Your smartphone may be powering down your relationship

an Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author, writes about sex and relationships for CNN Health. Read more from him on his website, GoodInBed.

Are you spending more time with your smartphone than with your partner — even during romantic dates?

Technology allows us to be constantly connected to the world, but it can also make us even more disconnected from each other.

In fact, two recent studies show that cell phones can have a negative impact on close relationships.

Researchers from the University of Essex found that people who engaged in personal discussions when a cell phone was nearby — even if neither was actually using it — reported lower relationship quality and less trust for their partner. They also felt their partner was less empathetic to their concerns.

Other studies suggest that cell phones can distract our attention from the present moment. And that’s a problem, considering the results of the Mobile Mindset Study, a recent survey that found three out of five U.S. smartphone users don’t go more than hour without checking their gadgets.

Taken a few steps further, smartphones, tablets, and laptops — and the social media they often support — have the potential to tear couples apart.

Internet infidelity: Is it time to snoop?

I’ve talked before in this column about the capability of Facebook and other social media to threaten relationships: They provide a sense of instant gratification that stimulates our brain’s reward centers, offering quick hits of novelty that can be downright addictive.

Plus, they allow us to connect with friends, co-workers, and even former flames, fostering an immediate and intense sense of intimacy that can lead us to romanticize these connections. At best, you’re giving your energy to these digital distractions, not your partner. At worst, you could be setting the stage for emotional infidelity.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to ditch your smartphone altogether, especially if you also need it for work. But there are things you can do to use it wisely — and even help improve your relationship. Here are three tips for making technology work for you and your partner:
Ian Kerner
Ian Kerner

Set it aside. It should go without saying that cell phones are best kept out of sight and out of mind when you’re on a date. Turn it off and place it in your bag or pocket for the duration — the world won’t end if you can’t check your e-mail for an hour or two.

I also recommend shutting down phones, tablets and laptops at night, or at least charging them in a room other than your bedroom. Not only can they interfere with your ability to relax and unwind, but their distracting presence can also put a real crimp in intimacy.

Rethink social media. We’ve talked about the possible perils of connecting with your exes online. But I typically advise that you don’t “friend” your partner, either. As Facebook friends, you have access to the most mundane parts of your significant other’s day, from what he ate for lunch, to what new movies she wants to see. Talk about removing any sense of mystery!

If you do want to connect online as well as off, consider joining a digital service that helps foster togetherness. Best described as intimate online spaces for just you and your partner, programs like Between or TwoCup offer a place to share private memories, messages, and photos — away from the prying eyes of others.

Make a sexy connection. Technology isn’t all bad: It can actually bring you closer together — and even add some spice to foreplay.

Use your smartphone to send your partner a sexy e-mail, voicemail message, or “sext” describing a fantasy or your plans with him or her for the evening. Engage in a little Skype or FaceTime flirtation, especially if one of you is out of town. Just a word of caution: Be sure to use personal, not company accounts.

Smartphones and other gadgets can clearly have a negative impact on your relationship — but they don’t have to. By learning to use them wisely, you can start to feel more connected to your partner than ever.

Diet drinks’ ‘link to depression’ questioned

2013-01-09

Experts are questioning whether diet drinks could raise depression risk, after a large study has found a link.

The US research in more than 250,000 people found depression was more common among frequent consumers of artificially sweetened beverages.

The work, which will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting, did not look at the cause for this link.

Drinking coffee was linked with a lower risk of depression.

People who drank four cups a day were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with depression during the 10-year study period than those who drank no coffee.
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“Start Quote

Sweeteners have been very widely tested and reviewed for safety and the ones on the market have an excellent safety track record”

Gaynor Bussell British Dietetic Association

But those who drank four cans or glasses of diet fizzy drinks or artificially sweetened juice a day increased their risk of depression by about a third.

Lead researcher Dr Honglei Chen, of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina, said: “Our research suggests that cutting out or down on sweetened diet drinks or replacing them with unsweetened coffee may naturally help lower your depression risk.”

But he said more studies were needed to explore this.
No proof

There are many other factors that may be involved.

And the findings – in people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and living in the US – might not apply to other populations.

The safety of sweeteners, like aspartame, has been extensively tested by scientists and is assured by regulators.

Gaynor Bussell, of the British Dietetic Association, said: “Sweeteners used to be called ‘artificial’ sweeteners and unfortunately the term ‘artificial’ has evoked suspicion. As a result, sweeteners have been very widely tested and reviewed for safety and the ones on the market have an excellent safety track record.

Sweeteners

Sweeteners are used in a wide range of manufactured sugar-free, reduced sugar and low calorie foods and drinks
These include aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame potassium (K), cyclamate and sucralose
They are virtually free of calories and do not affect blood glucose levels
There are regulations about how much sweetener can be used in foods and “Acceptable Daily Limits”

“However, the studies on them continue and this one has thrown up a possibly link – not a cause and effect – with depression.”

She said the study was a “one-off” and did not mean that sweeteners caused depression.

“For a start, people who suffer from depression may latch on to the idea that it is their sweetened beverages that caused it and so add a bias to their reporting of past intake, especially as ‘soda’ in the US is demonised even more than in the UK. Also, it may be that drinking ‘diet’ drinks is a marker for obesity or diabetes which in themselves can cause depression.

“Non-calorific sweeteners can play a useful role in the diets of those trying to lose weight and diabetics and it is certainly not advocated that people should replace their diet sodas with more coffee.”

Beth Murphy, at the mental health charity Mind, said: “We would urge anyone who is affected by depression to follow the advice of their GP or other medical professional in regards to their treatment.”

Ketamine: Leading the Way Toward Fast-Acting Antidepressants

It’s an anesthetic popular with veterinarians, but the latest studies show ketamine also shows promise as a potential antidepressant.

Ketamine produces hallucinations, out-of-body feelings, disorientation and even amnesia that can last a few hours, which has made it not just a staple in veterinary clinics but occasionally in nightclubs as well, as a recreational drug.

In a research review published last October in the journal Science, however, researchers called the growing connection between ketamine and depression “the most important advance in the field” in the depression field over the past 50 years. And now scientists report on two formulations of drugs with ketamine’s benefits, but without its consciousness-altering risks, that could advance the drug even further toward a possible treatment for depression.

Prozac and other methods of stabilizing mood, including talk therapy, take weeks, not hours, to show benefits. A rapid-acting antidepressant like one based on ketamine could potentially be lifesaving for those with depression, since those waiting for treatment to take effect are often at high risk of suicide.

In late November, the first randomized controlled trial of a ketamine-like drug, AZD6765 (made by AstraZeneca), was published in Biological Psychiatry. The study, which was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, included 22 participants with depression who had failed to respond to other treatments. Those randomly assigned to the ketamine compound showed a 32% improvement in mood, typically within an hour, compared with only 15% of those assigned to placebo. Overall, 18% of patients reached full remission, lasting two days, on the drug, in contrast with 10% of those taking placebo.

But while the drug had no significant side effects, the ketamine mimic was not nearly as effective as ketamine itself. “The antidepressant effects of AZD6765 were not as robust or sustained as those observed in our previous study of ketamine,” the authors write. With ketamine, 71% of patients had a significant positive response within a day of taking the drug — more than double that seen with the new medication — and the effects lasted for a week, not just two days.

Despite its weaker performance, AZD6765 does have an advantage over the original — it does not seem to impair consciousness, so it could still prove to be a useful medication. “Future studies with this compound are warranted on the basis of the positive antidepressant signal here, particularly those exploring efficacy and tolerability associated with higher or repeated doses,” the study concludes.

Preliminary data on another ketamine-like antidepressant, GLYX-13, was also presented at the December meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. A safety test on 116 people with treatment-resistant depression found that the drug did not impair consciousness, had minimal side effects and did significantly reduce depression symptoms for up to two weeks.

However, because this trial was designed to test the agent’s safety, its effects were not compared with those of a placebo.

But with the emerging evidence suggesting a connection between ketamine and improved mood and with both of the ketamine-like compounds still under study, some clinicians are starting to offer ketamine to patients whose depression is not responding to other approaches. Since it is FDA-approved for use as an anesthetic, doctors can provide the drug off-label to patients, as long as they inform users that the medication has not been tested for use as an antidepressant.

Others, like Dr. James Murrough, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, are conducting clinical trials of ketamine as a treatment for depression but are reluctant to offer the drug outside of research. “I’m excited because it has potential, but it’s not quite ready yet,” Murrough says. If the studies do support the safety and effectiveness of ketamine or ketamine-like agents for treating depression, however, these drugs could become an important part of the psychiatric arsenal in addressing symptoms of mood disorders quickly — before they lead to more serious symptoms like suicide.

Understanding Why Music Moves Us

2013-01-01

They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But why don’t we dance to paintings— or for that matter, buildings— anyway? The latest research hints at why.

According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, music and dance share a parallel expression of emotion. The new research suggests that the two disciplines can express a mood together, with complementary methods of generating the dynamics of feeling.

The intuitive link between our feelings and movements is so strong that even the word “emotion” includes the word “motion.” And across cultures, the three-way connection between music, motion and feelings is maintained, such that being “moved” by either feelings or music is not just a concept of English-speaking people.

MORE: How an Appreciation for the Arts May Boost Stroke Recovery

To better understand the roots of this deep connection, researchers at Dartmouth created a computer program that could produce either music or movement. Slider bars— similar to those on a mixing board— were created to control either the motion of an animated ball or the single notes of a piano, but not both at the same time.

Participants in the study included two very dissimilar groups: 50 college students in the U.S., and 87 villagers living in L’ak, a remote area of Cambodia, which is populated by the Kreung people. In this tribal group, music and dance mainly appear in ceremonies like weddings, funerals and animal sacrifices. The Kreung village is so isolated that members had never had any experiences with computers prior to the experiment.

In both the U.S. and Cambodian groups, participants were split into two groups for the experiment. All of them had to use the computer program to represent five different emotions: angry, happy, peaceful, sad and scared. But one group used the program in which the ball represented the emotion in movement, while the other used the program to play music to represent the feeling.

The program the scientists created allowed the participants to depict different aspects of the emotions. One slider bar, for example, controlled “rate,” which regulated how often notes or ball bounces occurred, better known to music lovers and dancers as beats per minute. Another handled “jitter” or the space between the notes or bounces. A third slider controlled the direction of either the music or the ball— whether the pitch or the ball moved up or down. The fourth handled the ratio of large to small movements: i.e., whether the pitch moved up quickly or slowly or the ball took large or small bounces. The final slider managed whether the music was consonant or dissonant or whether the ball moved smoothly or irregularly.

MORE: How Group Drumming May Improve Low-Income Student Behavior

“The study is bold, challenging and interesting,” says Mark Changizi, an independent neuroscientist at the 2Ai Institute, who was not associated with the research but also studies the relationship between music and movement.

The authors write, “The critical question was whether subjects who used music to express an emotion set the slider bars to the same positions as subjects who expressed the same emotion with the moving ball.”

And to a large extent, that was what the researchers found. In the American group, each parameter was used in a similar way to create an image of an emotion, regardless of whether the output was music or motion. “These results strongly suggest the presence of a common structure,” the authors write.

Changizi’s research produced similar findings, although he used a different way of mapping music to movement, explored in his book, Harnessed. “I make the case that music has culturally evolved to sound like evocative human movement and behavior,” Changizi says, “By working out the ‘fingerprint’ of sounds people make when they move, I show that the same peculiar fingerprint is found in the structure of music.”

But is this unique to Western music? Other cultures may represent emotions differently in their music and their movements— or they may have parallel, but different expressions for emotion in music v. dance.

The study of U.S. and Cambodian participants suggests that different cultures may share parallel ways of expressing emotions in music and movement. Combining the data for music and movement together, the Kreung results for each emotion were more similar to the American results for the same emotion than they were to the other feelings, with one exception.

That exception was “angry.” The Kreung idea of “angry” music was closer to the American idea of “scared” music than it was to American rage music. But given the overlap in situations that elicit anger and fear, however, that trend is not entirely surprising.

Overall, the study authors conclude, “[T]he dynamic features of emotion expression are cross-culturally universal, at least for the five emotions tested here… these expressions have similar dynamic contours in both music and movement.”

So what does this tell us about what music and dance are “for”? Changizi notes that painting and sculpture can evoke emotion, but not the contagious type that tends to unify a group. “The visual arts may well evoke great feeling in us,” he says, describing how we may smile or even be moved to tears by a painting. “But [they don’t] make us really move, not like music can. Nearly all music may sound like someone moving about us, but dance music in particular probably sounds like someone engaging in a much more infectious behavior, one that in real life we might join.”

The study’s authors suggest that music may have evolutionary functions that aid survival, from “the soothing power of lullabies and the stimulating, synchronizing force of military marching rhythms” that can bind parents and children or entire nations together. The power of music may indeed be in its ability to move us, both literally and figuratively.

Loneliness, Not Living Alone, Linked to Dementia

2012-12-12

Yes, there is a difference. Why one is more likely to trigger serious memory problems?

In a study published in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Tjalling Jan Holwerda of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam found that participants who reported feeling lonely — regardless of how many friends and family surrounded them — were more likely to experience dementia than those who lived on their own. The scientists focused on nearly 2,200 older adults living in Amsterdam, ages 65 to 86, who did not show signs of dementia and were not living in institutions like nursing homes, and visited them twice over three years. About half of the participants lived alone and 20% reported feelings of loneliness. Almost two-thirds of the elderly in the study were women.

Prior research suggested that having a supportive social network is linked with positive health outcomes, from psychological health to physical health, while lacking such support can be harmful. Indeed, a growing body of studies find that loneliness itself can kill, typically by raising blood pressure and increasing risk for heart disease and stroke. High blood pressure is also a risk factor for dementia.

Continue reading Loneliness, Not Living Alone, Linked to Dementia →

Young people and social media: Docs examine pitfalls By Pat Etheridge, Special to CNN

2012-11-26

They’re called “Generation M2”: highly tech-savvy children ages 8 to 18, whose lives are immersed in electronic media.

Now, the nation’s top pediatric organization is mobilizing efforts around their well-being.

“As pediatricians who are trying to help children behave in ways that keep them healthy and safe, we have to pay a lot of attention to what’s happening in social media,” said Dr. David Hill, chairman-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ council on communications and media.

The council led a panel called “Social Media: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” at the group’s annual conference last month in New Orleans. The goal of the presentation: getting pediatricians current on issues to discuss with young patients during regular wellness checkups.

The American Academy of Pediatrics established the council in 2007 with the recognition that growing media platforms touch on virtually every health concern pediatricians have about young people: aggression, sex, drugs, obesity, self-image and eating disorders, depression and suicide — even learning disorders and academic achievement.

Continue reading Young people and social media: Docs examine pitfalls By Pat Etheridge, Special to CNN →

Happy Teens Grow Up to Be Wealthier Too…….

Which comes first, happiness or money? Much scholarly head tapping has been devoted to examining whether richer people are happier and if so, how much richer? Nobel prize-winners have even looked into it. But a new study suggests that the question could perhaps be looked at the other way around. Happier teenagers, this study suggests, grow up to be richer adults.

The study, which appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences Teenagers, looked at thousands of teenagers and found that those who felt better about life as young adults tended to have higher incomes by the time they turned 29. Their happiness was measured on a scale of 1 to 5. Those who were happiest earned an average of $8,000 more than those who were the most despondent.

Continue reading Happy Teens Grow Up to Be Wealthier Too……. →