Mental distractions make pain easier to take, and those pain-relieving effects aren’t just in your head, according to a report published online on May 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

The findings based on high-resolution spinal fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) as people experienced painful levels of heat show that mental distractions actually inhibit the response to incoming pain signals at the earliest stage of central pain processing.

“The results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not just a psychological phenomenon, but an active neuronal mechanism reducing the amount of pain signals ascending from the spinal cord to higher-order brain regions,” said Christian Sprenger of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

Those effects involve endogenous opioids, which are naturally produced by the brain and play a key role in the relief of pain, the new evidence shows.

The research group asked participants to complete either a hard or an easy memory task, both requiring them to remember letters, while they simultaneously applied a painful level of heat to their arms.

When study participants were more distracted by the harder of the two memory tasks, they did indeed perceive less pain. What’s more, their less painful experience was reflected by lower activity in the spinal cord as observed by fMRI scans. (fMRI is often used to measure changes in brain activity, Sprenger explained, and recent advances have made it possible to extend this tool for use in the spinal cord.)

Sprenger and colleagues then repeated the study again, this time giving participants either a drug called naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioids, or a simple saline infusion. The pain-relieving effects of distraction dropped by 40 percent during the application of the opioid antagonist compared to saline, evidence that endogenous opioids play an essential role.

The findings show just how deeply mental processes can go in altering the experience of pain, and that may have clinical importance.

“Our findings strengthen the role of cognitive-behavioral therapeutic approaches in the treatment of pain diseases, as it could be extrapolated that these approaches might also have the potential to alter the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as early as in the spinal cord,” the researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have shed new light on one of the great unanswered questions of neuroscience: how the brain initiates rhythmic movements like walking, running and swimming.

While experiments in the 1970s using electrical brain stimulation identified areas of the brain responsible for starting locomotion, the precise neuron-by-neuron pathway has not been described in any vertebrate – until now.

To find this pathway, Dr Edgar Buhl and colleagues in Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences studied a small, simple vertebrate: the Xenopus frog tadpole.

They found that the pathway to initiate swimming consists of just four types of neurons.  By touching skin on the head of the tadpole and applying cellular neurophysiology and anatomy techniques, the scientists identified nerve cells that detect the touch on the skin, two types of brain nerve cells which pass on the signal, and the motor nerve cells that control the swimming muscles.

Dr Buhl said: “These findings address the longstanding question of how locomotion is initiated following sensory stimulation and, for the first time in any vertebrate, define in detail a direct pathway responsible.  They could thus be of great evolutionary interest and could also open the path to understanding initiation of locomotion in other vertebrates.”

When mechanisms in the brain that initiate locomotion break down – for example, in people with Parkinson’s disease – starting to walk becomes a real problem.  Therefore, understanding the initiation of swimming in tadpoles could be a first step towards understanding the initiation of locomotion in more complex vertebrates, including people, and may eventually have implications for treating movement disorders such as Parkinson’s.

The research is published today in the Journal of Physiology.

Paper

‘The role of a trigeminal sensory nucleus in the initiation of locomotion’ by Edgar Buhl, Alan Roberts and Stephen R. Soffe in the Journal of Physiology

People who feel good about themselves are less likely to choose an attractive product than a functional one, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But choosing highly aesthetic products may make people more open-minded.

“Today’s marketers are keenly aware that the way a product looks significantly impacts its commercial success,” write authors Claudia Townsend (University of Miami) and Sanjay Sood (UCLA). “In this research we demonstrate one way in which aesthetics impacts the choice decision differently than more functional attributes and then propose an explanation for this behavior.”

Drawing on literature showing that people equate beauty with goodness, the authors found that the choice of a highly aesthetic product is “self-affirming,” meaning that it can reinforce a person’s belief that they are a good person. The authors suggest that good aesthetics bestow a beauty premium on products, much like the benefit that good looks provide a person.

The authors looked at the relationship between self-esteem and product choice (among lamps and calculators) when one option is more physically attractive and the other more functional. The authors found that participants who had completed a prior self-affirming task were less likely to choose the highly aesthetic option, but instead chose based on function.

On the other hand, another study showed that after choosing good-looking products, people were more open to other perspectives. They also discovered that choosing a handsome object made people less likely to spend more money subsequently. “It is well known that decision makers often ‘throw good money after bad,’ meaning that there is a tendency to continue investing in products that are not paying off,” the authors write. “Interestingly, choosing a good-looking product reduced this tendency to escalate commitment.”

Advertisers might want to be aware that affirming potential customers’ sense of self may backfire. “It may, in fact, be disadvantageous if the product is highly aesthetic,” the authors conclude.

A new study, testing the benefits of a virtual exercise partner, shows that the presence of a moderately more capable cycling partner boosts motivation to stick to an exercise program. The work by Brandon Irwin and colleagues, from Michigan State University in the US, is published online in Springer’s journal, Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

For many people, lack of motivation is a barrier to achieving both the recommended amount and intensity of exercise. Using the principles of group exercise, which is known to increase people’s motivation to stick to an exercise program, the researchers investigated whether a virtually present partner would influence participants’ motivation to exercise for longer.

A total of 58 young women, recruited from university-based physical activity courses, took part in the experiment and exercised on a stationary bike on six separate days, including one training session. They were split into three groups. The first group exercised independently alongside a virtual person. The second group also exercised alongside a virtual person but this time they worked as a team, and the performance of the team was determined by the weakest link i.e. the one who stopped exercising first. The third group cycled alone.

At the start of the experiment, the women in groups 1 and 2 were assigned a ‘virtually present partner’ – also a female – for the ride and were told that their partner would be riding at the same time they were, on a similar bike in another lab. The women ‘met’ their partners via a pre-recorded video-chat, and were told that their partner’s performance was moderately better than their own. During the exercise sessions, participants were able to track their partner’s progress by watching the partner ride, on what looked like a live feed but was in fact a recording.

All students rode a video-game exercise bike for as long as they felt comfortable. They were then asked to rate their intention to exercise again, how well they felt they had done, and how tired they felt. The researchers measured how hard they had worked.

Overall, exercising with a virtually present partner improved performance on the cycling task: Participants cycled for longer when working alongside a more capable partner than when exercising alone. Across sessions, those women who exercised as part of a team cycled, on average, two minutes longer than those who exercised independently with a partner (22 versus 20 minutes), and twice as long as those who exercised without a partner (22 versus 11 minutes).

In terms of motivation, there was a marked decline in intent to exercise among those who cycled on their own. In contrast, those who cycled with a virtual partner reported no decline in motivation to exercise.

The authors conclude: “Being able to more than double one’s performance is a substantial gain for those trying to increase their physical activity. These results are encouraging and suggest that the gains we observed over six hour-long sessions could be sustained on a longer-term program of exercise. This may be of particular value in future efforts to help people meet physical activity recommendations.”

Reference

Irwin BC et al (2012). Aerobic exercise is promoted when individual performance affects the group: a test of the Köhler motivation gain effect. Annals of Behavioral Medicine; DOI 10.1007/s12160-012-9367-4

It seems really simple: If you want to achieve something, set a goal and then make specific plans to implement it. But according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers get overwhelmed while juggling multiple goals.

“Research has shown that forming specific plans for a single goal makes success more likely,” write authors Amy Dalton (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Stephen Spiller (UCLA). “Most of us, however, are juggling multiple goals in our lives and jobs and managing a busy schedule is difficult. This raises the question of whether forming specific plans can help us accomplish more of the tasks we set out to do.”

The authors looked at what happens when consumers make specific plans to pursue goals. For example, someone with the goal of eating a healthy meal might plan to “eat a salad with low-fat dressing at lunch tomorrow in the cafeteria.” The research involved laboratory and field experiments that manipulated whether or not people plan in advance how they will implement their goals and the number of goals participants formed.

In one study, the authors provided participants with a to-do list of “virtuous activities” to complete over the course of five days; some people had one activity, but others had six. Half the participants were encouraged to plan specifically how, when, and where they would carry out the to-do list each day. “We found that specific planning helped people who had a single goal on their to-do list, but not people with multiple goals,” the authors write. A second study, which involved a computer task, yielded similar results.

Why is specific planning less effective when applied to a number of goals? The authors believe that planning reminds people of all the obstacles and constraints that stand in the way of achieving goals.

But planning isn’t always detrimental to achieving multiple goals. In an interesting twist, the authors found that people came to see their goals as more manageable if they thought other people were juggling more goals than they were. “These people framed their goals as relatively easy to carry out and were more likely to benefit from planning,” the authors write.

A new study suggests that head impacts experienced during contact sports such as football and hockey may worsen some college athletes’ ability to acquire new information. The research is published in the May 16, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study involved college athletes at three Division I schools and compared 214 athletes in contact sports to 45 athletes in non-contact sports such as track, crew and Nordic skiing at the beginning and at the end of their seasons. The contact sport athletes wore special helmets that recorded the acceleration speed and other data at the time of any head impact.

The contact sport athletes experienced an average of 469 head impacts during the season. Athletes were not included in the study if they were diagnosed with a concussion during the season.

All of the athletes took tests of thinking and memory skills before and after the season. A total of 45 contact sport athletes and 55 non-contact sport athletes from one of the schools also took an additional set of tests of concentration, working memory and other skills.

“The good news is that overall there were few differences in the test results between the athletes in contact sports and the athletes in non-contact sports,” said study author Thomas W. McAllister, MD, of The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Lebanon, N.H. “But we did find that a higher percentage of the contact sport athletes had lower scores than would have been predicted after the season on a measure of new learning than the non-contact sport athletes.”

A total of 22 percent of the contact sport athletes performed worse than expected on the test of new learning, compared to four percent of the non-contact sport athletes.

McAllister noted that the study did not find differences in test results between the two groups of athletes at the beginning of the season, suggesting that the cumulative head impacts that contact athletes had incurred over many previous seasons did not result in reduced thinking and memory skills in the overall group.

“These results are somewhat reassuring, given the recent heightened concern about the potential negative effects of these sports,” he said. “Nevertheless, the findings do suggest that repetitive head impacts may have a negative effect on some athletes.”

McAllister said it’s possible that some people may be genetically more sensitive to head impacts.

Stories of athletes bravely “playing through the pain” are relatively common and support the widespread belief that they experience pain differently than non-athletes. Yet, the scientific data on pain perception in athletes has been inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory. Investigators from the University of Heidelberg have conducted a meta-analysis of available research and find that in fact, athletes can indeed tolerate a higher level of pain than normally active people. However, pain threshold, the minimum intensity at which a stimulus is perceived as painful, did not differ in athletes and normal controls. Their findings are published in the June issue of Pain®.

“Our analysis reveals that pain perception differs in athletes compared to normally active controls,” says lead investigator Jonas Tesarz, MD. “Studies in athletes offer the opportunity for an evaluation of the physical and psychological effects of regular activity on pain perception, which might foster the development of effective types of exercise for relief in pain patients.”

Researchers reviewed fifteen studies that evaluated experimentally induced pain threshold or tolerance in athletes compared to normally active controls. 568 athletes and 331 normally active controls were included. Eight of the studies were conducted in the USA, two in Canada, one in Australia, and four were conducted in Europe. The studies, which included both men and women, evaluated endurance sports, game sports, and strength sports. Twelve studies reported on pain tolerance, and nine studies examined pain threshold.

Athletes were found to have consistently higher pain tolerance in comparison to normally active adults. The magnitude of pain that athletes could withstand varied depending upon the type of sport in which they participate. For example, endurance athletes had a moderate tolerance for pain and their scores were fairly uniform. Athletes involved in game sports had a higher tolerance for pain than other athletes, but the results varied widely, suggesting that endurance athletes are more alike in their physical and psychological profiles, while athletes involved in game sports are more diverse.

The finding that regular exercise is clearly associated with higher pain tolerance, but pain thresholds are affected more ambiguously, likely has clinical implications, according to Dr. Tesarz. “Numerous studies of the effect of physical exercise in pain patients demonstrate a consistent impact on quality of life and functioning without an improvement in pain scores. It may be advisable in exercise treatment for pain patients to focus on the development of their pain-coping skills that would affect tolerance, rather than the direct alleviation of pain threshold,” he notes.

“Further research is needed to clarify the exact relationship between physical activity and modifications in pain perception, and to identify the involved psychological factors and neurobiological processes. However, the observation that pain perception is modifiable by physical activity provides promise for the use of non-invasive methods with few side effects for patients with chronic pain conditions,” concludes Dr. Tesarz.

Text messaging is a surprisingly good way to get candid responses to sensitive questions, according to a new study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

“The preliminary results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages than in voice interviews,” says Fred Conrad, a cognitive psychologist and Director of the Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR).

“This is sort of surprising,” says Conrad, “since many people thought that texting would decrease the likelihood of disclosing sensitive information because it creates a persistent, visual record of questions and answers that others might see on your phone and in the cloud.”

With text, the researchers also found that people were less likely to engage in ‘satisficing’ – a survey industry term referring to the common practice of giving good enough, easy answers, like rounding to multiples of 10 in numerical responses, for example. “We believe people give more precise answers via texting because there’s just not the time pressure in a largely asynchronous mode like text that there is in phone interviews,” says Conrad. “As a result, respondents are able to take longer to arrive at more accurate answers.”

Conrad conducted the study with Michael Schober, a professor psychology and dean of the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research. Their research team included cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, survey methodologists and computer scientists from both universities, as well as collaborators from AT&T Research. Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation.

“We’re in the early stages of analyzing our findings,” says Schober. “But so far it seems that texting may reduce some respondents’ tendency to shade the truth or to present themselves in the best possible light in an interview – even when they know it’s a human interviewer they are communicating with via text. What we cannot yet be sure of is who is most likely to be disclosive in text. Is it different for frequent texters, or generational, for example?”

For the study, the researchers recruited approximately 600 iPhone-users on Craigslist, through Google Ads, and from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, offering them iTunes Store incentives to participate in the study. Their goals were to see whether responses to the same questions differed depending on several variables: whether the questions were asked via text or voice, whether a human or a computer asked the questions, and whether the environment, including the presence of other people and the likelihood of multitasking, affected the answers.

Among the questions that respondents answered more honestly via text than speech: In a typical week, about how often do you exercise? During the past 30 days, on how many days did you have 5 or more drinks on the same occasion?

And among the questions that respondents answered more precisely via text, providing fewer rounded numerical responses: During the last month, how many movies did you watch in any medium? How many songs do you currently have on your iPhone?

According to Schober and Conrad, changes in communication patterns and their impact on the survey industry prompted the study. About one in five U.S. households only use cell phones and no longer have landline phones. These households are typically not surveyed even though cell-only households tend to differ in important ways from households with landline phones. More people are using text messages on mobile phones, with texting now the preferred form of communication among many people in their teens and 20s in the U.S. Texting is extremely common among all age groups in many Asian and European nations.

Conrad and Schober are also finding that people are more likely to provide thoughtful and honest responses via text messages even when they’re in busy, distracting environments.

“This is the case even though people are more likely to be multitasking – shopping or walking, for example – when they’re answering questions by text than when they’re being interviewed by voice.”

Most consumers want to fit in while still asserting their individuality—and they balance these conflicting desires when choosing products, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Consumers want both to signal their identity with desired groups and to be different from other group members. This research shows how people simultaneously satisfy these apparently conflicting motives in consumer behavior,” write authors Cindy Chan, Jonah Berger (both University of Pennsylvania), and Leaf Van Boven (University of Colorado, Boulder). “Is it possible to be similar and different—at the same time?”

The authors conducted field and laboratory studies to demonstrate how consumers simultaneously satisfy competing desires for group identification and individual uniqueness. They found that participants often satisfy their need to fit in by choosing a brand that represents their in-group, but they differentiate by choosing colors or styles to set themselves apart. “For example, a snowboarder may sport a Burton jacket to identify himself as a snowboarder (rather than a skier), while choosing an unusual pattern to stand apart from other snowboarders,” the authors write. Or a fashionable consumer might choose a popular brand handbag in an unusual color.

The experiments showed that participants who were concerned with communicating their social identity were more likely to choose a brand that was preferred by most members of an in-group (but not an undesirable out-group). That was especially true in categories that signify identity, like clothing. On the other hand, people with a strong need for uniqueness preferred less-popular products.

“Our research provides insights into decision making and behavior when there are tensions between motives of assimilation and differentiation, even in situations that may not involve consumption,” the authors write. “For example, an employee may desire to both be an integrated team member and have a unique role in the organization. Similarly, elected politicians and their loyal constituents may wish to toe the party line and voice their individual opinions,” the authors conclude.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London have shown that zebrafish could be used to study the underlying causes of psychiatric disorders.

The study, published online in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, found zebrafish can modify their behaviour in response to varying situations.

Dr Caroline Brennan, from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences who led the study, said: “Zebrafish are becoming one of the most useful animal models for studying the developmental genetic mechanisms underlying many psychiatric disorders; they breed prolifically and we have many new and exciting techniques that allow us to explore their genetic make-up in the laboratory.”

The scientists took 15 zebrafish through a series of experiments involving colour choice to test aspects of behaviour associated with psychiatric disease.

The fish were given a choice between two colours – they learnt to choose one of the colours which gave them food. The colours were then reversed and they learnt to change their colour choice.

The scientists then introduced a new set of colours and started the process again. The fish were able to change their behaviour accordingly, learning the new set of colours much faster than the original set, a process psychologists call ‘behavioural flexibility’.

The research challenges previous studies which suggested fish were unable to elicit behavioural flexibility, unlike mammals and humans, because they didn’t have a frontal cortex.

“Problems with behavioural flexibility, and general deficits in attention, are key symptoms displayed by people suffering a variety of psychological disorders related to impulse control, such as drug addiction, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and some personality disorders,” Dr Brennan said.

“The results of our study suggest that there may be a role for zebrafish in the future as a useful comparative model to study the cause and prognosis of some of these disorders.”

Zebrafish are often used by neuroscientists to explore mechanisms controlling behaviour and in the search for new compounds to treat behavioural disease such as addiction, attention deficit disorders or autism. This study adds further weight to the argument for using zebrafish in the study of these disorders and conditions.