MS cognitive rehabilitation: Task meaningfulness influences learning, memory, research finds

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Kessler Foundation researchers have found that among persons with multiple sclerosis, self-generation may be influenced by variables such as task meaningfulness during learning and memory. They also found that type of task (functional versus laboratory) had a significant effect on memory. This is the first controlled investigation of therapeutic and patient-specific factors that supports the inclusion of self-generation in cognitive rehabilitation. The study was published in the January issue of Neuropsychological Rehabilitation: An International Journal.Yael Goverover, PhD, OT, is a Visiting Scientist at Kessler Foundation. She is an associate professor at New York University. Dr. Goverover is a recipient of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research Fellowship award (Mary Switzer Award).The researchers studied two groups: 35 persons with MS who had moderate to severe learning and memory impairments (SEVERE-MS), and 35 persons with little to no impairment (MILD-MS). All the participants learned two types of tasks (functional everyday tasks and laboratory tasks), each in two learning conditions (Provided and Generated). Participants were required to recall the information immediately, 30 minutes, and 1 week following initial learning. Significantly more words were recalled from the generated condition, a finding that was consistent for both SEVERE-MS and MILD-MS. …


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Stopping smoking linked to improved mental health

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The researchers say the effect sizes are equal or larger than those of antidepressant treatment for mood and anxiety disorders.It is well known that stopping smoking substantially reduces major health risks, such as the development of cancers, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. But the association between smoking and mental health is less clear cut.Many smokers want to stop but continue smoking as they believe smoking has mental health benefits. And health professionals are sometimes reluctant to deal with smoking in people with mental disorders in case stopping smoking worsens their mental health.So researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Oxford, and King’s College London set out to investigate changes in mental health after smoking cessation compared with continuing to smoke.They analysed the results of 26 studies of adults that assessed mental health before smoking cessation and at least six weeks after cessation in the general population and clinical populations (patients with chronic psychiatric and/or physical conditions).Differences in study design and quality were taken into account to minimize bias.Measures of mental health included anxiety, depression, positivity, psychological quality of life, and stress. Participants had an average age of 44, smoked around 20 cigarettes a day, and were followed up for an average of six months.The research team found consistent evidence that stopping smoking is associated with improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, psychological quality of life, and positivity compared with continuing to smoke.The strength of association was similar for both the general population and clinical populations, including those with mental health disorders. And there was no evidence that study differences could have skewed the results.Although observational data can never prove causality, “smokers can be reassured that stopping smoking is associated with mental health benefits,” say the authors.”This could overcome barriers that clinicians have toward intervening with smokers with mental health problems,” they add. “Furthermore, challenging the widely held assumption that smoking has mental health benefits could motivate smokers to stop.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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No clowning around: Juggling sheds light on how we run

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Juggling may seem like mere entertainment, but a study led by Johns Hopkins engineers used this circus skill to gather critical clues about how vision and the sense of touch help control the way humans and animals move their limbs in a repetitive way, such as in running. The findings eventually may aid in the treatment of people with neurological diseases and could lead to prosthetic limbs and robots that move more efficiently.The study was published online recently by the Journal of Neurophysiology and will be the cover article in the journal’s March 2014 print edition.In their paper, the team led by Johns Hopkins researchers detailed the unusual jump from juggling for fun to serious science. Jugglers, they explained, rely on repeated rhythmic motions to keep multiple balls aloft. Similar forms of rhythmic movement are also common in the animal world, where effective locomotion is equally important to a swift-moving gazelle and to the cheetah that’s chasing it.”It turns out that the art of juggling provides an interesting window into many of the same questions that you try to answer when you study forms of locomotion, such as walking or running,” said Noah Cowan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who supervised the research. “In our study, we had participants stand still and use their hands in a rhythmic way. It’s very much like watching them move their feet as they run. But we used juggling as a model for rhythmic motor coordination because it’s a simpler system to study.”Specifically, Cowan and his colleagues wanted to look at how the brain uses vision and the sense of touch to control this type of behavior. To do so, they set up a simple virtual juggling scenario. Participants held a real-world paddle connected to a computer and were told to bounce an on-screen ball repeatedly up to a target area between two lines, also drawn on the monitor. In some trials, the participants had only their vision to guide them. …


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Virtual avatars may impact real-world behavior

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How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.”Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.As Yoon and co-author Patrick Vargas note, virtual environments afford people the opportunity to take on identities and experience circumstances that they otherwise can’t in real life, providing “a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modeling.”They wondered whether these virtual experiences — specifically, the experiences of taking on heroic or villainous avatars — might carry over into everyday behavior.The researchers recruited 194 undergraduates to participate in two supposedly unrelated studies. The participants were randomly assigned to play as Superman (a heroic avatar), Voldemort (a villainous avatar), or a circle (a neutral avatar). They played a game for 5 minutes in which they, as their avatars, were tasked with fighting enemies. Then, in a presumably unrelated study, they participated in a blind taste test. They were asked to taste and then give either chocolate or chili sauce to a future participant. They were told to pour the chosen food item into a plastic dish and that the future participant would consume all of the food provided.The results were revealing: Participants who played as Superman poured, on average, nearly twice as much chocolate as chili sauce for the “future participant.” And they poured significantly more chocolate than those who played as either of the other avatars.Participants who played as Voldemort, on the other hand, poured out nearly twice as much of the spicy chili sauce than they did chocolate, and they poured significantly more chili sauce compared to the other participants.A second experiment with 125 undergraduates confirmed these findings and showed that actually playing as an avatar yielded stronger effects on subsequent behavior than just watching someone else play as the avatar.Interestingly, the degree to which participants actually identified with their avatar didn’t seem to play a role:”These behaviors occur despite modest, equivalent levels of self-reported identification with heroic and villainous avatars, alike,” Yoon and Vargas note. “People are prone to be unaware of the influence of their virtual representations on their behavioral responses.”The researchers hypothesize that that arousal, the degree to which participants are ‘keyed into’ the game, might be an important factor driving the behavioral effects they observed.The findings, though preliminary, may have implications for social behavior, the researchers argue:”In virtual environments, people can freely choose avatars that allow them to opt into or opt out of a certain entity, group, or situation,” says Yoon. “Consumers and practitioners should remember that powerful imitative effects can occur when people put on virtual masks.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Association for Psychological Science. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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