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Many Seniors with Depression Faring Well During Pandemic

A new study finds that one very vulnerable population group appears to be holding its own during the COVID-19 pandemic. An assessment of seniors with a pre-existing major depressive disorder and living in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, or St. Louis finds that they are not becoming more depressed or anxious.

Research scientists from five institutions, including the University of California Los Angeles, participated in the study. They found that the older adults, who were already enrolled in ongoing studies of treatment resistant depression, also exhibited resilience to the stress of physical distancing and isolation.

The findings appear in peer-reviewed journal, The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

“We thought they would be more vulnerable to the stress of COVID because they are, by CDC definition, the most vulnerable population,” said Helen Lavretsky, M.D., a professor-in-residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA.

Interestingly, seniors with depression appear to have better resiliency than many others because they have learned to live with their disorder.

Lavretsky said, “what we learned is that older adults with depression can be resilient. They told us that coping with chronic depression taught them to be resilient.”

For the study, researchers conducted interviews with the participants, all of whom were over the age of 60, with an average age of 69, during the first two months of the pandemic.

Using two screening assessments of depression and anxiety, PHQ-9 and PROMIS, researchers found no changes in the participants’ depression, anxiety or suicidality scores before and during the pandemic.

Researchers further determined that:

• participants were more concerned about the risk of contracting the virus than the risks of isolation; • while all maintained physical distance, most did not feel socially isolated and were using virtual technology to connect with friends and family; • while they were coping, many participants said their quality of life was lower, and they worry their mental health will suffer with continued physical distancing; • participants were upset by the inadequate governmental response to the pandemic.

Based on the findings, the study authors wrote that policies and interventions to provide access to medical services and opportunities for social interaction are needed to help older adults maintain mental health and quality of life as the pandemic continues.

Lavretsky said many participants reported their quality of life to be lower, and they worried that their mental health will suffer with continued physical distancing. She said further research is needed to determine the impact of the pandemic over time.

She added that the findings offer takeaways for others while weathering the pandemic. “These older persons living with depression have been under stress for a longer time than many of the rest of us. We could draw upon their resilience and learn from it.”

The study identified several self-care and coping strategies used by the participants, which included maintaining regular schedules; distracting themselves from negative emotions with hobbies, chores, work or exercise; and using mindfulness to focus on immediate surroundings and needs without thinking beyond the present.

The authors further emphasized that access to mental health care and support groups, and continued social interaction are needed to help older adults whether the pandemic.

Source: UCLA

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Feeling Panicked Without Phone Tied to Worse OCD, Poor Sleep Quality

A new study finds a link between feelings of panic when a person is away from their smartphone and increased anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior. A related study found that these feelings are rampant among college students and lead to poor sleep quality.

In the first study, researchers at Ohio State University noted this panic is connected to feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

“It is that fear, that panicky feeling, of ‘oh, no, I left my phone at home,'” said Dr. Ana-Paula Correia, an associate professor in the department of educational studies at OSU, director of Ohio State’s Center on Education and Training for Employment, and one of the authors of the study.

There is a difference between normal smartphone use that benefits a person’s life — such as video chatting with friends when you can’t be together in person or using it for work — and smartphone use that interferes with a person’s life, she continued. If smartphone use is interfering with a person’s life, that is behavior that is more likely to cause anxiety when we are away from our phones, she explained.

Published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the study was based on Correia’s previous work, which created a questionnaire to evaluate people’s reliance on their smartphones. The study also explored the term “nomophobia,” defined as the fear of being away from your smartphone. Researchers are quick to note that nomophobia is not recognized as a diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association.

For the study, researchers gave the nomophobia questionnaire to 495 adults between the ages of 18 to 24 in Portugal. The study participants reported using their phones for between four and seven hours a day, primarily for social networking applications.

The researchers also gave the participants another questionnaire that evaluated psychopathological symptoms, such as anxiety, obsession-compulsion, and feelings of inadequacy

The researchers discovered that the more participants used their smartphone each day, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone.

The researchers also found that the higher participants scored on obsession-compulsion, the more they feared being without their phone. Obsession-compulsion was measured by asking participants to rate how much they felt they had to “check and double-check what you do” and similar questions, the researchers explained.

The researchers also discovered that gender doesn’t affect feelings of nomophobia. They reported that a little more than half of the study participants were female.

According to the researchers, the study’s results suggest that people experiencing tension might see their phones as a stress-management tool.

“This concept is about more than just the phone,” Correia said. “People use it for other tasks, including social media, connecting, knowing what’s going on with their social media influencers. So being away from the phone or the phone having a low battery can sort of sever that connection and leave some people with feelings of agitation.”

Nomophobia Can Lead to Poor Sleep

In a similar study, researchers found that nomophobia is extremely common among college students and is associated with poor sleep health.

Preliminary results of this study found that 89 percent of college students surveyed had moderate or severe nomophobia. And greater nomophobia was “significantly” related to greater daytime sleepiness and more behaviors associated with poor sleep quality, according to researchers at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

This study was published in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and was presented as a poster during Virtual SLEEP 2020, an annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

“We found that college students who experience more nomophobia were also more likely to experience sleepiness and poorer sleep hygiene, such as long naps and inconsistent bed and wake times,” said lead author Jennifer Peszka, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Hendrix College.

While Peszka said she anticipated that nomophobia would be common among the students participating in the study, she was surprised by its high prevalence.

“Because our study suggests a connection between nomophobia and poorer sleep, it is interesting to consider what the implications will be if nomophobia severity continues to increase,” she said.

The study involved 327 university students with a mean age of 20 years. Participants completed several questionnaires, including the Nomophobia Questionnaire, the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, and the Sleep Hygiene Index.

And while a common recommendation for improving sleep habits is to limit phone use before and during bedtime, Peszka said that doesn’t work for people with nomophobia. Following this  recommendation could exacerbate bedtime anxiety and disrupt sleep, rather than improve it, she said.

“The recommendation to curtail bedtime phone use, which is meant to improve sleep and seems rather straightforward, might need adjustment or consideration for these individuals,” she said.

Source: The Ohio State University, American Academy of Sleep Medicine

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Your In-Laws’ Drinking History Could Lead to Your Own Drinking Issues

A new study reveals a surprising family connection to alcohol use disorder (AUD): the drinking habits of a person’s in-laws.

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that marriage to a spouse who was exposed to parental alcohol misuse as a child increases that person’s likelihood of developing AUD, even if the spouse does not have a drinking disorder.

“Our goal here was to examine whether a spouse’s genetic makeup influences risk for AUD,” said Dr. Jessica Salvatore, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and lead author on the paper.

“In a somewhat surprising twist, we found that it wasn’t the spouse’s genetic makeup that influenced AUD risk. Rather, it was whether the spouse was raised by an AUD-affected parent.”

The research team analyzed marital data on more than 300,000 couples in Swedish national population registries and found that marriage to a spouse with a predisposition toward alcohol use disorder increased risk for developing AUD.

This higher risk was not explained by socioeconomic status, the spouse’s AUD status, nor contact with the spouse’s parents. Instead, the researchers discovered that, rather than genetics, this increased risk reflected the psychological consequences of the spouse having grown up with an AUD-affected parent.

“Growing up with an AUD-affected parent might teach people to act in ways that reinforce a spouse’s drinking problem,” said Salvatore. “For example, taking care of a spouse when they have a hangover.”

The results highlight the damaging and long-lasting impact of growing up with a parent with AUD, extending even to the spouses of their adult children.

“It demonstrates the long reach that parental alcohol problems have on the next generation,” Salvatore said. “It’s not just the offspring of affected parents who are at risk, it’s the people those offspring end up marrying, too.”

The findings are consistent with evidence from other studies, she said, which suggest that those who grow up with a parent with an alcohol use disorder may be at particularly high risk of using alcohol as a “tool” to improve their marital interactions.

“These kinds of processes may inadvertently lead a spouse down the path of alcohol misuse,” she said. “To be clear, my guess is that these processes are out of people’s conscious control. No one wants to ‘give’ their spouse an alcohol problem.”

The findings are an important contribution to a growing area of research on social genetic effects, or the effects of a social partner’s genetic makeup, Salvatore said. Conclusions from previous studies of social genetic effects were limited by the fact that people’s genotypes were linked to their childhood environments. In other words, in previous studies it was difficult to say whether effects were attributable to the partner’s genes versus how they were raised because their parents provided both their genes and their home lives.

“What we were able to do in our study was tease apart the effects of the social partner (spouse’s) genes and the rearing environment,” she said. “And when we did that, what we found surprised us: It’s something about the spouse being raised by a parent with a drinking problem, rather than the spouse’s genetic makeup, that influences a person’s risk for developing an alcohol problem.”

The study could prove valuable when it comes to treating couples struggling with alcohol. The findings reinforce the idea that interventions for substance-use disorders should be administered at the level of a couple or the family (for those who have a partner) rather than at the individual level, Salvatore said.

“In the best-case scenario, spouses can be one of our first defenses against poor health — they bug us to schedule our annual exams, and they’re among the first to notice if we’re feeling blue or tipping too many drinks back. But spouses can also be a liability for poor health,” she said. “The results from this study underscore how a spouse’s experiences in his/her family of origin can be a risk factor for the development of alcohol problems.”

Source: Association for Psychological Science

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Many Parents Butt Heads With Grandparents Over Parenting Rules

A new poll suggests that disagreements over parenting choices and rules can cause significant contention between a child’s parents and grandparents.

Nearly half of the parents in the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at Michigan Medicine describe disagreements with at least one grandparent about their parenting.  One in seven even say they limit the amount of time their child sees certain grandparents.

Disputes most commonly involve discipline (57%), meals (44%), and TV/screen time (36%.) Other thorny subjects include manners, safety and health, bedtime, treating some grandchildren differently than others and sharing photos or information on social media.

“Grandparents play a special role in children’s lives and can be an important resource for parents through support, advice and babysitting. But they may have different ideas about the best way to raise the child and that can cause tension,” says Mott Poll co-director Sarah Clark.

“If grandparents contradict or interfere with parenting choices, it can have a serious strain on the relationship.”

The nationally representative survey is based on 2,016 responses from parents of children ages 18 and under.

Discipline was the biggest source of contention. Among parents who report major or minor disagreements, 40% say grandparents are too soft on the child, and 14% say grandparents are too tough.

Nearly half of parents say disagreements arise from grandparents being both too lenient and overly harsh.

“Parents may feel that their parental authority is undermined when grandparents are too lenient in allowing children to do things that are against family rules, or when grandparents are too strict in forbidding children to do things that parents have okayed,” Clark says.

Some disagreements may stem from intergenerational differences, Clark says. For example, grandparents may insist that “the way we used to do things” is the correct way to parent.

New research and recommendations on child health and safety may also lead to disagreements if grandparents fail to put babies to sleep on their back or do not use a booster seat when driving grandchildren to preschool.

Many parents say they have tried to get grandparents to be more respectful of their parenting choices and household rules. These requests have mixed results: while about half of grandparents made a noticeable change in their behavior to be more consistent with how parents do things, 17% outright objected.

“Whether grandparents cooperated with a request or not was strongly linked to parents’ description of disagreements as major or minor,” Clark says. “The bigger the conflict, the less likely grandparents were to budge.”

Parents who said that grandparents refused such a request were also more likely to put limits on the amount of time their child spent with them.

“Parents who reported major disagreements with grandparents were also likely to feel that the conflicts had a negative impact on the relationship between the child and the grandparent,” Clark says.

“These findings indicate that grandparents should strive to understand and comply with parent requests to be more consistent with parenting choices — not only to support parents in the difficult job of raising children, but to avoid escalating the conflict to the point that they risk losing special time with grandchildren.”

Source: Michigan Medicine- University of Michigan

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Discriminatory Housing Practices Tied to Premature Births

A new study suggests that past discriminatory housing practices may play a role in perpetuating the significant disparities in infant and maternal health faced by minorities in the United States.

For decades, banks and other lenders refused loans to people if they lived in an area the lenders deemed to be a poor financial risk. This policy, called redlining, led lenders and banks to create maps marking neighborhoods considered too risky for investment. These maps were first drawn in 1935 by the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corp. (HOLC), and labeled neighborhoods in one of four colors — from green representing the lowest risk to red representing the highest risk.

These designations were based, in part, on the race and socioeconomic status of each neighborhood’s residents.

To analyze the link between historical redlining and infant and maternal health today, a research team from the University of California (UC), Berkeley obtained birth outcome data for the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco between 2006 and 2015 and compared them to HOLC redlining maps.

The findings, published online in the journal PLOS ONE, show that adverse birth outcomes — including premature births, low birth weight babies and babies who were small for their gestational age — occurred significantly more often in neighborhoods with worse HOLC ratings.

“Our results highlight how laws and policies that have been abolished can still assert health effects today,” said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of public health and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study.

“This suggests that if we want to target neighborhood-level interventions to improve the social and physical environments where kids are born and grow, neighborhoods that have faced historical forms of discrimination, like redlining, are important places to start.”

Non-Hispanic Black women living in the U.S. are one-and-a-half times more likely to give birth to premature babies than their white counterparts and are more than twice as likely to have babies with a low birth weight. Hispanic women face similar, though less dramatic, disparities, compared to non-Hispanic white women.

While the legacy of public and private disinvestment in redlined neighborhoods has led to well-documented disparities in income level, tree canopy coverage, air pollution and home values in these communities, the long-term health impacts of redlining are just now starting to be explored.

“Children born during the time of our study would be the great-great-grandchildren of those who were alive at the time of redlining, whose options of where to live would have been determined by redlining maps,” said study lead author Anthony Nardone, a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program.

“We chose to look at birth outcomes because of the stark inequities that exist across race in the U.S. today, inequities that we believe are a function of long-standing institutional racism, like historical redlining.”

Previous research led by Nardone showed that residents of neighborhoods with the worst HOLC rating were more than twice as likely to visit the emergency room with asthma than residents of neighborhoods with the highest HOLC rating. And a recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health found a link between redlining and preterm births in New York City.

In the new study, the researchers discovered that neighborhoods with the two worst HOLC ratings — “definitely declining” and “hazardous” — had significantly worse birth outcomes than those with the best HOLC rating.

However, Los Angeles neighborhoods rated “hazardous” showed slightly better birth outcomes than those with the second worst, or “definitely declining,” rating. In San Francisco and Oakland, neighborhoods with these two ratings showed similar birth outcomes.

This pattern might be due to the effects of gentrification on previously redlined neighborhoods, the authors speculated. They added that residents of the hardest hit neighborhoods may also rely more on community support networks, which can help combat the effects of disinvestment.

“We also saw different results by metropolitan area and slightly different results by maternal race,” Morello-Frosch said. “This suggests that maybe the underlying mechanisms of the effect of redlining differ by region and should be investigated further.”

Source: University of California- Berkeley

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Study Looks at SSRI Efficacy for Adolescent Anxiety

In a new study, University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers investigated the effectiveness of escitalopram (brand name Lexapro), a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), for the treatment of anxiety disorders in adolescents. They also looked at the impact of metabolism on escitalopram blood levels in adolescents.

The research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., with approximately 4.4 million children and adolescents affected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These disorders are not only common in children and teens, but, if untreated, result in considerable personal and economic cost over the lifetime,” said Jeffrey Strawn, M.D., associate professor and anxiety expert in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati.

“Psychotherapy and medications reduce symptoms for many children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. In particular, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, have shown benefit in numerous trials.”

Strawn said SSRIs work by increasing serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is one of the chemical messengers that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. These medications block the reabsorption of serotonin into nerve cells, making more serotonin available to improve transmission of messages between neurons.

“However, up to two in five children don’t completely improve with existing medication treatments,” he says. “While SSRIs represent the first line medication for anxious youth, predicting treatment response is difficult.

“Improvement varies considerably from patient to patient, often resulting in a trial-and-error process of medication selection and dosing. Additionally, clinicians have limited data to help them to determine which patients will respond to what treatments.”

“To help predict which patients would improve most with one SSRI, called escitalopram, my colleagues and I compared its use to a placebo in adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder.”

A total of 51 pediatric patients, ages 12 to 17, were randomly chosen to be treated with either escitalopram or a placebo for eight weeks. Their anxiety symptoms and overall improvement were evaluated in addition to how well they tolerated the medication. They also had their blood drawn to evaluate how medication blood levels impacted their outcomes.

“We found this particular SSRI to be superior to a placebo in reducing anxiety,” Strawn says. “Also, differences in how adolescents break down the medication affected blood levels, and these blood levels predicted certain side effects, like restlessness, jitteriness and insomnia. Understanding how blood levels vary could help us determine dosage.”

The researchers also found that some patients improved more quickly than others. Patients who were slower metabolizers of the medication had better outcomes and improved faster when compared to patients who had increased metabolism of the medication.

Strawn says this is the first controlled study of this SSRI for pediatric anxiety disorders and the first to assess the impact of metabolism on escitalopram blood levels in adolescents. He says a larger study with a more diverse population is needed.

“For clinicians treating anxious adolescents, this study provides preliminary answers to important questions about the effectiveness of this treatment. It may also help clinicians predict how quickly patients respond and identify which patients may be less likely to get better. This would help us select alternative treatments for patients who are less likely to respond,” he says.

“We hope this will open the door for more studies and eventually become a more effective treatment for patients in the future.”

Source: University of Cincinnati

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Surveys: Resilience Strained As Lockdowns, Fear of Pandemic and Financial Woes Persist

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected people’s daily emotional lives and mental health, increasing their stresses the longer that lockdowns, fear of getting sick and financial strains persist, according to a timely new study in the journal Sustainability.

Having a lower education level and speaking English as a second language further reduced resilience and hindered people’s ability to cope. The research is based on surveys that began in April, just a few weeks after lockdowns started in the United States.

“This is some of the first information we have on resilience in the face of COVID-19,” said co-author Dr. Clare Cannon, assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis. Drs. Regardt J. Ferreira and Fred Buttell, both professors in the School of Social Work at Tulane University in New Orleans, were additional co-authors.

“Our hypothesis, for our continuing research, is that it’s getting worse. The longer this goes on, the less resilient we are going to be,” said Cannon.

Cannon and co-researchers surveyed 374 people online, using social media, websites and other outlets, mostly in the United States, over a 10-week period beginning in April. More research is planned as the pandemic progresses.

Those surveyed were asked about previous disaster experience, their resilience, their perceived stress, their current situation as it relates to COVID-19, and personal and household demographics. The online Qualtrics survey took an estimated 10 minutes to complete.

Respondents in the current study had filled out questionnaires before masks were mandatory, before closures were prolonged, before large job losses had occurred and prior to full realization that the world was experiencing a global economic recession and deadly public health crisis, Cannon added.

Additionally, fewer people, at the time of the survey, had experienced family illness and loss to COVID-19 as would be the case now and in future surveys, she said.

The study’s authors sought to look at the role of perceived stress, assess demographic variables and add to the literature on disasters, infectious disease and resilience.

A difficult component of dealing with a pandemic is the understanding that contact with others is stressful. Historically, in environmental disasters (such as hurricanes), people find comfort in asking for and getting help from neighbors and friends.

However, this kind of dependence and interaction increased stress for people in the survey, Cannon said. That’s because in a pandemic, contact with others increases their risks and fears of getting sick, she said.

“There seems to be a real fear of contagion,” Cannon said. “There’s something unique about it being an infectious disease in that people pose a risk to each other. If we need things from other people, it increases our stress.”

“The more that people perceive stress the less resilient they are.”

Research on pandemics and their effects on people is scant, given that it’s been a century since a pandemic the size of COVID-19 has occurred. Additionally, very little research has taken place during a pandemic, researchers said.

The findings showed that just 28 days, on average, into the pandemic two-thirds of survey respondents reported moderate to high levels of stress. Most of the respondents were female (75 percent), well-educated, white and employed at the time.

“It begs the question,” researchers wrote in their article, “of whether populations with less social capital and fewer financial resources would be reporting even higher levels of stress and lower levels of resilience.”

The authors said the research points to the need for solutions for a population facing so much uncertainty.

“Given the findings from the study, governments must mitigate the associated risks of a pandemic by providing the needed resources for individuals, households, and communities to maintain resilience over a long period of time,” the authors concluded.

“The uncertain end of COVID-19 requires governments to offer a buffer against the pandemic impact and to ultimately reduce stress to create optimal health and well-being for citizens facing adversity.”

Source: UC Davis

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Black Patients Experience Less Anxiety, Pain with Black MD

A new study suggests that when doctors are the same race as their patients, it can forge a sense of comfort that helps reduce anxiety and pain, particularly for Black patients.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Miami, involved groups of non-Hispanic white, Hispanic, and Black patients who participated in a simulated doctor’s appointment.

The findings are published in the academic journal Pain Medicine.

Patients were given a mildly painful series of heat applications on their arm by a medical trainee playing the role of a doctor to simulate a painful medical procedure. Participants reported how intense their pain was throughout the procedure and researchers also measured the patients’ physiological responses to the painful experience using sensors on the patients’ hands.

Some of the patients were paired with a doctor who identified as the same race and ethnicity as they did, which is called “racial/ethnic concordance,” while others were not. After the experience, the research team compared the pain levels of the group paired with same race/ethnicity doctors with those paired with a doctor of a different race/ethnicity. The most surprising findings came from the Black patients who were paired with Black doctors.

“Black patients paired with Black doctors reported experiencing less pain across several types of measures than Black patients paired with Hispanic or non-Hispanic white doctors,” said Dr. Elizabeth Losin, assistant professor of psychology, who leads the Social and Cultural Neuroscience lab.

In addition, data from the sensors showed the Black patients’ physical responses to pain were also lower when they were paired with a doctor of their own race.

“This provides some evidence that Black patients were showing a benefit of having a doctor of their own race at multiple levels — showing pain relief in both their communication and their physiology,” Losin said.

The idea to study the role of racial concordance in the doctor-patient relationship came from previous research revealing that there are major disparities between racial and ethnic groups in terms of the level of pain experienced from medical conditions and procedures, according to the researchers.

In general, Black and Hispanic populations report more pain from medical conditions and in pain research studies, compared to non-Hispanic white populations. Further, previous studies have suggested that when a patient has a doctor who shares their demographics in terms of gender, race, or language, it can influence peripheral health outcomes like the patient’s satisfaction and their adherence to medication.

This led the researchers to investigate whether racial/ethnic concordance between doctor and patient would go deeper to affect the patient’s pain level as well.

“There are fewer studies about doctor-patient concordance and its effect on direct health outcomes like pain,” Losin said.

To understand why Black patients experienced reduced pain and pain-related bodily responses with a doctor of the same race, the team looked into some of the introductory surveys given to the patient participants and found a big clue.

“The factor that really differentiated the Black patients from the other groups was that Black patients were much more likely to say they had experienced racial or ethnic discrimination or were currently concerned about it,” said study leader Steven R. Anderson, a recent psychology Ph.D. graduate.

In addition, the Black patients who reported experiencing and worrying more about discrimination showed the greatest reductions in their bodily responses to pain when they had doctors of their own race, Anderson said.

“Together these findings suggest that perhaps one reason why Black patients may have had a reduced physiological response to pain when they had Black doctors was because they were less anxious about the possibility of being discriminated against,” Losin said. “We know that anxiety is closely tied to pain.”

Although non-Hispanic white and Hispanic patients were included in the study as well, whether or not they had a doctor of their own race didn’t seem to affect their pain levels. While the authors expected this for white patients, they found it surprising for Hispanic patients, who also have been found to report more pain than non-Hispanic whites in previous studies.

One possible reason Hispanic patients didn’t show the same pain reduction benefit of having a same-race doctor as Black patients did, is that on average the Hispanic patients didn’t actually perceive the Hispanic doctors to be more similar to them in terms of their race or ethnicity than the Black or non-Hispanic white doctors.

This is likely due to the high cultural and national heterogeneity among Hispanic/Latino Americans and suggests more research is needed into what factors related to the doctor-patient relationship may help decrease pain for Hispanic patients.

The researchers say their study highlights a potential benefit of having more Black physicians in the medical profession, as it could mean a reduction in pain disparities.

As of 2019, only around 5 percent of physicians identified as African American and Hispanic respectively, which means that most Black patients will rarely get to experience the benefits of seeing a physician that looks like them and understands their life experiences.

“Physician diversity initiatives are often seen as beneficial for improving patient comfort and satisfaction, but with our study we have evidence that there may be direct health consequences to not having a diverse work force as well,” Anderson said. “Our study speaks to the importance of physician diversity in improving health outcomes.”

Source: University of Miami

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Childhood Adversity Can Multiply Risk of Early Death

Childhood lays the foundation for health in adulthood and is central to physical and cognitive development. If this development is disrupted either through poverty or traumatic events, there may be long-term consequences for physical and mental health later in life.

In a new Danish study, a research team from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen found that adversity in childhood drastically increases the risk of premature death in early adulthood (16-36 years of age). This included a greater risk for dying from suicide, accidents and cancer.

The findings are published in the journal The Lancet.

The researchers analyzed social and stressful adversity in childhood among one million Danish children. Social adversity was defined as financial poverty or long-term unemployment in the family, while stressful adversity included situations such as the death of a parent, divorce or alcohol/drug abuse among the parents.

“We divided the children into five groups depending on the degree of adversity experienced in childhood. The more stressful experiences they have experienced during childhood, the higher the mortality rate in early adulthood. For the most vulnerable children, the mortality rate is, surprisingly, 4.5 times higher,” said Professor Naja Hulvej Rod from the Department of Public Health.

The higher mortality rate primarily manifests itself in suicide and accidents, but the study also reveals a higher risk of dying from cancer in this group.

According to the researchers, the study findings shed light on the critical importance of broad structural public-health initiatives to reduce stressful adversity in childhood. For example, if we can help prevent poverty and other childhood adversities, it may help reduce social inequalities in health over time.

“It is striking to see such a strong connection between adversity in childhood and mortality in the Danish welfare state, which among other things aims to promote financial stability among families with young children and to minimise social adversity. From an international perspective, you may worry that these associations are even stronger in a less extensive welfare system,” said Hulvej Rod.

The research is the first of its kind on a global basis. The size of the study made it possible for the research team to look at any associations between incidents of social and stressful adversity throughout childhood and how it affects death rates among young adults.

In the study, social adversity included financial poverty or long-term unemployment in the family. Stressful adversity included incidents such as divorce, alcohol/drug abuse among the parents or the death of a parent. The children were divided into 5 groups.

The first group included children (54%) who had experienced no or only very few isolated incidents of adversity in childhood.

In groups two through four, the kids (43%) had experienced isolated incidents of adversity in childhood, mainly related to poverty or illness in the family. Among kids in these groups, the researchers found a mortality rate in early adulthood that was 1.3 to 1.8 times higher than in the first group.

Group five involved children (3%) who had experienced great social and stressful adversity throughout childhood. In this group, the mortality rate was 4.5 times higher than those in group one.

Source: University of Copenhagen- The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

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For Many Concussion Patients, Sleep Problems Can Persist for Months

PHOTO: https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/240890.php

A new study shows that concussions can cause long-term problems with sleep.

In the first days following a severe concussion, it is common to experience headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, an increased need for sleep, or difficulty sleeping, according to researchers at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

“Most people fully recover from their problems after a short time, but some individuals suffer long-term problems that affect their quality of life, work, and school,” said Simen Berg Saksvik, a researcher and Ph.D. candidate in the university’s Department of Psychology.

Long-term symptoms can be especially detrimental to sleep, according to the new study, which was published in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

The study included 378 patients who had sustained concussions and were treated at one of two emergency departments in Trondheim. They were tracked for one year following their injury.

The patients with concussions were compared with two control groups: Patients who had other types of injuries that did not involve the head and participants without any injuries, the researchers explained.

“We found that problems like an increased need for sleep, poor sleep quality, daytime drowsiness, and fatigue occurred much more often and lasted longer after concussions than after other types of injuries,” Berg Saksvik said.

In the study, 136 participants experienced a sleep or daytime problem two weeks after suffering a concussion. Of these, 72 patients, or 53 percent, had problems lasting three months or longer, according to the study’s findings.

The study is germane for a large group of patients, according to the researchers. It is important to understand how patients who suffer symptoms following a concussion differ from those who recover by themselves, they noted.

“Sleep problems are often associated with issues like poor memory, concentration difficulties, depression, and anxiety. Treating sleep problems as early possible as after a concussion may help slow down or prevent the development of such problems,” Berg Saksvik said.

The findings also indicate that factors that directly affect our brain health play a role in the development of sleep problems, the researchers added.

The scientists will continue with their research, next looking into the underlying mechanisms that can explain associations between sleep and brain health.

“Then we’ll be able to offer better and even more personalized follow-up and treatment,” said  Dr. Alexander Olsen, an associate professor in the university’s Department of Psychology, and a neuropsychologist in the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinic at St. Olavs Hospital.

Olsen said he found it interesting that sleep problems in particular are so common following a concussion and seem to last so long for many patients.

“More effective treatment methods for sleep problems have gradually been developed, but these haven’t been tested systematically to any degree in this patient group,” he said. “In other patient groups, research has shown that if we succeed in treating sleep problems, patients will get rid of other ailments at the same time, such as concentration difficulties, tiredness, anxiety and depression, although these aren’t the specific focus of the treatment.” 

The researchers say they are hopeful that this might also work for patients who have suffered concussions. The researchers are planning a new treatment study for patients with sleep disturbances in collaboration with the Sleep and Chronotherapy Group at St. Olavs Hospital and NTNU’s Department of Mental Health.

New insights could also help other patients struggling with sleep problems, including those with various types of mental and neurological disorders, the researchers added.

Recent research suggests that concussions and sleep problems may both be linked to inflammation of the brain and the rest of the body, the researchers said. Over time this can affect brain health.

“Now we’re planning to investigate biological explanatory models for sleep disturbances by using brain imaging and blood tests collected from these individuals,” Berg Saksvik said.

MRI images can show if there are any changes in the brain that are associated with sleep problems, he noted.

“One advantage is that we have MRI images taken at several points following injury. This allows us to investigate how these images develop over time,” he said.

Source: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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What If Your Smartphone Could Tell When You’re Drunk?

Your smartphone could tell when you’ve had too much to drink by detecting changes in the way you walk, according to a new study.

Having real-time information about intoxication could be important to help people reduce alcohol consumption, prevent drinking and driving, or alert a sponsor for someone in treatment, according to lead researcher Brian Suffoletto, M.D., who was with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the research was conducted and is now with Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine.

“We have powerful sensors we carry around with us wherever we go,” Suffoletto said. “We need to learn how to use them to best serve public health.”

For the study, the researchers recruited 22 adults between the ages of 21 to 43. Volunteers came to a lab and received a mixed drink with enough vodka to produce a breath alcohol concentration of .20 percent. They had one hour to finish the drink.

For the next seven hours, participants had their breath alcohol concentration analyzed and performed a walking task every hour. For this task, researchers placed a smartphone on each participant’s lower back, secured with an elastic belt. Participants walked a straight line for 10 steps, turned around, and walked back 10 steps, the researchers explained.

The smartphones measured acceleration and mediolateral (side to side), vertical (up and down) and anteroposterior (forward and backward) movements while the participants walked.

About 90 percent of the time, the researchers said they were able to use changes in gait to identify when participants’ breath alcohol concentration exceeded .08 percent, the legal limit for driving in the United States.

“This controlled lab study shows that our phones can be useful to identify ‘signatures’ of functional impairments related to alcohol,” Suffoletto said.

Although placing the smartphone on the lower back does not reflect how people carry their cell phones in real life, the researchers plan to conduct additional research while people carry phones in their hands and in their pockets.

Suffoletto noted that his years of research on such digital interventions has been motivated by personal tragedy.

“I lost a close friend to a drinking and driving crash in college,” he said. “And as an emergency physician, I have taken care of scores of adults with injuries related to acute alcohol intoxication.

“In five years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels, they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence, and unprotected sexual encounters,” Suffoletto said.

Although this was a small investigation, the researchers note this is a proof-of-concept study that “provides a foundation for future research on using smartphones to remotely detect alcohol-related impairments.”

Researchers plan to not only build on this research detecting real-world signatures of alcohol-related impairment but also identify the best communication and behavioral strategies to influence and support individuals during high-risk periods, such as intoxication.

The study was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Source: Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

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Treating County Jail Inmates With Dignity, Respect Goes a Long Way

A new study finds that treating county jail inmates with respect and decency can go a long way in improving some aspects of America’s criminal justice system.

Researcher Matt Richie, an assistant criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (UWO), studies jail recidivism and operations as well as pre-trial/post-conviction treatment diversion programming. His study is the result of years of researching how correctional officers manage the jail population.

The findings reveal that a great deal of the work involves interpersonal communication skills rather than physical force. So, in a sense, treating people like people makes life easier for both ends of the power dynamic.

Richie hopes that more jail administrators take this approach and really work on building strong interpersonal communication skills.

The study, “Managing the Rabble with Dignity and Respect,” was recently published in the Journal of Crime and Justice, a publication of the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association.

The research involved 30 hours of observation inside a county jail and interviews with the jail employees. Richie chose to focus on a jail in a suburban or rural area because there’s already so much known about what goes on in urban parts of the country. In this case, he wanted to investigate a population where resources are limited and recidivism rates are high.

“If you leave the Milwaukee County Jail, there are 100 services — for mental health, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, human trafficking, you name it, they have something for it and some nonprofit wants to help you,” he said. “But what we know about suburban and rural areas is that those services are farther and fewer between. So if you have some of these issues, it’s harder for you to find treatment.”

The lack of support leads to the same people cycling in and out of the jails. And the jail workers on site have learned that in order to make everybody’s experience easier, it’s best to take on a customer service-like approach.

Richie chose to focus on jails instead of prisons because of the poor condition many inmates are in when they first land behind bars. When people begin prison time, they’ve been in the system for a while — they are likely clean and sober and receiving treatment for whatever ailments they face. That’s not often the case for people in jail, who might be hours removed from hitting rock bottom.

With so many obstacles, it was amazing to see the difference a five-minute conversation can make in diffusing a possibly explosive situation, Richie said. Time and again he observed officers opting to explain what needed to happen, express some empathy and avoid further conflict.

Even though the order of operations now is to try to talk things through first, use physical force second, sometimes that first step is given up on too quickly or done half-heartedly.

“I would hope more jail administrators would take this approach. Instead of doing defensive and tactical training, really work on interpersonal communication — and not just having that cadence of what to say and the rules of engagement for communication,” Richie said.

Source: University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

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Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Greater Risk for Health Problems Later

People who experienced one or more forms of maltreatment in childhood have a higher chance of developing several types of health conditions in later life, according to a new U.K. study published in the Journal of Comorbidity.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow analyzed UK Biobank data from more than 157,000 participants to examine the link between the four forms of childhood maltreatment — physical, sexual, emotional and neglect — and the presence of multiple health conditions, known as multimorbidity, later in adult life.

The team found that those who had experienced all four types of maltreatment were five times as likely to have four or more long-term health conditions, than those who reported experiencing no childhood maltreatment.

When compared with no experience of childhood maltreatment, participants experiencing all four types of maltreatment were more likely to be socially isolated, and more than three times as likely to report poor self-rated health, loneliness, frailty, and chronic widespread pain.

In addition, experiencing a greater number of types of childhood maltreatment was also linked to a higher prevalence of mental health conditions.

The researchers also found that experience of just one type of childhood maltreatment was associated with long term health conditions, including long term pain and frailty.

While experiencing multiple types of childhood maltreatment was relatively rare, the study found that, overall, child maltreatment impacts a high proportion of people, with 33% of the participants included in the study reporting at least one form of maltreatment.

“Our findings are in keeping with the growing body of research looking at the impact of childhood adversity on future health and social outcomes,” said Professor Frances Mair, Norie Miller Professor of General Practice at the University of Glasgow, who led the study.

“Our work, alongside other studies suggests in this area, suggests that childhood maltreatment can have consequences in later life, including the development of multimorbidity in adulthood.

“Our findings suggest people experiencing childhood maltreatment are not only at risk of higher numbers of long term health conditions in adulthood, but they are also experiencing factors that will complicate self-management and practitioner work —such as mental health problems and isolation — with implications for the resources needed to manage these patients well.”

There is a growing interest in the wider impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES), which include child maltreatment as well as domestic violence, parental abandonment, a parent with a mental health condition, a family member in prison, or an adult in the household experiencing drug or alcohol problems.

These childhood experiences are already known to have strong associations with multiple poor social and health outcomes, and result in a significant economic burden. Further, experience of maltreatment is already associated with increased risk factors for chronic disease and a range of different physical and mental health conditions.

“Multimorbidity is a major global challenge. As well as ensuring adequate support for patients experiencing complex multimorbidity, the importance of prevention is paramount,” said Dr. Peter Hanlon, one of the lead authors.

Joint lead author Dr. Marianne McCallum added, “Investing in prevention and support of early childhood adversity could result in improved health outcomes in the future. Our results add to the evidence that efforts to mitigate the impact of childhood adversity should be seen as public health measures.”

Source: SAGE

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Distractions Make it Difficult for Snackers to Know When They are Full

Eating while doing something perceptually demanding like watching TV, reading, or playing video games, makes it more difficult to notice when you feel full, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Sussex in England found that when your senses are taken up by an engaging task, you are less likely to be aware of how much extra food or drink you consume.

For their study, the researchers tested 120 participants, giving them lower and higher calorie drinks and giving them tasks that demanded both low and high amounts of their attention.

The researchers found that participants who were fully engaged in a perceptually demanding task ate roughly the same amount of follow-up crisps regardless of whether they were initially given a high or low calorie drink.

But the people who were engaged in a task that demanded less of them could adjust how much of the additional snack they ate. The people in this group ate 45 percent fewer crisps after the higher energy drink than after the lower energy drink, according to the study’s findings.

Previous research has shown that when perceptual demand is high — where the senses are engaged fully — the brain filters out some of the sensory information. This is the first time that research has shown that sensory and nutrient cues associated with becoming full could be filtered out in a similar way, according to the researchers.

“Our study suggests that if you’re eating or drinking while your attention is distracted by a highly engaging task, you’re less likely to be able to tell how full you feel,” said Professor Martin Yeomans from the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. “You’re more likely to keep snacking than if you’d been eating while doing something less engaging. This is important for anyone wanting to stay a healthy weight: If you’re a habitual TV-watching snacker — watching, say, an engaging thriller or mystery, or a film with a lot of audio or visual effects — you’re not likely to notice when you feel full. Video-gamers and crossword solvers should also take note.”

“We already knew that feeling full could be affected by the texture and appearance of food, as well as pre-existing expectations about how full we think a type of food should make us feel,” he continued. “Now we also know that feeling full depends on how much sensory information our brains are processing at the time.”

For the study, the researchers recruited 120 participants, who drank either a low-satiety (75kcal) or high-satiety (272kcal and thicker texture) drink while simultaneously completing a task that was either low or high in perceptual demand.

The participants who were given the low perceptual load task, and were given the high-satiety drink, felt more full and ate 45 percent less of the snack offered to them afterwards, according to the study’s findings.

However, the participants who were given the higher load perception task were less able to tell when they felt full, and ate more of the snacks offered to them, the researchers discovered.

The researchers conclude that a person’s ability to notice when the body feels full depends on how much available attention is “left” in the brain.

The results provide the first evidence that Load Theory of Attention — the idea that a person has a limited amount of sensory information they can notice — can be successfully applied to eating habits, the researchers noted.

The study was published in the journal Appetite.

Source: University of Sussex

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Denver’s Camping Ban Causing Severe Public Health Issues for Homeless People

After new “tough love” measures designed to clear homeless people from the streets and into social services, the city of Denver has seen an increase in physical assault, poor mental health and weather-related issues, such as frostbite and heat stroke, among homeless populations.

A new study from the University of Colorado Denver finds that this increase in “quality of life” policing in cities around the U.S. undermines the sleeping patterns, physical safety, and mental health of people experiencing homelessness.

For example, Colorado State Patrol troopers recently began clearing out nearly 200 residents from homeless encampments that surround the Colorado Capitol. The enforcement of city ordinances like camping bans, park curfews and obstructions of public passageways is lawful.

The study, done in collaboration with advocacy organization Denver Homeless Out Loud, is published in the Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness.

“These laws are enforced under the guise of ‘tough love,’ because municipalities want to push people into services,” says Marisa Westbrook, doctoral student in health and behavioral sciences at CU Denver, who worked alongside Tony Robinson, PhD, associate professor of political science.

“But we’d heard that this ‘quality of life’ policing is making sleeping on the street even more unhealthy, which is why we wanted to objectively document what those experiences looked like.”

Researchers surveyed 484 people experiencing homelessness across Denver and found that 74% had been asked to “move along” by police. A total of 44% had been ticketed or arrested after police contact for a ‘quality of life’ violation. These “move along” orders led individuals to seek more hidden and isolated city locations to sleep — nearly a quarter sought out hidden river or creek beds, while another quarter chose to keep moving all night.

Without the well-lit areas of public parks or the security and resources of a group — reasons why people experiencing homelessness stay together — those who moved to avoid police contact were more than twice as likely to be physically assaulted and 39% more likely to be robbed than homeless persons who didn’t move.

When police enforced camping or shelter bans, the study found a 45% increase in the risk of weather-related health issues like frostbite, heatstroke, and dehydration.

In addition, 70% report being woken often by police and 52% are constantly worried about police contact while sleeping. Those frequently woken by police sleep an average of two hours at a time and achieve less than four hours of sleep per night.

“You can imagine the impact on mental health,” says Westbrook. “They’re dealing with anxiety, stress and depression, but staying in shelters is simply not an option for some people. During the pandemic, homeless shelters have had higher rates of coronavirus than outdoor encampments. Cities are clearing outside encampments, but there are not enough housing units or shelter resources for people to stay far enough apart at this time.”

The situation will only get worse. Nearly 420,000 Coloradans risk evictions in the coming months, with the greatest increases beginning in August, according to the Bell Policy Center and COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project.

In fact, with the eviction moratorium lifted and curbed unemployment benefits, almost 20% of the 110 million renters nationwide are potentially facing homelessness.

Across Colorado, there are only 26 affordable housing units available to every 100 very low-income households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. For residents who make less than half of the median income, they’ve seen affordable housing choices decrease by 75% between 2010 and 2016 — one of the steepest drops in the nation.

“A lot of folks are just hanging on month after month,” says Westbrook. “They’re hoping they won’t be evicted or they’re living out of their car. In 2019, Denver voters chose to maintain the camping ban, which is one of the cruelest things we could have done for the health and wellbeing of our community.”

Source: University of Colorado Denver

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Tobacco Companies Use Targeted Marketing to Entice Teens to Vape

A new study is the first to show the ways e-cigarette companies persuade teens to vape. Officials are concerned because youth, and especially youth in vulnerable populations, can become addicted to nicotine and may develop a life-long habit.

E-cigarettes first entered the North American market in 2008 and were hailed as a smoking cessation tool. However, researchers from the University of British Columbia found that vaping companies are using marketing strategies that appeal to teens’ developmental desire for social identity, and use of nicotine has increased by nearly 20% among youth in grades seven to 12.

University of British Columbia researchers hope their findings will lead to proactive measures to combat the trend.

Assistant Professor Laura Struik, who teaches in UBC Okanagan’s School of Nursing, is the lead author on the paper. Struik conducted the study with Assistant Professor Sarah Dow-Fleisner, who conducts research in the UBCO School of Social Work on development trajectories and resilient functioning of children and families in high-risk contexts.

“This is the first study of its kind that makes direct links between reasons for youth uptake and the marketing strategies of e-cigarette companies,” says Struik. “The public needs to know how the next generation is being targeted to take up and ultimately become addicted to these nicotine products.”

The researchers say there are a variety of reasons teens take up vaping — ranging from managing stress to anxiety, curiosity, taste, peer pressure, easy access and even that vaping is easy to hide from parents and is perceived to be less harmful than cigarettes.

Although e-cigarettes were initially hailed as a smoking cessation tool, Dow-Fleisner says when they take a closer look at who uses them, it’s clear teens do not use the products to quit smoking.

“According to recent statistics, only 3% of Canadian youth in grades seven to 12 are current smokers — while 20% use e-cigarettes,” she says. “This suggests that upwards of 17% of e-cigarette users were originally non-smokers. In addition, among youth who do smoke combustible cigarettes, fewer than 8% of those report using e-cigarettes to quit smoking.”

Recent polls found that 95% of teens said they were curious about vaping so they wanted to try it, while 81% tried an e-cigarette because a friend vaped, and 80% reported continued e-cigarette use because they enjoyed the good flavors. More than 70% of the teens agreed e-cigarettes were “cool and fun.”

Despite emerging evidence of both short- and long-term health risks associated with vaping, Struik says the evidence is clear the other reasons teens take up vaping override the health risks.

“Youth don’t make the decision to vape because they don’t understand the risks or don’t care about the risks,” she says. “Young people are taking up vaping for a variety of reasons and e-cigarette companies are leveraging those diverse reasons to recruit teens into using their products. And it’s working.”

Struik and Dow-Fleisner, with their research assistants and UBCO’s Associate Chief Librarian Robert Janke, reviewed more than 800 studies and viewed numerous e-cigarettes TV commercials.

“The TV advertisements we reviewed were found to tap into almost all of the reasons youth cite for taking up e-cigarettes,” says Dow-Fleisner. “The most highly-cited reasons were most prominently presented in the ads, including a focus on relational aspects of vaping and product-related benefits, such as a positive sensory experience.”

A noteworthy finding is that vaping advertisements do promote e-cigarettes as a way to enhance your social life, says Struik.

“This is particularly concerning because teens are at a developmental stage when establishing a social identity is of utmost importance to them,” she says.

“It has been found in previous research that forming an identity around other forms of tobacco use, like smoking, results in resistance to health promotion efforts. So, we may have a more challenging context to work with than originally thought when it comes to intervening.”

Youth vaping is a concern, she adds, and there is a growing need for comprehensive strategic plans to curtail their use of e-cigarettes.

“It is clear that we need to bring youth to the table to understand how we can generate relevant information and interventions to support their decision to not vape,” says Struik.

“Our health promotion efforts need to keep up by accommodating the various reasons youth report vaping, and youth need to be meaningfully included to navigate this issue.”

Source: University of British Columbia

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Many Young Kids Would Rather Explore Options Than Get Rewards

A new study shows that many young children will pass up immediate rewards in order to explore other options.

The findings, published online in the journal Developmental Science, show that when adults and 4- to 5-year-old children played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest returns.

But while adults used that knowledge to maximize their prizes, children continued exploring the other options, just to see if their value may have changed.

“Exploration seems to be a major driving force during early childhood, even outweighing the importance of immediate rewards,” said Dr. Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

“We believe it is because young children need to explore to help them understand how the world works.”

And despite what adults may think, kids’ search for new discoveries is anything but random. Results showed children approached exploration systematically, to make sure they didn’t miss anything.

“When adults think of kids exploring, they may think of them as running around aimlessly, opening drawers and cupboards, picking up random objects,” Sloutsky said. “But it turns out their exploration isn’t random at all.”

Sloutsky conducted the study with Dr. Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State.

The researchers conducted two studies. In the first study of 32 children (ages 4-5) and 34 adults, participants were shown four alien creatures on a computer screen. When they clicked on each creature, they were given a set number of virtual candies.

One creature was clearly the best, giving 10 candies, while the others gave 1, 2 and 3 candies, respectively. Those amounts never changed over the course of the experiment.

The goal was to collect as much candy as possible over 100 trials. (The children could turn their virtual candies into real stickers at the end of the experiment.)

As expected, the adults learned quickly which creature gave the most candies and selected that creature 86 percent of the time. But children chose the highest-reward creature only 43 percent of the time.

And it wasn’t because the children didn’t know which creature would give the largest reward. In a memory test after the study, 20 of 22 children correctly identified which creature delivered the most candy.

“The children were not motivated by achieving the maximum reward to the extent that adults were,” Blanco said. “Instead, children seemed primarily motivated by the information gained through exploring.”

But what was interesting was that the children didn’t just click randomly on the creatures, Sloutsky said.

When they didn’t click on the option with the highest reward, they were most likely to go through the other creatures systematically, to be sure they never went too long without testing each creature.

“The longer they didn’t check a particular option, the less certain they were on its value and the more they wanted to check it again,” he said.

In a second study, the game was similar but the value of three of the four choices was visible — only one was hidden. The option that was hidden was randomly determined in each trial, so it changed nearly every time. But the values of all four choices never changed, even when it was the hidden one.

Similar to the first experiment, the adults picked the best option on almost every trial: 94 percent of the time. That was much more than the children, who chose the highest-value option only 40 percent of the time.

When the hidden option was the highest-value option, adults chose it 84 percent of the time, but otherwise they almost never selected it (2 percent of the time). Children chose the hidden option about 40 percent of the time, and it didn’t matter if it was the highest value one or not.

“The majority of the children were attracted to the uncertainty of the hidden option. They wanted to explore that choice,” Sloutsky said.

However, there were some individual differences in children, he noted. A few children, for example, acted a lot like the adults and almost always chose the greatest-value option. And in the second experiment, a few children almost always avoided the hidden option.

These differences may have to do with varying levels of cognitive maturation in children, he said. But it appears that all kids go through a phase where systematic exploration is one of their main goals.

“Even though we knew that children like to run around and investigate things, we’re now learning that there is a lot of regularity to their behavior,” Sloutsky said.

“Children’s seemingly erratic behavior at this age appears to be largely molded by a drive to stockpile information,” added Blanco.

Source: Ohio State University

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