Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery (Part 1)
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Researchers at The University of Nottingham are to investigate whether the therapeutic effects of clay modelling could help disturbed teenagers deal with their feelings of anger, anxiety, and depression. Academics are teaming up with professionals in the NHS (National Health Service), Nottingham Contemporary art gallery, and local artists for the innovative project that will look at the potential benefits that clay could offer to young people struggling with mental health problems.
Facial expressions convey strong cues for someone’s emotional state and the ability to interpret these cues is crucial in social interaction. This ability is known to be compromised in many psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as social anxiety or Korsakoff’s syndrome. New research has now revealed evidence that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is also characterized by changes in the way the brain processes specific emotions and that certain aspects of this disorder could be understood as a consequence of the altered processing of emotional cues.
Findings from a brain imaging study may provide clues for why some individuals with heavy cigarette-smoking habits experience depressed mood upon withdrawal from smoking, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The research was conducted by Ingrid Bacher, Ph.D., and colleagues from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, and the University of Toronto.
For a hormone, oxytocin is pretty famous. It is the “cuddle chemical”—the hormone that helps mothers bond with their babies. Salespeople can buy oxytocin spray on the internet, to make their clients trust them. It’s known for promoting positive feelings, but more recent research has found that oxytocin can promote negative emotions, too. The authors of a new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, takes a look at what oxytocin is really doing.
Positive emotions like joy and compassion are good for your mental and physical health, and help foster creativity and friendship. But people with bipolar disorder seem to have too much of a good thing. In a new article to be published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist June Gruber of Yale University considers how positive emotion may become negative in bipolar disorder.
Siblings of people with autism show a similar pattern of brain activity to that seen in people with autism when looking at emotional facial expressions. The University of Cambridge researchers identified the reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy and argue it may be a ‘biomarker’ for a familial risk of autism. The Medical Research Council funded study is published today, 12th July, in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
The human brain may simulate physical sensations to prompt introspection, capitalizing on moments of high emotion to promote moral behavior, according to a USC researcher. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the USC Rossier School of Education found that individuals who were told stories designed to evoke compassion and admiration for virtue sometimes reported that they felt a physical sensation in response. These psycho-physical “pangs” of emotion are very real — they are detectable with brain scans — and may be evidence that pro-social behavior is part of human survival.
A big part of coping with life is having a flexible reaction to the ups and downs. Now, a study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people choose to respond differently depending on how intense an emotion is. When confronted with high-intensity negative emotions, they tend to choose to turn their attention away, but with something lower-intensity, they tend to think it over and neutralize the feeling that way.
Young babies’ brains are already specially attuned to the sounds of human voices and emotions, according to a report published online on June 30 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Three- to seven-month-old infants showed more activation in a part of the brain when they heard emotionally neutral human sounds, such as coughing, sneezing, or yawning, than when they heard the familiar sounds of toys or water. That activity appeared in an area of the temporal lobe known in adults for its role in processing human vocalizations. The babies also showed greater response to sad sounds versus neutral ones in another part of the brain involved in emotion processing in adults.
Who are you prosecuting?
The Practice
Drop the case.
Why?
Lately I’ve been thinking about a kind of “case” that’s been running in my mind about someone in my extended family. The case is a combination of feeling hurt and mistreated, critique of the other person, irritation with others who haven’t supported me, views about what should happen that hasn’t, and implicit taking-things-personally.
