This year, nearly 30 million Americans will experience a panic attack, and many of them will be rushed to our nation’s crowded emergency rooms, believing they’re having a heart attack. Most of them will be given prescriptions for medications such as Xanax or Ativan, but few will learn how to manage future attacks. Now, a new book from psychotherapist and anxiety expert Michael Jones aims to help people with panic attacks deal with these frightening bouts of anxiety without medications.

Titled Nothing to Fear: A Self-Help Guide to Overcoming Panic Attacks for Life, the book walks readers through a step-by-step process to managing their anxiety. Jones teaches techniques based on years of research to help people understand panic and how to prevent such attacks.

“Having worked in emergency rooms for nearly a decade, I wanted to write a book that would help the many patients I saw there who were afraid they were dying of a heart attack or losing their minds,” Jones recounts. “Since most of the people I saw in these settings were not mental health patients, I wanted to produce a book that was easy to understand and with techniques that anyone could use.”

Written for people who have had one isolated attack as well as those with panic disorder, the book details the relationship between thoughts and the fight-or-flight response system. Jones blends Eastern meditation practices and variations on cognitive-behavioral therapy, considered the standard of care for individuals with this form of anxiety. “I teach the strategies I use with patients in my private practice,” Jones states. “Over the years, I’ve witnessed hundreds of patients regain control of their lives using these methods so I know they work. Aside from the experiences of my patients, years of scientific research has proven this approach to be as effective as any medication.”

The e-book version of Nothing to Fear is on sale now at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, and other retailers. It is scheduled to be released on iTunes in the next month and a print version will be released in early 2012.

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called “magic mushrooms,” was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.
Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn’t usually change significantly.
“Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older,” says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The research, approved by Johns Hopkins’ Institutional Review Board, was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The study participants completed two to five eight-hour drug sessions, with consecutive sessions separated by at least three weeks. Participants were informed they would receive a “moderate or high dose” of psilocybin during one of their drug sessions, but neither they nor the session monitors knew when.
During each session, participants were encouraged to lie down on a couch, use an eye mask to block external visual distraction, wear headphones through which music was played and focus their attention on their inner experiences.
Personality was assessed at screening, one to two months after each drug session and approximately 14 months after the last drug session. Griffiths says he believes the personality changes found in this study are likely permanent since they were sustained for over a year by many.
Nearly all of the participants in the new study considered themselves spiritually active (participating regularly in religious services, prayer or meditation). More than half had postgraduate degrees. The sessions with the otherwise illegal hallucinogen were closely monitored and volunteers were considered to be psychologically healthy
“We don’t know whether the findings can be generalized to the larger population,” Griffiths says.
As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.
Griffiths says lasting personality change is rarely looked at as a function of a single discrete experience in the laboratory. In the study, the change occurred specifically in those volunteers who had undergone a “mystical experience,” as validated on a questionnaire developed by early hallucinogen researchers and refined by Griffiths for use at Hopkins. He defines “mystical experience” as among other things, “a sense of interconnectedness with all people and things accompanied by a sense of sacredness and reverence.”
Personality was measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, which covers openness and the other four broad domains that psychologists consider the makeup of personality: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Only openness changed during the course of the study.
Griffiths says he believes psilocybin may have therapeutic uses. He is currently studying whether the hallucinogen has a use in helping cancer patients handle the depression and anxiety that comes along with a diagnosis, and whether it can help longtime cigarette smokers overcome their addiction.
“There may be applications for this we can’t even imagine at this point,” he says. “It certainly deserves to be systematically studied.”
Along with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this study was funded by the Council on Spiritual Practices, Heffter Research Institute and the Betsy Gordon Foundation.
Other Hopkins authors of the research include Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., and Katherine A. MacLean, Ph.D.

People who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits. The findings came from a study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology
In the study, Bartels and Pizarro gave participants a set of moral dilemmas widely used by behavioral scientists who study morality, like the following: “A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?”
Participants also completed a set of three personality scales: one for assessing psychopathic traits in a non–clinical sample, one that assessed Machiavellian traits, and one that assessed whether participants believed that life was meaningful.
Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.
These results (which recently appeared in the journal Cognition) raise questions for psychological theories of moral judgment that equate utilitarian responses with optimal morality, and treat non–utilitarian responses as moral “mistakes”. The issue, for these theories, is that these results would lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those who are “optimal” moral decision makers (i.e., who are likely to favor utilitarian solutions) are also those who possess a set of traits that many would consider prototypically immoral (e.g., the emotional callousness and manipulative nature of psychopathy and Machiavellianism).
While some might be tempted to conclude that these findings undermine utilitarianism as an ethical theory, Prof. Bartels explained that he and his co–author have a different interpretation: “Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely–adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment. These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others.” In short, if scientists’ methods cannot identify a difference between the morality of a utilitarian philosopher who sacrifices her own interest for the sake of others, and a manipulative con artist who cares little about the feelings and welfare of anyone but himself, then perhaps better methods are needed.

Be it at school, office, the neighborhood or the community in which people live, conflicting situations amongst various groups might arise on an almost day to day basis. Today, the prevalence of these intergroup conflicts is on the rise and has resulted in minor disagreements amongst friends to waging full scale wars between countries.
Social psychology research has always maintained that individuals often identify themselves with the social group they belong to and will bond together to defend their identity at all cost. Now, a new study published in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explains how motivation drives certain groups to behave in a particular manner.
“As a researcher in motivational processes, one thing I have learned is that people’s attitudes and behavior are more often than not driven by latent motivations that they themselves are often not aware of,” says Lile Jia who co-wrote the study along with his colleagues Samuel Karpen and Edward Hirt at Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. In this particular case study, Jia and his colleagues decided to examine if the motivation to regain a strong American group identity was partly behind the powerful opposition to building the Ground Zero Mosque in New York.
Jia and his co-authors believe that contemporary events and controversies evoke strong reactions in people because of the latent motivations that may be present due to current economic concerns and worries. According to Jia, “our case study shows that a threat to the American identity brought about by changes in the political and economic environment influences how Americans respond to the symbolic building on sacred lands by other groups.”
When conducting their research, Jia and his co-authors used a clever cover story developed by social psychologist Alison Ledgerwood. Participants, who were American citizens, read either an article describing a thriving American economy and rising international status or an article depicting a bleak picture of the American economy and a declining international status. The participants who read the article that showcased a downward spiraling American economy and international status considered this piece of information as a threat to their usually positive group identity as an American, as opposed to those who read the article that highlighted America’s positive economic trend. The results go on to demonstrate that the participants who read the article about the decline of the U.S. subsequently reported a greater opposition toward the building plan, were angrier with it, and were more likely to sign a petition against it. This is especially so for Americans who identify strongly with the country.
In the study, Jia and his co-authors state that people typically identify with their social groups along different dimensions; importance, commitment, superiority and deference. “In the context of Ground Zero Mosque, Americans who are loyal to the country on the deference dimension are especially responsive to the threat manipulation,” says Jia who explains that Americans wanted to protect the Ground Zero area from any use that might be construed as disrespectful or inappropriate.
Jia and his colleagues believe this study reemphasizes, following the footsteps of many social psychologists, the importance of motivation in understanding or explaining the reasons behind intergroup conflict. ”Future research can aim at discovering the host of common personal and group level motivations people bring to intergroup conflict. Knowing these various motivations will help us to develop intervention programs to resolve or prevent conflicts from emerging,” concludes Jia.

Young adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder showed more creativity compared with those who did not have ADHD, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Eckerd College also found that ADHD individuals preferred different thinking styles. They like generating ideas, but are not good about completing the tasks.

Lead author Holly White, an assistant professor of psychology at Eckerd, and Priti Shah, an associate professor at U-M, replicated their study from 2006, and those results found that ADHD individuals show better performance on standardized creativity tests. Previous research regarding individuals with ADHD focused on laboratory measures of creativity.

“We knew that ADHD individuals did better at laboratory measures of divergent thinking, but we didn’t know if that would translate to real-life achievement. The current study suggests that it does,” Shah said.

Divergent thinking involves generating several possible solutions to a problem. ADHD is neuropsychological disorder that involves inattentiveness, impulsiveness and hyperactivity. Most individuals get the disorder in childhood and it persists into adulthood. It has impaired the person’s ability to adjust academically and socially.

Sixty college students (half with ADHD) completed a questionnaire about their level of achievement regarding creativity in 10 areas, such as humor, music, visual arts, culinary arts, invention and writing. Those with ADHD scored higher than individuals who didn’t have the disorder.

Another questionnaire assessed the respondents’ preferred creative style: clarifiers, who define and structure the problem; ideators, who like to generate ideas; developers, who elaborate or refine ideas and solutions; and implementers, who incorporate a refined idea into a final product or solution.
Non-ADHD participants preferred problem clarification and idea development. ADHD individuals liked the ideator style. Knowing the creative style can help identify careers suited to the strengths and weaknesses of individuals with ADHD, the researchers said.

Researchers also note that their results could be partially attributed to testing college students, who may be a uniquely motivated and successful population with ADHD. They did, however, ensure that the ADHD and non-ADHD participants in the sample were similar in academic achievement. Individuals who are not succeeding as well academically may benefit from understanding that there may be tradeoffs associated with ADHD. With extra motivation to overcome difficulties in planning, attention, and impulsivity, they may be able to take greater advantage of their creative strengths, Shah said.

The findings appear in the current issue of Personality and Individual Differences.

It turns out there may be something to “playing hard to get.” A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a woman is more attracted to a man when she is uncertain about how much he likes her.

On the one hand, a lot of psychological research has found that person A usually likes person B about as much as they think person B likes them. “If we want to know how much Sarah likes Bob, a good predictor is how much she thinks Bob likes her,” write the authors of the paper, Erin R. Whitchurch and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University. “But what if Sarah is not sure how much Bob likes her?” This might lead Sarah to spend a lot of time thinking about Bob, wondering how he feels, and she might find him more attractive the more she dwells on him.

Forty-seven female undergraduates at the University of Virginia participated in the study. Each student, who believed that the experiment was designed to study whether Facebook could work as an online dating site, was told that male students from two other universities had viewed her profile and those of 15 to 20 other females. Then the women were shown four men’s Facebook profiles that they thought were real, but were actually fictitious. Some of the women were told they’d seen the four men who liked them the most; others were told these were four men who rated them about average. A third group were told the men could be either the ones who liked them most or the ones who liked them about average—so those women didn’t know about the level of the men’s interest in them.

As other research has found, women who believed the men liked them a lot were more attracted to the men than women who thought the men liked them only an average amount. However, the women who found the men most attractive were the ones who weren’t sure whether those men were into them or not.
“Numerous popular books advise people not to display their affections too openly to a potential romantic partner and to instead appear choosy and selective,” the authors write. Women in this study made their decisions based on very little information on the men—but in a situation not unlike meeting someone on an internet dating site, which is common these days. “When people first meet, it may be that popular dating advice is correct: Keeping people in the dark about how much we like them will increase how much they think about us and will pique their interest.”

First-year college students’ self-ratings of their emotional health dropped to record low levels in 2010, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey, UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering students at four-year colleges and universities.

Only 51.9 percent of students reported that their emotional health was in the “highest 10 percent” or “above average,” a drop of 3.4 percentage points from 2009 and a significant decline from the 63.6 percent who placed themselves in those categories when self-ratings of emotional health were first measured in 1985. 
 
Female students were far less likely to report high levels of emotional health than male students (45.9 percent versus 59.1 percent), a 13.2 percentage-point difference. Women were also more than twice as likely as men to feel frequently “overwhelmed by all I had to do” as high-school seniors.
 
While students’ perceived emotional health took a downturn, their drive to achieve and their academic abilities are trending upward. More students than ever before (71.2 percent) rated their academic abilities as “above average” or in the “highest 10 percent,” and 75.8 percent rated their drive to achieve in the same terms.
 
Often considered positive traits, high levels of drive to achieve and academic ability could also contribute to students’ feelings of stress, said John H. Pryor, lead author of the report and director of CIRP.
 
“Stress is a major concern when dealing with college students,” he said. “If students are arriving in college already overwhelmed and with lower reserves of emotional health, faculty, deans and administrators should expect to see more consequences of stress, such as higher levels of poor judgment around time management, alcohol consumption and academic motivation.”
 
The challenging economic landscape continues to influence students’ college experiences. The proportion of students using loans to help pay for college remains high, at 53.1 percent, and more students reported receiving grants and scholarships than at any point since 2001 — 73.4 percent, a 3.4 percentage-point increase over 2009.
 
“The increasing cost of higher education poses a significant barrier to college access for today’s students,” said Sylvia Hurtado, co-author of the report and director of the Higher Education Research Institute. “Students and families are now charged with the task of becoming more resourceful and strategic in finding new and creative ways to pay for college.”
 
The survey documented the continuing effect of the economy, with unemployment on the rise for students’ parents. The percentage of students reporting that their fathers were unemployed (4.9 percent) was at an all-time high, and the percentage reporting unemployed mothers (8.6 percent) also continued to increase. Students are weighing their preferences along with considerations regarding the net costs of attending particular colleges.
 
The survey also revealed that an increasing number of students are focused on the value that a college degree confers. In fact, more students than ever before (72.7 percent) indicated that “the chief benefit of college is that it increases one’s earning power.” This belief is in line with policymakers’ efforts to advocate for pubic investment in higher education as a means to stimulate the economy.
 
Students expressed views on a variety of public policy issues, some of which transcended party lines.
 
In recent years, students have demonstrated increasing support for the rights of gays and lesbians, specifically regarding legal marital status for same-sex couples. This year, in a new question on the survey, more than three-quarters of entering first-year students expressed support for the legal right for gays and lesbians to adopt children, with 48.0 percent agreeing strongly and 28.5 percent agreeing somewhat.
 
“I am heartened to learn about students’ overwhelming support for extending equal rights and dignity to gays and lesbians,” said Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “Students’ willingness to engage different perspectives and experiences is a virtual precondition for their own intellectual development in college and one of higher education’s most important contributions to the future of a just and diverse democracy.” 
 
Economic concerns also seem to have influenced students’ political views. An overwhelming 64.0 percent of students agreed that wealthy people should pay more taxes than they do now. This figure has been on the rise since 2002, when it was at 50.1 percent. 
 
Nearly one-third of students agreed that “The federal government should raise taxes to help reduce the deficit,” the highest percentage reported since this question was first asked 25 years ago. On this particular issue, students’ opinions differed according to their political orientation. Students who considered themselves liberal were twice as likely to support raising taxes to reduce the deficit as those who identified as conservative (45.7 percent versus 21.2 percent).
 
To view a summary or to order a copy of the monograph “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010″ (J.H. Pryor, S. Hurtado, L. DeAngelo, L. Palucki Blake and S. Tran), visit www.heri.ucla.edu.   

Anxious about the stability of your relationship with your romantic partner? Uncomfortable relying on a friend?
It could be because of how your mother treated you as a toddler, reports a new Cornell study that finds that such treatment can predict your experiences in these adult relationships.
That’s the finding of Vivian Zayas, assistant professor of psychology, whose study is published online by Social Psychological and Personality Science.
“It was assumed that differences in adult attachment — how people experience their relationships in adulthood, especially with romantic partners– was rooted in their experience with their primary caregiver early on in life, typically one’s mother,” Zayas said.
Yet no long-term longitudinal work had looked at whether early life maternal experiences were in fact related to attachment behaviors with romantic partners and friends in adulthood.
Zayas studied 36 young adults, who were all about 22 years old and had been studied as 18-month-olds with their mothers; the toddlers and their mothers had been closely observed for facial expressions, displays of affection, and other measures during free play. Zayas explored their relationships in adulthood two decades later.
Young adults who as toddlers had received sensitive, non-controlling maternal caregiving were less avoidant about their attachments to their partners and friends (e.g., were able to share their feelings). Avoidance to partners in adulthood was assessed by asking the young adults to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with such statements as “I am very comfortable being close to my boyfriend/girlfriend.”
These young adults were also less anxious about their attachment with partners. They were less likely to endorse a statement like, “I worry that my boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t care about me,” which reflects anxiety. “If you’re low on avoidance and anxiety you’re securely attached. If you’re high on one or the other or both, then you are insecurely attached in the relationship. We see long-term links between moms’ behavior at 18 months and young adults’ experiences with their romantic partners and friends,” Zayas said.
These findings are consistent with experimental work done in animals that were either assigned to poor- or high-quality maternal care. However, the study’s data are correlational, and other important variables may have contributed to the results, said Zayas,a faculty fellow in the Institute for the Social Sciences’ Judgment, Decision Making and Social Behavior theme project. Because researchers can’t assign children to good and poor environments, “We’re trading off experimental control to look at something that we couldn’t manipulate for ethical reasons,” Zayas said.
“We’re assessing naturally occurring differences in the quality of maternal caregiving experienced at 18 months and seeing how they relate to naturally occurring differences in attachment style in adulthood,” Zayas said.
A second finding: “There was essentially no significant relationship between the type of caregiving they experienced at 18 months and their attachment to their mothers in adulthood,” Zayas said.
As children grow, their attachment shifts from parents to peers. But parents continue to “provide you with a sense of security that very few people can replace,” Zayas said.
But the way you were treated at 18 months hardly predetermines your fate. “I don’t think you’re marked for life,” Zayas said. “The research shows that early life experiences don’t set things in stone. They are definitely malleable. Change can happen.”
The study was supported in part by National Institutes of Mental Health.

We’ve all heard the adage that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but until now the preponderance of scientific evidence has offered little support for it.
However, a new national multi-year longitudinal study of the effects of adverse life events on mental health has found that adverse experiences do, in fact, appear to foster subsequent adaptability and resilience, with resulting advantages for mental health and well being.

The study, “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability and Resilience,” to be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is available on the website of the American Psychological Association.

It examined a national sample of people who reported their lifetime history of adverse experiences and several measures of current mental health and well being.

Authors are Mark Seery, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo; E. Alison Holman, PhD, assistant professor of nursing sciences, University of California, Irvine; and Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD, professor of psychology and social behavior and medicine at UC Irvine.

Seery, senior author of the study, says previous research indicates that exposure to adverse life events typically predicts negative effects on mental health and well-being, such that more adversity predicts worse outcomes.

But in this study of a national survey panel of 2,398 subjects assessed repeatedly from 2001 to 2004, Seery and co-researchers found those exposed to some adverse events reported better mental health and well-being outcomes than people with a high history of adversity or those with no history of adversity.

“We tested for quadratic relationships between lifetime adversity and a variety of longitudinal measures of mental health and well-being, including global distress, functional impairment, post-traumatic stress symptoms and life satisfaction,” Seery says.

“Consistent with prior research on the impact of adversity, linear effects emerged in our results, such that more lifetime adversity was associated with higher global distress, functional impairment and PTS symptoms, as well as lower life satisfaction.

“However,” says Seery, “our results also yielded quadratic, U-shaped patterns, demonstrating a critical qualification to the seemingly simple relationship between lifetime adversity and outcomes.

“Our findings revealed,” he says, “that a history of some lifetime adversity — relative to both no adversity or high adversity — predicted lower global distress, lower functional impairment, lower PTS symptoms and higher life satisfaction.”

The team also found that, across these same longitudinal outcome measures, people with a history of some lifetime adversity appeared less negatively affected by recent adverse events than other individuals.

Although these data cannot establish causation, Seery says the evidence is consistent with the proposition that in moderation, experiencing lifetime adversity can contribute to the development of resilience.

“Although we studied major lifetime adversity,” he says, “there is reason to believe that other relatively mundane experiences should also contribute to resilience.

“This suggests that carefully designed psychotherapeutic interventions may be able to do so, as well, although there is much work that still needs to be done to fully understand resilience and where it comes from.”

Online dating profiles may serve an important role in the grieving process, say two University of Delaware communication professors.

Their new study, published in the August issue of the journal Death Studies, chronicles how widowed online daters use their profiles as a place to make sense of the past while articulating a vision of a future life.

Assistant Prof. Dannagal Young and Associate Prof. Scott Caplan collected more than 500 online dating profiles from divorced and widowed individuals of both sexes between 18 and 40 years old. They examined the profiles for evidence of healthy approaches to loss, such as describing the backstory behind the divorce or death of the spouse, and any attempt to make sense of the past experience, an act called “cognitive reappraisal.”
They found widowed daters are more likely than divorcees to:

• Mention the backstory;
• Try make sense of/find meaning in it; and
• Articulate a vision of their future partnership.

In addition, those who include a backstory are significantly more likely to describe how the experience changed them for the better. The profiles of widowed daters contained numerous references to life lessons learned, life as a fleeting experience, and the most important thing in life being love.

“Many surviving spouses point to a shift in priorities and a new appreciation for the fragility of life after their spouse dies,” explains Caplan. “Think of it as a post-loss enlightenment.”

In addition to meaning-finding and sense-making, there is another factor that correlates strongly with life satisfaction among widows and widowers: repartnering.

“Online dating seems like a way to bring these healthy behaviors together,” says Young.

Young, widowed in 2006, and Caplan, divorced in 2007, came up with the idea for the study after entering the online dating pool themselves. Their results suggest creating an online profile could play a beneficial role for widows and widowers.