Mindframe

Some amount of fear is healthy. As a 2015 episode of NPR’s Invisibilia illustrates, that rare person born with no fear suffers some unique setbacks. Still, given the millions of people around the world with anxiety disorders and/or post-traumatic stress disorders, it’s easy to see the ways that experiencing too much fear, or experiencing it at the wrong times, can adversely affect day to day life. That’s where the Cardiac Control for Fear in Brain (CCFB) studies come in. Led by Professor Sarah Garfinkel of the University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK, the goals are lofty. “Imagine what might be possible if you can turn fear on and off,” begins their fact sheet on the website for the European Research Council. The concept behind CCFB is rooted in research demonstrating that the brain is better at appropriately processing “fear stimuli” just after the heart has made a beat. This can be harnessed in, for example, exposure therapy, which works best when the fear response is...

  If you’re looking to bring a change in your psychological state, the answer may be as simple as adjusting your eating habits. So, which diet are we promoting today? Any of them, basically. Dr Joseph Firth, an Honorary Research fellow at The University of Manchester and Research Fellow at NICM Health Research Institute at Western Sydney University, led a recent meta-study . It checked 16 randomized studies encompassing 45,826 people, most of whom had non-clinical depression. In other words, they were bummed out, but not in a way that had been diagnosed as medical. Each of the 16 studies examined the effects of making various positive dietary changes—less fat, more nutrients, and so on—combined with physical exercise. The surprising thing was that diet-wise, there was no clear winner. Each eating system resulted in improved mental health, even for people who weren’t starting out with diagnosed depression—and this held especially true for women. It’s heartening news, even ...

Sleep: we all know it’s important. We all know we should be getting 7 to 9 hours a night. And yet one in five U.S. adults regularly fails to hit that target. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in twenty-five adults admits to having fallen asleep while driving withinthe last thirty days . That’s bad news to everyone on the road, but sleep deprivation can come back to bite you even if you aren’t literally dozing off at the wheel. For instance, the next time you stub your toe. A new study from the University of Berkeley, California shows that sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you more likely to get in an accident—it actually makes the injuriesfrom those accidents hurt worse . How do you safely study pain in humans, especially given that everyone has a different pain threshold (and even doctors tend to underestimate the pain experienced by some groups, including women as a whole )? First, researchers applied heat to the legs of healt...

  Reading to a toddler-aged child does more than just get them to sit still for a few minutes. Led by James Law, Professor of Speech and Language Sciences in Newcastle University’s School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, researchers found something interesting. According to a new study, when parents and other caregivers routinely read with small children, the result is a language advantage of eight months. The researchers carefully reviewed sixteen reading intervention studies from the past 40 years, conducted in the USA, South Africa, Canada, Israel, and China. Some children were read to by a parent; some were read to by another caregiver. Some were read to from books; some were shown electronic readers. The average age of the child involved was 39 months. The goal was to examine the effects on receptive language (the ability to understand words), expressive language (the ability to translate thoughts into words), and pre-reading skills (th...

As if depressed or anxious people needed another thing to worry about, a new study from UC San Francisco suggests that depression and anxiety may be as bad for the health as smoking or obesity. First author Dr. Andrea Niles and senior author Dr. Aoife O’Donovan of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the San Francisco VA Medical Center examined the records of 15,000 adults over four years. Of that sample, 16% were found to be noticeably depressed or anxious. Compared to their non-depressed, non-anxious counterparts, those 16% of respondents were 65% more likely to have a heart condition, 64% more likely to have had a stroke, 50% more likely to have high blood pressure, and a whopping 87% more likely to have arthritis. (They were not found to be at greater risk for cancer, but that’s not much of a silver lining, considering.) Clearly, depression and anxiety are not a simple bad mood, or a weakness of character, but a serious medical condition. Clearly, something mu...

  Science news is full of what certainly sound like promising new studies featuring lab mice or lab rats as the test subjects. New treatments are assessed, and psychological truths are mined. Reading about this research, it’s easy to feel like we are witnessing the first steps of something big, something impactful. However, you are not a mouse (we assume). If you have ever read a conclusion from a mouse behavior study and wondered at the exact practical implications to your life, it turns out you had a pretty good point. For instance, more than 80% of medical treatments tested on animals—usually mice—fail when tested on people. Mice are cheap, easy to genetically modify, and we share 99% of our genes, but that one percent holds some crucial differences, especially when it comes to neuroscience research. For example, mice lack a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved with human learning, memory, and cognition. It’s hard to model, let’s say, a mental illne...

Parents of teenagers won’t run out of things to worry over any time soon. A 2016 Pew Research Center report surveyed Americans with children under 18 and found that 60% of these parents worry about their child getting bullied, while 54% fear their child might at some point suffer from anxiety or depression, and a full 50% of responding parents fret over the possibility of their child getting kidnapped. However, here’s one danger the concerned parents might not have considered: high school football. Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently finished examining the impact of full-contact football on the adolescent brain, and the results are well, troubling. Using a new kind of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) called diffusion kurtosis, the scientists scanned the brains of 16 high school football players, all between the age of 15 and 17. The young brains were scanned before and after p...