MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Maria Pagano, PhD
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Department of Psychiatry, Division of Child Psychiatry
Cleveland, OHMedicalResearch: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Pagano: Socially anxious adolescents quickly figure out that alcohol and drugs can provide ease and comfort in social situations that are anxiety provoking. Reaching for a substance to change how you feel can quickly become a knee-jerk reaction, can develop into an addiction, and robs youths of learning how to tolerate interpersonal differences and uncomfortable feelings, developing emotional maturity, and cultivating self acceptance.
Adolescents who fear being criticized by their peers are likely to not speak up in group therapies during treatment, which can limit their benefit from treatment. There is a lot of healing that comes sharing your insides with others. Socially anxious patients may not get this healing nor let others really get to know who they are and give input to their lives
Higher peer helping in AA during treatment means getting active in low intensity tasks like putting away chairs, or making coffee at a 12-step meeting. It is less about needing peer assistance or expecting praise or recognition from giving service. It is more about adopting the attitude of "how can I be helpful?"
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Margaret C. Campbell, Phd | Professor | Marketing
Chair, Doctoral Curriculum Program Committee
437 Leeds School of Business
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309-0419
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Campbell: People try to maintain healthy body weights, attain academic and career success, save money for a car, a house, or retirement, and achieve a host of other goals that require repeated, goal-consistent behaviors. Unfortunately, consumers’ efforts often fall short. For example, 68% of Americans are overweight (Weight Control Information Network 2010), 46% who begin college do not graduate within six years (Associated Press 2006), and although 93% say that saving for retirement is important, only about 60% are actually saving (TIAA-CREF 2010) and approximately 50% have accumulated less than $25,000 (Helman, VanDehrei and Copeland 2007). Understanding goal pursuit and consumers’ choices to continue effort toward a goal that requires repeated goal-consistent behaviors is thus important. People need to be able to make progress on important goals that substantially impact their quality of life.
Monitoring the influence of behavior on distance from a focal goal has been identified as important for successful goal pursuit - such as weight loss. In seven experiments, we find that people tend to have a “progress bias” such that they perceive that goal-consistent behaviors (such as avoiding eating a piece of cake) help progress more than equivalent-sized goal-inconsistent behaviors (such as eating a piece of cake) hurt progress. An experiment on exercise and eating shows that the progress bias can lead to poor understanding of progress and thus, premature release of the goal. In this study, the progress bias resulted in people with a goal of expending more calories than they consumed ended up consuming more than they expended.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Vasileios Zikos
Assistant Professor
Research Institute for Policy Evaluation and Design (RIPED) and School of Economics
University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC)
Bangkok, Thailand
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?Dr. Zikos: Economic studies that look at subjective well-being typically focus on how and why life circumstances affect an individual’s life satisfaction. While such studies provide valuable insights on the average effects of life changes, they often find substantial variability in the way individuals react to life events. In this study we take a step toward identifying sources of individual heterogeneity by focusing on the link between physical or mental illnesses and health satisfaction and asking whether gender and personality can explain how people cope with becoming ill.
Earlier studies in psychology suggest that personality traits might be relevant to health and health-related behaviors. This allows us to hypothesize what could be the specific role of personality traits when people confront being ill. Our study is based on data collected in the British Household Panel Survey, a national longitudinal data set from the United Kingdom. The survey asked people about their happiness and satisfaction with aspects of their life. It also asked about their physical and mental health and about their personalities, among other things. Our study separates people into three groups: with physical illness only, with mental illness only and with both physical and mental types of illness. Because earlier studies found evidence of personality differences between genders, we conduct our analysis separately for men and women.
We found that illness implies a strong negative effect on the individual’s health satisfaction. Men are less affected by a single-symptom illness than women, but are more affected when more than one symptom is present. The number of symptoms doesn’t change how women are affected. Moreover, women with one of two distinct personality types are less affected by mental illness than all other personality types. The first personality type, high levels of agreeableness, experience high quality relationships in their lives. The second type, women with low levels of conscientiousness, have little need for achievement, order or persistence. For men, however, we did not find statistical evidence that personality affects how they cope with illness.
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