Group items tagged

“Exercise is a form of stress,” she pointed out. So is social isolation. Each, independently, induces the release of stress hormones (primarily corticosterone in rodents and cortisol in people). These hormones have been found, in multiple studies, to reduce neurogenesis. Except after exercise; then, despite increased levels of the hormones, neurogenesis booms. It’s possible, Dr. Stranahan said, that social connections provide a physiological buffer, a calming, that helps neurogenesis to proceed despite the stressful nature of exercise. Social isolation removes that protection and simultaneously pumps more stress hormones into the system, blunting exercise’s positive effects on brainpower.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

Stress caused by social situations, such as giving a speech or going to a job interview, can affect some people's immune system in ways that harm their health, researchers have found.The study included 124 volunteers who were purposely put into awkward social situations. Those who exhibited greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also had greater increases in inflammatory activity when exposed to social stress.

The findings provide "further evidence of how closely our mind and body are connected. We have known for a long time that social stress can 'get under the skin' to increase risk for disease, but it's been unclear exactly how these effects occur. To our knowledge, this study is the first to identify the neurocognitive pathways that might be involved in inflammatory responses to acute social stress," Slavich said.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

People with a history of heart disease who are prone to negative thinking, gloom, and inhibition -- a personality profile known as Type D (for "distressed") -- are nearly four times more likely to experience heart attack, heart failure, heart rhythm disorders, death, and other negative outcomes compared to heart patients with a different personality profile, the study found.

"There is a clear connection between heart risk and psychological risk factors, and those people who have this personality and lack social support have higher risk of health problems,"

Type D personalities are "characterized by negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and anger, and at the same time score high on social inhibition, meaning that they are less likely to disclose emotions," Denollet says.