NEW CLASS WEBSITE

This blog will not be updated as often as the NEW course site:

GO TO:
http://mrcaro.ning.com/

Parents' Love Seen As Key to Dugard Healing from Captivity

SANTA ANA, Calif. - They suffered every parent's worst nightmare when a stranger snatched their little girl. Then their most improbable dream came true when Jaycee Lee Dugard was found alive after 18 years in captivity.

As Terry and Carl Probyn rejoice, they must also grieve the childhood that was lost as they help their daughter move forward. While Dugard, 29, and her two daughters allegedly fathered by Phillip Garrido, will need extensive psychological treatment, mental health experts say the parents will have a crucial and challenging part in restoring them to family life and society.

"Our thoughts and prayers need to be for the grandparents here," said Curtis Rouanzoin, a Placentia, Calif., psychologist who specializes in trauma cases. "They're going to be an important part of the healing."

The Probyns, who raised Dugard in Orange County before moving to South Lake Tahoe where the abduction occurred, will have to contend with their own pain.

"This couple tragically had their first set of expectations cut off when their daughter vanished," said Laguna Hills, Calif., psychologist Sunny Steinmeyer. "Now they still have a daughter, but not the daughter they thought she would be. It must be worse than trying to get to know a stranger in some ways. They have to walk past their dreams and expectations and imaginings of what this girl would be like at 29 and have to readjust to who she really is."

And who she is, psychologists say, is likely a woman deeply traumatized and potentially struggling with mixed feelings toward her kidnappers and her parents.

Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, said in an interview Friday that his estranged wife, who is in Northern California with Dugard, told him their daughter expressed guilt over bonding with Garrido.

"She might have aspects of the Stockholm syndrome," said psychiatrist Jeff Sugar, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry crisis and emergency services at the University of Southern California. "She might be very confused about who and what this person is to her. She may have some attraction to him, even loving feelings for him. Often there's a lot of shame associated with the trauma and feelings of guilt."

Dugard also might have been told that her parents didn't love her and didn't want her anymore - part of the manipulative emotional imprisonment created by an abductor.

"I think it's a very difficult road back," said Heather Huszti, a child psychologist at Children's Hospital of Orange County. "In following some of these other cases where kids have been returned, sometimes those issues do come up of 'You didn't look for me. Why didn't you come and get me?' It wouldn't be unusual to have some anger at some point."

Rouanzoin, the Placentia psychologist, said the parents of Elizabeth Smart serve as examples of immersing their daughter in love after her return home nine months after her 2002 kidnapping.

In an interview with CNN, Elizabeth Smart, now 21, advised Dugard to "just relax and enjoy your family and spend some time reconnecting."

Elizabeth's father, Ed Smart, spoke of how the family helped her recover.

"A psychologist once said to me, 'It's really almost like being born again. You have to re-establish a bond with Elizabeth,'" Ed Smart said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press. "Finding those things she loves and enjoys helps her move forward - finding things that will become her passion and allow her to put the past behind her."

But the Probyns also have the challenge of grandchildren they didn't know about who are the product of violence against their daughter.

"The parents of this young mother can be very therapeutic if they can find it within their own hearts to love these kids and embrace their mother and show them what loving grandparents are about," Rouanzoin said. "It will be tough."

Yorba Linda, Calif., psychologist Lois Nightingale said Dugard and her children will need time to debrief and transition from the coping skills they developed to survive. The children, who are 11 and 15, could be delayed in social skills because of the deprivation and lack of stimulation they experienced.

Nightingale said she hopes the parents can help craft a family story to help them all move forward with resilience.

"Our emotions come from what we say about things," Nightingale said. "If the family has a family story of: 'We're survivors. We are strong and we had a faith about this and we went through this for a reason,' they will be able to use that to survive. If the media and their friends and teachers see them as victims and keep saying, 'Poor, poor you,' it will be harder for them. The more they can develop a story of power and gratitude, the better the children will do."

The End is Near...

Staying positive in negative territory

Pursuing happiness may be an inalienable right, but it's tougher keeping those spirits up while your 401(k) is lower than it used to be.

Part of the reason, say those who study the subject, is that you may be looking for happiness in all the wrong places. People can be happy in an economic slump -- they just have to change their ideas about what it takes to be happy, say a growing number of psychologists who study "positive psychology," which emphasizes the benefits of optimism and having a positive outlook.

Although past studies have found those who live in countries with higher per capita incomes report many measures of greater well-being, it's psychological wealth that helps people get through tough times, say researchers Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, who will present new findings at the four-day annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, which opens here today. About 10,000 psychology professionals are expected to attend.

Though money helps people lead more comfortable lives, it doesn't necessarily contribute to the moments in life that bring happiness -- which tend to come from social interactions and activities, not from accumulating material goods.

"Wealth really means having what you need, and money gives only one part of what we need," says Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.

Diener and his son Biswas-Diener, a psychologist and lecturer at Portland (Ore.) State University, co-wrote a 2008 book, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth. They will present findings of a survey of 136,000 people in 132 countries on how income and wealth relate to psychological needs.

"When you look at the entire world, money does matter," Diener says. "But it almost doesn't matter at all for enjoying life."

He says he and his wife had to cut back on spending when the stock market dropped.

"It has mattered zero to our happiness," he says. "We did have to make some tough decisions on what we can't do," such as canceling a trip with their five grandkids to Alaska.

They saved $10,000 by having the kids visit them at home in Salt Lake City instead. "It was not only OK, in some ways it was better. Without the traveling, life becomes slightly simpler and less hectic."

Simplicity is a silver lining to the downturn, says psychologist Robert Wicks.

"In the up economy, people were successful, but in many cases, they were missing their lives," says Wicks, a psychology professor at Loyola University Maryland in Columbia and author of Bounce: Living the Resilient Life, out next month.

"They weren't spending time really enjoying themselves and weren't spending time with family and friends. The simplicity that's possible during difficult economic times would not come to the fore if a crisis had notoccurred."

Some research suggests focusing on gratitude can increase happiness.

Gender plays a role

A study by Todd Kashdan, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Social Anxiety, Character Strengths, and Related Phenomena at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., published online in the Journal of Personality earlier this year, finds that gender plays a role in achieving well-being: Men are much less likely than women to feel and express gratitude.

Carla White, a website designer in Sioux Falls, S.D., says keeping a daily journal about things she's grateful for allowed her to feel happy again after grappling with her father's death for 18 months -- unsuccessfully, she says.

"I think what a gratitude journal does is it shows me I actually have some good stuff in my life. I feel at peace. I feel happy because of that," she says.

White, who also faced the prospect of job loss last year, has created a gratitude journal iPhone application, which she launched at the end of the year.

Anthony Scioli, a psychology professor at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., says he has tried to distance himself somewhat from the segment of positive psychology that focuses on happiness in the here and now.

"We do not live just in the moment. Philosophically, one could even say it is impossible to live in the moment because time is fleeting, and most of the 'time' we live in the future and the past," he says.

"Hope is predominantly about the future, but is also fueled by past experiences of success, empowerment, connection, security, coping."

Scioli will present research on hope at an APA session on Friday.

"Hope brings a special kind of happiness, a more permanent form," says Scioli, co-author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety, with clinical psychologist Henry Biller of the University of Rhode Island-Kingston.

"Hopeful people are sustained by the belief that there are always options," Scioli says.

"Diversify investments, consider a different line of work, or pick up a temporary part-time job. Rent a room in your house for extra income. Hopeful people are more apt to stay calm in a crisis due to their broader life perspective and faith in the future."

But sometimes having hope and wanting to be happy aren't so easy, especially when so many people have been laid off or can't find work.

That's when happiness really suffers, says Biswas-Diener, of Milwaukie, Ore., who is also program director for the Centre of Applied Positive Psychology in the United Kingdom.

"The truth is you do take a hit where your happiness is concerned if you get laid off," he says, but "money is only one of the reasons. It's the stress associated with not being able to pay bills.

"Also, jobs provide meaning. They structure your time. They give you a sense of identity. They allow you to provide for your loved ones. When you take away these critical psychological components, people really do feel it."

Experiences trump stuff

Psychologists also have found that being highly materialistic affects happiness, with those who are most concerned about money and possessions actually being less happy.

Keeping too close tabs on the economy, such as daily monitoring of economic indicators that have been on a roller-coaster ride since the recession began, also hinders happiness.

"We find that people whose moods are up and down a lot are less happy. People who are less reactive to every event, in general, are happier," Diener says.

But what about what money can buy? Previous research has found that using money to pay for something novel, social or experiential brings more happiness than buying things.

Some newer studies confirm these results. San Francisco State University researchers presented findings earlier this year to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, based on what participants said about their purchases.

They said they thought eating out or buying theater tickets was money better spent than on more things, such as a new tech toy or clothing, and the experiential purchase provided greater happiness for themselves and others, regardless of the amount they paid or their income.

Making happy memories

The researchers suggest that's because experiences can provide happy memories, which don't wear away as fast as the rush of buying a new possession.

But a study in this month's Journal of Consumer Research found that negative experiences can turn the theory upside down.

Researchers at the University of Texas-Austin and Washington University in St. Louis found that a bad experience, like a vacation gone wrong, can have a more negative impact on happiness than other spending of a comparable amount.

Humans are predisposed to pay greater attention to the negative, psychologists say.

That's partly evolutionary because humans automatically turn their attention to anything threatening before paying attention to rewards, says Diener -- ignoring a lion's threat, for example, could make you a goner, while ignoring something good isn't a matter of survival.

Focusing on what's good and the special moments that bring happiness to people's lives is why Pamela Gail Johnson of Lewisville, Texas, says she created the Secret Society of Happy People.

Johnson says the group, started in 1998, has struck a nerve with at least 7,000 people she counts as official members.

The website (www.sohp.com) has had more traffic since the downturn, she says.

"When they're in this global uncertainty, they start asking these tougher questions," she says. 'Do I need three cars? Does that make me happy?' "

Johnson urges people to savor the happy moments, even in the midst of financial chaos.

"If your basic needs are met, happiness is not about money," she says.

IB Psychology: 5th Edition

The 5th edition of IB Psychology is currently under development! One new area of focus compared to previous years will be more time spent on the unconscious! We will explore the final frontier of psychology! It may get a little creepy but that is the fascinating part!

MrCaro.com will be under some new construction next month as well!

And finally, there will be a corresponding interactive web site for the course located at
http://mrcaro.ning.com/

If you are current, future, or previous student, sign up to be a member!

Stay tuned for more IB Psychology Updates!


Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily
Associated Press - July 21, 2009

WASHINGTON - The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?

New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English - "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out - how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains - or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual - by simply speaking to them in two languages - can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns - nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time - like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba - while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process. You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."

Yet a soon-to-be-released survey from the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization that researches language issues, shows U.S. elementary schools cut back on foreign language instruction over the last decade. About a quarter of public elementary schools were teaching foreign languages in 1997, but just 15 percent last year, say preliminary results posted on the center's Web site.

What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language - TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans - a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography - that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.

But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.

"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."

Psychology of thriving: Mental health is not just expelling illness. Now, science explores what it takes to flourish

Jul. 6--Back in 1971, Philip Zimbardo locked students in basements beneath Stanford University to see what would happen.

It's not difficult to imagine his doing this. Zimbardo, with his slicked-back, black hair, sharp nose, and devil T-shirt, looks remarkably like a cartoon villain. And the outcome of his Stanford Prison Experiment was truly dark -- in less than a week, ordinary college students assigned to the role of prison guard had turned viciously sadistic, while those designated as prisoners cowered in terror.

But now, Zimbardo says, he's changed. In his opening lecture last month at the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in Philadelphia, he emphasized this point by blasting Santana's "Evil Ways" through the speakers of the Center City Philadelphia Sheraton. And 1,600 positive psychologists stood up and danced.

For too long, says Zimbardo, psychologists -- including himself -- have spent most of their time trying to understand how and why things go wrong. This work has produced, among other benefits, effective therapies for mental illnesses. But mental health, like physical health, means more than just eliminating sickness. It means actively thriving.

Can science shed light on what it takes to flourish? Zimbardo thinks it can. "We ask big questions and come up with solid answers based on the best experimental data," he explained. Below, we offer a few snapshots from talks presented at the congress, featuring positive psychologists quantifying some of the most personal aspects of the human experience -- things such as passion, love, and our perception of time.

Time out of mind

Facts. Emotions. Logic. If you ask most people what they base their decisions on, this is the type of answer you're likely to get. But Zimbardo thinks it's not the whole story -- or even most of it.

"The main thing that determines your decisions," he said, "is something you're unaware of -- your perspective on time."

Imagine going out to lunch with co-workers and deciding whether to have that second martini. You could approach the decision by considering what happened last time you drank too much at lunch, or by envisioning how it would affect your work performance later in the day. You could focus on how much fun it would be right now. Or you might figure that you never get much done in the afternoon anyway, so why not?

These four responses are typical of distinct time perspectives: past, future, present-hedonistic, and present-fatalistic.

Zimbardo and his colleagues created a time-perspective survey and gave it to thousands of people. Many had a single, strong time orientation, but some were more mixed.

Not surprising, college students scoring high in the present-hedonistic category were more likely to drink, smoke, use drugs, and drive dangerously.

But in older people recovering from heart trouble, a present-hedonistic orientation had the opposite effect. Elderly people who lived for the moment were more likely to take responsibility for their health.

That's because older people can't take good health for granted, the Canadian researchers who conducted the study said. Many simple daily pleasures are only possible if seniors take care of their bodies. And some activities that give immediate gratification -- such as socializing with friends and being physically active -- also have long-term health benefits.

The first step to making better decisions, Zimbardo says, is to understand how your own time perspective biases your thinking. Then you can start nudging it a little closer to the ideal: feeling positive about the past, planning for the future, and savoring the occasional splash of present hedonism. Take the test and see how you measure up at www.thetimeparadox.com.

Talk about the passion

Whether it's a dream set far in the future or a momentary pleasure, most of us are passionate about something. But University of Quebec professor Robert Vallerand is passionate about, well, passion.

He and his research group developed a survey to measure people's passion for their favorite activities. People rate how strongly, on a scale of one to seven, they agree with statements such as, "If I could, I would only do this activity," or "This activity reflects qualities I like about myself." Strong agreement with either statement is a sign of passion.

Not just the intensity, but also the type of passion matters. Vallerand and his colleagues identified two main kinds of passion: obsessive and harmonious. A person who is obsessively passionate about his favorite activity would agree more with the first statement, while someone whose passion is harmonious would agree more with the second.

When things are going well, it's hard to distinguish between these two types of passion. But when obstacles arise, they can lead to very different behavior.

Obsessively passionate cyclists braved Quebec's frigid winter weather to complete their daily bike rides, while those who were more harmonious spun at home or at the gym. Similarly, obsessively passionate dancers had more trouble taking enough time off to fully heal after an injury, sometimes leading to chronic damage.

Passion matters not only to individuals, but also to society, Vallerand said.

When he compared high-achieving professionals profiled by the Montreal newspaper La Presse with a random sample of people from an evening commuter train, he found that the high achievers were more passionate. They also worked an average of nine hours more per week.

What can you do to cultivate harmonious passion? Vallerand suggests three steps. First, select an activity you like, and set aside enough time to do it regularly. Second, internalize the activity -- make it part of how you see yourself. Finally, focus on enjoying the activity and improving your own performance -- not avoiding failure or doing better than others.

For better or for worse?

Passion can ignite romantic attraction, but the fate of relationships may depend on surprising details -- such as how one spouse responds to the other sharing some good news.

Shelly Gable, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies how couples respond to positive events, which could range from winning a casual Frisbee game to getting that long-awaited promotion at work.

Psychologists already knew that if one partner in a relationship provided support after a negative event, this helped the other partner and strengthened the relationship. But no one had looked at positive events.

When Gable did, the results surprised her. Enthusiasm after a positive event strengthened the relationship more than support after a negative event.

"I thought it would be important, but not as important as it was," she said, adding that needing help can make people feel incompetent or indebted.

Another unexpected result was that a passive, supportive response -- like saying, "That's nice, honey," and then turning back to the computer -- was almost as damaging as actually putting down the good event.

Luckily, giving active, constructive responses is a skill anyone can develop. "You don't have to be effervescent," Gable said. All you really have to do is show you care.

A surprising number of teenagers - nearly 15 percent - think they're going to die young, leading many to drug use, suicide attempts and other unsafe behavior, new research suggests.

The study, based on a survey of more than 20,000 kids, challenges conventional wisdom that says teens engage in risky behavior because they think they're invulnerable to harm. Instead, a sizable number of teens may take chances "because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake," said study author Dr. Iris Borowsky, a researcher at the University of Minnesota.

That behavior threatens to turn their fatalism into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over seven years, kids who thought they would die early were seven time more likely than optimistic kids to be subsequently diagnosed with AIDS. They also were more likely to attempt suicide and get in fights resulting in serious injuries.

Borowsky said the magnitude of kids with a negative outlook was eye-opening.

Adolescence is "a time of great opportunity and for such a large minority of youth to feel like they don't have a long life ahead of them was surprising," she said.

The study suggests a new way doctors could detect kids likely to engage in unsafe behavior and potentially help prevent it, said Dr. Jonathan Klein, a University of Rochester adolescent health expert who was not involved in the research.

"Asking about this sense of fatalism is probably a pretty important component of one of the ways we can figure out who those kids at greater risk are," he said.

The study appears in the July issue of Pediatrics, released Monday.

Scientists once widely believed that teenagers take risks because they underestimate bad consequences and figure "it can't happen to me," the study authors say. The new research bolsters evidence refuting that thinking.

Cornell University professor Valerie Reyna said the new study presents "an even stronger case against the invulnerability idea."

"It's extremely important to talk about how perception of risk influences risk-taking behavior," said Reyna, who has done similar research.

Fatalistic kids weren't more likely than others to die during the seven-year study; there were relatively few deaths, 94 out of more than 20,000 teens.

The researchers analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of kids in grades 7 to 12 who were interviewed three times between 1995 and 2002. Of 20,594 teens interviewed in the first round, 14.7 percent said they thought they had a good chance of dying before age 35. Subsequent interviews found these fatalistic kids engaged in more risky behavior than more optimistic kids.

The study suggests some kids overestimate their risks for harm; however, it also provides evidence that some kids may have good reason for being fatalistic.

Native Americans, blacks and low-income teens - kids who are disproportionately exposed to violence and hardship - were much more likely than whites to believe they'd die young.

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.