News U Can Use

Self-help books based on the traditional principles of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, including popular titles like 'CBT for Dummies', can do more harm than good, according to a new study, reported by the British Psychological Society.

The risks were highest for readers described as 'high ruminators' - those who spend time mulling over the likely causes and consequence of their negative moods.

The new research focuses on the use of self-help books as a preventative intervention for people at risk of developing depression. Gerald Haeffel identified 72 undergrads at risk and allocated each of them randomly to work through one of three self-help books. A third of the students spent four weeks working through a traditional self-help CBT-based book, of the kind typically found in book stores, which involved learning the links between thoughts, behaviour and mood, as well as identifying negative thoughts and re-evaluating them. Another group of students followed a 'non-traditional' CBT-based self-help book, similar to the first but modified so that the task of identifying and challenging one's own negative thoughts was removed. The final group followed a book that taught academic skills such as time-management and memory aids.

Here's the bottom line - among students who tended to ruminate and who had suffered an increase in stress, those who followed the traditional CBT book displayed more depressive symptoms after the four-week study period than those who followed either of the other two books. At four-month follow-up, the traditional CBT study group as a whole tended to have more depression symptoms than the other groups, although high ruminating and stressed students in the traditional group remained the biggest losers.

Researchers can predict your performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in your brain, a multi-institutional team reports this week.

The new study, in the journal Cerebral Cortex, found that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains.

The study adds to the evidence that specific parts of the striatum, a collection of distinctive tissues tucked deep inside the cerebral cortex, profoundly influence a person's ability to refine his or her motor skills, learn new procedures, develop useful strategies and adapt to a quickly changing environment.

"This is the first time that we've been able to take a real world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game," said Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and first author on the study.              
   
IMAGE: MRI scans reveal the brain structures analyzed in this study: nucleus accumbens (orange), putamen (red), caudate nucleus (blue), and hippocampus (green).
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Women with blonde hair have the competitive edge, being more aggressive and determined than redheads and brunettes, say scientists, according to the BBC.

Fair-haired women, whether natural or out of a bottle, display a warlike streak when fighting battles to get their own way, findings suggest.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences work might explain why many leading women are blonde.

The University of California team studied 156 female students.

About half of all American adults (48%, according to a Marist poll taken in December) say they are at least somewhat likely to make a New Year's resolution this year as Maia Szalavitz reports in Time.com. Their top vows: to lose weight (19%), quit smoking (12%) and exercise more (10%). Sound familiar?

But consider this: if hard-core addicts can break bad habits - some by moderating, not just quitting - there's still hope for you. Whether your goal for 2010 is to get fit or tame your drinking, experts say there's a lot you can learn from people who have successfully moderated their habits to help keep you off the resolution merry-go-round.

1. Don't Kid Yourself

"The most important thing is to be honest with yourself," says Howard Josepher, a former heroin addict and president of Exponents Inc., an organization that provides support and educational services to people with substance misuse issues. "You need to know the difference between enjoying yourself and self-medicating. It's not that self-medicating is necessarily bad - but you should give yourself parameters. If you are adhering to them, O.K. If not, you need to check yourself." 

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

It's not many generations ago that workers expected to have a job for life, most probably one that followed in the footsteps of their father, and his father before that. In many of today's richer societies, it's all different, the British Psychological Society reports.

Longer education and greater individual choice mixed with mergers, take-overs and bankruptcies mean that people's careers are typically punctuated by a series of distinct transitions or chapters. But how do people perceive these transitions and do such perceptions vary between cultures? To find out, Katharina Chudzikowski and her colleagues interviewed a mix of over a hundred nurses and blue- and white-collar workers from five countries - Austria, Serbia, Spain, USA and China.

Their stand-out finding? Workers in the United States didn't ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as conflict with a boss. Not once. Instead they tended to mention internal factors, such as their desire for a fresh challenge. By contrast, workers in China almost exclusively stressed the role played by external factors. Meanwhile, workers in the the European nations were more of a mix, attributing their career transitions to both internal and external factors.

The importance of pheromones in intra-species communication
has long been known in insects. A classical example
is bombykol, the sexual attractant of the butterfly Bombyx
mori. Bombykol is produced by the female butterflies in
odour glands of the abdomen. Male butterflies detect the
pheromone with sensory cells, located in the antennae and
can find the females by the gradient of her odour. As little as
one molecule of bombykol is enough to stimulate the
receptor cells and facilitate the orientation reaction. Several
studies suggest that pheromones play an important role also
in mammalian social behaviour and thus in humans as well.
The comprehensive review covers the current evidence of how
pheromones influence human life and interactions and
discusses the consequences for human sexual attraction and
mate-choice.

New research suggests that telling smokers cigarettes will kill them won't necessarily convince them to quit, Timothy McDonald reports for PM on the ABC.

Smoking kills around 15,000 Australians every year and despite the obvious risk, nearly a fifth of Australian adults still light up.

Matthew Rockloff from Queensland Central University says entire cultures are in some ways an attempt to imbue life with some sense of meaning so that people do not have to deal with the inevitable head-on.

"They cling to this sort of world view that they have of themselves or their self-esteem, what makes them important in the world in a cultural sense, their importance to their family or to their community or how they're connected to their culture," he said.

"In essence, everybody realises that even though they may physically die, their culture will carry on.

"And to the extent that they're valued and accepted into that culture then that provides some sort of buffer against that anxiety that people feel about the fact that they may ultimately die."

Researchers at New York University have developed a non-invasive technique to block the return of fear memories in humans. The technique, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, may change how we view the storage processes of memory and could lead to new ways to treat anxiety disorders.

Researchers have long sought to understand fear memories. These are expressed as the body's emotional reaction to objects or events previously linked to potential danger. It is known that, over time, such emotional responses could dissipate in a process called extinction in which the same event is experienced in a safe environment. After extinction, the fear memory is merely suppressed, not erased, and therefore these memories could resurface under certain conditions, such as unrelated stress. In some cases, the re-emergence of the emotional memory is maladaptive, leading to anxiety disorders. Because of this, researchers have sought to find ways to prevent the return of fear.

While researchers have traditionally seen long-term memory as fixed and resistant, it is now becoming clear that memory is, in fact, dynamic and flexible. As a result, the act of remembering makes the memory vulnerable until it is stored again—a process called reconsolidation. During this instability period, new information could be incorporated into the old memory. This was the phase during which the NYU researchers sought to employ a technique to block the return of fear memories.

Communicating "I have some good news and some bad news" is better than combining messages into a single, bleak result when small gains and large losses occur together, according to a study in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

"The Silver Lining Effect: Formal Analysis and Experiments" is by Peter Jarnebrant of the European School of Management and Technology and Olivier Toubia and Eric Johnson of Columbia University.

The authors ask how people's choices change when they are presented with information in either of two ways: as an integrated whole or as two segregated pieces. For example, they ask, does an investor prefer a statement showing only an aggregate loss of $95 – or one showing a loss of $100 and a gain of $5?

The authors follow upon work first done by RH Thaler in 1985. "Thaler's intuition was that decision makers would prefer to mentally separate a small gain from a big loss, thus providing a silver lining to the loss," explains Prof. Olivier Toubia, one of the authors. This study provides new tests to the original assumptions.