Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science / 19.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Justin M. Kim, Ph.D Dartmouth College Advisor: Paul J. Whalen MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Anxiety (and its co-conspirator ‘worry’) is an active, energy consuming process. You haven’t given up - you are still fighting back, trying to anticipate what might happen tomorrow. The problem of course is that there are an infinite number of ‘what if…’ scenarios you can come up with. For some individuals, the uncertainty of what ‘might happen’ tomorrow, is actually worse than the negative event itself actually happening. These individuals are intolerant of uncertainty. We were interested in how uncertainty and ambiguity of potential future threat contribute to the generation of anxiety and how they might be represented in our brain. In the psychology literature, how we deal with an uncertain future can be quantified as intolerance of uncertainty (IU). As is the case with any other personality characteristic, we all have varying degrees of IU. For example, individuals high in IU display difficulty accepting the possibility of potential negative events in the future. Importantly, psychiatric disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), whose symptoms are marked with worrying/obsessing, are commonly associated elevated IU. We noticed that while much of the neuroimaging research on IU has been primarily focused on brain function, brain structural correlates of IU have received little attention so far. As such, we believed that it was an important endeavor to assess the relationship between IU and the structural properties of the brain, which can be done through the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 18.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carlota Batres PhD Postdoctoral fellow at Gettysburg College MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The background for this study is that previous research has found that individuals from rural areas prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these preference differences: media exposure, differing optimal weights for different environments, and urbanization. In this study, we investigated familiarity as a possible explanation by examining participants’ face preferences while also examining the facial characteristics of the actual participants. The main finding of this study is that familiarity appears to be contributing to our facial preferences. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Technology / 09.03.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Indrajeet Patil PhD former PhD student at SISSA, Trieste and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Human societies are built on mutually beneficial cooperation, which relies on our prosocial and altruistic impulses to help each other out. Psychologists have been trying to understand the psychological basis of altruistic behavior for a while now, but studying costly altruism - a kind of helping behavior in which the altruist pays a heavy price to help others - has been difficult to study in lab settings given the ethical problems associated with creating any paradigm where participants stand to get hurt. Thus, the question is how do you study the motivation behind acts that involve a very high risk of physical injury to the self while helping others? Such situations are common in emergency contexts where people can be faced with the choice of either saving their own life or risking it to save someone else's life. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 15.02.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Brian Chin, B.S. PhD Student Doctoral Student Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Numerous studies demonstrate that married people tend to be healthier than those who are single, divorced, or widowed. However, less clear are the psychological and biological mechanisms through which this occurs. To this end, recent research has focused on how the unmarried may experience either greater amounts of stress or different types of stressful situations that put them at increased risk for morbidity and mortality. Models linking stress and disease often implicate the HPA axis as one pathway through which these stressful experiences can affect health. One way to index HPA axis activity is by measuring cortisol, a hormone that plays a regulatory role for many immunological and metabolic processes in the body. The primary aim of our study was to examine whether cortisol could be one biological mechanism through which marital status impacts health. Over three non-consecutive days, 572 healthy adult participants between 21-55 years old provided multiple saliva samples that were used to measure cortisol. Relative to their never married or previously married counterparts, married people had both lower cortisol outputs and steeper daily declines – both of which have been shown to be associated with better health outcomes. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Technology / 09.02.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lazaros Gonidis PhD candidate Postgraduate Researcher University of Kent MedicalResearch.com: In general, why do we tend to underestimate time when we are distracted versus when we are doing something boring? Is the adage that “time flies when you’re having fun” true? Response:  In order to be accurate at time “keeping” we need to attend to it. Anything that distracts us makes us less accurate, and to be more specific, it makes us underestimate the duration of events. In simple terms when we experience an event that last 10 minutes a distraction could make it feel like 5 minutes. On the other hand when we are bored, let’s say during a non-interesting event, we tend to focus more on time keeping looking forward for the event to finish. In this case we would overestimate the event and 10 minutes could feel like 15 minutes. (more…)
Author Interviews, Pediatrics, Psychological Science / 31.01.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Matthew Cassels PhD candidate, Developmental Psychiatry University of Cambridge Cambridge UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Around 70% of UK families with young children own a pet. However, the impact of pets on children’s lives is understudied and poorly understood. Researchers in the field of Human-Animal Interaction have been working towards addressing this gap in our understanding by focusing on the role of pets in our lives. Compared to the owners of other pets, dog owners have been found to be more likely to derive a sense of safety, companionship, and security from their pets, and to perceive them as more responsive and affectionate. Factors that contribute to differences in the quality of human-animal relationships are of great interest because the magnitude of the benefits derived from these relationships is related to their quality. Pets may be especially significant to young people, aiding them in their social and emotional development, and serving as important substitutes for human attachment figures. Children consider their relationships with their pets as among their most important, report strong emotional bonds with their pets, spontaneously list pets when asked to name close friends and providers of social support, report turning to their pets when feeling sad, identify pets more often than humans as providers of comfort, and rely on their pets as playmates and confidants. (more…)
Author Interviews, Metabolic Syndrome, Psychological Science, University of Pennsylvania, Weight Research / 27.01.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Rebecca L. Pearl PhD Department of Psychiatry, Center for Weight and Eating Disorders Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?  Response: Weight bias is a pervasive form of prejudice that leads to weight-based discrimination, bullying, and the overall stigmatization of obesity. Some individuals with obesity may internalize weight bias by applying negative weight stereotypes to themselves and “self-stigmatizing.” Exposure to weight bias and stigma increases risk for poor obesity-related health (in part by increasing physiological stress), but little is known about the relationship between weight bias internalization and risk for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Neurological Disorders, Psychological Science / 27.01.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Roberta Riccelli Magna Graecia University Catanzaro, Italy MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in personality neuroscience, an emergent field of research exploring how the extraordinary variety of human behaviors arise from different patterns of brain function and structure. According to psychologists, the extraordinary variety of human personality can be broken down into the so-called ‘Big Five’ personality traits, namely neuroticism (how moody a person is), extraversion (how enthusiastic a person is), openness (how open-minded a person is), agreeableness (a measure of altruism), and conscientiousness (a measure of self-control). However, the relationships between personality profile and brain shape remains still poorly characterized and understood. The findings of our study highlighted that the personality type characterizing each person is connected to the brain shape of several regions implicated in emotional behaviors and control. We found that neuroticism, a personality trait underlying mental illnesses such as anxiety disorders, was linked to a thicker cortex (the brain's outer layer of neural tissue) and a smaller area and folding in some brain regions. Conversely, openness, a trait reflecting curiosity and creativity, was associated to thinner cortex and greater area and folding in the brain. The other personality traits were linked to other differences in brain structure, such as agreeableness being correlated with a thinner prefrontal cortex (which is linked to empathy and other social skills). Overall, all the traits characterizing this model of personality are related to some features (e.g. thickness, area and folding) of brain regions implicated in attention, salience detection of stimuli and emotion processing. This could reflect the fact that many personality traits are linked to high-level socio-cognitive skills as well as the ability to modulate ‘core’ affective responses. (more…)
Author Interviews, Gender Differences, Neurological Disorders, Psychological Science / 20.01.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lise Eliot PhD Associate Professor of Neuroscience Chicago Medical School Rosalind Franklin University North Chicago, IL 60064 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Studies in rats indicate that the amygdala, which is important for many social behaviors including aggression and rough-and-tumble play, is larger in male animals.  Early MRI studies also reported that the human amygdala is larger in men, even after correcting for males' larger overall brain size.  Because so many MRI studies are now imaging amygdala volume in matched groups of healthy males and females, we realized that there is a lot of published data that could settle whether the human amygdala is indeed proportionally larger in men.  Another rationale for the study is that many psychiatric disorders that involve the amygdala (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance abuse) differ in prevalence between men and women. (more…)
Author Interviews, Autism, Gastrointestinal Disease, Psychological Science / 05.01.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: David Q. Beversdor MD Center for Translational Neuroscience University Hospital University of Missouri Health System Columbia, MO 65212 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Altered stress reactivity, alterations in cytokines and a high incidence of gastrointestinal disturbances have all been observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We wished to examine the interactions between these factors. What we found was that patients with greater stress reactivity, as indicated by cortisol response in the testing environment, had greater symptomatology involving the lower gastrointestinal tract, which was predominated by constipation. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, PLoS, Psychological Science / 02.12.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr-Gunther-Meinlschmidt.jpg Prof. Dr. Gunther Meinlschmidt, Psych University of Basel, Department of Psychology, Division of Clinical Psychology and Epidemiology Faculty of Medicine Switzerland MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Physical diseases and mental disorders affect a person’s quality of life. Further, they present a huge challenge for the healthcare system. It has been reported that physical and mental disorders systematically co-occur already early in life. What we wanted to know is whether there are certain temporal patterns between mental disorders and physical diseases during childhood and adolescence. A better understanding of such patterns may help to reveal processes that could be relevant both to the origins of physical diseases and mental disorders and to their treatment. (more…)
Author Interviews, MRI, Psychological Science / 02.12.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jeffrey S. Anderson, MD, PhD Director the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service Principal Investigator for the Utah Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory University of Utah MedicalResearch.com: What is your study about? Response: Billions of people find meaning in life and make choices based on religious and spiritual experiences. These experiences range from epiphanies that change the lives of celebrated mystics to subtle feelings of peace and joy in the lives of neighbors, friends, or family members that are interpreted as spiritual, divine, or transcendent. Astonishingly, with all we understand about the brain, we still know very little about how the brain participates in these experiences. We set out to answer what brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group of people, devout Mormons. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 18.11.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carlota Batres, Ph.D. Perception Lab School of Psychology and Neuroscience University of St Andrews UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The background for this study is that previous research had found that people in different environments prefer different faces, which suggests that preferences change according to the environment. However, because previous research had never tracked the same participants across environmental changes, such a link could not be confirmed. Therefore, we sought to determine if, and to what extent, face preferences were malleable by repeatedly testing participants whose environment was not changing as well participants undergoing intensive training at an army camp. (more…)
Author Interviews, Exercise - Fitness, Psychological Science / 04.11.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Colin Zestcott PhD Graduate Student University of Arizona MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We are very interested in terror management theory, which was developed by Jeff Greenberg (one of the co-Authors of the paper) and his colleagues in the late 80's. The theory is a very broad motivational theory that may help explain why people do the things they do in many different contexts. The theory explains why people need self esteem and why they care so much about their cultural worldviews. Athletes use many different motivational techniques to improve their performance in sport. Our idea was to apply an experimental social psychology theory--Terror Management Theory (TMT)--as one novel way to improve performance in basketball. According to Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski & Solomon, 1986) self-esteem and cultural worldviews help human beings avoid worrying about their inevitable mortality, by convincing them that they are more than just material creatures that are destined to die and decay; that they have meaning, purpose and value, and that they may somehow continue to exist after they die, either literally, as in religious beliefs in the afterlife, or symbolically, through their achievements, relationship and identification with groups. According to TMT self-esteem is defined as the feeling that one is a valuable member of a meaningful universe. (more…)
Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Psychological Science / 28.10.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Xiaoyan Fang and Sophia Hoschar Institute of Epidemiology II Mental Health Research Unit Helmholtz Zentrum München German Research Center for Environmental Health Neuherberg MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Time to treatment is a crucial determinant of survival in patients who have suffered an acute myocardial infarction. During an acute myocardial infarction, patients often use denial as a coping mechanism which may provide positive mood regulating effects but may also prolong prehospital delay time (PHD). Indeed, some small exploratory studies, mainly performed over 10 years ago, provided a preliminary evidence that denial contributes to decreased adherence to effective cardiac treatment by disavowing of the diagnosis and by minimizing the perceived symptom burden and symptom severity. Thus, the object of Munich Examination of Delay in Patients Experiencing Acute Myocardial Infarction (MEDEA) study is to find the effect of denial on patients’ prehospital delay. Our study contributes important new findings to the role of denial in the face of an AMI in an extended data set of STEMI patients.
  • First, the psychological coping mechanism of denial in the face of an AMI turned out to have more beneficial than adverse effects: denial contributed to less suffering from heart-related symptoms and negative potentially traumatizing affectivity without leading the patients to maladaptive behavior (e.g. waiting for the symptoms to resolve).
  • In addition, from an overall perspective, denial only minimally increased the delay time, whereas in the time window of 3-24hrs, denial led to a clinical significant longer delay. Apparently denial did not function in the most favorable time window presumably because of an extreme painful symptom pattern which overcame the effect of denial on prehospital delay. In this case, denial might be an intervention point for those who are without severe symptoms.
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Author Interviews, Nature, Psychological Science / 27.10.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Neil Garrett PhD Student Affective Brain Lab Department of Experimental Psychology University College London London, UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? 1. BEHAVIOURAL FINDING: The amount by which participants lied got larger and larger over the course of the block. Dishonesty escalation was observed only when participants lied for their own benefit, not when they did so solely for the benefit of others. 2. BRAIN FINDING: A network of brain regions associated with emotion responded strongly when participants lied initially. But as time went on, it would respond less and less to the same amount of lying. The greater the drop in sensitivity, the more a person increased their lying the next opportunity they got. (more…)
Addiction, Alcohol, Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 16.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kristina J. Berglund Department of Psychology University of Gothenburg MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: In Sweden, care providers do offer different treatment strategies for individuals who have alcohol problems, where some offer a treatment where the goal is abstinence and other offer a treatment where the goal is low-risk consumption. We wanted to investigate how important it was for having a successful treatment when there was congruence between the patient’s goals and the advocated goal of the treatment, and when there was not. The main findings was that that if the patient had a goal of abstinence than it was much more likely to reach that goal if the patient went to a treatment that advocated abstinence. It was less likely to reach the goal if a patient had a goal of low-risk consumption and went to a treatment that advocated low-risk consumption. The treatment that advocated abstinence was also more effective when the patient were ambivalent of his/her own goal. (more…)
Abuse and Neglect, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science, Technology / 15.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Yu Chen, Ph.D. Post-doc researcher Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: College students are facing increasing amount of stress these days. We are interested in leveraging information technology to help them become happier. We week to implement happiness-boosting exercises in positive psychology using technology in a lightweight way. Since college students frequently take photos using their smartphones, we started to investigate how to use smartphone photography to help students conduct the happiness-boosting exercises. Participants were divided into three groups and instructed to take a photo per day in one of the following three conditions: 1) a smiling selfie; 2) a photo of something that makes himself/herself happy; 3) a photo of something that makes another person happy, which is then sent to that person. We found that participants have become more positive after purposefully taking the assigned type of photo for three weeks. Participants who took photos that make others happy also became calmer. Some participants who took smiling selfies reported becoming more confident and comfortable with their smiles. Those who took photos to make themselves happy reported becoming more reflective and appreciative. Participants who took photos to make others happy found connecting with strong ties help them reduce stress. (more…)
Author Interviews, Duke, Medical Imaging, MRI, PLoS, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 15.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kevin S. LaBar, Ph.D. Professor and Head, Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience Program Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Neuroscience Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Duke University Durham, NC MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Emotion research is limited by a lack of objective markers of emotional states. Most human research relies on self-report, but individuals may not have good insight into their own emotions. We have developed a new way to identify emotional states using brain imaging and machine learning tools. First, we induced emotional states using film and music clips while individuals were in an MRI scanner. We trained a computer algorithm to identify the brain areas that distinguished 7 emotions from each other (fear, anger, surprise, sadness, amusement, contentment, and a neutral state). This procedure created a brain map for each of the 7 emotions. Then, a new group of participants self-reported their emotional state every 30 seconds in an MRI scanner while no stimuli were presented. We could predict which emotion was spontaneously reported by the subjects by comparing their brain scans to each of the 7 emotion maps. Finally, in a large group of 499 subjects, we found that the presence of the fear map during rest predicted state and trait anxiety while the presence of the sadness map predicted state and trait depression. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 14.09.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mr Liam Satchell Research Associate Department of Psychology University of Portsmouth, UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Most people in general are really interested in trying to understand "body language", how a person behaves may give clues to their psychology. However, psychology has rarely engaged in an empirical investigation of what information about personality may be available in largely automatic movements, such as walking. We brought together techniques from psychology research and sports and exercise science to investigate what features of personality may be available in gait. (more…)
Author Interviews, Breast Cancer, Genetic Research, Mental Health Research, Ovarian Cancer, Psychological Science / 31.08.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mag. Dr. Anne Oberguggenberger PhD Medizinische Universität Innsbruck Department für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik Innsbruck Austria MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Genetic counseling and testing is increasingly integrated in routine clinical care for breast- and ovarian cancer (BOC). Knowledge on follow-up psychosocial outcomes in all different groups of counselees is essential in order to improve follow-up care and counselees’ quality of life. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMJ, Psychological Science, Sexual Health / 10.08.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Steven Arnocky, PhD Associate Professor Department of Psychology Nipissing University North Bay, ON CAN  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Our work was based on previous findings from hunter-gatherer populations showing that men who hunt and share meat often enjoy greater reproductive access to women.  Research in North America has shown that individuals prefer altruistic partners, especially for long-term mating, and that there may be a sex difference in these preferences such that women exhibit this preference more strongly than men. In line with this, some research has shown that men will sometimes compete with other men in order to make charitable donations to attractive female fundraisers (termed 'competitive altruism'). Taken together, these findings led us to hypothesise that individuals (and perhaps particularly men) who behave altruistically might experience greater mating success. In Study 1, undergraduate men and women completed a self-report altruism questionnaire (items such as “I have donated blood”), a personality measure, and a sexual history survey. We found that participants who scored higher on a self-report altruism measure reported they were more desirable to the opposite sex, as well as reported having more sex partners, more casual sex partners, and having sex more often within relationships. Moreover, altruism mattered more for men’s number of lifetime and casual sex partners relative to women’s. Given the possibility that in any survey research, there is a chance individual’s may report their altruism of sexual history in what they view to be a more positive light (who doesn’t want to think of themselves as altruistic!), in Study 2, we used a behavioral measure of altruism (each participant was entered onto a draw for $100, and at the end of the survey was given the choice to keep their winnings or to donate to a charity). Participants again reported on their sexual histories, as well as completed a personality measure, a scale to capture socially-desirable responding, and a measure of narcissism. Results showed that even when controlling for these potentially confounding variables, that altruists reported having more lifetime sex partners, more casual sex partners, and more sex partners over the past year. Men who were willing to donate also reported having more lifetime dating partners. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science / 05.08.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Melissa F. Colloff PhD student and Kimberley A. Wade PhD, Department of Psychology University of Warwick MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Eyewitnesses of crimes often have to attempt to make identification decisions as to whether the police suspect is, or is not, the real culprit of the crime. In an identification parade (UK), or a lineup (US), the suspect is presented alongside similar-looking people (who are known to be innocent) and the witness has to identify the real culprit if he or she is there, or state that the real culprit is not present. Eyewitness identification decisions can be very influential in how a case progresses through the criminal justice system. An incorrect identification can result in a guilty person going free, or an innocent person being charged of a crime they did not commit. So generally speaking, our research investigates which identification procedures enhance a person’s ability to identify a guilty suspect. In our study, we wanted to find out how the police should accommodate suspects with distinctive facial features (e.g., tattoos, scars, piercings, bruising) in lineups. If the police suspect stands out in a lineup because he has a distinctive feature, this is not a good test of the witness’s memory. The witness might pick the suspect simply because it is obvious that he is the focus of the police investigation. Alternatively, the witness might pick the suspect just because he is the best match—but not necessarily an exact match—to their memory of the culprit, compared to the other lineup members. Basically, if a distinctive suspect stands out, a witness is likely to pick the distinctive suspect, even if he is not the real culprit. Estimates suggest that over one third of all police suspects have distinctive facial features. But police guidelines on how to accommodate distinctive suspects in lineups are not currently guided by research—in fact, there are thousands of studies on lineups, but only a handful that explore lineups for distinctive suspects. In our study, we examined three techniques currently used by the police to prevent distinctive suspects from standing out and compared these techniques to doing nothing to prevent the distinctive suspect from standing out. Let’s say the suspect has a black eye. One thing the police might do is digitally add a black eye to all of the other faces in the lineup (i.e., “replication”). Or, they might cover up the suspect’s black eye and cover up a similar area on the faces of the other lineup members. In practice, the police can cover up the feature by either overlaying the area of the feature with a black block (i.e., “block”), or by pixelating the area of the feature (i.e., “pixelation”). In our study, we compared replication, pixelation and block lineup techniques against lineups in which nothing was done to prevent a distinctive suspect from standing out—that is, lineups in which the suspect was the only person with a black eye. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Pediatrics, Psychological Science, Radiology / 19.06.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Luca Passamonti MD Department of Clinical Neurosciences University of Cambridge MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Dr. Passamonti: We wanted to study if the brain of young people with two different forms of conduct disorder (CD) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduct_disorder), a neuropsychiatric disease associated with severe and persistent antisocial behaviors (weapon use, aggression, fire-setting, stealing, fraudulent behavior), was different from that of young peers with no such abnormal behaviors. There is already evidence that conduct disorder may have a biological basis (i.e., reduced levels of cortisol under stress) and brain alterations but a whole “map” of the brain in conduct disorder studying cortical thickness was never been done before. (more…)
Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Pain Research, Psychological Science / 26.05.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Robert W. Levenson, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology Director, Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR) University of California Berkeley, CA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Dr. Levenson: This study comes from a 20-year longitudinal study of Bay Area married couples that we began in the late 1980s. The main purpose of the study was to understand the emotional qualities of successful marriages. Couples came to our laboratory every five years so that we could get a snapshot of the way they interacted with each. We also measured their psychological and physical health. This new paper connects the emotional behaviors we observed when couples discussed a problem in their marriage at the start of the study with the kinds of illnesses they developed over the ensuing decades. (more…)
Author Interviews, Pain Research, Psychological Science / 11.05.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study Former Ph.D. student at Ohio State Now at the National Institutes of Health MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Mischkowski: We tested in two double blind experiments whether the popular physical painkiller acetaminophen reduces empathy for the pain of other people. In the first experiment (N=80), participants completed measures of empathy (i.e., perceived pain and personal distress) while reading hypothetical about the physical and social mishaps of other people. We found that acetaminophen reduced empathy for pain in these scenarios. In Study 2 (N=114), we replicated and extending these findings, showing that acetaminophen also decreased empathy (i.e., perceived pain, personal distress, and empathic concern) for another study participant experiencing ostracism or painful noise blasts. Furthermore, noise unpleasantness accounted for the effect of acetaminophen on empathy for noise pain. (more…)
Author Interviews, Neurological Disorders, Psychological Science / 19.04.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Neuroscience Department of Psychology San Francisco State University Assistant Adjunct Professor Department of Neurology University of California, San Francisco Boardmember, Scientific Advisory Board Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Buenos Aires MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Morsella: The study is based on Passive Frame Theory, which I discuss below in brief, and on ironic processing, in which one is more likely to think about something (e.g., white bears) when instructed to not think about that thing.  Based on this research, the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) reveals that, following the activation of certain "action sets" (i.e., dispositions to act one way or another), conscious thoughts can arise involuntarily and systematically when one is presented with certain stimuli.  In the most basic version of the RIT, subjects are presented with visual objects and instructed to not think of the names of the objects, which is challenging.  In the new study, we show that the effect arises not only for automatic processes (e.g., forms of cued-memory retrieval) but also for processes involving more, in a sense, moving parts (e.g., symbol manipulation, in which symbols are mentally manipulated).  In the study, subjects were first trained to perform a word-manipulation task similar to the game of Pig Latin (e.g., “CAR” becomes “AR-CAY”). This task involves complex symbol manipulations.  After training, though participants were instructed to no longer transform stimulus words in this way, the RIT effect still arose on roughly 40% of the trials. The present experiment provides additional evidence for Passive Frame Theory, a new, comprehensive and internally coherent framework that illuminates the role of conscious processing in the brain. Click here for more information about Passive Frame Theory: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/consciousness-and-the-brain/201604/passive-frame-theory-new-synthesis Although consciousness is not "epiphenomenal" (meaning that it serves no function) or omnipresent (e.g., as in panpsychism, which states that consciousness is a property of all matter), in Passive Frame Theory, the role of consciousness is much more passive and less teleological (i.e., less purposeful) than that of other theoretical accounts. The framework reveals that consciousness has few moving parts and no memory, no reasoning, or symbol manipulation, which is relevant to the present study. Consciousness does the same thing, over and over, for various processes, making it seem that it does more than it does.  Hence, consciousness, over time, seems to be more flexible than it actually is. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMJ, Cancer Research, Colon Cancer, Psychological Science / 09.03.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Benedicte Kirkøen, PhD candidate Bowel Cancer Screening in Norway – a pilot study Cancer Registry of Norway (Kreftregisteret) MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Randomised controlled trials have demonstrated that screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) can reduce CRC related mortality, but the total benefit and harm of national cancer screening programmes are under debate. Saving relatively few lives requires a large number of people to be screened. Most people who attend screening will never develop cancer, but may be exposed to potential psychological stress by participation. Cancer is one of the largest threats to peoples’ health, and participating in screening for cancer might therefore cause anxiety. In Norway, colorectal cancer incidence has nearly tripled since the 1950s, and currently a large randomised pilot study of a national screening programme (Bowel Cancer Screening in Norway) is investigating the effect of screening on reduction in CRC incidence and mortality. As part of an evaluation of the benefits and harms of the pilot, we investigated the psychological effect of screening participation in a large group of participants. Of particular interest to us were participants who received a positive screening result and were referred to colonoscopy. (more…)
Author Interviews, BMJ, Karolinski Institute, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science, Technology / 06.02.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Jesper Enander Department of Clinical Neuroscience Karolinska Institutet MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? Dr. Enander: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a common anxiety disorder affecting about 2% of the general population, and is associated with hospitalization, substance dependence and suicidality. The disorder is characterized by a intense preoccupation with perceived defects in physical appearance, despite looking perfectly normal. It is common for people with BDD to seek non-psychiatric care, such as dermatological treatment or plastic surgery, however, such treatments rarely work, and can even lead to a deterioration of symptoms. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK recommends that patients with Body dysmorphic disorder should be offered cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), however, there is a gap between supply and demand of CBT. One way of increasing access to CBT is to deliver it using the Internet. In this randomized clinical trial we tested the efficacy of a Internet based CBT program for Body dysmorphic disorder called BDD-NET and compared it to supportive therapy. MedicalResearch: What are the main findings? Dr. Enander: Our study shows that BDD-NET was associated with large and significant improvements in  Body dysmorphic disorder symptom severity. 56% of those receiving BDD-NET were responders (defined as at least a 30% reduction in symptoms), compared to 13% of those receiving supportive therapy. At the six months follow-up, 39% of those who received BDD-NET no longer met diagnostic criteria for Body dysmorphic disorder. No serious adverse events were reported, and most participants were satisfied with BDD-NET, despite no face-to-face contact with a therapist, and deemed the treatment as highly acceptable. (more…)
Author Interviews, Baylor College of Medicine Houston, Psychological Science / 21.01.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jerry Park, Ph.D. Associate professor of sociology Affiliate Fellow, Institute for Studies on Religion Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Park: Research has shown that media representations of Asian Americans tend stereotype them as a “model minority.” The implied message in those media-based stereotypes is that non-Asian American minorities must not be working hard enough to achieve the same upward mobility levels of Asian Americans. So we wanted to know 1) whether these stereotypes inhabit the minds of college students and 2) whether those stereotypes are associated with beliefs about racial inequality. Using data on a sample of white college students at very selective universities (e.g. Columbia, Northwestern, Rice, Stanford) we found that these students tended to rate Asian Americans (as a group) as more competent than Blacks or Latinos. Then we analyzed whether there was a relationship between this stereotype and attitudes that read: “Many [Blacks/ Latinos] have only themselves to blame for not doing better in life. If they tried harder they would do better.” We found that most students disagree with this statement moderately; however when we account for their beliefs about Asian American competence, their responses shift more toward agreement. This confirmed for us that this model minority stereotype is not just in the media but in the thinking of college students as well. And it’s associated with beliefs about other minority groups who are perceived as not working hard enough (as opposed to recognizing the realities of systemic discrimination). (more…)