Psychological scientist Moïra Mikolajczak from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and her colleagues investigated just how trusting OT can make us. In this experiment, volunteers received either a placebo or OT nasal spray. Then, they played a trust game in which they received a certain amount of money which they could share with a partner (any amount shared with the partner would then triple). The partner then decides what to do the money—they can keep it all for themselves or split the amount with the giver. If the volunteer is trusting, they will share more money with their partner (in the hopes of having some of it returned to them) than volunteers who are not as trusting. The participants played the trust game against a computer and virtual partners (which were supposedly in another room), some of whom appeared reliable (they seemed likely to share the money with the participants) and some of whom appeared unreliable (they seemed likely to keep the money for themselves).

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that volunteers who received the OT nasal spray were more trusting of the computer and the reliable partners—that is, they offered more money to the computer and the reliable partner than did volunteers who received the placebo nasal spray. However, OT did not have an effect when it came to sharing with a seemingly unreliable partner—the volunteers were not generous towards a potentially unreliable partner, regardless of which nasal spray they received.

These findings suggest that OT fosters trust, but not gullibility: OT may make individuals more trusting, but only in certain situations. The authors conclude that “oxytocin is not the magical ‘trust elixir’ described in the news, on the Internet, or even by some influential researchers.”
Source: Association for Psychological Science

Source: Issuu

Source: LA Times

Source: BBC Magazine
Image: Flickr

A fascinating new paper by Gordon and colleagues reports the first longitudinal data on oxytocin levels during the initiation of parenting in humans. They evaluated 160 first-time parents (80 couples) twice after the birth of their first child, at 6 weeks and 6 months, by measuring each parents’ oxytocin levels and monitoring and coding their parenting behavior.

Three important findings emerged. At both time-points, fathers’ oxytocin levels were not different from levels observed in mothers. Thus, although oxytocin release is stimulated by birth and lactation in mothers, it appears that other aspects of parenthood serve to stimulate oxytocin release in fathers.

Corresponding author Dr. Ruth Feldman noted that this finding “emphasizes the importance of providing opportunities for father-infant interactions immediately after childbirth in order to trigger the neuro-hormonal system that underlies bond formation in humans.”

The neuroscientists also found a relationship between oxytocin levels in husbands and wives. Since oxytocin levels are highly stable within individuals, this finding suggests that some mechanisms, perhaps social or hormonal factors, regulate oxytocin levels in an interactive way within couples.

Finally, the findings revealed that oxytocin levels were associated with parent-specific styles of interaction. Oxytocin was higher in mothers who provided more affectionate parenting, such as more gazing at the infant, expression of positive affect, and affectionate touch. In fathers, oxytocin was increased with more stimulatory contact, encouragement of exploration, and direction of infant attention to objects.

“It is very interesting that elevations in the same hormone were associated with different types of parenting behaviors in mothers and fathers even though the levels of oxytocin within couples were somewhat correlated. These differences may reflect the impact of culture-specific role expectations, but they also may be indicative of distinct circuit effects of oxytocin in the male and female brain,” commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.

These important findings may now provide a foundation for studies of disturbances in oxytocin function in high risk parenting.
Source:Elsevier; The article is “Oxytocin and the Development of Parenting in Humans” by Ilanit Gordon, Orna Zagoory-Sharon, James F. Leckman, and Ruth Feldman. Gordon, Zagoory-Sharon, and Feldman are affiliated with Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Leckman and Feldman are affiliated with Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. The study was supported by the US-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 68, Issue 4 (August 15, 2010).

Source: Reuters

Sophie Molholm, Ph.D., discusses her new study of how children with autism spectrum disorders process sensory information such as sound, touch and vision. Dr. Molholm is associate professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of pediatrics.

A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has provided concrete evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process sensory information such as sound, touch and vision differently than typically developing children.

The study, which appears in the August 17 online issue of Autism Research, supports decades of clinical and anecdotal observations that individuals with ASD have difficulty coping with multiple sources of sensory information. The Einstein finding offers new insights into autism and could lead to objective measures for evaluating the effectiveness of autism therapies.

“One of the classic presentations of autism is the child in the corner with his hands over his ears rocking back and forth trying to block out the environment,” said senior author Sophie Molholm, Ph.D., associate professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of pediatrics. “People have long theorized that these children might not be integrating information across the senses very well. If you have all these sights and sounds coming at you but you can’t put them together in a meaningful way, the world can be an overwhelming place.”

The theory that autistic kids have trouble processing multisensory information has not been reliably supported by behavioral studies, and has rarely, if at all, been tested using measures of brain activity. Over the last few years, Dr. Molholm and her colleagues have been refining methods for measuring multisensory integration (MSI) using brainwave electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.

In the current study, MSI was measured in 17 ASD children, ages 6 to 16, and 17 typically developing children matched for age and non-verbal IQ. The children watched a silent video of their choice while they were presented with unrelated sounds and vibrations. The auditory and vibrational stimuli were presented separately (creating so-called unisensory conditions) and then together (multisensory condition), which acted as the researchers’ index of MSI. The children’s EEG responses to the unisensory conditions were summed and compared to their EEG responses to multisensory conditions.

The responses of the typically developing children to the multisensory stimuli exceeded the sum of their responses to the unisensory stimuli?an indication of healthy MSI, according to the researchers. In the ASD children, by contrast, the differences between the sum of children’s unisensory responses and their MSI responses were not nearly as pronounced, indicating that these kids were not integrating multisensory information as effectively.

“Our data makes a compelling case, at least for these conditions, that there are differences in multisensory integration between the two groups,” said Dr. Molholm.

After our nerves are stimulated, “sensory information arrives in the brain’s cortex within 20 milliseconds (ms), or 20/1000ths of a second,” said co-author John Foxe, Ph.D., professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of pediatrics and director of research of the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at Einstein. “Then it takes an additional 100 to 200 ms for the brain to integrate information arriving from different senses, since many brain regions are involved in analyzing it.”

In this study, the differences between the typically developing and ASD children were most striking for that time interval in which multisensory stimuli is normally processed. “We saw robust MSI in the typically developing kids from 100 and 200 ms after sensory stimulation reached the brain’s cortex,” said Dr. Foxe. “But in the ASD kids, MSI occurred significantly later—at about 310 ms—and at a much lower level.”

“This doesn’t mean that the children with ASD didn’t integrate the information at all,” he added. “It does mean that they didn’t integrate it as effectively as they should have, given their age and maturity. They may go on to integrate well later in life. We don’t know. This is a single slice of the developmental trajectory.”

“This was a much-needed study of multisensory integration in autism,” said Barry E. Stein, Ph.D., professor and chair of neurobiology & anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the Einstein study. “Using simple logic and standard techniques for electrically mapping the brain, the authors have identified defects in the way ASD individuals synthesize cues from different senses. In doing so, they have not only helped confirm the insights of parents and clinicians, but they’ve improved our understanding of how the behavioral differences in children with ASD may result from sensory anomalies.”

“Today, there’s a cottage industry—actually more like a military-industrial complex— for multisensory integration therapies for children with autism,” said Dr. Foxe. “A lot of parents’ hard-earned cash goes into these interventions, all in the absence of actual empirical evidence that there is anything wrong with MSI in these children or that these therapies do any good.”

The researchers are currently evaluating MSI in children from 6 years of age through early adulthood to better understand the developmental trajectory of multisensory integration. They also plan to study MSI in lower-functioning ASD children. “This experimental paradigm is especially good for that, because it makes so little demand on the kids,” said Dr. Foxe. “As you can imagine, asking them to do tasks doesn’t work very well.”

Dr. Molholm and Dr. Foxe’s study, “Multisensory processing in children with autism: high-density electrical mapping of auditory-somatosensory integration,” appears in the August 17 online issue of Autism Research. The first author is Natalie Russo, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Molholm and Dr. Foxe. The other co-authors are doctoral students Alice Brandwein and Ted Altschuler, and Hilary Gomes, Ph.D., a professor in psychology at the City College of New York.

Support for this research was provided by Cure Autism Now, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Wallace Research Foundation and the Canadian Institute of Health Research.

T. Roberts

Its happening all over, (even in my own home) young people moving back home. The New York Times What is it about 20-somethings? looks at the connundrum of why young people are taking longer to reach adulthood.

A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation. link to read article

Source: New York Times

Parents don’t have as much impact on their kids as they think. Yet the amount of time parents, especially moms, spend with their kids has risen dramatically. This would make sense if kids were providing their parents with commensurate increases in joy, but the sad fact is that kids don’t make us happier. In fact, a study by sociologist Robin Simon from Wake Forest says that parents are, across the board, more depressed than non-parents.
Parents need to take a step back and reconsider their priorities. So-called helicopter moms are sacrificing friendships, communities, and even marriages to hyper-manage their children’s lives, says sociologist Margaret Nelson from Middlebury College. And while some studies say helicopter parenting can lead to neurotic kids, Nelson is worried less about the kids and more about the mothers’ sanity link to article

Source: Big Think

The research, published in prestigious scientific journal Brain, is based on a major population study of women from Gothenburg. A representative sample of women were examined for the first time in 1968 when aged between 38 and 60, and then re-examined in 1974, 1980, 1992 and 2000.

A question about psychological stress was included in the 1968, 1974 and 1980 surveys and was answered by 1,415 women.

“Stress was defined as a sense of irritation, tension, nervousness, anxiety, fear or sleeping problems lasting a month or more due to work, health, family or other problems,” explains Lena Johansson, a researcher from the Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology Unit at the Sahlgrenska Academy’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg.

During the 35 years of the study, 161 of the participants developed dementia, mainly in the form of Alzheimer’s disease. The risk of dementia was about 65% higher in women who reported repeated periods of stress in middle age than in those who did not. In women who reported stress in all three surveys, the risk more than doubled.

“This is the first study to show that stress in middle age can lead to dementia in old age, and confirms similar findings from studies of animals. Stress has previously been shown to increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke, heart attack and hypertension,” says Johansson, who also refers to earlier research at the Sahlgrenska Academy showing that cardiovascular disease can lead to Alzheimer’s.

“This study could result in a better understanding of the risk factors for dementia, but our results need to be confirmed by other studies, and further research is needed in the area. Most of those who said that they were stressed did not develop dementia, so it’s not currently possible to advise people to be less stressed or warn about the dangers of high stress levels due to an increased risk of developing dementia.”

Source:University of Gothenburg , Brain
Image: Getty Images