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)

Grad Student Solves 30-Year-Old Physics Problem

                    Emilie Huffman, second year PhD student in physics. Credit: Duke University

Sometimes an age-old question just needs a fresh set of eyes.

That was the case in Duke’s physics department, where a graduate student and professor recently resolved a calculating dilemma that has vexed computational physicists for decades.

Emilie Huffman is a second-year PhD student from Charlotte, North Carolina. Last spring she began working with Shailesh Chandrasekharan, an associate professor and the director of graduate studies in physics, on what’s known as a sign problem.

Chandrasekharan is a theoretical nuclear and particle physicist who specializes in solving sign problems, which arise when one uses certain computational algorithms to calculate the behavior of large numbers of particles called fermions.

“Almost all the matter we know of are made with fermions,” Chandrasekharan said. “As building blocks of matter, it’s very important to be able to do calculations with them.”

But calculations of such complexity get tricky, and sign problems make it easy for wrong results to surface.

“It’s a very broad problem that affects almost all fields of physics involving quantum mechanics with strong correlations, where Monte Carlo methods are essential to perform calculations,” Chandrasekharan said.

Some in the field have simply moved on since the 1980s, leaving interesting questions plagued by sign problems unexplored. Other scientists have found workarounds and approximations. Very few, including Chandrasekharan, have tried to figure out solutions through the years. Huffman began work to expand on one of her advisor’s solutions, involving a grouping concept called fermion bags, and apply them to a new class of problems.

“She finally figured out a nice formula,” Chandrasekharan said. “Although the formula is quite simple and elegant, I couldn’t guess it.”

“In physics, often there’s a truth, and if you’re hitting on the right truth, everything starts falling into place.” Chandrasekharan says that’s what happened when he began applying Huffman’s formula to a class of problems.

Their paper appeared recently in the journal Physical Review B’s Rapid Communications.

“Now that I have a solution, I can begin to apply it,” Huffman said. Starting with condensed matter physics, Huffman plans to apply her solution to various questions that have been stymied by sign problems. “I can use this solution to study properties of graphene,” she said, referring to the single-layer carbon that has been touted as the strongest material in the world. Many puzzles remain in the field, especially involving multi-layer graphene sheets.

Wherever she turns her attention next, it’s clear Huffman has a promising career ahead.

Citation: “Solution to sign problems in half-filled spin-polarized electronic systems,” Emilie Huffman and Shailesh Chandrasekharan. Physical Review B Rapid Communications, March 12, 2014. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.89.111101.

Source: Duke University

The Power of the Past

If you grow up in the working class, neither love nor money can trump your blue-collar roots, a Duke sociologist has found.

Her study of couples from different social classes suggests that those who “marry up” still make life decisions based on their upbringing.

                             Cover of Streib book by Eric Ferreri, Duke News & Communications
                          Sociologist Jessi Streib’s book “The Past” is about class structure in marriages.

“Your social class never goes away,” says Jessi Streib, an assistant professor of sociology whose findings are revealed in her new book: The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages. “It stays with you in terms of how you live your life. The class you’re born into sticks with you and shapes you, even when you marry into more money and a far more financially secure life.”

Streib’s findings derive from interviews she conducted with white, heterosexual Midwestern couples. She interviewed 32 couples in which one spouse came from a working class background, the other from the middle class. For comparison, she also interviewed 10 couples in which both spouses grew up in the middle class.

Streib defines working class as people raised by parents with high school educations; the middle class subjects were raised by college-educated parents.

Her findings run contrary to the notion held by many scholars that strivers can outrun a difficult childhood by getting a college degree and good-paying middle-class job.

While the findings suggest that a middle class upbringing isn’t required to excel in the American workplace, those upwardly mobile people from working class roots may still miss out on opportunities if they can’t or don’t subscribe to the unspoken norms of middle class culture, Streib notes.

Streib found that couples from different classes held onto their own, firmly-rooted beliefs regarding money and parenting, often negotiating fervently with each other over the proper amount of career planning and nurturing of children. Should children be left to grow and discover on their own, or should goals and schedules be set for them?

“Those are the sorts of tiny battles cross-class couples have all the time,” Streib said. “These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are certainly common and consistent.”

Source: Duke Univesity

How to Learn math without fear, Stanford expert says

Stanford Prof. Boaler finds that children who excel in math learn to develop "number sense," which is much different from the memorization that is often stressed in school.
Image Credit: THEPLANETWALL STOCK

Students learn math best when they approach the subject as something they enjoy, according to a Stanford education expert. Speed pressure, timed testing and blind memorization pose high hurdles in the youthful pursuit of math.

"There is a common and damaging misconception in mathematics – the idea that strong math students are fast math students," said Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of mathematics education and the lead author on a new working paper. Boaler's co-authors are Cathy Williams, cofounder of Stanford'sYouCubed, and Amanda Confer, a Stanford graduate student in education. 

Curriculum timely

Fortunately, said Boaler, the new national curriculum standards known as the Common Core Standards for K-12 schools de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. Maths facts are fundamental assumptions about math, such as the times tables (2 x 2 = 4), for example. Still, the expectation of rote memorization continues in classrooms and households across the United States.

While research shows that knowledge of math facts is important, Boaler said the best way for students to know math facts is by using them regularly and developing understanding of numerical relations. Memorization, speed and test pressure can be damaging, she added.

On the other hand, people with "number sense" are those who can use numbers flexibly, she said. For example, when asked to solve the problem of 7 x 8, someone with number sense may have memorized 56, but they would also be able to use a strategy such as working out 10 x 7 and subtracting two 7s (70-14).

"They would not have to rely on a distant memory," Boaler wrote.

In fact, in one research project the investigators found that the high-achieving students actually used number sense, rather than rote memory, and the low-achieving students did not.

The conclusion was that the low achievers are often low achievers not because they know less but because they don't use numbers flexibly.

"They have been set on the wrong path, often from an early age, of trying to memorize methods instead of interacting with numbers flexibly," she wrote. Number sense is the foundation for all higher-level mathematics, she noted. 

Role of the brain

Boaler said that some students will be slower when memorizing, but still possess exceptional mathematics potential.

"Math facts are a very small part of mathematics, but unfortunately students who don't memorize math facts well often come to believe that they can never be successful with math and turn away from the subject," she said.

Prior research found that students who memorized more easily were not higher achieving – in fact, they did not have what the researchers described as more "math ability" or higher IQ scores. Using an MRI scanner, the only brain differences the researchers found were in a brain region called the hippocampus, which is the area in the brain responsible for memorizing facts – the working memory section.

But according to Boaler, when students are stressed – such as when they are solving math questions under time pressure – the working memory becomes blocked and the students cannot as easily recall the math facts they had previously studied. This particularly occurs among higher achieving students and female students, she said.

Some estimates suggest that at least a third of students experience extreme stress or "math anxiety" when they take a timed test, no matter their level of achievement. "When we put students through this anxiety-provoking experience, we lose students from mathematics," she said.

Boaler contrasts the common approach to teaching math with that of teaching English. In English, a student reads and understands novels or poetry, without needing to memorize the meanings of words through testing. They learn words by using them in many different situations – talking, reading and writing.

"No English student would say or think that learning about English is about the fast memorization and fast recall of words," she added.

Strategies, activities 

In her paper, "Fluency without Fear," Boaler provides activities for teachers and parents that help students learn math facts at the same time as developing number sense. These include number talks, addition and multiplication activities, and math cards.

Importantly, she said, these activities include a focus on the visual representation of number facts. When students connect visual and symbolic representations of numbers, they are using different pathways in the brain, which deepens their learning, as shown by recent brain research.

"Math fluency" is often misinterpreted, with an over-emphasis on speed and memorization, she said. "I work with a lot of mathematicians, and one thing I notice about them is that they are not particularly fast with numbers; in fact some of them are rather slow. This is not a bad thing; they are slow because they think deeply and carefully about mathematics."

She refers to the famous French mathematician, Laurent Schwartz, who wrote in his autobiography that he often felt stupid in school, as he was one of the slowest math thinkers in class.
Math anxiety and fear play a big role in students dropping out of mathematics, said Boaler.

"When we emphasize memorization and testing in the name of fluency we are harming children, we are risking the future of our ever-quantitative society and we are threatening the discipline of mathematics. We have the research knowledge we need to change this and to enable all children to be powerful mathematics learners. Now is the time to use it," she said.

Source: Standford Unversity

How pace of climate change will challenge ectotherms

Turtles sunning themselves (stock image). Turtles are ectotherms, one of many that will be threatened by climate change, researchers say.
Credit: © xoanon / Fotolia

Animals that regulate their body temperature through the external environment may be resilient to some climate change but not keep pace with rapid change, leading to potentially disastrous outcomes for biodiversity.

A study by the University of Sydney and University of Queensland showed many animals can modify the function of their cells and organs to compensate for changes in the climate and have done so in the past, but the researchers warn that the current rate of climate change will outpace animals' capacity for compensation (or acclimation).

The research has just been published in Nature Climate Change (Letters), written by Professor Frank Seebacher School of Biological Sciences and Professor Craig Franklin and Associate Professor Craig White from the University of Queensland.

Adapting to climate change will not just require animals to cope with higher temperatures. The predicted increase to fluctuations in temperature as well as to overall temperature would require animals to function across a broader range of conditions. This is particularly important for ectotherms, animals that rely on external sources of heat to control body temperature, and are therefore more influenced by environmental temperatures.

The research showed that many groups of ectotherms, which make up more than 90 percent of all animals, are able to change their physiological function to cope with an altered environment, but the rapid pace and fluctuations of human-induced climate change present serious challenges.

The researchers studied 40 years of published data to assess how biological functions change in response to a sudden fluctuations in environmental temperatures. They found that the physiological rates of ectothermic animals, such as heart rate, metabolism and locomotion, had already increased over the past 20 years with increasing average temperatures.

"It is important that animals maintain the right balance between the large number of physiological functions despite environmental fluctuations. An increase in temperature that leads to changed reaction rates can upset that balance and cause the decline of individuals and species," said Professor Seebacher. "For example, movement requires energy and oxygen to be delivered to muscles. However, if metabolism or the cardiovascular system can't cope with increased temperatures, animals can no longer move to forage, migrate or interact with each other.

"The overall trend in the last 20 years has been to increased physiological rates, and we predict that this would continue to increase with increasing temperature. "Even if animals are able to maintain the balance of their physiological functions in a warmer climate, increased metabolism leads to increases in the food resources needed and could upset the balance in ecosystems, particularly if predator and prey populations respond very differently to the environmental temperature change."

Source: University of Sydney

Mitigating climate change? Guiding responsible research in geoengineering

Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter Earth's climate system -- such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space -- has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter Earth's climate system -- such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space -- has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But such efforts could present unforeseen new risks. That inherent tension, argue two professors from UCLA and Harvard, has thwarted both scientific advances and the development of an international framework for regulating and guiding geoengineering research.

In an article published March 15 in the journalScience, Edward Parson of UCLA and David Keith of Harvard University outline how the current deadlock on governance of geoengineering research poses real threats to the sound management of climate risk. Their article advances concrete and actionable proposals for allowing further research -- but not deployment -- and for creating scientific and legal guidance, as well as addressing public concerns.

"We're trying to avoid a policy train wreck," said Keith, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. "Informed policy judgments in the future require research now into geoengineering methods' efficacy and risks. If research remains blocked, in some stark future situation, only untested approaches will be available."

"Our proposals address the lack of international legal coordination that has contributed to the current deadlock," said Parson, a professor of law and faculty co-director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. "Coordinated international governance of research will both provide the guidance and confidence to allow needed, low-risk research to proceed and address legitimate public concerns about irresponsible interventions or a thoughtless slide into deployment."

In their paper, the authors state that progress on research governance must advance four aims:

• Allow low-risk, scientifically valuable research to proceed.
• Give scientists guidance on the design of socially acceptable research.
• Address legitimate public concerns.
• End the current legal void that facilitates rogue projects.

Parson and Keith argue that scientific self-regulation is not sufficient to manage risks and that scientists need to accept government authority over geoengineering research. They emphasize that initial steps should not require new laws or treaties but can come from informal consultation and coordination among governments.

The authors also propose defining two thresholds for governance of geoengineering research: a large-scale threshold to be subject to a moratorium and a separate, much smaller threshold below which research would be allowed. Keith, for example, is currently developing an outdoor experiment to test the risks and efficacy of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering, which would fall below the proposed allowable threshold.

The authors emphasize that this article proposes only first steps. In the near term, these steps frame a social bargain that would allow research to proceed; in the long term, they begin to build international norms of cooperation and transparency in geoengineering.

Source:  Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences