Archive for July, 2008

Affectionate Writing Can Reduce Cholesterol

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
This was posted on PsyBlog, as a way of reducing cholesterol without medication. Makes interesting reading, and is actually quite a nice thing to do for it’s own sake!
Pen
[Photo by phil h]

According to new research, writing down affectionate thoughts about close friends and family can reduce your cholesterol levels. Floyd et al. (2007) randomly assigned participants to one of two groups: one experimental and one control. The experimental group wrote with affection about one person in their lives for 20 minutes on three occasions over a five-week period. The control group wrote mundane descriptions of their activities over the week, jobs they had done and places they had lived.

The results from two separate studies demonstrated that after only 25 days, the experimental group who had written affectionate notes, showed a significant reduction in cholesterol. These reductions were seen independently from the effects of general health factors like age, drinking, smoking and so on. Mean cholesterol levels reduced from 170 mg/dL to 159 mg/dL (figures are from the second study which was methodologically more secure).

The researchers also examined whether linguistic features of the experimental group’s writing affected cholesterol reduction. They found that those who wrote directly to someone showed greater reductions in cholesterol than those who wrote in the third person about someone.

One of the strengths of this study was that it specifically examined the benefits of expressing affection. Other studies have found evidence for the benefits of expressing affection but have had difficulties separating the expressing from the receiving. This is because when you express affection towards someone else, they are likely to reciprocate. Expressing is, therefore, tightly bound up with receiving.

In an age where human nature is often considered profoundly selfish, here’s a selfish reason to be nice to people. Of course compared with all the money-spinning methods of reducing cholesterol levels around nowadays, you’ll never see this one advertised (except on PsyBlog!) because it’s essentially free. So, pass it on…

Caution
These are preliminary results. The research was carried out in a small sample (Study 1, N=34; Study 2, N=30) of healthy US college students all in the normal range for cholesterol. More research will be required to see if this generalises across cultures, overall health status and so on. On the other hand, the possible side-effects of writing affectionate letters are not that worrying, unless you count paper cuts.

» This post is part of a series on the psychology of relationships.

 

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The Observer on Sunday Part II

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Part II of the article in The Observer newspaper on Sunday 6th July 2008.

Teach yourself self-hypnosis

Cognitive hypnotherapist Katie Abbott suggests some positive-thinking techniques that can be tried by anyone, anytime, anywhere 

 

 

Sometimes in life, we feel or act as though we’re in a trance. We do things or feel things we know aren’t good for us, but we carry on doing them regardless. Cognitive hypnotherapy works to take you out of that trance, to dehypnotise you so that you are free to be the way you want to be. Whether you’re at home, at work or on holiday, these simple self – hypnosis exercises will enable you to perform simple mind maintenance …
Article continues

Learn self-hypnosisThis can be done any time, anywhere, and is a great way to combat stress, re-energise or bring yourself out of a negative mood …

1. Breathe slowly, deeply and evenly from your stomach, not your chest.

2. With every exhale, say a word that represents the way you want to feel. For example, say “calm” or “energised”.

3. Recall a comforting image or memory from your past. Vividly re-experience it, remembering the sights, sounds and smells around you. Was it warm or cold? Were there any intense colours, or perhaps a scent in the air?

4. Try adding your own elements to this – add to the surroundings or environment to make it even more comforting. Practise this for three to five minutes a couple of times a week, and enjoy the benefits it can bring you.

Acting “as if”

There are no physiological differences between real and acted emotions. When you watch a film you may cry if there is an emotional scene, or you may cover your eyes during a frightening scene. You know that these are actors and the story is fictional, yet your mind and body still react as if they are real – your emotions are affected by your imagination. In the same way, acting as if you are happy can allow your brain to believe you are actually happy. The steps to achieve this are simple …

1. If you want to try to change your mood, just remember to act “as if” it were different.

2. If you feel nervous and tense, act as if you are confident and relaxed. If you want, you can even act as if you are someone else – whoever you want to be. Almost immediately, your physiology and mood may alter – it’s that simple.

Rehearsal

If at any time you are faced with a future event you are concerned about, such as an important meeting or interview, rehearsal is a quick way to change your instinctive or emotional response to that situation. This very simple (and very effective) technique conditions you to associate a comforting feeling with the event you are anxious about …

1. Start breathing deeply to encourage a feeling of relaxation.

2. Rehearse the event as if you were at your very best, from the beginning through to its successful completion. Don’t worry, you are not aiming for an Oscar.

3. Imagine there’s a cinema screen in front of you, on which you can see, hear and feel yourself being exactly the way you would like. Enjoy watching yourself in this state, and look forward to a future where you can always be like this.

Tasks

Being given a task can open up many new possibilities for yourself and those around you. The benefits manifest themselves in many surprising ways. Tasks can be tailored to suit individuals, but here are a couple everyone can try.

Random acts of kindness

Try performing one act of kindness a day. It could be buying a plant for a colleague’s desk, or simply making a cup of tea for someone.

Observe humanity

Sit in a cafe alone for no other reason than to observe passers by. Look at the people and things around you. Just observe life as it passes by, and see what you notice.

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The Observer on Sunday Part I

Monday, July 7th, 2008

This article appeared as part of a supplement to the Observer on Sunday newspaper for 6th July 2008

 

Cognitive hypnotherapy

Cognitive hypnotherapy provides overworked minds with the toolkit they need to fix their own stresses and strains. It is based on modern psychology and neuroscience and, don’t worry, there’s not a pendulum in sight …
Sunday July 6, 2008 
 

 

What is it?Chances are, when you think of hypnotherapy, you either imagine a swinging pocket watch or a hapless audience member being made to cluck like a chicken on stage in the name of entertainment. Neither of these preconceptions is true. Cognitive hypnotherapy combines cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnosis with theories based on modern neuroscience.

We all go into natural hypnotic trances every day without even knowing it. It’s comparable to being so absorbed in a book or film that the hours seem to fly by, or being in a meeting where your mind has wandered. It is this natural state of mind that is used in cognitive hypnotherapy. You never lose control and are certainly never put under the control of anyone else. Practitioner Katie Abbott explains: “There are no over-the-top, annoying motivational speeches or long, arduous hours of difficult analysis. Cognitive hypnotherapy is just an extremely effective way of making positive change.”

 


Is there any evidence?Controlled trials have shown that hypnosis can reduce anxiety (particularly before medical procedures), although there is still some doubt that the hypnotic state actually exists. In the past five years, however, scientific research has become more credible, thanks to the latest brain imaging technology; brain scans now prove that hypnotised subjects are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. In one study, volunteers were given hypnotic suggestions to “see in colour”. Scans showed that areas of the brain associated with colour perception were activated, even though the pictures they were looking at were black and white.

Where does it come from?

In the 18th century, Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer used magnets to practise a form of hypnotism (hence “mesmerising”). His patients claimed they felt no pain while being treated under his trance. Mesmer was later dismissed as a charlatan, but his methods have since been investigated and developed into the form of hypnotherapy we know today.

In 2001, Trevor Silvester set up the Quest Institute (questinstitute.co.uk) and introduced the idea of combining hypnosis with cognitive behavioural therapy, tools from positive psychology, cognitive theory and neuro-linguistic programming.

Who can do it?

“We all see the world in different ways, so hypnotherapy works to readjust your particular frame of reference,” Abbott says. “There’s no one way to treat stress or to encourage relaxation, it all depends on the way you see things – your model of the world. As part of a session, the client is supplied with a toolkit for the mind. This enables them to use different tools to fix different mental states.”

So the theory is that everyone has the capacity to adopt new mental tools, and anyone can be hypnotised. The only prerequisite is to be open to the process.

What results can I expect?

Usually, cognitive hypnotherapy needs two or three sessions in which the foundations for change are effectively put in place, although you are likely to feel relaxed after just one session.

According to Katie Abbott: “Most people report a change after their first meeting. It’s a change of mindset, the move towards a goal. Hypnotherapy can teach you how to control your body’s responses and reactions, and anchor you in calm when you become worried.”

Contra-indications

The hypnotic state is not dangerous, but people with severe depression, psychosis or epilepsy should consult their doctor before seeing a hypnotherapist.

How was it for you?
Kate Abbott (worrier)

I never thought hypnotherapy would be the thing to calm me down, but that’s what Katie Abbott has done for me, Kate Abbott. As I approached the treatment room, I panicked. What if I actually do lose my (self-diagnosed as endearing) neuroses? Or, scarier still: what if my namesake steals my identity?

But as soon as I was ushered into Katie’s Harley Street haven, I realised she wasn’t going to brainwash me like the horror movie reel running through my mind. The session started with a simple chat. We discussed our goal of relaxation versus my reality as a worrier. What followed was an hour of gentle conversation that induced a state of complete calm.

Throughout the session, I was unsure if I was “hypnotised” or just had a case of the cathartics, but I submitted entirely, visualising my past, present and future from a different perspective (“It’s OK not to be perfect”, I tell my 11-year-old self).

The result of this enlightening delve into my personal timeline is the self-hypnosis that I now practise at home. Katie asked me to concentrate on the present moment and to call to mind three things I could hear, three things I could see and three things I think about regularly, and comment on them. As I told Katie about he-who-shall-not-be-named, any angst I’ve ever experienced about relationships, past or imminent, eased off.

I didn’t care when I stumbled out on to Oxford Street moments after my session (I have been known to cry in the face of teeming crowds), and I didn’t experience so much as a sweaty palm onboard a plane the next day. I was in control, calm and confident.

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'Mind's Eye' Influences Visual Perception

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

This was posted on ScienceDaily, showing scientific proof of what NLP has known for about 25 years.

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2008) — Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly impacts our visual perception.

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors write.

It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner—or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?

“You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact,” says Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right.”

To test how imagery affects perception, Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes, which are strongly represented in the primary visual areas of the brain. They then presented a green horizontal grated pattern to one eye and a red vertical grated pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry, an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researcher’s hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle.

Additional experiments found that the effect of imagery on perception was approximately the same as showing the research subject a faint representation of one of the patterns between trials. Stronger shifts in perception were found if subjects either viewed or imagined a particular pattern for longer periods of time. They found that both imagery and perception can lead to a build-up of a “perceptual trace” that influences subsequent perception.

Pearson, Clifford and Tong also discovered that changing the orientation of the image from what had been imagined greatly reduced the impact of imagery on perception. Because orientation is processed in early visual areas, this suggests that imagery’s interaction with perception may occur at early stages of visual processing.

The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination.

“It has been very hard to pin down in the laboratory what exactly someone is experiencing when it comes to imagery, because it is so subjective,” Tong says. “We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects. So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception.”

The findings may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual—that one imagines something just as one sees it—or more abstract.

“More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson says. “So there’s more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and an Australia National Health and Mental Research Council Martin Fellowship. Pearson is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center. Tong is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Journal reference:
  1. Pearson et al. The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception. Current Biology, 2008; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.05.048
Adapted from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.

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