Increase working memory, decrease alcohol consumption in problem drinkers

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There are many theories about why individuals engage in heavy alcohol consumption. One general theory psychologists refer to is called the Dual Process Model. It holds that people have two different systems for processing information. The impulsive system automatically (quickly) evaluates stimuli in the environment in terms of emotion, and motivation, and (again quickly) pushes the individual to move toward or away from the stimuli. Alternatively, the reflective system focuses on long-term goals and personal standards but it is slower acting and requires more effort or energy. These two systems constantly battle for supremacy. In the case of drinking, if the impulsive system wins out an individual will likely consume cocktail after cocktail because the drink tastes good, or makes the person feel good. If the reflective system wins out, the individual will likely consume less, or not at all, knowing that in the long-run they will be healthier and happier if they avoid such excess.

The ability of the reflective system to win out, or override automatic impulses and maintain goal-directed action, is accomplished by, what psychologists call, executive functioning. Executive functioning includes a host of different cognitive functions such as planning, attention control, working memory (the ability to maintain and manipulate information), and response inhibition (the ability to override impulsive responses). Unfortunately, research has shown that these executive functions are often impaired in chronic drinkers. First, individuals who start out with poorer executive functioning are more prone to become chronic drinkers if they associate alcohol with feeling good. Even more, excessive drinking has been shown to further impair executive functions. This means that the more one drinks the harder it will be for them to stop drinking.

Though this sounds pretty dire, there have been a host of recent studies showing that executive functions like working memory and response inhibition can be trained. That means with practice people can become better at tipping the scale in favor of their long-term goals (the reflective system), rather than their automatic temptations (the impulsive system). Researcher Katrijn Houben and colleagues at Maastricht University and the University of Amsterdam, tested whether training executive functions, specifically working memory, could boost the supremacy of the reflective system, and thus help heavy drinkers to consume less alcohol.

The Sleep Cycle: What's really going on while you're catching your zzz's

Today I continue on my new quest to understand sleep and its role in our lives by attempting to answer a very basic question: what happens when our heads hit the pillow at night?

The 90 minute Sleep Cycle

The sleep cycle: A sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes and during that time we move through five stages of sleep. The first four stages make up our non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and the fifth stage is when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep occurs.

Friday Fun: Are you getting enough sleep?

Do you feel like this guy?

Sleep is one of those basic needs we can't escape. But that doesn't mean we're planning our days to make sure we get our requisite hours of sleep each night. We live in a society where we're expected to burn the candle at both ends, and even our best attempts at sleeping well can fail with early morning meetings, last minute projects, late night social gatherings, children who need night time attention, sleep problems, a snoring roommate, or those trains blowing their horns throughout the night. What happens when we find ourselves suffering from too little or too light of sleep? Given that I seem to be unable to function on less than 9 hours a night, this question has always been of particular interest to me. This month, I'm actually starting to plan some research studies examining the effects of sleep on relationships, and given that all this planning is depriving me of my much-needed sleep (oh the irony), I thought it was a good time to write a series of posts on sleep: what it is, how it works, and how bad sleep affects how we think, feel and act in our daily lives. To kick us off, I'm devoting this Friday Fun to a few sleep scales so we can all figure out just how we're doing on the sleep-o-meter.

Dear Science, Stop Cheating Already

Last night I was eating dinner at Rubio's (side note: "Baja Fresh," Rubio's slogan is a little confusing considering that their fish tacos are made with Alaskan pollock, just an observation) while surfing the web using my smartphone. What I found was shocking: an article released by Science Magazine, states that dutch social psychologist Diedrik Stapel has "admitted to using faked data" and "will not be asked to return" to Tilburg University where he is a faculty member.

Stapel

I was, and still am, totally and completely shocked by this news. Stapel is by all accounts "one of Europe's best social psychologists" and I was personally witness to his receipt of a career trajectory award (this award is given to researchers who seem to have a promising upward trajectory in their career) at the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's annual meeting a few years ago. There his colleagues and collaborators gushed about Stapel's prolific writing abilities and provocative findings. At the time I was a young-ish graduate student, and I looked at Stapel with great admiration, as an inspiration to my own academic work. Obviously, I should now re-think my role models.

I could go on and on wondering what made Stapel "fake" his data (according to the report, the data came with a ficticious person who collected and analyzed it). Instead, what I'd like to focus on is the whole issue of data fabrication. Specifically, why faking data is (1) short-sighted and (2) anti-scientific.

The Happiness Chronicles, Part I: Happiness, is there a Dark Side?

This is the first part of an occasional series at Psych Your Mind that will delve into psychological experiences that contribute to (or detract from) happiness. In Part I of this series, we will discuss the potential dark side of happiness.

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Over the last 20 years or so there has been an explosion of literature and accompanying research on the science of happiness. Most of this research has been devoted to understanding what makes people happy (or unhappy)? In general, the research on happiness up to this point has been singularly focused on maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative emotions. If you need an example of this focus, I encourage you to take a stroll through your nearest local bookstore, Borders, Barnes & Noble, examining the section marked "Psychology". What you'll find is a slew of books on becoming happier.

Clearly, there are benefits to experiencing positive emotion and costs to experiencing negative emotion and research bears this out. For one, experiences of chronic negative emotion are bad for your health. Other work suggests that increased positive emotion enhances your motivations to affiliate with and help others. Still other research suggests that having income levels that are above poverty, moderately contributes to one's happiness, though not as much as you might expect. In general, you get the picture: There is a lot of research out there suggesting positive good, negative bad.

However, recent psychological inquiry has begun to ask the question, is happiness always good? That is, are there potential costs to seeking out happiness?

Narcissists know they're narcissists

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While positive self-views are generally considered healthy, adaptive, and attractive, OVERLY positive self-views often have social costs. For example, when I asked my friend’s boyfriend if his classes this semester were challenging, he responded as follows: “I’ve done better than EVERY OTHER student in EVERY SINGLE grad class that I’ve taken. I certainly don’t except my classes this semester to be a problem.” If you’re like me, this statement made you shudder. The sense of superiority and the overt “bragginess” screams creep. Again, if you’re like me, you aren’t surprised that I was less interested in a friendship with him the second he uttered the statement, and that when this statement was followed by similar statements later on, my friend quickly ended the relationship. Although I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose my friend’s boyfriend with any disorder, or to label him as a particular type of person, this attitude of superiority is consistent with narcissism, colloquially defined as an inflated sense of self-importance, egotism, vanity, and selfishness.

As this example demonstrates, there is often a large disconnect between narcissists’ self-perceptions (e.g. how positively he sees himself) and others’ perceptions of him (how positively his friends, coworkers, classmates, and acquaintances sees him). Interestingly, narcissists often create positive first impressions - they are initially rated as charming, likable, extraverted, and physically attractive (e.g. Back, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2010). However, overtime these impressions sour, with others progressively seeing them as disagreeable, emotionally unstable, and poorly adjusted (like my example above). Despite the deterioration of their reputation, narcissists often continue to see themselves in overly positive ways. This begs the question – are narcissists self aware? More precisely: do narcissists know that others don’t see them in such a positive light? Are they aware of their own negative characteristics? DO THEY KNOW THEY’RE NARCISSISTS?

Can the important people in your life help you transcend group differences?

Our significant others (even our X's) influence our new relationships (source)

When I first started graduate school I was enthralled by the idea that much of how we relate to other people in our social lives is driven by our past relationships with important/close others. This theory, which my graduate advisor Serena Chen called the relational self suggests that who we are and how we think about the self is fundamentally shaped by our relationships with others. These influential relationships (they must be influential, stable, long-term relationships, though not necessarily positive/well-adjusted ones) create working models-- like scripts in a play that actors follow-- for how to interact with other people. Thus, whenever you are in a context that reminds you of a significant other you should apply these working models.

This can happen pretty much anywhere. Let's say you meet someone who looks like your ex-girlfriend (big X from now on). Your interaction with this person will be based--at least in a small part-- on how you'd expect an interaction with your X to go. So for example, if you expect your X to freak out about you being five minutes late to pick her up at the airport, you'd expect a person who resembles the X to do the same. In addition, if you tend to feel down or blue around your X, again, you should feel a slight dip in your own mood when around this new person.

The Plastic Brain

Today we would like to present you with the second of our series of guest bloggers. Allyson Mackey is a graduate student in the neuroscience program at UC-Berkeley. Enjoy!

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I was recently challenged by a colleague to come up with an example of a neuroscience finding that changed the way I live my life. I immediately thought of the now quite vast literature on neuroplasticity: the ability of our brains to change and adapt to new experiences. In this post, I’d like to propose that what we’ve learned about neuroplasticity so far can help us lead better lives, and that neuroplasticity research in the future will be poised to influence public policy issues ranging from health to education.  

I want to start by summarizing some exciting results from research on the structure and connectivity of brain cells, called neurons. Scientists have shown that experience can drive changes in the connections between neurons in as little as thirty seconds. Substantial changes in brain inputs, like the loss of a sense like vision or touch in a limb, can lead to remarkable compensatory re-organization in cortex. However, even subtle environmental changes can change brain structure. For example, giving rats interesting toys to play with, or allowing them to run more frequently on an exercise wheel, can lead to more connections between neurons in brain regions that are critical for learning, like the hippocampus. What is even more exciting is that cognitive enrichment and exercise can lead to neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, in the hippocampus. The formation of new neurons was long thought to be impossible since, unlike other cells in your body, most neurons can’t divide to make more neurons after birth.

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Unfortunately, neuroplasticity is often called a double-edged sword. While positive environmental changes can lead to beneficial neural changes, the brain is also susceptible to negative environmental factors. One particularly relevant example is stress.  Chronic stress can prevent the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus, strengthen fear and anxiety circuits, and even effectively turn off brain regions responsible for attention and self-control. In summary, results from animal studies of neural plasticity suggest that our brains have the intrinsic ability to change in response to environmental demands both in adaptive ways, in response to cognitive stimulation and exercise, but also in maladaptive ways, in response to stress.