Do Baby Einstein DVDs work? Exposing infants to educational dvds may affect their language development.

Written by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD on Wednesday, March 10.2010

A few weeks ago I wrote a study that showed that exposing premature babies to Mozart music may lead to metabolic changes that facilitate weight gain and better medical outcomes. That study is an example of one credible and positive outcome that came out of the “Mozart effect’ craze. Unfortunately, most of the other claims, such as that listening to Mozart improves intelligence, have been discredited. So today I’m discussing a similar fad: making babies watch “educational” dvds or movies. For example, an entire industry has been developed to provide ‘educational’ dvds designed for infants and toddlers, such as the Baby Einstein DVD series reduced and marketed by Walt Disney. These dvds are marketed as developmentally appropriate for young children and able to facilitate the development of various cognitive skills such as language. For example, the dvd Baby Wordsworth is supposed to help babies learn 30 English words using child-friendly scenes (e.g., puppets, etc).

But do they work?

The journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine just published a study conducted by a team of researchers at the University of California at Riverside. The study included 95 babies/toddlers between the ages of 12 and 25 months. These children were randomly assigned to a Baby Wordsworth DVD condition or to a no DVD group. Parents of the children in the DVD group were asked to use the Baby Wordworth DVD as they would use any other media at home. The no DVD group simply completed a series of laboratory tasks but were not provided with a dvd to watch at home.  The study lasted for 6 weeks. Before and after the 6 weeks, the children went through a battery of tests and the parents completed a series of scales designed to measure the baby’s language and cognitive skills.

The results:

1.      By the end of the 6 weeks,  there was no difference between those infants who were repeatedly exposed to the dvd and those who were not exposed to the dvd in regards to their general language and cognitive abilities.

The above finding is not really surprising as it would be unrealistic to expect that the dvd would have a major impact on the children’s cognitive or language function in just 6 weeks. So a better question would be: Does the dvd help children learn those 30 words?

2.      By the end of the 6 weeks, those infants who watched the dvd during this time were not more likely than those who didn’t watch the DVD to say the words, recognize the words, or identify the words using pictures of the objects.

The findings suggest that the educational DVD does not facilitate the learning of these words by infants when exposed to the dvd in a naturalistic setting for 6 weeks. So far, I had not been surprised by these results, but I was a bit surprised by the following:

3.      Those infants exposed to the dvd at an earlier age (closer to 12 months) had lower overall language scores at the end of the 6 weeks than those exposed to the dvd at a later age (closer to 24 months) or those not exposed at all.

This seems to suggest that early exposure to the dvd can actually negatively impact language development. Although a couple of previous studies have found similar effects, this study is critical because it helps us answer one key question: does early exposure to the dvd affect language development or do children with language development simply tend to watch more tv/dvds? For example, it is possible that parents of children who have more language delays buy the educational DVDs in order to help their children. If this is the case, there would be an association between watching dvds and language delays, but it would not be the DVD that contributed to the language delay. But this study suggests that this may not be the case because the participants in this study were randomly assigned to the DVD or the no DVD group. That is, in this study, the use of the DVD is unlikely to be due to parental concerns about the children’s language development.

So what can explain the possible detrimental effects of watching these educational dvds at an early age? The authors mentioned a couple of possibilities. It is possible that having the dvd as a tool kept the parents from engaging verbally with the infants leading to a delay in language development. It is also possible that the dvd lacks one major component of the language learning process: The Authors explain:

Regarding word learning specifically, a large body of language acquisition research suggests infants are more likely to learn words for novel objects if a speaker is looking at an object rather than attending elsewhere or looking directly at the child.18 Thus, learning words from a television screen requires children to be paying attention to the screen and also to be aware of the relevant referent object to which the on-screen labeler is referring. In the case of the DVD used in this study, the onscreen character looked directly at the children and signed the name for the object while a voice-over spoke the label. This scenario is very different from the optimal word learning scenario for children younger than 2 years.

Regardless of the reason, the results of this and previous studies seem to suggest that exposing young infants to television, even when such media was specifically designed as an educational tool for babies, may be associated with a delay in language development.
The reference: Richert, R., Robb, M., Fender, J., & Wartella, E. (2010). Word Learning From Baby Videos Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine DOI: 10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.24

Source:  http://www.child-psych.org/2010/03/do-baby-einstein-dvds-work-exposing-infants-to-educational-dvds-may-affect-their-language-development.html

In Our Time on the Infant Brain:

This morning’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s brilliant In Our Time was dedicated to the infant brain and has a wide ranging discussion about how ideas about the early development of the child developed into the modern age of neuroscience.

The streamed version will be available on the website permanently, but if you want to download the podcast you only have a week to do so from this page.

Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn’t differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies’ perception of the world began as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

Link to In Our Time ‘The Infant Brain’ (thanks Petra!)

Source:  http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/03/in_our_time_on_the_i.html

Babies, Even When Premature, ‘See’ With Their Hands

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2010) — Even premature babies at 33 weeks post-conceptional age, about 2 months before term (40 gestational weeks), are capable of recognizing and distinguishing two objects of different shapes (a prism and a cylinder) with their right or left hands. This is the first demonstration of fully efficient manual perception in preterm human infants.

The phenomenon was discovered by researchers at two laboratories: the Laboratoire de psychologie et neurocognition (CNRS / University of Grenoble 2 / University of Chambéry) and the Laboratoire de psychologie de la perception (CNRS / University of Paris Descartes) in cooperation with a team from the Neonatology Department of the Grenoble University Hospitals. The findings have been published on the PLoS One website.

The source of all perceptual knowledge, the sense organs and sensory systems of premature babies are less efficient than those of full-term babies, even though the latter are also not yet fully developed. Starting in the very first minutes after birth, a full-term infant is subjected to extensive tactile stimulation: it is washed, held on its mother’s stomach, nursed, diapered, etc. Its body almost immediately experiences contact with skin other than its own, with towels, sheets, nipples — in short, with objects of different textures, shapes and consistencies. It is common knowledge that a baby will flex its fingers tightly if its palm is touched by a finger, but this grasping reaction is not just a simple reflex. Even in the first hours of its life, a full-term newborn already has effective manual perception, a tactile capacity that enables it to make sense of its environment. But what about the premature infant, whose neurological functions are even less developed due to its early birth?

To find out, the researchers conducted an experiment with 24 premature babies aged 33 to 34+6 gestational weeks (GW), approximately 2 weeks after their birth. Their average gestational age (age at birth) was 31 GW (which corresponds to about 7 months of pregnancy) and their average weight at birth was 1500 g. The research team adopted an experimental method based on habituation (first phase) and reaction to novelty (second phase), similar to that used for full-term newborns. This method relies on a simple universal principle: the gradual loss of interest that all humans experience in relation to a familiar object and the renewed attention elicited by a new, unfamiliar object. In the first phase, the researcher places a small object (a prism for half of the babies and a cylinder for the other half) in one of the baby’s hands (the right hand for half of the group and the left for the other half). As soon as the infant lets go of the object, the experimenter places it back in the same hand and measures how long the baby holds the object each time. The researchers observed that the holding time decreased over the course of the trials, indicating that the baby had become “habituated” to the shape of the object.

In the second phase, once the babies are habituated to their first objects, the researchers present an object with a new shape to half of the group and a familiar object (the same as in the habituation phase) to the other half. The result: the holding time is longer for the new object (reaction to novelty) than for the familiar object. This proves that the decrease in holding time (observed in the first phase) is not due to the babies’ simply growing tired, because otherwise they would not be more interested in something new.

This experiment reveals for the first time that preterm infants are capable of recognizing an object with their hands (tactile habituation) and that they show a preference for a novel object, reflecting their capacity to differentiate between two objects of different shapes (tactile discrimination). In other words, each time they hold an object, premature babies, like those born at term, are capable of extracting information tactilely on its shape, temporarily storing this information in their memory and comparing it with new tactile input. If the object is the same they soon stop holding it, but if it is different they show greater interest. Therefore, preterm infants, like full-term newborns, are receptive to tactile information and are already learning.

These findings improve our understanding of the perceptual capacities of premature babies and should help neonatology professionals optimize the handling and treatment of their preterm charges, in particular for the purpose of reducing their stress and offering them optimal conditions for their development.

Journal Reference:

1. Lejeune et al. The Manual Habituation and Discrimination of Shapes in Preterm Human Infants from 33 to 34 6 Post-Conceptional Age. PLoS ONE, 2010; 5 (2): e9108 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009108

Source:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100226205020.htm

The Role Of Baby-Sign In Child Development

Article Date: 10 Mar 2010 – 1:00 PST

How important is it for mothers to use hand gestures to communicate with their infants? This is the key question investigated by new research being showcased at the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Festival of Social Science on 18 March.

Source: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/181731.php

 

Behavioral Problems in Childhood Doubles the Risk of Chronic Widespread Pain in Adult Life

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2010) — Bad behaviour in childhood is associated with long-term, chronic widespread pain in adult life, according to the findings of a study following nearly 20,000 people from birth in 1958 to the present day.

Chronic widespread pain is a common complaint that can have a major adverse effect on quality of life, often requiring referral to a hospital specialist for investigation and treatment. The research, published online in the journal Rheumatology on March 10, found that children with severe behaviour disturbances had approximately double the risk of chronic widespread pain by the time they reached the age of 45 than children who did not have behaviour problems.

The researchers found that this association was not explained by social class, early reporting of symptoms or an already-known link between adult psychological distress and chronic widespread pain (CWP). Instead, they believe that a dysfunction in the interaction between the nervous system and hormones, occurring in early life, may have long-term consequences for adult health.

The lead author of the study, Dr Dong Pang, an epidemiologist at the University of Aberdeen (UK), said: “We know already that severe adverse events in childhood such as hospitalisation after a road traffic accident and separation from mothers are linked to CWP in adulthood. In addition, aspects of childhood behaviour are strongly related to children reporting CWP. However, until now, it was unknown whether maladjusted behaviour in children was a long-term marker for CWP in adulthood. Our study shows that it is.

“We are not sure what underlying biological mechanism underpins this relationship, but one possible explanation might be that both the childhood behaviour and the adult CWP are due to a long-term neuroendocrine dysfunction beginning in early life. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the primary neuroendocrine stress response system, has been shown to be associated with childhood behaviour. Similarly, altered HPA axis function has been reported to be associated with CWP. Early life experience, such as emotional stress due to past trauma, may have a lifelong impact on the neuroendocrine system (HPA axis), which in turn leads to behavioural problems in childhood and CWP in adulthood as well as other mental problems. Further research at molecular and genetic level are needed to clarify this.”

The researchers followed a group of 18,558 children who were born in one week in 1958 in England, Scotland and Wales, and an additional 920 children who were born in the same week overseas and who came to the UK before the age of 16. Information was collected at regular intervals, including at the ages of 7, 11 and 16, and at 42 and 45 in adulthood. Parents and teachers independently assessed the children’s behaviour on aspects such as restlessness, worrying, solitariness, ability to make friends, obedience, stealing, sucking thumbs and biting nails, lying, bullying, truanting etc. At the age of 42 the participants completed a questionnaire asking about psychological distress in adult life, and at the age 45 they completed another one about pain.

The study found that CWP was slightly more common in women than in men (12.9% versus 11.7%). Children whose teachers had reported severe persistent behaviour problems at all ages (7, 11 and 16) had more than double the risk of CWP in adulthood compared with children without behaviour problems at all ages. If the children had severe behaviour problems at 11 and 16, then they had nearly double the risk of CWP in later life. Similar, but weaker associations were shown for parent-reported behaviour, which the researchers believe is because teachers tend to be better at providing objective assessments of behaviour as they have more children to compare.

The researchers say that it is not just CWP that is associated with bad behaviour in childhood. Other adult problems that are associated with childhood behavioural problems include long-term psychiatric problems such as depression and anxiety, suicidal behaviour, substance abuse and treatment for psychiatric illness. They suggest that all these problems may be outcomes of the chain of events set in motion by the dysfunctioning neuroendocrine system. If further research proves this to be the case, then it might be possible to intervene in early life to prevent these problems occurring later.

Professor Gary Macfarlane, the leader of the research group, said: “This study helps us to understand the factors in childhood that can lead someone to get on a trajectory of ill-health, including chronic pain. The disruption to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (stress-response) axis is one biological marker of the effect of such experiences and this could help to identify persons at higher risk of chronic pain. Interventions would be lifestyle focussed and would include identification and treatment of behavioural and emotional factors, but would also address lifestyle factors such as increased physical activity.

“We plan to undertake some studies in children to understand what range of factors cause a disturbance to the stress-response axis; such work can then inform what intervention studies may be appropriate.”

Journal Reference:

1. Dong Pang, Gareth T. Jones, Chris Power and Gary J. Macfarlane. Influence of childhood behaviour on the reporting of chronic widespread pain in adulthood: results from the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study. Rheumatology, (in press) DOI: 10.1093/rheumatology/keq052

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100309202920.htm

 

Childhood Stress Can Result in Brain Changes

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 1, 2010

Researchers report that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can detect structural changes in the brain among abused or emotionally neglected children.

The alterations appear to occur when children with a particular genetic makeup are abused predisposing the child to depression.

The study was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin and is published in the international scientific journal, Neuropsychopharmacology.

Commenting on the significance of the findings, Trinity’s Professor Thomas Frodl at the School of Medicine and Trinity Institute for Neuroscience said:

“This improved neurobiological understanding shows how stress and genetic variants interact and affect brain structure and function. In turn it demonstrates how it could affect a person’s propensity for depression. These structural alterations of the brain are associated with a higher vulnerability to depression and a more chronic course of the depression might be associated with further structural changes”.

“Therefore, early intervention in the case of major depression is necessary to increase the chance of a good disease outcome. Fortunately, depression can be treated very well by psychotherapy and antidepressant medication. Moreover, prevention strategies for childhood neglect and misuse are highly important to increase public health and to avoid in later life for these individuals, the burden of major depression.”

The world health organization (WHO) found that major depression is one of the most important human diseases with a prevalence of about 10% worldwide. Approximately 500,000 people in Ireland have or will develop major depression in their life. The WHO has forecast that major depression will be the second most common cause of disability by 2020. Advances in this area will have a high impact on overall disease costs.

The study was conducted on a total of 24 patients (aged 18-65 years) being treated as inpatients for major depression. They were investigated with high-resolution structural MRI and childhood stress assessments. Special analysis programs were used to measure brain regions. These patients were compared with 27 healthy control subjects from the local community who were matched for age and gender.

Further research is needed in a larger number of patients and controls to identify the underlying causes of depression and stress-gene interaction on brains structure as well as function.

Source: Trinity College Dublin

 

 

When Personality Makes Drugs Ineffective In Depression

Article Date: 10 Mar 2010 – 1:00 PST

A study published in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics addresses the role of personality factors in moderating treatment response in depression.

The temperament harm avoidance (HA) has consistently demonstrated an association with major depressive disorder (MDD), serotonin functioning and reduction in depression symptoms in response to antidepressant medications targeting the serotonin system. In this study, the investigators examined HA as a potential mediator of treatment response to a serotonergic tricyclic antidepressant. Outpatients (n = 150) with MDD were randomized to receive clomipramine or a control treatment. Patients completed the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (Ham-D) and the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) prior to treatment initiation, and then again after at least 8 weeks of treatment. Using structural equation modeling, the investigators evaluated a ‘mediation model’ in which change in HA is a mechanism of depression change in response to clomipramine, and a ‘complication model’ in which reduction in HA is a by-product of depression change. The mediation model provided a good fit to the data by all indices, whereas the complication model did not. Patients treated with clomipramine exhibited a greater decrease in HA as compared to those in the control group; moreover, HA reduction was associated with depression reduction.

HA mediated the response to antidepressant treatment, such that any treatment effect of clomipramine occurred through HA reduction. Although replication with multiple assessment periods is required to determine if HA reduction actually precedes depression reduction, the results contribute to a growing body of literature implicating personality constructs subsumed within negative emotionality as mediators of treatment response to medications targeting serotonergic functioning.

Source: Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics

New Drug Strategy for Depression?

 

A recent study analyzed 20,000 conversations and found that happiness strongly correlated with talkative people who went beyond the small talk. Christie Nicholson reports

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Hear movie clip by clicking on audio podcast above.]

That’s a scene from the 1968 movie The Party with Peter Sellers attempting small talk. And sometimes small talk can lead to interesting connections.

But according to a new study in the journal Psychological Science it might be best if you move from small talk quickly into a more substantial conversation.

Researchers analyzed 20,000, 30-second samplings of the daily conversations of study volunteers, and organized them into trivial chatter or more serious discussion. The participants also took personality and well-being assessment tests.

And they found that the happiest participants spent 70 percent more time talking with others than the least happy people. But more than just measuring amount of time spent talking with others, they also found a difference in the type of conversation happier folks engage in.

The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and only a third as much small talk as those who are least content.

Of course this study finding shows correlation not causation. Still, the authors note, “Just as self-disclosure can instill a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a sense of meaning in the interaction partners.”

—Christie Nicholson

Source:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=happy-people-talk-more-seriously-10-03-06

The secret of happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.

– William Penn

Normally I’m known as a “nice guy:” easygoing, fair, pretty calm and generally happy. But several years ago I planned a weekend conference on psychodrama that unglued me. Planning the conference took six months and included the usual things; arranging for a block of rooms, guaranteeing registrants, coordinating lunches and dinners, and keeping the cost down wherever I could.

As a clinical professor, the presentations and training itself were easy. I could lecture and demonstrate the use of role-playing in dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, show videos of how to apply group principles to people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, and demonstrate the various ways to deescalate a fight that had broken out between two members of a group. But guaranteeing payment for a block of rooms and coordinating the coffee sent shivers down my spine.

The pre-registration looked good enough to cover the costs. On the drive from New Jersey to Stockbridge, Mass. where the conference was to be held, I received a call on my cell phone. The shift manager explained that more people had shown up for the conference than anticipated and they could not be accommodated. They did not have reservations and he had no other options than to send them elsewhere.

I lost it.

In my car, alone, I began screaming at the top of my lungs. “You promised me they could accommodate up to 75 people! Now you’re telling me you only have room for 50! I’ve spent six months planning this damn thing with your hotel, we have a contract! You can’t tell me last minute that there is no place for these people — they’ll never trust me again! I’ll never be able to run another conference!” As Albert Ellis might have said, I was “awfulizing.”

Driving on the New York State Thruway I swerved, screamed, and generally worked myself up into what my mother would have called a “tizzy.”

I came to a tollbooth and dug into my pocket to pay. As the window went down I was still shrieking into the phone. I expected to pay and go, but instead the tollbooth operator said something that changed my life.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/01/proof-positive-counting-your-blessings/

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What’s In a Smile?

 

By John M Grohol PsyD

For decades, psychology and its researchers have focused on the negative side of humanity — the things that bring dysfunction into our lives. Depression, sadness, anxiety, you name it. More recently, psychologists have also begun to better understand the value of positive emotions too. This understanding has resulted in a new field of research called “positive psychology” or “happiness research.”

 

So how do we recognize a positive emotion? Or put more simply, “What’s in a smile?”

A new paper just published by Disa Sauter (2010) helps us answer this question.

Happiness is In Your Smile

Psychological research into happiness has, for the most part, focused on facial expressions. It’s no wonder: most of our communication — both verbal and nonverbal — comes from our face. People across cultures understand the value of a smile and other facial expressions that point toward the emotion we call “being happy” or happiness. And we know that smiling itself can help increase positive, pro-social behaviors.

But how much research has examined more specific positive emotions in facial expressions? Surprisingly, only one study has been conducted that examined how the face displays specific positive emotions. The researchers in that study found:

[…] that displays of amusement and pride were signaled by smiles, but that amused smiles tended to be open-mouthed, whereas smiles of pride had compressed lips. In contrast, awe was typically expressed with raised eyebrows and a slightly open mouth, but not with smiles.

This study highlights that there is likely more than one kind of smile and that different smile configurations may communicate different affective states.

Smiles are more complicated that the simple communication of happiness. They can communicate a wide range of positive emotions, depending upon their specific makeup.

Pride

What about expressions of pride? Pride is considered a “secondary emotion” behind more basic emotions such as happiness and fear. Surprisingly, expressions of pride across cultures shares some specific characteristics:

Using photographs of participants from over 30 nations, Tracy and Matsumoto showed that individuals who won a fight produced a number of behaviors typically associated with pride expressions, including raising their arms, tilting their head back, smiling, and expanding their chest. This configuration of cues is recognized by observers as communicating pride.

Happy Noises & Touching

Just as with pride, there are apparently a number of universally recognized human sounds that express positive emotion. Research has shown that specific emotions recognized from sounds alone include amusement, triumph, sensual pleasure (the one we’re all most familiar with!) and relief.

You’d think that touch would be a sense that has been well-studied, given how important touch is to our emotional needs. But there has been very little research conducted examining the effects of human touch. What little research that has been done has found that certain positive emotions can sometimes be detected through touch:

They found that participants from two cultures (USA and Spain) could decode affective states from tactile stimulation on the arm. Emotions that were well recognized included several positive states, such as love, gratitude, and sympathy. Hertenstein et al. also showed that love was typically signaled with stroking, gratitude was communicated with a handshake, and sympathy was expressed with a patting movement.

Of course, some positive emotions are not well communicated through touch, including the general sense of “happiness.” Notice that only specific positive emotions — and only certain ones — are well-communicated through touch. Pride is an example of a positive emotion that has no equivalent touch sense.

Conclusions

What’s in a smile? A lot of information, telling the receiver of the smile whether you meant you were happy, amused, or proud. Research into human expression of positive emotions is ongoing and will explore more of these areas in years to come.

What we have found so far is that not every specific positive emotion — for instance, pride — is expressed through every type of sense.

As the researcher notes, “It will be interesting to consider whether ease of communication via different types of signals may relate to different “families” of emotions, such as self-conscious emotions including pride, and prosocial emotions like love.” If happiness can only be communicated through facial expressions, and not through touch, that’s good information to know when we think we’re communicating our happiness to a loved one through a specific gesture.

Happiness is a core component of life and living, and is associated with helping protect us against heart disease and enhancing our overall health. We also know that gratitude tends to lead to more happiness. The better we understand how happiness is expressed to others, perhaps the more clearly we’ll be able to communicate such emotions in the future.

Reference:

Sauter, D. (2010). More Than Happy: The Need for Disentangling Positive Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19.

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Source:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/05/whats-in-a-smile/

 

 

 

By Therese J. Borchard 

About once a year I discover a workbook that allows me to put all the steps that I learn in therapy into practice. I’ve mentioned in past blog posts David Burns’s 10 Days to Self-Esteem, and how the exercises in that workbook allowed me to recognize distorted thought patterns and practice ways of untwisting them. Two years or so ago, when I didn’t know whether or not I should have my son treated for anxiety, my therapist recommended I read Understanding Your Child’s Puzzling Behavior, which was very, very helpful. And now fellow blogger and mindfulness expert Elisha Goldstein has published, with co-author Bob Stahl, a comprehensive workbook — A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook — that teaches the art of mindfulness in relieving and reducing stress.

I understand mindfulness as forcing a bit of time and space between a situation and your reaction, or recognizing the snowball of thoughts that’s forming in your mind before it becomes too overwhelming to sort through yourself. Goldstein and Stahl quote Vicktor Frankl, psychiatrist and holocaust survivor: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Although mindfulness techniques aren’t able to rescue me out of an acute, severe depression, if I diligently adhered to all the wisdom contained in Stahl and Goldstein’s book, and designated a time of the day to do all the exercises, I could save myself some considerable heartache and headache.

Why?

Their mindfulness exercises allow the reader to take some of the files off of her cluttered and disorganized desk because the files relate to the past or to the future, and the present tense is the only one she should worry about now. According to the authors, mindfulness is about sticking to the here and now and banishing all judgment. It’s also about breaking the job, day, or situation down … into small parts, in order to better manage it.

For example, in one of the first exercises, they suggest we list the stressful situation and rate it from a 1 (not very stressful) to a 10 (Help! I’ve fallen and can’t get up!). I started listing all the situations that bring me the most stress, most of which I assigned an 8:

• Going through my email
• Responding to requests for help (either with publishing or mental health)
• Dealing with all my medical conditions
• Eric’s work situation
• Meeting work deadlines
• Our health care situation and expenses
• Temper tantrums
• Doing homework with the kids
• Getting household jobs done during the weekend
• Putting the kids to bed

After I pinpointed which situations were producing the most stress, I felt a nice relief — that it’s not “my life is so stressful, I can’t take it!” but rather, “I have some stressful things going on in my life, let’s see if there are some solutions.” For example, erecting more boundaries on my email policy is probably needed. I should go back to checking emails only once or twice a day, designating a time of day, and sorting them into various categories in order of importance. Or maybe I can come up with some behavioral method that gives the kids incentive to complete their homework without my yelling bloody murder. These are modest revisions, but they could relieve a chunk of stress.

Goldstein and Stahl’s workbook uses a strong motivator for readers to learn the beneficial habit of mindfulness, and that is accountability. When you write things down and record your progress, you become accountable. Maybe that’s why my kids hate homework so much, come to think of it. So what they have done for us is set up a system by which we can challenge ourselves to better integrate our body, mind, and soul. Or at least that’s the plan.

I recommend this workbook to anyone who is stressed out … um … everyone I know.

Source:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/09/mindfulness-based-stress-reduction-workbook/

One-Page Questionnaire Is Effective Screening Tool for Common Psychiatric Disorders

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2010) — A one-page, 27-item questionnaire that is available free online is a valid and effective tool to help primary care doctors screen patients for four common psychiatric illnesses, a study led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers concludes.

Results of the My Mood Monitor (M-3) checklist study are published in the March/April 2010 issue of Annals of Family Medicine.

“About one in 10 Americans who suffer from depression and anxiety-related mental health disorders never receives treatment because they don’t understand what’s wrong, and when they go to their family doctor these treatable illnesses are too often missed,” said Bradley Gaynes, M.D., M.P.H, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

“For these millions of people and their primary care providers, the M-3 screener is a tremendously helpful resource,” Gaynes said.

The M-3 checklist is designed to screen for depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For most people who suffer from any of these conditions, Gaynes said, their initial diagnosis is made by a primary care provider, not by a psychiatrist. In addition, the majority of prescriptions for antidepressant medications are written by primary care physicians. For those reasons, a single tool that can screen for multiple disorders would be very helpful, Gaynes said.

To evaluate the M-3 checklist, Gaynes and study co-authors enrolled 647 adults age 18 or older who sought care at the UNC Family Medicine Center between July 2007 and February 2008. Each participant filled out a paper version of the checklist while waiting to see their doctor. Each participant’s completed checklist was then given to their doctor, and the doctors used the checklist to discuss emotional health with their patients.

Researchers later interviewed each person who filled out the checklist, within 30 days of their doctor visit, and assigned final diagnoses after reviewing each interview with Gaynes. These diagnoses were then compared to the answers each participant gave on their checklists. The results showed that the M-3 was effective in screening for any mood or anxiety disorder 83 percent of the time and for a specific disorder in 76 percent of cases.

Gaynes said the research team is currently designing a second study to measure the effectiveness of the M-3 checklist when used by individuals to monitor their mental health status over time. The company has developed a mobile phone version of the checklist that will be released later.

In addition to Gaynes, authors of the study were Joanne De-Veaugh-Geiss, LPA, and Hongbin Gu, Ph.D., from UNC’s Department of Psychiatry; David R. Rubinow, M.D., UNC’s chair of psychiatry, Sam Weir, M.D. of UNC’s Department of Family Medicine; Cora MacPherson, Ph.D., of Social & Scientific Systems Inc. in Silver Spring, Md.; Herbert C. Schulberg, Ph.D., M.S.Hyg., of Weill Cornell Medical College; and Larry Culpepper, M.D., M.P.H., professor and chairman of family medicine at Boston University and chief of family medicine at Boston Medical Center.

The M-3 checklist was developed by a team of mental health practitioners and experts, including Robert M. Post, M.D., head of the Bipolar Collaborative Network; Bernard M. Snyder, M.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and a cognitive behavioral therapist; Michael L. Byer, director of M-3 Information; and Gerald Hurowitz, M.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a clinical psychopharmacologist.

The checklist was developed by M-3 Information of Bethesda, Md., and is available at www.mymoodmonitor.com.

Source:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100308170955.htm

By Elvira G. Aletta, Ph.D.

The National Institutes of Mental Health reports that one in every four adults – approximately 57.7 million Americans – experience a mental health disorder in a given year. One in four, and that’s just the U.S.! And for every person in the world diagnosed with a mental disorder there is at least one, probably more, trying to help, cope and support that person any way they know how.

Mental illness is often a family issue. Parents, siblings, spouses and extended family provide housing, care and support, emotional and financial, sometimes to the point of becoming proverbial case managers. It’s hard enough when the chronic illness is something everyone recognizes, like diabetes. It’s a whole other thing when the disease is a mental illness which is ripe for misunderstanding, misinformation and stigma.

By helping yourself you will help your loved one better. Care givers often have a hard time with this concept. Here are a few tips:

1) Be informed. Go to the library or do a Google search to learn more about whatever diagnosis our loved one has. Be judicious, however. Go to reliable websites like the Mayo Clinic, National Institutes of Mental Health. I am proud to be part of the Psych Central community primarily because the information you find here is accurate, responsible and scientifically supported. As you do your research, remember that mental illness falls along a continuum of severity. One person’s depression, bipolar or borderline personality disorder may be quite different from someone else’s.

2) Join supportive organizations. Before you reject the idea of support groups because you are “not a joiner” or you “can’t relate to those people,” go to at least two meetings. I’d bet my favorite pair of shoes that you will be surprised who is there and what you get from them. Mental illness and addictions touch people everywhere from all walks of life.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI, provides thousands of families with much needed support. NAMI’s mission statement says: From its inception in 1979, NAMI has been dedicated to improving the lives of individuals and families affected by mental illness. They have a terrific website and local meetings.

Al-Anon also has a great tradition of fellowship and comfort. Al-Anon and Alateen are a fellowship of relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength, and hope in order to solve their common problems. There are meetings everywhere, at all times of the day and night, all around the world.

3) Keep healthy boundaries. Boundaries are hard to maintain when you love someone with a mental illness, but it is crucial. Take time out for yourself. Nurture yourself by exercising, keeping involved in activities that bring you pleasure, getting respite and taking a trip. Keep up your connections to friends. Such actions are not self-indulgent, they are your prescription for good health and resiliency like food, water, and air.

4) Do not work harder than your loved one. It is their job to do what they can to get well. You cannot make them well. You cannot do their therapy homework. You cannot force them to go to sessions, groups or meetings. As much as you wish you could, you cannot take their medication for them.

Two good books to help you let go, even as you maintain a relationship with the person with mental illness, are Co-dependent No More by Melody Beattie and Stop Walking On Eggshells by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger. It doesn’t matter whether or not your mentally ill love is an addict or a borderline personality disorder. The insight and advice in these books are reassuring and practical and transcend diagnosis.

5) Find a therapist for yourself. Caregivers often get depressed themselves and could use a professional’s eyes and ears to help them gain perspective again. Please do not wait until you are down for the count before you give yourself this valuable gift.

Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/08/5-tips-if-you-love-someone-with-mental-illness/

 

Released on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 0:37

At most classical music concerts, audiences are expected to be reverentially silent and still – a near impossibility for autistic kids who frequently have sensory issues and can’t fully control their speech or movement.

But noisemakers and wigglers are more than welcome at “Chords for Kids,” a free concert for families with autistic or special needs children. It’s performed by the North Central College student ensemble Concert Winds at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville.

“It was a just a group of friends with an idea,” said concert planner and “Chords for Kids” co-founder Susan Maynes of St. Charles.

After learning about a combined classical and operatic concert for autistic children staged in Salt Lake City by Utah Symphony-Utah Opera (which started annual autism concerts back in 2003), Maynes was inspired to try and do something similar locally.

“It was very much a fledgling, grass-roots movement,” said Jamie Walden-Mather of St. Charles, who is also an adjunct professor at North Central College. “This was a niche that really needed to be filled.”

Waldern-Mather put Maynes and other concert planners in contact with North Central College’s director of bands, Lawrence Van Oyen, who was receptive to the idea. The “Chords for Kids” parents group rented the college’s Pfeiffer Hall for its first year in 2007, but North Central stepped in to co-sponsor subsequent concerts by donating a campus venue and incorporating the concert into the Concert Winds performance curriculum.

“What we try to do on our end is to create a very understanding and safe environment for kids to come and learn what it’s like to be at a concert,” Maynes said, noting how the auditorium lights are turned up during the performance. The music repertory is also chosen so as “not to be too loud or too startling.”

“We have kids dancing in the aisles, kids bopping up and down in their seats and kids singing or humming along,” Maynes said. “And then we have a few who have to go out in the hall for a little bit because it’s too overwhelming for them. But nobody’s judging them and that’s the wonderful thing about it.”

Far from being bothered by the din, conductor Van Oyen and his musician students look forward each year to the “Chords for Kids” concert.

It’s also a learning experience for the students, since Van Oyen invites medical specialists and parents with autistic children to talk about the disorder and what it’s like to have a family member affected by it. The students also meet with audience members after the performance.

“We’re hoping (concerts like these) grow,” said Van Oyen, noting how other colleges like Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Chicago’s North Park University have done or are planning similar concerts after he did a presentation last year at the Illinois Music Educators Association conference.

Van Oyen also shared a bit about what’s on the bill for the fourth-annual edition of “Chords for Kids.” The repertory ranges from Henry Mancini’s “Theme from The Pink Panther.” to selections from Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.” Last year the concert drew about 300 attendees, and Van Oyen is hoping for more this year.

Vicky Martin, a mother of three in Wheaton, loves taking her family to the “Chords for Kids” concerts.

Whenever Martin’s 9-year-old autistic son, Carl, listens to music, “he just lights up like a firefly and just jumps up and down and gets all excited,” Martin said. “This is why this concert is so great for him.”

Martin is pleased that the “Chords for Kids” organizers also make a point of providing gluten-free and nut-free snacks after the performance, since these food allergies also affect her family.

The concert’s free admission is also a boon, since Martin says so many families with autistic kids have to scrimp and save to pay for therapy and other medical expenses.

“As a parent with a child with autism, to be given an opportunity to be able to do something normal with our whole family, it’s such a precious gift,” Martin said. “Everybody just totally accepts each other and their children for who they are.”

Read the original article on DailyHerald.com.

Source: http://chicagopressrelease.com/press-releases/chords-for-kids-lets-kids-with-autism-experience-a-live-classical-concert

 

 

Court awards bullied student $800,000

 

In what experts say could be a landmark decision, a Michigan school district has been ordered to pay $800,000 this week to a student who claimed the school did not do enough to protect him from years of bullying, some sexually tinged.

 

This week’s jury verdict against Hudson Area Schools puts districts on notice that it’s not enough to stop a student from bullying another. There needs to be a concerted effort to stop systemic bullying, too.

 

Essentially, the federal court ruling says schools can be held responsible for what students do, if there is a pattern of harassment or if they don’t do enough to provide a safe environment.

 

“This is going to have implications across the nation,” said Glenn Stutzky, a Michigan State University instructor and an expert on bullying.

 

The district’s attorney, however, says the verdict puts schools in the tricky position of being held liable for student behavior.

The district plans to appeal.

 

“You’re never going to completely stop kids from being mean to kids,” said Timothy Mullins of Giamarco, Mullins and Horton of Troy.

 

The case

 

It started with name-calling in middle school and escalated as Dane Patterson entered high school. Some of the harassment was bullying, such as being shoved into lockers.

 

Other harassment was decidedly sexual in nature. He was called sexual insults, his locker and notebook were defaced with similar names, and worse. He and his parents say they reported the abuse, and yet it continued. Finally, in 10th grade, he was taunted in a locker room by a naked student rubbing against him.

 

That was the last straw for the Patterson family. In 2005, they sued Hudson Area Schools under Title IX, the Equal Opportunity in Education Act, using the sexually tinged bullying as the basis for a sexual harassment lawsuit.

 

This week a jury in U.S. District Court told the school district to pay $800,000 in damages to Patterson, now 19. Anti-bullying proponents say the case will send a message to all school districts that they are responsible for sexual harassment and, by extension, bullying.

 

For the Pattersons, however, the verdict is much simpler. It’s vindication.

 

“I can’t even put into words the pain and suffering that I went through for years,” Dane Patterson said. “It’s something that I would not want anyone else to go through.”

 

While Patterson said he feels vindicated and is trying to move forward, his mother can’t help but look back on their ordeal.

 

“I don’t know how you get back eight years,” Dena Patterson said. She said her son is so emotionally damaged by his experiences, he can’t even go away to college and live in a dorm with other students. “We said it was worth standing up. We don’t want another student, another parent to endure what we have seen.”

 

Read More …  http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100306/NEWS06/3060306/1318/Bullied-student-awarded-800000&template=fullarticle

 

Family of autistic boy filed a discrimination lawsuit against Bainbridge School District, citing sexual harassment

 

2010-03-09 05:58:02 (GMT) (JusticeNewsFlash.com – Civil Rights – Discrimination Law, Justice News Flash)

 

Legal news for Washington discrimination attorneys. Autistic boy endured harassment and sexual harassment while at school, in which the school never corrected.

 

A Bainbridge High School autistic boy endured sexual harassment while at school, promoting a discrimination lawsuit.

 

Bainbridge, WA—A lawsuit has been filed by the family of a former Bainbridge High School student who suffered from autism, which alleges the school district allowed discriminatory acts against the student. The discrimination lawsuit was filed on February 12, 2010 in the Kitsap County Superior Court, as reported by the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

 

The plaintiffs, Jay and Jan Webster, claim that their son, who was 15 at the time and suffers from autism, endured harassment and sexual harassment over 75 times by four fellow students at Bainbridge High School. The harassment reportedly occurred between September 2006 and January 2007. The lawsuit contends that the boy routinely endured “malicious harassment, bullying, sexual assault and indecent exposure’… due to his disability, and that the district ignored the abuse and systematically failed to take any action.” Four students reportedly exposed themselves to the victim and they made contact with him with their genitalia. After the family contacted the school district on four separate occasions, in which no corrective measures were taken, the bullying then began to take a new form in “cyber bullying.” The cyber bullying went as far as students posting demeaning photos on MySpace of the boy, in which his parents contacted the high school principal, but nothing was done to address the issue.

 

The four students who sexually assaulted the victim were later arrested after Jan Webster was granted a sexual assault protective order by the Kitsap County Superior Court, which sparked a criminal investigation. Three of the students plead guilty in juvenile court, and had their charges reduce to indecent exposure; the fourth student went to trial in May 2007, in which he was found guilty of one count of malicious harassment and two counts of indecent exposure.

 

The lawsuit is seeking “special damages, including those resulting from medical and psychological treatments, as well as general damages, which include physical, emotional and emotional injury as a result of the harassment and abuse.”

 

Legal News Reporter: Nicole Howley-Legal news for Washington discrimination lawyers.

 

Source:  http://www.justicenewsflash.com/2010/03/09/family-autistic-boy-filed-discrimination-lawsuit-bainbridge-school-district-citing-sexual-harassment_201003093607.html

Keeping All Students Safe Act Passes House

 

Every child should be safe and protected while at school but an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death” as a result of misuses of restraint and seclusion in public and private schools, with many of these interventions used disproportionately on children with disabilities.

 

By a vote of 262-153, the House passed the Keeping All Students Safe Act (HR 4247) [March 3]. This bipartisan bill establishes, for the first time, federal minimum safety standards in schools, preventing harmful restraint and seclusion. Unlike in hospitals and other facilities that receive federal funding, there are no federal laws that address how and when restraint or seclusion can be used in schools and state regulations and oversight vary greatly and have often failed to protect children.

Click here for more information on Keeping All Students Safe Act Passes House.

Click here to see how your state representative voted on HR 4247.

Click here to read Testimony Before the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives from United States Government Accountability Office from May 19, 2009.