Posted: 06 Aug 2010 08:23 AM PDT

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Neurology / Neuroscience; Depression
Article Date: 06 Aug 2010 - 5:00 PDT

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The Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the John Templeton Foundation have announced the recipients of the 2010 Templeton Positive Neuroscience Awards, $2.9 million given to 15 new research projects at the intersection of neuroscience and positive psychology.

The winning projects explore a range of topics including how the brain enables humans to flourish, the biological bases of altruism and the effects of positive interventions on the brain.

"Research has shown that positive emotions and interventions can bolster health, achievement and resilience and can buffer against depression and anxiety," said Martin E. P. Seligman, director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center. "And while considerable research in neuroscience has focused on disease, dysfunction and the harmful effects of stress and trauma, very little is known about the neural mechanisms of human flourishing. Creating this network of positive neuroscience researchers will change that."

The 15 winning proposals represent 24 researchers and were selected from 190 submissions. The Awards identify the winning researchers as future leaders in the new field of positive neuroscience.

The Positive Neuroscience Project was established in 2008 by Seligman with a $5.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Seligman founded the quickly growing field of Positive Psychology in 1998 based on the idea that what is good in life is as worthy of scientific study as what is disabling in life.

Winners were selected by the Positive Neuroscience Steering Committee, comprised of psychologists, neuroscientists and fellow researchers from Stony Brook University, Harvard University, the University of Colorado, the John Templeton Foundation, Emory University, Ohio State University and Penn.

Winning studies include:

Abigail Marsh, assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University, will receive $180,000 to study neural functioning of heroically altruistic people, such as those who donate a kidney to save the life of a stranger. Marsh has shown that sensitivity to others' fearful facial expressions predicts altruism better than gender, mood, self-reported empathy or general sensitivity.
James K. Rilling, associate professor of anthropology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, and Richmond R. Thompson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bowdoin College, will receive $200,000 to study why some fathers are better parents than others. Children with nurturing and playful fathers are more likely to be popular with peers and teachers, be fair and generous and have higher IQs than kids with absent fathers.
Kateri McRae and Iris Mauss, assistant professors of psychology at the University of Denver, will receive $180,000 to study the neural bases of resilience. Extreme stress cripples some people, while others bounce back and some even thrive due to post traumatic growth. Research shows that positive emotions and flexible thinking are hallmarks of resilience and can be developed through training and therapy.
Elena Antonova from King's College London has received $180,000 to study how meditation affects sensory processing in the brain. Human brains filter the barrage of information flowing into our bodies through our senses. We wouldn't be able to notice anything if we noticed everything, so our brains help us quickly habituate to repeated signals, filtering most information under the radar of attention. Experienced meditators do not habituate to stimuli like most of us, nor do people with schizophrenia.
Alon Chen and Elad Schneidman from Weizmann Institute of Science will receive $200,000 to study the warm glow of companionship at the molecular level. Positive social interactions make us happier and healthier and even buffer us against ailments including heart disease and depression.
Britta Hölzel and Mohammed Milad from Harvard Medical School will use $200,000 to find out if meditation helps people conquer their fears. Mindfulness meditation impacts the structure and function of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala, brain regions that are also part of the neural circuits critical for deactivating conditioned fears.
Psyche Loui from Harvard Medical School was awarded $180,000 to study how the brain enables artistic genius. Loui will study neural connectivity in musicians with absolute pitch and people with synesthesia to better understand supernormal perception.
Jason Mitchell and Jamil Zaki from Harvard will study the relationship between doing good and feeling good and how both can be amplified within and between people. Sharing happiness may double your pleasure.
India Morrison from the University of Gothenburg will study how pleasurable touch affects the way we understand and relate to others. Touch is more than skin deep because skin is a social and emotional organ. Touch carries affective meaning, enhances social bonding and shapes our beliefs about what it feels like to be in another person's skin. Morrison will focus on a recently discovered type of nerve fiber that transmits the pleasure of gentle touch, and she will examine a people with a rare genetic mutation resulting in a severe reduction of those nerve fibers.
Stephanie D. Preston from the University of Michigan and Tony W. Buchanan from St. Louis University will study the neural differences between sensing that someone is in pain or danger and taking action to help them. Empathy is bodily response. Research shows that, when people feel another's pain psychologically, they also resonate physically in heart rate, facial muscles, skin response, neural activity and pupil dilation. Even so, people frequently fail to help those in need and sometimes even cause their distress.
Laurie Santos from Yale University will investigate how altruism evolved in the brain. Positive Psychology research has shown that good deeds lead to great pleasure. Altruistic actions can increase happiness even more than beneficial but selfish actions. Santos will work with two primate species, rhesus macaques and capuchin monkeys, to find out if they also experience prosocial actions as inherently rewarding.
William Cunningham from Ohio State University and Alexander Todorov from Princeton University will study how people's social goals influence how their brain processes important social stimuli.
Tor Wager and Sona Dimidjian from the University of Colorado will study how compassionate thinking impacts brain function and leads to more caring behavior. The researchers will conduct a four-week compassion meditation training and identify neural processes that support positive thoughts and affiliation with others.
Thalia Wheatley from Dartmouth College will study how different brain regions process emotion and support social intelligence. People see emotion in movement and hear emotion in music. She will study how different neural regions work together to process complex but universally understood emotion and how that relates to empathy and social skill.
Adam Anderson from the University of Toronto will study the neural and genetic bases of positivity and resilience. Anderson will examine how specific genes influence dopamine-related brain functions and behaviors and how that supports positive emotion, creative problem solving and recovery.

Source:
Jordan Reese
University of Pennsylvania

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Ole Ivar Lovaas dies at 83; UCLA psychology professor pioneered autism treatment

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 06:46 PM PDT

Ole Ivar Lovaas, a UCLA psychology professor who pioneered one of the standard treatments for autism, died Monday night at a hospital in Lancaster. He was 83.

He had been recovering from surgery for a broken hip and developed an infection, according to a family member. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease a few years ago.

Lovaas' 1987 paper, "Behavioral Treatment and Normal Educational and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children," showed for the first time that intensive one-to-one therapy early in life could eliminate symptoms of the disorder in some cases.

He described some of his research subjects as having "recovered," a concept that remains controversial but appealed to parents and helped launch an industry that provides the treatment to the growing numbers of children being diagnosed.

"Before that [paper], people still felt that there was no hope once your child was diagnosed with autism," said Doreen Granpeesheh, one of his former graduate students who went on to open the Center for Autism Research and Treatment, a large therapy company.

FOR THE RECORD: In Friday's LATExtra section, the obituary of Ole Ivar Lovaas, a UCLA psychology professor who pioneered one of the standard treatments for autism, said that one of his former graduate students went on to open the Center for Autism Research and Treatment. It is the Center for Autism and Related Disorders.

As a young professor at UCLA, Lovaas found his first research subjects in the 1960s in state mental institutions. Most didn't speak or know how to use a bathroom. One boy repeatedly punched himself in the head.

Using the principles of Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA, which relies on reward and punishment, he helped get some out of state facilities, at least temporarily. It was his first inkling that such children could be helped.

His early work was controversial because it employed electric shocks, delivered with a cattle prod — a technique that he later renounced in favor of milder methods, including the use of food treats, strict orders and access to favorite activities.

Though he was trained in Freudian theory, Lovaas became such a firm believer in behavioral therapy that he once told a reporter for Los Angeles Magazine that he could have turned Adolf Hitler into a nice man had he gotten him to UCLA by age 4 or 5.

Lovaas, who was born in Norway on May 8, 1927, often said that the Nazis had sparked his interest in human behavior. His middle-class family — his father was a journalist — lived in the farm town of Lier, near Oslo, and was forced to work the fields during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s.

Lovaas, a violinist, came to the United States after the war on a music scholarship to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He graduated in 1951 and spent the next seven years getting his doctorate in psychology at the University of Washington.

In the meantime, he married Beryl Scoles, another student, with whom he went on to have four children — daughters Kari, Lisa and Randi and son Erik. They later divorced.

Lovaas then married Nina Watthen, whom he met while lecturing in Norway in the 1980s. Lovaas, who over the years lived in Malibu and Topanga, is survived by his wife, all of his children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

At UCLA, Lovaas' class, Psychology 170A: Behavior Modification, was among the most popular undergraduate courses. In a booming voice, he entertained students with stories of Norway and played the song "Dust in the Wind" to introduce a lesson on human malleability.

He trained many of those students to deliver his therapy, sending them into the homes of the young children he enrolled in his studies. The highly regimented treatment broke the basic skills of life into thousands of individual drills.

His 1987 paper compiled several years of results. Of 19 children who received 40 hours a week of the treatment, nine were able to go on to mainstream first-grade classrooms and significantly raise their IQ scores. Comparison groups that got fewer hours of therapy, or none at all, fared far worse.

Demand for the therapy was instant and intensified with the 1993 publication of "Let Me Hear Your Voice," a memoir written under a pseudonym by a mother who had used it to help her two autistic children.

Though it has more scientific support than other treatments, it often is criticized as being too rigid. Most attempts to replicate it have produced improvements in children, but not to the same extent that Lovaas had reported.

He did not take kindly to criticism of his research, spending weeks to craft long rebuttals.

"It became a point of honor for Ivar to respond to anybody who was critical of the 1987 study," said Tristram Smith, an autism expert at the University of Rochester who was a graduate student of Lovaas. "He was definitely confident that he was right and that most other people had nothing to say. In some ways, you sort of have to agree. Nobody else was doing this kind of research."

alan.zarembo@latimes.com

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Pain Management: Reverse psychology

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 11:08 PM PDT

• For more fantasy baseball analysis, go to RotoExperts.com.

"Reverse psychology is an awesome tool, I don't know if you guys know about it, but basically you can make someone think the opposite of what you believe, and that tricks them into doing something stupid. Works like a charm." -Michael Scott, The Office

Following the seventh and final season of Steve Carell's contract with NBC's hit comedy The Office, the actor plans to leave the show. With him goes Michael Scott, one of the best network sitcom characters since Seinfeld went off the air. Many Office fans are scared that the show will fall apart without Scott. Sure there are a few other funny characters, but Scott is the heart-of-the-order comedy slugger who produces one or two great moments every show.

This brings me back to Scott's reverse psychology quote. When Philadelphia first baseman Ryan Howard (notes) (as opposed to Ryan Howard on The Office) sprained his ankle, I received a trade request from Howard's owner in one of my leagues with the following note attached.

"Howard's probably going to play through this injury, I just wanted to trade him to mix up my team a little. You need some power. Let's make this happen."

Uh oh, this guy's trying to use Scott's version of reverse psychology on me. Of course I knew that there was a 99 percent chance Howard would land on the disabled list and immediately rejected the trade.

But this desperate trade attempt did raise a good question: How should a fantasy general manager replace a star like Howard, or Kevin Youkilis (notes) for that matter, when we're in the final two months of the fantasy season? It's kind of like what The Office producers face when losing Carell. Do they just mix up the current cast, and hope that someone steps forward and takes the lead? Do they try and bring in an established comedian? Or do they just take a shot on someone new?

Luckily for Howard owners, it looks like he'll be back just after his DL period, so the replacement is only temporary. Youkilis will not be so lucky, and who knows which elite fantasy player will go down in the near future. Injuries happen all the time.

In my opinion, too many fantasy GM's make the mistake of trying to find an identical replacement for an injured player. Youkilis goes down, they grab the power hitting third baseman off the waiver wire, passing on a guy like Pittsburgh's Neil Walker (notes), who only has five homers but is hitting .313 with 18 RBIs over the last month.

It seems like simple advice, but instead of trying to match your injured guy stat-for-stat, why not take the time to evaluate your team and see if there are any other areas where you need help? Then make your fantasy free agent moves or trade plans accordingly.

For the sake of my Thursday nights (I know, I know, I'm a loser), I hope The Office doesn't try to find a Steve Carell clone. Find someone who brings something new to the show.

Ryan Howard, 1B, Philadelphia Phillies
As mentioned above, Howard sprained his left ankle on Sunday. The bad news is that the Phils placed him on the DL. The good news is that GM Ruben Amaro Jr. says the injury is not a high-ankle sprain, which could have benched Howard for three weeks or longer. Howard should be back close to Aug. 16. The Phillies acquired Mike Sweeney (notes) from the Mariners to serve as their primary first baseman while Howard rests. Sweeney missed most of June and all of July due to injury, but in May he hit .310/.349/.665. He's certainly worth a look in NL-only leagues and deeper mixed leagues.

Kevin Youkilis, 1B/3B, Boston Red Sox
The Red Sox announced that Youkilis will undergo season-ending surgery this Friday to repair the torn adductor muscle in his right thumb. The DL move came on the eve of Jacoby Ellsbury's (notes) return from his rib injury and kept the Red Sox in the race with Philadelphia for Most Injury Plagued Team of 2010. Youkilis admitted that his thumb has been bothering him for a while, and now the injury will end his season. According to a report in the Boston Herald, the muscle is past the point where rest can heal it, and surgery is the best option at this point. Mike Lowell (notes) rejoined the Sox on Tuesday after dealing with a hip injury. He homered in his first game back, but was having a poor season prior to that point. Besides Lowell and Walker, a name that Youkilis owners might want to consider is the Royals' Alex Gordon (notes). He's owned in fewer than 20 percent of Yahoo! leagues. Since rejoining the club on July 23, he's barely hitting over .200, but he's reached base in 10 of 12 games and was having an excellent run in Triple-A.

Carlos Santana (notes), C, Cleveland Indians
There was nothing funny about the home plate collision that sent Santana to the DL with a sprained lateral collateral ligament in his left knee. It seems miraculous that the injury is only a sprain, but that appeared to be the extent of it initially. Unfortunately the Tribe announced on Thursday that Santana will indeed undergo season-ending surgery.

After the Santana collision, two more catchers hit the DL: John Buck (notes) with a bad cut on his right hand, and Russell Martin (notes) with a torn labrum in his hip. Be careful when you open your fantasy league's free agent catcher list, because you might get hit with tumbleweed. It's barren. The Padres' Yorvit Torrealba (notes) has bumped his average up to .326 on the season and is available in about 85 percent of leagues. The Blue Jays called up catcher J.P. Arencibia (notes) from Triple-A Las Vegas. Arencibia had 31 homers with Las Vegas to this point, and the top prospect is going to fly off the free agent market.

Meanwhile, Martin's torn labrum could end his season. At the very least he won't be back until September.

Ice bucket list
Stars weren't the only players to go down last week, let's look at some of the other guys.

St. Louis third baseman David Freese (notes) is out for the season after aggravating his ankle injury in a minor league rehab game. He'll require season-ending surgery to repair tendon damage. … Cleveland DH Travis Hafner (notes) joined Santana on the DL with shoulder stiffness. His shoulder is a chronic problem that has bothered him for a while. … Cincinnati slugger Joey Votto (notes) returned Wednesday after missing two games with a wrist injury. He appears to be okay, but the wrist is not 100 percent and Votto owners will want to monitor his health status daily. … Votto's teammate, pitcher Mike Leake (notes), drilled Pittsburgh centerfielder Andrew McCutchen (notes) in the neck with a fastball on Tuesday. McCutchen didn't show any signs of a concussion and was able to play on Wednesday. … Mark Reynolds (notes) also tried to return a day after being hit high with a fastball. He wasn't as lucky as McCutchen. The Diamondback third baseman had to leave the game after experiencing dizziness. He'll likely miss a few games. … Dodgers shortstop Rafael Furcal (notes) got a scare earlier this week when he experienced some soreness in his surgically repaired lower back. An MRI on Tuesday came back negative, and he felt much better on Wednesday. He should be back by the team's road trip to Philly next week. … The Dodgers got some bad news on Manny Ramirez's (notes) strained calf. Team trainers evaluated the outfielder's calf on Tuesday and determined he would need at least another week before he was ready to begin a rehab assignment. … Twins first baseman Justin Morneau (notes) continues to make progress. Still dealing with concussion injuries, it looks like he could rejoin the team when they return home next Friday against Oakland. … Nationals manager Jim Riggleman says Stephen Strasburg (notes) will come off the DL and start next Tuesday against Florida. … Another player set to return next week is Rangers second baseman Ian Kinsler (notes). He is set to undergo an MRI next week, and if all goes well, he'll return Thursday.

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Psychology

Friday, August 6, 2010

“Research Benefits From Penn's Positive Psychology Center Awards” plus 2 more

“Research Benefits From Penn's Positive Psychology Center Awards” plus 2 more

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