New Findings…Group Settings Can Diminish Expressions of Intelligence

Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics — such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties — can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study.

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity.

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ,” said Montague. “Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”

“Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning,” said lead author Kenneth Kishida, a research scientist with the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. “And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.”

The researchers recruited subjects from two universities and administered a standard test to establish baseline IQ. The results were not viewed until after a series of ranked group IQ tasks, during which test takers, in groups of five, received information about how their performances compared to those of the other group members.

Although the test subjects had similar baseline IQ scores — a mean of 126, compared to the national average of 100 — they showed a range of test performance results after the ranked group IQ tasks, revealing that some individuals’ expressed IQ was affected by signals about their status within a small group.

The researchers wanted to know what was happening in the brain during the observed changes in IQ expression. The subjects were divided into two groups based on the results of their final rank — the high performers, who scored above the median, and the low performers, who scored at or below the median. Two of every group of five subjects had their brains scanned using fMRI while they participated in the task.

Among the researchers’ findings:

1. Dynamic responses occurred in multiple brain regions, especially the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and the nucleus accumbens — regions believed to be involved in emotional processing, problem solving, and reward and pleasure, respectively.

2. All subjects had an initial increase in amygdala activation and diminished activity in the prefrontal cortex, both of which corresponded with a lower problem-solving ability.

3. By the end of the task, the high-performing group showed a decreased amygdala activation and an increased prefrontal cortex activation, both of which were associated with an increased ability to solve more difficult problems.

4. Positive changes in rank were associated with greater activity in the bilateral nucleus accumbens, which has traditionally been linked to learning and has been shown to respond to rewards and pleasure.

5. Negative changes in rank corresponded with greater activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, consistent with a response to conflicting information.

6. Neither age nor ethnicity showed a significant correlation with performance or brain responses. A significant pattern did emerge along gender lines, however. Although male and female participants had the same baseline IQ, significantly fewer women (3 of 13) were in the high-performing group and significantly more (10 of 13) fell into the low-performing group.

“We don’t know how much these effects are present in real-world settings,” Kishida said. “But given the potentially harmful effects of social-status assignments and the correlation with specific neural signals, future research should be devoted to what, exactly, society is selecting for in competitive learning and workplace environments. By placing an emphasis on competition, for example, are we missing a large segment of the talent pool? Further brain imaging research may also offer avenues for developing strategies for people who are susceptible to these kinds of social pressures.”

“This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed,” said coauthor Steven Quartz, a professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Caltech. “Furthermore, this suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”

“So much of our society is organized around small-group interactions,” said Kishida. “Understanding how our brains respond to dynamic social interactions is an important area of future research. We need to remember that social dynamics affect not just educational and workplace environments, but also national and international policy-making bodies, such as the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.”

The research appears in the Jan. 23, 2012 issue of the journalPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in the article, “Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the expression of cognitive capacity and associated brain responses,” by Kenneth Kishida; Dongni Yang, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine; Karen Hunter Quartz, a director of research in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies of the University of California, Los Angeles; Steven Quartz; and Read Montague, corresponding author, who is also a professor of physics at Virginia Tech. The research was supported by grants from the Wellcome Trust and the Kane Family Foundation to Montague and the National Institutes of Health to Montague and Kishida. The article is online athttp://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/704.abstract?sid=5fc88e56-8a71-4a9b-be8d-ad3fa88c631e

Released: January 22, 2012

Source: Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/group-settings-can-diminish-expressions-of-intelligence

One Trait Has Huge Impact on Whether Alcohol Makes You Aggressive

Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio — Drinking enough alcohol to become intoxicated increases aggression significantly in people who lack one particular personality trait, according to new research.

But people with that trait don’t get any more aggressive when drunk than they would when they’re sober.

That trait is the ability to consider the future consequences of current actions.

“People who focus on the here and now, without thinking about the impact on the future, are more aggressive than others when they are sober, but the effect is magnified greatly when they’re drunk,” said Brad Bushman, lead author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

“If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are.”

Peter Giancola, professor of psychology, at the University of Kentucky, co-authored the paper with Bushman and led the experiments used in the study. Other co-authors were Dominic Parrott, associate professor of psychology at of Georgia State University and Robert Roth, associate professor of psychiatry, at Dartmouth Medical School. Their results appear online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

Bushman said it makes sense that alcohol would make present-focused people more aggressive.

“Alcohol has a myopic effect — it narrows your attention to what is important to you right now. That may be dangerous to someone who already has that tendency to ignore the future consequences of their actions and who is placed in a hostile situation.”

The study involved 495 adults, with an average age of 23, who were social drinkers. Before participating, the participants were screened for any past or present drug, alcohol and psychiatric-related problems. Women were tested to ensure they weren’t pregnant.

All participants completed the “Consideration of Future Consequences scale.” They indicated how much they agreed with statements like “I only act to satisfy immediate concerns, figuring the future will take care of itself.” Scores on this measure determined how much participants were present-focused or future-focused.

Half the participants were put in the alcohol group, where they received alcohol mixed with orange juice at a 1:5 ratio. The other half were given orange juice with just a tiny bit of alcohol. The rims of the glasses were also sprayed with alcohol so that they thought they were consuming a full alcoholic beverage.

Participants in the alcohol group had a mean blood alcohol level of 0.095 just before aggression was measured and 0.105 following, meaning they were legally drunk and that their alcohol levels were rising during the measurement of their aggressive behavior.

Those in the placebo group had mean blood alcohol levels that didn’t exceed 0.015, meaning they had very little alcohol in their systems and were well below standards of intoxication.

The aggression measure used in this study was developed in 1967 to test aggressiveness through the use of harmless but somewhat painful electric shocks. The researchers measured the participants’ threshold to the electric shock pain before the experiment began to ensure that no one received a shock that exceeded what they could take.

Each of the participants was told that he or she was competing with a same-sex opponent in a computer-based speed reaction test, with the winner delivering an electrical shock to the loser. The winner determined the intensity and the length of the shock delivered to the loser.

In actuality, there was no opponent. There were 34 trials, and the participant “won” half of them (randomly determined). Each time they “lost,” the participants received electric shocks that increased in length and intensity over the course of the trials, and the researchers measured if they retaliated in kind.

“The participants were led to believe they were dealing with a real jerk who got more and more nasty as the experiment continued,” Bushman said. “We tried to mimic what happens in real life, in that the aggression escalated as time went on.”

Results were clear, Bushman said.

“The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk. People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study,” he said.

“Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused.”

Men were more aggressive than women overall, but the effects of alcohol and personality were similar in both sexes. In other words, women who were present-focused were still much more aggressive when drunk than were women who were future-focused, just like men.

Bushman said the results should serve as a warning to people who live only in the moment without thinking too much about the future.

“If you’re that kind of person, you really should watch your drinking. Combining alcohol with a focus on the present can be a recipe for disaster.”

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and from the National Center for Research Resources.

Released: 12/19/2011

Source: Ohio State University

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/one-trait-has-huge-impact-on-whether-alcohol-makes-you-aggressive

Researchers Find That Young Adults Drop Exercise with Move to College Or University

Regular exercise tends to steeply decline among youth as they move to university or college, and does not appear to revert itself, but continues on a downward trajectory into adulthood.

Newswise — Hamilton, ON (Dec. 15, 2011) – Regular exercise tends to steeply decline among youth as they move to university or college, according to a study by researchers at McMaster University.

Researchers found a 24 per cent decrease in physical activity over the 12 years from adolescence to early adulthood. The steepest declines were among young men entering university or college.

The research appears today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study, based on Statistics Canada’s National Population Health Survey, followed 683 Canadian adolescents 12 to 15 years old, who were interviewed twice a year until they were 24 to 27 years of age.

While the children were most active, the research suggests that this advantage quickly disappears.

“This is a critical period, as the changes in physical activity during the transition from late adolescence to early adulthood represents the most dramatic declines in physical activity across a person’s life,” said Matthew Kwan, the principal investigator for the study and a postdoctoral fellow of the Department of Family Medicine of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

“In particular, the transition into post-secondary is a one-time period when individuals become much less active.”

Risk estimates suggest 20 per cent of premature deaths could be prevented with regular physical activity. Yet, recent data show 85 per cent of Canadian adults are not active enough to meet the recommended 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a week.

Public health campaigns encourage Canadians to be more active but the McMaster researchers say little work has been done to prevent the decline in physical activity and they suggest this issue should be made a priority.

For the study, physical activity was measured by estimating the amount of total energy used during leisure activities over a three-month period during the transition from adolescence into early adulthood, including the move to college or university.

The researchers found the rate of decline in physical activity was greater for men than for women, who showed only a modest 1.7 per cent decrease in their overall activity levels; however, the women were less active in high school.

“It may be that girls experience the greatest declines in physical activity earlier in their adolescence,” said Kwan.

For comparative purposes, the researchers also examined other health-risk behaviours of smoking and binge drinking. While both increased through adolescence, the researchers found the behaviours began to plateau or decrease in early adulthood; suggesting that individuals may be maturing out of these health-risk behaviours.

Conversely, Kwan added, physical activity decline does not appear to revert itself, but continues on a downward trajectory into adulthood.

Released: 12/15/2011

Source: McMaster University

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/young-adults-drop-exercise-with-move-to-college-or-university-mcmaster-researchers

Study Suggests Rules Requiring Minimum Standards Lower Standards to the Minimum

Newswise — Rules that are supposed to ensure minimum standards may in the end serve only to lower standards further than they might be without any rules at all, according to a study by a University of Iowa researcher.

Tom Rietz, professor of finance in the Tippie College of Business, speculates that this is because rules put in place to ensure minimum standards unwittingly establish a “good enough” level, so that people will perform only what is minimally needed.

“Rules may serve to calibrate expectations indicating what actions are good enough and, as a result, behavior may effectively fall to the rule,” Rietz said. “People who on their own initiative may have gone above and beyond instead do only the minimum.”

For example, he said free-will offerings might generate more admission income at a charity event than an established entry fee. Or, at a larger level, minimum wage laws may actually reduce overall wages in some situations because employers that might otherwise pay more instead pay only what the law requires them to.

Rietz said that minimum rules may also create a lack of trust between two parties in a relationship because it eliminates the benefit of the doubt. This is important, he said, because “social contracts commonly depend on trusting and reciprocating relationships. In modern economies, these relationships determine outcomes in conjunction with formal rules and explicit contracting.”

Take out that trust, he says, and societies and economies function less efficiently. In some ways, rules are put in place with the expectation that a guaranteed minimal level of performance will increase trust by reducing the risk to both parties and raising standards across the board. But recent experiments and studies have been calling into question the assumption.

Rietz’s experiment involved groups of 18 to 24 subjects who were paired off. One of the people in each pair—an “Investor”—was given $10, any amount of which could be given to the second person, the “Trustee.” Whatever was given was then tripled, and the Trustee could return any portion of that tripled amount to the Investor.

In some of the pairings, there were no rules dictating how much money Trustees had to return to Investors. With other pairs, Trustees were required to return a minimum of 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent to Investors.

The results showed that when there were no minimum return rules, the average Trustee returned 35 percent of the tripled amount to the Investor. But when a 10 percent minimum return rule was put in place, that median amount returned dropped to 10 percent, with 57 percent of Trustees returning only the minimum. Rietz said this is an indication that typical Trustees are no longer trustworthy in the sense that they don’t return more than the minimum.

While returns rise mechanically with 20 and 30 percent minimum return rules, Rietz said there is no evidence that trust returns between the two people.

“Without minimum return rules, trustees have to decide how much to return based on their own expectations about the value of information and what should be done in context,” Rietz said. “Rules restrict their ability to show trustworthiness through voluntary discretionary reciprocity.”

Minimum return rules also influenced how much Investors would initially send to Trustees. With no rules, Investors typically send about half of their $10, a figure that went down as minimum rules were put in place.

Rietz’s paper, “Trust Reciprocity and Rules,” was co-authored with Eric Schniter, Roman M. Sheremeta, and Timothy W. Shields of Chapman University.

Released: 11/9/2011

Source: University of Iowa

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/uiowa-study-suggests-rules-requiring-minimum-standards-lower-standards-to-the-minimum

OMEGA-3 Reduces Anxiety And Inflammation In Healthy Students

Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – A recent study gauging the impact of consuming more fish oil showed a marked reduction both in inflammation and, surprisingly, in anxiety among a cohort of healthy young people.

The research, supported by the Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS), was conducted by a team of scientists that has spent more than three decades investigating links between psychological stress and immunity.

“The findings suggest that if young people can get improvements from dietary supplements, then the elderly and people at high risk for certain diseases might benefit even more,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry and author of the study, which was published this month in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

“The more we understand about the complex interplay between inflammation and immunity, the closer we’ll get to figuring out which lifestyle choices and changes have the biggest impact on long term health.”

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), have long been considered as positive additives to the diet.

Earlier research suggested that the compounds might play a role in reducing the level of cytokines in the body, compounds that promote inflammation, and perhaps even reduce depression.

Psychological stress has repeatedly been shown to increase cytokine production so the researchers wondered if increasing omega-3 might mitigate that process, reducing inflammation.

To test their theory, they turned to a familiar group of research subjects – medical students. Some of the earliest work these scientists did showed that stress from important medical school tests lowered students’ immune status.

“We hypothesized that giving some students omega-3 supplements would decrease their production of proinflammatory cytokines, compared to other students who only received a placebo,” explained Kiecolt-Glaser.

“We thought the omega-3 would reduce the stress-induced increase in cytokines that normally arose from nervousness over the tests.”

The team assembled a field of 68 first- and second-year medical students who volunteered for the clinical trial. Half the students received omega-3 supplements while the other half were given placebo pills. The students were randomly divided into six groups, all of which were interviewed six times during the study. At each visit, blood samples were drawn from the students who also completed a battery of psychological surveys intended to gauge their levels of stress, anxiety or depression. The students also completed questionnaires about their diets during the previous weeks.

“The omega-3 supplement the students received was probably about four or five times the amount of fish oil you’d get from a daily serving of salmon,” explained Martha Belury, professor of human nutrition and co-author in the study.

Part of the study, however, didn’t go according to plans.

Changes in the medical curriculum and the distribution of major tests throughout the year, rather than during a tense three-day period as was done in the past, removed much of the stress that medical students had shown in past studies.

“These students were not anxious. They weren’t really stressed. They were actually sleeping well throughout this period, so we didn’t get the stress effect we had expected,” Kiecolt-Glaser said.

But the psychological surveys clearly showed an important change in anxiety among the students: Those receiving the omega-3 showed a 20 percent reduction in anxiety compared to the placebo group. An analysis of the of the blood samples from the medical students showed similar important results.

“We took measurements of the cytokines in the blood serum, as well as measured the productivity of cells that produced two important cytokines, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα),” said Ron Glaser, professor of molecular virology, immunology & medical genetics and director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research.

“We saw a 14 percent reduction in the amounts of IL-6 among the students receiving the omega-3.” Since the cytokines foster inflammation, “anything we can do to reduce cytokines is a big plus in dealing with the overall health of people at risk for many diseases,” he said.

Inflammation is a natural immune response that helps the body heal, but it also can play a harmful role in a host of diseases ranging from arthritis to heart disease to cancer.
Even though the study showed omega-3 supplements can reduce both anxiety and inflammation – and some of the researchers said that they take omega-3 supplements – the researchers aren’t ready to recommend that the public start taking them daily.

“It may be too early to recommend a broad use of omega-3 supplements, especially considering the cost and the limited supplies of fish needed to supply the oil,” Belury said. “People should just consider increasing their omega-3 through their diet.”

Also working on the research with Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser and Belury were William Malarkey, professor emeritus of internal medicine, and Rebecca Andridge, an assistant professor of public health.

In addition to support from the CCTS and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), the study was funded in part by a grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

Released: 11/9/2011

Source: Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/omega-3-reduces-anxiety-and-inflammation-in-healthy-students2

Food and Nutrition News….Students Coax Yeast Cells to Add Vitamins to Bread

In campus labs, the students developed a genetically engineered yeast to add vitamin A to the diets of malnourished people. Photo Credit: Will Kirk, JHU

Newswise — Any way you slice it, bread that contains critical nutrients could help combat severe malnutrition in impoverished regions. That is the goal of a group of Johns Hopkins University undergraduate students who are using synthetic biology to enhance common yeast so that it yields beta carotene, the orange substance that gives carrots their color. When it’s eaten, beta-carotene turns into vitamin A.

The students’ project is the university’s entry in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. After a regional judging earlier this month, the undergraduates’ project, called VitaYeast, has advanced to the iGEM finals, scheduled for Nov. 5-7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the annual iGEM contest, students from around the world present projects based on synthetic biology, a burgeoning field in which researchers manipulate small bits of DNA and other biological material to make cells carry out new tasks.

The Johns Hopkins participants say that no matter what happens at the iGEM finals, they will continue to tout their enhanced bread as a relatively simple way to help hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering from malnutrition.

Team member Arjun Khakhar, a junior biomedical engineering major, grew up in Bombay, India, where he saw widespread poverty and malnutrition. “The major problem in developing countries right now is not that people are hungry and starving because they don’t have enough food,” he said. “What people don’t have now is the [right type of] food that they need to survive. Vital nutrients like vitamins are just missing from their diets, because they can’t afford fruits and vegetables. That’s what we wanted to provide through VitaYeast.”

Producing a new food to save malnourished people around the globe may sound like an audacious goal for a group of 15 to 20 students who haven’t yet picked up their college diplomas. But Arjun doesn’t think so. “How do I get the idea in my mind that I want to change the world?” he said. “I would ask, How can you not have the idea that you want to change the world?”

To curb global malnutrition, Arjun and his teammates envisioned an enhanced starter dough that could be shared easily and cheaply among large groups of impoverished people. The bread baked from this dough could avert health problems that occur when vitamins and other nutrients are missing from their diets. Such health problems can be serious. The World Health Organization has described vitamin A deficiency as the leading cause of preventable blindness in children.

Yeast, which helps make bread rise, does not normally produce vitamins. To make this happen, the students, representing a variety of science majors, had to genetically tweak the single-cell microbes. The team members figured out how to add to yeast cells certain DNA sequences that triggered a series of biochemical reactions that produced beta carotene. They presented that development at the iGEM regional contest and are continuing to work on yeast that also produces Vitamin C, another crucial nutrient needed in impoverished areas.

As they worked on the VitaYeast project, the students were advised by Johns Hopkins faculty members, including Jef Boeke, a leading yeast expert who is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the School of Medicine. “One of the great things about iGEM teams, which are mostly made up of undergraduates, is that those students, frankly, will not believe that something is impossible,” Boeke said. “If you tell them that something is impossible, they will go off and do it. I find that to be very exciting.”

Working in lab space provided by Boeke and other faculty members, the iGEM students solved the science challenges and produced samples of their enhanced dough. But would VitaYeast yield bread that looks and smells good enough to eat? As all good cooks know, the proof is in the pudding — or, in this case, the bread basket. To find out, the students purchased a bread-making machine, found a simple recipe online and turned their lab into a makeshift kitchen. “We wanted to simulate the process that a regular person might go through to bake bread,” said team member Steffi Liu, a junior biomedical engineering major from Edison, N.J. “The only thing that’s different in the recipe is that we substituted our vitamin A yeast for the normal dry packaged yeast.”

The resulting bread, she said, “looks exactly the same as normal bread. Definitely the same smell! The lab smelled amazing after we baked the bread. Everybody wanted a bite of it. But obviously we can’t do that.”

Because the lab bread contains a genetically engineered ingredient that has not undergone safety testing or received approval from government regulators, the students are not permitted to eat it. But they are encouraged by the tempting aroma and traditional breadlike texture and appearance.

In recent years, some genetically engineered foods have been rejected by malnourished people merely because they did not look, smell or taste like the familiar food staples. The Johns Hopkins students are banking on greater success, partly because they are thinking small. “VitaYeast is a tiny component – it gets killed in the bread,” said Noah Young, a senior biomedical engineering major from Irvine, Calif. “We’re not genetically modifying the wheat. We’re not genetically modifying the flour or the water. We’re genetically modifying something like 1 percent of the bread recipe. When you bake VitaYeast bread and you look at it, it looks like normal bread.”

As part of the project, team member Ashan Veerakumar, a senior neuroscience major from Toronto, will survey Baltimore area residents about whether they would eat genetically modified food, particularly if it could improve their health. “The thing we’re trying to find out here,” Ashan said, “is whether our project is something the public will accept.”

He and some of the other team members are also looking for outside funding to continue pushing the VitaYeast project forward. Yet before VitaYeast bread can make its way to malnourished people, it must overcome many hurdles, including animal testing and rigorous regulatory reviews.

Still, faculty adviser Boeke is not betting against his student scientists. “Could this notion of releasing a genetically modified organism in a Third World country ever happen?” he asked. “Personally, I think the answer is yes.” Some of the iGEM students, Boeke said, “were ready to rush off and do it right away, and we had to restrain their enthusiasm.” Another faculty member, who is a bioethicist, was called in to urge the students to be more patient in pressing toward their goal. “She’s helped the students understand what the steps are needed to get to that point,” Boeke said. “That will certainly be a multiyear process, at best. But I think it could happen.”

Released: 10/25/2011

Source: Johns Hopkins

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/students-coax-yeast-cells-to-add-vitamins-to-bread

Number of First-Time Medical School Applicants Reaches New High

Medicine Continues to Attract Diverse, Robust Pool of Applicants

Newswise — Washington, D.C., October 24, 2011— First-time applicants to medical school reached an all-time high in 2011, increasing by 2.6 percent over last year to 32,654 students, according to new data released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). Total applicants rose by 2.8 percent to 43,919, with gains across most major racial and ethnic groups for a second year in a row.

“We are very pleased that medicine continues to be an attractive career choice at a time when our health care system faces many challenges, including a growing need for doctors coupled with a serious physician shortage in the near future,” said Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., AAMC president and CEO.

“At the same time the number of applicants is on the rise, we also are encouraged that the pool of medical school applicants and enrollees continues to be more diverse. This diversity will be important as these new doctors go out into communities across the country to meet the health care needs of all Americans,” Kirch added.

The total number of applicants and enrollees from most major racial and ethnic groups increased in 2011. After a slight decrease (0.2 percent) in 2010, Black/African American applicants increased by 4.8 percent while enrollees increased 1.9 percent. Hispanic/Latino applicants increased by 5.8 percent and enrollees increased 6.1 percent.

Even with greater numbers of applicants, medical schools continue to attract well-qualified individuals. The overall academic credentials of applicants remained strong, with an average GPA of 3.5 and an MCAT® exam score of 29. In addition, the majority of applicants reported slightly increased rates of premedical experiences in community service and medical research, with 82.5 percent reporting community service experience in medical and clinical settings, 68.4 percent in nonclinical community service, and 73 percent reporting experience in research.

Total enrollment increased by 3 percent over last year, with 19,230 students in the 2011 entering class. Medical schools have steadily been increasing their class sizes since the AAMC called for a 30 percent increase in enrollment in 2006 to help alleviate anticipated physician workforce shortages. The majority of this year’s growth came from existing schools while a smaller portion came from first-year enrollees at medical education programs newly established over the last decade. In total, there has been a 16.6 percent enrollment increase over 2002, the base year used in calculating the 30 percent goal. Current projections indicate that medical schools are on target to reach the 30 percent enrollment increase by 2017.

“U.S. medical schools have been responding to the nation’s health challenges by finding ways not only to select the right individuals for medicine, but also to educate and train more doctors for the future. However, to increase the nation’s supply of physicians, the number of residency training positions at teaching hospitals must also increase to accommodate the growth in the number of students in U.S. medical schools. We are very concerned that proposals to decrease federal support of graduate medical education will exacerbate the physician shortage, which is expected to reach 90,000 by 2020,” said Kirch.

Additional highlights:

•Medicine remains an attractive career choice for both men and women, with first-time female applicants increasing 3 percent to 15,953, and first-time male applicants growing nearly 2 percent to 16,698 in 2011. The percentage of male (53 percent) and female (47 percent) enrollees remained steady from last year.
•Asian American applicants increased by 3.8 percent and enrollees increased by 3.3 percent over 2010.
•American Indians applicants and enrollees decreased from 200 to 169 and 191 to 157, respectively.

Released: 10/24/2011

Source: Association of American Medical Colleges

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/number-of-first-time-medical-school-applicants-reaches-new-high

Bullying and Cyberbullying Occur Even in College, Professors Find

Newswise — Research conducted by professors at Indiana State University shows that bullying and cyberbullying doesn’t come to an end with high school.

“We hoped that maturity happens at some point,” said Bridget Roberts-Pittman, assistant professor of counseling. “But is an 18-year-old senior any different than an 18-year-old college freshman?”

Roberts-Pittman and Christine MacDonald, professor of educational and school psychology, said little research has been conducted on bullying and cyberbullying among college students. They decided to help fill in that gap.

“We got into looking at college students because there are studies on elementary, junior high, high school and the workplace,” MacDonald said. “There’s nothing on colleges. It doesn’t just stop when they turn 18.”

In the study, MacDonald and Roberts-Pittman found that almost 22 percent of college students reported being cyberbullied while 15 percent reported being bullied. Cyberbullying occurs when new technology such as social networking , text messaging or instant messaging is used to harass others with harmful text or images. Bullying is defined as when a person attacks another verbally, attacks another physically, makes obscene gestures or intentionally isolates another from a social group.

The study also showed that 38 percent of students knew someone who had been cyberbullied while almost 9 percent reported cyberbullying someone else. Comparatively, research on kindergarten through 12th grade students suggests that as many as 25 percent of school age children have reported being cyberbullied and also 25 percent report that they have cyberbullied another student.

“You’d normally think that wouldn’t happen,” MacDonald said regarding the students reporting their own cyberbullying. “The real number may be higher.”

Of college students who reported being cyberbullied, 25 percent reported being harassed through a social networking site, 21 percent reported that they received harmful text messages, 16 percent receiving such harmful communication through e-mail, and 13 percent through instant messages.

“You don’t have to be the biggest or the strongest or have the best clothes, now you can say, ‘I have a keyboard,’” Roberts-Pittman said about cyberbullying.

In bullying, 42 percent reported seeing someone being bullied by another student while about 8 percent reported bullying another student. Additionally, almost 15 percent reported seeing a professor bully a student while 4 percent reported that they had been bullied by a professor.

“Students who are different in some way seem to be singled out. If it’s by ethnicity or sexual orientation, we don’t know. We don’t have enough data,” MacDonald said.

Universities and colleges must take steps to create safe environments, according to the professors.

“We really believe there’s a whole dimension to bullying from minor rude behavior like not saying hello to assault at the other end,” MacDonald said. “By intervening at minor behaviors, we can stop more severe negative behaviors.”

Intervention must take place from the residence halls to the classrooms.

“We recommend trying to change the climate,” Roberts-Pittman said.

From kindergarten through 12th grade research, they know that anti-bullying measures only work when its enforced systemwide, and the researchers recommend that happen at universities as well.

“We must insist on civil and respectful behavior,” MacDonald said.

They said those being bullied, must come forward and speak out about it.

“Keep talking about it until someone is willing to do something,” MacDonald said.

They also suggested recruiting allies to have someone advocate for them whether it’s a resident assistant, student ombudsman or a professor.

“Come forward,” Roberts-Pittman said.

Released: 10/20/2011

Source: Indiana State University

Via Newswise

Related Link;

http://www.newswise.com/articles/bullying-still-occurs-in-college-professors-find

News You Can Use: Brain Study Reveals How Students Overcome Math Anxiety

Success in math takes practice to control fears

Newswise — Using brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in math.

For the highly math anxious, researchers found a strong link between math success and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes involved in controlling attention and regulating negative emotional reactions. This response kicked in at the very mention of having to solve a mathematics problem.

Teachers as well as students can use the information to improve performance in mathematics, said Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago. Beilock and PhD student Ian Lyons report their findings in the article, “Mathematics Anxiety: Separating the Math from the Anxiety,” published Oct. 20 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“Classroom practices that help students focus their attention and engage in the math task at hand may help eliminate the poor performance brought on by math anxiety,” said Beilock, a leading expert on mathematics anxiety and author of the book “Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To”.

Instead of feeling anxious about an impending math task, students who could focus their attention were able to complete difficult math problems more successfully. Perhaps counter-intuitively, their success wasn’t just about activating areas of the brain involved in math calculation. For math-anxious individuals to succeed, they need to focus on controlling their emotions, Beilock said.

Lyons and Beilock said their work implies that teaching students to control their emotions prior to doing math may be the best way to overcome the math difficulties that often go along with math anxiety. Without this initial step, simply providing additional math instruction or allowing students to become distracted by trying to squelch emotions once a math exam has begun is likely to prove ineffective in producing math success.

The study, which the National Science Foundation funded, began by administering a questionnaire to a group of UChicago students to determine if they had math anxiety. Students answered questions about how anxious they felt when registering for a math course, walking to a challenging math class, being handed a math textbook and so on. Lyons and Beilock then invited a group of students who were especially anxious about these math-related tasks to have their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed difficult math problems and a similarly difficult spelling task. A group of non-math-anxious students was selected as a control group.

In the fMRI scanner, students watched a computer screen for different cues in the form of simple, color-coded shapes. One shape indicated to students they were about to answer questions that tapped their spelling skills, and another shape indicated they were about to do a series of math problems. After a short delay, students then performed a few math or spelling problems. By analyzing brain responses during the cue and problems separately, Lyons and Beilock were able to look at what went on in highly math-anxious student’s heads, even before the actual math began.

For the highly math-anxious, the researchers found a strong connection between math performance and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes.

The more these frontal and parietal regions were activated in math-anxious students when anticipating an impending math task, the more their math performance looked like the non-math-anxious control group. Indeed, highly math-anxious students who showed little activation in these regions when preparing to do math got only 68 percent of math problems correct. But those who showed the strongest activation got 83 percent correct — nearly on par with low math-anxious controls (88 percent correct). This relationship was not seen for the spelling task.

The study found that for the highly math-anxious students who performed well on the math task, the brain activity that started during the anticipation phase initiated a cascade of brain activity during completion of the math task itself. This activity did not involve areas typically associated with performing numerical calculations. Rather, it was seen in subcortical structures — especially caudate and nucleus accumbens — associated with motivation and juggling risks and rewards with the demands of the task at hand.

“Essentially, overcoming math anxiety appears to be less about what you know and more about convincing yourself to just buckle down and get to it,” Beilock said. “But if you wait till the math exam has already started to deal with your anxiety, it’s already too late,” Lyons added.

For students who were not anxious about math to begin with, there was no relationship between activation in brain areas important for focusing attention, controlling emotion and math performance. This shows that approaching math may be entirely different for high and low math-anxious students. “Think about walking across a suspension bridge if you’re afraid of heights versus if you’re not — completely different ballgame,” Lyons said.

The study also sheds light on how people who get nervous about doing math can put their fears aside in everyday situations, such as balancing a checkbook or figuring out a tip among friends or coworkers. Taking a few breaths before jumping in can help one focus less on preparing to do math, and more on what actually needs to be done. “When you let your brain do its job, it usually will,” Lyons said. “If doing math makes you anxious, then your first task is to calm yourself down.”

Released: 10/18/2011

Source: University of Chicago

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/brain-study-reveals-how-students-overcome-math-anxiety

Too Much Undeserved Self-Praise Can Lead to Depression

Accurate Assessments for Poor Performance Better for Self-Esteem, Research Finds

Newswise — WASHINGTON — People who try to boost their self-esteem by telling themselves they’ve done a great job when they haven’t could end up feeling dejected instead, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

High and low performers felt fine when they assessed themselves accurately, probably because the high performers recognized their strengths and low performers acknowledged their weaknesses and could try to improve their future performance, according to a study in the October issue of the APA journal Emotion.

“These findings challenge the popular notion that self-enhancement and providing positive performance feedback to low performers is beneficial to emotional health. Instead, our results underscore the emotional benefits of accurate self-assessments and performance feedback,” said lead author Young-Hoon Kim, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania.
.
The study involved experiments with four different groups of young people from the United States and Hong Kong. Three U.S. groups totaled 295 college undergraduates, with 186 women and a mean age of 19, and one Hong Kong group consisted of 2,780 high school students, with 939 girls, from four different schools and across grades 7-12.

In the first two experiments, one of the U.S. groups and the Hong Kong students took academic tests and were asked to rate and compare their own performances with other students at their schools. Following their assessments, all the participants completed another widely used questionnaire to assess symptoms of depression.

In the third and fourth experiments, researchers evaluated the other two sets of U.S. undergraduates with feedback exercises that made high performers think their performance was low and low performers think their performance was high. Control groups participated in both and received their scores with no feedback.

Across all the studies, results showed that those who rated their own performance as much higher than it actually was were significantly more likely to feel dejected. “Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement,” said co-author Chi-Yue Chiu, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The results also revealed cross-cultural differences that support past findings that Asians are more humble than Americans. The U.S. undergraduates had a higher mean response when rating their performance than the Hong Kong students, at 63 percent compared to 49 percent, the researchers found. Still, they found that excessive self-enhancement was related to depression for both cultures.

Released: 10/19/2011

Source: American Psychological Association

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/too-much-undeserved-self-praise-can-lead-to-depression