Total Image

Email Print

Virtual Reality Eases Public Speaking Fears

For many people, the mere thought of public speaking makes their palms sweat, heart race and stomach reel. But help may be on the way in the form of virtual reality exposure (VRE) therapy – computer-generated images and sound delivered through a helmet-like headset. Page Anderson, an assistant professor of psychology at Georgia State University, is beginning a clinical study later this month to determine how effective the technology is in allaying the fear and anxiety that often accompany public speaking.

Using a virtual audience, Anderson's study will compare the efficacy of VRE therapy versus another type of cognitive behavioral therapy to treat public-speaking anxiety. She says this study will mark one of the first attempts using VRE therapy to treat an interpersonal fear. Traditionally, those seeking help to overcome phobias undergo "exposure therapy" – the idea that patients face their fears to beat them. For such therapy to work, the degree of exposure needs to be controlled and prolonged to give anxiety time to subside, then be repeated, Anderson says.

"All of that's difficult to do," she says. "So I'm examining whether facing one's fears in the virtual world allows one to conquer them in the real world."

Virtual reality has been used in research settings to treat many phobias, including fear of flying and heights. Anderson tries to immerse people in the virtual environment by including as many senses as possible. "You see the virtual environment, you hear the virtual environment. Sometimes you can feel aspects of the virtual environment," she says.

— Georgia State University

What's That Smell?

In a finding that holds lessons for restaurateurs and advertisers, researchers have found that visual words can influence the perception of smells – with pleasant words influencing olfactory brain regions to perceive an odor as pleasant. The research is published in a recent issue of Neuron.

In their experiments, researchers presented subjects with a cheddar cheese odorant and showed them labels that read either "cheddar cheese" or "body odor." They found that the subjects rated the odor significantly more pleasant when it was labeled "cheddar cheese" than "body odor."

They then scanned the subjects' brains using functional MRI during the presentation of labels and odors to explore which brain regions were activated. They also analyzed brain activity when the subjects were presented with clean air labeled either "cheddar cheese" or "body odor."

The researchers found that labeling the odor "cheddar cheese" produced an activation in a specific part of the brain region that processes olfactory information. Clean air labeled as "cheddar cheese" activated the same area, but to a lesser extent. The "body odor" label, however, did not produce activation in this area, either with the cheddar cheese odor or clean air.

The researchers also used correctly labeled pleasant ("flowers") and unpleasant ("burned plastic") odors as reference odors to test the subjects' responses to such odors and to identify areas of the brain activated by either pleasant or unpleasant odors. Also, they tested whether a change in the amount of "sniffing" in response to an odor label might influence the results, finding no effect.

They emphasized that they used word labels so that the cognitive input would be "high level and semantic," as opposed to a picture, which could have been a lower-level association in the brain.

"The results thus show that cognitive inputs can be very important in influencing subjective responses, including affective responses to olfactory stimuli, and show that some of the brain areas activated by odors show an effect of this high-level cognitive influence," according to the researchers. They also noted that their inclusion of clean air in the study showed that semantic labels influenced judgment, even when the absence of odor was paired with the labels.

Whether the words caused subjects to imagine a smell or simply affected their brain's processing of odors, "the important new point being made in this paper is that high-level cognitive inputs, such as the sight of a word, can influence the activity in brain regions that are activated by olfactory stimuli," they wrote.

— Cell Press

Dental Doubts Causes Delays

Rural residents are nearly twice as likely as their urban counterparts to postpone timely trips to the dentist, seeking help only after they develop a problem and oral pain is severe, according to researchers at the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville. The delay results in widespread dissatisfaction with treatment and less than optimal outcomes.

"What we found is there is a group of people who wait until their condition is of sufficient painful intensity and duration before deciding that it's bad enough to pick up the phone and call the dentist," says study investigator Joseph Riley, an assistant professor of public health services and research at UF's College of Dentistry. "There is evidence that these people assume this problem-oriented approach to oral health because of low access to care, whether that be due to an inability to pay or the lack of dentists practicing in rural areas," Riley adds.

UF researchers, writing in a recent issue of Public Health Reports, note similar trends among blacks and women, though men with painful symptoms were the group most likely to entirely avoid dental visits, possibly attempting to self-medicate their pain at home to avoid going to the dentist.

Over a four-year period, the researchers studied patterns in access to dental care among 703 randomly selected people aged 45 years and older living in rural or urban counties in North Florida.

Researchers interviewed each participant and conducted an oral examination at the beginning of the study. They then conducted follow-up telephone interviews at six-month intervals to track financial status, symptoms of oral pain, and usage of dental services and treatment. Study participants were also interviewed in person and underwent additional oral examinations two and four years into the study.

Study investigators found rural residents and people who take a problem-oriented rather than preventive approach to oral healthcare were more likely to need emergency dental care for oral pain. People who live in rural areas and take a problem-oriented approach of opting to wait until oral discomfort worsened were at the highest risk of anyone for needing pain-related emergency treatment.

Over the course of the study, 23 percent of the participants experienced at least one emergency dental visit because of painful symptoms due to afflictions such as toothaches and abscesses. Sixty-seven percent of those who reported an emergency dental visit due to pain rated their discomfort severe.

Only 56 percent of patients who visited the dentist for emergency treatment of painful oral conditions described themselves as "very satisfied" with the outcome of their treatment, versus 79 percent of those who sought urgent care but were pain-free at the time.

"What we found is that patients who had urgent dental visits because of pain were less likely to be satisfied by the time it took to be seen, the dental treatment they received and by the actual outcome of the visit," says Riley.

Riley says there is nothing unique about the dental choices people in rural North Florida make compared with residents living elsewhere. The UF study findings are consistent with data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, wherein minority and poor populations carry the burden of oral health problems, he says.

— UF Health Science Center

High Overnight Blood Pressure Linked to Blood Sugar Levels

People whose blood pressure doesn't drop significantly overnight tend to have more cardiovascular problems.

Now, new research at the University of Michigan (U-M) Health System, Ann Arbor, and the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System indicates that they also tend to have higher levels of glucose (blood sugar).

That could put these so-called "non-dippers" at greater risk for developing diabetes and other diseases, which in turn raises the risk of cardiovascular problems, researchers say.

"We found that non-dippers experienced a higher likelihood having increased fasting glucose than people whose blood pressure dips by more than 10 percent overnight," says Meredith Montero, a third-year medical student at the U-M Medical School, Ann Arbor, who presented the research recently at the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society in Orlando, Fla.

"This means that healthcare providers may want to monitor these patients' glucose more closely and emphasize to them the importance of monitoring their blood pressure," Montero says.

— U-M Health System

Handling Sarcasm

The ability to comprehend sarcasm depends upon a carefully orchestrated sequence of complex cognitive skills based in specific parts of the brain. Yeah, right, and I'm the Tooth Fairy.

But it's true: New research details an "anatomy of sarcasm" that explains how the mind puts sharp-tongued words into context. The findings appear in a recent issue of Neuropsychology.

The Israeli psychologists who conducted the research explain that for sarcasm to score, listeners must grasp the speaker's intentions in the context of the situation. This calls for sophisticated social thinking and "theory of mind," or whether we understand that everyone thinks different thoughts. As an example of what happens when "theory of mind" is limited or missing, autistic children have problems interpreting irony, the more general category of social communication into which sarcasm falls.

Participants with prefrontal damage were impaired in comprehending sarcasm, whereas the people in the other two groups had no such problem. Within the prefrontal group, people with damage in the right ventromedial area had the most profound problems in comprehending sarcasm. The ventromedial area is the inferior (rear) part of the prefrontal cortex and includes the cortex on top of the orbits of both eyes and the inside part of the frontal lobes.

The findings fit what we already know about brain anatomy. The prefrontal cortex is involved in pragmatic language processes and complex social cognition, thus it followed that that participants with prefrontal damage had faulty "sarcasm meters." At the same time, damage to the ventromedial area, which is involved in personality and social behavior, will disrupt not only understanding sarcasm but also understanding social cues, empathic response and emotion recognition.

The authors write, "Understanding sarcasm requires both the ability to understand the speaker's belief about the listener's belief and the ability to identify emotions."

The findings highlight the importance of lesion size in sub-regions of the frontal lobe because the extent of the right ventromedial lesion was significantly related to performance in the sarcasm task: The worse the damage, the greater the impairment.

— American Psychological Association

Staying Connected with Kids After Divorce

Even in the best situations, divorce is tough on kids. The weeks and months before and after a divorce are marked by change, confusion and uncertainty. The upheaval of divorce can hurt the closest father-child relationships, according to Pat Tanner Nelson, EdD, a human development specialist with the Cooperative Extension at the University of Delaware, Newark. In fact, research shows that fathers most likely to withdraw from parenting after a divorce are those who were actively involved in parenting during their marriages, but don't share legal custody of the children.

These fathers often become alienated, Nelson says, and feel that they have lost control and influence over their children's lives. But, it's vitally important for dads to stay connected with their kids after a divorce, no matter how challenging it may be. "Having two caring and involved parents is a tremendous benefit for children. A warm, nurturing and supportive father is associated with positive child development from birth through young adulthood," she says.

Research shows that children with involved fathers tend to have higher self-control, higher self-esteem, more positive coping skills and better social skills than children who don't have a father in their lives.

Navigating the rocky transition from married parents to divorced parents requires commitment to a shared goal – the physical and emotional well being of the children.

The relationship between the couple may have been troubled for months or years before the dissolution of the marriage and may continue to be strained. But, that doesn't mean the ex-spouses can't continue to be – or learn to be – good partners in parenting, Nelson says.

"Two parents don't need to be married to each other and they don't need to love each other. They just need to love and actively support their children," Nelson says. "It takes teamwork and maturity on the part of divorced parents to form what Nelson calls an "effective parenting alliance." In a parenting alliance, each parent is invested in the child; each parent values the importance of the other parent's role in their child's development; each parent respects the judgments of the other parent; and the parents are able to communicate effectively about the needs of the child.

To lay the groundwork for such an alliance, fathers and mothers may need to reexamine and redefine their roles after a divorce, Nelson says. They may need to get help in processing their feelings of anger, frustration and alienation before they can productively define their new parenting roles. Nelson says mothers should show support for the parenting provided by their former spouses. Fathers need to enjoy and feel good about the interactions they have with their children after the divorce. They need to feel that what they do will have a positive, constructive impact on their children's lives, Nelson says.

Both parents should improve their stress management and conflict management skills to help them weather the difficult situations that will inevitably arise. "It's a mighty big assignment for many divorced spouses to develop positive communication patterns, but it is essential for the well-being of the children," Nelson says. "Although spouses may divorce, parenting is forever.

— University of Delaware