Mental Health - Scientific American

LONDON -- A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference.

"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret," wrote 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his political novel, Coningsby . Hyperbole aside, he may have mixed things up a bit. The latest research suggests that young people tend to fixate on their regrets, whereas older adults generally learn not to waste time wallowing in remorse about past circumstances they cannot change. A new study demonstrates that these cognitive differences manifest themselves in brain scans and physiological responses, revealing that, unlike healthy adults, both depressed adults and young people treat missed opportunities and genuine losses as equally regretful events--even if they were not directly responsible. Taming such ruefulness appears to be crucial to emotional stability and happiness in old age , and related therapies could help adults with depression. For the young, however, a little regret might be useful, motivating them to learn from their mistakes. [More]

Nell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.”

Can a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression.

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine

When an animal faces a predator, its senses go into overdrive. So scientists wondered, could human anxiety be an evolutionary legacy to protect us against potential threats? And if so, might anxious people have a heightened sense of smell, presumably to detect predators or disease-carriers.  

At the end of a long day, I flop down on the couch and close my eyes. I burrow my face into a pillow and enjoy a few moments of silence. Yet one thought creeps into my consciousness. Go to the gym. Find your running shoes. It won’t kill you.

From the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet. He made easy eye contact and loved to be stroked, hugged and kissed--all the things Alex recoiled from as an infant.

If you have ever jumped at a loud noise and felt an adrenaline rush, you have experienced the effects of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). In the body, this hormone triggers the familiar fight-or-flight response--racing heart, shortness of breath, sweaty palms. In the brain, however, it acts as a chemical messenger, playing a role in anxiety and depression. That role, a new study suggests, is more complex than anyone expected.

This column is not about Newt Gingrich. Nor is it about Chaz Bono. It’s not even about how the thought of them dancing together would make Rick Santorum’s head explode. No, this column is about a psychiatrist named Keith Ablow, who in recent months has taken the time to write about Gingrich and Bono from his unique perspective as a mental health professional.

The entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience--known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms--is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam.

Tropical fish tanks in restaurants, hospitals and homes evoke feelings of tranquility and beauty. They even lower stress levels prior to medical procedures and encourage Alzheimer's patients to eat sufficiently . But what's good for humans may be bad for the sea.

It's springtime, and that means mud pies, bug bites and scraped knees--if you're a preschooler. Or at least it used to.

What's the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked bread and noticing that you're out of breath? Both require attention. However, the direction of that attention differs: it is either turned outward, as in the case of noticing a stop sign or a tap on your shoulder, or turned inward, as in the case of feeling full or feeling love. 

DREAM STATES [More]

After several years of setbacks, gene therapy is once again yielding promising results. One area in which it is proving its potential is in restoring vision to patients who have been losing it since birth.

In the film Amèlie , the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with hundreds of marbles while a teacher is yelling at him to hurry up.

Have you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week , with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short.

What makes us who we are? Where is our personal history recorded, or our hopes? What explains autism or schiziphrenia or remarkable genius? Sebastian Seung argues that it’s all in the connections our neurons make. In his new book, Connectome , he argues that technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable to start mapping at least portions of the connectome. It’s a daunting task, he says, but without it, neuroscience will be stuck. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.