Laura’s Psychology Blog

A Beautiful but deadly frog that sings for its mate.

Here is what I am reading today:

• animals that learn to avoid poisons

“Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison—and that the insects were passing that trait on to their young. Now, scientists have figured out how this behavior evolved. Roaches, like other insects, detect taste through special receptors that line hairlike appendages on their mouthparts. The receptors differentiate between sweet and bitter flavors, which signal to the roach whether to eat or avoid the food, respectively”

• blue eyes came from one ancestor

“Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.”

• we all think we are beautiful… or more beautiful than we really are?

“In April 15, 2013 Dove launched a 3-minute video entitled “Dove Real Beauty Sketches.” The video achieved instant popularity and has been watched millions of times — a successful viral campaign which has beenwidely talked about. In the video, a small group of women are asked to describe their faces to a person whom they cannot see. The person is a forensic artist who is there to draw pictures of the women based on their verbal descriptions”

• everything you wanted to know about breastfeeding neadertals

“A team led by Manish Arora, an environmental health dentist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, hypothesized that it might be possible to detect when a child was weaned from the amount of barium in its growing teeth. Barium is an element similar to calcium and is present in water sources and many types of soils, explains co-author Christine Austin, a dental researcher at Westmead Hospital in near Sydney, Australia. Barium makes its way into both teeth and bone in small amounts. As a tooth grows, both dentine, which makes up the center of a tooth, and enamel, which forms its hard surface, are laid down in daily layers, which are clearly visible under a microscope.”

• empathy and morality?

“In their new report, co-authors Liane Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, and Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and Favaloro University in Argentina, address two key questions related to moral decision-making: First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarian respondents or enhanced in non-utilitarians?”

• delaying nerve cell loss by dieting?

“”There has been great interest in finding compounds that mimic the benefits of caloric restriction that could be used to delay the onset of age-associated problems and/or diseases,” said Luigi Puglielli, MD, PhD, who studies aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was not involved in this study. “If proven safe for humans, this study suggests such a drug could be used as a preventive tool to delay the onset of neurodegeneration associated with several diseases that affect the aging brain,” Puglielli added.”

Emily Underwood of Science Magazine is hosting a terrific panel discussion on DSM 5 that you won’t want to miss:

Thursday, May 23rd
3-4 p.m. EDT
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencelive/

Emily’s guests will be the following:

Allen Frances of Duke University
William Eaton of Johns Hopkins University
Frank Farley of Temple University

This is guaranteed to be a very lively discussion!

Today is officially Mental Health Day. The American Psychological Association (APA) has asked all of us who blog on mental health related issues to participate by publishing a blog that relates to mental health. According to the APA, Congress designated May as Mental Health Month in 1949 to raise public awareness of the issues.

So, what exactly should I write about? I am a researcher, not a clinician, so the topic that immediately came to mind was the controversy over the soon-to-be-published and much anticipated DSM 5. I’ve written elsewhere about this topic here.

All editions of the DSM have provoked their share of controversies. Are we over-diagnosing conditions and pathologizing normal behaviors? Or are we under-diagnosing conditions and preventing people from obtaining the treatment they need? This edition has its share–do we need a category for “attenuated psychosis syndrome” or will this result in the use of antipsychotic medications with all of their substantial side effects by normal people? Should we worry about the fact that the number of participants in the DSM process with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry has jumped from 14% to 70% from DSM IV to DSM 5? Is the price of the DSM 5 ($199) too steep?

For me, the biggest news is the rejection of the DSM 5 as a source for researchers by non other than the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Thomas Insel, director of NIMH, had this to say: “…the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.” Instead, the NIMH has launched its own “Research Domain Criteria Project” (RDoC) to move away from a symptoms-based approach, like that of the DSM, to a more causal approach emphasizing similarities in genetics, brain circuits, and cognitive processes among different types of psychological disorders.

It seems to me that this apparent rejection of the DSM 5 by NIMH really caught the attention of the American Psychiatric Association (another APA), which publishes the DSM and depends on the sales of the book for the majority of its income. On May 13, NIMH issued a press release that seemed more conciliatory. The press release says “DSM-5 and RDoC represent complementary, not competing, frameworks for this goal.”

Another player in this mix is the World Health Organization’s ICD system, which is also in the process of a revision slated for publication in 2015. Unlike the DSM, the ICD system is freely distributed. While the ICD is promoted to a worldwide audience, the DSM is used primarily in the United States. In recent revisions, the DSM and ICD committees have worked more closely together to work out inconsistencies.

It will be interesting to watch as these diagnostic systems go into effect. As a researcher and a neuroscientist, I’m already liking what I’m reading about RDoC. When we find that the candidate genes associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are quite similar, it makes no sense to have one disorder described in one place in the DSM and the other in a completely different section in the manual.

Hopefully, the end result of the discussion about classification systems will be improved care for the people with the disorders. I personally think we have a very long way to go in this direction, and I welcome any efforts that lead to less stigma and better outcomes.

Watching the Grape vines start to bud!

Here is what I am reading today:

• why having rituals work

“Basketball superstar Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts in every game; Curtis Martin of the New York Jets reads Psalm 91 before every game. And Wade Boggs, former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. (Boggs also wrote the Hebrew word Chai (“living”) in the dirt before each at bat. Boggs was not Jewish.) Do rituals like these actually improve performance?”

have a second helping of insects!

“A new report from the U.N. says that eating insects (high in protein, low in fat) can help fight global warming, pollutions, and yes, hunger. And if the suggestion catches on, it could even be great for small businesses.

The concept of eating insects as part of a regular diet is known as entomophagy is already practiced by an estimated two billion people, according to the report, which was issued on Monday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

In 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation named Dr. Aaron T. Dossey’s “All Things Bugs” company the winner of the foundation’s annual Grand Challenges Explorations contest. The group received a grant to pursue its project to come up with viable insect protein options to combat malnutrition in children.”

• white matter and aging

“”White matter integrity actually peaks around the same absolute age in both chimpanzees and humans, but humans may experience more degradation because they live longer. Perhaps the need to retain brain capacity late in life is one reason increased brain size was selected for in human evolution,” Preuss says.   The senior author is James Rilling, PhD, Yerkes researcher, associate professor of anthropology at Emory and director of the Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience. Collaborators at the University of Oslo also contributed to the paper.”

• how genes are turned off and on

“Led by Bing Ren of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Joseph Ecker of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and James Thomson of the Morgridge Institute for Research, the scientists also describe novel genetic phenomena likely to play a pivotal role not only in the genesis of the embryo”

• tools around 2 million years ago??

“A recent study led by Joseph Ferraro, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor, offers new insight in this debate with a wealth of archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South (KJS), Kenya. The study’s findings were recently published in PLOS One.”

• how we perceive laughter

“The research was published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONEby Dirk Wildgruber and colleagues from the University of Tuebingen, Germany.

Laughter in animals is a form of social bonding based on a primordial reflex to tickling, but human laughter has come a long way from these playful roots.”

• Neuroprosthetics

“Neuroprosthetics: Prosthetic arms are getting ever more sophisticated. Now they just need a sense of touch. The Modular Prosthetic Limb will help patients to feel and manipulate objects just as they would with a native hand. Nature Publishing Group”

This first computer in 1948 could hold a whopping 8kb.

Here is what I am reading today:

• The Russian Meteor heard ten hours later in America

“The human ear cannot hear these infrasound signals. However, by playing the data faster than true speed, Georgia Tech faculty member Zhigang Peng increased the sound waves’ frequency to audible levels. The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology’s Data Managment Center provided the data.

“The sound started at about 10 hours after the explosion and lasted for another 10 hours in Georgia,” said Peng, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He’s confident that the sound is associated with the meteor impact because a slow propagation of the sound waves can be seen across the entire collection of USArray stations, as well as other stations in Alaska and polar regions.”

• growing brain cells

“”We think this one type of cell may be useful in treating several types of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in a targeted way,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF and co-lead author on the paper.”

• counting peanuts

“”The human capacity for complex symbolic math is clearly unique to our species,” says co-author Jessica Cantlon, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “But where did this numeric prowess come from? In this study we’ve shown that non-human primates also possess basic quantitative abilities. In fact, non-human primates can be as accurate at discriminating between different quantities as a human child.”"

• ADHD crisis – problems with providers

“”It is unclear why so many physicians who specialize in the management of ADHD — child neurologists, psychiatrists and developmental pediatricians — fail to comply with recently published treatment guidelines,” said Andrew Adesman, MD, senior investigator and chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park. “With the AAP now extending its diagnosis and treatment guidelines down to preschoolers, it is likely that more young children will be diagnosed with ADHD even before entering kindergarten. Primary care physicians and pediatric specialists should recommend behavior therapy as the first line treatment.”"

• benefits of sports teams

“”Athletic participation may prevent involvement in violence-related activities among girls but not among boys because aggression and violence generally might be more accepted in boys’ high school sports,” said senior author Tamera Coyne-Beasley, MD, MPH, FSAHM, FAAP, professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

• texting and driving… its what some kids do

“”Texting while driving has become, in the words of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a ‘national epidemic,’” said principal investigator Alexandra Bailin, a research assistant at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death among teenagers, and using a phone while driving significantly increases the risk of accidents in this age group. The specific act of texting while driving has been found to raise the risk of a crash by 23 times, leading many to conclude that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving while intoxicated.”