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.

Marijuana Use Up Among Teens Since Legalized in Colorado, Washington

Marijuana use significantly increased and its perceived harm decreased among eighth- and 10th-graders in Washington state following the passage of recreational marijuana laws, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of California Davis and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health believe this is the first study in the nation to assess changes in teens’ perceptions and marijuana use before and after legalized recreational use, and compare these attitudes and use in 45 other states where marijuana use is not legal.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, showed that legalization of recreational marijuana use significantly reduced perceptions of marijuana’s harmfulness by 14 percent and 16 percent among eighth and 10th graders and increased their past-month marijuana use by two percent and four percent in Washington state, but not in Colorado.

Among states without legalized marijuana use, the perceived harmfulness also decreased by five percent and seven percent for students in the two grades, but marijuana use decreased by 1.3 percent and .9 percent.

Among older adolescents in Washington state and all adolescents surveyed in Colorado, there were no changes in perceived harmfulness or marijuana use in the month after legalization.

The researchers compared data on the perceived harmfulness of marijuana use to health and self-reported marijuana use for nearly 254,000 Colorado and Washington state students in the eighth, 10th, and 12th grades who participated in the Monitoring the Future survey.

The survey measures drug, alcohol, and cigarette use and related attitudes among adolescent students nationwide.

The researchers then compared Washington and Colorado with 45 other states in the contiguous U.S. that did not legalize recreational marijuana use. In a sensitivity analysis, they also compared Washington and Colorado data with 20 states with medical marijuana laws but no recreational marijuana laws. They report the results were unchanged.

The investigators attribute the lack of change in attitudes and marijuana use among __teens in Colorado after legalization to a more robust commercialization effort prior to the law taking effect.

Colorado had very developed medical marijuana dispensary systems before recreational use became legal, with substantial advertising which youth were exposed to. Colorado also had lower rates of perceived harmfulness and higher rates of use compared to Washington state and other states where recreational use is not legal.

“While legalization for recreational purposes is currently limited to adults, potential impacts on adolescent marijuana use are of particular concern,” said Magdalena Cerdá, an epidemiologist with the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and first author of the study.

“Some adolescents who try marijuana will go on to chronic use, with an accompanying range of adverse outcomes, from cognitive impairment to downward social mobility, financial, work-related, and relationship difficulties,” she noted. “We need to better understand the impact of recreational marijuana use so we’re better prepared to prevent adverse consequences among the most vulnerable sectors of the population.”

While more targeted research is needed to determine the influence of legalized recreational marijuana use among adolescents and how well the Washington and Colorado experiences can be generalized to the rest of the U.S., the researchers said they believe that states considering legalized recreational use may also want to consider investing in evidence-based substance abuse prevention programs for adolescents.

The potential effect of legalizing marijuana for recreational use has been a topic of considerable debate since Washington and Colorado first legalized its use for adults in 2012. Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., followed suit in 2014, and voters in California, Massachusetts, and Nevada approved recreational use this past November.

“The perceived harmfulness of marijuana has declined sharply in the U.S. in the last few years, despite the fact that there are adverse consequences associated with marijuana use in some adults and in adolescents,” said Deborah Hasin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and in psychiatry at Columbia University and principal investigator of the study.

“Epidemiologic monitoring of these consequences as more states legalize recreational use, and public education about potential health consequences, are important to protect public health.”

The study’s findings suggest that legalization of marijuana in Washington reduced stigma and perceived risk of use, which could explain why younger adolescents are using more marijuana after legalization, according to Cerdá.

“Other potential reasons for the increase in use include increased access to marijuana through third-party purchases, and lower price,” Cerdá said. “Older adolescents may also have had their attitudes and beliefs about marijuana formed before recreational marijuana use was legalized, making it less likely their use would change after legalization.”

Source: University of California Davis