Monitor on Psychology - July/August 2012

Brief IN

less with stereotypical masculinity. The men who said that “real men” don’t think much about emotions were less adept at recognizing and coping with their own, perhaps making them more vulnerable to PTSD. (Psychology of Men & Masculinity, April)

n Exposure to violence puts wear and tear on children’s DNA, finds a study out of Duke University. Researchers examined data from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which has followed 1, 100 British families with twins since their birth in the 1990s. The findings suggest that children who’d been exposed to violence showed prematurely aged DNA, as measured by the length of the children’s telomeres — the region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome that protects the chromosome from deteriorating. Emerging evidence suggests that shorter telomeres are linked to biological age and predict the emergence of chronic diseases. (Molecular Psychiatry, online April 24)

n A simple blood test may be able
to help distinguish between people
who are depressed and those who
are not, finds a study by scientists at
Northwestern University. The research
used a test involving a panel of 28
biological markers that circulate in
the bloodstream and found that 11
of them could predict the presence of
depression at accuracy levels that ranged
from medium to large. Researchers
then further tested the predictive value
of these biomarkers with 14 depressed
teens and 14 healthy ones. They found
that the teens with depression had
significantly higher concentrations
of the 11 targeted molecules in their
blood, including Myristoylated alanine-
rich C-kinase substrate (MARCKS)
and proto-oncogene c-Maf (MAF). In
addition, there were 18 biomarkers that
could distinguish between adolescents
with depression and those with
depression and anxiety. (Translational
Psychiatry, online April 17)

n Multitasking may not be so bad for us after all, finds a small study of 63 participants by scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Participants answered a questionnaire about their media use and then were asked to search for something on a page, both with and without the distraction of an unrelated noise. Participants who reported they frequently used different types of media at the same time performed better at the task when the noise was present than when it was absent. Frequent media users also performed worse than light media multitaskers in the tasks without the noise. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, online April 12)

n Playing action-based video
games, even for short times, appears
to improve visual attention, find
University of Toronto psychologists.
Twenty-five participants who had not
previously played video games played
either a first-person shooter video
game or a three-dimensional puzzle
video game for a total of 10 hours in
one- to two-hour sessions. Before and
after the participants played the games,
scientists recorded the brain waves of
participants’ who were trying to detect
a target among other distractions. The
researchers found that those who played
the shooter video game improved
most on the visual attention task and
showed significant changes in brain
activity, indicating the brain’s increased
inhibition of distractors. Those who
had played the puzzle game did not
exhibit differences in visual attention
or brain activity. (Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, June)

n Head injuries often impair one’s ability to make medical decisions, suggests a study out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Researchers studied 86 patients with traumatic brain injury, divided into three classifications of severity — mild, complicated mild and moderate/severe — and 40 healthy controls. They found that the more severe the injury, the less able patients were to make decisions about their care. (Neurology, May 8)

n Women who have experienced violence are more likely to later engage in risky sexual behavior, according to a study with 481 low-income women at a publicly funded sexually transmitted disease clinic in Providence, R.I. The women who’d been exposed to multiple forms of violence were later more likely to have unprotected sex, many sexual partners and use alcohol and drugs before sex. (Psychology of Violence, online March 19)