My Blog Of Knowledge: November 2010

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Retirement Can Invigorate and Improve Mood

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on November 26, 2010

A new study suggests retirement leads to a substantial reduction in mental and physical fatigue and depressive symptoms.

However, the research also concludes that retirement does not change the risk of major chronic illnesses such as respiratory disease, diabetes and heart disease.

The authors, led by Hugo Westerlund, Ph.D., from Stockholm University, say their research findings have important implications given that people will be working longer and retiring later in life.

Retirement is a major life transition, says the study. But the results of various studies investigating the health effects of retirement have been inconsistent with some suggesting a beneficial effect and others concluding the reverse.

This large scale population based study is ground-breaking as it observes participants for a long period of time (15 years) and for 7 years prior to retirement and 7 years post retirement. The research is based on almost 190,000 observation years.

The participants were drawn from a large French cohort study and included 11,246 men and 2,858 women who were surveyed annually from 1989 to 2007. The researchers argue that “a major strength of this study is that it is based on repeated yearly measurements over an extended time period.”

Most participants were married (89%) and were in white-collar jobs. They all retired on a statutory basis – 72% between the ages of 53 and 57 inclusive — and all participants had retired by the age of 64.

In the year before retirement, one in four (25%) participants had suffered from depressive symptoms and 728 (7%) were diagnosed with one or more of the following: respiratory disease, diabetes, heart disease or stroke.

Unmarried respondents and those in more menial jobs had higher odds of physical (but not mental) fatigue.

The results show that retirement is linked with a substantial decrease in both mental and physical fatigue, with a smaller but significant decrease in depressive symptoms. However, the research also shows there is no association between retirement and chronic disease. As expected, said the authors, these diseases gradually increased with age.

The authors believe there are a number of explanations for the findings: “If work is tiring for many older workers, the decrease in fatigue could simply reflect removal of the source of the problem … furthermore, retirement may allow people more time to engage in stimulating and restorative activities, such as physical exercise,” they said.

They conclude that their research results “indicate that fatigue may be an underlying reason for early exit from the labour market and decreased productivity, and redesign of work, healthcare interventions or both may be necessary to enable a larger proportion of older people to work in full health.”

The study is found in the British Medical Journal where, in an accompanying editorial, Alex Burdorf, a professor in the determinants of public health in the Netherlands, said the study “is unique in that annual health measurements were carried out several years before and after retirement.”

Burdorf believes further research is needed to corroborate the findings, especially as they contradict other studies, and he said, ”it is too early to make definite claims about positive and negative benefits from retirement at a particular age.”

The author agreed, however, that efforts are needed to improve and adapt working conditions “to help elderly workers maintain good health.”

Source: British Medical Journal

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Mammal Study Suggests Jet Lag Impairs Memory

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on November 26, 2010

Researchers believe chronic jet lag alters the brain in ways that cause memory and learning problems. And the impairment lasts long after one’s return to a regular 24-hour schedule.

Jet lag is a result of crossing several time zones in a short period of time, with the worst effects occurring during eastward travel.

When a person enters a time zone that is not synched with his or her internal clock, it takes much longer to reset this daily rhythm, causing jet lag until the internal clock gets re-synched.

In the study, University of California Berkeley psychologists subjected female Syrian hamsters to six-hour time shifts — the equivalent of a New York-to-Paris airplane flight — twice a week for four weeks.

During the last two weeks of jet lag and a month after recovery from it, the hamsters’ performance on learning and memory tasks was measured.

As expected, during the jet lag period, the hamsters had trouble learning simple tasks that the hamsters in the control group aced. What surprised researchers was that these deficits persisted for a month after the hamsters returned to a regular day-night schedule.

What’s more, the researchers discovered persistent changes in the brain, specifically within the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays an intricate role in memory processing.

Compared to the hamsters in the control group, the jet-lagged hamsters had only half the number of new neurons in the hippocampus following the month-long exposure to jet lag.

New neurons are constantly being added to the adult hippocampus and are thought to be important for hippocampal-dependent learning, according to neurobiologist Dr. Lance Kriegsfeld, while memory problems are associated with a drop in cell maturation in this brain structure.

“This is the first time anyone has done a controlled trial of the effects of jet lag on brain and memory function, and not only do we find that cognitive function is impaired during the jet lag, but we see an impact up to a month afterward,” said Kriegsfeld.

“What this says is that, whether you are a flight attendant, medical resident, or rotating shift worker, repeated disruption of circadian rhythms is likely going to have a long-term impact on your cognitive behavior and function.”

Kriegsfeld, graduate student Erin M. Gibson and their colleagues reported their findings this week in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

“Other studies have shown that chronic transmeridian flights increase deficits in memory and learning along with atrophy in the brain’s temporal lobe, suggesting a possible hippocampal deficit,” said Gibson. “Our study shows directly that jet lag decreases neurogenesis in the hippocampus.”

Flight attendants and rotating shift workers – people who regularly alternate between day and night shifts – have been found to have learning and memory problems, decreased reaction times, higher incidences of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer, and reduced fertility.

To date, these effects have been documented only in jet-lagged subjects, not after recovery from jet lag, Gibson said.
The UC Berkeley study is the first to look at long-term effects as well as changes in brain anatomy.

“The evidence is overwhelming that disruptions in circadian timing have a direct impact on human health and disease,” Kriegsfeld said.

“We’ve now shown that the effects are long-lasting, not only to brain function, but likely to brain structure.”

The researchers used hamsters in their study because they are a classic model of circadian rhythms. Their bodily rhythms are so precise, Kriegsfeld said, that they will produce eggs, or ovulate, every 96 hours to within a window of a few minutes.

Because jet lag can increase stress hormones like cortisol and disrupt reproduction, the researchers controlled for the effects of these by removing adrenal glands or ovaries in some of the hamsters and injecting normal levels of hormone supplements of corticosterone and estrogen, respectively. These hamsters showed a similar reduction in new, mature hippocampal neurons in the brain.

“The change was really dramatic and shows that the effect on behavior and the brain is direct, not a secondary effect of increased stress hormones,” Gibson said. “They are not due to increased cortisol concentrations.”

How do you avoid jet lag problems? Kriegsfeld said that, in general, people should allow one day of recovery for every one-hour time zone shift. Those, such as night-shift workers, who cannot return to a normal day-night cycle should sleep in a room with light-tight curtains shielded from outside noise in order to properly adjust to an altered sleep schedule.

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Diagnosis Uncertainty Increases Stress

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on November 30, 2010

According to a new study, not knowing can be more stressful than knowing, when it comes to awaiting a physician’s diagnosis.

In fact, the feeling of anxious uncertainty can be more stressful than knowing you have a serious illness.

“Not knowing your diagnosis is a very serious stressor,” said the study’s lead author, Elvira V. Lang, M.D., associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

“It can be as serious as knowing that you have malignant disease or need to undergo a possibly risky treatment.”

Lang and her colleague, Nicole Flory, Ph.D., studied the stress levels of 214 women scheduled to undergo different diagnostic and treatment procedures.

Immediately prior to the procedures, each of the women completed four standardized tests measuring stress and anxiety levels: the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Impact of Events Scale (IES), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and Perceived Stress Scale (PSS).

Of the 214 women, 112 were awaiting breast biopsy, a diagnostic procedure to investigate a suspicious lump in the breast; 42 were awaiting hepatic chemoembolization, a treatment for liver cancer; and 60 were awaiting uterine fibroid embolization, a treatment for uterine myoma or benign fibroids.

Breast biopsy patients reported significantly higher levels of anxiety, with an average STAI score of 48, than chemoembolization patients, who had an average STAI score of 26, and fibroid embolization patients, with an average STAI score of 24.

IES scores were not significantly different, but were higher among the breast biopsy patients (average score 26) than the other patient groups (average score 23).

Average CES-D scores were 15 for breast biopsy patients, 14 for chemoembolization patients and 12 for fibroid embolization patients. PSS ratings were also highest among breast biopsy patients (average rating 18), compared to fibroid embolization patients (16) and chemoembolization patients (15).

“These results really drive the point home that the distress of not knowing your diagnosis is serious,” Lang said.

“We believe that healthcare providers and patients are not fully aware of this and may downplay the emotional toll of having a diagnostic exam.”

According to Lang, simple steps can be taken to alleviate patient stress prior to a procedure.

“Training the medical team in how to talk to patients makes a huge difference,” she said. “This can diffuse tension right away and can help patients to shape expectations in a more helpful fashion.”

Source: Radiological Society of North America

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Short Writing Project Helps Women Overcome Stereotypes

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on November 29, 2010

New research finds a brief writing exercise can help women in college physics classes improve self-confidence and overcome negative stereotypes.

Scientists discovered the assignment improves female academic performance and can reduce some of the well-documented differences between genders.

The writing exercise seems particularly beneficial to female students who tend to subscribe to the negative stereotype that males perform better in physics, the researchers said.

Apparently, awareness of this so-called gender gap can negatively affect women’s performance on their physics exams. But, this rather simple writing exercise—aimed at re-affirming an individual’s core values—appears to narrow the gap and level the playing field for women who find themselves in this frequently stereotyped demographic.

In light of their findings, Dr. Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues suggest that similar value-affirmation exercises might help to close the gender gap further.

Their research will appear in the journal Science.

“The introductory course we investigated in this study is intended for students planning to be science majors,” Miyake said.

“So, the women in that course probably did well in high school science courses, are interested in science, and are highly motivated to do well. The fact that we found a large reduction in the gender gap for affirmed women tells you that some psychological processes are affecting women’s performance on exams and how powerful those influences are.”

This new experiment follows a previous study by some of the same researchers about the positive long-term effects of a similar writing exercise on African-American seventh graders at a public school.

In the new study, Miyake and his colleagues tested 399 male and female college students in an introductory physics class. During the first and fourth weeks of the class, the researchers asked a randomly selected group of the students to write about their personally important values, such as friends and family, for 15 minutes.

Other students were randomly placed into a control group and asked to write about their least important values and to explain why they might be important to other people.

The values-affirmation exercise turned out to be a promising intervention that appears to provide a measurable boost for women—but not for men—during both their in-class multiple-choice exams and a national, standardized test of conceptual mastery of physics, the researchers said.

The writing exercise helped reduce the difference between male and female academic performance in the 15-week physics class. More women earned B’s in the affirmation group than in the control group—and more women earned C’s in the control group than in the affirmation group.

The results of a survey given to the students indicate that the resulting academic improvement was most pronounced in women who believed that men generally performed better at physics. In the control group, women’s exam scores tended to decrease as their level of endorsement of the stereotype increased.

But, this negative relationship between stereotype endorsement and exam scores could not be found in the affirmation group. According to Miyake, “These results tell us that writing self-affirming essays improved the affirmed women’s exam performances by alleviating their anxiety related to being seen in light of negative stereotypes about women in science.”

“Imagine getting a B in that class as opposed to a C,” Miyake said. “That difference is big psychologically for women who are considering further education in science—even a career in science. It gives you a huge boost in confidence and it might motivate you to take more science courses.”

“Although our findings are promising, I’d like to caution that the values affirmation intervention is not a silver bullet that magically makes the gender achievement gap disappear altogether,” Miyake concluded.

“The situation is more complicated than that, and there are many factors contributing to the gender gap in some STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines. But, this values affirmation intervention holds promise especially when it’s combined with the sort of educational reforms that are known to improve all students’ learning.

“Provided that we create rich learning opportunities for all students, psychological interventions like this may help make challenging and possibly intimidating STEM courses less intimidating and more accessible to a larger fraction of the student population—one that has historically not been as well-prepared for or supported in these environments.”

Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science

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Do Search Engines Create Knowledge?

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on November 29, 2010

Scholars say that data creates information and that knowledge is a product of well-structured information. As such, scientists are now investigating if search engines like Google are a source of knowledge.

Undoubtedly, Google and other search engines have become part of everyday life. But if knowledge is power, are search engines power nodes?

For academic and formal users of the Web, experts say researchers need to be aware of how search engines operate, to ensure it is quality and not just popularity that drive their selection of sources.

In an article in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, José van Dijck of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, argues that search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, have become significant co-producers of academic knowledge, rather than neutral tools.

Google Scholar searches diverse sources from one convenient place to find information in a range of formats (articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions) and help to locate these through a library or online.

To date, little empirical or ethnographic research is available on how students actually go about open searches. But surveys show that students performing topic searches for scholarly papers overwhelmingly choose search engines, rather than library-based research discovery networks, as their preferred starting-point.

Many students view library services as an “add-on” to Google Scholar, rather than the other way around.

One of the key points about search engines’ ranking and profiling systems, according to van Dijck, is that these are not open to the same rules as traditional library scholarship methods in the public domain.

“Automated search systems developed by commercial Internet giants like Google tap into public values scaffolding the library system and yet, when looking beneath this surface, core values such as transparency and openness are hard to find,” she said.

Inexperienced users tend to trust proprietary engines as neutral knowledge mediators, she said. In fact, engine operators use meta-data to interpret collective profiles of groups of searchers.

At first sight, Google Scholar adopts one of the basic academic values—citation analysis—by using algorithmic web spiders to create indexes to a vast web of academic materials.

Like its parent engine, Google Scholar functions as a ranking system based on semantic links to a vast reservoir of sources that through their provenance might be considered academically sound.

However, Google Scholar’s algorithm works on the basis of quantitative citation analysis. Scholars go about it differently, ranking citations according to their relative status and weight in specific professional disciplines.

Ranking information through Google Scholar is quite similar to a Google Search: It ranks sources on the basis of popularity rather than truth-value or relevance. Articles with more links to them will beat higher quality research that is not picked up by the Google Scholar algorithm.

This issue is further complicated because certain institutions refuse access to their databases. Google will not reveal a full list of databases it does cover, or the frequency of its updates to indicate a timescale. Users are left in the dark about the search’s scope and timeliness.

Van Dijck’s scrutiny of the construction of academic knowledge through the coded dynamics of the search engine draws on sociologist Bruno Latour’s actor network theory and work by Manuel Castells. In actor network theory, search engines are not simply objects, but are part of human-technology networks involved in knowledge production.

Castells suggests “unwiring” network activity to look more closely at the complex power relationships of digital networks before mindfully rewiring it.

Van Dijck calls for enriched information literacy incorporating a basic understanding of the economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions of search engines. “Without a basic understanding of network architecture, the dynamics of network connections and their intersections, it is hard to grasp the social, legal, cultural and economic implications of search engines,” she said.

If Google has become the central nervous system in the production of knowledge, we need to know as much as possible about its wiring.

“To ensure future generations of critical and knowledgeable scholars, we need to teach information literacy enriched with analytical skills and critical judgement. The production of scientific knowledge is way too important to leave to companies and intelligent machines,” van Dijck concluded.

Source: SAGE Publications UK

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Retirement Can Invigorate and Improve Mood

Mammal Study Suggests Jet Lag Impairs Memory

Diagnosis Uncertainty Increases Stress

Short Writing Project Helps Women Overcome Stereotypes

Do Search Engines Create Knowledge?