--Original published at Site Title

In this day and age where stress affects everyone, it is important that more research is done about stress biomarkers. Constant exposure to chronic stress can lead to serious mental illness such as anxiety and depression. Stress can affect individuals differently depending on their biological makeup. Some individuals might respond negatively to stress while other might respond positively and form resilience. According to Thomas Larrieu’s research, stress plays a significant role in a range of mental illnesses. Yet, stress does not disturb everyone equally; while some individuals become depressed when dealing with continual hardships, others acclimate and endure. Larrieu and his team set out to show the risk influencers and biomarkers for susceptibility to social status depression.

The findings from an experiment lead by Thomas Larrieu helps us understand why individuals have different responses to stress. The experiment primarily tested if social status effects susceptibility to stress in adolescent mice. In particular, the researchers exposed mice to chronic social defeat stress (CSDS). Before finding out the effects of social status on stress, the researchers had to distinguish the subordinate mice from the dominant mice. Within the mice population, to initiate social status, the young mice were placed into cages of four for seven weeks before exposure to any stress. After seven weeks they measured social ranking by performing several tests on the mice. One test, categorized as a social confrontation tube test; consisted of putting two mice from the same social environment in the middle of a tube. The mice were previously trained to get out of the tube by walking forward. For the test, the mouse that walked forward and essentially made the other mouse back out of the tube was considered the dominant mouse, the mouse that was forced to walk backward was the subordinate mouse. With this social test and several others, the researchers were able to determine the social ranking of the mice. They ranked the mice from 1 to 4, 1 and 2 being dominant and 3 and 4 being subordinate.

After the researchers established the social hierarchy of the mice, they started to expose the subjects to different scenarios that would induce stress. When dominant and subordinate mice were exposed to a very aggressive mouse from another species for ten days, the dominant mice showed social avoidance whereas subordinate mice were not significantly affected. Researchers then analyzed the effects on the brain when mice felt defeated and showed signs of depression. The researchers measured the concentration of metabolites in nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumben plays a role in motivation and reward that would affect whether an individual is resilient or not (Schlaepfer et al.). The more activity there is in the nucleus accumbens, the less likely the individual is susceptible to depression. The experiment showed that subordinate mice have more activity in their nucleus accumbens when exposed to stress than dominate mice do. From their findings, the researchers discovered the biomarkers for resilience to stress in mice. The resilience to stressful situations comes from the amount of activity in a nucleus accumbens.

After discovering the correlation between social status and susceptibility to stress, the researchers did recognize the fact that some mice could have been more susceptible to stress just from having trait anxiety, which could have affected the results. Nevertheless, they hope that their findings can help with the progress of researching vulnerability to stress. Now that stress biomarkers have been detected in mice, there is a greater possibility that scientists will find ways for humans to become more resilient to stressful situations.

I did not find it hard to summarize the research article. I found it harder to summarize the pop culture article. I thought the research article made more sense to me, so I was able to summarize it with no problems. The research article went into to detail about how the researchers came to their conclusions, whereas I was a little skeptical about the pop culture article because I don’t think there was enough information. I had to leave out other tests the researchers conducted to determine their social ranking. I also left out other procedures they did to induce stress on the mice. I left those components of the research out because I did not feel that was the crucial points that needed to go into the summary. I wanted the reader to have one example of how the researchers assigned social status and how they exposed the mice to chronic social defeat stress. While reading the pop culture article, I questioned what procedures the scientists conducted to figure out the mice social hierarchy. I also wondered how they were exposing the subjects to stress. It was important that I elaborated on some of the researcher’s procedures that lead them to their conclusions to reduce skepticism from the reader.

I did not think much about journalism before this assignment. I am more skeptical about reading pop culture articles. But now, if the author does leave out some vital information I will be a little sympathetic, knowing that they have a word count and not all the information can go into the article.

--Original published at Lynsey Wissler's Blog

When the idea of how we treat and handle pain is discussed we often do not think it can be related to how we contribute emotions to photographs. We also do not expect that a fake treatment would make us feel better when we are exposed to the pain. In a recent study, The University of Luxembourg has conducted a study regarding the placebo effects and the role of cognitive reappraisal which is how well they can interpret negative emotions. The concept of how emotions can be tracked through fMRI scanning was also analyzed. Particularly, this was done to show that a person’s ability to reinterpret negative events and to control feelings influences how strongly a placebo will work to reduce pain. Dr. Marian van der Meulen has discovered that when looking at a person’s brain, specific spots of the brain which interprets pain are less active when the placebo is in place.
To begin, the participants were selected through an advertisement, 13 males and 17 females participated. From there, the experimental procedure took place where these participants had two sessions, one of which was in a lab and the other was a questionnaire on emotional regulation. For the lab testing, the volunteers were asked to look at photographs and their emotions were tracked. The second part of the procedure was the PA section. In this portion of the examination, a pain stimulus was added to the lower forearm of the patient and the “unpleasantness” which they felt was recorded. After the pain stimulus, the patients received a cream which they were informed would relieve pain. This is where the placebo comes into the picture; the cream which they were told relieved pain was actually just a simple moisturizer. The fMRI was used to track the brain activity throughout the experiments and different tests.
After the cream was given, every participant reported less pain on their arm. This meant to the researchers that the placebo effect worked on the study. There also was a correlation which was discovered, when comparing the two tests. The participants who could control their negative feelings when looking at the photographs had the highest reaction to the cream in the brain when looking at the fMRI. Meaning, that your emotional regulation affects how placebos will impact you. Overall it was discovered that the placebo can, in fact, reduce pain and play a role in our brains.

Reflection

When doing this project, deciding the information to include in my news article was very challenging for me. I had trouble deciding what information was important for the reader to know in order to understand the study to the full extent. I also felt as though I needed to say everything which was in the study but I could not do that because of length limitations. I decided not to include numbers specifically, but to actually describe the results. I also thought that it was important to have the participation selection included which the original article did not have.  I think that the participants pay an important role when determining if the study is reliable and is necessary for the reader to know.  Overall, my perspective of journalism has changed over the course of the semester in several ways. First, I did not realize that every journal has an in-depth case study behind it. I found this interesting because I always just assumed that it was the original journal and that was it, not that there were several pages behind it. I also did not realize just how challenging it was for a journalist to select what is important for the readers understanding. This can be so tricky and this really put it into perspective for hard it can be to decide. In the beginning of the semester I did not have as much of an appreciation for this field and now I definitely do. Overall this set of projects helped me to understand and have more of an appreciation for journalism and how it is when working with scientific articles.

University of Luxembourg. “Pain, emotions and the placebo effect.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170829131224.htm.

--Original published at Site Title

Researchers studied a very controversial question: Can money buy happiness? It was hypothesized that money can be used to provide a buffer against the time famine and make individuals happier. Buying time-saving services was claimed to provide protection for people from the negative effects of time stress on life satisfaction. Researchers Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, and Michael Norton put their claimed beliefs to the test conducting 9 studies on this topic.

            The first six studies of the experiment were correlation studies of an individual’s view of satisfaction with life in comparison to spending money on time saving services. Scientists operationalize their definition of time saving services to “encompass any way in which respondents could spend money to provide more time”. The definition of happiness or life satisfaction however was not defined in their study but left up to be determined by the participants. They used a broad large and diverse sample for their experiments.  Of the participants in the first six studies 366 were recruited Mechanical Turks from the United States, 1,260 U.S. were Americans found through the GfK Knowledge Networks Panel, 467 were adults from Denmark, and 326 were working adults from Vancouver, Canada that were discovered in public settings. The Dutch millionaire population was studied in the fifth and six studies found from an Elite Research database on public records. These first studies gave all participants a survey of the same questions that included answering basic question about their background information along with how much money they spent each month on time saving services and rating life satisfaction.  

Study 7 used Qualtrics a professional survey company to recruit 1,802 Americans over the age of 19.  The method of study was a survey as well asking similar questions to before along with questions on how much money spent on groceries, money spent on material purchase, experiences, and time saving purchases. Study 8 used 60 adults from Vancouver, Canada and looked at how the buying of time casually promoted happiness. Giving participants $40 on back to back weekends. One weekend was designated to spend money on time saving services, while the other was designated to buying a material item. The participants then reported back their feelings all at the same time the night of their purchase.  The final study conducted included giving 98 Canadian working adults a hypothetical $40 to spend on anything they wished. Participants were then asked what the money would be spent on and who it would go to.

The results across these diverse groups of all the studies showed that 28.2% used money to save them time resulting in a mean amount of $147.95 US dollars each month. A significant amount of people viewed spending money on time saving services as beneficial and increasing their life satisfaction. Studies also were shown not to be bias on income and that individuals from varying financial backgrounds showed similar results. Improvement on daily moods were reported higher in individuals who spent less money on material items and more on time saving purchases.  Surprisingly however when giving money to spent on whatever you would want more people choose material items then purchases that could save them time.

Reflection:

Throughout the process of writing the summary of the research article I tried to keep in mind the 5 critical questions we were taught in class to ask ourselves when reading research. Putting yourself in a journalist’s shoes can be very difficult often research papers are very long and its not so easy making a whole study fit into a page limit of an article.  Trying to pick out and touch on the most important pieces was hard for me to do because I wanted to include every aspect of the research.  I think the most important thing to remember and think about when writing it is if it was generalized back to the right population.  I wanted to make sure that my readers could understand the research and viewed it as accurate with no misleading details. I didn’t necessarily include all the p values of the experiment or quantitative results only because I believed it wasn’t essential for understanding the results. There were some variables I couldn’t include in my summary because it would have made my report too long like the percentages of each study. 

We previously critiqued journalists very harshly on their ability to incorporate materials we believed essentially but having to do it myself I can see how they left some pieces out.  Journalists also seem to make their articles more interesting and attention grabbing and add details that aren’t needed for the understanding of the article, but are needed to make an individual continue to read the article. Hearing “all people” versus the accurate depiction of the people studied makes a huge difference when interpreting research, however more individuals will probably be likely to read a paper that is directed to all people not just a certain group.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/28/545839192/need-a-happiness-boost-spend-your-money-to-buy-time-not-more-stuff

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/For%20Kaley.pdf

--Original published at Casey's Blog Site

Is the best way to learn really to make mistakes and move on? Investigators at Ohio State tested this and found that this really isn’t all that true. After several experiments they found that to really learn from your mistakes you must really have the feeling of failure.

Rather then just looking at what went wrong, for example let’s use a test, they [Ohio State investigators] suggest that for the next test you won’t try any harder if you didn’t feel the pain of failure. This is because when a person feels any negative emotion their brain will make a tag to remember this. The more failure a person feels the more memorable the tag will be. So when a person sets the same goal for a similar situation then they will have a better chance of remember the negative feelings of past experiences and since no one enjoys feeling like a failure, the person would try harder.

For people the norm  when faced with failure is usually to protect themselves and make excuses as to why they may have gotten the test question wrong or made some other mistake. Which is exactly what researchers found. In their first study they had volunteers from their campus search for a blender online with specific specifications with a lower price than what the researchers had found. Although the researchers had rigged the computer to make sure the price the volunteers used wasn’t correct to make sure they would feel the sense of failure. Half of the participants were asked to focus on their feelings after being told they failed while the other half was told to focus on their thoughts.

Then they were asked to complete a similar task, looking for a gift for a friend that best suited them or find a book that best fit their college budget. Researchers predicted that those who focused more on their thoughts would put in more effort in trying to find a book best suited for their budget while those who focused on their thoughts would put the same amount of effort.

Results showed that their predictions were correct. By looking at the amount of time a participant took to complete the task it showed that those that spent more time completing the task were those that focused on their emotions while those who focused on their thoughts spent about the same time as the task before.

As stated before when a person is faced with failure usually, not always, a person makes an excuse for making the mistake and they try to protect their self-esteem. This does nothing when it comes to trying to prevent later mistakes.

So when a person tries to think and focus more on the actual feeling of failure they later on will have the same displeasure and try harder to put more effort into future situations that are similar to the original task.

So next time you don’t get the grade you want on a test or make some form of mistake try to think more about how you actually feel rather than the mistake itself and you can better prepare yourself for next time.

Reflection:

Summarizing from the original study was difficult, mainly from trying to explain what the study was about and the significance of it. To me reading the study top to bottom it makes sense to me. But trying to reword it all and have it make sense is a different story. As for being a journalist I believe I wouldn’t have the job, I feel as though I am too wordy to be a journalist. When comparing to the article I have actual paragraphs while the author for the article has quite less than paragraphs. He gets the point across clearly with less for sure. Also while I was typing the article I tried to keep in mind the potential audience that may read it, meaning any teens on up to those with PhD’s. Keeping this is mind I know that teens may not have as long of an attention span to read as much as those higher in the field, so I tried to keep the article somewhat short while also explaining one of the several experiments and its results. Also I feared if adding the other experiments and their variables as well as the researcher’s explanations to why they done this or that would have made it incredibly wordy and I wouldn’t get the right points across, or repeat the same information. Overall journalism to me is still a difficult task, I still have no desire to come close to being a journalist but I respect those who are since there are more restrictions that they have to work with than many may realize.

Link to original article:  https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/09/14/owning-your-mistake-can-enhance-chances-of-future-success/125994.html

--Original published at Site Title

Summary:

Scientists at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have made a major breakthrough in understanding the specifics and biology of schizophrenia. Their breakthrough, which was published in the journal Nature, has pioneered a new age of understanding and research about this disease. The principal investigator, Dr. Daniel Geschwind, and his team used a brand new type of technology commonly referred to as chromosome conformation capture to further investigate their questions and claims.

Some background knowledge on this disease needs to be known ahead of time in order to understand the extent of their fabulous work. Prior to the team’s findings, not much was known about schizophrenia from a biological perspective and its origins. What was most well known by most was that this disease is highly genetic and until 2014, no one knew why. 2014 being the first major breakthrough with this kind of work. Scientists found a link between 100 different DNA variations located on several distinct locations on the human genome and schizophrenia. The details between exactly how they were link being a bit fuzzy.

Using this knowledge as their baseline, the team started digging into the depths of the unknown. Before starting, they obtained human fetal cortical tissues from several different individuals who were at different gestation periods. The intricate and elaborate system they used chemically marks and maps where looped chromosomal DNA meet. By doing this, they could find the schizophrenia linked sites that contact gene’s known for brain development. There were several genes found that were found in previous studies but the new ones discovered made the study take an interesting turn. These new genes were found to connect to cell receptors that were triggered by neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It was theorized that increases in this neurotransmitter worsen the schizophrenia symptoms but it wasn’t actually confirmed until this study.

These scientists have found several hundred genes that were previously unknown. Though no solid facts and evidence came from this study, they took a big step in the right different. Dealing with the brain can be a tricky concept but thanks to these scientists, we’ve taken a step in the right direction to further understand the workings of our brains.

Reflection:

Before I even started rewriting this article I knew it was going to be very difficult to write. Overall, the original article was simple and relatively easy to understand but I had gotten very confused once I read the actual journal from the research study. The content was difficult to comprehend and most of it didn’t make sense to me. Honestly this made it hard to figure out where to start. So I tried to use the same technique that was used in the article and I gave background information. Personally, that helped me better understand the information. The only piece of information that I added that wasn’t in the article was a sentence or two about the sample size that was being used. I thought it was very hard to figure this out since I could barely understand anything in the journal. Mainly though, I took out a bunch information that I thought was needed so my summary was relatively shorter than the first article. It’s hard to choose which one I like better but I guess it would have to be the first article. I thought that the author did a very good job with their article and putting all of the essential information into simple terms that made everything easy to understand. They did make theirs somewhat long but I think that it really worked out since there was so much information to cover. I think that journalists who write about psychology deserve more credit because they have to write about some difficult topics and I think that they do great jobs of making it easily understandable.

Won, Hyejung, et al. “Chromosome Conformation Elucidates Regulatory Relationships in Developing Human Brain.” Nature, vol. 538, no. 7626, 2016, pp. 523–527., doi:10.1038/nature19847.

News Article

--Original published at Kevin Psych Blog

A recent study found there is a link between being angry and espousing economically conservative views.

Research involved several studies done with varying groups of people, each study introduced different methods of testing in an attempt to find if and how emotions played a role in political ideology, specifically if anger could be linked to right wing economic opinions. These studies found that anger can be connected to competitiveness, which in turn increases the likelihood for someone to take on right wing opinions.

The first study conducted involved participants, selected from an undergraduate subject pool, being asked to fill out a scale survey (rating statements from 1 to 5) on three topics; anger proneness,  competitiveness, and finally economic ideology. Surveys similar to this were also used in the other three studies. This study, as predicted, showed a correlation between anger proneness and economic conservatism as anger proneness predicted competitiveness which in turn predicted economic conservatism.

The second study consisted of 203 recruits from Amazon Mechanical Turk. It hoped to separate sociocultural and economic conservatism, and see if anger increased both. The idea was that if sociocultural and economic ideals came from the same goals, anger should promote conservative views in both. This study hoped to evoke anger in participants by having the “anger” group respond to a writing prompt in which they were to describe something that frustrates them, while the control group wrote about a typical day for them. Afterwards the participants filled out two scales which borrowed from the original in the first study as well as two scales measuring independence and sociocultural beliefs. At the end of this study the participants were asked which side of the political spectrum they felt they fell on. The study again found a link between anger and economic conservatism but not between anger and sociocultural conservatism.

Study three sought to show how fear, specifically a perceived threat to ones environment, might affect someones political views. It also wanted to compare competitiveness with a possible alternative, “other-blaming”. Participants  (undergraduate students again) were asked to complete an identical writing task as seen in the second study. After the writing they were asked to complete an emotional testing scale, separated by type of emotion (anger, anxiety, and fear). They were asked to rank how accurate a word pertaining to that emotion was to how they were feeling on a scale from one to five. Then participants again completed the competitiveness scale from study one. After all of this they were given two hypothetical candidates, one who espoused right wing economic views and one with left wing economic views and asked who they would support, then asked where they believed they leaned politically. The results of the study showed that people who felt angry were more likely to “other blame” than people in the control group or in the fear group, but that only competitiveness had an impact on rates of conservatism.

For the final study the researchers turned to Amazon Technical Turk for recruits again. In this study participants believed they were completing two completely separate tasks, one was the emotion manipulation activity used in the second study, and the other involved unscrambling words that evoked resource scarcity, resource abundance, or were neutral as the control group. After these tasks were done they responded to the same scales from the first two studies. Unsurprisingly the study showed that people placed in the resource scarcity group were much more likely to express economically conservative views. The researched believed this was a result of the environment having an effect on peoples emotions, causing them to become more competitive.

Overall these studies have shown that people who are more prone to anger are also often more likely to hold conservative economic views. However it is important to understand that only economic ideology was impacted, sociocultural views were not affected and thus demonstrated to be played on by other emotions. It is necessary for people to understand things like this, so as to help them better form opinions and keep in mind that their emotions could be being played with to manipulate them during election seasons. Hopefully by arming people with this information they can keep themselves more informed and more rational.

Reflection

I found it pretty easy to summarize the original research article in the allocated amount of words. It’s really a simple task when I just made sure to get straight to the point. I chose to summarize each study individually, how they were done and what the results were. I tried not to waste anytime with fluff like news articles tend to due to keep the audience interesting. I just wanted to explain exactly what was found as well as I could personally understand it, and the amount of words I was given was more than enough to do that. I don’t think I was forced to leave out any information, if information was left out it was because I either didn’t completely grasp what I was reading or I felt it unnecessary (such as repeating results from previous studies). When I talked about “fluff” I was referring to things I noticed in the original news article like quotes that didn’t really need to be there, such as one meant to give an example of someones response to the “what makes you angry” question. I didn’t think it was really needed to give someones response, you save time if you just get to the point and tell us what the results of the study were. I don’t think you need to give an example of “what makes someone angry”, most people probably get that concept. Without things like that I believe I was probably able to explain the studies a little more in depth than the news article did, and I used even less words. I don’t like the generalize so I won’t speak for all journalists, but the writer of the article I picked seemed more concerned with writing an interesting article than an informational one, which I don’t fault them for, I just think if it was more dense it could have had more information packed into the amount of words used.

Keri L. Kettle, Anthony Salerno (June 6, 2017) Anger Promotes Economic Conservatism Retrieved from Sage.

https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/09/02/study-finds-link-between-anger-economic-conservatism/125474.html