 
Article Date: 14 Jan 2010 – 1:00 PST
An excess of one type of serotonin receptor in the center of the brain may explain why antidepressants fail to relieve symptoms of depression for 50 percent of patients, a new study from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center shows.
The study is the first to find a causal link between receptor number and antidepressant treatment and may lead to more personalized treatment for depression, including treatments for patients who do not respond to antidepressants and ways to identify these patients before they undergo costly, and ultimately, futile therapies.
The research, led by Rene Hen, PhD, professor of pharmacology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Columbia University, and a researcher the New York State Psychiatric Institute, appears in the January 15 issue of the journal Neuron.
Most antidepressants – including the popular SSRIs – work by increasing the amount of serotonin made by cells — called raphe neurons — deep in the middle of the brain. Serotonin relieves symptoms of depression when it is shipped to other brain regions.
But too many serotonin receptors of the 1A type on the raphe neurons sets up a negative feedback loop that reduces the production of serotonin, Dr. Hen and his colleagues discovered
“The more antidepressants try to increase serotonin production, the less serotonin the neurons actually produce, and behavior in mice does not change,” Dr. Hen says.
Dr. Hen and his colleagues measured the effect of antidepressants with a commonly used behavioral test that measures the boldness in mice when retrieving food from bright open areas. Mice on antidepressants usually become more daring, but the drugs had no such effect on mice with surplus serotonin receptors.
Recent genetic and imaging studies of depressed patients have suggested that high receptor numbers of the 1A type in the raphe neurons are associated with treatment failure. Until now, no direct test of the association could be performed because the number of receptors in the raphe neurons could not be altered without changing the number of receptors in other parts of the brain.
Using new techniques in genetic engineering, Dr. Hen created a strain of mouse that can be programmed to produce high or low levels of serotonin receptors of the 1A type only in the raphe neuron. The levels present in the mice mimicked the levels found in people who are resistant to antidepressant treatment.
“By simply tweaking the number of receptors down, we were able to transform a non-responder into a responder,” Dr. Hen adds.
That strategy also may work for patients resistant to antidepressant treatment, Dr. Hen says, if drugs can be found to reduce the number of receptors or impede their activity.
But first the role of surplus serotonin receptors in people must be confirmed. Dr. Hen’s lab is now looking at patients enrolled in clinical trials to see if receptor levels predict response to antidepressants.
Authors of the Neuron study are Jesse W. Richardson-Jones, Caryne P. Craige, Bruno P. Guiard, Alisson Stephen, Kayla L. Metzger, Hank F. Kung, Alain M. Gardier, Alex Dranovsky, Denis J. David, Sheryl G. Beck, Rene Hen and E. David Leonardo.
This study was supported in part by NIMH, NARSAD and AstraZeneca.
Source
Columbia Psychiatry
Columbia University Medical Center Â
Source:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/175934.php
 
Posted By KENNEDY GORDON/Examiner Staff Writer
15 January 2010
When Jennifer Norton’s autistic daughter was four years old, she couldn’t speak. After discovering that some non-verbal children respond to learning sign language, Norton decided to give it a try.
“Within a week, my daughter called me ‘Mommy’ for the first time,” Norton said. “It broke me up.”
Alena is now six, with a verbal vocabulary of about 500 words, and can sign 1,500 words using American sign language (ASL).
“This is something I was told she would never be able to do,” Norton said as a happy Alena chirped away on the sofa in their Milroy Dr. living room.
“For a child who’s functionally non-verbal, she never fails to get her point across.”
The key to Norton’s success was a DVD from the Signing Time series. Produced by Utah-based Two Little Hands Productions, Signing Time teaches ASL through music and dance. The movies are Alena’s favourites.
Signing Time inspired Norton, 27, so much she’s using it in her new business, Big Heart, Moving Hands. A professional ASL instructor, Norton offers sign language training for all ages, particularly children, whether they’re deaf or not.
Teaching hearing infants to sign can decrease tantrums and help children develop better communications skills, Norton said.
“Some studies have shown that learning ASL can boost IQs,” she said.
In business since November, Big Heart, Moving Hands offers sign language training to individuals or groups. Participants also receive Signing Time DVDs and training materials, including flashcards.
“It’s a vocabulary course,” Norton said. “I don’t focus on the grammar and the syntax. It’s about learning the words.”
Other programs use their own sign language systems, Norton said, but she prefers to work with ASL.
NOTE: Visit www.bigheartmovinghands.com for more information.
Source(Includes Video): Â http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2261880
 
The Children, Schools and Families Bill had its second reading in Parliament on January 11 2010.Â
Two parts of the Bill create new duties specifically to support children with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities. The Bill will create a new requirement for Ofsted to report on SEN and disability issues when they do school inspections. This was one of the key aspects of our private members bill on SEN and Disability Support taken forward by John Bercow MP last year.
The Children, Schools and Families Bill will also introduce a new right to go to tribunal if the local authority refuses to amend a statement at annual review, which we have also called for.Â
We strongly welcome these new measures and believe that they could make a significant difference in helping children with autism to get the right support at school. Â
However, the Bill also contains some measures which we have concerns about. The NAS will be focusing on these parts of the Bill to make sure that the needs of children with autism are recognised.  Â
New individualised home-school agreements between the school, parent and pupil will set agreed standards around the pupils’ education, behaviour and well-being. We believe these should acknowledge schools’ responsibilities in supporting the behaviour of children with autism and other SEN.
For children who are not in school because they are ill or excluded, local authorities will be able to provide part-time education, rather than full-time. While we think this may be appropriate in some circumstances, we want to make sure that it does not allow local authorities to avoid providing full-time education simply because it is not convenient.
The Bill also contains measures to monitor and register home educators. We are seeking commitments that detailed proposals recognise the needs of children with special educational needs, including providing appropriate support from people who understand autism.Â
We will be raising more detailed concerns at committee stage, in particular that families should not be penalised if they feel that it is not appropriate for their child to have a one-to-one meeting with local authority officers.
You can read our briefing for second reading below.
Related resources
Relevant documents for downloading
- Children, School and Families Bill: second reading briefing (DOC)
Download a copy of our briefing for the second reading of this Bill.
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 14, 2010
According to an influential group of American physicians, adolescents and parents need help recognizing that suicide is a problem in their own communities.
Education is also needed to help identify teens that are suicidal.
According to a study, “Attitudes and Beliefs of Adolescents and Parents Regarding Adolescent Suicide,†published in the February issue of Pediatrics, in the United States in 2006, 1,771 children and adolescents ages 10 to 19 committed suicide.
The tragedies made suicide the third leading cause of death in this age group.
To design a better suicide prevention program, researchers set out to understand what interventions would be most effective.
In focus groups in Chicago and Kansas City, both teenagers and their parents correctly identified many of the known risk factors for suicide, including mental illness, alcohol and substance abuse, relational or social loss, and hopelessness.
However, study authors said it was concerning that some of the parents reported regular drug and alcohol use as being a normal part of adolescent development, rather than problem behavior.
Parents and teens suggested guns should be removed if an adolescent is known to be suicidal, but parents acknowledged they may not be able to identify a suicidal teen. Parents and teens didn’t think suicide was a problem in their communities.
All groups were interested in learning how to identify and intervene with a suicidal adolescent. Study authors conclude pediatricians should regularly screen all adolescents in their offices and encourage families to be open to discussing depression and suicide.
Source: American Academy of Pediatrics
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/01/14/learn-to-identify-teens-at-risk-for-suicide/10753.html
Mental Health Issues Up for High School, College Students
Compared to the 1930s, five times as many American high school and college students are struggling with anxiety and other mental health issues, according to a new study.
Researchers reviewed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who completed the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory questionnaire between 1938 and 2007, the Associated Press reported.
The findings showed that, overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with students in 1938. In two areas, six times as many students in 2007 scored much higher in two areas:
- *The rate of hypomania (a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism) was found in 31 percent of students in 2007, compared with 5 percent in 1938.
- *The rate of depression among students was 6 percent in 2007 and 1 percent in 1938.
The study also found that 24 percent of students in 2007 scored high in a category called “psychopathic deviation” — defined as having trouble with authority and feeling that rules don’t apply to you — compared with 5 percent of students in 1938, the AP reported.
The findings were released Monday, and the study will appear in a future issue of the journal Clinical Psychology Review.
 
Article Date: 14 Jan 2010 – 0:00 PST
As many as 50 per cent of people bring their work home with them regularly, according to new research out of the University of Toronto that describes the stress associated with work-life balance and the factors that predict it.
Researchers measured the extent to which work was interfering with personal time using data from a national survey of 1,800 American workers. Sociology professor Scott Schieman (UofT) and his coauthors Melissa Milkie (University of Maryland) and PhD student Paul Glavin (UofT) asked participants questions like: “How often does your job interfere with your home or family life?”; “How often does your job interfere with your social or leisure activities?”; and “How often do you think about things going on at work when you are not working?”
Schieman says, “Nearly half of the population reports that these situations occur ‘sometimes’ or ‘frequently,’ which is particularly concerning given that the negative health impacts of an imbalance between work life and private life are well-documented.”
The authors describe five core sets of findings:
- People with college or postgraduate degrees tend to report their work interferes with their personal life more than those with a high school degree;
- Professionals tend to report their work interferes with their home life more than people in all other occupational categories;
- Several job-related demands predict more work seeping into the home life: interpersonal conflict at work, job insecurity, noxious environments, and high-pressure situations; however, having control over the pace of one’s own work diminishes the negative effects of high-pressure situations;
- Several job-related resources also predict more work interference with home life: job authority, job skill level, decision-making latitude, and personal earnings;
- As predicted, working long hours (50-plus per week) is associated with more work interference at home – surprisingly, however, that relationship is stronger among people who have some or full control over the timing of their work;
“We found several surprising patterns,” says Schieman. “People who are well-educated, professionals and those with job-related resources report that their work interferes with their personal lives more frequently, reflecting what we refer to as ‘the stress of higher status.’ While many benefits undoubtedly accrue to those in higher status positions and conditions, a downside is the greater likelihood of work interfering with personal life.”
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 14, 2010
A study of daily mood variation in working adults discovers individuals ranging from blue collar workers to highly paid professionals are in a better mood, have more energy and complain of fewer aches and pains over the weekend.
The study, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology concludes that ‘weekend effect’ is largely associated with the freedom to choose one’s activities and the opportunity to spend time with loved ones, the research found.
“Workers, even those with interesting, high status jobs, really are happier on the weekend,†says author Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.
“Our findings highlight just how important free time is to an individual’s well-being,†Ryan adds.
“Far from frivolous, the relatively unfettered time on weekends provides critical opportunities for bonding with others, exploring interests and relaxing — basic psychological needs that people should be careful not to crowd out with overwork,†Ryan cautions.
The study tracked the moods of 74 adults, aged 18 to 62, who worked at least 30 hours per week. For three weeks, participants were paged randomly at three times during the day, once in the morning, the afternoon and the evening.
At each page, participants completed a brief questionnaire describing the activity in which they were engaged and, using a seven-point scale, they rated their positive feelings like happiness, joy, and pleasure as well as negative feelings of anxiety, anger, and depression.
Physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches, digestive problems, respiratory ills, or low energy, also were noted.
The results demonstrated that men and women alike consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend. They feel better regardless of how much money they make, how many hours they work, how educated they happen to be, or whether they work in the trades, the service industry, or in a professional capacity. They feel better whether they are single, married, living together, divorced, or widowed. And, they feel better regardless of age.
To tease out exactly why weekend hours are so magical, the researchers asked participants to indicate whether they felt controlled versus autonomous in the task they were engaged in at the time of the pager signal. Participants also indicated how close they felt to others present and how competent they perceived themselves to be at their activity.
The findings indicated that relative to workdays, weekends were associated with higher levels of freedom and closeness: people reported more often that they were involved in activities of their own choosing and spending time with more intimate friends and family members. Surprisingly, the analysis also found that people feel more competent during the weekend than they do at their day-to-day jobs.
The results support self-determination theory, which holds that well-being depends in large part on meeting one’s basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Read More …Â http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/01/14/weekend-routine-linked-to-happiness/10746.htm
 
Article Date: 14 Jan 2010 – 2:00 PST
A consortium of European researchers, coordinated by the Computer Vision Centre (CVC) of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), has developed HERMES, a cognitive computational system consisting of video cameras and software able to recognise and predict human behaviour, as well as describe it in natural language. The applications of the Hermes project are numerous and can be used in the fields of intelligent surveillance, protection of accidents, marketing, psychology, etc.
HERMES (Human Expressive Graphic Representation of Motion and their Evaluation in Sequences) analyses human behaviour based on video sequences captured at three different focus levels: the individual as a relatively distant object; the individual’s body at medium length so as to be able to analyse body postures; and the individual’s face, which allows a detailed study of facial expressions. The information obtained is processed by computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms, which permits the system to learn and recognise movement patterns.
HERMES offers two important innovations in the field of computer vision. The first is the description of in natural language movement captured by the cameras, through simple and precise phrases which appear on the computer screen in real time, together with the frame number in which the action is taking place. The system uses an avatar to talk and describe this information in different languages. The second innovation is the possibility to analyse and discover potentially unusual behaviour – based on the movements it recognises – and give off warning signals. For example, HERMES sends a signal to the control centre of an underground station after capturing the image of someone trying to cross the tracks, or alerts a medical centre if an elderly person living alone falls.
Seven different sub-projects have been developed by researchers working on the HERMES project:
1.- Cameras system: static cameras were used to supply a full scene, and high resolution active cameras – pan-tilt-zoom sensors (horizontal and vertical inclinations and zoom) – were used for the automatic tracking and close-ups of individuals. To do this, optimisation techniques were applied to the information contained in the images.
2.- Movement analysis of objects and individuals in the images. The information obtained is used to guide the active cameras towards where the action is taking place. These tasks were carried out using different tracking techniques.
3.- Movement analysis of a person’s body in order to extract information from different parts of the body, analyse these actions and describe or predict behaviours. In this case, techniques based on pattern and silhouette recognition were used.
4.- Analysis of facial movements to understand emotional states of an individual, attitudes and possible reactions. In this sub-project new techniques were created and used for the tracking and aligning of 2D and 3D faces.
5.- Integration of software and natural language with the aim of describing what is happening in the scenes recorded using a conceptual representation scheme.
6.- Full integration of system, software and hardware to work in real environments and in real time. The system was designed and put to use in real life situations to test its functioning.
7.- The generation of virtual sequences based on the description of behaviours in natural language and the interaction of real and virtual worlds in the same sequence, using increased reality techniques.
The application advantages of HERMES are obvious, mainly in the fields of intelligent surveillance and the prevention of accidents or crimes. However, researchers consider that there is much to be gained with the use of this tool in sectors such as marketing or psychology.
The HERMES project was coordinated by Juan José Villanueva, emeritus professor of the Department of Computer Science at UAB and former director of the CVC, a position he held for 14 years.
HERMES, which has received several scientific awards in many of the top specialised conferences, was carried out as part of the 6th European Research Framework Programme. The project, lasting three and a half years and with 2,100,000 euros in funding, included the participation of five of the field’s most prominent research groups in Europe and of a firm specialising in information and communication technologies: the Computer Vision Centre at UAB, Spain, which worked as project coordinator; the Institut für Algorithmen und Kognitive Systeme (IAKS) at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany; the Computer Vision and Media Technology Laboratory (CVMT) at the University of Aalborg, Denmark; the Computer Vision Laboratory (BIWI) at the ETH -Eidgenoesssiche Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland; the Active Vision Laboratory (AVL) at Oxford University, United Kingdom; and Answare Technologies, Spain.
Jan
22
 
MIT’s online magazine Technology Review has a good short article reviewing the year in robotics, giving the highlights of the latest developments from 2009.
The piece has loads of links so you can read up, and sometimes see, the robots in action and it looks like giving robots ‘social skills’ to interact with humans has been a big area of progress:
The socialization of robots was an important area of research this year. Many researchers believe that giving robots social skills will make them better at assisting people in homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. Andrea Thomaz, a TR35 innovator for 2009, created robots that can learn simple grasping tasks from human instructors who use social cues, such as verbal instructions, gestures, and expressions.
Read More …Â http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/01/the_year_in_robotics.html
 
Did you ever lie awake in bed at night unable to sleep because of the sound of a dripping faucet? Did you ever feel enraged because someone sitting near you was chewing gum and making sounds while dong so? Are you someone who would like to wear a turtle neck sweater during the cold weather but cannot because it feels as though the touch of the fabric on your neck and throat is strangling? Do you react badly by the sudden and unexpected touch of someone, even if its someone you know and love? If you are familiar with any of these experiences you then have a good idea of what sensory defensiveness or sensory overload is all about.
However, what distinguishes you from those who fit the full diagnostic category of sensory defensiveness is that there are multiple stimuli that the sensory defensive person finds intolerable. As a result, daily life is deeply affected because it is difficult or impossible to work, have a relationship or engage in social interaction with other people. The reason for these limitations is that there are so many stimulating factors in the environment that cause real irritation that the individual is distracted and therefore, incapacitated. Many of these people withdraw into social isolation and this isolation as well as the sensitivity to stimuli, are depressing.
Read More …Â http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=34973&cn=5