Mindcare Counselling Blog

Men and women differ in the way they anticipate an unpleasant emotional experience, which influences the effectiveness with which that experience is committed to memory, according to new research.  In the study, supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, women showed heightened neural responses in anticipation of negative experiences, but not positive ones. The neural response during  anticipation was related to the success of remembering that event in the future. No neural signature was found during anticipation in either positive or negative experiences in men.  Dr Giulia Galli, lead author from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said: "When  expecting a negative experience, women might have a higher emotional responsiveness than men, indicated by their brain activity. This is likely to then affect how they remember the negative event."  "For example, when watching disturbing scenes in films there are often cues before anything 'bad' happens, suc...

Happy adolescents report less involvement in crime and drug use than other youth, a new UC Davis study finds. The paper, “Get Happy! Positive Emotion, Depression and Juvenile Crime,” is co-authored by Bill McCarthy, a UC Davis sociology professor, and Teresa Casey, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis, and will be presented at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 22 at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. “Our results suggest that the emphasis placed on happiness and well-being by positive psychologists and others is warranted,” McCarthy said. “In addition to their other benefits, programs and policies that increase childhood and adolescent happiness may have a notable effect on deterring nonviolent crime and drug use.” The authors used 1995 and 1996 data from nearly 15,000 seventh- to ninth-grade students in the federally funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the largest, most comprehensive survey of adolescents ever undertaken. They found that about 29 p...

Updated leisure text adds new facets of leisure theory to aid budding practitioners in the field Do people in China think about leisure the same way North Americans do? Do men and women perceive leisure differently, or is all leisure positive? And how do you know if you're experiencing leisure at all? Leisure professor Dr. Gordon Walker can answer all of those questions – and more. After all, he's written the book on it. Walker a professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta is co-author with Douglas Kleiber (University of Georgia) and Roger Mannell (University of Waterloo) of "A Social Psychology of Leisure," one of the most cited textbooks on the subject. First published in 1997, and with the second edition hot off the press, Walker says the book gives undergraduate students and graduate students new to the subject, a multi-faceted foundational text looking at leisure from many angles, including psychological, socio-cult...

It has typically been thought that boys and men generally don’t like to talk about their problems out of embarrassment or fear that they’ll be considered weak. But researchers at the University of Missouri say the real reason is because males typically think talking about problems is a waste of time. According to a  Missouri release , in conducting four studies with 2,000 children and adolescents, researchers found that each gender has different expectations regarding how they would feel after talking about their problems. The girls generally said they would feel understood and less alone, whereas the boys said they would feel like they were “wasting time” or “felt weird” doing it. According to the researchers, the boys who were surveyed did not express any more fear than the girls about being teased for talking about their problems. In discussing the implications of the study findings, researcher Amanda J. Rose said it is important for parents to explain to young boys that talkin...

A soon-to-be released study in  Psychological Science  suggests that the self-pride found among the residents of certain countries is not necessarily a cultural difference but actually relates to economic inequality within countries. According to a  release  from the Association for Psychological Science, the differences in “self-enhancement” were originally thought to be differences between Eastern and Western philosophies. But researchers surveyed 1,625 people in 15 culturally diverse countries and discovered that economic inequality was the greatest factor in predicting self-enhancement. Researchers found that while everyone across the world rated themselves above average, “the more economically unequal the country, the greater was its participants’ self-enhancement.” “We don’t know the precise mechanism, but it seems unlikely that it is primarily an East-West difference,” said researcher Steve Loughnan. “It’s got to do with how your society distributes its resou...

Health communicators have long searched for the most effective ways to convince smokers to quit. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that using a combination of disturbing images and threatening messages to prevent smoking is not effective and could potentially cause an unexpected reaction. Read More Image Credit : elycefeliz

We all feel overwhelmed by difficult emotions or situations sometimes. But most people get through it or can put their problems in perspective and find a way to carry on with determination and hope. So why does one person try suicide when another person in the same tough situation does not? What are the latest advances in suicide prevention research. NIMH researcher Dr. Jane Pearson talks about warning signs as well as progress in suicide prevention. Other links to Suicide related research : http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/Suicide-FactSheet-a.pdf http://www.suicidology.org/web/guest/home http://www.sprc.org/library/prevtoolkit.pdf http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/linksmedia.html

Blaming others can ruin your health - CNN.com

Boys are getting used to grow physically . The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century . Joshua Goldstein, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (MPIDR), has used mortality data to demonstrate this trend, which until now was difficult to decipher. What had already been established for girls now seems to also be true for boys: the time period during which young people are sexually mature but socially not yet considered adults is widening. © MPIDR, Human Mortality Database,  www.mortality.org "The reason for earlier maturity for boys, as with girls, is probably because nutrition and disease environments are getting more favourable for it," says demographer Joshua Goldstein. It has long been documented by medical records that girls are experiencing their first menstruation earlier and earlier. But comparable data analysis for boys did not exist. Goldstein ...