Student psychologists help the depressed

Liisa Luuk and Lisa Backlund are in the last term of their Psychology programme. During the spring they will be doing a graduation project in which they will evaluate the effects of cognitive behavioural therapy on depression, where the treatment is a combination of online treatment and actual face-to-face meetings. Their study is a part of a larger European research project in which the results from eight European countries are brought together.

Liisa Luuk och Lisa Backlund There is good support in research for both traditional face-to-face CBT and for treatment delivered online, Ms Backlund explains. What is new, and has not been researched as much, is that in this study there are four face-to-face meetings with the therapist in addition to the online treatment. Many patients request meeting their therapist, and it can result in more people completing their therapy.

“We will be taking part in the entire project,” Ms Luuk says. “We have received general guidelines from the other EU countries taking part, but we have been able to design the online treatment and the form of the treatment meetings. And we are also part of the recruitment process, conducting interviews with the participants prior to treatment. Then we follow up the results afterward, and we will also take part as therapists.”

Meeting and treating patients is not new for them.

“We see patients for three terms during our course at the university clinic ,” Ms Backlund explains. “During that time we are given basic psychotherapy training. And last term we went out for twelve weeks on professional placement, working with patients.”

In Sweden the studies will be carried out in Linköping and Stockholm. There will be places for 150 people who feel depressed to receive treatment and take part in the study, which is free. The criteria for taking part include being over 18 and having access to a telephone and a smart-phone. The treatment itself will start in February and run over ten weeks. Those interested in taking part may indicate their interest now.

“It’s important for us to have a large number of participants to make the results as reliable as possible and so that they can be compared with the various other EU countries,” Ms Luuk says. “It’s great being part of a real research project that is so big, it’s wonderful. Gaining experience of seeing how the research is done when these big names in the field are the ones doing it.”

“If we were to work as psychologists in primary care in the future, it is very possible that we would be the ones actually putting this treatment into practice,” Ms Luuk says.

Ms Backlund agrees with her.

“Yes, there's a good chance that treatment will go in this direction – more online treatment – so it’s an excellent experience for us.”

The treatment includes four face-to-face meetings with the therapist; in between, the treatment is internet-based. The participants will read some texts that talk about depression and how it is dealt with in CBT. Some of it deals with changing what you do – how to do things differently in order to deal with your depression – and part of it deals with how to manage your thinking. These are two key parts of CBT. Then there are small tasks. They might be answering questions or doing some exercises. Then you apply what you’ve read to your daily life.

Later, the treatment will be evaluated.

“We will compare it with a control group,” Ms Backlund says. “We have various questionnaires that the participants will fill in before and after the study, where they will assess how they feel. We will compare the severity of the depression symptoms before and after the treatment. We will also have a control group, that does not take part, to compare with. They will receive online treatment after the study has been completed. So everyone who takes part in the study will receive treatment.”

Professor Gerhard Andersson of the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linköping University is behind the project. Naira Topooco is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology, and a part of Professor Andersson’s research team. She is a project manager in the research study and Ms Luuk’s and Ms Backlund’s immediate supervisor. DAY treatment was developed by researchers and psychologists from Linköping University and is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Source: The DAY-studie (article in Swedish)

A French Chevalier for scholarly societal contributions

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Berkeley’s Program of Critical Theory, where she served as founding director, received the formal honor from Consul General Pauline Carmona at ceremonies in San Francisco. Butler was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry in 2013. This week she was pinned with the medal itself.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier in the Order of Arts et Lettres for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona.

Professor Judith Butler receives the French Chevalier for her contributions in philosophy, ethics, political and literary theories from French Consul General Pauline Carmona in San Francisco.

Carmona noted at the award ceremony the strength of Butler’s links with French scholars and intellectuals and the profound impact her work has had on France’s society, especially in the fields of feminism and gender studies.

Butler is active in gender and sexual politics, human rights and anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She was recently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She received the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, as well as the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies.

She is the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford and American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the College des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She has received honorary degrees from Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University and the University of St. Andrews. In 2013 she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry. In November 2014, Butler received an honorary degree from the Universite Fribourg in Switzerland.

She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Source: UC Berkeley

Feelings of awe and joy can bolster your mental and physical health.

              POSITIVE EMOTIONS CAN STRENGTHEN YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM
                                         Image Credit: Mens Health

The wonders of the world can be just as good for your health as they are for your enjoyment, suggests a UC Berkley study.

Researchers have linked positive emotions—awe, contentment, spirituality—with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, proteins that signal your immune system to work harder and bolster good health.

In two separate experiments, more than 200 young adults were asked to log the extent to which they experienced amusement, awe, compassion, joy, love, and pride on a given day. Samples of gum and cheek tissue taken that same day showed that those who experienced more of these positive emotions had the lowest levels of the cytokine Interleukin 6, a marker of inflammation that can cause autoimmune disease and depression.

“That awe, wonder and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy,” says UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, a co-author of the study.

An added emphasis on spirituality and mindfulness may just be enough to get you through this winter happy and healthy. 

Source: Mensfitness

Why Do We Feel Thirst? An Interview with Yuki Oka

Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech Marketing and Communications

To fight dehydration on a hot summer day, you instinctively crave the relief provided by a tall glass of water. But how does your brain sense the need for water, generate the sensation of thirst, and then ultimately turn that signal into a behavioral trigger that leads you to drink water? That's what Yuki Oka, a new assistant professor of biology at Caltech, wants to find out.

Oka's research focuses on the study of how the brain and body work together to maintain a healthy ratio of salt to water as part of a delicate form of biological balance called homeostasis.

Recently, Oka came to Caltech from Columbia University. We spoke with him about his work, his interests outside of the lab, and why he's excited to be joining the faculty at Caltech.

Can you tell us a bit more about your research?

The goal of my research is to understand the mechanisms by which the brain and body cooperate to maintain our internal environment's stability, which is called homeostasis. I'm especially focusing on fluid homeostasis, the fundamental mechanism that regulates the balance of water and salt. When water or salt are depleted in the body, the brain generates a signal that causes either a thirst or a salt craving. And that craving then drives animals to either drink water or eat something salty.

I'd like to know how our brain generates such a specific motivation simply by sensing internal state, and then how that motivation—which is really just neural activity in the brain—goes on to control the behavior.

Why did you choose to study thirst?

After finishing my Ph.D. in Japan, I came to Columbia University where I worked on salt sensing mechanisms in the mammalian taste system. We found that the peripheral taste system has a key function for salt homeostasis in the body by regulating our salt intake behavior. But of course, the peripheral sensor does not work by itself.  It requires a controller, the brain, which uses information from the sensor. So I decided to move on to explore the function of the brain; the real driver of our behaviors.

I was fascinated by thirst because the behavior it generates is very robust and stereotyped across various species. If an animal feels thirst, the behavioral output is simply to drink water. On the other hand, if the brain triggers salt appetite, then the animal specifically looks for salt—nothing else. These direct causal relations make it an ideal system to study the link between the neural circuit and the behavior.

You recently published a paper on this work in the journal Nature. Could you tell us about those findings?

In the paper, we linked specific neural populations in the brain to water drinking behavior. Previous work from other labs suggested that thirst may stem from a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, so we wanted to identify which groups of neurons in the hypothalamus control thirst. Using a technique called optogenetics that can manipulate neural activities with light, we found two distinct populations of neurons that control thirst in two opposite directions. When we activated one of those two populations, it evoked an intense drinking behavior even in fully water-satiated animals. In contrast, activation of a second population drastically suppressed drinking, even in highly water-deprived thirsty animals.  In other words, we could artificially create or erase the desire for drinking water.

Our findings suggest that there is an innate brain circuit that can turn an animal's water-drinking behavior on and off, and that this circuit likely functions as a center for thirst control in the mammalian brain. This work was performed with support from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Institutes of Health [for Charles S. Zuker at Columbia University, Oka's former advisor].

You use a mouse model to study thirst, but does this work have applications for humans?

There are many fluid homeostasis-associated conditions; one example is dehydration. We cannot specifically say a direct application for humans since our studies are focused on basic research. But if the same mechanisms and circuits exist in mice and humans, our studies will provide important insights into human physiologies and conditions.

Where did you grow up—and what started your initial interest in science?

I grew up in Japan, close to Tokyo, but not really in the center of the city. It was a nice combination between the big city and nature. There was a big park close to my house and when I was a child, I went there every day and observed plants and animals. That's pretty much how I spent my childhood. My parents are not scientists—neither of them, actually. It was just my innate interest in nature that made me want to be a scientist.

What drew you to Caltech?

I'm really excited about the environment here and the great climate. That's actually not trivial; I think the climate really does affect the people. For example, if you compare Southern California to New York, it's just a totally different character. I came here for a visit last January, and although it was my first time at Caltech I kind of felt a bond. I hadn't even received an offer yet, but I just intuitively thought, "This is probably the place for me."

I'm also looking forward to talking to my colleagues here who use fMRI for human behavioral research. One great advantage about using human subjects in behavioral studies is that they can report back to you about how they feel. There are certainly advantages of using an animal model, like mice. But they cannot report back. We just observe their behavior and say, "They are drinking water, so they must be thirsty." But that is totally different than someone telling you, "I feel thirsty." I believe that combining advantages of animal and human studies should allow us to address important questions about brain functions.

Do you have any hobbies?

I play basketball in my spare time, but my major hobby is collecting fossils. I have some trilobites and, actually, I have a complete set of bones from a type of herbivorous dinosaur. It is being shipped from New York right now and I may put it in my new office.

Written by Jessica Stoller-Conrad


Source: California Institute of Technology

Credit score can also describe health status

It appears the same behaviors that ruin credit ruin health too. Credit: © Ivelin Radkov / Fotolia

A credit score doesn't just reduce a person's entire financial history down to a single number and somehow predict their credit-worthiness.

It might also be saying something about a person's health status, too, according to a new analysis from a long-term study of the physical and mental health of more than 1,000 New Zealanders who have been monitored continuously from birth to age 38.

The latest paper from the study, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found a strong relationship between low credit scores and poor cardiovascular health.

This doesn't mean that poor financial management hurts your health, post-doctoral researcher Salomon Israel of Duke University is quick to point out. It's that the sort of personal attributes that can lead to a poor credit score can also contribute to poor health.

This and other studies from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand have found that self-control, planning ahead and perseverance are attributes that predict both better financial status and better health.

"What it comes down to is that people who don't take care of their money don't take care of their health," said study leader Terrie Moffitt, who is the Nannerl O. Keohane university professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. She said this study confirms what the insurance and financial industries may already understand.

Backtracking into the data on these study participants, the researchers found that about 20% of the relationship between credit scores and heart health was accounted for by the attitudes, behaviors and competencies displayed by the study members when they were younger than age 10.

"We're showing that these things take root early in life," Israel said.

Harvard economist David Laibson, who was not involved in the research, said the study "fundamentally transforms our understanding of the psychological factors that connect our health and wealth."

Lamar Pierce, an associate professor of organization & strategy at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed. "This study is important because it identifies common cognitive foundations long before financial and physical health problems emerge," said Pierce, who was not involved in this study. "It provides hope that early life intervention can impede the development of life-long patterns of illness and financial struggle."

Using a standard measure called the Framingham cardiovascular risk score, the Duke researchers estimated the "heart age" of their participants, based on blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood sugar and smoking habits. At age 38, the participants' Framingham "heart ages" ranged from 22 to 85 years. Participants with higher credit scores had younger "heart ages." The components of the Dunedin study's human capital measure -- educational attainment, cognitive ability and self-control -- each predicted higher credit scores and younger heart age.

The idea of checking credit scores against the detailed personal data in the Dunedin study came from a conversation Moffitt had with her seatmate on a plane about a decade ago. When she told her travelling companion from the life insurance industry that she studied self-control and life outcomes, he said, "We do that too, but we use credit scores."

"The thing that's so compelling about credit scores is that they're both predictive and retrospective," said co-author Avshalom Caspi, the Edward M. Arnett professor of psychology and neuroscience, psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Duke. "They offer a window on the future, but also a window on the past."

In recent years, credit scores have been used for pre-employment screening and many other functions beyond their original intent, Israel said. This study seems to bear out their usefulness as a proxy for a person's reliability and steadfastness, and in turn how healthy they may be.

"Our findings suggest that life insurance companies that acquire an applicant's credit score are also indirectly acquiring information about that applicant's educational attainment, intelligence and personality, right back to childhood," the authors wrote.

The link might work the other way as well. In less developed countries where credit scores aren't available, a Harvard team has been experimenting with using a 40-minute personality quiz to assess candidates' credit-worthiness for microloans.

This research was supported by the New Zealand Health Research Council, US National Institute on Aging (AG032282, T32-AG000029), the UK Medical Research Council (MR/K00381X) the Jacobs Foundation and the Yad Hanadiv Rothschild Foundation.

Source: Duke University

Why 'I'm so happy I could cry' makes sense

Individuals who express negative reactions to positive news were able to moderate intense emotions more quickly, scientists found. They also found people who are most likely to cry at their child's graduation are most likely to want to pinch a cute baby's cheeks. Credit: © michaeljung / Fotolia

The phrase "tears of joy" never made much sense to Yale psychologist Oriana Aragon. But after conducting a series of studies of such seemingly incongruous expressions, she now understands better why people cry when they are happy.

"People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions," said Aragon, lead author of work to be published in the journal Psychological Science. "They seem to take place when people are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions, and people who do this seem to recover better from those strong emotions."

There are many examples of responding to a positive experience with a negative emotion. A crying spouse is reunited with a soldier returning from war. Teen girls scream at a Justin Bieber concert and so do soccer players as they score a winning goal. The baseball player who hits a winning home run is pounded at home plate by teammates. And when introduced to babies "too cute for words," some can't resist pinching their cheeks.

"I was surprised no one ever asked why that is," she said.

Aragon and her colleagues at Yale ran subjects through some of these scenarios and measured their responses to cute babies or happy reunions. They found that individuals who express negative reactions to positive news were able to moderate intense emotions more quickly. They also found people who are most likely to cry at their child's graduation are most likely to want to pinch a cute baby's cheeks.

There is also some evidence that strong negative feelings may provoke positive expressions; for example nervous laughter appears when people are confronted with a difficult or frightening situations, and smiles have been found by other psychologists to occur during extreme sadness.

These new discoveries begin to explain common things that many people do but don't even understand themselves, Aragon said.

"These insights advance our understanding of how people express and control their emotions, which is importantly related to mental and physical health, the quality of relationships with others, and even how well people work together," she said.

Source: Yale University