An American written report has investigated the effect of prayer on patients undergoing heart surgery. Three hundred and seventy-i center surgery patients who were prayed for by 12 religious congregations fared no amend in the six months after their operation than 377 patients who were not prayed for. All the same, pb researcher Mitchell Krucoff at Duke University told Reuters that "This is non 'God failed the examination' or 'God passed the test'…it'south fashion too early".

Other patients in the study received pre-surgery treatment from a 'Healing Touch' therapist, and were taught breathing exercises, visualised beingness in a peaceful place and played calming music. These patients were more likely to be alive half-dozen months after their functioning and suffered far less distress than other patients. "We cannot discern with certainty whether the mechanism of this effect relates to the presence of a empathetic human existence at the bedside or to whatsoever individual component of the treatment", the researchers admitted.

The researchers pointed to several methodological concerns. For instance, most of the participants, including a majority in the no-prayer group, said friends and family would be praying for them. 2nd, the prayer congregations in this study included Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist groups, but the results may have differed with a uniform prayer group, or if the faith of the people doing the praying had been matched to those existence prayed for. There's also the issue of when the prayers were performed – something not monitored hither.

The report was motivated, the researchers wrote, by the fact that "bedside pity and prayers for the sick" are practised throughout the earth and yet scientific quantification of the "methods, mechanisms, safety, and effectiveness" of these practices take barely begun.
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Krucoff, M.W., Crater, S.W., Gallup, D., Blankenship, J.C., Cuffe, M., Guarneri, K., Krieger, R.A., Ksheetry, 5.R., Morris, Yard., Oz, M., Pichard, A., Sketch Jr., Thou.H., Koenig, H.G., Mark, D. & Lee, Yard.L. (2005). Music, imagery, touch, and prayer as adjuncts to interventional cardiac intendance: the Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) Ii randomised study. The Lancet, 366, 211-217.

Mail written past Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest .

Sadly, children who are abused by their parents are more likely than unharmed children to abound up to become abusive parents themselves. Whether this behaviour is inherited or learned is unclear. Dario Maestripieri at the Yerkes National Primate Research Eye investigated this issue in rhesus macaque monkeys, among whom infant abuse is besides known to occur.

To compare the influence of genes vs. experience, Maestripieri used a cross-fostering technique that involved taking a new-born female monkey from her biological mother and passing her within 48 hours of her nascence to a different adult female who would raise the infant as her ain. Some monkeys born to abusive mothers were passed to a not-abusive foster mother and vice versa. Other monkeys in the experiment were raised by their calumniating or not-calumniating biological mother every bit usual. Subsequently on, Maestripieri observed which infants went on to abuse their ain offspring.

Maestripieri constitute no evidence for abusive behaviour being genetically inherited, rather it appeared to exist acquired through feel of being abused. Nine of the xvi monkeys who were reared by calumniating mothers went on to be abusive themselves, including four adopted monkeys whose biological mother was not an abuser. In contrast, none of the monkeys raised past not-abusive mothers went on to abuse, including six adopted monkeys whose biological female parent was an abuser.

Maestripieri said abused female monkeys might learn to be abusive themselves either based on their own direct experience of being abused, or through observation of their mother abusing their younger siblings, or because of neural changes caused by being driveling. That not all driveling monkeys went on to be calumniating themselves also points to other protective or hazard factors.

"The availability of a primate model of child maltreatment provides the opportunity not only to conduct enquiry on the causes and consequences of this phenomenon but besides to test diverse forms of intervention and therefore contribute to its prevention", Maestripieri concluded.
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Maestripieri, D. (2005). Early feel affects the intergenerational transmission of infant corruption in rhesus monkeys. Proceedings of The National University of Sciences, United states of america, 102, 9726-9729.

Mail written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest .

Anticipating where your opponent's shot is going to land is vital for success at games like lawn tennis. In that location are visual clues from the style your opponent strikes the brawl, and it obviously helps to carefully spotter the ball's flight. But another way, investigated by Lionel Crognier and Yves-Andre Fery, is to impose your tactics on the rally, influencing your opponent's shot and then that you can predict where she will play the ball.

To demonstrate this, Crognier and Fery invited 17 experienced tennis players to attempt and conceptualize a passing-shot delivered by an 'opponent'. Crucially, the participants had to anticipate his shot 'blind' considering they were wearing liquid-crystal goggles that were made temporarily opaque just as the opponent was performing his back-swing. This prevented them from using anticipatory cues from his stroke or from the flight of the brawl. The participants were protected from the ball by quickly-erected netting that as well recorded the ball's location and where they made their volley.

The participants made the anticipatory volley in three conditions in which they had varying tactical dominance. When the opponent bounced the ball get-go and and so made the passing-shot (low authority), or when the participants kickoff hitting the brawl to their opponent as in a warm up (medium dominance) before he played the passing shot, the participants' anticipation was no improve than chance. In contrast, when they rallied before performing an attacking shot at the opponent (high tactical dominance), they anticipated the direction of his subsequent passing-shot with 78 per cent accuracy.

"Expert players can accurately predict the management of shots provided that they have controlled the rallies", the researchers said. The communication "read the play" should be added to the traditional instructions "go on your heart on the brawl" and "read the opponent'south movements", they advised. Tennis players may also be interested to note that down-the-line passing shots were predictable more easily than cantankerous-court shots.
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Crognier, L. & Fery, Y-A. (2005). Effect of tactical initiative on predicting passing shots in tennis. Applied Cerebral Psychology, 19, 637-649.

Post written past Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate .

Every year in the UK, 150,000 people attend Accident and Emergency (A&E) having deliberately harmed themselves. These are vulnerable people, up to v per cent of whom, based on electric current rates, volition have committed suicide inside 5 to ten years. The staff at A&Eastward are ofttimes the simply professional person contact these patients will have. Yet bear witness suggests self-harm patients are unpopular among A&E staff, and in a recent survey self-impairment patients rated medical personnel equally providing the virtually unsatisfactory support.

Nadine Mackay and Christine Barrowclough investigated what factors might influence an A&E nurse or doctor'southward willingness to help someone who has self-harmed. Eighty-9 A&East nurses and junior doctors working in the Manchester region responded by questionnaire to short accounts almost fictitious self-impairment patients.

Overall, where self-harming followed an event the A&Eastward staff deemed controllable (e.g. fiscal problems), they subsequently reported feeling less sympathetic and less willing to help, compared with when it followed an uncontrollable consequence (e.1000. bereavement). The staff likewise reported feeling less optimistic well-nigh patients who had attended A&East after self-harming for the sixth time, compared with patients attending for the commencement fourth dimension, and this reduced optimism was associated with less willingness to help.

Doctors reported feeling more irritated by, and less willing to assist self-harm patients than did nurses. They also felt less demand than nurses for extra training. Male doctors and nurses were also less sympathetic and less willing to aid than female person staff.

Acknowledging the danger of extrapolating from responses to fictitious accounts, the researchers concluded that A&E staff could benefit from extra training in the management of self-damage patients. "This might be aimed at encouraging staff to examine and challenge their beliefs about the causes of deliberate self-harm and the value of back up and treatment that tin can be provided", they said.
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Mackay, N., Barrowclough, C. (2005). Accident and emergency staff's perceptions of deliberate self-harm: attributions, emotions and willingness to help. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44, 255-267.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate .

There's emerging testify that sitting nigh a vivid lite every forenoon could aid people with depression (run into recent Cochrane review). More than dubious is the suggestion that 'negative ion generators' – gadgets that purportedly increase the concentration of negatively-charged atoms in the atmosphere – might also help relieve depression. Namni Goel at Weslyan Academy and his team tested both these treatments with 31 patients who had been diagnosed with major depression lasting at least two years.

Patients were tested at dissimilar times of the year to control for seasonal furnishings. Ten patients used a fluorescent lamp and 12 patients used a "high density" ion generator. As a control, 10 patients used a "low density" ion generator that had a negligible outcome on the air. Participants were asked to use their allocated treatment for an hour every morning for five weeks. The patients obviously knew whether they'd been allocated to the light handling or not, only those allocated to the ion generator treatment didn't know what kind of generator they had (loftier or depression density) and the researchers were bullheaded to which patients were allocated which treatments.

L per cent of patients in the light treatment and high-density ion generator groups experienced remission from their depression, the researchers reported, whereas none of the patients with the low-density generator experienced remission. These effects didn't depend on the time of year, nor were they explicable by changes to the patients' body clock (i.e. their circadian rhythm) equally measured by melatonin levels in their saliva. The researchers suggested the treatments might work because they raise levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that is likewise the target of many antidepressant drugs.

"Light and negative air ion therapies may particularly benefit patients who discontinue, cannot tolerate or show inadequate response to medication", the researchers ended.
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Goel, Due north., Terman, Grand., Terman, J.Southward., Macchi, M.M. & Stewart, J.W. (2005). Controlled trial of bright light and negative air ions for chronic low. Psychological Medicine, 35, 945-955.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Enquiry Digest .

To investigate the neuroscience backside socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome are socially fearless, impulsive, erratic, and highly empathic, but they're excessively anxious near not-social situations.

Meyer-Lindenberg recruited xiii people with Williams syndrome who were unusual in that they had normal IQ. They and 13 healthy controls were asked to lucifer one of two simultaneously presented faces with a different face that showed the same emotion (aroused or afraid). In another chore they had to match fearful or threatening scenes. A central difference emerged. The Williams syndrome patients showed increased amygdala activation during the scene task whereas the controls showed increased amygdala activation during the face chore. The amygdala is an almond shaped region cached deep in the brain and known to be involved in emotions.

When the researchers investigated circuitry at the front of the brain, they found aberrant or absent regulation of the amygdala past key regions in the prefrontal cortex of the Williams syndrome participants. In particular, the orbitofrontal cortex regulated amygdale performance in the healthy controls but not in the Williams syndrome participants. And the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was linked to the orbitofrontal cortex in healthy controls but not in the Williams participants.

The researchers said "Together with nonhuman primate findings of increased social but decreased not-social fear after neonatal amygdala lesions, our data propose the possibility that the reverse design of dissociated fear (decreased social fear and increased non-social fright) found in individuals with Williams syndrome may be a event of a built deficiency in a prefrontal organization involved in inhibitory amygdala regulation".
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Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Hariri, A.R., Munoz, K.East., Mervis, C.B., Mattay, V.South., Morris, C.A. & Berman, K.F. (2005). Neural correlates of genetically aberrant social cognition in Williams syndrome. Nature Neuroscience, Advance Online Publication: DOI: 10.1038/nn1494.

Mail written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest .

How is knowledge about the world organised in our minds? Studies with people whose memory has been afflicted past encephalon damage, have pointed to a hierarchy of factual, 'semantic' knowledge, in which more general information must exist accessed first on the way to more specific information.

Presented with a photo of a dog, patients with semantic dementia volition oft just exist able to place it every bit an 'animal'. Presented with a desk, such patients will only recognise it as 'furniture'. That is, they seem to accept lost their object-specific knowledge but retained their knowledge of higher-society, 'superordinate' categories. This has led psychologists to advise that superordinate information is somehow less vulnerable to encephalon impairment.

But at present Glyn Humphreys and Emer Forde at Birmingham University have reported on a patient, FK, who appears to exhibit the reverse pattern. When he was a 22-yr-erstwhile pupil, FK suffered frontal, temporal and occipital brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning. Now FK is good at naming things at their 'base-level' (e.thou. dog, desk, hammer), merely is severely impaired at matching them with their superordinate categories (e.1000. animal, furniture, tool).

This pattern "runs contrary to near all of the neuropsychological literature on patients with semantic dementia", the authors said. "The data are clearly inconsistent with strictly hierarchical accounts of semantic retentivity, in which admission to superordinate knowledge is a prerequisite for accessing other forms of cognition".

The authors said their findings also claiming the idea that we have different memory stores for each of our senses. Patient FK'due south ability to name different items was consequent regardless of whether they were presented to him past sight, sound, or impact. This "fits better with the idea that we have one semantic system…rather than a semantic system differentiated past modality", they said.
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Humphreys, G.Due west. & Forde, Chiliad.E. (2005). Naming a giraffe only not an fauna: base-level but not superordinate naming in a patient with impaired semantics. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 539-558.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Inquiry Digest .

How much do immature children sympathise virtually the internet? Zheng Yan at the University of Albany recruited 83 children, anile from 5 to 12 years, to find out how much they used and understood the internet.

Children anile from v to eight years tended to have little online experience, and to exist naïve about both the technical and social side of the net. One five-yr-old-boy said "Um, it has ii computers on it. It is x square feet large. It wouldn't hurt you".

The children aged between nine and ten appeared to exist in a transition phase. They had limited online experience but showed greater awareness of the internet'south uses and dangers. "Information technology'due south somewhere for finding stuff", and is fabricated "of a thousand computers", one nine-year-one-time explained. But the internet "tin can give us bad ideas" a 10-year-former girl warned.

By eleven to 12 years of historic period, the children reported having extensive online feel and showed a mature understanding of the web. "The net is in a lot of places and thus no one can point out exactly where it is", one 12-yr-quondam explained. You can become to "inappropriate sites" or "become addicted", warned some other.

Zheng Yan said that direct online feel was not the merely predictor of children's understanding – experience derived from films, TV, and watching other people was also relevant. "Filtering out harmful online content is not the but strategy to protect children", Yan advised. "Other strategies such equally offering age-appropriate educational programmes via Tv and Internet and considering developmental differences to guide online activities tin can aid to increase immunity to cyberspace dangers", he said.
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Yan, Z. (2005). Age differences in children's understanding of the complexity of the Net. Applied Developmental Psychology, 26, 385-396.

Mail service written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate .

Older people who are depressed, especially those in residential or nursing intendance homes, could benefit from writing about their lives. Helen Elford at Sheffield University and her colleagues recruited four residents from a nursing home in South Yorkshire. The residents, one man and four women aged between 71 and 89 years, were invited to write in a series of booklets, each containing prompts to reminisce most unlike aspects of their lives: their childhood, neighbourhood, working days and holidays and outings. Their writings were typed up past the researchers and returned to them in a concluding, bound booklet.

A month later, one of the participants, a 78-year-old lady chosen Anne, was interviewed to discover out whether she'd found the projection helpful. The researchers also kept field notes and the care home manager completed a questionnaire about the projection.

Anne enjoyed the reminiscing and afterwards initial feet was surprised by how well she had been able to write, and by how much she had remembered. "I idea 'I'm not capable of doing it', but you lot helped me and it came out easily ", she said. The researchers' field notes revealed the other participants had as well enjoyed the project, and that the procedure had served as a social prop when friends and relatives visited. The care dwelling house staff were as well impressed by the level of interest shown past the participants. "Information technology surprised me. [You] forget they can write", the care home manager said.

"There were numerous benefits to the participants from engaging in writing activities, including the fact that it was cathartic, provided a sense of meaning and purpose, an opportunity to exercise writing skills and memory, and a focus for them to share cardinal stories with others", the researchers concluded. "Providing writing materials is one very simple and inexpensive way in which care settings for older people could increase the opportunities available to them", they added.
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Elford, H., Wilson, F., McKee, K.J., Chung, M.C., Bolton, G. & Goudie, F. (2005). Psychosocial benefits of lonely reminiscence writing: An exploratory study. Ageing and Mental Health, 94, 305-314.

Mail written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate .

An inevitable weakness with psychology research is that so much of information technology is conducted with people (usually students) who have volunteered. If sure kinds of people routinely opt out of research, it could mean our estimates of what is psychologically average or 'normal' are completely off the mark.

Bernd Marcus and Astrid Schūtz at Chemnitz Academy of Applied science tried to find out if people who don't participate in enquiry take different personalities from people who practise. They emailed 685 people, mostly men, who maintained personal web-sites, asking them to participate in an "online written report on psychological aspects of personal spider web pages". 2 hundred and fourscore of them agreed to participate.

Over a hundred students, mostly women, so viewed the web-sites of people who had and hadn't agreed to participate. Without knowing who had volunteered, the students used a web-site'south content to score its possessor'due south personality on things like sociability, anxiousness, inventiveness, intelligence, meticulousness and cocky-adoration – adjectives chosen to tap into the 'Big Five' personality factors of neuroticism, extraversion, conjuration, openness to experience and conscientiousness.

People who volunteered to participate were rated as more than agreeable and more than open to experience than those who did not volunteer, even though the student raters were unaware of who had and hadn't volunteered. "To the degree that these ratings are valid, these differences will translate direct into incorrect normative information in personality cess", the authors said. Therefore "…a finding that the sample mean in a given study does not deviate from published norms only applies to volunteers and does non generalise to the full population", they warned.
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Marcus, B. & Schūtz, A. (2005). Who are the people reluctant to participate in research? Personality correlates of iv dissimilar types of nonresponse as inferred from self- and observer ratings. Journal of Personality, 73, 959-984.

Mail service written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest .