Misery Around The Web


Filed Under Round-ups | Dec 15, MST 1:16 pm

 
The American College of Physicians recently released guidelines for treating depression, and it hasn’t gone down well with psychiatrists.

Newsweek reports that the rate of suicides among young black men went up 83% over the eighties and early nineties.

Recent research shows that people are better at spotting fake smiles after they’ve been rejected. More proof that the worse you feel, the more realistic your world view.

New York magazine reports that urban loneliness might be a myth, according to researchers. It’s long been assumed that people in cities are lonelier than people living in more rural environments,  but this assumption of urban alienation may not hold under closer inspection.

Coronary heart disease and depression are a deadly combo, and a recent study suggests that this deadliness is tied to behavioral changes in those afflicted by the pair. Being depressed causes people to stop taking care of themselves, which increases their chance of dying.

In a study of 102 female and 50 male African Americans teenagers, researchers found that mothers who played mental games increased the presence of depressive symptoms in their daughters. The boys showed no changes in wellbeing.

The High Cost of Feeling Powerless


Filed Under Overcome Depression | Sep 23, MDT 4:44 am

You’re more likely to spend money on expensive, high-status items after being reminded of a time in your life when someone had power over you. At least, that’s what a recent study suggests.

In three experiments, the authors asked participants to either describe a situation where they had power over another person or one in which someone had power over them. Then the researchers showed them items and asked how much they would be willing to pay.

After recalling situations where they were powerless, participants were willing to pay more for items that signal status, like silk ties and fur coats, but not products like minivans and dryers. They also agreed to pay more for a framed picture of their university if it was portrayed as rare and exclusive.

One lesson to gleam from these experiments is that our feelings are very much context dependent. The researchers were able to elicit a state of social insecurity in their subjects only through asking a few carefully designed questions.

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Mimicry, social belonging, and automatic behavior


Filed Under Relating to People | Aug 8, MDT 12:05 pm

Humans have a tendency of mimicking each other in subtle ways; put two people in a room together, and if one of them starts rubbing their nose, the other might end up doing the same thing without realizing it.

No one has provided a comprehensive answer as to why people behave this way, though there have been some interesting studies which have given us at least a partial understanding of why we mimic each other.

Recent experiments, for example, have shown that our sense of belonging has an impact on our mirroring habits:

In one experiment, participants played an online ball-tossing game with three other computer players, and were either excluded or included in the game. After reporting their enjoyment of the game and what they thought of the other players, participants were asked to describe a photograph to a female confederate who constantly moved her foot, but not enough so that it was consciously noticed by the participant. The researchers hypothesized that participants in the excluded condition would move their foot more to match the confederate.

In the next experiment, the procedure was kept mostly the same. This time, however, all of the participants were female. They were excluded from either a group of males or females during the ball-tossing game and interacted with either a male or female confederate during the photo description task. Participants were also questioned more thoroughly on how they felt after the game, such as how much they felt they belonged to the group. The researchers predicted that if the female participants were ostracized by females and later interacted with a female confederate, then they would mimic the confederate more than other participants.

The results, appearing in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provided strong support for the researchers’ hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants who had been excluded from the game mimicked the confederate during the second task more than other participants. In the second experiment, participants excluded by members of their own sex mimicked a confederate of the same sex more than participants in other conditions. There was also an inverse relationship between feelings of belonging and nonconscious mimicry.

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New study links stress hormone gene to poor response to Celexa


Filed Under Medication, Overcome Depression | Jul 16, MDT 12:17 pm

citalopram The Mayo Clinic recently released a study on how variations in SLC6A4, the serotonin transporter gene, altered the way patients responded to the anti-depressant Celexa. A new study published in Biological Psychiatry shows how variations in FKBP5, a gene that has influence over a class of stress hormones known as glucocorticoids, also alters how patients responded to Celexa (otherwise known as citalopram).

The FKBP5 gene has been linked to dissociative symptoms in traumatized children, and  childhood maltreatment has been linked to poor responses to anti-depressant treatment. A relationship exists between this gene, childhood abuse, and resistance to certain anti-depressant treatments.  Scientists now have the task of figuring that relationship out.

The pharmacogenetic field is growing fast, and new studies are coming out every day that flesh out how genetic differences account in part for the different responses people have to the medications they take.

In the near future, doctors will only prescribe drugs once they have a thorough understanding of the genetic profile of their patient.