Rocky Mountain Silence

A striking serenity was apparent in the snow covered mountain peaks and glaciers of the Canadian Rockies where my wife and I recently vacationed. Even the elk, deer, and mountain goats were silent as they grazed in open fields. There were no cellphone rings or conversations. There was no traffic or horn honking.

There are certainly advantages to living in cities where 70% of our population is predicted to live by 2050. City dwellers are “wealthier and receive improved sanitation, nutrition, contraception and healthcare.” On the other hand, they have much higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders. One of the main contributors may be noise. Parts of the brain, the amygdala and cingular cortex are overactive in people born in cities.  The same study found that children living near airports had higher levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol.

Seems like the Rocky Mountain homesteaders we met have already figured this out.

 It’s about bad timing.  At an age when a teen’s brain can understand why a certain behavior may be wrong, his/her brain’s self-control mechanism has not fully developed.  This disconnect is the likely reason why teens engage in behavior they know intellectually is risky. 

Brain scans have shown that one part of a teen’s brain is very sensitive to dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter.  That means the teens feel anticipated rewards very powerfully.  Unfortunately, another part of the brain responsible for evaluating and controlling impulses doesn’t fully develop until age 25.  So the felt value of a pleasurable activity overpowers an adolescent’s ability to calculate the risk of that activity.    This may explain why educational efforts, lecturing and preaching to teens aren’t very effective.  The challenge remains……..

 Years ago, I wrote a paper about how IQ tests alone were poor measures of academic or life success.

It’s another season for my office phone to be ringing with requests to test five year olds’ IQs.   Jenny or Ethan might be eligible for a gifted kindergarten program.  Yet another example of our education system’s perpetuating a practice that’s totally unsupported by research.

Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman in NutureShock cite research showing that “IQ is an astonishingly ineffective predictor of a young child’s academic success”.  The operative word is “young”.  Less than 1 out of 3 kindergarten students will qualify for the gifted program if retested in third grade.  This is because young children’s brains are just beginning to develop.  Between the ages 3-10, 2/3 of kids’ IQ scores will improve or drop more than 15 points. 

You might think that school districts would retest kids to insure that they still belong in this program.  Nope.  Not one of the largest 20 school districts requires retesting.  A strong parent lobby killed a bill in a 2007 Florida legislative committee that would have required retesting.

You can’t blame parents for wanting everything they think is best for their kids  Unless our educational system changes its practices and waits until children’s brains are more developed at 7 or 8 years old, parents will continue to attempt to guarantee security in kindergarten and never look back.

According to two recent studies, it turns out that all of the “baby media” videos parents buy and play to their babies may be entertaining – period.  One study of almost 100 babies between one and two years old showed no relationship between watching DVDs and learning words or ideas.  Another study found that babies who learned the most words learned them from their parents during everyday interactions.

Then, there’s the question of what school-age children are learning when teachers “teach to the test”.   They might learn specific facts, but they’re less likely to be less curious and discover new information. 

 Two other studies showed that children will come up with creative and unexpected information if allowed to explore an object on their own rather than having a teacher tell them what the object can do. Sounds like more support for experiential learning.

No matter what age you are, research has determined the methods that are most effective in learning and recalling  information for tests.

• Study 20% more than you think you need to study.   Research has shown that people think they know more than they actually know.  Fourth and fifth graders were asked to study as much as they thought was necessary to learn information from a social studies passage.  The average passing grade was 68%.  When these students were required to study as long as necessary to score 100% on a test, the necessary amount of time significantly increased.

• Read a passage and immediately write an essay for about 10 minutes about what you just read.  This is called a “retrieval practice test”.  Students who used this study method recalled 50% more information one week later compared to students who either just read the passage or read the passage and immediately made concept maps or diagrams on what they read.

Depending on the study, it’s estimated that between 14%-24% of high school and college students have engaged in some form of self-harm behavior.  The most common behavior is cutting.

A study just published in Pediatrics found more than 5,000 YouTube videos on self-harm.  The authors studied 100 of these videos in one month and found they were viewed 2 million times.  Some of the videos were documentaries and others were “how-to” videos.  YouTube has a team of reviewers that are supposed to remove videos with “graphic content that encourage dangerous activities.”  If these reviewers are monitoring videos, they may be catching just the tip of the iceberg.

Does excessive video gaming cause depression in kids?  Maybe, and maybe not, However, two studies of thousands of elementary through high school kids found that those who played the most video games showed signs of depression and anxiety months and years after beginning playing.

But one study showed that these kids were more impulsive and less comfortable with other children to begin with.  so it may be that kids who are not socially adept and predisposed to depression gravitate more to video games.  As gaming increases, social isolation increases which could contribute to and exacerbate depression and social anxiety.

Signs of video addiction in kids are provided by Douglas Gentile, Ph.D., a leading researcher in this subject.

Tools for parents to keep video use safe and balanced are available at http://www.getgamesmart.com/tools/

Days after Jared Loughner killed 6 and injured 14 people in Arizona, the court of public opinion (media) is declaring him mentally ill.

Whether or not an evaluation finds Loughner mentally ill is not really important. What is important is the media’s continued association of the terms “mentally ill” with violent behavior.

I’m looking at newspaper headlines since 1975. Examples are Former mental patient kills 3 outside store, Mental patient hurts boy, officer on plane, Mental patient killed, hostages freed, Ex-mental patient kills two neighbors.

Here’s the problem. Headlines never say “Non-mental patient patient kills………… But this event happens much more frequently and illustrates that more people who don’t have a history of mental illness are dangerous. This fact has been born out by repeated research studies. As a 1980 headline in the Miami Herald declared, there’s a distinction between behavior that is sick and behavior that is sickening or evil. Most violent behavior is the latter.

Welcome to my blog……. 12/30/2010

My psychology practice deals with various mental health problems experienced by children, adolescents, and adults. The purpose of this blog is to provide readers with factual information about these mental health issues. I find that people increasingly believe information that is factually inaccurate. A recent Newsweek article attributed some of these inaccuracies to the Internet and TV. 1 My training as a psychologist emphasized relying on facts and conclusions that can be verified through research. This is the information I’d like people to rely on. So let’s begin with some facts about Attention Deficit Disorder that contradict one of the current myths.

An increasingly held belief about Attention Deficit Disorder is that everyone has this disorder because multitasking throughout the day with multiple technological gadgets is decreasing all of our attention spans.

Let’s get a little historical perspective here. Evidence of Attention Deficit Disorder has existed for over 100 years. Over 80 international scientist/researchers signed a Consensus Statement in 2002 stating that Attention Deficit Disorder is a real disorder involving differences in multiple brain functions. The disorder has been documented on numerous continents.

But……, if we’re all more distracted and have shorter attention spans today, how do we know who really has ADD? It means we have to evaluate children and adults using a revised “norm” of attention. If the new norm for sustaining attention is lower, people with ADD must be considerably less attentive than this new norm. As new norms are developed for rating scales used to screen for ADD, we’ll have a revised basis for comparing ADD and non-ADD individuals which will allow us identify ADD even in a less-attentive society.

1. Thomas, Evan. Why It’s time to Worry. Newsweek. Dec. 13, 2010, pp. 34-35.