Laura’s Psychology Blog

Anyone looking forward to a new season of Doctor… WHO??

Here is what I am reading today:

• Women’s feet getting longer and wider

“”I had heard women reporting changes in their shoe size with pregnancy, but found nothing about that in medical journals or textbooks,” says Neil Segal, M.D., UI associate professor of orthopaedics and rehabilitation. “In order to study this more scientifically, we measured women’s feet at the beginning of their pregnancy and five months after delivery. We found that pregnancy does indeed lead to permanent changes in the feet.” The UI study followed 49 pregnant women and collected static and dynamic arch measurements during the first trimester of pregnancy and again about five months after childbirth. The researchers found that for about 60 to 70 percent of the women in the study, their feet became longer and wider.”

• hard to avoid the bad stuff we are eating today

“”Current information we give families may not be enough to reduce exposures,” said Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, lead author on the study and an environmental health pediatrician in the UW School of Public Health and at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. She is a physician at Harborview Medical Center’s Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit, and a UW assistant professor of pediatrics.

Phthalates and bisphenol A, better known as BPA, are synthetic endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Previous studies have linked prenatal exposure to phthalates to abnormalities in the male reproductive system. Associations have also been shown between fetal exposure to BPA and hyperactivity, anxiety, and depression in girls.”

infection and stress play a role in schizophrenia

“…a research group headed by Urs Meyer, a senior scientist at the Laboratory of Physiology & Behaviour at ETH Zurich, has now made a breakthrough: for the first time, they were able to find clear evidence that the combination of two environmental factors contributes significantly to the development of schizophrenia-relevant brain changes and at which stages in a person’s life they need to come into play for the disorder to break out. The researchers developed a special mouse model, with which they were able to simulate the processes in humans virtually in fast forward. The study has just been published in the journal Science.”

• want to boost reading skills… allow your kids to play video games!

“”Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment,” said Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy. “Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly.”"

• driving skills going to pot

“Cannabis is second only to alcohol for causing impaired driving and motor vehicle accidents. In 2009, 12.8% of young adults reported driving under the influence of illicit drugs and in the 2007 National Roadside Survey, more drivers tested positive for drugs than for alcohol. These cannabis smokers had a 10-fold increase in car crash injury compared with infrequent or nonusers after adjustment for blood alcohol concentration.”

Every once and a while, I will have a visitor sit into my class, this time it was my husband Roger armed with his ever present camera!

Here is what I am reading today:

• students in need of vocabulary lessons

“Vocabulary instruction in the early years is not challenging enough to prepare students for long-term reading comprehension, argues a study led by a Michigan State University education researcher.”

• what happens to female mice exposed to BPA

“Female mice exposed to Bisphenol A through their mother’s diet during gestation and lactation were found to be hyperactive, exhibit spontaneous activity and had leaner body mass than those not exposed to the chemical, researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health have discovered.”

• even a beetle navigates by the stars

“Despite having tiny brains, dung beetles are surprisingly decent navigators, able to follow straight paths as they roll poo balls they’ve collected away from a dung source. But it seems the insects’ abilities are more remarkable than previously believed. Like ancient seafarers, dung beetles can navigate using the starry sky and the glow from the Milky Way, new research shows.

“This is the first time where we see animals using the Milky Way for orientation,” said lead researcher Marie Dacke, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden. “It’s also the first time we see that insects can use the stars.”"

• hard to make memories without sleep

“The connection between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration as we grow older has been elusive. But for the first time, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a link between these hallmark maladies of old age. Their discovery opens the door to boosting the quality of sleep in elderly people to improve memory.”

• blood test for autism?

“Results of a recent clinical study by researchers from Western and the University of Arkansas reveal the presence of a unique blood marker, which may further the understanding of possible gut linked environmental contributors to autism. The findings may also forecast potential blood tests for early screening to identify and potentially treat the condition, even before symptoms present.”

• do doctors FEEL your pain??

“A patient’s relationship with his or her doctor has long been considered an important component of healing. Now, in a novel investigation in which physicians underwent brain scans while they believed they were actually treating patients, researchers have provided the first scientific evidence indicating that doctors truly can feel their patients’ pain – and can also experience their relief following treatment.”

• taking stairs and raking leaves is exercise?

“New research at Oregon State University suggests the health benefits of small amounts of activity – even as small as one- and two-minute increments that add up to 30 minutes per day – can be just as beneficial as longer bouts of physical exercise achieved by a trip to the gym.”

• do mice love a good massage??

“In mice, a particular type of neuron responds specifically to gentle touch. Stroking skin produces a pleasurable sensation in many mammals, including humans, but until now, it was unclear which neurons detected that stimulus”

• video game dating?

“You knew it would have to come around sometime. Too many gamers out there to not believe it was going to happen. Finally there are a few sites which allow men and women who love to play video games to play with each other! Although it is hard for many of my female colleagues to believe, but there are a rising number of young women who love and play video games! We play as a family, in pairs and individually… and now we know we are not alone!” — Laura Freberg

In 1985, Super Mario took it’s first bounce into history! I do remember!

Here is what I am reading today:

• neural implant and decisions

“By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys’ brains, the researchers, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, University of Kentucky and University of Southern California, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys’ ability to make decisions when their normal cognitive functioning was disrupted.”

• is it true that you can work up an appetite with exercise?

“Professors James LeCheminant and Michael Larson measured the neural activity of 35 women while they viewed food images, both following a morning of exercise and a morning without exercise. They found their attentional response to the food pictures decreased after the brisk workout.”

• interesting way to boost honesty

“”Based on our previous research we knew that an honour code is useful, but we were wondering how much the location mattered,” says Nina Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Prof. Mazar co-wrote the paper with Lisa L. Shu of the Kellogg School of Management, Francesca Gino and Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of the Fuqua School of Business.”

love hurts… and why?

“Neurobiologist Larry Young studies a monogamous species of rodent, the prairie vole, to understand the behavior and chemistry behind relationships. In The Chemistry Between Us, Young teams up with science journalist Brian Alexander to describe science’s progress in illuminating the neurochemistry behind our experience of love. In this excerpt, the authors describe the work of neurobiologist Oliver Bosch, a specialist in maternal behavior, who worked with Young’s prairie voles to study the bitter price of bonding.”

• children understand the concept of fairness

“A new study, conducted by Patricia Kanngiesser, a visiting graduate student from the University of Bristol, U.K., together with Felix Warneken, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard, suggests that children may have a far more advanced concept of fairness than previously thought. The study, described in a paper recently published in PLoS ONE, shows that children as young as 3 consider merit—a key part of more-advanced ideas of fairness—when distributing resources. Earlier studies had suggested that the use of merit didn’t emerge until a few years later.”

• neglect and white matter

“By studying mice that had been isolated early in life, researchers led by Gabriel Corfas of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School hoped to uncover how social deprivation can affect the developing brain. After the mice had weaned, the researchers put them into one of three environments: One was a deluxe suite, enriched with fresh toys every other day and populated by friends of similar ages, one was a standard laboratory cage holding four mice, and one was a holding cell for total isolation. “

Here is what I am reading today:

• what do brain scans tell us about junk food?

“Researchers from St. Luke’s — Roosevelt Hospital Center and Columbia University in New York performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 25 men and women of normal weights while they looked at images of healthy and unhealthy foods. The scans were taken after five nights in which sleep was either restricted to four hours or allowed to continue up to nine hours. Results were compared.

“The same brain regions activated when unhealthy foods were presented were not involved when we presented healthy foods,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, the study’s principal investigator. “The unhealthy food response was a neuronal pattern specific to restricted sleep. This may suggest greater propensity to succumb to unhealthy foods when one is sleep restricted.”:

• training your brain to beat depression

“…Prof David Linden, who led the study which was published in the PLoS One journal, said it had the potential to become part of the “treatment package” for depression. About a fifth of people will develop depression at some point in their lives and a third of those will not respond to standard treatments.

Prof Linden added: “One of the interesting aspects of this technique is that it gives patients the experience of controlling aspects of their own brain activity. “Many of them were very interested in this new way of engaging with their brains.”…

• artificial intelligence is getting better

“A new type of game will mine your social media to personalise the experience

“WHEN I put my son to bed, I quite often tell him a story,” says Peter Molyneux, a British game developer who recently left Microsoft to start his own studio, 22Cans. “I will have crafted that story around what I know about him, what he has done in the past few days. Those are the best stories I can tell him – better than Harry Potter, better than anything else because they pull his life into the story.” Molyneux, who has worked in the industry for 30 years, wants to create an artificial intelligence that can offer players the same tailored experience in his next game.”

do you know these guys?

My readings for today:

• chemical weight loss to come?

“Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have synthesized a pair of small molecules that dramatically alter the core biological clock in animal models, highlighting the compounds’ potential effectiveness in treating a remarkable range of disorders — including obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and serious sleep disorders.”

• man dances with his wife the first time ( get out the hankies!)

paralyzed man dances with his wife

• the body’s biological clock

“Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, led by Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known as REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ, are essential for maintaining normal sleeping and eating cycles and for metabolism of nutrients from food.

The findings, reported March 29 in Nature, describe a powerful link between circadian rhythms and metabolism and suggest a new avenue for treating disorders of both systems, including jet lag, sleep disorders, obesity and diabetes.”