Many U.S. Kids Lack Secure Attachment, Face Future Hurdles

-Rick Nauert, PhD

A somber new study of some 14,000 U.S. children finds that 40 percent lack strong emotional bonds with parents and are more likely to face educational and behavioral problems as a result.

In a report published by Sutton Trust, a London-based institute that has published more than 140 research papers on education and social mobility, researchers found that infants under the age of three who do not form strong bonds with their mothers or fathers are more likely to be aggressive, defiant, and hyperactive as adults.

These bonds, or secure attachments, are formed through early parental care, such as picking up a child when he or she cries or holding and reassuring a child.

“When parents tune in to and respond to their children’s needs and are a dependable source of comfort, those children learn how to manage their own feeling and behaviors,” said researcher and doctoral student Sophie Moullin. “These secure attachments to their mothers and fathers provide these children with a base from which they can thrive.”

In the new reports, researchers used data collected by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative U.S. study of 14,000 children born in 2001. The researchers also reviewed more than 100 academic studies.

Their analysis shows that about 60 percent of children develop strong attachments to their parents, which are formed through simple actions, such as holding a baby lovingly and responding to the baby’s needs.

Such actions support children’s social and emotional development, which, in turn, strengthens their cognitive development, the researchers write.

These children are more likely to be resilient to poverty, family instability, parental stress, and depression. Additionally, if boys growing up in poverty have strong parental attachments, they are 2-1/2 times less likely to display behavior problems at school.

The approximately 40 percent who lack secure attachments, on the other hand, are more likely to have poorer language and behavior before entering school.

This effect continues throughout the children’s lives, and such children are more likely to leave school without further education, employment, or training, the researchers write.

Among children growing up in poverty, poor parental care and insecure attachment before age four strongly predicted a failure to complete school.

Of the 40 percent who lack secure attachments, 25 percent avoid their parents when they are upset (because their parents are ignoring their needs), and 15 percent resist their parents because their parents cause them distress.

Dr. Susan Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who studies social and emotional development in young children and infants, said insecure attachments emerge when primary caregivers are not “tuned in” to their infant’s social signals, especially their cries of distress during infancy.

“When helpless infants learn early that their cries will be responded to, they also learn that their needs will be met, and they are likely to form a secure attachment to their parents,” Campbell said.

“However, when caregivers are overwhelmed because of their own difficulties, infants are more likely to learn that the world is not a safe place — leading them to become needy, frustrated, withdrawn, or disorganized.”

The researchers argue that many parents — including middle-class parents — need more support to provide proper parenting, including family leave, home visits, and income supports.

“Targeted interventions can also be highly effective in helping parents develop the behaviors that foster secure attachment. Supporting families who are at risk for poor parenting ideally starts early — at birth or even before,” said Jane Waldfogel, Ph.D., a co-author of the report and a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia.

Source: Princeton University

4 Keys to Leaving a Bad Relationship

-Craig Malkin, PhD

Narcissists, even abuse ones, can be hard to leave. Here’s why – and what to do.

The more time we spend with people, the more they literally become a part of us. We think of ourselves, often, not just as individuals, but one point in a vast network of human connections: I’m not simply Craig or Dr. Malkin, but Anna’s therapist, Jennifer’s husband, Eugene’s son. Our identity is tied to the people we love. When these strands of connection become stretched or frayed by anger and pain, we fight to hold on, partly because we’re fighting to preserve a part of ourselves. What began as a bond soon becomes a tether.

When Anna decides she can’t see Neil anymore, she ceases to be “Neil’s girlfriend.” It’s one loss in a series of many. They’ll stop living together. They’ll stop eating together. They’ll have to sort through the evidence of their identity as a couple—the furniture and assorted knick-knacks—and decide who gets what. The process of extracting shared possessions from “Neil and Anna, the couple” and redistributing them to two, separate people can be as painful as a root canal. Which is why instead of leaving, we often find reasons to stay. One of the more insidious ways we do that is through self-blame.

Self-blame comes in handy when a relationship no longer works and leaving feels too painful. If we convince ourselves that someone’s being hurtful or insensitive because of our own failings, there’s still hope. All we have to do is improve. If I’m the problem, then the happiness of the relationship is entirely in my hands. It’s a solution that preserves hope at the expense of our self-esteem.

This is the trade Anna had made in her own childhood. Her father, who drank heavily, often exploded with rage. Rather than accept her powerlessness in the face of this, she decided somewhere along the line that if she just became more obedient or thoughtful, he’d become nicer. With Neil, she’d continued to find hope the same way—and now, it kept her trapped. Regardless of how hard she worked to leave, her self-blame pulled her back.

One way you can liberate yourself from this kind of self-criticism is by confronting a feeling you’ve probably come to fear more than you realize: disappointment.

Chronic self-blamers bury their disappointment because, in the past, voicing it might have made things worse. For many people, the fallout from daring to tell their family That hurt my feelings or I really wanted you at my recital would have been too great. In Anna’s family, even when she didn’t feel hurt, angry yelling and deafening silence had been the norm. Her father made her feel like a burden when she so much as hinted at feeling unhappy, shouting or sulking until she fell silent. Either way, it became easier for her to swallow her disappointment by taking his message to heart: You’re the problem. You expect too much.

Remind yourself: You have a right to your disappointment. If you share your needs and feelings and it actually drives the person away, then you can’t be happy in the relationship. The solution isn’t to slide down the spectrum and become Echo. Recognize self-blame for what it is: a powerful fear that you’ll lose love if you ask for what you want. It keeps you stuck in the wrong relationship, with someone who needs you to bury your needs. The only way to find out if they can give you more care or attention or empathy is it to invite them to. And you can’t do that if you blame yourself for what’s missing.
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Disappointment, far from being a threat to intimacy, often deepens it. Being clear about when your relationship leaves you feeling neglected, alone, unworthy, or small puts you back in touch with your own needs. It brings you closer to your lovers and friends. It teaches them how to love you. And there are some simple steps to getting back in touch with healthy disappointment:

Create healthy boundaries. If something hurts, say so. It’s not your job to protect your partner or friend from knowing they’ve behaved badly. By all means, share the disappointment in a vulnerable way. It’s your best chance of being heard. But don’t let people think you’re happy when you’re not. That’s Echo’s trick. If they can’t tolerate hearing that you’re hurt, they’re likely to go on hurting you.

Check your self-blame at the door. When something upsetting happens between you and your partner or friend, keep in mind your fear of losing them is bound to throw you back into self-blame. Instead of asking What have I done wrong?, ask Am I feeling disappointed? Am I afraid to say something’s wrong?

Don’t confuse empathy with responsibility. It’s fine to try understanding why someone’s feeling upset, even when they’ve hurt you. Maybe your last few comments came across as cold or critical. But you can always correct that by offering a sincere apology. It’s your partner’s choice to handle their upset by lashing out. Don’t make yourself responsible for anyone’s actions but your own. That’s just another way of blaming yourself instead of feeling disappointed.

Treat your PTSD. For many abuse survivors, the cruel irony is that their trauma symptoms can keep them stuck. Nothing stirs self-doubt more than constant messages you’re the one with the problem—or worse “crazy,” as emotional abusers who love to gaslight often claim. If you’re recovering from trauma, you’ll need help feeling sane again. It’s this very problem that I address in the following video.

Whatever Doesn’t Kill You, Will Only Make You Stronger?

-Dawn C. Carr MGS, PhD

Rethinking what it means to be resilient.

A few months ago, my father-in-law turned 80. As a gerontologist, I’m a big fan of celebrating major milestones when it comes to aging. But, for my father-in-law, I find this accomplishment more exceptional than usual. You see, we’ve suspected my father-in-law was a cat for years because he seems to have nine lives! Despite a barrage of serious health setbacks, and there have been some biggies, he always seems to bounce back.

We often ponder the reason for his amazing resilience, despite all odds. Is it something about his genetics (which would bode well for me given that I’m married to someone with half of his genes)? Possibly, though research suggests that genetics explains less than one-third of health outcomes in later life, so that’s definitely not the whole story (1,2). Perhaps it could be something about his lifestyle? Given his fondness of McDonald’s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Johnny Walker, and five decades of heavy smoking, I’d say that his health behaviors were unlikely beneficial to how well he’s fared. So that leaves us with psychosocial factors.

In a paper I recently published with colleagues (3), we examined how their level of psychological resilience influenced people faced with a major health event. Specifically, we created an index of self-reported resilience factors (e.g., how much they agree with the statement “When I really want to do something, I usually find a way to succeed at it.”) and examined how they influenced the extent to which getting a new chronic condition led to increased disability two years later. For example, if someone suddenly had a heart attack, we were interested in seeing whether he lost his ability to do things like bathe, go grocery shopping, or manage his money. Our study showed that the least resilient individuals were likely to experience a new disability, and those who were the most resilient recovered in less than two years such that they had no more disabilities than those who hadn’t experienced a major health event.

So, what causes someone to be resilient? There are several hypotheses.

1. Some people are innately more resilient and, therefore, are able to withstand more adversity than others.
2. Resiliency is a measure of social class—it’s related to whether or not people are born into a family that offers opportunities that allow them to do well in life.
3. People learn from bad things happening and develop tools to handle additional challenges later on.

For the first hypothesis, we have no reason to believe that resilience is a trait that you have or you don’t. Rather, like other individual characteristics, we may have a propensity towards certain personality traits at birth, but this propensity is activated by our environment, by our development, and by the people in our lives to collectively shape our psychological responses over time. This is not to say that we are unable to change our responses to our environment, but there is significant evidence to debunk the idea that resilience is something that we’re either born with or we’re not.

So let’s consider the second hypothesis, that resiliency is simply a measure of social class. If you are brought up in a family in which there are expectations and opportunities to experience success, and you observe success in others, you are likely to feel as though working hard will pay off. Furthermore, success (regardless of how you might define it) is more likely to be an expectation. On the other hand, if you grow up in a family in which your parents (or parent) spend many years struggling to find a job, pay the bills, and provide for your basic needs, you likely have fewer examples of how working hard allows you to overcome major challenges, and you probably have a narrower set of choices from which to make decisions that lead to success.

There is no doubt that social class plays a critical role in resilience. But, social class alone isn’t the whole story. We all have examples of these unique people who thrive despite all odds, and similarly, those who fail despite all odds. Is it possible that by having bad things happen and overcoming them, we learn how to have a better life? The answer seems to be…maybe, but it depends.

Recent research has emphasized the long-standing impact of early life traumas on health outcomes in adulthood. The more traumatic experiences an individual has during childhood, the worse his or her physical and psychological health fares several decades later (4). Part of this is likely related to social class, too. Those most likely to experience significant early life trauma are apt to be brought up in households with greater financial strain, less parental education, and in neighborhoods with greater crime and instability. But regardless of the factors that cause these early traumas, it seems that such significant events can dramatically alter our self-concept, our expectations, our early-life stress levels, and other factors that set in motion a series of problems. But what happens when difficult experiences happen after childhood?

My father-in-law did not face significant trauma early in life, but seems to have spent years sporting his resiliency in adulthood. After his early military service derailed him from his college trajectory early in adulthood, he managed to return to civilian life and complete his architecture degree while raising a young family—barely getting any sleep along the way. As a self-employed architect, he had a career that came with major ebbs and flows, which meant working excessive hours and experiencing a lot of stress. After about two and half decades of marriage and two sons (and I can tell you, they couldn’t have been easy kids to raise!), his wife had a brain aneurysm and subsequent brain surgery, followed by a diagnosis of lung cancer and two years of chemotherapy. He was left with a pile of medical bills and widowhood in his late 50s. He remarried, only to face a similar scenario a decade later.

At age 72 and widowed twice, he remarried once again. When his current wife strongly encouraged him to stop smoking, to eat a healthier diet, and start exercising, he obliged. I am certain those changes have had a remarkable impact on his continued survival. And today, I’d say he’s happier than I’ve ever seen him. But, what allows my father-in-law to manage his current health challenges, make hard changes in his life, and get us to laugh hysterically when he shares his version of stories behind these and many other life circumstances, rather than complain, give in, and resign himself to the health problems plaguing him now? Some would say that he is simply more resilient than the average guy, his doctors included.

When bad stuff happens to resilient people, it appears that in the short-term they don’t do anything different from what nonresilient people do. Instead they feel something different about their ability to handle things. And as a result, they fare better physically and psychologically over the long-term. But as a colleague of mine pointed out, complaining about all of this fuss about resilience, “If something bad happens, what choice do you really have? You have to keep going.” And have you heard that manta: “Whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”? Yet, people who have terrible things happen to them don’t always respond with such a mentality—some complain about the hand they were dealt. Others throw in the towel and stop trying so hard to get back up again. What do you do?

Over the last few years, as my father-in-law has experienced several health events that, alongside his existing chronic conditions, he’s had no reason to recover from, he’s left even his doctors bewildered. And, when we sat in a room full of his friends and family, toasting his 80th birthday, I wondered, how does he do it? Not only did he seem to be well recovered from his most recent medical set-back, which had occurred only a few weeks earlier, but he took us to the golf course to hit some balls. And he proudly showed us a picture of himself wearing a huge grin and holding an iguana from his recent trip to Mexico.

We don’t always have control over the health events or all of the situations we are faced with in our lives. But we usually have choices about how we respond to many of the challenges we face. And, it seems that how we respond really matters when it comes to our health. The next time you find yourself in a tough situation, try to take a step back and think about your emotional response to the situation and how you frame the problem in the context of your life story. Remember, resilience is learned and cultivated through life experiences, and learning, particularly about ourselves, is a lifelong process.

1. “Environment, not genes, plays starring role in human immune variation, study finds.” https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/01/environment-not-genes-pla…
2. Crimmins, E., & Fitch, C. (2012). The Genetics of Age-Related Health Outcomes. Journals of Gerontology, Medical Sciences, 67A (5); 467-469.
3. Manning, L.K., Carr, D.C., & Kail, B. L. (2014). Do Higher Levels of Resilience Buffer the Deleterious Impact of Chronic Illness on Disability in Later Life? The Gerontologist.
4. Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/

How Old Are You, Really? And Does It Matter?

-Dawn C. Carr MGS, PhD

Chronological age is not as relevant as it used to be.

Apparently, my “real age” is five years younger than my actual chronological age, according to a popular online quiz. That probably means I should celebrate, right? I mean, younger IS better, isn’t it? Well, it depends on what you’re talking about.

It is true that with aging comes certain, well, challenges, to put it lightly. Our taste buds become less effective, our sense of touch becomes dampened, our metabolism slows down, our eyesight changes, our muscle mass begins to diminish in tandem with a decline in bone mass, and our risk of getting a range of chronic illnesses rises. Despite these potential challenges, the timing of these events varies greatly, influenced heavily by lifestyle behaviors, environmental factors, and to a lesser degree, genetics (hence the reason for many of these so called “real age” quizzes). But age as a number can’t be all that matters.

As people’s chronological age increases, happiness also increases. In part this is because, in general, when we’re young adults, our focus is on what lies ahead, and when we’re older, our attention shifts to the things that are emotionally meaningful right now. On the other hand, if we perceive our health to be much worse than others of similar chronological age, regardless of how old we actually are, we aren’t very satisfied with our lives. Clearly, how we feel about our age and the expectations we assign to that number are also important.

The science behind the behaviors that maximize longevity isn’t exactly refined, but we know for certain that people who eat fruits and vegetables, exercise, and develop and maintain loving relationships and meaningful social roles are well poised to find themselves happy and healthy when they reach later life. So, if we do things right, i.e., eat well, exercise, and cultivate loving relationships, 70 may look very different than what we might have expected, and if lots of people begin engaging in healthier behaviors, our very conception of life at 70 is also likely to change.

Healthy lifestyle behaviors, regardless of our actual chronological age, matter because of the way they make us feel now, but also because of the way they influence our risk of making it to old age and feeling good when we get there. However, a study published in November of last year, funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society, showed that for a surprisingly large segment of the population in their later years, chronological age is astonishingly un-predictive of health. It seems that, at some point, our chronological age stops mattering and our “real age” (i.e., how old we feel) is what becomes relevant.

In addition to our psychological factors and the impact of lifestyle behaviors and other factors on health as we age, the value of chronological age as a marker for the timing of our life events is also becoming less salient. Not long ago, the entry into “adulthood” was more normative chronologically, but a shift in the timing of marriage, the timing of having one’s first child, the lengthening of time spent becoming educated has created greater variation in when we view adolescence ending and adulthood beginning. Similarly, and perhaps in part because of the delay of early life events, our ideas about the start of old age have also changed. A New York Times article recently pointed out that the average age of retirement in this country is still 61, which is, believe it or not, quite a bit higher than what it used to be only a decade ago. But, for some because of having enough income beyond Social Security and for others because they can and want to, many baby boomers are rethinking their initial retirement plans and working or planning to work well beyond 66. So turning age 65, which was once a rite of passage into old age via retirement, is slowly losing meaning.

The working longer trend isn’t exactly news, but the emergence of new expectations about how long we can and should plan to spend working in our lifetimes has the potential to have a ripple effect on younger generations who, in their future-oriented minds, are still planning to cram all of their work and family into the first half of adulthood so they can retire. This potential redesigning of the life stages might further remove the connection between chronological age and life events.

So, if aging isn’t always bad and our chronological age doesn’t clearly indicate which life stage we are in, what value does chronological age still provide? I would say not nearly as much value as it held in the past. But this leaves us with a conundrum. If not age, then what metric should we use to take stock of our live? Well, these “real age” quizzes might offer us a clue. Although there are certainly many quizzes that are downright silly, others do offer some insight by distinguishing our expectations about what a chronological age should look like from how we feel, the behaviors we are engaging in, and in some cases, biological factors. Maybe the new metric is similar, a value that doesn’t just measure years since birth, but takes into account our feelings, preferences, and lifestyle behaviors. Ideally, this new metric wouldn’t be an “age” at all, but a value that lies on a spectrum of psychosocial and physical health.

That sort of metric doesn’t really exist yet. So in the meantime, go ahead and take those “real age” quizzes. But I challenge you to take this as an opportunity to evaluate your own expectations of what life will look like at certain ages and what you want to truly define you.

And let’s not lose sight of the fact that younger isn’t always better.

Is Your Intimate Partner Doing This Manipulative Behavior?

-Jeffrey Bernstein, PhD

This is one game that makes you both losers in the game of love!

Pete and Laurie  (names changed to protect confidentiality) were counseling clients of mine who were “Head Game Gamblers,” a destructive behavior I describe in my book, Why Can’t You Read My Mind? In their early dating days, for example, Joe would deliberately make Sue wait awhile before returning her phone calls. He was crazy about her, but did not want to show it—too much.

They had since lived together for eight years. That was then. Struggling now, Joe had come to think that Sue had a hidden agenda whenever she was affectionate and kind to him. “Here she goes again,” he would think. “I know how she operates. She wants to visit her sister for the weekend so she is just turning on the charm now.” Joe, in this example, erroneously interpreted Sue’s kindness as evidence that she was manipulating him. He lost sight of the behavior at hand because he assumed that she had ulterior motives.

With the toxic thought pattern of this Head Game Gamble entrenched, partners think that they can read each others’ minds. Ironically, years of togetherness and shared experience can make the head game gamble even more likely, because partners often believe (mistakenly) that spending years together automatically means they know how the other feels. The head game gamble can manifest when one partner believes the other’s behaviors or actions are always directed at him or her. Your partner thinks, “She woke up early and cleaned the kitchen to tell me that I don’t do enough.” Or when your partner comes home slightly late after a meeting, you interpret it as: “He’s obviously paying me back because I didn’t take out the garbage like I said I would.”

A head game gambler may think, “She’s paying me back for watching football all afternoon by not making dinner,” but, in reality, his partner just feels a cold coming on and needs to rest. Similarly, another might imagine, “He only said that my new haircut isn’t attractive because I said he’s going bald,” when, in fact, the new hairstyle is simply not as flattering as the previous one.

When you make assumptions about your partner’s actions or comments, you will often be incorrect. Remember the old saying about the word assume: When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.

So stop assuming, as a first step to stop head gaming. Focus on what you love and admire about your partner. Giving trust is always the best way to receive it back. We all experience anxiety from time to time in our relationships, but you can let your anxiety be a signal to look at the strengths you have as a couple as opposed to letting head games tear you apart.

There’s a difference, however, between developing alternative explanations to feed your own head game gambles and your partner actually behaving in a passive-aggressive manner, such as deliberately leaving dishes in the sink, making noise while you’re trying to sleep, or intentionally interrupting you with “important questions” as you try to study for a grad school exam.

If your partner is exhibiting unacceptable behavior such as repeatedly being passive aggressive, assert yourself by telling your partner that you will not accept such treatment. Simply say, “This is not acceptable anymore.” If toxic behaviors continue, you should consider seeing a mental health professional, or encourage your partner to do so.

For parenting concerns with challenging children and teens, check out Dr. Jeff’s second edition of 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child.

Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the State University of New York at Albany and completed his post-doctoral internship at the University of Pennsylvania Counseling Center. He has appeared on the Today Show, NBC, and public radio, among others. Dr. Bernstein has authored four books.

Dads Play Important Role In Child Development

-Rick Nauert, PhD

A new study defies the notion that mothers are the primary influence for a child’s social, language, and cognitive development.

Michigan State University scholars discovered fathers play a surprisingly large role in their children’s maturation, from language and cognitive growth in toddlerhood to social skills in fifth grade.

The research provides some of the most conclusive evidence to date of fathers’ importance to children’s outcomes and reinforces the idea that early childhood programs such as Head Start should focus on the whole family, including mother and father alike.

The findings are published online in two academic journals, Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Infant and Child Development.

“There’s this whole idea that grew out of past research that dads really don’t have direct effects on their kids, that they just kind of create the tone for the household and that moms are the ones who affect their children’s development,” said Claire Vallotton, associate professor and primary investigator on the research project.

“But here we show that fathers really do have a direct effect on kids, both in the short term and long term.”

Using data from about 730 families that participated in a survey of Early Head Start programs at 17 sites across the nation, the researchers investigated the effects of parents’ stress and mental health problems such as depression on their children.

These areas were assessed because parental stress and mental health issues affect how parents interact with their children and, subsequently, childhood development.

The study found that fathers’ parenting-related stress had a harmful effect on their children’s cognitive and language development when the children were two to three years old, even when the mothers’ influences were taken into account. This impact varied by gender; fathers’ influence, for example, had a larger effect on boys’ language than girls’ language.

Another key finding: Fathers’ and mothers’ mental health had a similarly significant effect on behavior problems among toddlers.

Further, fathers’ mental health had a long-term impact, leading to differences in children’s social skills (such as self-control and cooperation) when the children reached fifth grade.

In fact, fathers’ depression symptoms when children were toddlers were more influential on children’s later social skills than were mothers’ symptoms.

Researchers believe that all together, the findings contribute to the small but growing collection of information that affirms the effects of fathers’ characteristics and father-child relationship qualities on children’s social development.

This knowledge suggests a father’s mental health is a critical factor, rather than just the fathers’ residence in the home or presence in the child’s life. These findings appear in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Tamesha Harewood, lead author on the paper in Infant and Child Development, said fathers, in addition to mothers, should be included in parenting research and family-intervention programs and policies.

“A lot of family-risk agencies are trying to get the dad more involved, but these are some of the things they could be missing,” said Harewood, a researcher in Michigan State University’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies.

“When the agency is talking with the dad, it’s not just about providing for your child economically, but also to be there for your child, to think about how stress or depression might be influencing your child. In order to understand and help children in their development, there needs to be a comprehensive view of the whole family, including both mom and dad.”

Source: Michigan State University

Mid-Life Forgetfulness May Not Be Decline

-Rick Nauert, PhD

A new study suggests memory decline in mid-life may be the result of a change in what information the brain focuses on during memory formation and retrieval, rather than a decline in brain function.

Memory issues that often present during a person’s fourth decade include the inability to remember details such as where objects have been placed.

Senior author Natasha Rajah, Ph.D., at McGill University’s Douglas Institute, says this reorientation could impact daily life.

“This change in memory strategy with age may have detrimental effects on day-to-day functions that place emphasis on memory for details such as where you parked your car or when you took your prescriptions.”

Brain changes associated with dementia are now thought to arise decades before the onset of symptoms. So a key question in current memory research concerns which changes to the aging brain are normal and which are not.

But Rajah said most of the work on aging and memory has concentrated on understanding brain changes later in life. “So we know little about what happens at midlife in healthy aging and how this relates to findings in late life. Our research was aimed at addressing this issue.”

In this study, 112 healthy adults ranging in age from 19 to 76 years were shown a series of faces. Participants were then asked to recall where a particular face appeared on the screen (left or right) and when it appeared (least or most recently). The researchers used functional MRI to analyze which parts of brain were activated during recall of these details.

Rajah and colleagues found that young adults activated their visual cortex while successfully performing this task. As she explains, “They are really paying attention to the perceptual details in order to make that decision.”

On the other hand, middle-aged and older adults didn’t show the same level of visual cortex activation when they recalled the information. Instead, their medial prefrontal cortex was activated. That’s a part of the brain known to be involved with information having to do with one’s own life and introspection.

Even though middle-aged and older participants didn’t perform as well as younger ones in this experiment, Rajah said it may be wrong to regard the response of the middle-aged and older brains as impairment. “This may not be a ‘deficit’ in brain function per se, but reflects changes in what adults deem ‘important information’ as they age.”

In other words, the middle-aged and older participants were simply focusing on different aspects of the event compared to those in the younger group.

Rajah says that middle-aged and older adults might improve their recall abilities by learning to focus on external rather than internal information. “That may be why some research has suggested that mindfulness meditation is related to better cognitive aging.”

Rajah is currently analyzing data from a similar study to discern if there are any gender differences in middle-aged brain function as it relates to memory. “At mid-life women are going through a lot of hormonal change. So we’re wondering how much of these results is driven by post-menopausal women,’ she said.

The study appears in the journal NeuroImage.

Source: McGill University

Mouse Study Provides New Understanding of OCD

-Rick Nauert, PhD

New research on genetically altered mice suggests the overactivity of a brain transmitter may be the source of neurodevelopmental diseases and behavioral and thought disorders.

Duke University researchers discovered a single type of receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain is responsible for a range of symptoms in mice that are reminiscent of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The findings provide a new mechanistic understanding of OCD and other psychiatric disorders and suggest that they are highly amenable to treatment using a class of drugs that has already been investigated in clinical trials.

“These new findings are enormously hopeful for considering how to approach neurodevelopmental diseases and behavioral and thought disorders,” said the study’s senior investigator, Nicole Calakos, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology and neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center.

The study appears online in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

OCD, which affects 3.3 million people in the United States, is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive, obsessive thoughts, and repeated compulsive behaviors that collectively interfere with a person’s ability to function in daily life.

In 2007, Duke researchers created a new mouse model of OCD by deleting a gene that codes for Sapap3, a protein that helps organize the connections between neurons so that the cells can communicate. Similar to the way some people with OCD wash their hands excessively, the Sapap3-lacking mouse grooms itself excessively and shows signs of anxiety.

Although researchers praised the new model for its remarkable similarity to a human psychiatric disorder, and have begun using it to study OCD, questions remain about how the loss of the Sapap3 gene leads to the grooming behaviors.

In the new study, Calakos’s team found that overactivity of a single type of receptor for neurotransmitters — mGluR5, found in a brain region involved in compulsive behaviors — was the major driver for the abnormal behaviors.

When researchers gave Sapap3-lacking mice a chemical that blocks mGluR5, the grooming and anxiety behaviors abated.

“The reversibility of the symptoms was immediate, on a minute time frame,” Calakos said. In contrast, the original study describing Sapap3-lacking mice found that antidepressants could help treat symptoms but on the time scale of weeks, as is typical with these drugs in patients.

The immediate effects seen in the new study were also surprising, given that the brains of these mice appear developmentally immature and neurodevelopmental diseases are not typically thought of as being easily reversible, Calakos said.

Intriguingly, by taking normal laboratory mice and giving them a drug that boosted mGluR5 activity, Calakos’s team could instantaneously recreate the same excessive grooming and anxiety behaviors they saw in the Sapap3-lacking mice.

The researchers found that without a functioning Sapap3 protein, the mGluR5 receptor is always on. That, in turn, makes the brain regions involved in compulsion overactive.

In particular, a group of neurons that give the “green light” for an action, like face-washing, is working overtime. (These same neurons can promote a habit, such as eating sweets, according to a study published by Calakos’s team earlier this year.)

Calakos said that mGluR5 should be considered for the treatment of compulsive behaviors. “But which people and which compulsive behaviors? We don’t know yet,” she added.

Other lines of research have explored targeting mGluR5 with drugs to move its activity up or down in the brain. For example, mGluR5-blockers are being considered for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. But because mGluR5 inhibitors have not always panned out in clinical trials, it may make sense to target different parts of the mGluR5 pathway or identify specific patient subsets, Calakos said.

Source: Duke University/EurekAlert

Perception of Physical Attractiveness Influenced by Relationship Status

-Rick Nauert, PhD

New research suggests opposites do attract, that is, unless you are in a relationship.

Specifically, if you are in a relationship you are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling your own, but for single people, opposites attract.

In the study, Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness.

The photographs were digitally manipulated so that the resemblance to the student was modified.

Images were of an individual of the opposite sex, whose face had been manipulated to look either more or less similar to the student. They were also presented with images of a same-sex individual manipulated in the same way.

“We found that single participants, those not in relationships, rate dissimilar faces as more attractive and sexy than self-resembling faces;” stated Lindová.

This was observed when participants rated both same-sex and opposite-sex faces.

“For the first time, we have observed how our partnership status affects who we find attractive” she added.

When in a relationship, the preference for someone who has some resemblance to us, may stem from a variety of motives.

“Our interpretation is that attractiveness perception mechanisms that give us a preference for a genetically suitable partner may be suppressed during romantic relationships,” explained Lindová.

“This might be a relationship maintenance strategy to prevent us from finding alternatives to our own partner, or perhaps self-resemblance becomes more important in terms of the social support we expect receive from relatives, which are known as kinship cues.”

Little research has been carried out about how our perceptions change when we enter a relationship. These findings have important sociological and biological implications that require further study.

In addition, Lindová pointed out that this work may be of interest to the applied psychological sciences.

“For example, as those not in a relationship were not influenced by kinship cues our findings might help to explain social phenomena such as parent and adolescent disaffection;” she said.