A provocative new study suggests a male leader is judged more harshly than a comparable female leader when they make an error.

Researchers say that any mistake made by a leader causes employees and followers to view the leader as less competent, less desirable to work for and less effective than leaders who do not make a mistake.

In the new research, Penn State’s Christian Thoroughgood discovered that if the leader is a man making a mistake in a man’s world, he is judged more harshly than a woman making the same mistake in a man’s world.

Thoroughgood and his colleagues have published their findings online in the Journal of Business and Psychology.

Naturally, it is a fact that leaders do make mistakes, and these mistakes can have far-reaching negative consequences. Nevertheless, for leaders to be effective, followers must trust their ability to make difficult decisions, execute their initiatives and act as positive organizational figureheads. Therefore, it is critical that followers see their leaders as competent.

When the leaders make mistakes, followers question their competence and are less willing to follow them and work for them.

Thoroughgood and his colleagues looked at how male and female leaders are rated, not when they succeed, but when they make mistakes.

Investigators studied whether subordinates would perceive their leaders differently according to the type of mistake they made and their gender, i.e., a man or a woman working in either a man’s world (construction) or a woman’s world (nursing).

In the study, a total of 284 undergraduates from a large northeastern university in the US, who had worked on average for nearly three years, read a series of fictional emails describing a leader’s behavior.

They were then asked to envision themselves as subordinates of the leader – either a man or a woman. In the emails, the leaders made two types of errors: task errors and relationship errors.

Survey participants then answered an online survey measuring their perception of the leader’s competence in both task and relationship matters, their desire to work for the leader as well as their opinion of whether the leader was effective or not.

Investigators discovered that errors did damage perceptions of leaders who commit them. Leaders who made mistakes were viewed as less competent in both task and relationship areas and ‘subordinates’ were less likely to want to work for them. They were also seen as less effective.

In addition, the authors observed an effect of gender. Male leaders were evaluated more negatively than female leaders for errors made in masculinized work domains.

The authors suggest that male leaders may be seen as violating expectations of male performance in this context, whereas women are expected to fail in masculine work settings.

The authors conclude that leadership errors do matter as they damage the perception of a leader’s competence and may harm follower’s desire to work for them.

“While it is impractical to suggest leaders should attempt to avoid errors altogether, they should recognize the different types of errors they make and consider how these errors impact their followers in different ways.”

Source: Springer

Compared to their siblings, cancer survivors have more scarring and disfigurement on their arms, legs and head later in life. And, on average, adults with these traits tend to have more depression and a lower quality of life.

“I think it showed us these aren’t necessarily life-threatening late effects of cancer… but certainly we need to be more aware of the outcomes these patients are dealing with,” said Karen Kinahan, coordinator of the STAR Survivorship Program at the Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center of Northwestern University in Chicago.

Kinahan and her team analyzed information on 14,358 childhood cancer survivors and 4,023 of their siblings already participating in a different study.

Survivors of leukemia, lymphoma and kidney cancers who had been diagnosed before they were 21 years old (and had started treatment between 1970 and 1987) answered a questionnaire when they entered the study and another in 2003.

Overall, one-fourth of the survivors had a scar or disfigurement on their head or neck, compared to one in 12 of their siblings. Cancer survivors were also more likely to have scars or disfigurements on their arms, legs, chests and stomachs.

Scars and disfigurements can be caused by surgery or radiation. And in children who are still growing, areas that are radiated tend not to grow as well, according to Dr. Karen Wasilewski-Masker, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. This may result in cancer survivors looking out of proportion as they age.

Individuals with scars or disfigurements on their head, neck, arms or legs had a 20 percent higher risk of depression than those without scars, according to the researchers.

Cancer survivors also experienced more hair loss than their siblings—about 14 percent of survivors and six percent of cancer-free siblings reported going bald. And balding was also linked to depression, especially in women.

The researchers found that various aspects of cancer survivors’ quality of life were worse and were linked to scarring, disfigurements and hair loss. These included general health, physical ability, pain, mental health and social functioning.

“We need to be aware of the possibility of some psychosocial problems in patients that have some type of disfigurement… but we also need to not assume that just because a person may look different because of a cancer treatment that it’s impacting them in a negative way,” said Wasilewski-Masker, who is part of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s program for childhood cancer survivors.

In a separate study, published in the same journal, researchers found that nearly three-fourths of 388 people between 15 and 39 years old were back at work or school full-time within 15 to 35 months of being diagnosed with cancer.  More than half, however, experienced trouble when they returned, including forgetting things and struggling to keep up with the work.

“Really this study is a starting point to understand the groups in this population who are least likely to return to work. It really sets the stage for future studies,” said Helen Parsons, the study’s lead author from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Wasilewski-Masker added that there are differences between cancer patients when making the determination of whether to stop working or going to school. For example, high school and college students are typically still financially supported by their parents, and patients’ abilities may depend on the intensity of their treatment.

The report is published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Source: Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center of Northwestern University

Child with cancer photo by shutterstock.

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.

According to researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology, people suffering from depression tend to spend more time chatting and sharing files with others.

Two hundred and sixteen undergraduate students were monitored over a month’s time for actual Internet use. Higher scores on depression surveys — which were given at the beginning of the study — correlated with higher use. About 30 percent of the students met the minimum criteria for depression.

Previous research in this area relied on subjects’ memories, which is more imprecise than technology, said study co-author Sriram Chellappan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science at the university.

“If you were asked how many times you looked at your email last month, it would be impossible to give an accurate answer,” Chellappan said.

Study volunteers — who were given pseudonyms at the beginning of the project to protect anonymity — were asked to fill out surveys containing several questions related to depression symptoms. The questions were written to hide the researchers’ interest in depression levels. Researchers then monitored subjects’ activity every time they signed on to the university server.

A paper describing the research, titled “Associating Depressive Symptoms in College Students with Internet Usage Using Real Internet Data,” has been accepted for publication in a future issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

Source: Missouri University of Science and Technology

Woman on a computer 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 research found that setting goals and making a specific plan to achieve that goal works only when the person has just one goal. More than one goal? People get overwhelmed, said researchers Amy Dalton, Ph.D., of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Stephen Spiller, Ph.D., of the University of California-Los Angeles.

“Research has shown that forming specific plans for a single goal makes success more likely,” the researchers said in their study, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. “Most of us, however, are juggling multiple goals in our lives and jobs and managing a busy schedule is difficult. This raises the question of whether forming specific plans can help us accomplish more of the tasks we set out to do.”

The research involved laboratory and field experiments that manipulated whether people plan in advance how they will implement their goals and the number of goals participants tried to achieve.

In one study, the researchers gave participants a to-do list of “virtuous activities” to complete over the course of five days. Some had one activity, but others had six. Half the participants were encouraged to plan specifically how, when, and where they would carry out the to-do list each day. The more goals, the less successful the planning was. A second study, which involved a computer task, yielded similar results.

Why is planning less effective when applied to a number of goals? The researchers believe that planning reminds people of all the obstacles and constraints that stand in the way of achieving their goals.

In an interesting twist, the researchers found that people came to see their goals as more manageable if they thought other people were juggling more goals than they were.

“These people framed their goals as relatively easy to carry out and were more likely to benefit from planning,” the researchers said.

Source: Journal Of Consumer Research

Goals photo by shutterstock.

“What surprised us was that we were seeing rates of problems at the same level as what we were seeing in the mothers,” said chief researcher Jan Nicholson, Ph.D., research director at Melbourne’s Parenting Research Centre. “That was a surprise. We simply haven’t looked for this before.”

Nicholson defined the baby blues as a condition which includes symptoms of anxiety, worry, stress, feeling unable to cope, feeling blue and despairing that things won’t get better.

The researchers examined mental health data of 5,000 new mothers up until their child turned 5 and at questionnaires returned by 3,471 of the fathers. In the child’s first year of life, 9.7 percent of fathers reported symptoms of postnatal depression compared with 9.4 percent of mothers—a statistically insignificant difference.

“We were able to determine that new fathers have a higher rate of these problems, a 40 percent higher rate, than men generally who are of a similar age and background,” Nicholson said.

Men with lower incomes were at a 70 percent higher risk and the younger the father the higher the risk.  Fathers with high levels of psychological stress when their children were infants were far more likely to still be reporting psychological difficulties when their children turned 2 and 4 years old.

Nicholson said the study emphasizes that it’s time to get rid of the idea that only young mothers get the baby blues.

“There’s often an assumption that with mothers their distress is related to biological changes, but also that early life services are very much geared around mothers and babies, and we really haven’t looked at fathers closely before to see what’s going on with them,” she said.

“We think that to the extent that we have services that are geared to supporting women, given that the rate is the same for men, we should be having similar efforts going into supporting men.”

The study is published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

Source: Parenting Research Centre

Father with child photo by shutterstock.

The search for happiness can be a never-ending quest, noted psychologist Dr. Kennon Sheldon.

“Previous research shows that an individual’s happiness can increase after major life changes, such as starting a new romantic relationship, but over time happiness tends to return to a previous level,” he said. “Through our research, we developed a model to help people maintain higher levels of happiness derived from beneficial changes.”

The model consists of two components: The need to keep having new and positive life-changing experiences and the need to keep appreciating what you already have and not want more too soon, he explained.

In their study, Sheldon, along with co-author Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, surveyed 481 people about their happiness. Six weeks later participants identified a recent positive change in their lives that had made them happier.

Six weeks after that, the psychologists evaluated whether the original happiness boost had lasted.

For some it had, but for most it had not, they reported. The psychologists then tested their model for predicting whose boost had lasted.

“The majority got used to the change that had made them happy in the first place,” Sheldon said.

“They stopped being happy because they kept wanting more and raising their standards, or because they stopped having fresh positive experiences of the change.

“For example, they stopped doing fun things with their new boyfriend and started wishing he was better-looking. A few were able to appreciate what they had and to keep having new experiences. In the long term, those people tended to maintain their boost, rather than falling back where they started.”

Due to genetics and other factors, individuals have a certain “set-point” of happiness, he said. Some people tend to be bubbly, while others are more somber. Sheldon theorizes that people can train themselves to stay at the top of their possible range of happiness.

“A therapist can help a person get from miserable to OK; our study shows how people can take themselves from good to great,” he said.

And buying stuff isn’t the path to happiness, Sheldon adds.

“The problem with many purchases is that they tend to just sit there,” he said. “They don’t keep on providing varied positive experiences. Also, relying on material purchases to make us happy can lead to a faster rise in aspirations, like an addiction. Hence, many purchases tend to be only quick fixes.

“Our model suggests ways to reduce the ‘let down’ from those purchases. For example, if you renovate your house, enjoy it and have many happy experiences in the new environment, but don’t compare your new decor to the Joneses’.”

The study is in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Source: University of Missouri

Happy couple on the beach photo by shutterstock.

In a new study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the U.S. Army, heart rate monitors were attached to computer users in a suburban office setting, while software sensors detected how often they switched windows.

People who read email changed screens twice as often and were in a steady “high alert” state, with more constant heart rates. Those removed from email for five days experienced more natural, variable heart rates, researchers found.

“We found that when you remove email from workers’ lives, they multitask less and experience less stress,” said Gloria Mark, Ph.D., a co-author of the study, which was funded by the Army and the National Science Foundation.

Participants were civilian employees at the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center outside Boston who were dependent on their computers to complete their assigned tasks at work. Those with no email reported feeling better able to do their jobs and stay on task, with fewer stressful and time-wasting interruptions.

Measurements bore that out, Mark said. People with email switched windows an average of 37 times per hour. Those without changed screens half as often — about 18 times in an hour.

The findings could be useful for boosting productivity, she said, adding employers may want to consider controlling email login times or batching messages.

“Email vacations on the job may be a good idea,” she noted. “We need to experiment with that.”

Mark noted it was hard to recruit volunteers for the study, but participants were much happier at the end of the five days. They “loved being without email, especially if their manager said it was OK,” she said. “In general, they were much happier to interact in person.”

Getting up and walking to someone’s desk offered physical relief as well, she said. Other research has shown that people with steady “high alert” heart rates have more cortisol, a hormone linked to stress. Stress on the job, in turn, has been linked to a variety of health problems.

The only downside to the experience was that the individuals without email reported feeling somewhat isolated, Mark said, noting they were able to garner critical information from colleagues who did have email.

Source: University of California Irvine

Computer email photo by shutterstock.

It is the antioxidants in the grapes that seem to play a protective role on anxiety-like behavior, learning and memory function, and hypertension. The research was presented at the Experimental Biology conference in San Diego, California.

Although anxiety disorders, cognitive impairment and hypertension are distinct and complex disorders, they share key features and often overlap. For example, one-fourth of the 40 million Americans with an anxiety disorder also have hypertension.

Furthermore, oxidative stress is considered a contributor to learning and memory problems, although the reason for this is not yet clear.

The researchers used a rat model to examine the role of oxidative stress as it related to both anxiety-cognitive impairment and hypertension.

They discovered that feeding the rodents a grape-enriched diet for two weeks prevented the anxious behavior, learning and memory problems, as well as a rise in blood pressure compared to the rats with induced oxidative stress but no grapes in their diet.

“These results suggest promising potential for grapes in a very important area of health,” said Samina Salim, Ph.D., the lead investigator.

“We attribute the benefits of the grapes to their antioxidant activity and their ability to combat oxidative stress.”

Grapes were provided in the form of a freeze-dried whole grape powder by the California Table Grape Commission.

Source:  University of Houston

Grapes photo by shutterstock.

Investigators learned that despite little indication of short sleep from traditional measurements, EDS was more likely to occur in children who were experiencing learning, attention/hyperactivity and conduct problems.

Researchers believe a variety of factors contribute to EDS in this cohort. Investigators posit obesity, symptoms of inattention, depression and anxiety, asthma and parent-reported trouble falling asleep were contributory factors to EDS even among children with no signs of diminished sleep time or sleep apnea.

“Impairment due to EDS in cognitive and behavioral functioning can have a serious impact on a child’s development,” said Susan Calhoun, Ph.D., the study’s lead author.

“When children are referred for neurobehavioral problems, they should be assessed for potential risk factors for EDS. Recognizing and treating EDS can offer new strategies to address some of the most common neurobehavioral challenges in young school-age children.”

An important lesson learned from the study was that most of the 500 children studied by Penn State researchers showed few signs of short sleep when tested, nor was short sleep associated with any of the learning, attention and behavior problems. This implies that conventional testing may not capture sleep problems for this population.

Calhoun says that parents and educators are good resources for determining if a child seems excessively sleepy in the daytime and the complaint should be taken seriously.

Fifteen percent of children normally have EDS, although this study suggests the percent is higher among children with learning, attention and behavior problems.

Source: American Academy of Sleep Medicine

Child in bed photo by shutterstock.

Researchers discovered the phenomenon ultimately affects body mass and may be a factor in the continuing rise of obesity.

“‘Hedonic hunger’ refers to the desire to eat for pleasure, and to enjoy the taste, rather than to restore the body’s energy needs,” said Palmiero Monteleone, M.D., of the University of Naples SUN in Italy and lead author of this study.

“For example, desiring and eating a piece of cake even after a satiating meal is consumption driven by pleasure and not by energy deprivation. The physiological process underlying hedonic eating is not fully understood, but it is likely that endogenous substances regulating reward mechanisms like the hormone ghrelin and chemical compounds such as 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) are involved.”

In the current study, researchers assessed eight satiated healthy adults, feeding them each their personal favorite food and, later, a less-palatable food of equal caloric and nutrient value.

During the feeding period, researchers periodically measured 2-AG and ghrelin levels. The plasma levels of ghrelin and 2-AG increased during hedonic eating, with the favorite foods, but not with non-hedonic eating.

This increase suggests an activation of the chemical reward system, which overrides the body’s signal that enough has been eaten to restore energy.

“Hedonic hunger may powerfully stimulate overeating in an environment where highly palatable foods are omnipresent, and contribute to the surge in obesity,” said Monteleone.

“Understanding the physiological mechanisms underlying this eating behavior may shed some light on the obesity epidemic. Further research should confirm and extend our results to patients with obesity or with other eating disorders in order to better understand the phenomenon of hedonic eating.”

The study will be published in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

Source: The Endocrine Society

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