Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts

Crying Over Spilt Milk


We should feel good about ourselves. In general, we are encouraged to do this from an early age and most of us are familiar with the comment that “if we don’t, who will?” So parents and teachers shower encouragement on us like confetti as we develop. In the business world, the trend continues with managers being taught to praise willy-nilly. Boot camp in the army won’t fit into this picture and all kids aren’t quite as fortunate, but the “folk theory” as Kim and Chiu describe it, prevails (1).

The danger of this continuous re-enforcement of our great, but imaginary, abilities is that we will believe it and we will have a severely self-enhanced view of our capability and potential. In extreme cases, enough to stand for election. The corollary applies in the boot camps around the country where some of the participants in the game can be harboring significant self-effacement ideas.

As Kim and Chui point out, the literature is unclear if marked self-enhancement is all that it’s cracked up to be and they set out measure the effects with better controls than had previously been in place so that their subsequent analysis should be more meaningful (1).

They started experimenting with a group of 95 US undergrads and then, in a show of confidence, expanded it to a group of 2780 High-School students in grades 7 through 12 in Hong Kong, before tidying up with another group of 160 US undergrads. Clearly a robust study, where they misled participants as to their test scores in order to test how robust was their self-esteem or lack of it.

With the computers humming and dissipating many kilowatts, they showed that the depression levels were minimized in those individuals whose self-assessment was most accurate. An overblown view of ones abilities, and hence ones expectations of performance and grade position, only led to tears and a gnashing of teeth in the wilderness. Unjustified self-effacement had a similar effect.

The conclusion? Don’t kid yourself.

  1. Y-H Kim and C-Y Chui, Emotion, 11, 1096, (2011).

Too Late!


Our experiences in the first few years of our lives have enduring effects on the way we behave later. At that early age we have little or no control on what is going on. Of course, now that we’re grown up, we don’t recall much of those early days and would probably assume that it is our later experiences that mostly shape our behavior. But this may not be so.

 A study by Feng et al from the Kunming Institute of Zoology report this week on a study of rhesus monkeys in which some youngsters who were separated from their mothers at birth, who were hand reared for the first month and then were reared with another youngster (1). The maternal separation was due to problems such as inexperienced moms not handling their babies properly, bad weather that is hazardous for young baby monkeys etc. and not for the purpose of studying the effects of the separation.

These peer-reared monkeys behave differently from those normally reared by their moms even three years later. They spent a lot of their time sitting around on their own and were generally less rhesus monkey-like.

When the monkeys were caught for check-ups, the control group, that is monkeys reared by their moms in the normal manner, responded with the release of cortisol. Cortisol, you’ll recall, helps us to get out there and fight for our survival. The guys who had been raised without their moms, had a much slower, and hence lower, cortisol release, so in a bad situation, they would be more likely to lose.

This effect of early life bad times is also seen in people. Published this week is a meta-data study of problems of depression in later life of children who had been maltreated and the depression treatments had poor outcomes. This work was carried out by Nanni et al from London’s King’s College (2).

Seriously scary to see how long term, permanent even, some of these effects can be on brain functionality.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/12/1010943108.full.pdf+html
  2. http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/appi.ajp.2011.11020335

Get A Grip


Depression appears to be on the increase in the western world if the TV ads for antidepressants are an indicator. We rarely hear the phrase “pull yourself together” these days and that must be a good thing. However, in the workplace our depression may not be noticed and the workload is not reduced, but the pressure is often increased in an attempt to produce greater output.

The usual incentive used by the industrial magnates is money and that has proved pretty effective for a long time, but if we are genuinely depressed, do we care? The other incentive that is used by the more enlightened is working conditions and mood enhancing surroundings. The idea being that if we are happy little bunnies we will be very productive and everything will expand and we will have more happy bunnies producing more and more (goods that is.)

But let’s get back to that part of the population suffering from depression. Cléry-Melin et al from Paris have studied the effect of depression of incentive and emotional arousal on the job in hand with a group of 40-somethings  with major depression (1). They were asked to squeeze a handle and were motivated by squeezing for money. They were mood-modified by being shown nice or nasty pictures prior to the task. They also had to rate the amount of effort that they had put in. A control group of vibrant Parisiens of the same age group was also squeezing for cash.

The mood-modifying pictures did nothing for the control group who squeezed harder for cash regardless of the pictures. However, the depressed patients squeezed as instructed but didn’t seem to care if there was more money at stake if they squeezed harder or not. Motivation was passing them by. The nastier the picture, the more effort they thought they had put in and, conversely, the nicer pictures gave them the feeling that things were easier.

Clearly, with healthy people, money is a good incentive in the short term and they can focus on the job in hand regardless of images that have been used to play with their emotions. The study raises more questions, though. Long term, is the same true? Does the lack of mood enhancing conditions result in the depression and failure of effective motivation? Perhaps happy bunnies over the long term with short-term motivational boosts might be best, don’t you think?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023178

It's Not In Your Genes


As faster and cheaper genomic analysis rushes forward, we see more and more groups checking for genome correlations with particular conditions. Some of these have been spectacularly successful. Others have not. Sometimes I’m glad that this is the case.

Clearly, that you may have a predisposition to develop breast cancer, can ensure proper monitoring and that is a good thing. To know or not to know is then a personal choice. The knowledge can weigh heavily.

The studies that I’m glad don’t give good correlations are ones such as the enquiry into a genetic link to criminal violence, for example.

The latest good news is from the study by the large team of Lewis et al from the UK. They looked at the genomic analysis of a little over 2,000 patients suffering from depression. They were classified in terms of suicidal behavior to see if a genetic predisposition to suicidality was present.  The classification went from suicidal thought, through to attempts and finally completion.

The great good news is that there isn’t a clear genomic set-up that means that we should stay away from tall buildings, high cliffs or train lines. A genetic predisposition for suicide would be enough to bring on a bout of depression and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we think that we may be programmed, it is easy to slip into a fatalistic frame of mind.

I see these negative answers as a most positive result and as important as the ones that do come up with correlations. We have enough trouble moving towards equal opportunity, as it is without having to be reading our genome like the astrology pages.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020690