Brain shows diminished response to untrustworthiness, UCLA scientists report.

Shelley Taylor, UCLA

Why are older people especially vulnerable to becoming victims of fraud? A new UCLA study indicates that an important clue may lie in a particular region of the brain that influences the ability to discern who is honest and who is trying to deceive us.

Older people, more than younger adults, may fail to interpret an untrustworthy face as potentially dishonest, the study shows. The reason for this, the UCLA life scientists found, seems to be that a brain region called the anterior insula, which is linked to disgust and is important for discerning untrustworthy faces, is less active in older adults.

“The consequences of misplaced trust for older adults are severe,” said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research, which appears today (Dec. 3) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “A recent study estimates that adults over age 60 lost at least $2.9 billion in 2010 to financial exploitation, ranging from home repair scams to complex financial swindles. This figure represents a 12 percent increase from 2008.

“Older adults seem to be particularly vulnerable to interpersonal solicitations, and their reduced sensitivity to cues related to trust may partially underlie this vulnerability.”

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New strategies developed at UCLA may improve health and decrease costs.

One of the most important health problems in the United States is the failure of patients with chronic diseases to take their medications and do all that is necessary to control their illnesses.

In a study published in the current Journal of General Internal Medicine, UCLA researchers and their colleagues suggest that physicians take a serious look at tools and strategies used in behavioral economics and social psychology to help motivate their patients to assert better control over chronic diseases. Breaking large goals into smaller, more manageable parts, for example, may help patients better manage diseases such as diabetes, the researchers say.

Diagnosing diseases and discovering effective treatments aren’t the only challenges facing health care professionals in the United States, said Braden Mogler, the paper’s lead author and a third-year medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

“One of the big challenges is simply finding ways to help the many patients with chronic diseases understand why treatment is important and how to follow it,” Mogler said. “Many doctors often lack effective tools to encourage patients in these ways. There is a lot of research from the social sciences on human behavior and encouraging individual change, and this paper shows how that research can potentially be applied to doctor–patient interactions.”

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We gaze a bit lower than expected to gather most accurate information from one’s face.

Places within face (green circles) where, on average, each of 50 participants first looked at when trying to identify faces of famous people. White circle corresponds to the average across all participants.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. However, to get a real idea of what a person is up to, according to UC Santa Barbara researchers Miguel Eckstein and Matt Peterson, the best place to check is right below the eyes. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“It’s pretty fast, it’s effortless — we’re not really aware of what we’re doing,” said Miguel Eckstein, professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. Using an eye tracker and more than 100 photos of faces and participants, Eckstein and graduate research assistant Peterson followed the gaze of the experiment’s participants to determine where they look in the first crucial moment of identifying a person’s identity, gender and emotional state.

“For the majority of people, the first place we look at is somewhere in the middle, just below the eyes,” Eckstein said. One possible reason could be that we are trained from youth to look there, because it’s polite in some cultures. Or, because it allows us to figure out where the person’s attention is focused.

However, Peterson and Eckstein hypothesize that, despite the ever-so-brief — 250-millisecond — glance, the relatively featureless point of focus, and the fact that we’re usually unaware that we’re doing it, the brain is actually using sophisticated computations to plan an eye movement that ensures the highest accuracy in tasks that are evolutionarily important in determining flight, fight, or love at first sight.

“When you look at a scene, or at a person’s face, you’re not just using information right in front of you,” said Peterson. The place where one’s glance is aimed is the place that corresponds to the highest resolution in the eye — the fovea, a slight depression in the retina at the back of the eye — while regions surrounding the foveal area — the periphery — allow access to less spatial detail.

However, according to Peterson, at a conversational distance, faces tend to span a larger area of the visual field. There is information to be gleaned, not just from the face’s eyes, but also from features like the nose or the mouth. But when participants were directed to try to determine the identity, gender, and emotion of people in the photos by looking elsewhere — the forehead, the mouth, for instance — they did not perform as well as they would have by looking close to the eyes.

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UC Irvine professor broadens reach with online environmental psychology course.

Daniel Stokols, UC Irvine

Daniel Stokols has taught an environmental psychology class at UC Irvine since 1973. He figures that’s about 8,000 students over almost 40 years. Since his course went online in June, however, a staggering 150,000 more have taken it.

A Chancellor’s Professor of planning, policy & design and psychology & social behavior with joint appointments in epidemiology, public health and nursing science, Stokols is thrilled at his increased reach. He enjoys introducing people to the field of environmental psychology, which focuses on the interaction between human beings and their surroundings.

“As an instructor, it’s exciting to present information to a broader audience,” Stokols says. “I enjoy hearing from people all over the world who are enrolled in the course, and in many cases, we’ve exchanged information about research findings, publications, degree programs offered at UCI, and some of the ways they’re applying course content to their own work and living situations.”

In everyday terms, environmental psychology explores such things as how traffic congestion, crowding and pollution affect people. Scholars in the field also look at the ways in which architectural design and urban planning foster or inhibit social interaction; encourage or discourage physical activity; and promote or alleviate obesity.

Last spring, with the help of UCI’s Teaching, Learning & Technology Center, Stokols recorded and edited his classroom lectures in environmental psychology, then posted them to UCI’s iTunes U channel and the center’s YouTube channel. UCI Extension also included a link to Stokol’s iTunes U class on the campus’s OpenCourseWare site.

The free online course, which consists of lecture videos, presentation slides and study guides, is not taken for degree credit, as there are no tests or homework assignments. Subscribers learn about seminal research in environmental psychology, such as Stokols’ 1981 study on the effects of aircraft noise on elementary school children.

He and his research partners found that students going to schools under the LAX flight path had elevated blood pressure compared with students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds attending schools in quieter areas, and they performed less well on academic tests and cognitive skills assessments.

Published in journals and a book, the study prompted the Inglewood and Lennox school districts to implement noise abatement measures, including the installation of soundproofing materials in classroom ceilings.

“The course also gets students to start thinking about environmental justice concerns and why undesirable land uses tend to be more prevalent in low-income, minority neighborhoods,” Stokols says. “It can be very difficult for communities without political power to redress those problems.”

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UCSF study finds link between attentional state and length of telomeres.

Scientific studies have suggested that a wandering mind indicates unhappiness, whereas a mind that is present in the moment indicates well-being. Now a preliminary UC San Francisco study suggests a possible link between mind wandering and aging, by looking at a biological measure of longevity.

In the study, telomere length, an emerging biomarker for cellular and general bodily aging, was assessed in association with the tendency to be present in the moment versus the tendency to mind wander, in research on 239 healthy, midlife women ranging in age from 50 to 65 years.

Being present in the moment was defined as an inclination to be focused on current tasks, while mind wandering was defined as the inclination to have thoughts about things other than the present or being elsewhere.

According to the findings, published online on Nov. 15 in the new Association for Psychological Science journal Clinical Psychological Science, those who reported more mind wandering had shorter telomeres, while those who reported more presence in the moment, or having a greater focus and engagement with their current activities, had longer telomeres, even after adjusting for current stress.

Telomeres are the DNA-caps that protect the ends of chromosomes, preventing them from deteriorating or fusing with neighboring chromosomes. Telomeres typically shorten with age and in response to psychological and physiological stressors. In research pioneered at UCSF, scientists have discovered that telomere shortness predicts early disease and mortality.

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If you’re having doubts, don’t ignore them, suggests UCLA psychology study.

Jason Lavner, UCLA

Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
— Voltaire

In the first scientific study to test whether doubts about getting married are more likely to lead to an unhappy marriage and divorce, UCLA psychologists report that when women have doubts before their wedding, their misgivings are often a warning sign of trouble if they go ahead with the marriage.

The UCLA study demonstrates that pre-wedding uncertainty, especially among women, predicts higher divorce rates and less marital satisfaction years later.

“People think everybody has premarital doubts and you don’t have to worry about them,” said Justin Lavner, a UCLA doctoral candidate in psychology and lead author of the study. “We found they are common but not benign. Newlywed wives who had doubts about getting married before their wedding were two-and-a-half times more likely to divorce four years later than wives without these doubts. Among couples still married after four years, husbands and wives with doubts were significantly less satisfied with their marriage than those without doubts.

“You know yourself, your partner and your relationship better than anybody else does; if you’re feeling nervous about it, pay attention to that,” he added. “It’s worth exploring what you’re nervous about.”

The psychologists studied 464 newlywed spouses (232 couples) in Los Angeles within the first few months of marriage and conducted follow-up surveys with the couples every six months for four years. At the time of marriage, the average age of the husbands was 27, and the average age of the wives was 25. The research is published in the online version of the Journal of Family Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

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Expressing your emotions can reduce fear, UCLA psychologists report.

“Give sorrow words.“ — Malcolm in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”

Can simply describing your feelings at stressful times make you less afraid and less anxious?

A new UCLA psychology study suggests that labeling your emotions at the precise moment you are confronting what you fear can indeed have that effect.

The psychologists asked 88 people with a fear of spiders to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container outdoors. The participants were told to walk closer and closer to the spider and eventually touch it if they could.

The subjects were then divided into four groups and sat in front of another tarantula in a container in an indoor setting. In the first group, the subjects were asked to describe the emotions they were experiencing and to label their reactions to the tarantula — saying, for example, “I’m anxious and frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider.”

“This is unique because it differs from typical procedures in which the goal is to have people think differently about the experience — to change their emotional experience or change the way they think about it so that it doesn’t make them anxious,” said Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology at UCLA and the senior author of the study. “Here, there was no attempt to change their experience, just to state what they were experiencing.”

In a second group, the subjects used more neutral terms that did not convey their fear or disgust and were aimed at making the experience seem less threatening. They might say, for example, “That little spider can’t hurt me; I’m not afraid of it.”

“This is the usual approach for helping individuals to confront the things they fear,” Craske said.

In a third group, the subjects said something irrelevant to the experience, and in a fourth group, the subjects did not say anything — they were simply exposed to the spider.

All the participants were re-tested in the outdoor setting one week later and were again asked to get closer and closer to the tarantula and potentially touch it with a finger. The researchers measured how close subjects could get to the spider, how distressed they were and what their physiological responses were, focusing in particular on how much the subjects’ hands sweated, which is a good measure of fear, Craske said.

The researchers found that the first group did far better than the other three. These people were able to get closer to the tarantula — much closer than those in the third group and somewhat closer than those in the other two groups — and their hands were sweating significantly less than the participants in all of the other groups.

The results are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

“They got closer and they were less emotionally aroused,” Craske said. “The differences were significant. The results are even more significant given the limited amount of time involved. With a fuller treatment, the effects may be even larger.

“Exposure is potent,” she added. “It’s surprising that this minimal intervention action had a significant effect over exposure alone.”

So why were the people in the first group — those who performed what the life scientists call “affect labeling” — able to get closer to the tarantula?

“If you’re having less of a threat response, which is indicated by less sweat, that would allow you to get closer; you have less of a fear response,” said study co-author Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “When spider-phobics say, ‘I’m terrified of that nasty spider,’ they’re not learning something new; that’s exactly what they were feeling — but now instead of just feeling it, they’re saying it. For some reason that we don’t fully understand, that transition is enough to make a difference.”

The scientists also analyzed the words the subjects used. Those who used a larger number of negative words did better, in terms of both how close they were willing to get to the tarantula and their skin-sweat response. In other words, describing the tarantula as terrifying actually proved beneficial in ultimately reducing the fear of it.

“Doing more affect labeling seemed to be better,” Lieberman said.

“That is so different from how we normally think about exposure therapy, where you try to get the person to think differently, to think it’s not so bad,” Craske said. “What we did here was to simply encourage individuals to state the negative.”

“We’ve published a series of studies where we asked people, ‘Which do you think would make you feel worse: looking at a disturbing image or looking at that disturbing image and choosing a negative emotional word to describe it,’” Lieberman said. “Almost everyone said it would be worse to have to look at that image and focus on the negative by picking a negative word. People think that makes our negative emotions more intense. Well, that is exactly what we asked people to do here. In fact, it’s a little better to have people label their emotions — multiple studies now show this. Our intuitions here are wrong.”

This is the first study to demonstrate benefits for affect labeling of fear and anxiety in a real-world setting, Craske and Lieberman said.

“The implication,” Craske said, “is to encourage patients, as they do their exposure to whatever they are fearful of, to label the emotional responses they are experiencing and label the characteristics of the stimuli — to verbalize their feelings. That lets people experience the very things they are afraid and say, ‘I feel scared and I’m here.’ They’re not trying to push it away and say it’s not so bad. Be in the moment and allow yourself to experience whatever you’re experiencing.”

Craske and Lieberman are studying how this approach can help people who have been traumatized, such as rape victims and victims of domestic violence. The approach potentially could benefit soldiers returning from war as well.

“I’m far more optimistic than I was before this study,” Lieberman said. “I’m a believer that this approach can have real benefits for people.

“There is a region in the brain, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that seems to be involved in labeling our feelings and our emotional reactions, and it is also associated with regulating our emotional responses,” he said. “Why those two go together is still a bit of a mystery. This brain region that is involved in simply stating how we are feeling seems to mute our emotional responses, at least under certain circumstances.”

“There’s a trend in psychology of acceptance-based approaches — honestly label your feelings. This study has that flavor to it,” Craske said.

Katharina Kircanski, a former UCLA graduate student and current postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, is lead author of the study; she conducted this research as a graduate student in Craske’s laboratory.

The research was federally funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health, and by the American Psychological Association.

UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

UC Irvine study finds watching extensive TV coverage placed participants at risk.

Roxane Cohen Silver, UC Irvine

Repeated exposure to violent images from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war led to an increase in physical and psychological ailments in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, according to a new UC Irvine study.

The study sheds light on the lingering effects of “collective traumas” such as natural disasters, mass shootings and terrorist attacks. A steady diet of graphic media images may have long-lasting mental and physical health consequences, says study author Roxane Cohen Silver, UC Irvine professor of psychology & social behavior, medicine and public health.

“I would not advocate restricting nor censoring war images for the psychological well-being of the public,” Silver said. “Instead, I think it’s important for people to be aware that there is no psychological benefit to repeated exposure to graphic images of horror.”

People who watched more than four hours a day of 9/11 and Iraq war-related television coverage (in the weeks after the attacks and at the start of the war) reported both acute and post-traumatic stress symptoms over time. Those who watched more than four hours a day of 9/11-related coverage in the weeks after the attacks reported physician-diagnosed physical health ailments two to three years later.

Seeing two particular kinds of images in the early days of the Iraq war was associated with post-traumatic stress symptoms over time: soldiers engaged in battle and dead U.S. and Allied soldiers.

The study included assessments of participants’ mental and physical health before the 9/11 attacks and information about their media exposure and acute stress responses immediately after the attacks and after the initiation of the Iraq war. Researchers conducted follow up assessments in the three years after 9/11.

The acute stress period refers to the first few weeks after the event and post-traumatic stress is any time after one month. Researchers started to measure stress nine to 14 days after 9/11 and within a few days after the start of the Iraq war.

Almost 12 percent of the 1,322 participants reported high levels of acute stress related to 9/11 and about 7 percent reported high levels of acute stress related to the Iraq war. After taking pre-9/11 mental health, demographic characteristics, and lifetime trauma exposure into account, people who watched four or more hours of 9/11- or Iraq war-related television were more likely to experience symptoms of acute stress.

“The results suggest that exposure to graphic media images may be an important mechanism through which the impact of collective trauma is dispersed widely,” Silver says. “Our findings are both relevant and timely as vivid images reach larger audiences than ever before through YouTube, social media and smartphones.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study appears in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, the flag-ship journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It was co-authored by Alison Holman, assistant professor of nursing at UC Irvine, Judith Pizarro Andersen of the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Michael Poulin of the University at Buffalo, Daniel McIntosh of the University of Denver and Virginia Gil-Rivas of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

“When we consider that graphic images of individuals being overcome by the 2011 tsunami in Japan were shown repeatedly, that a vigorous debate occurred last year regarding the release of the gruesome death photos of Osama bin Laden, and that vivid and disturbing images of 9/11 will likely appear on our television screens marking the anniversary of the attacks, we believe that our paper has something important to say regarding the impact of repeated exposure to graphic traumatic images,” Silver said.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UC Irvine is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with nearly 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff. Orange County’s second-largest employer, UC Irvine contributes an annual economic impact of $4 billion. For more news, visit www.today.uci.edu.

UCLA study also finds that mindfulness technique benefits immune system.

Steve Cole, UCLA

Many elderly people spend their last years alone. Spouses pass and children scatter. But being lonely is much more than a silent house and a lack of companionship. Over time, loneliness not only takes a toll on the psyche but can have a serious physical impact as well.

Feeling lonely has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and even premature death. Developing effective treatments to reduce loneliness in older adults is essential, but previous treatment efforts have had limited success.

What to do? Researchers at UCLA now report that a simple meditation program lasting just eight weeks reduced loneliness in older adults. Further, knowing that loneliness is associated with an increase in the activity of inflammation-related genes that can promote a variety of diseases, the researchers examined gene expression and found that this same form of meditation significantly reduced expression of inflammatory genes.

In the current online edition of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, senior study author Steve Cole, a UCLA professor of medicine and psychiatry and a member of the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA, and colleagues report that the two-month program of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which teaches the mind to simply be attentive to the present and not dwell in the past or project into the future, successfully reduced the feelings of loneliness.

Remarkably, the researchers said, MBSR also altered the genes and protein markers of inflammation, including the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP) and a group of genes regulated by the transcription factor NF-kB. CRP is a potent risk factor for heart disease, and NF-kB is a molecular signal that activates inflammation.

Inflammation is a natural component of the immune system and can help fight a wide variety of bodily insults, ranging from infections to a whack by a hammer. But chronic inflammation is now known to be a primary player in the pathology of many diseases and psychological disorders.

“Our work presents the first evidence showing that a psychological intervention that decreases loneliness also reduces pro-inflammatory gene expression,” Cole said. “If this is borne out by further research, MBSR could be a valuable tool to improve the quality of life for many elderly.”

In the study, 40 adults between the ages of 55 and 85 were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness meditation group or a control group that did not meditate. All the participants were assessed at the beginning and the end of the study using an established loneliness scale. Blood samples were also collected at the beginning and end to measure gene expression and levels of inflammation.

The meditators attended weekly two-hour meetings in which they learned the techniques of mindfulness, including awareness and breathing techniques. They also practiced mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes each day at home and attended a single daylong retreat.

These MBSR participants self-reported a reduced sense of loneliness, while their blood tests showed a significant decrease in the expression of inflammation-related genes.

“While this was a small sample, the results were very encouraging,” said Dr. Michael Irwin, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and director of the Cousins Center. “It adds to a growing body of research that is showing the positive benefits of a variety of meditative techniques, including tai chi and yoga.”

Just last month, for example, Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and a Cousins Center member, published a study showing that a form of yogic meditation involving chanting also reduced inflammatory gene expression, as well as stress levels, among individuals who care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

“These studies begin to move us beyond simply connecting the mind and genome, and identify simple practices that an individual can harness to improve human health,” Irwin said.

Other authors of the study include first author David Creswell, who led the study during his postdoctoral training at the Cousins Center and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Lisa J. Burklund, Matthew D. Lieberman, Jesusa M. G. Arevalo, Jeffrey Ma and Elizabeth C. Breen, all of UCLA. The authors report no conflict of interest.

The UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology encompasses an interdisciplinary network of scientists working to advance the understanding of psychoneuroimmunology by linking basic and clinical research programs and by translating findings into clinical practice. The center is affiliated with the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

UC Davis Health System hosts two-day summit.

Heather Young, UC Davis

A team of 30 pain and education experts from throughout North America gathered for an intensive two-day summit at UC Davis Health System last week to develop competencies in pain management education for new clinicians across the health professions.

“It is a remarkable outcome to have this group of leaders with diverse expertise, opinions and perspectives reach consensus on core competencies for pain throughout curricula for nurses, physicians, physical therapists and other health professionals,” said Heather M. Young, associate vice chancellor for nursing at UC Davis and founding dean for the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

The Expert Summit for Interprofessional Consensus on Pain Management Competencies included  leaders from several health-related disciplines — such as dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, psychology, social work and veterinary medicine — as well as educational experts and researchers.

“Although the management of acute and chronic pain remains a challenge, pain education is lacking in many health science curricula, particularly for beginning students,” said summit participant Judy Watt-Watson, president of the Canadian Pain Society and professor emerita for The Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. “The work of this interprofessional group was remarkable in that they produced such an important document so quickly that will have major benefit for educators and ultimately patients.”

The summit was part of the Interprofessional Pain Management Competency Program, a project to develop pain management core competencies and drive curriculum reform related to pain management. The program is led by Scott M. Fishman, professor and chief of pain medicine and vice chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine and Young.

The Interprofessional Pain Management Competency Program’s initial phases, including the summit, are supported by The Mayday Fund, an organization dedicated to alleviating the incidence, degree and consequence of human physical pain.

“The current state of pain management competencies and content in schools of medicine and nursing, as well as other health professions, is inadequate,” Fishman said. “The creation and distribution of core competencies in pain management that apply across professions and can serve as a foundational step in improving the culture and content of care for adults and children with acute, chronic or end-of-life pain.”

A 2011 Institute of Medicine report revealed the need for improved pain education for health professionals due to increasing numbers of Americans coping with chronic pain as well as skyrocketing costs. According to the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 100 million American adults–more than the total affected by heart diseases, cancer and diabetes combined–suffer from chronic pain. Pain costs the nation up to $600 billion annually in medical treatment and lost productivity.

Prior to the summit, Fishman and Young worked with a five-member executive committee to examine the current state of pain education for early-stage health-professional students through literature and curricula review and expert interviews. The result of that work was presented to the summit participants who worked over the two days to reach consensus on a framework for pain management competencies. They agreed the core competencies would cover four key areas:

• Multidimensional nature of pain
• Assessment and measurement
• Management of pain
• Clinical conditions: interprofessional, patient-centered care in context

The group plans to summarize the summit results in a journal article and full report within the next six months. Other means of dissemination, such as additional peer-reviewed publications, presentations at professional conferences and distribution to academic and professional organizations is also planned to encourage endorsement and application of the competencies in various health education programs throughout the world.

Greater Good center, UC Davis award $3M to expand scientific understanding of gratitude.

Andrea Hussong

>>Related: Greater Good center will begin accepting applications Sept. 3 for gratitude dissertation research awards

The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with UC Davis, announced the winners of its research awards to expand the scientific understanding of gratitude. The awards are part of the Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude project, which is supported with funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Almost 300 applications were received from institutions all over the United States. Each was evaluated based on its scientific significance, approach and methods, creativity, potential influence, and capacity for success. Here are the principal investigators and project titles of each winner, who received research grants that ranged from $168,000 to $338,000.

Sara Algoe, assistant professor/director, Emotions and Social Interaction Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “Unpacking the Mechanisms of Gratitude’s Benefits within Close Relationships”

Yarrow Dunham, visiting assistant professor of psychology, Princeton University: “Gratitude in Development: Cognitive and Normative Contexts”

Naomi Eisenberger, assistant professor, Department of Psychology/director, Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, UCLA: “Giving Thanks: Is ‘Giving’ Key to the Heath Benefits of Gratitude?”

Tom Gilovich, professor, Department of Psychology, Cornell University: “Cultivating Gratitude in a Consumerist Society”

Jeff Huffman, director of Cardiac Psychiatry Research Program, Massachusetts General Hospital/assistant professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School: “The Impact of Gratitude on Biology and Behavior in Persons with Heart Disease”

Andrea Hussong, director, Center for Developmental Science/professor of psychology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The Socialization of Gratitude through Parent- Child Interaction”

Christina Karns, postdoctoral research associate, Brain Development Lab, University of Oregon: “Neural Systems Supporting Gratitude”

Deobrah Lieberman, professor, evolutionary psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Miami: “Gratitude: A Basic Human Emotion for Initiating Friendships”

Wendy Berry Mendes, Sarlo/Ekman Associate Professor of Emotion at UC San Francisco: “Effects of Measured and Manipulated Gratitude on Biomarkers of Health and Aging”

Joel Meyers, professor, Department of Counseling and Psychological Services, Georgia State University: “A Model of Bullying Based on Gratitude and its Effects on Social Bonds”

Laura Redwine, assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, UC San Diego: “Gratitude in Pre-symptomatic Heart Failure: Effects on Health-Related Physiological Outcomes and Clinical Disease Progression”

Kristin Shutts, assistant professor, director of the Social Kids Lab, University of Wisconsin: “Effects of Gratitude on Children’s Social Attitudes and Prosociality”

Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior, Emory University: “Gratitude and Partner Preference in Chimpanzee Cooperation”

Joel Wong, associate professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, University of Indiana: “The Use of a Gratitude Writing Intervention With Psychotherapy for Outpatient Clients: Examining Neural Correlates and Psychosocial Mechanisms”

Related links:

• Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley
• UC Davis

UCLA hosts “Spirituality and Medicine — Toward an Integrative Approach.”

Anne Coscarelli, Simms/Mann Center

Religious and spiritual leaders help their congregants through many of life’s most difficult moments — death, divorce, lost jobs, crises of faith. But what is the right thing to do when one of their own has been diagnosed with cancer?

To help find answers to this question, more than 35 Los Angeles–area religious and spiritual leaders came together recently to learn from UCLA professionals — psychologists, a chaplain, an oncologist and an oncology social worker — about how they can help those diagnosed with this devastating illness, and their families, get through treatment and beyond.

The conference, “Spirituality and Medicine — Toward an Integrative Approach,” was co-sponsored by the Simms/Mann–UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Simms/Mann Institute for Education and Community Development. It was the first conference of its kind at UCLA, with a focus on how to integrate the science of medicine with spirituality to soothe the heart and soul.

“Physicians focus on disease and medicine, vitally important in cancer treatment, but cancer affects more than just the body,” said Anne Coscarelli, a psychologist and founding director of the Simms/Mann Center, who addressed conference participants. “It is a disease that changes most parts of a person’s life — the mind, body and soul of an individual. Medicine alone is not enough. We need to integrate medical science with what we have learned about optimizing psychological well-being, including spirituality, to heal patients with cancer and their families.”

Dr. Herbert Eradat, a survivor of acute lymphocytic leukemia, shared his perspective as an oncologist. He provided the religious and spiritual leaders a “Cancer 101″ lecture on basic terms and their definitions, cancer staging, and the most common treatments available today. Cancer, he told them, “in its simplest term, is a parasite growing wildly inside the body, seeking to spread to other organs.” That parasite also can gnaw away at patient’s emotions, fears and dreams for a normal life, he added.

“Spirituality in oncology is not a new concept,” Eradat said. “An article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology reported that as many as 88 percent of patients report that spirituality is at least somewhat important and is frequently extremely important. We in medical oncology are starting to recognize the value of spiritual care provided along with conventional treatments — not just surviving the cancer but also about what it takes to really heal.”

Eradat said it is important for oncologists to assess the spiritual needs of a patient, along with their organ function. He also advised the gathered leaders about what they should advise their congregants to ask their doctors. The most important questions are:

• What type of cancer is this?
• What is the stage of the cancer?
• What are the best treatments, and how soon do we need to treat this cancer?
• What are the side effects of treatment?
• What are the goals of treatment — curative or long-term stabilization of the cancer?
• What can you give for symptom management?

Patients and their families often are left reeling after a cancer diagnosis and aren’t thinking about what the questions they should be asking. Helping them to inform themselves would be a valuable service, Eradat said.

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