Researchers used a comprehensive and contemporary form of group-based cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat child war and sexual violence victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in central Africa. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has been successfully used to treat child victims of sexual violence in the West, although this was the first attempt to adapt the intervention for use in developing countries affected by war and sexual violence.

Amazingly, researchers discovered the intervention reduced the trauma experienced by child victims of war, rape and sexual abuse by more than 50 percent.

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast pioneered the intervention in conjunction with the international NGO World Vision.

The trial setting, Eastern Congo, has the world’s highest rate of sexual violence. Known as “the rape capital of the world,it is estimated that girls and women in the eastern DRC are 134 times more likely to be raped than their counterparts in the West.

After only 15 sessions of the new group-based Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT), Queen’s researchers found reductions of:

• 72 percent in trauma symptoms in female victims of rape and sexual abuse;
• 81 percent in feelings of depression and anxiety;
• 72 percent decrease in conduct disorder;
• 64 percent decrease in anti-social behavior.

Researchers believe the knowledge gained in the multifaceted intervention can also be used to improved group-based cognitive interventions in the West. Sadly, in war-affected countries, such as the DRC, victims of rape and sexual violence often do not receive any psychological or even medical help.

In the Queen’s study, the children received sessions of trauma psychoeducation, relaxation techniques, mental imagery techniques, and tips on how to identify and change particular inaccurate or unhelpful cognitions.

The girls also drew pictures of their most traumatic events and were encouraged to talk about these events in individual sessions with Queen’s psychologists and a team of Congolese counselors.

Speaking about the implications of the results for treating child victims of war and sexual abuse worldwide, Paul O’Callaghan, from Queen’s School of Psychology, said, “It is not surprising that studies show sexual abuse to have a profoundly detrimental effect on the mental health of girls in war-affected countries, but what is surprising was just how successful the intervention was in reducing psychological distress.

“The dramatic reduction in trauma, depression and anxiety, conduct problems and anti-social behavior shows that this kind of therapy is very effective in treating war-affected children who have been exposed to rape and sexual violence. In addition to the statistical results of the therapy, many of the girls attested to how the intervention helped reduced their terrible nightmares, disturbing flashbacks and suicidal thinking,” O’Callaghan said.

“For me, that was the most rewarding part of our work in the DRC.”

The study, which took place over five weeks in 2011, also treated the psychological distress of 50 war-affected boys between the ages of 12 and 17. It was shown to dramatically reduce levels of trauma, depression and anxiety, conduct disorder and anti-social behavior in male child soldiers and street children.

Source: Queen’s University Belfast

Child looking out door photo by shutterstock.

Investigators from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) believe this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions.

“The roots of this behavior lie not in individual psychological disorders,” said social anthropologist Dr. Simon Harrison, “but in a social history of racism and in military traditions that use hunting metaphors for war.

“Although this misconduct is very rare, it has persisted in predictable patterns since the European Enlightenment. This was the period when the first ideologies of race began to appear, classifying some human populations as closer to animals than others.”

European and North American soldiers who have mutilated enemy corpses appear to have drawn racial distinctions of this sort between close and distant enemies.

Researchers say that historically, European and North American soldiers have “fought” their close enemies yet did not touch their bodies after death. However, when they “hunted” their distant enemies the bodies became the trophies that demonstrate masculine skill.

Almost always, only enemies viewed as belonging to other ‘races’ have been treated in this way, said the researchers.

“This is a specifically racialized form of violence,” said Harrison, “and could be considered a type of racially motivated hate crime specific to military personnel in wartime.”

People tend to associate head-hunting and other trophy-taking with”primitive” warfare. They consider wars fought by professional militaries as rational and humane. However, such contrasts are misleading.

The study shows that the symbolic associations between hunting and war that can give rise to abnormal behavior such as trophy-taking in modern military organizations are remarkably close to those in certain indigenous societies where practices such as head-hunting were a recognized part of the culture.

In both cases, mutilation of the enemy dead occurs when enemies are represented as animals or prey. Parts of the corpse are removed like trophies at “the kill.”

Metaphors of war-as-hunting that lie at the root of such behavior are still strong in some armed forces in Europe and North America – not only in military training but in the media and in soldiers’ own self-perception.

Harrison gave the example of the Second World War and shows that trophy-taking was rare on the European battlefields but was relatively common in the war in the Pacific, where some Allied soldiers kept skulls of Japanese combatants as mementos or made gifts of their remains to friends back home.

The study also gives a more recent comparison: there have been incidents in Afghanistan in which NATO personnel have desecrated the dead bodies of Taliban combatants but there is no evidence of such misconduct occurring in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia where NATO forces were much less likely to have considered their opponents racially “distant.”

Nevertheless, researchers say the behavior is not a tradition. These practices are usually not explicitly taught. Indeed, they seem to be quickly forgotten after the end of wars and veterans often remain unaware of the extent to which they occurred.

Importantly, attitudes towards the trophies themselves change as the enemy ceases to be the enemy.

The study shows how human remains kept by Allied soldiers after the Pacific War became unwanted memory objects over time, which ex-servicemen or their families often donated to museums.

In some cases, veterans have made great efforts to seek out the families of Japanese soldiers in order to return their remains and to disconnect themselves from a disturbing past.

Harrison said human trophy-taking is evidence of the power of metaphor in structuring and motivating human behavior.

“It will probably occur, in some form or other, whenever war, hunting and masculinity are conceptually linked,” he says. “Prohibition is clearly not enough to prevent it. We need to recognize the dangers of portraying war in terms of hunting imagery.”

Source: Economic & Social Research Council

Soldier with knife photo by shutterstock.

Moreover, positive social contact before a stressful event can reduce and even change the stress response.

The research finding refutes the nearly 100-year-old belief that stress triggers a “fight or flight” response in humans and animals.

In the investigation, Professor Markus Heinrichs and Dr. Bernadette von Dawans expanded a line of research from the late 1990s suggesting that women show an alternate “tend-and-befriend” response to stress – in other words, a protective (“tend”) and friendship-offering (“befriend”) reaction.

Heinrichs and von Dawans wanted to see if the stress response in men could also produce behaviors other than aggression. As such, they targeted their research to investigate male social behavior under stress.

In the research Von Dawans discovered that “men also show social approach behavior as a direct consequence of stress.”

The investigators used a tool they had previously developed to measure stress in public speaking engagements.

The researchers examined the implications of this stressor for social behavior using specially designed social interaction games. These games allowed them to measure positive social behavior – for example, trust or sharing – and negative social behavior – for example, punishment.

Researchers discovered that subjects who were under stress showed significantly more positive social behavior than control subjects who were not in a stressful situation.

Negative social behavior, on the other hand, was not affected by stress.

These findings challenge the belief that a stressful situation always results in an aggressive response.

Heinrichs believes the discovery has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the social significance of stress.

“From previous studies in our laboratory, we already knew that positive social contact with a trusted individual before a stressful situation reduces the stress response. Apparently, this coping strategy is anchored so strongly that people can also change their stress responses during or immediately after the stress through positive social behavior.”

The results are published in the international journal Psychological Science.

Source: University of Freiburg

Moreover, the anger expressed during a quarrel may represent more than just the current topic of disagreement.

Baylor University researchers say the presentation of anger during a marital argument may reflect the overall climate of your marriage rather than what your partner is feeling at the moment of the dispute.

What’s more, “if your partner is angry, you are likely to miss the fact that your partner might also be feeling sad,” said Keith Sanford, Ph.D. His study — “The Communication of Emotion During Conflict in Married Couples” — is published online in the Journal of Family Psychology.

“I found that people were most likely to express anger, not in the moments where they felt most angry, but rather in the situations where there was an overall climate of anger in their relationship – situations where both partners had been feeling angry over a period of time,” he said.

“This means that if a couple falls into a climate of anger, they tend to continue expressing anger regardless of how they actually feel . . . It becomes a kind of trap they cannot escape.”

Common spats that might fester deal with in-laws, chores, money, affection and time spent on the computer.

Sanford found that when people express anger, they often also feel sad. But while a partner will easily and immediately recognize expressions of anger, the spouse often will fail to notice the sadness.

“When it comes to perceiving emotion in a partner, anger trumps sadness,” he said.

Sometimes the acknowledgment and understanding of genuine sadness during a conflict can help the partners grow closer. The awareness of sorrow can potentially help couples to break out of a climate of anger.

“A take-home message is that there may be times where it is beneficial to express feelings of sadness during conflict, but sad feelings are most likely to be noticed if you are not simultaneously expressing anger,” Sanford said.

The findings were based on self-reporting by 83 married couples as well as observation and rating of their behavior by research assistants, who were given permission by the couples to videotape them through a one-way mirror.

Couples were asked to choose two areas of conflict and talk to each other about them — one chosen by the wife, the other by the husband. They also were asked to rate their emotions and those of their partners before and after each discussion.

One would expect that partners’ emotional intelligence on how their partner feels would be high because of the “insider knowledge” making it easier for them to read each other, Sanford said.

But the only time in which couples made significant use of insider knowledge to distinguish emotions was in interpreting soft emotions — such as hurt or disappointment — in conflicts about specific events, the study showed.

While women expressed soft emotions more, they were no better at perceiving hard emotions (such as anger) than soft ones, Sanford said.

Source: Baylor University

An angry couple fighting photo by shutterstock.

A Harvard researcher credits new efforts by the Army to prevent PTSD, as well as ensuring that those who do develop the disorder receive the best treatment available.

Early estimates suggested PTSD would affect up to 30 percent of the troops, said Harvard professor of psychology Dr. Richard J. McNally in an article that appears in the May 18 issue of Science. But current surveys show the actual rates ranging from 2.1 to 13.8 percent, he noted.

The most rigorous survey of American troops found that 4.3 percent of all American military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan developed PTSD, while 7.6 percent of those who saw combat developed the disorder, he added.

“As a society we’re much more aware of these issues than ever before,” McNally said. “That is reflected by the fact that the military and the Veteran’s Administration has established programs to ensure soldiers receive the best treatment possible. The title of my article is ‘Are We Winning the War Against Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?’ I think a provisional answer to that is, ‘Yes, we might be.’”

The suggestion that 30 percent of troops might develop PTSD was based on the findings of the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS), completed in 1990, which found that 30.9 percent of Vietnam veterans showed symptoms of PTSD. While later analyses brought that number down, the findings served to galvanize Army efforts to address the risk of soldiers developing the disorder, McNally said.

Part of the drop may be that today’s wars are less lethal — in a decade of war in Iraq, fewer than 5,000 American troops were killed, compared to more than 55,000 killed over a similar period in Vietnam, McNally noted. He was quick to add that new efforts by the Army to tackle the disorder sooner, and ensure soldiers receive the best treatment available, may be helping as well.

“It’s important to remember that simply being deployed carries a great deal of stress,” he said. “Soldiers miss their family, and those who stay at home essentially become a one-parent family. Difficulties with children, or school, or making ends meet — there are all kinds of stressors that have to do with separating families, let along having one member in a war zone. Fortunately, the military has taken steps to help soldiers cope with these stressors in addition to the traumatic combat stressors that can produce PTSD.”

Those steps include the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program, created to help soldiers build the resilience necessary to reduce their risk for PTSD before being deployed, and Battlemind training, which was created to treat those at risk of developing the disorder after they return.

“It’s not therapy per se, but a preventive intervention to help people put their experiences in perspective,” McNally said. “For example, it encourages soldiers to use the sort of emotional bonding that happens within units to reconnect with their families, and to see symptoms like hypervigilance not as symptoms of a mental disorder, but as something they need to adjust when they come home. It helps people realize that those things are part of the normal readjustment process.”

Evidence suggests the training is working, McNally said, pointing to the results of random trials that show that four months after returning home, soldiers who underwent Battlemind training showed fewer symptoms of PTSD and depression than those who underwent the Army’s standard post-deployment program. No such trials have been conducted with CSF, so it remains unclear what impact, if any, it has on the incidence of PTSD, he added.

Despite such efforts, however, some soldiers will develop PTSD, McNally said. Those who do have access to what are known to be the best treatments for the disorder, including prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy.

“Until this initiative, less than 10 percent of the clinical specialists in PTSD used these treatments,” McNally said. “These treatments weren’t available to veterans of the Vietnam War — they were only developed in the 1990s — and the evidence shows that the longer you have PTSD, the more likely it is that other problems will accumulate. The earlier we can get people into treatment, the quicker we can help them get their lives back together.”

Source: Harvard University

The study involved college athletes at three Division I schools, comparing 214 athletes in contact sports to 45 athletes in non-contact sports such as track, crew, and Nordic skiing.

The contact sport athletes, who wore special helmets that recorded the acceleration speed and other data at the time of any head impact, experienced an average of 469 head impacts during the season.

All of the athletes took tests of thinking and memory skills before and after the season. Additionally, 45 contact sport athletes and 55 non-contact sport athletes also took an additional set of tests of concentration, working memory, and other skills.

“The good news is that overall there were few differences in the test results between the athletes in contact sports and the athletes in non-contact sports,” said study author Thomas W. McAllister, M.D., of The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “But we did find that a higher percentage of the contact sport athletes had lower scores than would have been predicted after the season on a measure of new learning than the non-contact sport athletes.”

About 22 percent of the contact sport athletes performed worse than expected on the test of new learning, compared to four percent of the non-contact sport athletes.

McAllister noted that the study did not find differences in test results between the two groups at the beginning of the season, suggesting that the cumulative head impacts that had been sustained over previous seasons did not result in reduced thinking and memory skills in the overall group.

“These results are somewhat reassuring, given the recent heightened concern about the potential negative effects of these sports,” he said. “Nevertheless, the findings do suggest that repetitive head impacts may have a negative effect on some athletes.”

The research is published in the May 16, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Source: American Academy of Neurology

Football players photo by shutterstock.

The latest findings contradict stereotypes presented in previous studies that describe female terrorists as socially isolated and vulnerable to recruitment because they are uneducated, unemployed and from a foreign land, psychologists reported in a study published online in the APA journal Law and Human Behavior.

“We discovered that some of the popular notions about female terrorists do not reflect what has occurred in the past,” said the study’s lead author, Karen Jacques, Ph.D. “A more realistic description is helpful because it provides insights into the social dynamics that might promote an individual’s involvement in terrorist activities.”

The researchers did find one difference between female and male terrorists: Female terrorists had more individual motivations, such as personal revenge for the death of a loved one, for their terrorist activities than men.

For the study, researchers at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom examined biographical data from multiple sources on 222 female and 269 male terrorists connected to one of 13 conflicts involving groups such as al Qaeda, the Irish Republican Army, and the Popular Liberation Army of Colombia.

Jacques and her co-author, Paul J. Taylor, Ph.D, examined eight variables for each terrorist: age at first involvement, education, employment status, immigration status, marital status, religious conversion, criminal activity, and activist connections.

The majority of both female and male terrorists were between 16 and 35 years old, native residents, employed, educated through secondary school, not converted from another religion, and rarely involved in a previous crime, the researchers discovered.

Compared to male terrorists, women had, on average, more education, with the majority continuing beyond secondary school, and were more likely to be divorced or widowed, less likely to be employed, and less likely to be immigrants.

“A surprising finding was that, unlike for other criminals, there were very few instances of previous involvement in criminal activity among both females and males,” said Jacques. “This could be because they were unwilling to confess to other crimes, because criminality could attract authorities’ undue attention to potential terrorists, or the possibility that having a criminal career is not a significant precursor to terrorism.”

About a third of all terrorists had previous connections to terrorism through their families. However, more than 50 percent of those with family connections to terrorism indicated that family influence did not motivate them to carry out terrorist activities, the researchers said.

Source: The American Psychological Association

Researcher Lenna Nepomnyaschy, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Social Work, also found that 5-year-old children have increased cognitive skills when there is an informal agreement between the mother and father to provide some financial support.

“This is definitely a puzzling result that needs to be examined further,” said Nepomnyaschy. “Maybe these [court-directed] fathers are violent, have problems with drugs, spank the children, or have bad relationships with the mother. We don’t have a definitive answer.”

“We want to be careful and not say that formal support is bad,” said Nepomnyaschy, who worked on the study published in Social Service Review with researchers from the University of Wisconsin. “For most mothers it is hugely important. But it might not be working for all types of families.”

While previous research focused on how financial support affected the children of divorced parents, nearly 40 percent of children born today have parents who are not married, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Never-married mothers represent the largest proportion of single-parent families in the United States, the researcher noted.

The latest research, which uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, indicates that for young children of unmarried parents an informal agreement between the mother and father — as well as the father being involved in the child’s life — might lead to a better emotional environment.

“One possible reason why children whose fathers provide informal support might be exhibiting better vocabulary, verbal skills and scholastic aptitude is that these fathers not only give money to the mother when they can, but they also come around and are more involved in the child’s life,” Nepomnyaschy said.

According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, only 20 percent of unmarried fathers not living with their children paid formal child support by the time the child was 3 years old, while 40 percent provided informal support. Many of these low-income fathers are out of work and struggling to make ends meet, Nepomnyaschy noted.

Researchers found that providing some informal support — more than $700 in two years — was associated with an increase in the cognitive skill levels of the children.

However, when these fathers were mandated to provide support through the courts, children who received low levels of formal support — below $1,800 over two years — exhibited more aggressive behaviors than children the same age who were not getting any formal support from their fathers.

Researchers believe that low-income fathers and mothers may prefer informal support because, in many states, if the mother is receiving food stamps or welfare, the support check paid by the father is kept by the state. Nepomnyaschy noted that informal support also often gives the father better leverage over visitation, child-rearing, and the ability to monitor how the money is spent.

“It is likely that unmarried mothers only go after formal support when their romantic relationship ends or when the father’s informal support stops,” she said.

She believes that more research is needed to determine whether these findings hold up as children get older.

“We may find that the importance of formal child support to a child’s well-being increases in the long term,” she said. “But it is important to look at how we incentivize these fathers to get involved in ways other than just providing formal support when these children are still young.”

Source: Rutgers

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry and led by researchers at King’s College London, also confirmed that psychopathy is a distinct sub-group of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), said Nigel Blackwood, M.D., from the College’s Institute of Psychiatry and lead author of the study.

He noted that most violent crimes are committed by a small group of male offenders with ASPD, but only about a third of these men are true psychopaths (ASPD+P). Psychopaths are characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, and use aggression in a planned way to secure what they want, whether it is status or money.

Previous research has shown that psychopaths’ brains differ structurally from healthy brains, but until now, none have examined these differences within a population of violent offenders with ASPD, Blackwood said.

“Using MRI scans we found that psychopaths had structural brain abnormalities in key areas of their ‘social brains’ compared to those who just had ASPD,” he said.

He noted there is a clear difference between those with ASPD and those with ASPD+P.

“We describe those without psychopathy as hot-headed and those with psychopathy as cold-hearted,” he said.

“The cold-hearted psychopathic group begin offending earlier, engage in a broader range and greater density of offending behaviors, and respond less well to treatment programs in adulthood, compared to the hot-headed group. We now know that this behavioral difference corresponds to very specific structural brain abnormalities which underpin psychopathic behavior, such as profound deficits in empathizing with the distress of others.”

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 44 violent offenders diagnosed with ASPD. Crimes committed included murder, rape, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm. Of these, 17 met the diagnosis for psychopathy (ASPD+P) and 27 did not (ASPD-P). They also scanned the brains of 22 healthy non-offenders.

The study found that ASPD+P offenders displayed significantly reduced grey matter volumes in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles compared to ASPD-P offenders and healthy non-offenders.

These areas are important in understanding other people’s emotions and intentions and are activated when people think about moral behavior, the researchers noted. Damage to these areas is associated with impaired empathizing with other people, a poor response to fear and distress, and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

“Identifying and diagnosing this sub-group of violent offenders with brain scans has important implications for treatment,” Blackwood continued. “Those without the syndrome of psychopathy, and the associated structural brain damage, will benefit from cognitive and behavioral treatments. Optimal treatment for the group of psychopaths is much less clear at this stage.”

Source: King’s College London 

“Sadly, our results show that many women must cope with multiple forms of violence, and that some combinations of violent experiences put women at risk for HIV, other STDs or unplanned pregnancy, not to mention the risks from the violence itself,” said lead author Jennifer Walsh, Ph.D., of The Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine.

Although previous research has linked sexually risky behavior and diverse forms of violence, such as childhood maltreatment and sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and exposure to community violence, very few studies have considered patterns of violence and their impact on sexual risk-taking, according to the researchers.

The study included 481 women attending an urban STD clinic who were assessed for a previous history of violence and sexually risky behaviors. The women were primarily African-American and most were poor.

Overall, these women reported high rates of exposure to violence compared to the general population. All types of violence were interrelated, with women who experienced one type being more likely to experience other forms as well, the researcher noted.

Using a statistical technique known as latent class analysis to find common patterns in the data, researchers identified four classes of women with different experiences of violence: Women with low exposure to violence (39 percent); women who were predominantly exposed to community violence (20 percent); women who were predominantly exposed to childhood maltreatment (23 percent); and women who experienced multiple forms of violence (18 percent).

The team found that the women who reported experiencing multiple forms of violence and those who were exposed to community violence had the highest levels of risky behavior, including a higher number of sexual partners and alcohol and drug use before sex.

“Given the ties between multiple violent experiences and sexual risk-taking, clinicians working with women who experience violence or who are at risk for HIV/STDs may need to consider the overlap between the two in order to impact sexual health consequences,” Walsh said

Those who work with women who have experienced one type of violence should ask about other types of violence “to get a complete picture.”

The researcher adds further research is needed to understand how and why violent experiences are associated with sexually risky behavior to help develop more effective interventions.

Source: Lifespan

Condom photo by shutterstock.

The data from the study stretches back 50 years and “is consistent with what we see in clinical practice — that we are very well able to keep our patients functioning better and out of the hospital when they consistently take these medications,” said Dr. Roberto Estrada, attending psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

For the study, German researchers searched through findings from 65 clinical trials reported in 116 articles published between 1959 and 2011. The trials involved nearly 6,500 patients with schizophrenia.

Researchers found that, after one year, relapse rates were 27 percent among patients who took antipsychotic drugs and 64 percent among those who took an inactive placebo. For patients taking antipsychotics, rates of hospital readmission were 10 percent compared to 26 percent for those taking placebo.

Five studies showed evidence that patients who took antipsychotic drugs behaved less aggressively, and findings from three studies suggested that they have a better quality of life.

Antipsychotic drugs are the main type of treatment for schizophrenia, but they can cause serious side effects. Researchers found that patients who took antipsychotic drugs had more negative side effects than those who took a placebo, including movement disorders (16 percent vs 9 percent), sedation (13 percent vs 9 percent), and weight gain (10 percent vs 6 percent).

Antipsychotic drugs can also be expensive, said the authors. In 2010, about $18.5 billion was spent worldwide on antipsychotic drugs, according to a journal news release.

“The cost and adverse effects associated with antipsychotics remain major impediments to achieving more successful treatment of schizophrenia,” said Estrada.  ”Further work needs to be done to develop more effective treatments for schizophrenia that are better-tolerated and thus likely to improve patients’ adherence to taking these medications.”

Still, the overall message from the new study is clear, noted the study authors.

“Antipsychotic maintenance treatment substantially reduces relapse risk in all patients with schizophrenia for up to two years of follow-up,” said psychiatrist Dr. Stefan Leucht, from the Technical University of Munich, and colleagues in a journal news release.

“The effect was robust in important subgroups such as patients who had only one episode, those in remission,” he added.

Benefits were witnessed regardless of whether patients took older or newer forms of antipsychotic drugs, Leucht added. However, for many patients “the drugs seemed to lose their effectiveness with time,” he said.

Although the medications have drawbacks, they have eased the suffering of those with schizophrenia.

“This study confirms clinical observations going back to the early 1950s — that is, antipsychotic drugs are effective in reducing the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The decreased number of patients in long-term mental health facilities, such as state mental hospitals, is a testimonial to this,” said Dr. Norman Sussman, a psychiatrist at NYU Langone Medical Center and professor at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City.

“Hopefully, even better treatments will emerge in the near future that have fewer adverse effects and more robust therapeutic impact on cognition and social functioning,” Sussman said.

The findings are published in the online edition of The Lancet.

Source:  The Lancet

In two separate studies, researchers examined the stability and satisfaction of intimate relationships among college students with a history of childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM).

The studies, published in the Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, suggest that emotional abuse as a child impacted relationship fulfillment due to self-criticism.

Researchers discovered that participants had an extremely strong tendency to self-criticize, and this interfered with their relationship satisfaction.

The studies also revealed that some participants had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the emotional abuse they endured. Researchers suggest this could be the result of internalizing behaviors caused by the maltreatment or by a child’s inability to properly comprehend their circumstances.

Childhood maltreatment includes sexual and physical abuse, emotional maltreatment and neglect. Childhood maltreatment is a significant contributor to the dramatic increase in referrals to university counseling centers, researchers believe.

Investigators believe childhood maltreatment also generates self-criticism causing a destructive effect on romantic relationships.

“Over time, this tendency might be consolidated, becoming a defining part of a person’s personality, and ultimately derailing relationships in general and romantic relationships in particular,” said Dana Lassri, whose doctoral dissertation, supervised by psychologist Dr. Golan Shahar, served as the basis for the study.

Lassri believes that even though these findings were gathered from college-age individuals, the behaviors could potentially worsen throughout adulthood.

Source: American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

However, researchers discovered that both men and women are jealous of peers who have strong social skills.

In the study, a group of researchers from Spain, the Netherlands and Argentina analyzed the differences between men and women in feelings of envy and jealousy at work.

“Women with a high level of intrasexual competition are more jealous if the rival is more attractive and more envious if the rival is more powerful and dominating. They did not get any results in men, as no rival characteristics that provoke jealousy or envy predicted intrasexual competition,” said psychologist Dr. Rosario Zurriaga, one of the authors of the study.

Intrasexual rivalry is competition with other people of the same sex caused by the desire to obtain and keep access to the opposite sex.

Zurriaga, together with researchers at the universities of Groningen (the Netherlands) and Palermo (Argentina) analyzed this type of rivalry using questionnaires distributed directly to 200 subjects in their workstations.

Investigators distinguished between two emotions: jealousy and envy. Jealousy is a threat or loss of success in a relationship due to interference from a rival and implies a loss or threat of loss of what they had. Envy is a response to another person who has success, skills or qualities that they desire and involves feeling inadequate in comparison to the envied person.

According to their results, sexual competition generally causes more jealousy and envy in women. However, rivals’ social skills provoke both emotions, both in men and women.

“This result shows the importance of social skills in work environments” Zurriaga stated.

The researchers hope the findings will allow proactive interventions to improve the workplace environment.

“Our research intends to clarify the role of emotions like envy and jealousy at work. These feelings have not been studied in working contexts and can cause stress in workers and negatively affect the quality of working life,” the researchers added.

“This is one of the first studies that examines rivals’ characteristics in this environment and contributes to a better understanding of conflicts and problems that can occur in working relationships.”

Study participants represented a variety of business sectors with 26 percent of participants involved in administration, 21 percent in services sector, 30 percent in education and the rest in health and other professions.

Participants were equally balanced by gender, with an average age of 36 years, and 11 years with their current company.

Source: FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Researchers now believe that pondering mortality can reduce aggression, improve health decision, increase altruism and lessen divorce rates.

“According to terror management theory, people deal with their awareness of mortality by upholding cultural beliefs and seeking to become part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, such as nations or religions,” says Jamie Arndt, a study co-author and professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.

“Depending on how that manifests itself, positive outcomes can be the result.”

For example, in one study American test subjects were reminded of death or a control topic and then either imagined a local catastrophe or were reminded of the global threat of climate change.

Afterwards, subject’s militaristic attitudes toward Iran were then evaluated. Additionally, after being reminded of death, people who were reminded of climate change were more likely to express lower levels of militarism than those who imagined a local disaster.

“The differences seen in this study resulted from the size of the group with which the test subjects identified,” said Ken Vail, the lead author.

“In both cases, they responded to the awareness of mortality by seeking to protect the relevant groups. When the threat was localized, subjects aggressively defended their local group; but when the threat was globalized, subjects associated themselves with humanity as a whole and became more peaceful and cooperative.”

Investigators have discovered that even catastrophic events can have a silver-lining.

After real tragedies, such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, people’s heightened fear and awareness of death had both positive and negative effects.

“Both the news media and researchers tended to focus on the negative reaction to these acts of terrorism, such as violence and discrimination against Muslims, but studies also found that people expressed higher degrees of gratitude, hope, kindness and leadership after 9/11″ Vail said.

“In another example, after the Oklahoma City bombing, divorce rates went down in surrounding counties. After some stimuli escalates one’s awareness of death, the positive reaction is to try to reaffirm that the world has positive aspects as well.”

Researchers discovered people were often influenced to make positive choices after their awareness of death was increased. Studies found that conscious thoughts of death can inspire intentions to exercise more. Other studies found that keeping mortality in mind can reduce smoking and increase sunscreen use.

Even subconscious awareness of death can more influenced behavior. In one experiment, passers-by who had recently overheard conversations mentioning the value of helping were more likely to help strangers if they were walking within sight of cemeteries.

“Once we started developing this study we were surprised how much research showed positive outcomes from awareness of mortality,” said Arndt.

“It seems that people may be just as capable of doing the opposite and ‘looking on the bright side of death,’ as the Monty Python song says.”

Source: University of Missouri-Columbia

9/11 photo by shutterstock.

The event may be traumatic, such as relationship problems, abuse and sexual assault or could surface after changing school or moving.

As explained in an article found in the May issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing, eating disorders includes conditions of anorexia and bulimia.

In the study, researchers from the University of Minnesota spoke to 26 women and one man receiving treatment from a specialist outpatient clinic. These individual who ranged in age from 17 to 64 had suffered from eating disorders for an average of 20 years.

“The aim of our study was to find out if there was any link between transitional events in family life and the onset of eating disorders,” said lead author Jerica M. Berge, Ph.D.

“Eating disorders are an important public health issue and knowing what causes them can help us to develop more effective treatment and support.”

The patients had a median age of 27 years and had been receiving treatment for between ten months and 18 years. Nine had anorexia nervosa, three had bulimia nervosa, one had both and the other 14 had eating disorders that did not meet the diagnostic criteria for any one specific condition.

Six key themes covered the significant (translational) events that preceded eating disorders:

• School transition. Some talked about the problems they had adapting to the more independent world of junior high school and others talked about leaving home to go to college and how they missed friends and family.

Starting college was very hard for one woman. “Nobody knew who I was…I was incredibly lonely with no support and I just stopped eating.” Another struggled to cope without regular support. “You don’t receive the daily love that you are used to growing up, you are left to provide that for yourself and I just wasn’t able to do it.”

• Relationship changes. Breaking up with a partner affected some participants and others talked about their parents splitting up and moving on.

When her father got a new girlfriend when she was seven, one woman lost the close relationship they had enjoyed. “Overnight she became the most important thing in his life…his girlfriend would be really mean to me and my dad wouldn’t defend me.” Another woman described how her dad left for “the perfect Barbie”, adding “I was so mad at my dad for choosing her over us…I think that is when my eating disorder really began.”

• Death of a family member. The death of a family member or close friend often proved traumatic, with people saying that they didn’t not know how to deal with their grief and that they received little support.

One woman’s sister died when she was five, but no-one talked about this “major event” in her life. “I started to eat – to compensate for feelings of anxiety.” Another lost her mother to an eating disorder when she was 11. She found herself living in a single-parent household where she was given “so much freedom with not much emotional support… I lost control.”

• Home and job transition. Some were affected by their family relocating or losing their job and described how they felt lonely, unsupported and lacked close relationships during these transitions.

A new job left one woman with little time for friends and she struggled to relate to her workmates who were all much older than her. “I felt really alone and had no-one to talk to or hang out with.” Moving house at 16 was really hard for another woman. “I just felt lost and my eating problems began.”

• Illness/hospitalization. A number had been ill and some said that their weight loss made them feel good and prompted positive comments from others.

Having viral meningitis scared one woman – she realized she had no control over her illness, but could control her eating. “I guess I was thinking that if I could be this small, people would kind of take care of things for me.” Being diagnosed with hypoglycemia aged from 17 to 64 and being told she needed to eat frequently was the start of another woman’s problems. “I started to think constantly about food…since then I’ve had a real struggle with bingeing.”

• Abuse/sexual assault/incest. Some talked about abusive events and how they felt let down or deserted by the very friends and family they needed to support them. Two said they ate more to become unattractive or bigger and intimidating.

Being sexually abused by her brother triggered one woman’s eating disorder. “I think in a way I developed the eating disorder just to get away from it…Just to kill the pain because I couldn’t tell anyone.” Another woman started eating to try and stop the abuse and violence from her partner. “I thought if I gained weight that he would leave me alone or I could fight him back.”

Berge said the study confirms that eating disorders can be triggered by a number of life changes and that lack of support was a common theme.

“We hope that our findings will be of interest to parents as well as health professionals as they underline the need for greater awareness and support at times of change and stress.”

Source: Wiley-Blackwell

Young woman weighing herself photo by shutterstock.