Psychology

Love really does change how the brain works

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 Love can make people do crazy things, and now a new study is explaining why. Scientists in Australia have found that love really does scramble the human brain on a neurological level.

While prior studies have established that romantic love has a connection to the release of oxytocin, often called the “love hormone,” within the brain, this new report documents how a specific area of the brain is responsible for placing our sweethearts on a pedestal when we first fall in love. This project was a joint collaboration featuring The University of South Australia, The Australian National University, and the University of Canberra.

“We actually know very little about the evolution of romantic love,” says ANU lead researcher and PhD student Adam Bode in a university release. “As a result, every finding that tells us about romantic love’s evolution is an important piece of the puzzle that’s just been started.”

“It is thought that romantic love first emerged some five million years ago after we split from our ancestors, the great apes. We know the ancient Greeks philosophized about it a lot, recognizing it both as an amazing as well as traumatic experience. The oldest poem ever to be recovered was in fact a love poem dated to around 2000 BC.”

couple standing on body of water during golden hour
A couple on the beach

Study authors explain this project was the first ever to investigate and analyze the link connecting the human mind’s behavioral activation system (BAS) and feelings of romantic love. In all, a total of 1,556 young adults who identified as being “in love” took part in a survey. Questions mostly focused on their emotional reaction to their partner, their behavior around them, and the focus they placed on their loved one above everything else.

Sure enough, researchers discovered that when people fall in love, our brains react differently. Our new romantic flame becomes the center of our lives. Bode explains this study has shed some light on the mysterious mechanisms underlying romantic love.

Dr. Phil Kavanagh, University of Canberra academic and UniSA Adjunct Associate Professor, notes that this work indicates romantic love is associated with changes in behavior as well as emotion.

“We know the role that oxytocin plays in romantic love, because we get waves of it circulating throughout our nervous system and blood stream when we interact with loved ones,” Dr. Kavanagh concludes. “The way that loved ones take on special importance, however, is due to oxytocin combining with dopamine, a chemical that our brain releases during romantic love. Essentially, love activates pathways in the brain associated with positive feelings.”

Where do you feel love? Study reveals the emotion is all in your head

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The heart may be the “love muscle,” but a new study finds the feeling of love is all in the head. Aalto University researchers have identified where in the body people feel various types of love and the intensity with which they experience this emotion. They found that love forms a spectrum, with some types felt more intensely than others, and that the sensation of love tends to center in a person’s head.

“It was noteworthy, though not very surprising, that the types of love associated with close relationships are similar and are the most strongly experienced,” says Pärttyli Rinne, a philosopher who coordinated the study.

The research was a joint initiative between Rinne and Professor Emeritus Mikko Sams. Furthermore, doctoral researcher Mikke Tavast took charge of analyzing the data, while Enrico Glerean developed the research methods.

The researchers surveyed participants on their experiences of 27 distinct types of love, ranging from romantic and parental love to feelings for strangers, nature, God, and even oneself. Participants had to indicate on a body silhouette where they felt each type of love and how intensely they experienced it both physically and mentally.

To clarify, their findings, published in Philosophical Psychology, illustrated that all the love types were most intensely felt in the head. However, the intensity and spread varied in other body areas. Some types of love were felt only in the chest, while others radiated throughout the entire body. The more intense the love, the more widespread the feeling was in the body.

“‘Love between persons is divided into sexual and non-sexual. The types of love that are particularly close to each other are those that have a sexual or romantic dimension,” Rinne explains in a university release.

The types of love form a gradient in intensity and in how widely they're felt throughout the body
The types of love form a gradient in intensity and in how widely they’re felt throughout the body.

“It was also interesting to find a strong correlation between the physical and mental intensity of the emotion and its pleasantness. The more strongly a type of love is felt in the body, the more strongly it’s felt in the mind and the more pleasant it is,” Rinne adds.

“When we move from more strongly experienced types of love to less strongly experienced types, the sensations in the chest area become weaker. It may be that, for example, love for strangers or wisdom is associated with a cognitive process. It may also be that there are pleasant sensations in the head area. This is something that should be investigated further.”

Rinne also touched upon the cultural nuances in love experiences. For instance, if the study were conducted in a deeply religious community, love for God might be the most dominant feeling. Similarly, for parents in relationships, love for children could be the most potent emotion.

Over 200 New Depression-Related Genes Identified

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Summary: A groundbreaking study has uncovered more than 200 genes linked to depression, shedding light on the complex nature of the condition. This global research effort, the first of its kind, analyzed genetic data from nearly one million participants of diverse ancestry groups.

The study identified over 50 new genetic loci and 205 novel genes associated with depression, offering potential drug targets and insights into its development. Importantly, it emphasizes the need for diverse genetic datasets to better understand and treat this widespread mental health disorder.

Key Facts:

  1. The study identified over 200 genes linked to depression, with more than 50 new genetic loci discovered.
  2. Drug repurposing potential was highlighted, as one gene encodes a protein targeted by a common diabetes drug.
  3. Diversity in genetic research is crucial, as genetic hits for depression showed less overlap across ancestry groups than expected.

Source: UCL

More than 200 genes linked to depression have been newly identified in a worldwide study led by UCL researchers.

The research, published in Nature Genetics, found more than 50 new genetic loci (a locus is a specific position on a chromosome) and 205 novel genes that are associated with depression in the first large-scale global study of the genetics of major depression in participants of diverse ancestry groups.

The study also showcases the potential for drug repurposing, as one of the identified genes encodes a protein targeted by a common diabetes drug, while also pointing to new targets for drugs that may be developed to treat depression.

Depression is very common, yet how it develops is still poorly understood. Genetic research using big data offers new avenues to understand the disease and has uncovered dozens of genes associated with depression, each of which individually confers only a small increase in risk.

It can also help find new drug targets, but so far, research has mainly focused on people of European ancestry, which the researchers say is a major shortcoming, especially for such a complex condition as depression.

The new paper involved multiple genetic research methods, including genome-wide association studies, a meta-analysis of previously published data, and a transcriptome-wide association study.

The international research team reviewed genetic data from 21 study cohorts from several countries and included nearly one million study participants of African, East Asian, South Asian, and Hispanic/Latin American descent, including 88,316 people with major depression.

The study has made major advances in identifying genes that are linked to the risk of depression, both for newly identified links and by strengthening prior evidence, and showcases some genes with potential implications for drug development, such as NDUFAF3.

The protein that NDUFAF3 encodes has been implicated previously in mood instability, and it is targeted by metformin, the first-line drug for treating type 2 diabetes. Animal studies of metformin have suggested a possible link with reduced depression and anxiety, so this latest finding further suggests that additional research into metformin and depression may be warranted.

Other genes identified in the study may have biologically plausible links with depression, such as a gene linked to a neurotransmitter involved in goal-directed behavior and genes encoding a type of protein previously linked with multiple neurological conditions.

Surprisingly, the researchers found less overlap in the genetic hits for depression across ancestry groups than expected, at about 30% (based on a new method developed by the research team to gauge the degree to which a genetic association found in one ancestry group is applicable to another ancestry group), which is less overlap than previously found for other traits and diseases.

Therefore, it is even more important to study depression in diverse samples because some of the findings might be ancestry-specific.

Lead author Professor Karoline Kuchenbaecker (UCL Psychiatry and UCL Genetics Institute) said, “Here we show beyond doubt that our understanding of such complex diseases as depression will remain incomplete until we overcome the Eurocentric bias in genetics research and look for causes in diverse people across the world.”

“Many genes previously found to be linked to the risk of depression might only actually affect depression risk in people of European origin, so in order for genetic research to contribute to new drugs that can help people of all ancestries, it is vital that our genetic datasets are suitably diverse.”

Professor Kuchenbaecker added, “This is a first-stage discovery effort, so more work will be needed to confirm these new targets, but finding them in the first place has been a huge and vital challenge, especially for a disorder where new medications are so urgently needed.”

Abstract

Multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of major depression aids locus discovery, fine mapping, gene prioritization and causal inference

Most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of major depression (MD) have been conducted in samples of European ancestry. Here we report a multi-ancestry GWAS of MD, adding data from 21 cohorts with 88,316 MD cases and 902,757 controls to previously reported data.

This analysis used a range of measures to define MD and included samples of African (36% of effective sample size), East Asian (26%) and South Asian (6%) ancestry and Hispanic/Latin American participants (32%). The multi-ancestry GWAS identified 53 significantly associated novel loci.

For loci from GWAS in European ancestry samples, fewer than expected were transferable to other ancestry groups. Fine mapping benefited from additional sample diversity. A transcriptome-wide association study identified 205 significantly associated novel genes.

These findings suggest that, for MD, increasing ancestral and global diversity in genetic studies may be particularly important to ensure discovery of core genes and inform about transferability of findings.

More Parallel “Traffic” Observed in Human Brains than in Animals

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Scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and collaborators compared human brain communication networks with those of macaques and mice and found that only the human brains transmitted information via multiple parallel pathways.

The researchers said their study “Evidence for increased parallel information transmission in human brain networks compared to macaques and male mice,” published in Nature Communications, not only provided new insights into mammalian evolution but also could potentially play a role in neurorehabilitation after brain injury, or in the prevention of cognitive decline in pathologies of advanced age.

“Some people age healthily, while others experience cognitive decline, so we’d like to see if there is a relationship between this difference and the presence of parallel information streams, and whether they could be trained to compensate neurodegenerative processes,” said Alessandra Griffa, PhD, senior postdoctoral researcher.

When describing brain communication networks, Griffa likes to use travel metaphors. Brain signals are sent from a source to a target, establishing a polysynaptic pathway that intersects multiple brain regions “like a road with many stops along the way.”

She explains that structural brain connectivity pathways have already been observed based on networks (“roads”) of neuronal fibers. But as a scientist in the medical image processing lab (MIP:Lab) in EPFL’s school of engineering, and a research coordinator at Lausanne University Hospital’s (CHUV) Leenaards Memory Centre, Griffa wanted to follow patterns of information transmission to see how messages are sent and received. She and her colleagues created “brain traffic maps” that could be compared between humans and other mammals.

Close up photo of two doctors male and female working in laboratory holding digital tablet and analysing mri scan image.

Reconstructing the brain road maps

To achieve this, the researchers used open-source diffusion (DWI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from humans, macaques, and mice, which was gathered while subjects were awake and at rest. The DWI scans allowed the scientists to reconstruct the brain “road maps,” and the fMRI scans allowed them to see different brain regions light up along each “road,” which indicated that these pathways were relaying neural information.

They analyzed the multimodal MRI data using information and graph theory, and Griffa says that it is this novel combination of methods that yielded fresh insights.

“By applying a graph- and information-theory approach to assess information-related pathways in male mouse, macaque, and human brains, we show a brain communication gap between selective information transmission in non-human mammals, where brain regions share information through single polysynaptic pathways, and parallel information transmission in humans, where regions share information through multiple parallel pathways,” wrote the investigators.

“In humans, parallel transmission acts as a major connector between unimodal and transmodal systems. The layout of information-related pathways is unique to individuals across different mammalian species, pointing at the individual-level specificity of information routing architecture. Our work provides evidence that different communication patterns are tied to the evolution of mammalian brain networks.”

Animal and human brain schematics
In the mouse and macaque brains, information was sent along a single “road,” while in humans, there were multiple parallel pathways between the same source and target. [Alessandra Griffa CHUV/EPFL CC BY-SA]

“What’s new in our study is the use of multimodal data in a single model combining two branches of mathematics: graph theory, which describes the polysynaptic ‘roadmaps,’ and information theory, which maps information transmission (or ‘traffic’) via the roads,” explained Griffa. The basic principle is that messages passed from a source to a target remain unchanged or are further degraded at each stop along the road, like the telephone game we played as children.”

The researchers’ approach revealed that in the non-human brains, information was sent along a single “road,” while in humans, there were multiple parallel pathways between the same source and target. Furthermore, these parallel pathways were as unique as fingerprints, and could be used to identify individuals.

“Such parallel processing in human brains has been hypothesized, but never observed before at a whole-brain level,” added Griffa.

Griffa explained that the beauty of the model is its simplicity, and its generating new perspectives and research avenues in evolution and computational neuroscience. For example, the findings can be linked to the expansion of human brain volume over time, which has given rise to more complex connectivity patterns.

“We could hypothesize that these parallel information streams allow for multiple representations of reality, and the ability to perform abstract functions specific to humans,” she pointed out.

Although this hypothesis is only speculative, as the study involved no testing of subjects’ computational or cognitive ability, these are questions that Griffa would like to explore in the future.

The Effectiveness of Interventions for Improving Chronic Pain Symptoms Among People With Mental Illness

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Chronic pain (CP) and mental illness (MI) are leading causes of years lived with disability and commonly co-occur. However, it remains unclear if available interventions are effective in improving pain outcomes in patients with co-existing CP and MI. This systematic review synthesised evidence for the effectiveness of interventions to improve pain outcomes for people with comorbid CP and clinically diagnosed MI. Ten electronic databases were searched from inception until May 2023. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were included if they evaluated interventions for CP-related outcomes among people with comorbid CP and clinically diagnosed MI. Pain-related and mental health outcomes were reported as primary and secondary outcomes, respectively. 26 RCTs (2,311 participants) were included. Four trials evaluated the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioural therapy, 6 mindfulness-based interventions, 1 interpersonal psychotherapy, 5 body-based interventions, 5 multi-component interventions, and 5 examined pharmacological-based interventions. Overall, there was considerable heterogeneity in sample characteristics and interventions, and included studies were generally of poor quality with insufficient trial details being reported. Despite the inconsistency in results, preliminary evidence suggests interventions demonstrating a positive effect on CP may include cognitive-behavioural therapy for patients with depression (with a small to medium effect size) and multi-component intervention for people with substance use disorders (with a small effect size). Despite the high occurrence/burden of CP and MI, there is a relative paucity of RCTs investigating interventions and none in people with severe MI. More rigorously designed RCTs are needed to further support our findings. PERSPECTIVE: This systematic review presents current evidence evaluating interventions for CP-related and MH outcomes for people with comorbid CP and clinically diagnosed MI. Our findings could potentially help clinicians identify the most effective treatments to manage these symptoms for this vulnerable patient group.

An enormous study links intelligence and personality in surprising ways

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Are fools happy and geniuses disorganized — or is that a mistaken stereotype?

Thousands of studies examine human personality and intelligence — core aspects of individuality — including how to measure them and how they impact life outcomes. But we know surprisingly little about how personality and intelligence relate to each another.

“Each study pressed a pinprick in the veil, offering an insight into what makes people unique,” Kevin Stanek, a human capital researcher at Gilead Sciences, explained to Big Think. “But we wanted the panoramic view. We wanted to know how it all fits together to make each person an individual.”

So Stanek, Deniz Ones, and dozens of research assistants set out on a massive quest to collect data from every study they could find, including research that was never published, research by the military and private businesses, and research that had sat dormant on hard drives for decades. “We couldn’t have done it without thousands of hours of help from other researchers and volunteers,” reflects Stanek.

Fourteen years later, the massive data catalog has dropped. It contains 79 personality traits and 97 cognitive abilities from 1,300 studies from over 50 countries including over 2 million participants. And an early meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that personality and intelligence relate in some surprising ways.

What do we mean by personality and intelligence?

Personality and intelligence are largely genetic, stable traits that substantially influence the course of one’s life, from educational attainment and job performance to divorce rate and life expectancy. But what are they, exactly?

Personality describes how someone generally thinks, feels, and behaves. It is made up of five major independent traits, also known as the “Big 5”: neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness. Stanek and Ones’ dataset also incorporates several aspects and facets that make up each of the Big 5 traits, like depression and suspiciousness for neuroticism, and politeness and empathy for agreeableness.

Intelligence (termed cognitive ability by the researchers) describes how well someone can understand and apply information. Intelligence can be split into two kinds. Acquired knowledge, also called invested abilities, refers to specific skills and knowledge. Non-invested knowledge refers to all other cognitive abilities. Like personality, these two types of intelligence can be broken into facets like working memory, pattern recognition, and verbal ability.

“The links between these nuanced traits are what make us individuals,” explains Stanek. “They’re the richness of the picture beyond just personality types and IQ scores.”

How personality is related to intelligence

The disorganized and absentminded professor, the moody genius, the bubbly airhead — many stereotypes link certain personality traits to intelligence. Is any of this based in reality? Stanek and Ones’ initial meta-analysis of the compilation found hundreds of reliable relationships between personality and intelligence. (An interactive visualization is available here on Stanek’s website.) Here’s a sampling:

  • Openness, which refers to the willingness to engage with new ideas and experiences, is the only personality trait with an established history linking it to intelligence. As expected, openness was moderately strongly correlated with general mental ability. 
  • Conscientiousness, a measure of self-regulation and orderliness, correlated positively with intelligence overall. But some facets, including cautiousness and routine seeking, predicted lower cognitive abilities. 
  • Extraversion, a measure of sociality and enthusiasm, was only negligibly related to intelligence overall. However, the activity facet more strongly correlated, and (surprisingly) sociability had a small negative relationship with some cognitive abilities. 
  • Neuroticism encompasses negative emotionality, which can inhibit advanced thinking. Despite the trope of the moody genius, perhaps it’s no surprise that higher levels of neuroticism predicted lower levels of intelligence, albeit weakly. The uneven temper and depression facets were particularly strong predictors of decreased intelligence. 
  • Agreeableness, which relates to getting along with others, overall had the weakest correlation with intelligence. However, the compassion and interpersonal sensitivity facets were moderately strong predictors of general mental ability, and the politeness facet was negatively associated with some cognitive abilities.

In short, the data showed at least two things. First, most of the significant correlations occur at the facet level rather than the Big 5 level. Ignoring these more specific traits conceals important relationships between personality and cognitive ability. “It’s convenient to categorize people into basic types,” Ones says. ”But only by incorporating the many nuances of personality do we see the constellation of traits that matter and make someone unique.”

Second, many of our stereotypes are wrong. Happy, engaged, compassionate people are more likely to be intelligent than their moody, insensitive counterparts.

What to expect when you’re extraverted

Ones cautions against any causal claims. These are after all just correlations, and it will take time for researchers to fully assess how clusters of personality traits and abilities move together. But one intriguing possibility is that certain personalities are more likely to engage in cognitively enriching activities. This would explain why openness (that is, interest in engaging with new ideas and experiences) and activeness (a facet of extraversion) were positively related to intelligence.

It’s also possible that intelligence makes life easier, thus reducing negative emotionality and freeing one up to be less cautious and more compassionate. Or some third factor could be at play, like wealth or health boosting cognitive abilities and facilitating certain personality types. (Stanek and Ones are releasing a book this fall that will detail their thoughts on how it all fits together.)

“One takeaway is simply these neat connections — empathetic people, happy people, open people tend to be more intelligent,” says Ones. “But it’s bigger than that.” Stanek and Ones set their sights on using this information to better understand why personality and cognitive abilities go together, and ultimately how this information can optimize people’s success. 

“Right now, companies use information to understand and influence you,” Ones explains. “We want people to better understand themselves so they can identify their optimal job, friends, city, romantic partner, or anything else important to them.”

Brain Scans Reveal How Drinking Turns People Into Raging Assholes

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We all have that friend who gets a little out of hand when they start drinking alcohol. Maybe he gets loud, or maybe she starts fights with strangers for looking at her funny. Alcohol seems to induce aggression, changing the brain in a way that makes a drunk person more likely to see minor social cues as threats, but how it does so has always been a bit of biological mystery.

Scientists found that alcohol-induced aggression was correlated to decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex.

But in a paper published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, a team of researchers led by Thomas Denson, Ph.D., of the University of New South Wales School of Psychology use brain scans to show that alcohol changes activity in certain key parts of the brain related to aggression and emotion.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that tracks changes in blood flow in the brain, the team looked at the brains of 50 young men after they consumed either two alcoholic drinks or two non-alcoholic placebo drinks. These volunteers engaged in a task that gauged their level of aggression in the face of provocation, which revealed the parts of the brain that become more active in such situations.

These scans show how alcohol-induced aggression was related to decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but increased activity in the hippocampus.
These scans show how alcohol-induced aggression was related to decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but increased activity in the hippocampus.

The researchers found that alcohol-induced aggression was correlated with decreased activity in prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but increased activity in the hippocampus. These parts of the brain all control key factors in aggression: The prefrontal cortex is associated with thoughtful action and social behavior, the caudate is linked to the brain’s reward system and inhibitory control, and the ventral striatum is a part of the reward system that makes you feel good when you do something good. The hippocampus, meanwhile, is associated with emotion and memory.

These results support previous hypotheses that prefrontal cortex dysfunction is associated with alcohol-induced aggression. Taking all these brain areas together, the researchers say their findings suggest that intoxicated people have trouble processing information through their working memory. In short, they suspect that alcohol focuses a person’s attention on the cues that could instigate aggression while taking attention away from their knowledge of social norms that say violence is not acceptable.

Along similar lines, they also suspect that alcohol could make relatively minor cues seem aggressive or violent, which can cause a drunk person to overreact to a minor incident, like someone looking at them funny or accidentally bumping into them at the bar. Denson’s previous research on the angry brain found a lot of overlap in the way the prefrontal cortex behaves when someone is drunk and angry versus when they’re simply ruminating on their anger while sober.

This research proposes some possible brain biomarkers for alcohol-induced aggression, which is a significant public health issue. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, alcohol-related violence — including homicide, child abuse, suicide, and firearm injuries — was responsible for more than 16,000 deaths between 2006 and 2010, the most recent years the agency reported figures.

While the new study doesn’t propose a solution per se, it does build on our body of knowledge around an age-old question: Why do some people become assholes when they get drunk?

Abstract: Alcohol intoxication is implicated in approximately half of all violent crimes. Over the past several decades, numerous theories have been proposed to account for the influence of alcohol on aggression. Nearly all of these theories imply that altered functioning in the prefrontal cortex is a proximal cause. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, 50 healthy young men consumed either a low dose of alcohol or a placebo and completed an aggression paradigm against provocative and nonprovocative opponents. Provocation did not affect neural responses. However, relative to sober participants, during acts of aggression, intoxicated participants showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but heightened activation in the hippocampus. Among intoxicated participants, but not among sober participants, aggressive behavior was positively correlated with activation in the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results support theories that posit a role for prefrontal cortical dysfunction as an important factor in intoxicated aggression.

Porn and video game addicts risk ‘masculinity crisis,’ says Stanford professor — RT News

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Men who play video games “in excess” and watch online porn are facing what has been called a masculinity crisis, according to a leading US psychologist.

Reuters/Robert Galbraith

For those who think online video games and porn are passive online activities that have no real consequences in the real world, take heed.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo interviewed 20,000 young people in the United States, 75 percent of them male, and found that excessive, solitary playing of video games and watching porn is seriously damaging the social development of young men.

​

“Our focus is on young men who play video games to excess, and do it in social isolation – they are alone in their room,” Zimbardo, who just released a book on the subject, entitled“Man (Dis)Connected,” told the BBC in an interview.

“Now, with freely available pornography – which is unique in history – they are combining playing video games, and as a break, watching on average, two hours of pornography a week.”

Zimbardo says “excessive” use of video games and pornography is not necessarily a matter of specific time, but rather the psychological change in mindset that such isolated activities produce, where the individual begins to feel he’d rather be doing that particular activity than anything else.

Phillip Zimbardo, 82, is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is perhaps best known for his 1971 experiment in which students were asked to play the roles of ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ in a mock prison. Intended to continue for two weeks, the experiment was aborted in less than a week as the initially normal ‘guards’ eventually became sadistic and the ‘prisoners’ became submissive and depressed. Zimbardo has also written introductory psychology books, textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect and the The Time Cure. Zimbardo is the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.

“When I’m in class, I’ll wish I was playing World of Warcraft. When I’m with a girl, I’ll wish I was watching pornography, because I’ll never get rejected,” he explained. The brains of young men are actually becoming “digitally rewired” by these new pastimes.

Zimbardo says that one of the consequences is the so-called“porn-induced erectile dysfunction,” or PIED, where young men who should be sexually active are “having a problem getting an erection.”

“You have this paradox – they’re watching exciting videos that should be turning them on, and they can’t get turned on.”

While playing video games and watching pornography are not necessarily bad activities, they can begin to have a negative effect on the social development of individuals if used in excess, the psychologist said.

He believes that parents need to take more control of the situation by taking simple steps, like keeping a journal for tracking how much time is being set aside for a variety of different activities, like doing homework, reading and writing.
At the same time, schools need to rethink their sexual education requirements, and instead of placing excessive emphasis on the physical side of relations, talk more about communication and expressing emotions, he said.

“We need to set standards of excellence, and be aware that there is a problem in the first place,”Zimbardo said.

High IQ could be shield against schizophrenia, scientists say.

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An Albert Einstein pumpkin is pictured at Madame Tussauds in New York (Reuters / Carlo Allegri)

An Albert Einstein pumpkin is pictured at Madame Tussauds in New York .

High intelligence might halt the development of schizophrenia, especially in genetically predisposed people, according to a large-scale study contradicting earlier, more conventional beliefs that braininess may increase risk of this disorder.

A team of US and Swedish scientists has recently established that intelligence quotient, or IQ, is an important “moderator” in the development of schizophrenia, but the link actually works the opposite way.

“If you’re really smart, your genes for schizophrenia don’t have much of a chance of acting,” said first author Kenneth S. Kendler, professor of psychiatry and human and molecular genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

More than 1.2 million Swedish males born between 1951 and 1975 and registered in the Military Conscription Register participated in the study that assessed their IQ at ages from 18 to 20, in late adolescence, and tracked the history of schizophrenia-related hospitalization until 2010.

High IQ lowers the risk of schizophrenia (Image from the study published in American Psychiatric Association)

High IQ lowers the risk of schizophrenia (Image from the study published in American Psychiatric Association)

It turns out, low IQ is among other factors – like fetal experience, childhood trauma or early drug use – contributing to the development of the mental illness, although there is a huge variation in the intelligence scores of people with schizophrenia.

“What really predicted risk for schizophrenia is how much you deviate from the predicted IQ that [you] get from your relatives,” Kendler said. “If you’re quite a bit lower, that carries a high risk for schizophrenia. Not achieving the IQ that you should have based on your genetic constitution and family background seems to most strongly predispose for schizophrenia.”

According to the study, a 1-point decrease in IQ increases the risk of schizophrenia by 3.8 percent, and the strongest effect was seen within families – it “nearly disappears at the highest IQ level.”

 

Probability of schizophrenia predicted by risk of illness in close relatives (Image from the study published in American Psychiatric Association)

Probability of schizophrenia predicted by risk of illness in close relatives (Image from the study published in American Psychiatric Association)

The study, dubbed “IQ and schizophrenia in a Swedish national sample: Their causal relationship and the interaction of IQ with genetic risk”, is said to be the largest study of the relationship between IQ and schizophrenia to date. It has been published recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that often manifests itself with poor social interaction and loss of motivation and initiative. In extreme cases psychosis, a state of losing contact with reality, flooded with hallucinations, paranoia and delusions occur. Treatment may help some people recover from the illness, although others may be affected for years, demonstrating unusual or bizarre behavior.

In the US 2.4 million adults and almost a quarter of a million Australians suffer from this severe mental disorder, which occurs in about one in 100 people worldwide.

Chronic pain could change your personality

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Subtle changes in the brains of people with chronic pain could cause personality shifts that make them worry more and be less adventurous, say researchers.

Chronic pain patients are less likely to want to go out and explore the world (OcusFocus: iStockphoto)

Such personality shifts could result from other diseases too, say the researchers, whose work adds to the idea that our personality can change throughout life.

It is well known that traumatic injury to the brain from an accident or cancer can change one’s personality,” says clinical psychologist, Dr Sylvia Gustin of Neuroscience Research Australia.

But she and colleagues were interested in finding out whether more subtle changes to the brain, known to occur in people with chronic pain, could also lead to shifts in personality.

Their study, published recently in PLOS ONE, studied 22 people with chronic nerve pain on one side of their face.

“These people report a severe burning pain in their face. They say it’s like lightning or a knife through their cheek,” says Gustin, adding such pain can occur if nerves are injured during dental surgery.

Using five different brain imaging methods the researchers compared the brains of the chronic pain patients with those of healthy controls.

They also assessed the personality of participants using a 240-item questionnaire.

Gustin and colleagues found that people with chronic pain were more passive and less novelty seeking than the controls.

“Chronic pain patients are less likely to want to go out and explore the world,” says Gustin.

Imaging found chronic pain patients had greater activity in parts of the brain involved in emotions, cognition and behaviour

In particular, they had more neuronal growth in the prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain linked to emotions, cognition and behaviour — including seeking out new experiences.

The degree of nerve growth was correlated with the degree of personality change, says Gustin.

She says previous research in animals also showed similar changes associated with chronic pain, says Gustin.

Gustin and colleagues argue that these brain changes occur after the onset of chronic pain and lead to a reduction in novelty seeking.

Importantly, all the changes seen in the brain were on the opposite side to that of the face pain.

Given that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, this supports the idea that the pain was directly linked with the brain changes.

Focus on pain

Gustin thinks greater nerve growth occurs in the prefrontal cortex because people are focusing more on their pain.

“I think this is because these people are thinking and worrying more,” she says.

She says this worrying in turn could prove to be “vicious cycle” by exacerbating the brain linkages that lead to decreased novelty-seeking.

Gustin says other diseases could also lead to subtle personality changes like this.

The findings challenge a long-standing view that people don’t change their personality after the age of 18, she adds.

In future research she would like to see if it is possible to reverse brain and personality changes due to chronic pain by altering brain rhythms.

Gustin says a major outstanding question is why some people develop chronic pain in the first place and others, with the same injuries, don’t.