Cola Consumption and Muscle Problems: New Research Suggests Link
New research suggests drinking too much cola product is leading to a medical condition that has serious consequences.
http://www.associatedcontent.comarticle/1762970/cola_consumption_and_muscle_problems.html

Cola Causes Bone Loss - ABC News

Cola Causes Bone Loss - ABC News

Shared via AddThis

Women look away more from abnormal babies

WASHINGTON - Puzzling new research suggests women have a harder time than men looking at babies with facial birth defects. It's a surprise finding. Psychiatrists from the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, who were studying perceptions of beauty, had expected women to spend more time than men cooing over pictures of extra-cute babies. Nope.

Instead, the small study being published Wednesday raises more questions than it can answer.

First the background: The McLean team already had studied men and women looking at photos of adults' faces on a computer screen. They rated facial beauty, and could do various keystrokes to watch the photos longer. A keystroke count showed men put three times more effort into watching beautiful women as women put into watching handsome men.

Lead researcher Dr. Igor Elman wondered what else might motivate women. Enter the new baby study.

This time 13 men and 14 women were shown 80 photos of babies, 30 of whom had abnormal facial features such as a cleft palate, Down syndrome or crossed eyes. Participants rated each baby's attractiveness on a scale of zero to 100, and used keystrokes to make the photo stay on the screen longer or disappear faster.

Women pressed the keys 2.5 times more than men to make photos of babies with the facial abnormalities disappear, researchers reported in PLoS One, a journal of the Public Library of Science. That's even though they rated those babies no less attractive than the men had.

"They had this subliminal motivation to get rid of the faces," said Elman, who questions whether "we're designed by nature to invest all the resources into healthy-looking kids."

Both genders spent equal time and effort looking at photos of the normal babies.

The study couldn't explain the gender disparity. Elman noted that previous work has linked child abandonment and neglect to abnormal appearance, and even asked if the finding might challenge the concept of unconditional maternal love.

That's too far-reaching a conclusion, cautioned Dr. Steven Grant of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study.

The work is part of broader research into how we normally form attachments and what can make those attachments go awry, work that tests if what people say matches what they do.

"Common sense would tell you one thing," Grant said. "This doesn't fit with common sense. It raises a question."


Psychologists converge to study happiness
The Philadelphia Inquirer - June 21, 2009

Jun. 21--After months of gloomy economic news, Philadelphia has been, at least for a few days, the worldwide epicenter of a certain kind of positive thinking.

About 1,500 people who make their living thinking about what makes us happier and more emotionally successful have converged on Philadelphia for the First World Congress on Positive Psychology. The event opened Thursday and concludes today.

As one of the speakers, Karen Reivich, a psychologist who codirects the Penn Resiliency Project, puts it, this meeting is for those who study "not just what ails people but what allows people to flourish."

Flourishing may be setting the bar pretty high, given how many of us are seeking new jobs or barely holding onto the old ones. But the psychologists have some advice they say can make it easier to weather recession-related turmoil.

The meeting is the largest gathering ever of positive psychologists, who are members of a relatively new field. It landed in Philadelphia -- not exactly known for its positive attytood -- because University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman is here. Seligman, who started out studying depression and "learned helplessness" but later gravitated toward optimism and well-being, is considered positive psychology's founder.

Philadelphia may not seem all that optimistic "at any given moment," he said, but it is the place where a new nation was formed and that was clearly the work of positive thinkers.

Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, said his retirement savings had taken a hit just as other people's did. Changes in fortune, he said, can shake what psychologists call positive emotions, the ones that feel good. But luckily, other factors that affect our sense of well-being do not have much to do with money: engagement in activities, finding meaning in life, and forming relationships with others.

These days, Seligman is thinking about those things and less about retirement funds.

It turns out that it is not precisely true that money does not buy happiness. Very poor people or countries are, in fact, less happy than those that are rich, said Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychologist who is president of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA), the meeting's sponsor. However, to use an economics term, income has "marginal utility" when it comes to happiness; its effect on mood diminishes at higher levels.

Many who try to live on less money find they are soon just as happy as they were before, Diener said. "Obviously, our grandparents didn't make as much money as we did, and they were happy," he said.

There is good reason to cultivate positive emotions, he said. Evidence is mounting that good feelings improve health, relationships, and work performance. "Something that people don't know is that being generally happy is very good for you, not just because it feels good," Diener said, "but because it actually helps you function better."

On the other hand, work is an important contributor to well-being, the psychologists said, and losing a job is a big psychological blow. Michael Frese, who teaches at the University of Giessen in Germany and attended the Philadelphia conference, likes a fellow researcher's explanation: the "vitamin theory of work." The idea is that work provides structure and emotional experiences such as exercising control, socializing, and helping others that make people feel better about their lives. The amount they are paid is not a key factor, though low pay is likely to make people look for a different job, Frese said.

He studies how people's attitudes toward work help them thrive in their jobs or find new ones. He has found that people who take initiative in their jobs, shaping the work for themselves, can sometimes be seen as difficult employees but are also more successful and more likely to land on their feet if things go bad.

People who take personal initiative, he said, prepare "both for opportunities and potential problems" in the future. He has studied what happened to East Germans after unification, which led to widespread unemployment. "People who showed a high degree of initiative left companies more quickly while they were still intact," he said. "They migrated more."

Frese said a healthy way to cope with the kind of economic upheaval many Americans were experiencing now was to think of it as a learning experience. "What do you learn as a society so that it will not happen again," he said.

Reivich studies resilience, another key survival trait. She said she believed it, like optimism, could be taught and has developed programs for children that are now in use in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

"One of the things that resilient people do well is, they don't get stuck in habits of thinking," she said. They try to look at problems from all angles and focus on actions they can take to change their situation. She helps people learn how to combat a tendency to think all day about the worst things that could happen by arguing with their own "internal radio station" -- the thoughts we all hear in our heads. It also helps to spend some time each day giving thanks for the good things in your life.

Never underestimate the value of relationships with others when times are tough. "The one-sentence version of resilience and happiness in general is, 'Other people matter,' " Reivich said.

One could make a case that overly exuberant optimism helped get us in this mess in the first place. James Pawelski, executive director of the IPPA and a senior scholar at Penn's Positive Psychology Center, bristled at the notion of a Pollyanna-ish optimism or "happiology."

It is psychologically valuable to look for a silver lining in painful circumstances, he said, but positive psychologists aim to make the world better, not ignore warning signs. The goal is what he called "realistic optimism."

For decades, psychologists and psychiatrists focused on alleviating the pain of people with mental illnesses and other psychological problems. Most still do. Frese said the world's current problems gave positive psychologists an opportunity to think about what this new discipline, spawned in the midst of an economic boom, could contribute when more people are worried about meeting basic needs.

"In terms of evolution, I think it's quite clear that the negative factors are the more important ones," he said. "You don't want to die. That's the first thing you have to take care of."

Contact staff writer Stacey Burling at 215-854-4944 or sburling@phillynews.com.

Workplace romance is topic of research

Jun. 5--Romance in the workplace. It's a topic that's been written about in books, laughed about on sitcoms and dramatized on film.

But, surprisingly, there's been little clinical research on this hot topic, said Amy Nicole Salvaggio, assistant professor of industrial organizational psychology at the University of New Haven in West Haven. "It's very common," Salvaggio said of relationships between co-workers. "It's talked about in literature, TV and movies a lot. [But] it's not commonly studied."

She's hoping to change that. Salvaggio is seeking couples to participate in a study about how one's work life affects his or her love life -- and vice versa. She's looking to speak with couples who work together, and with couples who toil at separate workplaces. In both instances, she'll ask the couples to speak confidentially about their personal relationships and work attitudes.

Salvaggio began her research last year, while working at the University of Tulsa. She said she wanted to study the topic of work and relationships, because nearly everyone struggles with balancing his or her professional and personal lives. "Work and love do kind of make up the cornerstones of our existence," Salvaggio said.

She's particularly interested in talking to couples who are co-workers, mainly because it hasn't been studied much. That's probably because relationships, being so unpredictable, are considered a bit scary to those in the field of workplace psychology, Salvaggio

said.

"Workplace psychology focuses on rationality in the workplace," she said, adding that romantic relationships are inherently irrational, and can intimidate some researchers.

Yet, even though she plans to focus on couples who work together, she said even those with separate places of employment can feel the impact of their job on their relationship. This phenomenon is called "spillover," meaning that one's feelings about the job, both positive and negative, can leach into your personal life.

"We're looking at [answering questions such as] 'If you're satisfied with your job, does that relate to whether or not you're satisfied with your partner?" Salvaggio said.

Couples in the study will fill out an online survey that asks questions about both their job and their relationship. Salvaggio will then follow up with subjects three more times: at one month, three months and six months after the initial survey. Couples need not be married to participate -- they need only define themselves as being in a relationship. The study is also open to couples of all sexual orientation. All the information gathered through the survey will be kept confidential, and couples will not see each other's responses.

Ultimately, the goal is to help companies and couples navigate the intersection of work life and love life. Salvaggio said, just as couples struggle with a job or jobs that put stress on their relationship, employers suffer when a worker's romantic relationship hurts his or her job performance. "We want to offer some guidance beyond common sense," she said.

Salvaggio is seeking couples over the age of 22 who work more than 20 hours a week. Compensation for completion of the entire study will be in the form of gift cards valued at a total of $90 per couple Interested couples can reach Salvaggio at 932-7381 or at asalvaggio@newhaven.edu

Sleep can moderate emotional experiences

SEATTLE, Jun 12, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- The sleeping brain evaluates which emotional experiences should be remembered, U.S. researchers said.

The study also found the sooner sleep followed a learning experience the longer the memory lasted -- even for a mater of months. The study suggests memory improves if learning experiences are staggered across time.

Lead study author Jessica Payne of Harvard Medical School in Boston said they were surprised to find the sleeping brain -- in addition to seeing the enhancement of negative memories over neutral scenes -- showed selectivity within the emotional scenes themselves. Sleep served to consolidate into memory what seemed the most relevant, adaptive and useful about the scenes.

"It may be that the chemical and physiological aspects of sleep underlying memory consolidation are more effective if a particular memory is 'tagged' shortly prior to sleeping," Payne said in a statement.

The study included data from 44 college students who encoded scenes with neutral or negative objects on a neutral background and were tested on memory for objects and backgrounds 24 hours later.

Half were randomly assigned to train and be tested between the hours of 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., the other half between the hours of 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Four months later, participants were once again tested on their memory of the scenes.

The findings were presented at Sleep, the 23rd annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, in Seattle.

The Final Countdown

The Week Ahead

Monday (6/15)

The War on Terrorism

Video: Inside 9/11

HW: Reading Packet pages: 48-57 (review); 65-67;-79-89

Tuesday (6/16)

The War on Terrorism

Video: Inside 9/11

HW: Final Exam Readings

Wednesday (6/17)

FINAL: Blocks 3 and 4

Thursday (6/18)

FINAL: Block 1

LAST DAY OF SCHOOL OF 2008-2009 SCHOOL YEAR!!!!

Have a wonderful summer everyone! I hope to see you all in the fall and many of you in IB Psychology!

By Request!

Intervention:


Bin Laden's 1996 Fatwa:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html

Celexa failed autism study; kids got side effects

Associated Press - June 01, 2009

CHICAGO - An antidepressant that is among the most popular kinds of medicine used for treating autism didn't work for most kids and caused nightmares and other side effects, new research found.

Results showed risks with Celexa outweighed any benefits in the largest published study of medication versus dummy pills for autism. That's according to the lead author, Dr. Bryan King, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington medical school.

The drug is not approved for treating autism. However, many doctors have prescribed it, thinking it might help prevent repetitive behaviors such as spinning, twirling and head-banging that are hallmark autism symptoms. Similar antidepressants have been shown to help treat repetitive actions in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But in the autism study, Celexa worked no better than dummy pills. In fact, compared with kids on placebo, those on Celexa were more than twice as likely to develop repetitive behaviors, as well as other side effects including sleep problems and hyperactivity.

Celexa is in a class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are among the most widely used medicines given for autism.

The new research could "change this practice," said prominent Yale University autism researcher Dr. Fred Volkmar. He commented in an editorial released with the study Monday in the June issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

The results echo a separate study reported in February that showed a low-dose form of Prozac, another SSRI, also did not reduce repetitive behaviors in autism.

The overall global market for drug treatment in autism is at least $2 billion and SSRI antidepressants account for nearly 60 percent of that, the study authors said.

Celexa's maker, Forest Laboratories Inc., issued a statement saying the company "was not involved in this study and therefore cannot provide comment."

The National Institutes of Health paid for the research.

Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said the new results underscore the difficulty in treating a condition with an uncertain cause and symptoms that range from mild to severe.

"We are still so challenged to come up with medications that can address core symptoms," she said, "largely because we still don't understand the biology of autism."

The study involved 149 autistic children aged 5 to 17 who were randomly given either up to 20 milligrams daily of Celexa for 12 weeks or dummy pills.

Doctors rated children's symptoms during treatment on a scale of 1 to 7, with high scores reflecting worsening symptoms. The rating method allowed doctors to evaluate improvements in repetitive actions and also other behaviors.

Only about one-third of children on Celexa showed substantial improvement; most showed little or no improvement or got worse.

Celexa is among antidepressants labeled with a warning about the potential for increasing risks for suicidal thoughts and behavior in children, but these symptoms didn't occur in the study.

About one-third of children on dummy pills also improved. King said reasons for that are uncertain. It could be they expected to get better with any kind of pill - the well-known "placebo effect." Or it could just have been a coincidence since autism symptoms tend to fluctuate over time.

That tendency might also explain why many kids on placebo also developed new or worse symptoms, he said.

Goodbye Seniors

Make your decisions not out of fear but with courage.
Allow compassion to guide your heart and give hope to others.
At all stages of life, see your future as brighter than your past.