Rashness & Rumination: New Understanding About the Roots of Depression

Two studies explore some of the developmental roots of depression in childhood and adolescence.

In the first study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, researchers focused on depressive rumination, or the relentless focus on what has gone wrong or will go wrong, coupled with an inability to see a solution to these overwhelming problems. It’s no surprise that rumination has a strong connection to depression— in fact, studies show that some talk therapies can actually make depression worse by compelling people to focus on problems and their origins, rather than guiding them toward positive solutions on what to do about them.

To better understand what role rumination might play in seeding depression to begin with, however, the researchers, led by Mollie Moore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied 756 young adolescent twins, aged 12 to 14. They compared identical twins, who share the same genes, to fraternal twins, who are no more genetically alike than other siblings, using questionnaires designed to tease out whether the teens tended to brood over their problems and their insolubility or whether they thoughtfully reflected on them with an eye toward finding possible solutions. What psychologists have labeled “moody pondering” or brooding is more likely to be associated with depression, while reflection may actually be helpful as a coping mechanism for emotional or challenging experiences. The authors also looked at whether the teens were able to distract themselves from their problems, noting that “individuals who have a greater tendency to ruminate and a lesser tendency to distract are at the greatest risk for experiencing depressive symptoms.”

They found that while much of brooding is influenced by environmental influences such as parenting and peers, virtually all of the connection between whether that brooding is associated with depression may be driven by genes.  Someone who inherits a tendency to brood, in other words, also seems to inherit a tendency to become depressed.

“I appreciated the authors’ distinction between brooding and distraction and their finding that the two played opposite roles,” says Gregory Smith, professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who was not associated with the research, “At the core, they found that although brooding is not highly heritable, genetic influences appear to contribute to the relationship between brooding and depression.”

That doesn’t mean that people who brood are necessarily at higher risk of depression. Because the research only looked at the twins at one point in time, the authors note that “it remains unclear from our results alone whether brooding is a risk factor for depression or is merely associated with depressed mood concurrently.”  Since rumination can be re-directed and managed through cognitive behavioral therapy or other interventions, figuring out whether the tendency to brood can trigger depression could lead to early and effective treatments, which might actually prevent depression by stopping ruminating before it becomes engrained in brain circuitry.

Smith, who is also investigating some of the potential root causes of depression, reports in his study, published in Psychological Science, on an interesting connection between depression and people’s tendency to act without thinking when faced with strong emotion, known among psychologists as “urgency.” Although this behavior seems unrelated to depression, he and his colleagues found a surprising link.

“In numerous longitudinal studies, [urgency] has been shown to predict subsequent involvement in a range of rash, ill-advised behaviors, including problem drinking, pathological gambling, smoking, risky sex, drug use, binge eating, and others,” he says.

And what’s driving these behaviors is an impulse to act without considering the consequences. “It might be [more] useful to understand impulsivity more broadly: as the tendency to respond to an immediate urge or need, without due consideration of one’s ongoing, long-term interests and health,” Smith says.

That can lead to not acting when it’s necessary, as well as actively making poor choices. “Sometimes inaction can meet an immediate need at the expense of an ongoing goal pursuit,” he says. “For example, one might be very nervous about asking one’s boss for a promotion and raise. Inaction [not asking] would alleviate the immediate nervousness, but at the expense of one’s longer-term interests.”

In the study, Smith and his colleagues studied over 1,900 fifth graders as they made the transition from elementary school into sixth grade middle school.  After controlling for factors like gender and early onset of puberty that could also affect depression, they found that fifth grade urgency was one of the best predictors of being depressed in sixth grade:  the only greater predictor was already having been depressed in fifth grade.

And this prediction held up even after the authors controlled for early involvement with smoking, drinking or binge eating:  addictive behaviors that might themselves lead to depression because of their negative consequences.  Instead, the findings suggest that impulsivity in the face of emotion — leading to either action or inaction — increases risk for both addictive disorders and depression.

While the connections between either ruminative negative thoughts or impulsive behaviors and depression might seem obvious, such finer-grained understanding of how these tendencies may contribute to depression could lead to better ways of preventing an array of behavior problems.

Why Married People Are Smug and Singles So Carefree

2013-03-07

By Maia Szalavitz

If you’re single, you can’t seem to get away from the couple who won’t stop cooing and talking about how great it is to be in a relationship and how relieved they are to be spared from the horrors of dating.  And if you’re married, you can’t stop hearing from singles about how marriage is a hellish trap and their own commitment-free life is a blissful expression of their independence.

It may not make the annoying nature of your self-satisfied friends any easier to take but a new study may explain why people in relationships are so convinced that partners are the way to go, while those who are single adamantly refuse to accept the joys of being part of a pair.  People who see their relationship status as unlikely to change are prone to idealize it— while those who are open to other possibilities don’t feel the need to boost themselves by disparaging the status of others.  Understanding the psychology of this process can help explain a lot of otherwise mystifying behavior among both singles and couples.

The study, which will be published in Psychological Science, is based on the theory of “cognitive dissonance,” a phenomenon first described in the 1950s. If you are deeply committed to a belief and have acted in ways that you think are irreversible as a result, it’s often easier to change your other beliefs and actions than it is to question the original idea.

“Cognitive dissonance happens when we’ve made a choice and we’re not 100% satisfied with it or it goes against something we believe,” says Kristin Laurin, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, the lead author of the study,  “We feel uncomfortable, so what we do is adapt our attitudes so now the choice fits better with the attitude.”

The term was first coined by psychologist Leon Festinger, who studied members of an apocalyptic cult. After they had quit their jobs, cut ties with outside friends and family and sold their belongings, the predicted catastrophic flood failed to arrive. The leader gave them a lame explanation that it had been their faith that saved the world.  But while some members did quit, many others became even more fervent, in a desperate attempt to justify their already-made decisions to dedicate their lives to the cult.

Festinger and his colleagues and students soon found that a similar reaction occurs in many cases where people have paid a high price for something that fails to deliver fully.  In fact, these studies find that the more people pay for something, the more likely they are to see it as having been worth it.  Whether it’s wine or a car or even a fraternity initiation, the more you pay in cash or emotional pain, the better you tend to feel about what you’ve gotten. (This is part of why hazing is so hard to eradicate:  it does increase loyalty).

Laurin and her colleagues suspected that a similar thought process might take place when people consider their relationship status.  If you believe you are likely to stay single, it can be easier to look on the bright side, rather than constantly spending time envying people in pairs.  Similarly, if you think your relationship is going to last, it’s not a great idea to focus on the upside of being unpartnered.

Researchers tested these ideas in several experiments, one of which was conducted on Valentine’s Day two years ago. In that study, 113 college students were offered chocolates for answering survey questions about their current relationship status and whether they felt it was likely to last.

Then, they read a description of a student of the same gender, who was either single or in a relationship and were asked to write a few paragraphs about how they thought that person would spend Valentine’s evening. They also quantified how happy and fulfilled the person would be and were asked if they thought the student in the example would have a better evening if they had the opposite relational status to the one described.

As predicted, participants who saw their relational status as unlikely to change made more positive judgments about those who shared that status and were more negative about those who didn’t.

“The more the coupled people felt that their relationship was going to last, the more they wrote happy stories about relationships and sad, unhappy stories about being single,” Laurin says, “And conversely the more single people thought that they would be single for a long time, the more they wrote happy stories about single and sad, unhappy stories about relationships.”

These preferences may help explain why single people tend to find that their friends drop them when they couple up — and why couples who break up often find themselves excluded by their married friends. “I think that definitely contributes to the divide you see,” says Laurin.

However, the research did not find that couples were more likely to idealize their status than singles were — even when similar experiments were done with older adults, amongst whom being single is more stigmatized than it is in college.

“That was one of most surprising things we found,” Laurin says,  “We thought that since there’s a prevailing cultural ideology that people should be in relationships, [it] might be harder for single people to say ‘Yeah, it’s totally awesome [being single],’ but we actually found exact same size effect across both groups.”

Other experiments explored whether cuing people to think about their relational status as more or less changeable would reduce the effect (it did) and whether being more satisfied as a single or coupled person would account for the idealization of one’s own status (it didn’t).

So whether or not you have someone to come home to on Valentine’s Day — take heart.  Those smug married people or carefree singles don’t actually have it better— they just want to convince themselves that they do.

How to sleep with a woman

2013-03-04

By :Hugh Wilson

According to new research, what you do in bed can seriously undermine your relationship.

And on this occasion, the experts aren’t talking about sex. Hotel chain Premier Inn surveyed 2,000 adults and found that bedroom battles caused by cold feet, snoring and late night loo trips are putting more and more relationships under stress.

In all, these bedroom bothers led to 167 arguments a year, the survey found.

So how do you successfully sleep – and we mean sleep – with a woman. Here’s our handy guide.

Don’t hog the duvet

According to the study, hogging the duvet is the number one cause of arguments among couples in the bedroom, leading to lost sleep and serious resentment. So don’t be a duvet hogger if you can help it.

Admittedly, it can be pretty hard to help it, given that many of us wrap the warm cosy things around ourselves – pulling them off our partners in the process – when we’re fast asleep. The answer? Think of investing in two single quilts rather than one double.

“Our research shows that most of the arguments couples have in the bedroom are down to habits that are easy to resolve as a relationship develops,” said spokeswoman Claire Haigh.

Get help for your snoring

Snoring was the next most hated bedroom baddie, with 20% of respondents claiming that a snoring spouse cost them up to two hours of sleep a night. More women than men complained of a snoring partner.

“People suffer from snoring to varying degrees and the research shows it can impact on our day-to-day lives, especially if one person in the relationship is missing out on much needed sleep,” said Haigh.

So what’s the answer? The British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association has a handy guide to help you determine what sort of snorer you are and what you can do about it.

It’s also worth knowing that lifestyle factors such as being overweight and drinking alcohol before bed can make your snoring worse. Similarly, overwork or a poor sleep routine can mean that when you do finally hit the sack you’re seriously overtired, another risk factor for snoring.

Be a gentleman in bed

When it comes to bedroom etiquette, it can be the simple things that matter most.

According to the study, one irritation is a partner who leaves the lights on to read. Another is a partner who comes home late and doesn’t get undressed in another room. Yet another is a man who comes home a little the worse for wear and stumbles around the bedroom trying to remove his socks. And then there are those of us who just have to get up to go to the loo in the night.

It’s no wonder the research found that one in 10 partners had considered ending their relationship because of disturbed nights and bedroom annoyances.

Much of this is easily remedied, of course. If you want to read when your partner wants to sleep, do it in another room. And when you do come to bed get ready elsewhere and slip silently between the sheets undetected.

And if all else fails, there is one more radical option that may improve your relationship no end…

Many couples are now choosing to sleep separately, at least every now and then, for the good of their physical health and the health of their relationships. In fact, a study published earlier this year found that one in 10 couples that live together regularly spend nights in separate rooms or at least separate beds.

That might go right against your grain. Conventional wisdom says that couples that sleep apart do so because they can’t stand each other. But Dr Neil Stanley, one of the UK’s leading sleep researchers, says that sleeping apart can be a good thing for many of us. Couples suffer 50% more sleep disturbances, Dr Stanley claims, when they share a bed.

That’s serious, because disturbed sleep leads to tired days and tiredness leads to cranky couples. You’re more likely to argue, bicker and put strain on your relationship when you’re tired. Dr Stanley says that poor sleep increases the risk of divorce, as well as a host of physical and mental problems.

So perhaps the most gentlemanly thing you can do in bed tonight is to get out of it. If you don’t have a spare room, maybe you can invest in a sofa bed or fold-up mattress?

That’s not to suggest you sleep apart all the time – there’s some evidence to suggest that sex lives and relationships can suffer if couples never share a bed. But on nights when you’re out late, or you know you’re particularly tired, or you’ve had a drink, sleeping in a separate room could ensure you both get a good night’s sleep, and wake up healthier, happier and nicer to be around in the morning.

Most Common Psychiatric Disorders Share Genetic Roots

By Maia Szalavitz

Diverse mental illnesses may actually represent variations on a common theme rather than separate disorders.
(NIMH), which provided some of the funding for theResearch Domain Criteria
A quiet autistic child is certainly unlike a manic adult with bipolar disorder, or a person suffering a bout of paranoia due to schizophrenia, but new research suggests that these varied conditions may be more alike than previously thought.

Researchers analyzed genetic data from some 33,000 people of European descent who had either autism, schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder or attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  They were compared with nearly 28,000 unaffected controls. Scanning the entire genome, the scientists found variants in four different regions that affected risk for all or most of these conditions.

The results suggest that it may be possible to move away from classifying psychiatric disorders primarily based on profiles of symptoms and focus on biological causes of mental illness, according to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital.

“This was a really well done study and the best yet at trying to address the question of whether there might be common processes underlying what we have long though to be very different psychiatric conditions,” says Dr. Bryan King, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital, who was not associated with the research.

“It’s really very exciting to see scientists from 19 countries bringing together data on tens of thousands of different patients to ask questions about the genetic architecture of these various mental illnesses,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH), which provided some of the funding for the that was published in The Lancet.

Two of the four variants are involved in regulating calcium channels, which are crucial for the proper functioning of nerve cells.  “They are fundamental to the working of neurons,” says King. “Calcium and chloride balance is critical to the proper electrical activity of the neuron.”

The findings could help explain many apparently odd connections between psychiatric disorders.  For example, autism was once known as childhood schizophrenia, in part because people with both conditions seem to be mesmerized by their own internal worlds.  Conversely, some of the adults labeled as having schizophrenia in the past might have been diagnosed with autism instead if their childhood history had been known.

“In families with bipolar disorder, the risk of schizophrenia is increased, so we knew that there was some overlap, but it was not clear to what extent,” says Thomas Lehner, a co-author of the study and branch chief of genomics for the NIMH.

The new knowledge of the common gene-based roots could help to tease apart some of these overlapping symptoms and diagnoses. Some of the variants the researchers found are more common in patients with depression, for example, while others are more prevalent among those with schizophrenia. But without biological tests to differentiate between disorders, until now, symptoms have been the only guide to classifying psychiatric conditions. To make matters worse, many people have symptoms of more than one disorder and many disorders share some of the same symptoms.

Insel compares the situation to diagnosing people with malaria, the flu and a bacterial infection as having the same disease.  “All of them have a fever of about 103 and they look really miserable, with sweating and muscle aches. Under the DSM, they’d all have same thing,” he says, noting that this does not mean that psychiatric disorders are any less real, just that we don’t yet have precise ways of characterizing them.

The genetic revelations are only a first step, however. Scientists still have to figure out why a problem with calcium channels might lead to autism in one case and bipolar disorder in another. And the knowledge may lead to a re-thinking of at least the five psychiatric conditions found to share some genetic changes.

“When we say with the DSM that this person has ADHD and autism [together],  at some level we’re saying those two entities are somehow distinct,” says King, “Instead, the truth may very well be, at least in some instances, that ADHD manifestations and autism manifestations are part of some overarching problem that’s neither one nor the other.”

Insel and Lehner stress that none of the genetic variants the scientists identified are a major cause of any of the disorders.  “This confers a very small amount of risk,” says Insel, “If you went out and had your genotype looked at and you had this particular variant, does that mean that you have a greater likelihood of schizophrenia? Only in a very, very tiny way, maybe a 10% increase in risk.”

But understanding the places where development may be going astray or how circuitry may be disrupted could eventually provide leads for better treatments. “The shared biology opens the door to the exploration of novel treatment approaches and early interventions,” says King.

To capitalize on such approaches, the NIMH is developing the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), an alternative system for classifying psychiatric illness that considers symptoms in many different ways. Anxiety, for example, may involve a problem with a fear circuit that in turn is related to variants of a specific gene that is activated, or triggered by an early childhood experience of terror.  Genetic studies that identify common genes that psychiatric conditions share could help to fill in such multi-dimensional views of mental illness.  “RDoc is saying let’s build in many levels of information,” says Insel, “We know that the DSM approach is not the way to understand these disorders. It may be a way to bill for them, but it’s not a way to develop science or even identify who should get what treatment.”

That understanding could lead to a more biology-based understanding that psychiatric disorders that many experts welcome. Factoring in the effect that genes have in dialing up or turning down risk may prove invaluable in improving our understanding of how the brain develops, and how we might intervene when that process goes awry.