might inflate the value of secret information. Sometimes, of course, secret information is genuinely of higher quality and affords real strategic advantage over public information. With that in mind, people may overgeneralize about the association between secrecy and quality to contexts where it is unwarranted.”

Which means that:

“If people exaggerate the value of secret information, they may too readily cede privacy in the interest of national security, even if they value that privacy highly.”

6. The creative power of death

If you’ve ever struggled to come up with a humorous caption for a cartoon or photo then perhaps what you need is an unconscious reminder of your own mortality. A new study had people trying to caption a cartoon from The New Yorker. The results suggested that:

“The captions written by individuals who were subconsciously primed with the word death were clearly voted as funnier by the jury. By contrast, the exact opposite result was obtained for the students who consciously wrote about death: their captions were seen as less humorous.”

But why is that?

“[a] substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences.”

Perhaps this helps explain why Woody Allen is so funny.

Image credit: opensourceway

The Psychology of Flow (in under 300 words)

What is it like to be fully alive, right now, engaged with what you are doing? That’s the psychology of flow.

What is it like to be fully alive, right now, engaged with what you are doing? That's the psychology of flow.

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What “The Love Bridge” Tells Us About How Thoughts and Emotions Interact

How much control do you have over your emotions?

Have you ever wondered why one person can speak in public without apparent nerves while another crumples under pressure?

Or why one elite athlete can shake off their nerves to win Olympic gold while another chokes?

Even with ample experience some people never seem to learn to cope with their emotions.

A key insight comes from a controversial psychology study carried out on a rickety bridge by Dutton and Aron (1973).

The love bridge

Men crossing the bridge were approached by an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey. The men were chosen because they were known to be nervous and this was exaggerated by the fact the bridge was swaying, its handrails were very low and there was a 230-foot drop to the river below.

After the men filled out the survey the woman gave them her number and said they could call her if they wanted the study explained in more detail.

A little further up men crossing another bridge were also being approached by a female researcher half-way across. The difference was that this bridge was sturdy, did not sway and was only a few feet above a small stream.

One of the key tests was: how many people would call up the attractive woman?

On the stable, safe bridge only 2 out of the 16 participants called. But, on the rickety bridge, 9 out of 18 called. So something about the rickety bridge made people more likely to call.

Fear transformed into attraction?

Dutton and Aron’s explanation was that it’s how we label the feelings we have that’s important, not just the feelings themselves. In this experiment men on the rickety bridge were more stressed and jittery than those on the stable bridge. And the argument is that they interpreted these bodily feelings as attraction, leading them to be more likely to make the call.

So: fear had been transformed into attraction.

This explanation is now controversial because subsequent studies have found that it’s rare to be able to reinterpret a negative emotion like fear into a positive one like attraction. Indeed some studies have specifically shown it can’t be done (Zanna et al., 1976).

However, we can reinterpret one positive emotion into a different positive emotion, and the same for negative emotions.

Certainly neutral bodily feelings can be interpreted either way. That’s why you can have a strong cup of coffee and the arousing effect might contribute to either elation or irritation, depending on how your day is going.

For a more extreme example think about the physical feeling you get on a roller-coaster. It’s not dissimilar from being mugged. You sweat, the knees wobble, the heart races and the bowels loosen. But one experience people will pay for and the other everyone would pay to avoid.

Of course the aftermath of each experience and the interpretation is quite different.

Going back to the original questions: the speaker who tries to reinterpret their nerves as excitement and anticipation is likely to do better than one who thinks of them as signals to run away and hide.

In the same way the athlete who deals with performance anxiety by trying to channel it into their race will do better than the athlete who allows it to overwhelm them.

Our emotions aren’t just things that happen inside us which bubble up from the deep over which we have little or no control. Like conscious thoughts their effect on our behaviour depends on how we interpret them.

Emotions aren’t the opposite of rationality, they are part and parcel of rationality and do respond to how we think. While Dutton and Aron’s experiment may have been flawed, the motivating idea behind their experiment was not: how we label and interpret our feelings can fundamentally change our experience of them.

Image credits: Jamie Hladky & _chrisUK