Results from the six-month program included less weight gain, improved body image, less consumption of fast food and more participation in family meals. The program included weekly peer meetings, consultations with primary care providers and separate meetings for parents.

Kaiser Permanente researchers have published their results online in the journal Pediatrics.

Experts say the study is the first to report long-term results from a weight management program designed specifically for teenage girls.

Most other programs have included younger children and interventions focused on the entire family. This program included separate meetings for parents with the rationale that teens are motivated more by peer acceptance than parental influence.

The study is also unique in that it was conducted in a primary-care setting, rather than an academic or specialty-care environment.

“Nearly one-third of teenage girls are overweight or obese, and many of them are likely to become obese adults,” said Lynn DeBar, Ph.D., M.P.H., lead author and senior investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.

“Our study shows that intervention programs can help these girls achieve long-term success managing their weight and also learning new habits that will hopefully carry over into their adult life.”

“Many teenage girls are still growing taller, so for them, maintaining weight or slowing weight gain is an acceptable goal,” said Phil Wu, M.D., a pediatrician who leads Kaiser Permanente’s effort to prevent and treat childhood obesity and is also a co-author of the study.

“Girls in the program gained less weight than those who weren’t in the program, and they reduced their overall body mass index, improved their self-image and developed healthy lifestyle habits, so all of these are successes.”

Researchers followed 208 girls, ages 12-17. All of the girls were classified as overweight or obese, according to standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards.

Half of the girls were assigned to the intervention group and half to usual care.

Girls in the intervention group met weekly with their peers and a behavioral counselor during the first three months, and then every other week during months four and six.

The girls were weighed and asked to keep a food and activity diary, which they discussed during each meeting. The program focused on decreasing portion size, limiting consumption of energy-rich foods, establishing regular meal patterns, substituting water for sugar-sweetened beverages, reducing fast food, increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, and having more family meals.

A significant exercise prescription was delivered with girls encouraged to exercise at least five days a week for 30-60 minutes. Moreover, screen time was to be limited to two hours a day.

Participants also received yoga instruction, and a physical-activity video game to use at home. Discussion topics included ways to avoid disordered eating, coping with family and peer teasing and developing strategies to combat negative self-talk.

An important part of the problem included parental education on support for their daughters. This weekly meeting was not held in the presence of the daughters.

Health care providers received summaries of the girls’ current health habits, including meal and physical activity patterns. After receiving training in motivational techniques, the providers met with the girls at the beginning of the study to help them choose one or two behaviors to work on.

The providers had a second visit with the girls at the end of the six-month intervention to check their progress.

Girls assigned to the usual-care group received a packet of materials that included a list of online reading about lifestyle changes. They also met with their primary care provider at the beginning of the study, but the providers were not given health habit summaries for these girls.

Both groups had health assessments and lab tests at the beginning of the study, at six months, and then again at 12 months. The girls started out with an average weight in the 190 lb. range, and an average body mass index in the 97th percentile, which by CDC standards is considered to be obese.

At the end of the study, girls who participated in the program were in the 95th percentile, while girls in the usual-care group were in the 96th percentile.

Researchers say the weight changes were statistically significant but modest compared to some other weight loss interventions.

They point out that the girls were severely obese to begin with and possibly treatment-resistant due to previous involvement in other weight loss programs.

A salient feature of the program was a de-emphasis on calorie counting, focusing instead on lifestyle changes. However, researchers acknowledge that this approach may have produced more modest weight changes than they had expected.

This study is part of ongoing Kaiser Permanente research into weight loss. Previous studies include:

• A Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research study published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2011 found that people trying to lose at least 10 pounds were more likely to reach that goal if they had lower stress levels and slept more than six hours, but not more than eight hours, a night.
• Another Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research study published in 2010 found that the more people logged on to an interactive weight management website, the more weight they kept off.
• Researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research also reported in a 2008 study that keeping a food diary can double a person’s weight loss and that both personal contact and Web-based support can help with long-term weight management.

Source: Kaiser Permanente

Overweight teenager photo by shutterstock.

In an effort to understand how the motivation to exercise is linked to behavior, researchers examined college students’ intentions to be physically active as well as their actual activity levels.

“Many of us set New Year’s resolutions to be more physically active, and we expect these resolutions to be stable throughout the year,” said David Conroy, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology.

“One of the things we see in this study is that from week to week our motivation can change a lot, and these weekly changes in motivation can be destructive to our resolutions.”

Investigators recruited 33 college students and assessed over a 10-week period both the students’ weekly intentions to be physically active and their activity levels.

Participants were instructed to log on to a website and to rate their intentions to perform physical activity for the week ahead. To assess physical activity, participants were instructed to wear pedometers each day for the first four weeks.

Researchers discovered that for many of the participants, the motivation to exercise fluctuated on a weekly basis, and these fluctuations were linked to their behavior.

The findings from the study appear in the current issue of the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

“Our motivation to be physically active changes on a weekly basis because we have so many demands on our time,” said Conroy.

For most of us, the challenge to remain motivated to exercise in the weeks when we are maxed-out is problematic. “Maybe one week we’re sick or we have a work deadline — or, in the case of students, an upcoming exam.”

According to Conroy, the lapses in motivation really seem to be destructive.

“Our results suggest that people with consistently strong intentions to exercise have the best chance of actually following through on their intentions, while people with the greatest fluctuations in their motivation have the hardest time using that motivation to regulate their behavior.”

A solution for individuals with wavering motivation includes incorporating physical activity into their daily lives, said research assistant Amanda Hyde.

“Maybe the way to get these people to be more physical active isn’t necessarily by increasing their motivation,” she said, ” but rather by changing the way they do things in their lives so exercise automatically fits within their schedule, like walking to work rather than driving or taking the stairs rather than the elevator.”

Conroy added that consistency of intentions is not the only thing that matters in predicting whether or not a person will be active. It also matters if it is a weekday or the weekend.

“We saw that people who consistently reported stronger intentions to be active were more active during the week, but then on weekends the pattern flipped for them,” said Conroy. “If a person was really motivated during the week, then he or she crashed on the weekend.”

This finding may be unique to the student population as an opposite behavior – that of limited exercise during the week, then over-exercising on the weekend – is often displayed by the working professional a/k/a “weekend warrior.”

Conroy noted that people seem to have different systems that motivate their behavior during the week and on the weekend.

In the case of college students, “individuals may be exhausted from having regulated their behavior and managed their time so carefully during the week that on the weekends they need to recharge their batteries and throw their time management out of the window.”

Regarding New Year’s resolutions, Conroy advised that people should focus less on making broad commitments to becoming more active and instead come up with a plan for how they’re going to sustain their motivation from one week to the next.

“It is important to pay attention to how we can sustain a high level of motivation and not just let that motivation degrade in response to all the external demands we face,” said Conroy.

Source: Penn State

Researchers from New York University and Université Paris Descartes, have published their findings in the journal Psychological Science.

In the study, researchers used questions about gambling, where information about probabilities is given explicitly in numerical form. For instance, in experiments, participants may be asked, “Would you rather have a 50:50 chance of winning $100 or otherwise $0, or would you rather just take $40?”

The consensus in the field is that decision makers, confronted with such possibilities, make poor decisions. They do not maximize their possible winnings, and sometimes their choices are logically inconsistent with one another.

However, investigators realized that in our everyday life we are rarely given explicit estimates of probability. Therefore, what probability information people have is based primarily on their own past experience.

In fact, researchers in several laboratories have conjectured that, when information about probability is learned through experience, people make better decisions.

The researchers at NYU and Université Paris Descartes wanted to test this claim. In the Psychological Science study, participants first played a video game that included firing computerized bullets at different-sized rectangles on the screen. The game was set up so the bullets took a zig-zagging trajectory and, as a result, often missed their target.

This meant the chances of hitting a rectangle increased with its size—it was simply easier to strike a bigger target, and participants gradually learned the link between rectangle size and probability.

Following training, the researchers compared performance in two different decision tasks.

The first was a “classical” decision task where participants chose between alternatives with the probabilities of different outcomes clearly presented. The participant always chose between a larger probability of getting $1 and a smaller probability of getting $2.

In the second (decision from experience), though, they saw two rectangle targets differing in size. They were told that the larger target was worth $1 if they hit it while the smaller—and harder to hit—target was worth $2.

The experimenters adjusted the size of the larger rectangle so that the participant’s probability of hitting it was matched to the larger probability in the “classical” task.

They adjusted the size of the smaller rectangle so that the participant’s probability of hitting it was identical to the smaller probability in the “classical” task. As a result, the motor and classical decision tasks were mathematically identical.

Despite hundreds of trials of training, participants were still markedly sub-optimal in the decision-from-experience task. They showed the same kind of misuse of probability as found in typical decision tasks with probabilities explicitly presented in numerical form.

In summary, practice alone isn’t enough to get people to make good decisions based on risk, said Dr. Laurence Maloney, a professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, one of the study’s co-authors.

“You could imagine taking someone and saying, well, let’s practice them over and over and over again until they’re experts and maybe their decision-making will be perfect,” he said, adding that’s not what happened in his experiment.

“Basically, the key idea is that people have a distorted appreciation of probability, and it doesn’t go away even when you become one of the world’s experts at shooting rectangles.”

Source: New York University

If you have a positive memory of the schooling, and feel reasonably comfortable with numbers, you are probably better at making informed decisions on a plethora of numerological topics including health risks, investment alternatives, calories, etc.

A new study reviews how people with strong numerical literacy — that is, individual who understand numbers better and process information differently — ultimately make more informed decisions.

The article, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, explores how people who are numerate feel comfortable thinking about numbers and are less influenced by other information, said Ellen Peters, Ph.D., of Ohio State University, the author of the new paper.

For example, in one of Peters’s studies, students were asked to rate undergraduates who received what looked like different test scores.

Numerate people were more likely to see a person who got 74  percent correct and a person who got 26 percent incorrect as equivalent, while people who were less numerate thought people were doing better if their score was given in terms of a percent correct.

Investigators say this type of analysis is necessary for many forms of decision-making.

For example, “A lot of people take medications,” Peters says. Every drug has benefits and potential risks, and those can be presented in different ways. “You can talk about the 10 percent of the population that gets the side effect or the 90 percent that does not.”

For individuals who are less numerate, the method by which the information is presented is critical.

Other research has shown that only less numerate people respond differently to something that has a 1 in 100 chance of happening than something that has a 1 percent chance of happening. The less numerate see more risk in the 1 in 100 chance — even though these numbers are exactly the same.

Researchers believe the findings have implications for how policy makers and others should communicate about the risks of medicines, earthquakes, climate change, and the stock market.

“Numbers are really just abstract symbols, and we have to bring meaning to them somehow,” Peters said. “In general, people who are numerate are better able to bring consistent meaning to numbers and to make better decisions.

“It suggests that courses in math and statistics may be the educational gift that keeps on giving.”

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Boy with numbers photo by shutterstock.

The Brigham Young University study found that 16- to 18-year-olds perform better academically when they sleep for 7 hours.

“We’re not talking about sleep deprivation,” said study author Eric Eide. “The data simply says that seven hours is optimal at that age.”

The new study by Eide and fellow BYU economics professor Mark Showalter is the first in a series of studies where they examine sleep and its impact on health and education.

Current federal guidelines are based on studies where teens were simply told to keep sleeping until they felt satisfied.

“If you used that same approach for a guideline on how much people should eat, you would put them in a well-stocked pantry and just watch how much they ate until they felt satisfied,” Showalter said.

“Somehow that doesn’t seem right.”

BYU investigators attempted to devise a scientific study that matched the amount of sleep to academic performance or productivity.

Analyzing data from a representative sample of 1,724 primary and secondary school students across the country, they found a strong relationship between the amount of sleep youths got and how they fared on standardized tests.

But more sleep isn’t always better. As they report in the Eastern Economics Journal, the right amount of sleep decreases with age:

• The optimal for 10-year-olds is 9 – 9.5 hours;
• The optimal for 12-year-olds is 8 – 8.5 hours;
• The optimal for 16-year-olds is 7 hours.

“We don’t look at it just from a ‘your kid might be sleeping too much’ perspective,” Eide said.

“From the other end, if a kid is only getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night because he’s overscheduled, he would perform better if he got 90 minutes more each night.”

The size of the effect on test scores depends on a number of factors, but an 80-minute shift toward the optimum is comparable to the child’s parents completing about one more year of schooling.

“Most of our students at BYU, especially those that took early-morning seminary classes in high school, are going to realize that 9 hours of sleep isn’t what the top students do,” Showalter said.

Source: Brigham Young University

Sleeping teenager photo by shutterstock.

Experts say attention to these phenomena is important given the prevalence of hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes.

The study on how cognitive performance can decline after earthquakes is published by New Zealand researchers in the journal Human Factors.

In the report, University of Canterbury’s William S. Helton and James Head discuss how prior studies have found that more traffic accidents and accident-related fatalities occur following human-made disasters such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Experts believe the mishaps are due to increased cognitive impairment that can lead to higher stress levels and an increase in intrusive thoughts. However, until this time, no research has been conducted on the effects of natural disasters on cognitive performance.

The authors were unexpectedly presented with a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, as they were performing a human performance study with community members at the time of the quake.

“We were conducting a [different] study on human performance requiring two sessions,” said Helton.

“In the midst of the study, between the two sessions, we had a substantial local earthquake, which resulted in the rare opportunity to do a before/after study. We were quick to seize the opportunity.”

Investigators measured participants’ cognitive control by asking them to either press a button corresponding to numbers presented on a video screen or to withhold a response to a preselected number presented on the same screen.

Normally, participant performance would improve during the second session, but the authors found an increase in errors of omission following the earthquake.

Helton and Head also noted distinct differences in pre- and post-earthquake findings depending on self-reported responses to the disaster: If the participants reported being anxious following the quake, their response times sped up and they made more errors of commission, whereas those who reported depression logged slower response times.

Researchers believe the study substantiates the phenomenon many people report experiencing after a major event like an earthquake.
“People would find themselves zoning out and making more errors than usual after the quake.”

Investigators believe future research is needed to explore this phenomenon further, but the scientists’’ findings may point to potentially serious complications arising from post-disaster performance in daily life and work tasks.

These findings also suggest that police, emergency responders, and others working in the aftermath of the disaster may also experience cognitive disruption, which can interfere with their ability to perform rescue-related tasks.

“Presumably people are under increased cognitive load after a major disaster,” Helton continued.

“Processing a disaster during tasks is perhaps similar to dual-tasking, like driving and having a cell phone conversation at the same time, and this can have consequences.”

Source: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Natural disasters photo by shutterstock.

Needless to say, a pessimistic assessment goes hand in hand with an increased risk of illness or death. It can be assumed that on average people who rate their health as poor have an unhealthier lifestyle, are often in a fragile state of health or are already sick.

However, earlier studies that only monitored the participants for a few years after the survey reveal that the correlation persists even if these factors are taken into account.

In the new study by researchers at the University of Zurich, investigators demonstrated that self-rated health is also linked to the probability of survival or death over a long period of more than thirty years.

In the study, which was conducted in Switzerland, men who rated their health as “very poor” were 3.3 times more likely to die than men of the same age who rated their health as “excellent”, and the risk of death was 1.9 times higher in women who rated their health as “very poor” than for those who rated it as “excellent”.

Here, the risk increased steadily from an optimistic to a pessimistic rating: people in “excellent” health had better chances of survival than those in “good” health, the latter better chances than those in a “fair” state of health, and so on.

“The steady increase in risk and the long time of over thirty years between the self-rating and the end of the observation period render it practically impossible for medical history or a dark foreboding to be main causes of the correlation observed,” explains head of the study Matthias Bopp.

When investigators statistically removed confounding variables, such as education levels, marital status, tobacco-related strains, medical history, the use of medication, blood pressure and blood glucose into account, the correlation between self-rated health and mortality only remained strong.

The difference in the risk of death between the best and the worst rating was still 1:2.9 in men and 1:1.5 in women.

“Our results indicate that people who rate their state of health as excellent have attributes that improve and sustain their health,” concludes specialist in preventive medicine David Fäh.

“These might include a positive attitude, an optimistic outlook and a fundamental level of satisfaction with one’s own life.”

The results of the study support the broad concept of health advocated by the World Health Organization not as the absence of disease, but rather as complete physical, mental and social wellbeing.

In the future, investigators hope that an individual’s uncertain view of health will trigger positive holistic strategies to improve an individual’s outlook on life.

“Good doctors should therefore not just look for the presence of risk factors or diseases, but also check which health resources their patients have and boost and consolidate them if need be,” says David Fäh.

Source: University of Zurich

Elwely woman and doctor looking out window photo by shutterstock.

Dr. Anthony McCaffrey, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, admits that although the “aha moments” are rare, his Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH) has led to the first systematic, step-by-step approach to devising innovation-enhancing techniques.

McCaffrey recently won a two-year, $170,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to turn his technique into software with a user-friendly graphical interface.

McCaffrey reviewed more than 100 significant modern and 1,000 historical inventions and analyzed how successful inventors overcame various cognitive obstacles to uncover the key obscure information needed to solve problems.

He found that almost all innovative solutions follow two steps: Noticing an infrequently seen, obscure feature and second, building a solution based on that feature.

“I detected a pattern suggesting that something everyone else had overlooked often became the basis of an inventive solution,” he says. This revelation led McCaffrey to study aspects of human perception and cognition that inhibit our noticing obscure features.

“I felt that if I could understand why people overlook certain things, then develop techniques for them to notice much more readily what they were overlooking, I might have a chance to improve creativity.”

Psychologists use the term “functional fixedness” to describe the first mental obstacle McCaffrey investigated. It explains, for example, how one person finding burrs stuck to his sweater will typically say, “Ugh, a burr,” while another might say, “Hmmm, two things lightly fastened together. I think I’ll invent Velcro!”

The first view is clouded by focusing on an object’s typical function. To overcome functional fixedness, McCaffrey sought a way to teach people to reinterpret known information about common objects.

For each part of an object, the “generic parts technique” (GPT) asks users to list function-free descriptions, including its material, shape and size. Using this, the prongs of an electrical plug can be described in a function-free way to reveal that they might be used as a screwdriver, for example.

“The trick is how to unconceal the features relevant to your purposes,” McCaffrey points out.

The result of creating the function-free parts list is a tree diagram in which the description of each part does not imply a use, helping subjects see beyond common functions of any object and its parts.

McCaffrey designed an experiment to test whether GPT improved problem=solving in a group of 14 undergraduates trained in GPT compared to a control group of 14 who were not. Both groups were given insight problems commonly used in psychological testing, plus new ones designed by McCaffrey’s colleagues.

Overall, the GPT group solved 67.4 percent more problems than the control group, a dramatic and statistically significant improvement in performance. In a follow-up study asking subjects to list features for the same objects (independent of a problem), GPT-trained subjects listed the key obscure feature required for the solution 75 percent of the time compared to 27 percent for controls.

This suggests it is not mere exposure to problems but rather the GPT that leads to uncovering the key obscure feature more often.

McCaffrey believes his philosophy background helps him think about problems from a broad perspective. In Nietzsche, McCaffrey found his broad definition of “feature” that doesn’t limit a theory of creativity. From Heidegger, he borrowed the notion of “unconcealment,” the idea that any object can have an unlimited number of features that are gradually unconcealed within an endless array of contexts.

McCaffrey’s goal is to help people to notice things consciously that they might not otherwise see, and remain open to the possibilities.

“Noticing is one thing, and building on it or connecting it to other things is the next step,” he said. ”Some of this can be learned, and we now have a discipline for it.”

He plans to publish a series of innovation-enhancing techniques to address as many as two dozen distinct creativity blocks caused by the normal function of our perceptual and cognitive systems.

His findings appear now in an early online issue of Psychological Science.

Source: UMass Amherst

Man with light bulb over his head by shutterstock.

Penn State investigators determined people who are more physically active report greater levels of excitement and enthusiasm than people who are less physically active.

Researchers determined people also are more likely to report feelings of excitement and enthusiasm on days when they are more physically active than usual.

This discovery conceptually dates back to ancient times when the Greeks believed physical and mental well-being were inseparable.

“You don’t have to be the fittest person who is exercising every day to receive the feel-good benefits of exercise,” said David Conroy, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology.

“It’s a matter of taking it one day at a time, of trying to get your activity in, and then there’s this feel-good reward afterwards.”

Conroy believes a common fault is the focus on long-term rather than short-term exercise goals.

“When people set New Year’s resolutions, they set them up to include the entire upcoming year, but that can be really overwhelming,” he said.

“Taking it one day at a time and savoring that feel-good effect at the end of the day might be one step to break it down and get those daily rewards for activity. Doing this could help people be a little more encouraged to stay active and keep up the program they started.”

In the study, researchers asked 190 university students to keep daily diaries of their lived experiences, including free-time physical activity and sleep quantity and quality, as well as their mental states, including perceived stress and feeling states.

Participants were instructed to record only those episodes of physical activity that occurred for at least 15 minutes and to note whether the physical activity was mild, moderate or vigorous. Participants returned their diaries to the researchers at the end of each day for a total of eight days.

Investigators then separated the participants’ feeling states into four categories: pleasant-activated feelings exemplified by excitement and enthusiasm, pleasant-deactivated feelings exemplified by satisfaction and relaxation, unpleasant-activated feelings exemplified by anxiety and anger, and unpleasant-deactivated feelings exemplified by depression and sadness.

“We found that people who are more physically active have more pleasant-activated feelings than people who are less active, and we also found that people have more pleasant-activated feelings on days when they are more physically active than usual,” said co-author and doctoral student Amanda Hyde, who noted that the team was able to rule out alternative explanations for the pleasant-activated feelings, such as quality of sleep.

“Our results suggest that not only are there chronic benefits of physical activity, but there are discrete benefits as well. Doing more exercise than you typically do can give you a burst of pleasant-activated feelings. So today, if you want a boost, go do some moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise.”

The researchers say that this is one of the first studies to acknowledge a benefit of physical activity is activation of positive feelings and energy.

“Knowing that moderate and vigorous physical activity generates a pleasant-activated feeling, rather than just a pleasant feeling, might help to explain why physical activity is so much more effective for treating depression rather than anxiety,” Conroy said.

“People dealing with anxious symptoms don’t need an increase in activation. If anything, they might want to bring it down some. In the future, we plan to look more closely at the effects of physical activity on mental health symptoms.”

The results of the study may be found in the current issue of the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

Source: Penn State

Young man running photo by shutterstock.

Researchers say the study shows that the intervention can be used in a variety of settings as a method to improve memory.

“The goal of our study was to demonstrate the generalizability of our training protocol to a larger number of individuals with moderate-to-severe memory impairment,” said Dr. Eva Svoboda, a clinical neuropsychologist and lead author of the study.

“Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to harness powerful emerging technologies with brain science in an innovative way to give people with a range of memory deficits some of their independence back.”

Memory impairment, particularly when it is severe, can impact virtually all aspects of everyday life, making it difficult or impossible to keep appointments and stay on top of changing personal, social and occupational responsibilities.

Memory re-training has been used for over two decades and is based on a philosophy that leans on the use of implicit memory to improve other areas of memory. Implicit or procedural memory pertains to a type of memory that does not require us to think about things as we do them — for example, riding a bicycle or brushing one’s teeth.

Commercial technologies such as smartphones, iPhones, Android devices and other mobile electronic devices have immense potential for individuals with memory impairment as they offer high storage capacity, auditory and vibration alerts, rich multimedia capability and high user acceptability.

The current study involved 10 outpatients, 18 to 55 years of age, who had moderate-to-severe memory impairment. Their memory impairment was the result of non-neurodegenerative conditions including ruptured aneurysm, stroke, tumor, epilepsy, closed-head injury, or anoxia (insufficient oxygen to the brain) after a heart attack.

Participants completed two phases of training on either a smartphone or another personal digital assistant (PDA) device. Prior to the training, all participants reported difficulty in day-to-day functioning.

Some required ongoing supervision and regular assistance from family members due to their forgetting to pay bills, take medications or attend appointments.

In the first phase, participants were taught the basic functions of their device using a training method that tapped into their preserved implicit /procedural memory.

Each participant received several one-hour training sessions to learn calendaring skills such as inputting appointments and reminders.

In the second phase, participants took the device home to apply their newly acquired calendaring skills in real-life situations. This included setting alarm reminders to take medications and attend future appointments, charging the device, and remembering to keep the device with them at all times.

They also learned how to use other software functions, such as phone, contacts, and camera.

As part of the outcome measures, participants were given a schedule of 10 phone calls to complete over a two-week period at different times of the day — to closely approximate real life commitments.

Family members who lived with participants kept a behavioral memory log of whether real-life tasks were successfully completed or not by their relative. Participants and family members completed a “memory mistakes” questionnaire which involved rating a list of common memory mistakes on a frequency-of-occurrence scale, ranging from “never” to “all the time.”

Participants and family also completed two additional questionnaires. One measured confidence in the participant when dealing with various memory-demanding scenarios (e.g., dentist calls to change appointment dates). The other examined the participant’s use of the device to support traveling back in time (e.g. searching activities and events from preceding days, weeks and months), traveling forward in time (e.g., planning ahead, entering future events and appointments), and technical ease of use of the device.

Although this was only a small trial, all 10 individuals showed “robust increases” in day-to-day memory functioning after taking the training, based on results from the functional and questionnaire-based measures.

Participants continued to report benefits from smart phone and PDA use in short-term followup three to eight months later.

The findings appear online, ahead of print publication, in the international journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation.

Source: Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care

Smart phone photo by shutterstock.

Investigators discovered short-term stimulant treatment did not substantially increase the risk of cardiovascular events or symptoms in healthy youth.

ADHD affects 5-9 percent of youth and is frequently treated with stimulant medications, such as methylphenidate and amphetamine products. A recent safety communication from the US Food and Drug Administration advised that all patients undergoing ADHD treatment be monitored for changes in heart rate or blood pressure.

In the study, Dr. Mark Olfson and his colleagues assessed the risk of adverse cardiovascular events in children and adolescents without known heart conditions treated with stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The investigation is one of the largest studies to date that focused primarily on youth while controlling for pre-existing cardiovascular risk factors.

As reported in the study, Olfson and colleagues examined claims records from a large privately insured population for associations between cardiovascular events in youth with ADHD and stimulant treatment.

In total 171,126 privately insured youth aged 6-21 years without known pre-existing heart-related risk factors were followed throughout the study.

Researchers included patients who have previously received stimulant treatment, patients currently receiving stimulant treatment, and patients who began or ceased stimulant treatments during the study period.

Olfson and colleagues assessed the various groups for incidents of severe cardiovascular events such as acute myocardial infarction, less severe cardiovascular events such as cardiac dysrhythmias, and cardiovascular symptoms such as tachycardia and palpitations.

Analysis showed that cardiovascular events and symptoms were rare in this cohort and not associated with stimulant use.

This finding helps to allay concerns of adverse events in otherwise healthy young people receiving treatment for ADHD. Olfson and colleagues said of the results, “It is reassuring that in these young people, short-term stimulant treatment did not substantially increase the risk of cardiovascular events or symptoms.”

The research is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Source: Elsevier

Child with pencil photo by shutterstock.

A new study suggests that the genetic contribution to the risk of being diagnosed with antisocial personal disorder comes not from a single gene or genetic risk factor, but from two distinct dimensions of genetic risk.

Currently, antisocial personality disorder is defined as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

This definition is found in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association.

DSM-IV i provides formal diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder. This process may be guided by rating scales that measure the traits and features associated with a personality disorder.

But, until now, no one has studied the dimensional structure associated with the DSM antisocial personality disorder criteria.

Dr. Kenneth Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University and colleagues examined questionnaire and genetic data from adult twins. They found that the DSM-IV criteria do not reflect a single dimension of liability but rather are influenced by two dimensions of genetic risk reflecting aggressive-disregard and disinhibition.

“When psychiatrists, as clinicians or researchers, think about our psychiatric disorders, we tend to think of them as one thing – one kind of disorder – a reflection of one underlying dimension of liability,” said Dr. Kendler.
“This is also true of genetics researchers. We tend to want to identify and then detect ‘the’ risk genes underlying disorder X or Y.”

Kendler added, “What is most interesting about the results of this paper is that they falsify this inherent and rather deeply held assumption. Genetic risk factors for antisocial personality disorder are not one thing. Rather, the disorder, as conceptualized by DSM-IV, reflects two distinct genetic dimensions of risk.”

Experts believe the study results make sense.

“The distinction between the two sets of heritable traits contributing to antisocial personality disorder, aggressive-disregard and disinhibition, highlights the complexity of unraveling the genes contributing to this personality style. We now have some puzzle pieces, but we have a long way to go to fit these pieces together,” commented Dr. John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry.

Source: Elsevier

The key to popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) revolves around how the experience makes us feel. Investigators discovered social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace evoke a positive experience on individuals when the users access and use the sites.

While experts have known that the use of SNSs can have both a positive and negative effect on an individual, the popularity of SNSs suggests a strong positive experience is the norm.

In the current study investigators looked at body physiological responses when an individual was exposed to a 3 minute episode of (a) a slide show of natural panoramas (relaxation condition), (b) the subject’s personal Facebook account, and (c) a Stroop and mathematical task (stress condition).

Investigators monitored skin conduction velocity, pulse, respiration rate and pupil dilation using an electroencephalogram and electromyography. The procedure was performed on 30 healthy subjects.

Researchers wanted to learn how the SNSs experience influence body responses associated with stress, relaxation and the “affective experience.”

Statistical analysis of the psychophysiological data and pupil dilation indicates that the Facebook experience was significantly different from stress and relaxation on many linear and spectral indices of somatic activity.

Investigators believe the biological signals revealed that Facebook use can evoke a psychophysiological state characterized by high positive valence and high arousal (Core Flow State).

This means that use of Facebook may help individuals improve their mood.

The study is found in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Source: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

Facebook image photo by shutterstock.

The program is called the School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS), and is widely used as an alternative to some schools zero-tolerance anti-bullying policies.

Bullying has gained greater national attention in recent years as specific events have brought it into the media spotlight. Bullying left unchecked can lead to academic, interpersonal, physical health and mental health problems.

Despite the concern, relatively few school-based programs have shown to be effective at preventing bullying. Even worse, zero-tolerance policies adopted at many schools have not been shown to be effective either.

An alternative to zero-tolerance policies is positive schoolwide prevention efforts. Tracy E. Waasdorp, Ph.D., of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her colleagues decided to evaluate one such program.

School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) aims to alter the school environment by creating improved systems — such as discipline and data management — and procedures — such as office referral and behavioral reinforcement — that promote positive changes in staff and student behaviors.

“SWPBIS teaches behavioral expectations through direct instruction, positive reinforcement and consistent consequences, promoting acceptable social and classroom behaviors. This in turn is theorized to reduce the likelihood of engaging in and rewarding bullying behavior,” the authors note.

Data for the study came from a randomized controlled effectiveness trial of the universal SWPBIS model conducted in 37 Maryland public elementary schools to determine the impact on discipline problems and the school environment. The sample included 12,344 children.

“The hierarchical linear modeling results indicated that children in the SWPBIS schools displayed significantly less bullying behavior and experienced lower levels of rejection over time vs children in the comparison schools,” the study results indicate.

Researchers called the potential effects of SWPBIS on bullying encouraging and in line with policymakers’ and researchers’ emphasis on school climate and culture for bullying prevention as an alternative to zero-tolerance policies.

“These findings suggest that a universal SWPBIS model is a promising approach for preventing bullying. Although the rates of bullying tend to be the highest in middle school, when SWPBIS is implemented in elementary school, it may help children better prepare for the transition into adolescence,” the researchers conclude.

The new study appears in the February issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: JAMA

Researchers say improvements are on the horizon as mobile dating, the latest iteration in digital dating, holds promise as it brings together potential partners face-to-face fast to see if “sparks” exist.

Although the research on mobile dating is scarce, Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study, is optimistic about this approach.

“GPS features on smartphone apps can tell you who is nearby and willing to be browsed,” Finkel said. “With a little bit of basic information, potential daters can get together right away for a quick face-to-face meet-up.”

Experts say that face-to-face contact is critical in finding that special someone — and, that the faster this happens, the better.

The human-to-human connection has been found to be superior to viewing online profiles. Previous research by Finkel and colleagues has shown that the ‘ideal’ preferences of daters (from viewing online profiles) were significantly altered after in-person meetings with potential partners.

The research will be published by Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Finkel believes the online dating industry has advanced from a version 1 to a version 3. His discussion on the evolution of online dating follow.

• The first generation in 1995—the launch of Match.com:

“We use the analogy that dating sites like Match.com are like supermarkets of love,” Finkel said. “You check out the wares (online profiles) and see what you like. Upon first blush, this approach seems reasonable, but there are two major problems with it: People really don’t learn much from a profile, and people get overloaded by choice.”

• The second generation in 2000—enter eHarmony:

Sites like eHarmony market themselves less as supermarkets of love than as something akin to real estate brokers of love. They use “matching algorithms” in an effort to identify which potential partners are especially compatible with a given online dater. The choice issue, Finkel observed, is somewhat solved by the algorithm approach. Only a handful of people are chosen as compatible matches.

“But there is no compelling evidence that any of these algorithms work,” he said. “Limiting the number of potential partners is only helpful if the algorithmic-selection process favors compatible partners over incompatible ones, which it fails to do. Even if the algorithms are cutting 2,000 potential partners down to five, if that process is random, is it really any better than strolling into the neighborhood bar?”

• The third generation in 2008—mobile dating:

With the advent of smartphone apps, mobile dating was launched. Mobile dating’s ability to get people face-to-face fast may make a big difference, according to the new Northwestern research.

“You have a little bit of basic information,” Finkel said. “Is this person below threshold or above threshold for a five-minute meet-up—five minutes from now? There’s no better way to figure out whether you’re compatible with somebody than talking to them over a cup of coffee or a pint of beer.”

Researchers hope their report will stimulate industry leaders to utilize available scientific methodologies to enhance online dating services.

Source: Northwestern University

Computer keyboard with love key photo by shutterstock.