"Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious"

From the New York Times:

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.

In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.

Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. In the University of Colorado experiments, for instance, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.”

Moshi - the Cat Goddess

This morning - I listened to a lecture by Martin Rossman, MD on UCTV about guided imagery and stress management. He encourages people to allow themselves to relax just as cell phones that need to be recharged. While people could meditate on a flame or their breath, for instance - he encourages people to imagine some nice, relaxing place. To imagine the sights, smells, sounds, feel - to use ones senses. I think it's probably just as well to keep it simple.

Another thing that he suggests is to have a mental discussion with an "inner guide" which would be like prayer if you believed in God. He suggested imagining someone who was full of love and wisdom - it could be a goddess figure or whatever. So after the show - I figured that I would try that. I imagined a woman in a robe sitting across a fire from me. Meanwhile our cat, moshi, was sitting on a stool or chair and moving so that the chair was rocking. This went on for like 10 minutes - for awhile it seemed like a distraction - and then I decided that Moshi is a cat goddess.

She had some good advice about various people and things. And then she got down off her stool and came over and let me pet her (which is VERY unusual on her part) just a little bit. She thinks that Abby (our aging dog) would like having a puppy around. I forgot to ask her how she would like it.

"The Love of Nature and the End of the World" (Book)

Written by Shierry Weber Nicholsen

I read this book recently. It's from the viewpoint of eco-psychology / environmental philosophy.

I googled the author and up came a blog -Ecotherapy News (by Linda Buzzell-Saltzman - founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy (IAE). "The Love of Nature and the End of the World" was the "Book of the Month" - in October 2005.

From there I found the International Community for Ecophsychology, Centre for Human Ecology, and the Danish Centre for Ecotherapy. There are also sites related to Art and Ecopsychology, Art Therapy and Ecotherapy.

There is a review of the book by Louise Chawla at the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter website:

This book has its starting point in a persistent question: How can the public mind relegate matters of the environment, which is the ground of our whole lives, to the periphery of concern, as though they were the private interest of a group called “environmentalists”? At the same time, I have never met anyone who did not value and appreciate some part of the environment. How can we be so split in our thinking.

This opening question guides this book by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, a psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle, who for many years taught environmental philosophy and psychology in Antioch University’s Program on Environment and Community (in Seattle).

By the “public mind,” she does not mean politicians and the voters they mobilize: at least, not only actors in formal political processes. If this were the case, her question would be relatively easy to answer, because there is no shortage of reports that document how big money influences politics by attributing concern for the environment to “special interest” groups of environmentalists.

Instead, Nicholsen explores a much more difficult and less charted territory by extending the public mind to include people in their spheres of everyday life. As she uses the word “mind,” it includes perceptual experience and emotion. To answer this question, she assembles the insights of aesthetics and psychoanalysis. (more)

I was especially interested in Nicholsen's discussion of the unspoken. She often refers to art and expression of nature through painting. And she is a fan of Cezanne.

A lot of the problem seems to be coming to terms with guilt and despair - even as we love nature and life - in the face of what is going on with our planet. How do psychologists "fix" such as that?

Of Dogs and Gods

There was an article recently about a study headed by Nicholas Epley, a professor of human behaviour at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The study suggests that people who are lonely are more likely to believe in supernatural beings like God(s) and/or to anthropomorphize their pets.

Recently there was a lady on Dr. Phil who insisted that her Chihuahua was her son. Her other dogs were dogs - but not her Chihuahua - she treated it like it was a person.

It sounds like in the study that the researchers attempted to create feelings of loneliness in some people and connectedness in others and then asked various questions - including beliefs in various things. So these were not long standing beliefs, but manipulated temporary ones.

1st part -

...the team recruited subjects online, gave them a personality test to determine how lonely they felt, and then explored how they perceived four objects...Those who described themselves as chronically lonely were much more likely to perceive one of these gadgets as having intentions, free will, consciousness and emotions.

2nd part -

They gave 99 individuals from the University of Chicago – half of them religious and half non-believers – a standard personality test, then randomly doled out "future life predictions" supposedly based on individual test results. The students were told either that they'd suffer from loneliness throughout their lives or would always have rewarding relationships.

Everyone in the lonely group reported more belief in God, the devil, ghosts, angels, miracles and curses. Most significantly, even those who had described themselves as non-believers before getting a prognosis of loneliness reported more religious belief than the non-believers in the not-lonely group.

3rd part (influenced by movies) -

The subjects were then asked to rate their belief in the same supernatural agents cited in the second study, and to describe their own pet or that of someone in their circle.

Again this time, says Epley, the lonely group reported stronger belief in "commonly anthropomorphized" supernatural entities like God and the devil. These lonely subjects were also more likely to describe pets as possessing human traits such as being thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic.

A lot of people use belief in God(s) to overcome addictions and such. That is the model of AA. And it's not surprising that dogs become surrogate children for people postponing (or avoiding altogether) child raising or for older people whose children are no longer at home.

It's interesting to have the two things linked - as two alternatives. Gods or dogs.

Though I'm sure that there are plenty of other alternatives such as sports teams, soap operas, video games, consumption, etc. that provide a sense of belonging to people - and which can also rely to some extent on some level of delusion.

"Screen violence tied to boys' aggression"

Boys aged 2 to 5 who viewed an hour of on-screen violence a day increased their chances of being overly aggressive later in childhood, but the association was not seen in girls, researchers said on Monday.

"This new study provides further evidence of how important and powerful television and media are as young children develop," study author Dr. Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute said.

"Of 184 boys (in the study), 25 of them had serious problems with aggression and for each hour on average per day they had watched violent TV, they were three times more likely to be in that group" than those who did not watch violent programming, Christakis said in a telephone interview.

Christakis and fellow researchers, writing in the journal Pediatrics, analyzed the television and video viewing habits of 330 children aged 2 to 5, then assessed their behavior five years later.

Christakis said many parents may be unaware that the shows or video games their young children watch are violent or inappropriate for their age group...

The association between violent programming and overly aggressive behavior was not found among the 146 girls in the study, who tended to watch more educational and nonviolent shows than the boys, Christakis said.

Boys may be more genetically predisposed to aggression, "so the same level of exposure brings out aggression in them where it doesn't in girls. It also could be boys are socialized to respond aggressively," he said.

" The Puzzle of Hidden Ability"

By Sharon Begley / Newsweek

Even their parents struggle to draw the tiniest hint of emotion or social connection from autistic children, so imagine what happens when a stranger sits with the child for hours to get through the standard IQ test. For 10 of the test's 12 sections, the child must listen and respond to spoken questions. Since for many autistics it is torture to try to engage with someone even on this impersonal level, it's no wonder so many wind up with IQ scores just above a carrot's (I wish I were exaggerating; 20s are not unknown). More precisely, fully three quarters of autistics are classified as having below-normal intelligence, with many deemed mentally retarded.

It's finally dawning on scientists that there's a problem here. Testing autistic kids' intelligence in a way that requires them to engage with a stranger "is like giving a blind person an intelligence test that requires him to process visual information," says Michelle Dawson of Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital in Montreal. She and colleagues therefore tried a different IQ test, one that requires no social interaction. As they report in the journal Psychological Science, autistic children's scores came out starkly different than on the oral, interactive IQ test—suggesting a burning intelligence inside these kids that educators are failing to uncover.

That failure has lifelong implications. "If we label these children as below-normal in intelligence, that is how they're treated," says Laurent Mottron, who led the study. The disparity between scores on the two IQ tests also makes you wonder who else the tests, which are used for everything from screening military recruits to filling "gifted" classes, are mislabeling.

For the study, children took two IQ tests. In the more widely used Wechsler, they tried to arrange and complete pictures, do simple arithmetic, demonstrate vocabulary comprehension and answer questions such as what to do if you find a wallet on the street—almost all in response to a stranger's questions. In the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, they got brief instructions, then went off on their own to analyze three-by-three arrays of geometric designs, with one missing, and choose (from six or eight possibilities) the design that belonged in the empty place. The disparity in scores was striking. One autistic child's Wechsler result meant he was mentally retarded (an IQ below 70); his Raven's put him in the 94th percentile. Overall, the autistics (all had full-blown autism, not Asperger's) scored around the 30th percentile on the Wechsler, which corresponds to "low average" IQ. But they averaged in the 56th percentile on the Raven's. Not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence" range on the Wechsler; on the Raven's, one third did. Healthy children showed no such disparity.

The Wechsler measures "crystallized intelligence"—what you've learned. The Raven's measures "fluid intelligence"—the ability to learn, process information, ignore distractions, solve problems and reason—and so is arguably a truer measure of intelligence, says psychologist Steven Stemler of Wesleyan University.

That presents a puzzle. If many autistics are more intelligent than an IQ test shows, why haven't their parents noticed? Partly because many parents welcome a low score, which brings their child more special services from schools and public agencies, says one scientist who has an autistic son (and who fears that being named would antagonize the close-knit autism community). But another force is at work. "We often think of intelligence as what you can show, such as by speaking fluently," says psychologist Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the University of Wisconsin. "Parents as well as professionals might be biased to look at that" rather than dig for the hidden intellectual spark.

The challenge is to coax that spark into the kind of intelligence that manifests itself in practice. That is something autism researchers are far from doing. Worse, much of the expert advice might be counterproductive. Many experts dismiss autistics' exceptional reading, artistic or other abilities as side effects of abnormal brain function, "not a reflection of genuine human intelligence, which it is likely to be," says Mottron. They advise parents to steer their child away from what he excels at and obsesses over, such as letters and words and details, and toward what he struggles with, such as faces and the big picture. Dawson, who is autistic, thinks that's a prescription for intellectual failure; autistics should be encouraged to build on their strengths, as everyone else is. The problem of a lurking intelligence that won't be coaxed out by the usual education and parenting methods is not necessarily unique to autistics. It makes you wonder how many other children, whose intellectual potential we're too blind to see, we've also given up on.

"The Psychology Behind George W. Bush's Decision-Making"

By John P. Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D. / posted on Scoop

When we feel inadequate about some aspect of our lives, we work to submerge those feelings with compensations and defenses. Evidence is that in the case of George W. Bush, deep feelings of inadequacy and powerful defensive behaviors employed to submerge them and cover them up cripple the decision-making process he needs for his duties as president.

The dynamics of the president's cover-up involve a vicious psychological paradox: because he secretly anticipates the humiliating failure he has experienced all his life, he behaves in ways that ensure that he will fail. He makes hasty, risky, ill-informed decisions in which he relies on his defenses rather than judgment. When the decisions go bad, they reconfirm his inner feelings of incompetence and heighten his fear of being "found out." The feedback loop forces him into an ever deeper "state of denial" about the decisions and an ever-renewed tendency to make more flawed decisions.

If this dynamic is close to correct, then keeping the secret of his feelings of inadequacy has become a matter of life and death for the president. The stakes for him are higher than we can imagine because, by becoming president, he raised his expectations for the success he has sought for so long (the final escape from this secret fear), and he has inflated his worst fear to its grandest scale. He is a man working with all his resources to keep his sense of himself afloat--and he is in danger of drowning... (big snip)

Here, however, we offer no diagnosis, and these are the reasons. Persons sometimes feel reassured by a diagnosis because it lets them feel they have a condition that can be dealt with. When mental health professionals try to diagnose celebrities, however, the effort can seem like name calling. In practice, diagnoses help the professional formulate a treatment plan. In this case, of course, no treatment is plausible. We believe that to a large extent, a president's psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the question, "Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his or her ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the nation?" Recent history has certainly been witness to presidents with psychologies that have damaged their historical legacies. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind. But in neither case was the very ability to make sound decisions compromised to the extent we believe it is with this president.

From many accounts one can conclude that Bush's decision-making process is a failed process; in an important sense, it is no process at all...

How does his incompetence arise? It arises out of decisions made with sketchy information. It arises out of decisions made in angry rebellion because he is trying to show decisiveness to mask his ambivalence. His incompetence comes from feeling so much anxiety about his ability to grasp the alternatives on which a decision must be based that he doesn't even consider alternatives. His incompetence comes from polarized behavior. (Though he worried that the country might face another terrorist attack, he first resisted the creation of Homeland Security and then under funded it and staffed it with political hacks; so when Katrina and Rita hit, the nation was unprepared.) His incompetence comes from the intellectual laziness and slackness that developed because he always had a safety net that protected him from the consequences of any seriously inadequate behavior and decisions. His incompetence comes from the willingness of his "gut" to favor the drama of the most reckless and grandiose options in order to beat back feelings of failure...

"...Links Between Personality and Politics"

Some of the things mentioned in the article seem obvious like, "Most liberals, he said, think about morality in terms of two categories: how someone’s welfare is affected, and whether it is fair." But then adds: "Conservatives, by contrast, broaden that definition to include loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity."

I wouldn't say that it is "broadening" the definition of morality to have more concern for "respect for authority" - I would say that it's a matter of different values. And they tend to be generally self-centered and/or short-sightied ones at that - not especially concerned for the welfare of the group or the environment or the future, for that matter. Loyalty - seems to imply "blind" loyalty - but then they only want "loyalty" to conservatives - not to liberal leaders. As far as "sanctity" - liberals can be plenty interested in spirituality - though it tends to be of an non-authoritarian variety.

I find it interesting, but not surprising, that studies found "that personality traits associated with liberalism or conservatism later in life show up in preschoolers". I think that there are underlying ideas and perceptions about the world that I have probably always had that affect my political outlook.

The article concludes with: What is important, said Larry Bartels...is how psychological tendencies are translated into views about specific political issues: “how many flexible, curious, open-to-experience liberals do you know who want to experiment with restructuring the Social Security system?”

But the restructuring of Social Security seems to be a desire on the part of conservatives to take the country backwords 100 years - to undo the "liberal" changes that took place under FDR - and to make it easier for the rich to get richer and to ignore social problems (of course - the rich have to convince others that it is in their self-interest to support policies that favor the rich whether the policies do or not).

I think it's one thing for people to be rewarded (and be able to keep many of those rewards) for hard work and “conscientiousness” - but it does none of us any good as a group if the needs of all of us (including social stability, healthcare and a safe and stable environment) are ignored. I think going back 100 years puts us all at risk in many ways. And there are more important things than the bottom line.

Some more snips:

Research into why someone leans left or right — a subject that stirred enormous interest in the aftermath of World War II before waning in the 1960s — has been revived in recent years, partly because of a shift in federal funds for politics and terrorism research, new technology like brain imaging and a sharper partisan divide in the nation’s political culture.

“I believe that recent developments in psychological research and the world of politics — including responses to 9/11, the Bush presidency, the Iraq War, polarizing Supreme Court nominations, Hurricane Katrina, and ongoing controversies over scientific and environmental policies — provide ample grounds for revisiting” the psychological basis of Americans’ opinions, party and voting patterns, John T. Jost, a psychologist at New York University, wrote in a recent issue of American Psychologist.

The newest work in the field, found in a growing number of papers, symposiums and college courses, touches on factors from genetics to home décor. Some people have greeted the results with fascination....

For anyone who assumes political choices rest on a rational analysis of issues and self-interest, the notion that preference for a candidate springs from the same source as the choice of a color scheme can be disturbing. But social psychologists assume that all beliefs, including political ones, partly arise from an individual’s deep psychological fears and needs: for stability, order and belonging, or for rebellion and novelty.

These needs and worries vary in degree, develop in childhood and probably have a temperamental and a genetic component, said Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland. A study of twins, for instance, has shown that a conservative or progressive orientation can be inherited, while a decades-long study has found that personality traits associated with liberalism or conservatism later in life show up in preschoolers.

...What Mr. Jost and Mr. Kruglanski say is that years of research show that liberals and conservatives consistently match one of two personality types. Those who enjoy bending rules and embracing new experiences tend to turn left; those who value tradition and are more cautious about change tend to end up on the right.

What’s more, these traits are reflected in musical taste, hobbies and décor. Dana R. Carney, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, who worked with Mr. Jost and Samuel D. Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin among others, found that the offices and bedrooms of conservatives tended to be neat and contain cleaning supplies, calendars, postage stamps and sports-related posters; conservatives also tended to favor country music and documentaries. Bold-colored, cluttered rooms with art supplies, lots of books, jazz CDs and travel documents tended to belong to liberals (providing sloppy Democrats with an excuse to refuse clean up on principle).

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, said he found this work intriguing but was more inclined to see a person’s moral framework as a source of difference between liberals and conservatives. Most liberals, he said, think about morality in terms of two categories: how someone’s welfare is affected, and whether it is fair. Conservatives, by contrast, broaden that definition to include loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity. Conservatives have a richer, more elaborate moral horizon than liberals, Mr. Haidt said, because there is a “whole dimension to human experience best described as divinity or sacredness that conservatives are more attuned to.”

So how does he explain the red-blue divide? “Areas with less mobility and less diversity generally have the more traditional,” broadened definition of morality, “and therefore were more likely to vote for George W. Bush — and to tell pollsters that their reason was ‘moral values,’ ” he and his co-writer, Jesse Graham, say in a paper to be published this year by The Journal Social Justice Research.

Mr. Jost did his own research on the red-blue divide. Using the Internet he and his collaborators gave personality tests to hundreds of thousands of Americans. He found states with people who scored high on “openness” were significantly more likely to have voted for the Democratic candidate in the past three elections, even after adjustments were made for income, ethnicity and population density. States that scored high on “conscientiousness” went Republican in the past three elections.

Some of these psychological studies have been dogged by charges of bias however. In 2003 a mammoth survey of more than 50 years of research on the psychology of conservatism that Mr. Jost and Mr. Kruglanski undertook with the help of Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway at Berkeley concluded that conservatives tend to be “rigid,” “close-minded” and “fearful,” less tolerant of minorities and more tolerant of inequality. At the time the conservative columnist George F. Will ridiculed the results: “The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses.”

The authors insist they are not making value judgments; whether a particular trait is positive or negative depends on circumstance. “Fear of death has the highest correlation with being conservative,” Mr. Sulloway said. But he continued: “What’s wrong with fearing death? If you don’t fear death, evolution eliminates you from the population.”...