Category: Mind & Brain

Breathing technique can reduce frequency, severity of asthma attacks

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 14, 2009

Mueret10%2C-9-09%2Clr.jpg As the health care reform debate turns to cutting costs and improving treatment outcomes, two SMU professors are expanding a study that shows promise for reducing both the expense and suffering associated with chronic asthma.

Thomas Ritz and Alicia Meuret, both of SMU’s Psychology Department, have developed a four-week program to teach asthmatics how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.

With the help of a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, they plan to engage 120 Dallas County patients in four weeks of breathing training by the study’s projected end in July 2012. Their co-investigators include David Rosenfield, also of SMU’s Psychology Department, and Mark Millard, M.D., of Baylor University Medical Center.

Mueret8%2C-9-09%2Clr.jpg More than 22 million Americans suffer from asthma at an estimated annual economic cost of more than $19 billion, according to the American Lung Association. The number of cases doubled between 1980 and 1995, prompting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to classify the disease as an epidemic in 2000.

During an attack, sufferers tend to hyperventilate, breathing fast and deep against constricted airways to fight an overwhelming feeling of oxygen deprivation.

Unfortunately, this makes the problem worse by lowering the body’s carbon dioxide levels, which restricts blood flow to the brain and can further irritate already hypersensitive bronchial passages.

Patients who “overbreathe” on a sustained basis risk chronic CO₂ deficiencies that make them even more vulnerable to future attacks. Rescue medications that relieve asthma symptoms do nothing to correct breathing difficulties associated with hyperventilation.

As part of SMU’s Stress, Anxiety and Chronic Disease Research Program, Ritz and Meuret use their biofeedback-based Capnometry-Assisted Respiratory Training (CART) to teach asthma patients to normalize and reverse chronic overbreathing. A hand-held device called a capnometer measures the amount of CO₂ exhaled. Using this device, patients learn how to breathe more slowly, shallowly and regularly.

Mueret4a%2C-9-09%2Clr.jpg CART techniques could have a positive impact on quality of asthma treatment even as they reduce the need for acute care, Ritz says.

“The research shows that this kind of respiratory therapy can limit both the severity and frequency of asthma attacks,” he says. “That means fewer doctor visits and less frequent use of rescue medications, with the associated savings of both time and money.”

And for those who count any year without a trip to the emergency room as a year with a good treatment outcome, that means a higher quality of life, says Meuret, who lives with asthma herself.

“The training gives patients new ways to deal with acute symptoms, and that helps them to feel more in control,” she says. — Kathleen Tibbetts

(Photos: SMU Professor Alicia Meuret uses biofeedback data to demonstrate the relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in hyperventilation.)

News coverage:
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Tags Alicia E. Meuret, Dedman College, SMU Department of Psychology, Thomas Ritz

Mind & Brain

Study: Taboo prejudices can’t hide from psychological testing tool

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 31, 2009

People don’t like to admit if they are prejudiced, whether it’s against blacks or gays, women or Jews, or the elderly.

But researchers of social psychology have tests that can measure conscious or unconscious bias, and one of them is the “Implicit Association Test.” Developed in 1998, the test asks implicit questions — as opposed to explicit — to expose bias on socially sensitive topics. Worldwide, various IAT versions have been used in more than 1,000 studies over the years. The test’s most controversial finding has been that 70 percent of people tested for their racial attitudes unconsciously preferred white people to black people, but only 20 percent reported such an attitude.

What researchers hadn’t determined up until now is how reliable IATs have been at predicting behavior related to these taboo prejudices. Now they know.

Poehlman%2CAndrew.jpg In the first study of its kind, publishing in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” an SMU researcher and others validated the IAT’s ability to predict behavior around socially sensitive topics, particularly race. The study aggregated the findings of 184 different IAT research studies, which tested 14,900 subjects, and found the predictive validity of self-report measures was remarkably low, while incremental validity of IAT measures — how much it can predict behavior over-and-above explicit measures — was relatively high.

“Within behavioral research, we humans have attitudes and feelings and beliefs that we’re not willing or able to report on, or understand ourselves,” says T. Andrew Poehlman, one of the study’s four authors and an assistant professor at SMU. “This research shows that when you aggregate across many studies, it seems that non-conscious attitudes influence the way people behave in a systematic and important way. When you have attitude domains in which people are unable to accurately report on how they feel, then using a test like this can get around some of the touchier attitudes some subjects may have.”

Confirming the IAT’s predictive validity has ramifications for emerging interest in administering the IAT for applications in law, policy and business.

For example, one finding from IAT research is that most Americans associate men — more than women — with math. But most people won’t self-report that belief, either because they consider it unacceptable or they’re unaware of their bias. Also, IAT research has shown a majority of people prefer young people to old people, and white people to black people.

IAT presents concepts to subjects via computer and asks them to categorize them. Measuring the speed at which subjects respond, enables researchers to assess attitudes.

“The reality is, we hold a lot of these undesirable attitudes whether we like them or not,” says Poehlman in SMU’s Cox School of Business. “Since it’s impossible for people to empty the contents of their mental container onto the table — because most of what we’ve got in our brain is unconscious — the IAT has proven to be a good measure of attitudes, and we can use it as a predictor of how people will behave.”

Greenwald%2C%20Anthony%2007.JPG Lead author of the study was Anthony Greenwald, psychology professor and adjunct professor of marketing and international business at the University of Washington. Besides Poehlman, other authors are Eric Uhlmann, Northwestern University; and Mahzarin Banaji, Harvard University.

Greenwald created the IAT, then Banaji and Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia associate professor of psychology, developed it further.

More than 10 million versions of the test have been completed via the Internet site https://implicit.harvard.edu, as a self-administer demonstration, according to the University of Washington.

Anthony Greenwald

“In situations where people can easily report on their preferences because they are either willing or able, then explicit measures do a fine job,” Poehlman says. “But when we get to sticky things that people may not know they think, such as emerging preferences, racism, etc., or things that they know they think, but just don’t want to say, such as ‘women are bad at math,’ then the IAT is pretty useful.”

Studies reviewed for the analysis covered: black-white interracial behavior, non-racial intergroup behavior, gender and sexual orientation, consumer preference, political preference, personality differences, alcohol and drug use, close relationships and clinical phenomena.

Findings showed that:

Across all nine areas, measures of the test were useful in predicting social behavior.
For consumer and political preferences, both measures effectively predicted behavior, but self-reporting had significantly greater predictive value.
For samples with criterion measures involving black-white interracial behavior, predictive validity of IAT measures significantly exceeded that of self-report measures.

“The Implicit Association Test is controversial because many people believe that racial bias is largely a thing of the past,” Greenwald says.”The test’s finding of a widespread automatic form of race preference violates people’s image of tolerance and is hard for them to accept. When you are unaware of attitudes or stereotypes, they can unintentionally affect your behavior. Awareness can help to overcome this unwanted influence.” — Margaret Allen (University of Washington contributed to this report)

Tags Andrew Poehlman, Cox School of Business

Health & Medicine Learning & Education Mind & Brain

Déjà Vu research pushes around memory, creates illusion of past encounter

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 19, 2009

Brown%2C%20Alan2%206-19-09%20photoshopped.jpg

A new study by research psychologists Alan S. Brown of SMU and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University provides new clues about déjà vu, that eerie sense of experiencing a moment for the second time.

These clues, in turn, could help unlock the secrets of the human brain.

“Déjà vu is inappropriate behavior by the brain,” says Brown, professor in SMU’s Department of Psychology and a leading researcher on memory. “By shedding light on this odd phenomenon, we can better understand normal memory processes.”

Published in the May issue of “Psychological Science,” the study significantly extends research on the déjà vu theory of “double perception,” which suggests that a quick glance at a scene can make it appear strangely familiar when it is fully perceived moments later.

“This is easy to imagine in today’s distracted society,” Brown says. “Let’s say you enter a new museum, glancing at artwork while talking on your cell phone. Upon hanging up, you look around and sense you’ve been there long ago.”

According to double perception theory, the initial glance created a mushy memory without time-space context, Brown says. “When you then consciously register the scene, the brain connects the two memories — and you get that spooky feeling.”

Brown and Marsh re-created this experience in the laboratory using unique symbols. In their trials, a symbol was flashed at a subliminal level on a computer screen, followed by a longer view of the same or a different symbol, or no symbol.

When a flash was followed by its identical symbol, participants were five times more likely to say they had seen that symbol sometime before the experiment.

“We pushed memory around,” Brown says. “We changed people’s views of their personal past by instilling a false sense of a previous encounter.”

In pushing its participants’ memories to a time and place outside the laboratory, the new study goes beyond the few previous studies of double perception that have been conducted in the past 100 years. Those studies used words or names, rather than symbols.

“Words and names are contaminated because study participants actually could have encountered them before the experiment,” Brown says, “but it’s extremely unlikely that they ever had encountered our symbols. Our study more closely parallels a quick glance at an unfamiliar object in the real world.”

In addition to double perception, researchers have other theories about the cause of déjà vu, which is French for “already seen.” These theories include a brief dysfunction in the brain, such as a seizure, and “episodic familiarity,” when a forgotten memory connects with part of the present experience.

Brown and Marsh tested episodic familiarity in a 2008 study published in “Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,” in which participants were quickly shown photos of college campuses they had never visited. Upon returning to the laboratory several weeks later, they viewed a series of new and old campus photos and judged whether they had been to the locations. The study showed that the initial brief exposure increased participants’ beliefs that they had visited these colleges — when, in fact, they hadn’t.

“Déjà vu is such a rare event, with potentially numerous causes,” Brown says. “If we can nudge people a little bit in that direction, we can learn the mechanisms behind it.” — Sarah Hanan

Tags Alan S. Brown, Dedman College, Elizabeth Marsh, SMU Department of Psychology

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain

Chemical exposure now linked to Gulf War syndrome

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 20, 2009

The following story published March 20, 2009 on www.sciencedaily.com

A new study by researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center and Southern Methodist University is the first to pinpoint damage inside the brains of veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome. The finding links the illness to chemical exposures and may lead to diagnostic tests and treatments.

Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study, said the research uncovers and locates areas of the brain that function abnormally. Recent studies had shown evidence of chemical abnormalities and shrinkage of white matter in the brains of veterans exposed to certain toxic chemicals, such as sarin gas during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The research, was published in the March issue of the journal “Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.” Imaging enables investigators to visualize exact brain structures affected by these chemical exposures, Haley said.

Richard Gunst, Wayne Woodward and William Schucany, professors in SMU’s Statistical Science Department in Dedman College, are collaborating with the imaging specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center to compare brain scans of veterans with the syndrome against a healthy control group.

“Before this study, we didn’t know exactly what parts of the brain were damaged and causing the symptoms,” Haley said.

Richard Gunst

“We designed an experiment to test areas of the brain that would have been damaged if the illness was caused by sarin or pesticides, and the results were positive,” he said.

In designing the study, Haley and his colleagues reasoned that if low-level sarin or pesticides had damaged Gulf War veterans’ brains, a likely target of the damage would be cholinergic receptors on cells in certain brain structures. If that was so, administering safe levels of medicines that stimulate cholinergic receptors would elicit an abnormal response in ill veterans.

In the study, 21 chronically ill Gulf War veterans and 17 well veterans were given small doses of physostigmine, a substance which briefly stimulates cholinergic receptors. Researchers then measured the study participants’ brain cell response with brain scans.

Pictured right: Wayne Woodward

“What we found was that some of the brain areas we previously suspected responded abnormally to the cholinergic challenge,” Haley said. “Those areas were in the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and amygdala, and the thalamus. Changes in functioning of these brain structures can certainly cause problems with concentration and memory, body pain, fatigue, abnormal emotional responses and personality changes that we commonly see in ill Gulf War veterans.”

A previous study funded by the U.S. Army found that repetitive exposure to low-level sarin nerve gas caused changes in cholinergic receptors in lab rats.

“An added bonus is a statistical formula combining the brain responses in 17 brain areas that separated the ill from the well veterans, and three different Gulf War syndrome variants from each other with a high degree of accuracy,” Haley said. “If this finding can be repeated in a larger group, we might have an objective test for Gulf War syndrome and its variants.”

An objective diagnostic test, he said, sets the stage for ongoing genetic studies to see why some people are affected by chemical exposures, and why others are not.

New studies would also allow the selection of homogenous groups of ill veterans in which to run efficient clinical trials for treatments. Haley first described Gulf War syndrome in a series of papers published in January 1997 in the “Journal of the American Medical Association.”

William Schucany

In previous studies, research from Haley showed that veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome had lower levels of a protective blood enzyme called paraoxonase, which usually fights off the toxins found in sarin.

Veterans who served in the same geographical area and did not get sick had higher levels of this enzyme.

Haley and his colleagues have closely followed the same group of tests subjects since 1995. In 2006, UT Southwestern and the Department of Veterans Affairs established a dedicated, collaborative Gulf War illness research enterprise in Dallas, managed by UT Southwestern.

Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a longtime supporter of Gulf War research, facilitated that agreement and secured a $75 million appropriation over five years for Gulf War illness research.

The study was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

Other UT Southwestern researchers involved in the study included Jeffrey Spence and Patrick Carmack, assistant professors of clinical sciences; Michael Devous and Frederick Bonte, professors of radiology; and Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry.

Tags Dedman College, Richard Gunst, Robert Haley, SMU Department of Statistical Science, Wayne Woodward, William Schucany

Mind & Brain

Forget brainstorming, try brainwriting!

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 5, 2009

Given difficult business issues such as rapidly emerging technologies, shrinking budgets and growing global competition, generating creative solutions is imperative for organizations to survive and prosper.

However, the widely used process of brainstorming may not be nearly as effective as a technique called brainwriting, says Peter Heslin, an assistant professor of Management and Organization in SMU’s Cox School of Business.

peter-heslin.ashx.jpeg

“The most widely adopted process for generating creative ideas within organizations is brainstorming,” said Heslin, who won the 2006 C. Jackson Grayson Endowed Faculty Innovation Award for excellence and creativity in teaching.

“Despite its immense popularity, when groups of people interact for the purpose of brainstorming, they significantly over-estimate their productivity and produce fewer unique ideas than nominal groups of people generating ideas alone.”

“When the stakes are high, group process innovations that enable even modest increases in the quality of ideas available for consideration could be of immense practical value,” Heslin says in an upcoming paper for the “Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.”

Heslin says that a key challenge for managers and scholars is identifying how groups can be more productive in generating ideas.

In contrast to the oral sharing of ideas in groups during brainstorming, brainwriting involves a group of people silently writing and sharing their written ideas. Research has revealed that brainwriting yields superior idea generation than either non-sharing or nominal groups. Groups that contain people with diverse but overlapping knowledge and skills tend to be particularly creative, he says.

Tags Cox School of Business, Peter Heslin