Postpartum Depression Seems Distinct from Other Mood Disorders

Emerging research suggests mental disorders that often occur in association with pregnancy affect a different area of the brain than traditional mood disorders.

Neuropsychologists used fMRIs to study brain activity during postpartum depression and anxiety and discovered the distinct patterns.

On the surface, postpartum depression (PPD) looks much like other forms of depression. New mothers struggling with it often withdraw from family and friends, lose their appetites, and of course, feel sad and irritable much of the time.

However, many people and clinicians have underestimated the uniqueness of mood and emotional disorders that arise during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth.

Study results are published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences.

“Motherhood really can change the mother, which is something we often overlook. And we forget about examining the neurobiology of maternal mental health and maternal mental illness, particularly anxiety,” said behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Jodi Pawluski.

Pawluski, of the University of Rennes in France, co-authored the paper with Drs. Joseph Lonstein of Michigan State University and Alison Fleming of the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Overall, fMRI studies show that neural activity in women with PPD compared to people with major depression who had not given birth involves distinct patterns for new mothers with PPD.

For instance, the amygdala is usually hyperactive in anxious and depressed people, but for the women with PPD, the amygdala can actually be less activated.

PPD is now listed as “perinatal depression,” a subset of major depression, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the text which sets industry standards for diagnosing mental conditions.

Postpartum anxiety isn’t included at all in the DSM-5, even though one in seven new mothers are affected by it, Pawluski says.

Postpartum anxiety is estimated to be just as prevalent as PPD, even though it receives far less attention in the literature. Many of these mothers aren’t depressed, so their condition remains largely unaddressed.

“When we talk about the neurobiology of postpartum depression and anxiety, our information from the studies done on humans is only comprised from about 20 papers,” Pawluski said.

“If you think that 10 percent to 20 percent of women during pregnancy and the postpartum period will suffer from depression and/or anxiety, and then you realize there are only 20 publications looking at the neurobiology of these illnesses, it’s quite shocking.”

Postpartum mood disorders not only affect mothers but also their infants. New mothers experiencing postpartum anxiety or depression are more likely to snap at their infants and may have trouble forming a bond.

“The depressed mothers can be more intrusive or irritated by their infants, but they can also be more detached or withdrawn, and this is also seen with anxiety postpartum,” said Pawluski.

Those early interactions can have a long-term impact on infants’ health.

Children of depressed mothers have higher medical claims than do children of healthy women. This is because they bear a higher burden of illness, use health care services more frequently, and have more medical office and emergency department visits than do children of non-depressed mothers. The annual cost of not treating a mother with depression, in lost income and productivity alone, is estimated to be $7,200.

Still, despite affecting nearly one in 10 women, PPD and postpartum anxiety are still treated as extensions of major depression and generalized anxiety disorder, respectively.

The experience of postpartum depression can be further complicated by the fact that women are expected to enthusiastically embrace their new motherhood. Many women with postpartum mood disorders don’t feel that they can discuss the issues and feelings they’re having openly.

Pawluski, who herself is a mother of two, said of new parenthood, “It’s a life changer. It’s fantastic, terrifying, amazing, frustrating, exhausting, thrilling, and everything in between. It is not always a happy time, and we need to understand that, talk about it, and figure why it can trigger mental illnesses in so many women.

“If we can improve the health and well-being of the mother, we will improve the health and well-being of the child and family.”

Source: Cell Press/EurekAlert
 
Photo: This diagram represents similarities and differences in fMRI activation patterns in key brain areas associated with postpartum depression, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. Credit: Maayan Harel .

Preemies’ Brain Processing May Set Stage for Later Delays

Babies born prematurely don’t use their expectations about the world to shape their brains as babies born at full term do, according to new research.

The findings offer clues as to why otherwise healthy babies born prematurely face a higher risk of developmental delays as they grow, according to researchers at Princeton University, the University of Rochester Medical Center, and the University of Rochester.

In six month-old babies born at full-term, the portions of the brain responsible for visual processing respond not just to what the baby sees, but also to what the baby expects to see. That’s a sign babies are learning from their experiences, said Dr. Lauren Emberson, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton.

But babies born prematurely don’t demonstrate that type of brain response to expectations, known as top-down processing, she noted.

“This helps bring together the picture that this type of processing is important for neural development,” Emberson said. “This also gives us insights into what might be going wrong in the case of prematurity. We believe this inability for learning to shape the brain is possibly one of the reasons.”

The researchers tested 100 babies, split between those born at full term and those born prematurely. The babies were tested at six months of age, based on their conception.

The babies were exposed to a pattern that included a sound, like a honk from a clown horn or a rattle, followed by an image of a red cartoon smiley face. The researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a technology that measures oxygenation in regions of the brain using light, to assess the babies’ brain activity.

After exposing the infants to the sound-and-image pattern, the researchers would omit the image sometimes. In the full-term infants, brain activity was detected in the visual areas of the brain, even when the image didn’t appear as expected, a sign of this top-down sensory prediction, according to the study’s findings. The brains of premature babies didn’t show this activity.

The research sets the stage for continued work to understand how top-down processing helps babies learn better and how the lack of top-down processing relates to later developmental delays in the babies born prematurely, according to Emberson. For example, the first sign of a developmental delay for a child might come when they aren’t using any words at age two, she said.

“Developmental sciences knows these missed milestones don’t happen in the moment. They’re happening in the months and years leading up to that,” Emberson said. “By looking much earlier and being able to show that there are these differences in how learning is shaping the brain, maybe we can know much sooner which babies are likely to have problems.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

Source: Princeton University

Helicopter Parenting Socially Anxious Kids May Backfire

New research discovers that when mothers of children with social anxiety disorder try to support their children, their efforts may lead to negative consequences.

Investigators used an experiment that involved building difficult puzzles and discovered that, even at home, mothers of children with the disorder are more involved with their offspring than mothers of healthy control children.

These findings indicate behavioral control on the part of the mother, says Julia Asbrand of the Institute of Psychology in Freiburg, Germany.

Study findings are published in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research.

Experts explain that social anxiety disorder (SAD) usually emerges in late childhood or early adolescence. It affects up to seven percent of children and can persist into adulthood if left untreated.

The diagnosis involves a persistent fear of being embarrassed in social settings. SAD can limit children’s lives in regard to the social relationships they are able to form, their academic performance, and their general well-being.

Most studies that have assessed the important role of the family with regard to SAD have been done within a laboratory setting. To extend research on the matter, Asbrand’s team conducted their experiment in the homes of 55 pairs of mothers and children (aged between nine and 13 years old, with and without SAD).

This was done to assess their interaction within their natural environment.

The children had to complete as many difficult tangram puzzles as possible within ten minutes, and were told that they would receive the results afterwards. The mothers were allowed but not encouraged to help.

The puzzle-building simulated a typical task such as homework or preparation for school that could induce mental stress and frustration. The sessions were videotaped without the experimenter being presented.

According to Asbrand, the finding that mothers of children with SAD are more involved in their offspring’s lives are in line with those of previous studies. She says such over involvement extends to helping with tasks such as preparing for school, as well as tasks that require interaction.

In the experiment, it was noted that mothers of children with SAD touched the puzzle pieces significantly more often and assisted without the child asking for help or showing overt signs of helplessness.

These results indicate behavioral control on the part of the mother. On the positive side, mothers of SAD children were not overly critical or negative about their children’s performance.

“By touching the puzzle, mothers may convey the impression that the child is not able to solve the puzzle alone, thereby limiting the child’s degree of self-efficacy,” Asbrand elaborates.

“Consequently, this kind of control may lead the child to constantly expect a threatening environment, which could increase hypervigilance and subjective fear.

Such behavior by mothers also limits their children’s opportunity to successfully apply coping strategies to new situations on their own.”

Asbrand sees value in focusing on ways to change interactional processes within families, for instance by training parents to react more flexibly towards their children.

Source: Springer/EurekAlert

Mapping Lesions in Preemie Brains May Help Predict Disabilities

Scanning a premature baby’s brain shortly after delivery to map the location and volume of lesions — areas of injury in the brain’s white matter — may help doctors better predict whether the baby will develop specific types of disabilities, according to a new study published in the journal Neurology.

Lack of oxygen to the brain — which damages the brain’s white matter — is the most common form of brain injury in premature babies. White matter contains nerve fibers that regulate communication between various parts of the brain and body. Damage to this area can interfere with the signals the nerve fibers send out to other areas.

The findings show that preemies with greater frontal lobe injuries have a 79-fold greater chance of developing thinking problems than infants without such injuries, as well as a 64-fold greater chance of problems with movement development.

“In general, babies who are born before 31 weeks gestation have a higher risk of thinking, language and movement problems throughout their lives, so being able to better predict which infants will face certain developmental problems is important so they get the best early interventions possible,” said study author Steven P. Miller, MDCM, of The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Canada. “Just as important is to be able to reassure parents of infants who may not be at risk,”

The study tracked a group of premature infants who had been admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at British Columbia’s Women’s Hospital during a seven-year period. They found 58 babies with white matter injury who had an MRI brain scan at an average of what would have been 32 weeks of gestation. At 18 months of age, these babies were then evaluated for motor, thinking and language skills.

The findings show that a greater volume of small areas of injury, no matter where they were located in the brain, could predict movement problems at 18 months. In addition, a greater volume of these small areas of injury in the frontal lobe could predict thinking problems. The frontal lobe is the area of the brain that regulates problem solving, memory, language skills, and voluntary movement skills.

The study emphasizes the importance of injury location when considering developmental outcomes. For example, preemies with larger frontal lobe injuries had a 79-fold greater chance of developing thinking problems than infants without such injuries, as well as a 64-fold greater chance of problems with movement development.

According to the researchers, future studies should evaluate premature infants not just at 18 months, but at various points throughout childhood to determine the long-term consequences of early injuries in the brain.

Source: American Academy of Neurology

Reading Books with Dad May Boost School Readiness, Parenting Skills

A parenting program in which fathers read to their preschoolers was found to boost the dads’ parenting skills while also improving the preschoolers’ school readiness and behavior, according to a new study led by New York University (NYU).

“Unlike earlier research, our study finds that it is possible to engage fathers from low-income communities in parenting interventions, which benefits both the fathers and their children,” said lead author Dr. Anil Chacko, associate professor of counseling psychology at NYU Steinhardt.

Fathers play a vital role in the social, emotional, and behavioral development of their children. However, few studies have focused on helping fathers improve their parenting skills — and, in turn, outcomes for their children — as most parenting research is conducted with mothers. Furthermore, previous research on parenting interventions for fathers have issues with high rates of fathers dropping out of the studies.

The new study evaluated the effects of the program called “Fathers Supporting Success in Preschoolers,” an intervention that focuses on integrating parent training with shared book reading to improve outcomes among fathers and their preschoolers.

Shared book reading is an interactive and dynamic activity in which an adult uses prompts and feedback to allow a child to become an active storyteller. It relies heavily on pictures and encourages parents to give their children praise and encouragement. Shared book reading fosters father-child interactions and also helps develop school readiness.

“Rather than a goal of increasing father involvement, which implies a deficit approach, a program that uses shared book reading targets a specific parenting skill set and represents a valued activity for parents and children,” said Chacko.

For the study, 126 low-income fathers and their preschool-aged children were recruited across three Head Start centers in New York City. The families, a majority of whom spoke Spanish, were randomly assigned to either participate in the eight-week program or were put on a waitlist (which acted as the control condition).

The short-term intervention included weekly sessions lasting 90 minutes each. In these sessions, small groups of dads watched videos showing fathers reading with children but with exaggerated errors.

The fathers then identified and, in small and large groups, discussed better approaches to these interactions. Fathers were then encouraged to practice the strategies they identified at home with their child during shared book reading.

The program was designed to help improve parenting strategies by establishing routines, encouraging child-centered time, using attention and incentives to promote good behavior, using distraction and ignoring to reduce attention-seeking behavior and resorting to time-outs sparingly.

The researchers then evaluated the program’s effects on parenting skills, child behavior and language, and outcomes for fathers, including stress and depression. The researchers measured these factors before and immediately after the program through direct observation, standardized assessments of language, and self-reported information. Attendance data was also collected as a measure of engagement.

The findings show that parenting behaviors, child behaviors, and language development of the children who participated in the program improved significantly compared to those on the wait-list.

In addition, fathers reported improved discipline approaches and promotion of their children’s psychological growth. The researchers also observed that fathers made fewer critical statements to their children and used more positive parenting behaviors like praise and affection.

The researchers also found a moderate effect on language outcomes among the children. Overall, the data suggest more than a 30 percent improvement in parenting and school readiness outcomes.

Importantly, the average attendance rate for the weekly sessions was 79 percent, which was substantially higher than past parenting programs for fathers.

“Unlike other parenting programs, fathers in this program were not recruited to work on parenting or reduce child behavior problems, but to learn — with other fathers — skills to support their children’s school readiness, which may remove stigma and support openness among fathers in supporting their children,” said Chacko. “The findings are particularly noteworthy given the study’s population of low-income, Spanish-speaking, immigrant fathers.”

The researchers added that shared book reading may not be the best approach for all fathers and children, so interventions should be tailored to the preferences of communities and parents in order to increase the chances of success.

“Ultimately, we believe that developing a program that is both focused on the parent and child, and one that is not deficit-driven or focused on improving problematic parenting but is focusing on skill development, would be appealing and engaging for fathers,” said Chacko.

The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

Source: New York University

Young Mandarin Speakers Show Strong Grasp of Musical Pitch

Preschoolers whose native tongue is Mandarin Chinese — a tonal language — are better than their English-speaking counterparts at processing musical pitch, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California (UC), San Diego.

In a tonal language, the tone in which a word is spoken not only conveys a different emphasis or emotional content, but an altogether different meaning. For example, the syllable “ma” in Mandarin can mean “mother,” “horse,” “hemp,” or “scold,” depending on the pitch pattern of how it’s spoken.

Mandarin-language speakers must quickly learn to identify the subtle changes in pitch that convey the intended meaning of the word. It’s the linguistic attention to pitch that gives young Mandarin speakers an advantage in perceiving pitch in music, the authors conclude.

The findings, published in the journal Developmental Science, show how brain skills learned in one area may affect learning in another.

“A big question in development, and also in cognition in general, is how separate our mental faculties actually are,” said lead author Dr. Sarah Creel of the Department of Cognitive Science in UC San Diego’s Division of Social Sciences.

“For instance, are there specialized brain mechanisms that just do language? Our research suggests the opposite — that there’s permeability and generalization across cognitive abilities.”

For the study, the researchers conducted two separate experiments with similar groups of young Mandarin Chinese learners and English learners. They tested a total of 180 children (ages three to five) on tasks involving pitch contour and timbre. While the English and Mandarin speakers performed similarly on the timbre task, the Mandarin speakers significantly outperformed on pitch, aka tone.

“Both language and music contain pitch changes, so if language is a separate mental faculty, then pitch processing in language should be separate from pitch processing in music,” Creel said. “On the other hand, if these seemingly different abilities are carried out by overlapping cognitive mechanisms or brain areas, then experience with musical pitch processing should affect language pitch processing, and vice versa.”

Tonal languages are common in parts of Africa, East Asia, and Central America, with estimates that as much as 70 percent of world languages may be considered tonal. Other tonal languages besides Mandarin include Thai, Yoruba, and Xhosa.

“Demonstrating that the language you speak affects how you perceive music — at such an early age and before formal training — supports the theory of cross-domain learning,” said co-author Dr. Gail Heyman, of UC San Diego’s Department of Psychology.

Creel and Heyman’s work follows on a hypothesis first put forth by Dr. Diana Deutsch, also of UC San Diego, that speaking a tonal language leads to enhanced pitch perception in music.

Deutsch studied skilled adult students of music and tested them on absolute or “perfect” pitch. Absolute pitch is the relatively rare ability to recognize a musical note without reference to any other notes.

The present study focused on relative pitch, which is an understanding of the pitch relationships between notes. Relative pitch allows you to sing in key and be in tune with other people around you.

Even so, don’t ditch your child’s music lessons for language, or language lessons for music, warn the researchers. It’s still true that to succeed at music, you need to study music. And learning an additional language is a demonstrably good thing in itself, too — whether or not it makes you a better musician.

Source: University of California- San Diego

For First Time Moms, Gestational Diabetes May Up Depression Risk

Emerging research suggests that gestational diabetes raises the risk of postpartum depression (PPD) in first-time mothers.

In the largest study of its kind to date, including more than 700,000 women, researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden also established a strong link between a previous history of depression and PPD.

Their results appear online in the journal Depression and Anxiety.

Investigators discovered women with a history of depression are more than 20 times more likely to experience PPD than mothers without a previous clinical diagnosis of depression.

Moreover, while gestational diabetes alone increased risk for PPD, a history of maternal depression in conjunction with gestational diabetes further increased the likelihood of PPD.

“Most practitioners think of these as two isolated and very different conditions, but we now understand gestational diabetes and postpartum depression should be considered together,” said Michael E. Silverman, Ph.D., lead author of the study.

“While having diabetes increases PPD risk for all women, for those women who have had a past depressive episode, having diabetes during pregnancy makes it 70 percent more likely that they will develop PPD.”

In addition to gestational diabetes, the researchers studied more than a dozen other risk factors, including pre-gestational diabetes, for association with PPD in women with and without a history of depression.

Among women with a history of depression, pre-gestational diabetes, and mild preterm delivery increased risk. Young age, instrument-assisted or cesarean delivery, and moderate preterm delivery increased risk in women who had no history of depression.

Investigators believe that examining the modifying effect of maternal depression on pre- and perinatal PPD risk factors will further our knowledge of the relationship between diabetes and depression.

Showing that a history of depression modifies some of the risks associated with obstetric and perinatal factors suggests that there may be different causal pathways of PPD in women with and without a history of depression.

PPD can result in negative personal and child developmental outcomes, and identifying previous depressive episodes as a risk factor for PPD allows doctors to pursue earlier interventions.

“The reason a doctor asks if you smoke is because they know you are 20 times more likely to get cancer if you do. We believe OB/GYNs should now do the same for depression history,” Dr. Silverman said.

“With this information, we can now intervene early, before the mother gives birth.”

This is the largest population-based study to date to characterize PPD in relation to depression history.

Researchers used the nationwide Swedish Medical Birth Register, which includes information on all births in Sweden. Unlike in past studies, researchers relied on clinical diagnoses of PPD since symptom-based PPD inventories have a tendency to overestimate the prevalence of the condition.

Source: The Mount Sinai Hospital/EurekAlert

Kids may Put On More Weight When Parents See Them as Overweight

Children whose parents considered them to be overweight tended to gain more weight over the following decade compared with children whose parents thought they were a normal weight, according to new research.

The findings indicate that children whose parents identified them as being overweight perceived their own body size more negatively. This made them more likely to attempt to lose weight, factors that partly accounted for their weight gain, according to the researchers.

“Although parents’ perception that their children are overweight has been presumed to be important to management of childhood obesity, recent studies have suggested the opposite — when a parent identifies a child as being overweight, that child is at increased risk of future weight gain,” write psychology researchers Drs. Eric Robinson of the University of Liverpool and Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine.

Their study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“We argue that the stigma attached to being an overweight child may explain why children whose parents view them as being overweight tend to have elevated weight gain during development,” the researchers add.

Drawing from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, Robinson and Sutin examined data for 2,823 Australian families.

As part of the study, researchers measured the children’s height and weight when they began the study as four or five year-olds. At that time, the children’s parents reported whether they thought the children were best described as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or very overweight.

Later, when they were 12 or 13, the children used a series of images depicting bodies that increased in size to indicate which image most resembled their own body size. The children also reported whether they had engaged in any behaviors in an attempt to lose weight in the previous 12 months.

Researchers took height and weight measurements again when the children were 14 or 15 years old.

The results indicated that parents’ perceptions were associated with children’s weight gain 10 years later, according to the researchers. Children whose parents considered them to be overweight at age four or five tended to gain more weight by age 14 or 15, the study found.

This association could be accounted for, at least in part, by the children’s beliefs and behaviors, the scientists said. That is, children whose parents thought they were overweight perceived their own body size more negatively and were more likely to report attempts to lose weight.

The results were the same for boys and girls, and they could not be explained by other possible factors, such as household income, presence of a medical condition, and parents’ weight, the researchers noted.

Importantly, the link between parents’ perceptions and children’s later weight gain did not depend on how much the child actually weighed when they began the study.

When Robinson and Sutin examined data from 5,886 Irish families participating in the Growing Up in Ireland study, they saw the same pattern of results.

The researchers say they cannot determine whether parents’ perceptions actually caused their children’s weight gain.

“The findings of the present studies support the proposition that parents’ perception of their children as overweight could have unintended negative consequences on their children’s health,” Robinson and Sutin concluded.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

ASD Kids Face Numerous Challenges During Early School Years

New research suggests young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are less likely to develop positive relationships with their teachers than typically developing kids do.

The finding is important because for many, a particular teacher provided a positive lasting influence during the early school years — a factor that often enhanced growth and development both academically and personally.

In fact, numerous studies suggest that a positive student-teacher relationships is one of the best predictors of children’s academic success.

University of California, Riverside investigators teamed with the University of Massachusetts, Boston. They discovered the difficulty bonding exacerbates an already challenging transition into elementary school for these children.

The researchers hope that by understanding — and ultimately improving — these relationships, educators can support children with ASD in their early school years and help them make long-term gains in their academic, behavioral, and social adjustment.

University of California, Riverside’s Jan Blacher and her team spent the past four years studying 200 children with ASD as they moved from pre-kindergarten into elementary school. The investigators tracked student-teacher relationships, children’s emotional behaviors, and parental support.

Children in the study ranged from four to seven years old, with about 85 percent of them having what professionals call “high functioning autism,” meaning they don’t also have intellectual disabilities.

The results are newly published or forthcoming in five new papers in top journals in the field, including the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders; Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities; and Remedial and Special Education.

Blacher, said that behavior problems and social skills deficits, which accompany many ASD diagnoses, are one reason that students and their teachers fail to build strong mutual relationships.

Externalizing behaviors, such as aggression, increase conflict, while internalizing behaviors, such as anxiety, can reduce the closeness between teachers and students.

“When children with autism come to school, they are already struggling to make social and emotional connections, and when that affects their relationships with teachers it feels like a double whammy,” said Blacher, who has shown in previous research that many children with ASD feel lonely at school.

“A major goal that follows from this research is educating and supporting teachers so they understand how important their interactions with children are during this transitional time.”

Blacher’s group also noted that one cause of behavior outbursts or other instances of “acting out” during the early school years may be an inability for children to control their anger or emotions. Such poor emotional regulation is common in children with ASD.

Blacher notes, “Many intervention programs used by schools focus heavily on behavior management, but we found that supporting emotional regulation is an important tactic in helping children develop interpersonal relationships and complete school activities.

Helping children with ASD take charge of their emotions before they manifest as behavioral problems will go a long way in helping students build positive relationships with their teachers.”

Blacher said the team also studied parents’ roles in helping children make the transition into school, finding that shared reading increased children’s knowledge of contextual language and vocabulary.

“These shared learning experiences are social in nature and help support children as they encounter similar activities in the classroom. Early literacy is a strength for children with high functioning ASD, so this should be encouraged, as it gives the children something to be proud of. One hopes that increasing literacy skills will also lead to better classroom adjustment and, in turn, to more positive teacher-student relationships,” Blacher said.

Source: University of California, Riverside/Newswise

Friendships Ease Depression in Heavy Gamers

Teens who are considered heavy gamers — those who regularly play videogames for more than four hours a day — often suffer from symptoms of depression. However, a new study led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that high-quality friendships, whether in real life or online, tend to mitigate game-related depression in these teens.

The findings, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggest that although heavy gaming, particularly in boys, can be seen as a risk factor for depression, not everyone who plays for several hours a day is at risk for developing emotional problems.

In fact, some of the downsides of gaming, such as social withdrawal, may be balanced out in those who are socially engaged either online or in real life with friends. In fact, the researchers say, boys with high-quality friendships appear immune from the depression associated with heavy use of video games.

“Our findings open up the idea that maybe playing a lot of video games can be part of having an active social life. Instead of being concerned about the game playing, we should focus on those who also lack a social life or have other problems,” says study leader Michelle Colder Carras, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Mental Health at the Bloomberg School.

“Rather than seeing a lot of video game playing and worrying that this reflects gaming-related problems, parents and clinicians should figure out whether these __teens also have high-quality friendships. It could just be that they have good friends who they like to hang out and play video games with. That is probably not a worrisome equation.”

According to the researchers, the new findings could inform organizations such as the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association that have proposed making Internet Gaming Disorder a condition that would be on par with disorders relating to substance abuse and pathological gambling.

“While playing video games for four hours a day can be worrisome behavior, not everyone who does so is at risk of developing symptoms of addiction or depression,” says Colder Carras. “If these adolescents are sitting around playing games together with their friends or chatting regularly with their friends online as they play, this could be part of a perfectly normal developmental pattern. We shouldn’t assume all of them have a problem.”

For the study, the researchers analyzed 2009-2012 data from the annual Monitor Internet and Youth study, a school-based survey of nearly 10,000 teenagers across the Netherlands. The __teens reported how often they played video games, used social media, and instant messaging, and discussed their friendships. The teens also answered questions about addictive behaviors, including whether they felt like they could stop gaming if they wanted to and whether they would get irritable when not playing.

The findings show that symptoms of video game addiction depend not only on video game play but also on concurrent levels of online communication and that those who are socially active online report fewer symptoms of game addiction.

All heavy gamers tended to have more depressive symptoms, but boys who were not very social online showed more loneliness and anxiety, regardless of the quality of their friendships. Girls who gamed extensively but were also very active in online social settings had less loneliness and social anxiety but also lower self-esteem.

Indeed, most of the adolescents who reported playing video games for four or more hours a day did report depressive symptoms, possibly reflecting problems that need treatment, says Carras. But it shouldn’t be assumed that all those teens have a gaming-related disorder that requires treatment. Parents and clinicians need to look at the underlying reasons for why the teens play so many video games.

Source: Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Binging on 21st Birthday Suggests Issues Ahead

New research finds that students who binge-drink on their 21st birthday are more likely to drink heavily in the future.

University of Washington investigators analyzed data from a group of 600 undergraduate student drinkers who were followed from one month before their 21st birthday to one year after.

Students who drank the most on their 21st birthday also reported consuming the highest amounts of alcohol throughout the following year. The finding held true even when accounting for the subjects’ drinking habits before they turned 21.

Investigators explain that this is the first study to show that drinking heavily on one specific occasion can result in long-term increases in drinking.

The study appears in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

The association between 21st birthday drinking and subsequent drinking was stronger for students who were lighter drinkers before turning 21, indicating that 21st birthday drinking may serve as a more perilous gateway among those with limited prior drinking experience.

Alcohol-related consequences such as vomiting, blacking out, and neglecting responsibilities were also assessed. Accounting for prior drinking habits, students who drank more heavily on their 21st birthday experienced more of these consequences over the rest of the following year.

“We didn’t expect one day’s behavior to matter for an entire year of choices, but it did,” said Irene Geisner, the study’s lead author. She is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Celebrating a 21st birthday is often seen as a rite of passage, during which most people drink more than they intend to. In fact, students typically consume more alcohol on their 21st birthday than during any other event.

In this study, the average number of drinks consumed was 9.6, likely an underestimate of typical drinking behavior as the majority of study participants received an intervention.

The study builds on a body of work led by Christine Lee, a University of Washington research professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. She has studied whether specifically timed interventions can reduce drinking during specific high-risk events and overall general drinking.

Her team has developed in-person and web-based event-specific interventions for 21st birthdays and spring break.

“There’s a long-range public health benefit to designing effective interventions for 21st birthday drinking, or any event when young adults drink heavily,” Lee said.

“The recent findings suggest that event-specific alcohol interventions may have an even greater utility and thus be more cost-effective than we previously thought.”

Source: University of Washington

Older Kids More Apt to See Admitting Mistakes to Parents As Right Thing to Do

Even if they believe they could be punished, older kids are more likely than younger children to view confessing to a misdeed as the right thing to do, according to University of Michigan researchers.

And, kids of all ages who anticipate that a parent would feel happy about a child’s confession — even if they might be punished — were found to be more likely to come forward rather than conceal transgressions.

The goal of the study was to investigate the emotions that children associate with lying and confessing.

The study also tested whether these emotions were connected to children’s tendencies to confess or cover up misdeeds in real world situations, said Craig Smith, Ph.D., a research investigator at the Center for Human Growth and Development.

Smith and colleague Michael Rizzo, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland asked a small group of four to nine year-olds about a series of hypothetical situations in which children committed misdeeds and then either lied or confessed. How did they think they would feel?

The study found that four and five year-olds were more likely to connect positive emotions to the act of lying, and negative emotions to confessing, Smith said.

The younger children often focused on the gains associated with lying. The seven to nine year-olds more often associated guilt with lying and positive emotions with confessing. They were more apt to talk about the wrongness of lying and the rightness of confession.

This doesn’t mean that little kids don’t experience guilt or understand that lying is wrong. One sure way to guarantee a child won’t confess is to “bite the kid’s head off immediately,” Smith said.

“It goes along with the larger picture of being approachable as a parent,” he said.

So, what’s a parent to do when a child comes forth with a transgression?

“Convey that you’re going to listen without getting angry right away,” Smith said. “As a parent, you might not be happy with what your child did, but if you want to keep an open line of communication with your child you can try to show them that you’re happy that your child has told you about it.”

This open communication becomes even more critical when the child is a teenager and must grapple with adult issues, such as whether to confide in a parent or conceal issues like calling for a ride home when alcohol is involved, or substance abuse, Smith said.

Source: University of Michigan/EurekAlert

Identifying Eating Disorders Early May Be Key to Saving Lives

Detecting and treating eating disorder symptoms as early as possible is key to helping prevent children from developing a potentially life-threatening eating disorder, according to a new study published in the academic journal Appetite.

The researchers from Newcastle University in England found that children with more eating disorder symptoms at age nine had a higher number of symptoms at age 12. Therefore, identifying eating disorder symptoms in children as young as nine years old will allow for early intervention which could potentially save lives.

The six-year study identified three areas that parents, teachers, and doctors should watch for in children and preteens: boys and girls with body dissatisfaction, girls with depressive symptoms, and boys and girls who have had symptoms at an earlier stage.

Eating disorder symptoms can include rigid dieting, binge-eating, making oneself sick after eating, and high levels of anxiety about being fat or gaining weight. Many more children have symptoms without developing a full eating disorder; however, for those who do, eating disorders are very serious conditions and can be fatal.

And while eating disorders are rare at age nine (1.64 per 100,000), they are more prevalent at age 12 (9.51 per 100,000). It quickly escalates from there with the most common age for hospitalization being 15 years old for both males and females.

“This research was not about investigating eating disorders themselves, rather we investigated risk factors for developing early eating disorder symptoms,” said study leader Dr. Elizabeth Evans, Research Associate at Newcastle University’s Institute of Health and Society. “Most previous work on children and young adolescents has only looked at the symptoms at one point in time so cannot tell which factors precede others.

“Our research has been different in that we have specifically focused on the factors linked with the development of eating disorder symptoms to identify children at the greatest risk. Results suggest the need to detect eating disorder symptoms early, since a higher level of symptoms at nine years old was the strongest risk factor for a higher level of symptoms at 12 years old.”

For the research, children who had been enrolled in the Gateshead Millennium Study completed questionnaires about eating disorder symptoms, depressive feelings, and body dissatisfaction when they were seven, nine, and 12.

The findings highlight that some risk factors precede the symptoms of the condition and others occur at the same time. The researchers found that at age 12, boys and girls who are more dissatisfied with their bodies have greater numbers of eating disorder symptoms. Body dissatisfaction is a significant indicator of being at greater risk for the condition. In addition, girls with depressive symptoms at 12 years old tend to have greater numbers of eating disorder symptoms. This relationship was not seen in boys.

The research is being followed up by repeating the questionnaires with the same cohort of children at 15 years old. This will allow researchers to see what happened next for the adolescents who showed greater numbers of eating disorder symptoms at age 12.

“Future studies we do will investigate if our findings with young adolescents hold true for older adolescents, or whether we detect new risk factors. Both possibilities will further inform our efforts to promote and target early prevention for eating disorders,” said Evans.

Source: Newcastle University

Parents’ Obesity May Slow Child Development

New findings from the National Institutes of Health suggest children of obese parents may be at risk for developmental delays.

Investigators discovered that children of obese mothers were more likely to fail tests of fine motor skill — the ability to control movement of small muscles, such as those in the fingers and hands.

Children of obese fathers were more likely to fail measures of social competence, and those born to extremely obese couples also were more likely to fail tests of problem solving ability.

Scientists at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) say the new study is unique as it provides a more comprehensive view of child development.

“The previous U.S. studies in this area have focused on the mothers’ pre- and post-pregnancy weight,” said the study’s first author, Edwina Yeung, Ph.D., an investigator in NICHD’s Division of Intramural Population Health Research.

“Our study is one of the few that also includes information about fathers, and our results suggest that dad’s weight also has significant influence on child development.”

Yeung and her coauthors cited research indicating that about one in five pregnant women in the United States is overweight or obese.

In the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics, authors reviewed data collected from the Upstate KIDS study, which originally sought to determine if fertility treatments could affect child development from birth through age three.

More than 5,000 women enrolled in the study roughly four months after giving birth in New York State (excluding New York City) between 2008 and 2010.

To assess development, parents completed the Ages and Stages Questionnaire after performing a series of activities with their children. The survey is not used to diagnose specific disabilities, but serves as a screen for potential problems, so that children can be referred for further testing.

Children in the study were tested at four months of age and retested six more times through age three. When they enrolled, mothers also provided information on their health and weight, before and after pregnancy, and the weight of their partners.

Investigators discovered that when compared to children of normal weight mothers, children of obese mothers were nearly 70 percent more likely to have failed the test indicator on fine motor skill by age three.

Moreover, children of obese fathers were 75 percent more likely to fail the test’s personal-social domain, an indicator of how well they were able to relate to and interact with others by age three.

Children with two obese parents were nearly three times more likely to fail the test’s problem-solving section by age three.

Investigators acknowledge that it is not known why parental obesity might increase children’s risk for developmental delay.

The authors note that animal studies indicate that obesity during pregnancy may promote inflammation, which could affect the fetal brain. Less information is available on the potential effects of paternal obesity on child development.

Investigators also note that some studies have indicated that obesity could affect the expression of genes in sperm.

If the link between parental obesity and developmental delays is confirmed, researchers believe physicians may need to take parental weight into account when screening young children for delays and early interventional services.

Source: National Institutes of Health/EurekAlert

Young Children Use Smell to Help Make Social Decisions

New research reveals that children begin using smell to help guide their responses to emotionally-expressive faces around the age of five.

“Even though we may not be aware of it, the sense of smell influences how adults process emotional and social information to guide their decisions and behavior. Our findings establish that, beginning at the age of five, smell also influences children’s emotional decisions,” said Valentina Parma, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and one of the study’s authors.

In the study, published in Developmental Science, 140 children between three and 11 years old were invited to participate in the research while visiting a local children’s museum.

Each child was exposed to one of three odors — either rose, fish, or blank —  for three seconds. Immediately afterwards, the child saw a screen containing photographs of two faces, one happy and the other disgusted, and was asked to select one. Both facial expressions were from the same person. Afterward, the children rated the pleasantness of the odor.

The findings showed that children under the age of five tended to choose the happy face, regardless of the associated odor or how they rated its pleasantness.

However, beginning at age five, the odor influenced the children’s decision of which face to select, according to the researchers.

Specifically, the older children based their selection on whether the visual and olfactory cues were emotionally similar. For example, the happy face was selected more frequently when paired with an odor rated as pleasant. Exposure to the unpleasant fish odor increased the likelihood of choosing the disgusted face.

“Now that we know that children as young as five years old use smells to make emotionally-based decisions, it may be possible to use this information in educational settings to guide social behavior,” said Parma.

Moving forward, the researchers intend to explore whether this same developmental path applies to children with autism spectrum disorder. If so, the sense of smell might represent a useful tool to complement social and emotional treatment options, she said.

Parma also noted the value of conducting the research on site at Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum, a children’s museum focused on creating learning opportunities through play.

“Taking the research outside the lab benefitted the museum, the local community, and the researchers,” said Parma. “The Please Touch Museum was able to provide children and parents with the opportunity to interact with scientists and learn about the research process. In turn, the research team established that we could conduct the research outside the laboratory setting without sacrificing methodological standards. This allowed us to enroll and test hundreds of children within a short period of time. It was a win for all involved.”

Source: The Monell Chemical Senses Center
 
Photo credit: First Hattiesburg.