Rodent of the Week: Athletes! You must win at home

There was good reason to be worried when the Lakers lost that second game of the NBA championship playoff series against Boston. The loss was at home. According to new animal research, winning at home appears to be important to the male species' ability to prepare for, and win, future conflicts.

In a study with mice, researchers showed that experiencing a win caused changes in the brains that enhanced the ability to win in the future. Researchers also found that winning at home had a particular effect, causing more activity in male hormone receptors in brain regions thought to influence social aggression.

The researchers paired territorial male mice who had winning experience -- sort of macho male mice that, by the way, are a species of California mice called Peromyscus californicus -- with smaller and sexually inexperienced male mice in various settings, such as home cages and neutral settings. Naturally, the mice fought. The researchers then examined the brains of the mice and compared them to similar mice that were not paired for fights. The mice that won both home and away victories had increased expression of hormone receptors in their brains. But only the brains of mice that won in their home cages showed increased hormone sensitivity in two areas of the brain thought to control motivation and reward. Mice that won at home also won more fights with larger and tougher mice when fighting in neutral locations.

The experience of winning, especially at home, appears to actually change the brains of mice. Perhaps this phenomenon extends to other species. In this somewhat dense conclusion, the authors wrote their results "are therefore provocative because they suggest a mechanism through which environmental context modulates socially induced changes to the functional properties of neural circuits that control behavioral motivation and reinforcement."

The study, released online Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Advanced Cell Technology Inc.

Psychological test can help predict whether the love will last

Just think of how much emotional pain could be avoided if humans knew just when to exit a romantic relationship? Knowing whether to break up or stay together is a wrenching question that often lacks an easy answer.

Until now, that is. Researchers at the University of Rochester say they have devised a test to tell if a relationship is going to fall apart. The test involves uncovering what people really -- meaning really -- think of or feel about their partners. Previous studies show people are often unable or reluctant to express their true feelings about their partners. "[T]hat assumes that they know themselves how happy they are, and that's not always the case," a coauthor of the study, Ronald D. Rogge, explained in a news release.

Rogge and his colleagues devised a test in which volunteers supplied their partner's first name and two other words that related to the person -- like a pet name or distinct characteristic. The volunteers then watched a monitor as words were presented. The words conveyed positive ideas, such as "vacation" and "peace" along with the partner-related words they supplied or bad ideas, such as "tragedy" and "criticize," and the partner-related words. The respondents were asked to press a bar when they saw various words. One test featured the bad and partner-related words, and the other the good words and partner-related words. The idea was to get people's automatic reactions to the words. If people have generally good associations with their partners, they would perform the "good words" task easier than the "bad words."

That is, in fact, what happened. The volunteers who found it easier to associate their partner with bad things, and had greater difficulty associating their partner with good things, were more likely to separate over the next year.

Such a measure could be useful to therapists in trying to uncover feelings clients are unwilling to divulge and to differentiate the nature of the problem in a relationship, the authors wrote.

"[I]n deteriorating relationships, the negative associations people begin to form about their partner may be too subtle or threatening for them to recognize in themselves or too socially undesirable for them to report to others," they wrote.

The study was released Wednesday in the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Popperfoto / Getty Images

Book Reviews: 'The No Om Zone,' 'The Yoga Body Diet' and 'Healing Yoga for Neck & Shoulder Pain'

Some people use yoga to strengthen, stretch and relax muscles; others delve into its lifestyle and spiritual aspects. Here are three new books with varying approaches to the 5,000-year-old practice.

“The No Om Zone” bills itself as a “no-chanting, no-granola, no-Sanskrit practical guide to yoga.” This book by Kimberly Fowler, founder of the L.A.-based YAS Fitness Centers, is geared to athletes and others who want to improve muscle tone and flexibility, take away aches, alleviate pain and calm the mind. Fowler promises you won’t have to go sit on a mountaintop and chant to achieve these results.

The former triathlete started doing yoga in 1983 to rehabilitate after an injury and became a fan after seeing the benefits to her body and athletic performance. She was turned off, however, by "elitist" classes targeted to the few who could do pretzel poses and handstands. Today, the motto in her yoga classes is “safe, fun and effective.”

Her book offers short workouts for 13 parts of the body, including the neck, arms, core/abs, lower back, hips and knees. Each body part gets its own chapter describing and showing the anatomy of the area, common injuries, recommended yoga poses for it and a workout routine typically lasting about 10 minutes. Poses are accompanied by photos, step-by-step guides, difficulty ratings, descriptions of benefits, tips and modifications to make them easier.

Fowler does manage to slip some mind-body material into the book. The first body part addressed is the head, for example, and here she talks about the benefits and practice of meditation and describes how to do yoga breathing.

This is a good book for those who want yoga workouts targeted to individual body areas as opposed to a one-size-fits-all workout. Fowler also offers a "No Om Zone" DVD containing three 15-minute workouts.

“The Yoga Body Diet,” by Kristen Schultz Dollard and John Douillard, is everything “The No Om Zone” is not. Not only is it not a no-granola book, it even includes recipes for granola.

Dollard, digital director at Self magazine, is a yoga teacher and former editor of iyogalife.com. Douillard directs LifeSpa, an ayurvedic retreat center in Boulder, Colo., and has written and produced numerous health and fitness books, CDs and DVDs.

Their pretty book – generously illustrated with colorful pen-and-ink drawings – says it can help you get a “yoga body” in four weeks through eating, exercising and de-stressing according to the principles of yoga and ayurveda.

The book describes ayurveda as yoga’s sister science, one of the world’s oldest medical systems practiced by 80% of India’s population today. Dollard and Douillard say their mission is to present “ayurveda’s greatest hits” and teach you how to use it for weight loss.

“Yoga Body” kicks off with a quiz to determine what ayurvedic “type” you are: vata (airy), pitta (fiery) or kapha (earthy). Each type is told what kinds of foods to eat and avoid, yoga moves to do and lifestyle changes to make. Recipes for chai tea, pad Thai, roti pizza and other dishes include variations for each ayurvedic type.

The book’s illustrated yoga pose guide is easy to follow, with about 75 positions that range from the simple corpse pose to the more challenging revolved half-moon.

The book at times has the feel of an overly simplified greatest hits compilation as it offers its take on ayurvedic practices. Some of the recommendations – such as to stop snacking and eat only three meals a day – may not work for some or even have proven benefits. But those interested in the ayurvedic philosophy may find the book an approachable starting point to determine whether they want to go further into the practice.

“Healing Yoga for Neck & Shoulder Pain” zeroes in on the area of the body where many people feel the effects of stress. Author Carol Krucoff, a yoga therapist at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, N.C., writes that neck and shoulder tension, tightness and discomfort are the top complaints of her students. Krucoff says she’s been successful in helping people find lasting relief with yoga, though it doesn’t happen overnight.

Krucoff, a former Washington Post journalist, looks at the practice of yoga through this lens, exploring the science of neck pain and yoga; the anatomy of the spine, shoulders, neck, face and jaw; the role of stress and emotions in neck and shoulder pain; and the best postures for sitting and standing.

She explains how, where and when to do yoga; how to breathe properly; and how to do 38 poses to help the neck and shoulders. Simple line drawings illustrate the mostly gentle exercises. Some of the stretches can be done in an office chair. 

“Healing Yoga” is a good introduction for those who want to focus on this part of the body, or ease into yoga for physical reasons or lack of familiarity with the practice. The book’s production values are basic, but the writing is clear, informative and inspiring.

Krucoff writes that the best healing comes when people bring the lessons of yoga into their daily lives.

“Rather than muscle your way into a yoga pose, you learn to relax into it -- using the tools of gravity, patience, and the breath -- to allow the pose to deepen and unfold,” she says. “Over time, with regular practice, the lessons learned on the yoga mat begin to influence how you live in the world.”

-- Anne Colby

Photos, from top: "The No Om Zone: A No-Chanting, No-Granola, No-Sanskrit Practical Guide to Yoga," Kimberly Fowler, Rodale Books, $19.99; "The Yoga Body Diet: Slim and Sexy in 4 Weeks (Without the Stress), Kristen Schultz Dollard and John Douillard, Rodale Books, $21.99; "Healing Yoga for Neck & Shoulder Pain: Easy, Effective Practices for Releasing Tension & Relieving Pain," Carol Krucoff, New Harbinger Publications, $17.95

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Touch and go – what you touch may influence how you feel

Having a rough day? Got a soft spot for ice cream? It might be more than a feeling. In fact, tactile contact –  touching something light or heavy, smooth or rough, soft or hard – can have a profound effect on your perceptions and judgments, even when the object has nothing to do with the task at hand.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers from Harvard University, Yale University and MIT tested people’s subconscious responses to feeling objects of different weights and textures.

- In one case, participants had to evaluate a resume, some reading it on a light clipboard and others on a heavy one; the heavy clipboard readers thought the applicant was more serious about the job.

- In another study, people were asked to complete a puzzle, either with smooth or sandpaper-covered pieces, and then judge the harshness of a social interaction; those who did the “rough” puzzle thought the interaction was harsher. 

- The researchers also found that people sitting in wooden chairs, as compared to cushioned chairs, drove a harder bargain in a mock car sale. They believe that the participants associated the hard chair with strictness and stability, and thus were less likely to budge on their offer price.

In other words, even though the heavy, rough or hard objects weren’t directly related to the assigned task, they clearly affected people’s behavior.

Here's the abstract to the touch study.

Given the prevalence of tactile metaphors in our everyday language, the associations found in the study – heavy equals serious, rough equals difficult, hard equals strict – make sense. Still, it’s impressive that the subconscious cues just from touching something can have such a discernable effect on our impressions and behavior.

So, which came first, the emotions or the language?

It’s tempting to say that our idioms reflect innate qualities of objects – a hard, rough, heavy rock, for example – but trying to spell out the connection suggests that it's not quite so simple.

After all, what's so serious or difficult or strict about a rock?

— Rachel Bernstein

Photo: Sometimes, a touch can be worth a thousand words. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times.

Personality neuroscience: A new science of mind, or Phrenology 2.0? [Updated]

Psychologists who study the infinite variety of humans' personalities and temperaments often find themselves drawn to biological explanations of the personality traits that make us who we are. They surmise that factors such as heredity or brain structure must play key roles in whether we are outgoing or introverted, easygoing or prone to worry, callous or caring toward others.

But take that line of reasoning too far, and you get dangerously close to phrenology, a kind of science-cum-parlor game that was all the rage during much of the 19th century. The idea behind phrenology was that each of the mind's faculties lies at an exact and predictable spot in the brain, and that a person's propensities -- her tendency to embrace new challenges, his inclination to view others' motives suspiciously -- could be divined simply by observing the size and shape of his or her skull, which was thought to reflect the size and shape of the underlying faculties.

[Updated at 9:10 a.m.: An earlier version of this posting incorrectly identified phrenology as nephrology.]

This, of course, required complex maps of the head and specialists -- readers, if you will -- to guide the curious in discovery of themselves or others. It all looked very scientific -- and in some ways, helped give rise to the field we now know as neuroscience. But it came almost two centuries before the invention of imaging technologies capable of mapping the brain and watching it work. So the precise location of the mind's "faculties" was pretty much a shot in the dark.

But what if there was a germ of truth to the idea that personality traits do basically reside in predictable regions of the brain, and that the size or shape of those regions do reflect the fundamental makeup of a person's character? That is the intriguing preliminary finding of a study published this week in the journal Psychological Science. And it is the basis for a fledgling discipline called "personality neuroscience."

The "big five" personality traits -- extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness or intellect -- are the dimensions of character that psychologists seem to agree make up each person's unique personality "fingerprint." Guided by neuroscience findings suggesting specific roles for certain brain regions, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota psychologist Colin DeYoung measured the size of several regions in 116 healthy subjects' brains. They also had the subjects fill out standardized personality inventories, allowing them to locate each subject on the continuum of each of the "big five" traits.

For all but one of the "big five" -- openness, or intellect -- the researchers found that specific brain structures did vary in size in ways that tracked closely with a subject's score on one of the "big five" traits. If a subject scored highly on, say agreeableness, she was more likely to show greater heft in her brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which becomes active when a person exercises empathy. An extrovert was more likely to have a brawnier medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region known to be involved in responding to social reward.  

Unlike the phrenologists of the 19th century, DeYoung's team doesn't presume to know whether differences in the size of a brain region give rise to unique personality characteristics, or whether our personality differences cause our brains to develop in unique ways -- say, that when we practice random acts of kindness, our "agreeableness" center grows larger, or that a lifetime of social isolation might cause a region associated with "extraversion" to shrink.   

-- Melissa Healy

Parenting style influences teen drinking patterns, researchers say

Some parents assume that teenagers will drink alcohol and there is little they can do to prevent it. Research does indicate that parenting has little effect on whether kids decide to try alcohol. But parenting attitudes and actions can make a big difference in how much and how often a teenager drinks.

Researchers at Brigham Young University surveyed 5,000 adolescents about their drinking habits and their relationship with their parents. They found the kids least prone to heavy drinking had parents who scored high on accountability (knowing where their kids were and with whom) and warmth. Having so-called "indulgent" parents, who were low on accountability and high on warmth, nearly tripled the risk of the teen participating in heavy drinking. The study also found that "strict" parents -- high on accountability and low on warmth -- more than doubled their teen's risk of heavy drinking. These results were apparent even when researchers controlled for other influences, such as peer pressure, religious and economic background.

"Authoritative parents tend to be highly demanding and highly responsive," the authors wrote. "They monitor their children closely and provide high levels of support and warmth. Our data suggest that peer encouragement to drink might have less impact when parents are both highly supportive and highly attentive."

The study is published in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Lee Romney  /  Los Angeles Times

Cyberstalking: The emerging form of partner violence

Violence in intimate relationships is all too common -- just ask any cop who's responded to the calls. But younger generations who grew up with computer technology have more to worry about than a punch or slap. Cyberstalking is emerging as a form of partner violence that differs from traditional domestic abuse and is troubling in the ease in which it occurs.

In a study published this month, Kansas State University researcher Lisa A. Melander shines a light on how cyberstalking impacts college-age students. Gathering data in male-only or female-only focus groups, Melander found a range of cyber harassment, including sending unsolicited or threatening e-mails, posting hostile Internet messages and obtaining personal information about the victim without his or her consent.

The study found some differences in cyber harassment compared to face-to-face domestic violence. One, the conflict is quick and easy, so flare-ups occur in cyberspace when they might have blown over if people were only communicating in person. Two, matters that would typically be private become public very quickly -- meaning friends, relatives and others can be pulled into the situation and also suffer from the conflict. And, three, geographic location has no bearing on the situation. Victims can't always escape by changing their physical location.

Melander also found that, contrary to traditional violence where there is likely one abuser and one victim, cyber harassment can often involve both partners because of the back-and-forth that takes place. Moreover, when people communicate via computer they are less inhibited and don't have visual cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, to guide their interactions. That too can aggravate conflict that is being played out in cyberspace.

Melander concludes that computer technology "may change how relationship violence occurs among younger generations." A previous study suggested that about one-third of college students reported some form of computer-based harassment. But much more research is needed on the impact of the "darker side" of technology, she said.

The study is published in the June issue of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

Biofeedback technique eases musicians' anxiety

If you've ever sat down at the piano to play a Mozart sonata and couldn't find middle C, you know the feeling of performance anxiety. The condition, often called stage fright, is anxiety that is so severe it can impede performance. As many as three-quarters of musicians have musical performance anxiety. Thus, for serious students, learning to master this condition may be as important as learning all the scales.

A new study shows that a specific biofeedback technique is highly effective in decreasing stage fright. Researchers studied 14 college-age musicians. The musicians' tendency to have stage fright was estimated in a performance before an audience at the start of the study (with questionnaires and heart rate measurements). Half of the musicians repeated the performance four weeks later. The other half received training in biofeedback that was designed to teach them how to control their heart rate through thoughts and emotions. These students also performed again after four weeks.

The study showed a 71% decrease in performance anxiety in the biofeedback group compared with the control group. The biofeedback group had a 62% improvement in performance. The musicians in the biofeedback group also said they had an overall increased sense of calmness, slept better, were more relaxed and had less anger in their everyday lives.

Biofeedback helps coordinate the brain-heart-body processes, the authors wrote. This synchronicity defeats performance anxiety and gives musicians a feeling of "flow," the authors said, which they defined as "when a person is functioning at peak capacity, including mind, body and energy."

The study appears in the current issue of Biofeedback, published by the Assn. for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

-- Shari Roan

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Photo credit: Mel Melcon  /  Los Angeles Times

Broken hearts hurt men more than women

Women may shed more tears over a busted romantic relationship, but men suffer the greater emotional toll, researchers say.

In a study of more than 1,000 men and women, ages 18 to 23, researchers found that unhappy romances cause men more emotional grief, including threatening their identity and feelings of self-worth. Young men and women express their distress at a breakup differently. Women are more likely to feel depressed after a breakup, while men are more likely to have substance-abuse problems.

Men may be more affected by a breakup because their romantic partners are their primary source of intimacy. Women, however, are more likely to have other close relationships with friends or family members to turn to for support, said the study's author, Robin Simon of Wake Forest University.

Nonmarital relationships are important to a young adult's well-being, Simon said. "However, the advantages of partner support and disadvantages of partner strain are more closely associated with men's than women's mental health," she wrote.
 
The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Javier Etxezarreta  /  EPA

A new Rx from the doctor: hang up and drive

We're all used to doctors asking us lifestyle-related health questions about drinking, smoking, using drugs or wearing seat belts. But should physicians also inquire about distracted driving?

Absolutely, says Dr. Amy Ship, author of a perspective paper in the Thursday issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The primary care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston makes the case that doctors should counsel patients about the potentially devastating effects of texting or talking on the phone while driving: "...as technology evolves, our questions must be updated in keeping with the risks..." she writes.

In her own practice, Ship says she asks patients about wearing seat belts, then segues into asking about texting while driving. If a patient cops to that, Ship counsels them on the hazards of that behavior. Even if patients only admit to talking on the phone while driving, Ship advises them on the risks they're taking. And though she's handy with statistics, Ship says that telling patients driving while distracted is about the same as driving drunk is often a better way to cut to the chase.

She also asks patients if they could cut down their phone use in the car, or even abstain altogether. She writes, "If patients tell me that occasionally they receive 'important' phone calls they don't want to miss, we discuss what that means in the context of the risks. We talk about alternatives, including pulling over to make or take calls. I remind them that we all managed without mobile phones until recently and encourage them to return to the practices of the pre-cellphone era."

For patients who argue that talking hands-free is OK, Ship counters with this: "...I ask them, 'How would you feel if the surgeon removing your appendix talked on the phone -- hands free, of course -- while operating?' "

We can't argue with Ship, and we wonder if more doctors will take up her call to counsel patients about the dangers of distracted driving. "A question about driving and distraction is as central to the preventive care we provide as the other questions we ask," she writes. "Not to ask -- and not to educate our patients and reduce their risk -- is to place in harm's way those we hope to heal."

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times