Self Help For Anxiety & Depression: A List Of FREE Interactive Self Help Websites
Today I wanted to get around to doing what I have been meaning to do for a while and post a list of free access interactive and/or educational websites which I have come across. These sites are fantastic resources and each one offers a different way to get involved with your recovery. Please note I am not affiliated with any of these sites and they are not affiliate sites. I hope you find one or more useful as I know many of my clients have.
Click Image to Read Reviews
Click Image to Read Reviews
Self Help / Educational Websites
Updated 27th March 2010
- Anxiety Online
- Beyond Blue
- Depnet
- Bipolar Disorder Education Program
- Blackdoginstitute
- BlueBoard
- BluePages
- CRUfAD – Self Help
- Depression Education Program
- e-couch
- Feardrop – online exposure therapy for phobias
- Living Well Working Well
- MoodSwings
- Multicultural Information on Depression online (MIDonline)
- Virtual Clinic
- Added 27th March 2010
- Depressioncenter.net
- Beatingtheblues (UK)
There you have it! Check them out and let me know what you think. Know of any others? (No affiliate sites please).
‘Quirky Yes,Hopeless No’:Making Quirky Cool & Helping Kids With Aspergers Learn Social Skills
By PATRICIA MORRIS BUCKLEY – For the North County Times | Posted: March 17, 2010Beth Wagner Brust knows there are few things more difficult than watching your child struggle to make friends. Her youngest son, Ben, was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten, but by third grade he still didn’t have any friends.
“My pediatrician said he had Asperger’s,” explained Brust, a Carmel Valley resident. Asperger’s is considered a higher form of autism that makes social interaction, among other things, difficult. “Like any parent, I was thrown for a loop. Then I heard about the Friends Club in Carlsbad.”
The Friends Club is a safe, non-threatening and non-stressful environment where kids with Asperger’s get together to learn the “unwritten” social skills. Now it’s inspired Brust and Cynthia La Brie Norall, Ph.D., to write “Quirky, Yes — Hopeless, No: Practical Tips to Help Your Child with Asperger’s Syndrome Be More Socially Accepted” (St. Martin’s Griffin).
Asperger’s children are often the kids who are bullied, sit alone at lunch and rarely get an invitation to a birthday party. But at the club, they learn such skills as making eye contact, greeting people, letting others talk about their interests and being less rigid through games, breaking skills into baby steps and role playing.
By learning the subtle social cues that typical children take for granted, they can begin making friends. And that’s exactly what happened with Ben.
“By the end of the first year, I heard him ask another kid, ‘Am I boring you?’ and I almost fell over,” recalled Brust. “I’d never heard him say that before. It was amazing to see that growth in six months.”
The Friends Club was the brainchild of Norall, an educational behavior psychologist. While working at a preschool in Valley Center in 1992, she first encountered children with autism. That’s around the time that autism diagnoses began to rise dramatically. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 out of every 100 8-year-olds is autistic.
“I just found this population fascinating,” Norall said. “I went to every seminar and conference I could on autism. I really wanted to help them.”
In 1999, she opened her own practice, Comprehensive Autism Services and Education (CASE). A year later, she started the Friends Club when her mentor, Dr. B.J. Freeman, a child psychologist who founded the Autism Clinic at UCLA, suggested that she do something to help those higher on the autistic spectrum.
The Friends Club broke the commonly held professional belief that social groups should also contain typical children.
“I got a lot of negative criticism over that decision,” she said. “But these kids know that they are different and if I brought in typical kids, the Aspies (kids with Asperger’s) would stand out. They needed a place to connect.”
Norall likes to tell the story of a teenage girl on her first time at Friends Club who said, “Well, Cynthia, it’s about time you put this together for my species.”
Nine years later, thousands of Aspies have been through the Friends Club. In addition to the branch in Carlsbad, there are Friends Club satellites in Napa, Vancouver, Canada and Oahu, Hawaii, and also a camp during the summer. Twenty-two groups have approximately 150 kids. Groups are broken into age categories; from very young (age 3 to 7), to tweeners, teens and young adults. Norall’s staff now numbers 50, a few of whom are Friends Club graduates. Each group contains six kids and two leaders.
Parents, amazed at the results, kept encouraging Norall to write a book. With that goal in mind, she’d kept extensive summaries of each activity as a report for the parents, but also to remind herself what the kids had taught her. Still, it took Brust, a children’s author herself, to persuade Norall to really get writing.
They decided they wanted the book, originally titled “Decoding Your Asperger’s Children: Lessons Learned at the Friends Club,” to be a practical parenting guide rather than a book on what Asperger’s is or how to “cure it.”
The book is organized alphabetically by topic, such as cooperation, discipline, bullying, perfectionism, anxiety or meltdowns. The lessons teach “people skills,” including how to greet others, how to make eye contact, how to pay compliments, how to cooperate and ask for help and how not to be rude.
Ultimately, Norall and Brust wanted their readers to understand how the Aspie’s brain is wired differently. Then they can not only help the youngsters, but also be less frustrated overall and enjoy the differences these kids bring to the world.
“We wanted a book that had no jargon, but written in a conversational tone like Dr. Spock,” said Brust. “We also wanted readers to be able to skip around in it. There’s always a ‘trouble du jour,’ and you can read just about that. Parents of special needs kids have no time and it doesn’t take a big time commitment to read this book. We’ve made it as accessible as possible.”
The finished manuscript quickly sold to mainstream publisher St. Martin’s Griffin. “Quirky, Yes — Hopeless, No” hit stores in August. Alyse Diamond, the book’s editor, believes there’s nothing like it in a market filled with technical books by doctors or memoirs by mothers.
“What gripped me was that this wasn’t just another book written by a doctor,” said Diamond. “The co-writer is a mom and she’s been in the trenches with her son, so together they bring a unique perspective that you don’t normally see. More and more kids are being diagnosed with autism every year. It’s not going away. That’s why it’s important to us to get a book like this in the hands of people who need it.”
Reaction to the book has been highly positive. Publisher’s Weekly said, “Although a dozen or more experts are cited, the book is conversational in tone, full of insights and will help and encourage parents and their Aspie or high-functioning autistic kids alike.”
Temple Grandin, the author of “Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships” and “Thinking in Pictures,” and perhaps the most famous person with autism, said in her review, “This is a fantastic book for helping people on the autism spectrum learn social skills. Great for individuals on the spectrum, teachers, and social skills training specialists.”
While good reviews from major publications and notable names in the autism field are welcome, the ones that mean the most to Norall and Brust are those from parents and professionals who work with the children.
“I want everyone to read this book so that the teasing will stop,” said Brust. “These kids can be creative and fun. I love being around Ben because he thinks differently. But that can also be frustrating because we don’t understand how they think.”
The good news is that Ben, now a senior at Canyon Crest High School, is doing so well that he plans to attend community college soon. While he just stopped going to Friends Club, Brust sees the lasting value of what he learned there and hopes that people who read their book will experience some of the same social connections he’s had.
“This book is about helping Aspie kids navigate the world better,” Brust said. “Every chapter has something specific and concrete that parents can do to make a difference. Our goal is to help as many of these kids as possible.”
Pay It Forward: Research Proves That Acts Of Kindness From A Few Cascade On To Dozens
Read The Original Research Paper HERE (Free PDF)
ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2010) — For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
This diagram illustrates how a single act of kindness can spread between individuals and across time. Cooperative behavior spreads three degrees of separation
In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.
The research was conducted by James Fowler, associate professor at UC San Diego in the Department of Political Science and Calit2’s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, who is professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School. Fowler and Christakis are coauthors of the recently published book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
In the current study, Fowler and Christakis show that when one person gives money to help others in a “public-goods game,” where people have the opportunity to cooperate with each other, the recipients are more likely to give their own money away to other people in future games. This creates a domino effect in which one person’s generosity spreads first to three people and then to the nine people that those three people interact with in the future, and then to still other individuals in subsequent waves of the experiment.
The effect persists, Fowler said: “You don’t go back to being your ‘old selfish self.”’ As a result, the money a person gives in the first round of the experiment is ultimately tripled by others who are subsequently (directly or indirectly) influenced to give more. “The network functions like a matching grant,” Christakis said.
“Though the multiplier in the real world may be higher or lower than what we’ve found in the lab,” Fowler said, “personally it’s very exciting to learn that kindness spreads to people I don’t know or have never met. We have direct experience of giving and seeing people’s immediate reactions, but we don’t typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people.”
The study participants were strangers to each other and never played twice with the same person, a study design that eliminates direct reciprocity and reputation management as possible causes.
In previous work demonstrating the contagious spread of behaviors, emotions and ideas — including obesity, happiness, smoking cessation and loneliness — Fowler and Christakis examined social networks re-created from the records of the Framingham Heart Study. But like all observational studies, those findings could also have partially reflected the fact that people were choosing to interact with people like themselves or that people were exposed to the same environment. The experimental method used here eliminates such factors.
The study is the first work to document experimentally Fowler and Christakis’s earlier findings that social contagion travels in networks up to three degrees of separation, and the first to corroborate evidence from others’ observational studies on the spread of cooperation.
The contagious effect in the study was symmetric; uncooperative behavior also spread, but there was nothing to suggest that it spread any more or any less robustly than cooperative behavior, Fowler said.
From a scientific perspective, Fowler added, these findings suggest the fascinating possibility that the process of contagion may have contributed to the evolution of cooperation: Groups with altruists in them will be more altruistic as a whole and more likely to survive than selfish groups.
“Our work over the past few years, examining the function of human social networks and their genetic origins, has led us to conclude that there is a deep and fundamental connection between social networks and goodness,” said Christakis. “The flow of good and desirable properties like ideas, love and kindness is required for human social networks to endure, and, in turn, networks are required for such properties to spread. Humans form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs.”
The research was funded by the National Institute on Aging, the John Templeton Foundation, and a Pioneer Grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Read The Original Research Paper HERE (Free PDF)
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Cyber-Bullying & LGBT Groups: Prevalence & Psychological Impact
From http://www.medicalnewstoday.comSchools are typically on guard against students who bully by inflicting repeated violence on other students. But technology has given rise to a relatively new form of bullying which inflicts emotional harm in a stealth manner, working through Web sites, chat rooms, e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging.
And according to a new national study by Iowa State University researchers, one out of every two lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and allied youths are regular victims of “cyberbullying,” which causes psychological and emotional distress to victims — producing thoughts of suicide in some who are repeatedly victimized.
In the online survey of 444 junior high, high school and college students between the ages of 11 and 22 — including 350 self-identified non-heterosexual subjects — 54 percent of the LGBT and allied youth reported being victims of cyberbullying in the 30 days prior to the survey. Cyberbullying includes attacks such as electronic distribution of humiliating photos, dissemination of false or private information, or targeting victims in cruel online polls.
Among the non-heterosexual respondents, 45 percent reported feeling depressed as a result of being cyberbullied, 38 percent felt embarrassed, and 28 percent felt anxious about attending school. More than a quarter (26 percent) had suicidal thoughts.
“There’s a saying that we’ve now changed to read, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can kill,'” said Warren Blumenfeld, an Iowa State assistant professor of curriculum and instruction and the study’s lead author. “And especially at this age — pre-adolescence through adolescence — this is a time when peer influences are paramount in a young person’s life. If one is ostracized and attacked, that can have devastating consequences — not only physically, but on their emotional health for the rest of their lives.”
Co-authored by Robyn Cooper, a research and evaluation scientist at ISU’s Research Institute for Studies in Education (RISE), the study is being published in this month’s special LGBT-themed issue of the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy.
The results underscore the helplessness felt by victims of cyberbullying. Forty percent of the non-heterosexual respondents indicated that their parents wouldn’t believe them if they were being bullied online, while 55 percent reported that their parents couldn’t do anything to stop it. Fifty seven percent also indicated that they didn’t think a school official could do anything to stop it.
“They feared that there might be more retribution by ‘tattling,'” said Blumenfeld, who was bullied as a teen for being gay.
“One of the things we found is that the LGBT students really want to make a difference,” said Cooper, who authored her doctoral dissertation on minority stress and the well-being of sexual minority college students. “They want their stories told. They want people to know what they’re going through, but they don’t want the repercussions of being bullied. So being able to respond to this survey was very helpful.”
One in four of the LGBT and allied students responded that they needed to learn how to deal with cyberbullying by themselves. More than half also feared telling their parents about the cyberbullying because they might restrict their use of technology, which Blumenfeld says is often the “lifeline to the outside world” for many young LGBT students who have been ostracized by their peers at school.
The ISU study also proposes strategies for cyberbullying prevention. Eighty percent of the survey’s respondents indicated that their peers should do more to stop it.
“One of the strategies coming out of this study – since respondents expect and want their peers to step in more – is that we should find ways on our campuses to empower young people to speak up and act as allies,” Blumenfeld said. “In bullying circles, it’s empowering the bystander to become the upstander to help eliminate the problem.”
Blumenfeld and Cooper recommend developing social norms programming at schools that focus on peer influences that correct misperceived societal norms.
The ISU researchers plan to author additional papers on their analysis from this survey. They also have submitted a new grant proposal to extend their research to a larger national sample that would include face-to-face interviews and focus groups.
Source: Mike Ferlazzo Iowa State University
Aspergers in the News: “Temple Grandin” & “House Rules”
An HBO biopic about Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes, and a new Jodi Picoult novel bring the issues and experiences of people with ASD to the general public this month. Reviews below:
Temple Grandin
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY http://www.nytimes.com Published: February 4, 2010
In her autobiography, “Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism,” Temple Grandin explains that she values “positive, measurable results more than emotion.” The HBO movie “Temple Grandin” honors its heroine’s priorities, stressing deeds over tearful setbacks and joyous breakthroughs.
That restraint, unusual in a portrait of a person who heroically overcomes a handicap, is oddly captivating and makes the story all the more touching. “Temple Grandin,” which has its debut on Saturday and stars Claire Danes in the title role, is a made-for-television biopic that avoids the mawkish clichés of the genre without draining the narrative of color and feeling.
Ms. Grandin was born in 1947 in Boston, and her autism was diagnosed when she was a child. At that time most psychiatrists considered it a mental disorder caused by cold, withholding “refrigerator mothers.” Helped by a mother who was anything but, Ms. Grandin was nurtured at home and by a few farsighted teachers who helped her unlock her talents. Most comfortable around animals, she grew up to become a sought after animal behaviorist and livestock consultant, world famous for designing humane slaughterhouses.
In some ways her story is harder to tell than other, similar tales of valor, be they “The Miracle Worker,” “My Left Foot” or “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in which success is so intimately linked to disability. Helen Keller, Christy Brown and Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subjects of those movies, became famous because of their extraordinary personal histories; in all three cases their most lasting work is autobiographical.
Ms. Grandin credits autism for her achievements, arguing that she would never have been so attuned to animal sensibilities or the fine points of agricultural engineering without the distinctive vision and hypersensitivity that comes with autism.
But to the outside world her eminence and inner workings are incongruent. Ranchers don’t commission her stockyard designs because they are moved by her life story; parents and teachers of autistic children don’t care about her theories on curved cattle chutes, but view her accomplishments as a yardstick for their own hopes.
“Temple Grandin” fuses the two with a wonderstruck look at feedlots and loading ramps and a practical, pragmatic view of autism.
Viewers are thrown into the mindset of the teenage Temple with little introduction or fanfare, experiencing the world as she does: in blisteringly vivid images that pop into her head faster than a Google search and that she describes in her book as “full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head.” In that sense, at least, her condition is ideally suited to moviemaking.
In an early scene in which Temple goes to visit her aunt on a ranch in Arizona, she gets off the airplane as startled and fearful as a feral animal. Sounds and sights are heightened — the screeching whirr of the propeller, shouted greetings, the flaming desert heat — to capture how overwhelming and unbearable they are to an autistic girl who flinches at the squeak of a felt-tip marker and cannot bear to be touched.
Ms. Danes is completely at ease in her subject’s lumbering gait and unmodulated voice. She makes Temple’s anxiety as immediate and contagious as her rarer bursts of merriment, laughing too loudly and over and over, as she re-enacts a scene from a favorite television show, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” And as the character ages and learns more social graces, Ms. Danes seamlessly captures Temple’s progress.
Julia Ormond looms surprisingly large in the small role of Eustacia, Temple’s mother, a fighter who insists that people treat her daughter as “different, but not less.” Ms. Grandin’s autobiography didn’t go into the family background — proper Bostonians with old money. Eustacia Cutler gives an account of it in her own, highly emotive autobiography, “A Thorn in My Pocket,” which has all the makings of a more lurid Lifetime movie and is perhaps wisely left out of the HBO film. But Ms. Ormond conveys the back story elliptically, adding a slight upper class inflection to her voice and showing Yankee stubbornness just beneath her sorrowed beauty. When a psychiatrist patronizingly tells Eustacia that her child has infantile schizophrenia brought on by maternal coldness, she snaps, “I’m supposed to have done this, well then, I can undo it.”
She sends Temple, who loves horseback riding, to Arizona for a summer, which introduces her to her life’s work, as well as a device to relieve her panic and anxiety: seeing how cows appear to calm down in squeeze chutes — metal stalls that press against the sides of animals to still them for inoculation — Temple tries it on herself, and finds comfort in the pressure. She designs a squeeze chute for herself, and that plywood contraption is just one of the many eccentricities that set her apart.
Temple finds a mentor, her high school science teacher, Dr. Carlock (David Strathairn), one of the first to train Temple to expand her intellect rather than merely control her impulses.
Students and other teachers were less kind. So were many of the ranchers and meat growers who stood in Temple’s way — and threw bull testicles at her car — when she began her studies in animal husbandry.
Hers is a tale that could be easily be played up for drama, intrigue and weepy reconciliations, but this narrative is loyal to Ms. Grandin’s credo: emotions are secondary to tangible results. And the result is a movie that is funny, instructive and also intangibly charming.
HBO, Saturday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.
Directed by Mick Jackson; written by Christopher Monger and William Merritt Johnson; based on the books “Emergence” by Temple Grandin and Margaret Scariano, and “Thinking in Pictures” by Ms. Grandin; Emily Gerson Saines, Gil Bellows, Anthony Edwards, Dante Di Loreto, Paul Lister and Alison Owen, executive producers; Scott Ferguson, producer. Produced by Ruby Films and Gerson Saines Productions.
WITH: Claire Danes (Temple Grandin), Catherine O’Hara (Aunt Ann), Julia Ormond (Eustacia) and David Strathairn (Dr. Carlock).
House Rules
by Jodi Picoult
Violence and Young People: An Enlightening & Alarming Discussion
On Sunday 27th Feb. I took part in a rich and informed discussion on Violence and Young People on Peter Jan
etzki’s “Talking Life” radio program on which I am a regular guest. I was very much a “third wheel” in this discussion, with the key guests being Dr Steven Stathis, Psychiatrist and Paediatrician, who is a consultant at Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. Steven is also Director of the Child and Family Therapy Unit (CAFTU), and consults at the Youth Detention Centre, Wacol. The other key guest was Dr Mubarak Ali, a researcher in Social Work at Flinders University in Adelaide. Mubarak has done extensive and ground-breaking international research examining child and youth use of the internet and digital technology, and how this usage correlates with violent behaviour. It was a rich discussion with some interesting content and phone calls. If this is a topic which in any way interests you, I would encourage you to take the time to have a listen.
UPDATE: You can now listen to the entire podcast by selecting the links below. These files are now stored in my library internally for easy access: (Free – mp3-internal links) click to play or right click and “save link /target as” to download.
OR
Peter Janetzki
A podcast of the entire show in easy to listen parts, and podcasts of recent shows can be found here or by clicking on the 96.5 logo.You can listen to the podcast from your browser or with iTunes, Talking Life streams live every Sunday night from from 8-10pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (GMT+10) and you can listen by going to the 96.5 website @ 96five.com and clicking on the home page media player.
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REPOST: Talking to Your Child About What’s in The News
I originally blogged this post on August 5th last year. With the recent natural disasters in places like Haiti and Chile, and also the very raw and terrible tragedies involving young children and youth closer to my home in southeast Queensland, Australia, I have decided to repost it. I have done so in case it is helpful for other parents who, like myself are dealing with kids who are concerned about what they see and hear and read about troubling local and world events…
My experience is that many children, particularly those who have generalised anxiety can become quite distressed by exposure to seemingly innocuous exposure to events that are a part of everyday life.
Although news gleaned from television, radio, or the Internet often is a positive educational experience for kids, problems can arise when the images presented are violent or the stories touch on disturbing topics. While we worry about our childrens’ exposure to violence and sexual content in movies, on the internet, and on tv, we need to remember that news programs shpw often live and real images and media from real events which are often distressing and increasingly graphic.
News about a natural disaster, such as the devastating earthquake in China or cyclone in Myanmar, could make kids worry that something similar is going to hit home, or fear a part of daily life — such as rain and thunderstorms — that they’d never worried about before.
Reports on natural disasters, child abductions, homicides, terrorist attacks, and school violence can teach kids to view the world as a confusing, threatening, or unfriendly place.
How can you deal with these disturbing stories and images? Talking to your kids about what they watch or hear will help them put frightening information into a reasonable context.
How Kids Perceive the News
Unlike movies or entertainment programs, news is real. But depending on a child’s age or maturity level, he or she may not yet understand the distinctions between fact and fantasy. By the time kids reach 7 or 8, however, what they see on TV can seem all too real. For some youngsters, the vividness of a sensational news story can be internalized and transformed into something that might happen to them. A child watching a news story about a bombing on a bus or a subway might worry, “Could I be next? Could that happen to me?”Natural disasters or
stories of other types of devastation can be personalized in the same manner. A child in Massachusetts who sees a house being swallowed by floods from a hurricane in Louisiana may spend a sleepless night worrying about whether his home will be OK in a rainstorm. A child in Chicago, seeing news about an attack on subways in London, might get scared about using public transportation around town. TV has the effect of shrinking the world and bringing it into our own living rooms.
By concentrating on violent stories, TV news also can promote a “mean-world” syndrome and give kids an inaccurate view of what the world and society are actually like.
Talking About the News
To calm children’s fears about the news, parents should be prepared to deliver what psychologists call “calm, unequivocal, but limited information.” This means delivering the truth, but only as much truth as a child needs to know. The key is to be as truthful yet as inexplicit as you can be. There’s no need to go into more details than your child is interested in. Although it’s true that some things — like a natural disaster — can’t be controlled, parents should still give kids space to share their fears. Encourage them to talk openly about what scares them.
Older kids are less likely to accept an explanation at face value. Their budding skepticism about the news and how it’s produced and sold might mask anxieties they have about the stories it covers. If older kids are bothered about a story, help them cope with these fears. An adult’s willingness to listen sends a powerful message.
Teens also can be encouraged to consider why a frightening or disturbing story was on the air: Was it to increase the program’s ratings because of its sensational value or because it was truly newsworthy? In this way, a scary story can be turned into a worthwhile discussion about the role and mission of the news.
Tips for Parents
Keeping an eye on kids’ TV news habits can go a long way toward monitoring the content of what they hear and see. Other tips:
- Recognize that news doesn’t have to be driven by disturbing pictures. Public TV programs, newspapers, or newsmagazines specifically designed for kids can be less sensational — and less upsetting — ways of getting information to children.
- Discuss current events with your child regularly. It’s important to help kids think through stories they hear about. Ask questions: What do you think about these events? How do you think these things happen? These questions can encourage conversation about non-news topics too.
- Put news stories in proper context. Showing that certain events are isolated or explaining how one event relates to another helps kids make better sense of what they hear. Broaden the discussion from a disturbing news item to a larger conversation: Use the story of a natural disaster as an opportunity to talk about philanthropy, cooperation, and the ability of people to cope with overwhelming hardship.
- Watch the news with your kids to filter inappropriate or frightening stories.
- Anticipate when guidance will be necessary and avoid shows that aren’t appropriate for your child’s age or level of development.
- If you’re uncomfortable with the content of the news or if it’s inappropriate for your child’s age, turn it off.
- Talk about what you can do to help. In the case of a news event like a natural disaster, kids may gain a sense of control and feel more secure if you find ways to help those who have been affected.
sourced from http://www.kidshealth.org
reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD
Viva La Siesta!: A Nap Significantly Boosts the Brain’s Learning Capacity
BERKELEY — If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.
Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter — a common practice at college during midterms and finals — decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.
“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies.
In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.
At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.
Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.
These findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s shor
- Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. (Courtesy of Matthew Walker)
t-term memory storage and make room for new information, said Walker, who presented his preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.
Since 2007, Walker and other sleep researchers have established that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space.
“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said.
In the late
st study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory-refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.
“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason,” Walker said. “Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need.”
Walker and his team will go on to investigate whether the reduction of sleep experienced by people as they get older is related to the documented decrease in our ability to learn as we age. Finding that link may be helpful in understanding such neurodegenerative conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Walker said.
In addition to Walker, co-investigators of these new findings are Bryce A. Mander and psychology undergraduate Sangeetha Santhanam.
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More than Words: The Importance of Physical Touch
Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.
But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.
The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.
In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.
“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”
To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.
In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.
The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.
To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.
The study fell short of showing that touch caused the better performance, Dr. Kraus acknowledged. “We still have to test this in a controlled lab environment,” he said.
If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”
“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”
The same is certainly true of partnerships, and especially the romantic kind, psychologists say. In a recent experiment, researchers led by Christopher Oveis of Harvard conducted five-minute interviews with 69 couples, prompting each pair to discuss difficult periods in their relationship.
The investigators scored the frequency and length of touching that each couple, seated side by side, engaged in. In an interview, Dr. Oveis said that the results were preliminary.
“But it looks so far like the couples who touch more are reporting more satisfaction in the relationship,” he said. Again, it’s not clear which came first, the touching or the satisfaction. But in romantic relationships, one has been known to lead to the other. Or at least, so the anecdotal evidence suggests.
School Related Issues: Guest apearance on 96.5 FM’s “Talking Life”
On Sunday 14th February I took part in a discussion on School related issues from preschool to Secondary school as a guest on Peter Janetzki’s terrific “Talking Life” radio program on which I have been a regular guest over its nine year history. It was a great discussion with some interesting content and phone calls.
Peter Janetzki
A podcast of the entire show and recent shows can be found here or by clicking on the 96.5 logo.You can listen to the podcast from your browser or with iTunes, The show streams live every Sunday night from from 8-10pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (GMT+10) and you can listen by going to the 96.5 website @ 96five.com and clicking on the home page media player.
About Peter
Peter Brown BHMS (Hons) MPsychClin MAPS
I’m a Clinical Psychologist and have a private practice and consultancy in Brisbane Australia. I have 24 years experience in child, adult and family clinical psychology. I have a wonderful wife and three kids.
I am co-founder of Christian Wholeness Counselling Services.
I like researching issues of the brain & mind, reading and seeking out new books and resources for myself and my clients. I thought that others might be interested in some of what I have found also, hence this blog…
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