Mindcare Counselling Blog

As we get older, our cognitive abilities change, improving when we're younger and declining as we age. Scientists posit a hierarchical structure within which these abilities are organized. There's the "lowest" level -- measured by specific tests, such as story memory or word memory; the second level, which groups various skills involved in a category of cognitive ability, such as memory, perceptual speed, or reasoning; and finally, the "general," or G, factor, a sort of statistical aggregate of all the thinking abilities. What happens to this structure as we age? That was the question Timothy A. Salthouse, Brown-Forman professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, investigated in a new study appearing in an upcoming issue of  Psychological Science , a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. His findings advance psychologists' understanding of the complexities of the aging brain. "There are three hypotheses about how ...

UC Berkeley researchers have found that stress chemicals shut down and the brain processes emotional experiences during the REM dream phase of sleep They say time heals all wounds, and new research from the University of California, Berkeley, indicates that time spent in dream sleep can help. UC Berkeley researchers have found that during the dream phase of sleep, also known as REM sleep, our stress chemistry shuts down and the brain processes emotional experiences and takes the painful edge off difficult memories. The findings offer a compelling explanation for why people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as war veterans, have a hard time recovering from painful experiences and suffer reoccurring nightmares.They also offer clues into why we dream. "The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day's emotional experiences," s...

Online psychology clinics could help people cope with a variety of anxiety disorders, Australian experience reveals. The Anxiety Online clinic of the Swinburne University of Technology has been lauded by the  Journal of Medical Internet Research . The eTherapy programs of the clinic are tailored to treat generalised anxiety, panic, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and social anxiety disorders.  More than 220 people with an least one mild anxiety symptom – who completed one of the five fully-automated programs over 12 weeks – showed significant improvements on 21 of 25 measures, Swinburne researchers have reported.  Each program consists of 12 modules using text-based and multimedia materials such as audio, video and animated graphics and online activities.  Swinburne National eTherapy Centre Director Associate Professor Britt Klein said that although the findings need to be replicated, the preliminary results were very pleasing.  “Essentially we ...

November 3, 2011 — A new study provides more evidence that people with schizophrenia have a diminished sense of mind–body connection, or "body ownership," and hints that yoga and other types of movement therapy that get patients to focus on their own body may be helpful. Katharine N. Thakkar, PhD, from the Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia outpatients and 21 healthy control patients by testing their susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI). First described in 1998, this tactile illusion is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the participant's own hidden hand. "Watching a rubber hand being stroked while one's own unseen hand is stroked simultaneously often leads to a sense of ownership over the rubber hand and a shift in perceived position of the real hand toward the rubber hand," the investigators explain in their...

In times of stress, we're often encouraged to pause for a moment and simply be in the 'now.' This kind of mindfulness, an essential part of Buddhist and Indian Yoga traditions, has entered the mainstream as people try to find ways to combat stress and improve their quality of life. And research suggests that mindfulness meditation can have benefits for health and performance, including improved immune function, reduced blood pressure, and enhanced cognitive function. But how is it that a single practice can have such wide-ranging effects on well-being? A new article published in the latest issue of  Perspectives on Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, draws on the existing scientific literature to build a framework that can explain these positive effects. The goal of this work, according to author Britta Hölzel, of Justus Liebig University and Harvard Medical School, is to "unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity o...

Lead author, Michael F. Lorber, now at NYU, looks at mother-child parenting patterns from birth to first grade Children who are persistently aggressive, defiant, and explosive by the time they're in kindergarten very often have tumultuous relationships with their parents from early on. A new longitudinal study suggests that a cycle involving parenting styles and hostility between mothers and toddlers is at play. The study was done by researchers at the University of Minnesota and appears in the journal  Child Development . The researchers looked at more than 260 mothers and their children, following them from the children's birth until first grade. They assessed infants' difficult temperament as well as how they were parented between the first week and the sixth month of life, based on both observations and parent reports. When the children were 2 and a half and 3 years old, the researchers watched mothers with their children doing tasks that challenged the children and r...

Success in math takes practice to control fears. Using brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in math. For the highly math anxious, researchers found a strong link between math success and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes involved in controlling attention and regulating negative emotional reactions. This response kicked in at the very mention of having to solve a mathematics problem. Teachers as well as students can use the information to improve performance in mathematics, said Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago. Beilock and PhD student Ian Lyons report their findings in the article, "Mathematics Anxiety: Separating the Math from the Anxiety," published Oct. 20 in the journal  Cerebral Cortex . "Classroom prac...

BOSTON – Updated guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) offer new information on diagnosing and treating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in younger children and in adolescents. Emerging evidence makes it possible to diagnose and manage ADHD in children from ages 4 to 18 (the previous AAP guidelines, from 2000 and 2001, covered children ages 6 to 12). The new guidelines describe the special considerations involved in diagnosing and treating preschool children and adolescents. They also include interventions to help children with hyperactive/impulsive behaviors that do not meet the full diagnostic criteria for ADHD. "Treating children at a young age is important, because when we can identify them earlier and provide appropriate treatment, we can increase their chances of succeeding in school," said Mark Wolraich, MD, FAAP, lead author of the report. "Because of greater awareness about ADHD and better ways of diagnosing and treating this di...

"Babies and young children are like the R&D division of the human species," says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play. Alison Gopnik takes us into the fascinating minds of babies and children, and shows us how much we understand before we even realize we do. About Dr. Alison Gopnik  Dr. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.  The author of  The Philosophical Baby, The Scientist in the Crib  and other influential books on cognitive development, Gopnik presents evidence that babies and children are conscious of far more than we give them credit for, as they engage every sense and spend every waking moment discovering, filing away, analyzing and acting on information about how the world works. Gopnik’s work draws on psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical develo...

Gestalt Therapy was developed in the 1940′s by Fritz and Laura Perls and further influenced by the likes of Kurt Lewin and Kurt Goldstein (Corsini & Wedding, 2000). It was developed as a revision to psychoanalysis and focuses on an experiential and humanistic approach rather than analysis of the unconscious which was one of the main therapeutic tools at the time Gestalt Therapy was employed. Gestalt Therapy rejects the dualities of mind and body, body and soul, thinking and feeling, and feeling and action. According to Perls, people are not made up of separate components, this is, mind, body and soul, rather human beings function as a whole. In doing so, one defines who one is (sense of self) by choice of responses to environmental interactions (boundaries). The word “Gestalt” (of German origin) refers to a “whole, configuration, integration, pattern or form” (Patterson, 1986). The form of Gestalt Therapy practiced today utilises ideas, data and interventions from multiple sources...

For some people, the glass is always half full. Even when a football fan's team has lost ten matches in a row, he might still be convinced his team can reverse its run of bad luck. So why, in the face of clear evidence to suggest to the contrary, do some people remain so optimistic about the future? In a study published today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) show that people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to 'faulty' function of their frontal lobes. People's predictions of the future are often unrealistically optimistic. A problem that has puzzled scientists for decades is why human optimism is so pervasive, when reality continuously confronts us with information that challenges these biased beliefs. "Seeing the glass as half full rather than half empt...

The new University of Warwick led research found that in significant numbers of the depressed test subjects they examined by fMRI that this hate circuit had become decoupled. Those depressed people also seemed to have experienced other significant disruptions to brain circuits associated with; risk and action, reward and emotion, and attention and memory processing. The researchers found that in the depressed subjects: A new study using MRI scans, led by Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science, has found that depression frequently seems to uncouple the brain's "Hate Circuit". The study entitled " The Hate circuits were 92% per cent likely to be decoupled The Risk/Action circuit was 92% likely to be decoupled The Emotion/Reward circuit was 82% likely to be decoupled Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer  studies said that: "The results are clear but at f...

Today ,as a weekend special I take a detour and instead of posting a new research study , I'll share a beautiful video of Autistic water boy Jason McElwain in his first game sinking 6 3-pointers in a row!! Watch the crowd go insane when he sinks the buzzer beater!! Image credit :  Autism Awareness Ribbon , a photo by  Cheryl's Art Box  on Flickr.

  Today ,as a weekend special I take a detour and instead of posting a new research study , I'll  share a beautiful video  of Autistic water boy Jason McElwain in his first game sinking 6 3-pointers in a row!! Watch the crowd go insane when he sinks the buzzer beater!!

The drinking habits of the friends of a teenager's boyfriend or girlfriend may have more influence on the youngster's drinking than the habits of the teen's own friends or romantic partner. That's the finding of U.S. researchers who analyzed national data collected from 449 heterosexual couples who were in grades 7 to 12 in the mid-1990s. The study appears in the October issue of the journal American Sociological Review. "Dating someone whose friends are big drinkers is more likely to cause an adolescent to engage in dangerous drinking behaviors than are the drinking habits of the adolescent's own friends or romantic partner," lead author Derek Kreager, an associate professor of crime, law, and justice at Pennsylvania State University, said in a journal news release. "This applies to both binge drinking and drinking frequency." For example, the researchers found that teens whose romantic partner's friends were heavy drinkers were mo...

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have used an imaging technique to show that the brain activation patterns in children with poor reading skills and a low IQ are similar to those in poor readers with a typical IQ. The work provides more definitive evidence about poor readers having similar kinds of difficulties regardless of their general cognitive ability. Schools and psychologists have historically relied on a child's IQ to define and diagnose dyslexia, a brain-based learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read: If a child's reading achievement was below expectation based on IQ, he would be considered dyslexic, while a poor reader with a low IQ would receive some other diagnosis. But these new findings provide "biological evidence that IQ should not be emphasized in the diagnosis of reading abilities," said Fumiko Hoeft, MD, Ph.D, an instructor at Stanford's Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, who ...