[Press release] Carnegie Mellon Researchers Reveal How Mindfulness Training Affects Healt

From the 14 February 2015 press release

Over the past decade, there have been many encouraging findings suggesting that mindfulness training can improve a broad range of mental and physical health problems. Yet, exactly how mindfulness positively impacts health is not clear.

Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell — whose cutting-edge work has shown how mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults and alleviates stress — and his graduate student Emily K. Lindsay have developed a model suggesting that mindfulness influences health via stress reduction pathways. Their work, published in “Current Directions in Psychological Science,” describes the biological pathways linking mindfulness training with reduced stress and stress-related disease outcomes.

….

 

Lying Less Linked to Better Health

 

From the 4 August 2012 article at Eureka News Alert

Telling fewer lies tied to improved relationships, too, according to study

ORLANDO, Fla. — Telling the truth when tempted to lie can significantly improve a person’s mental and physical health, according to a “Science of Honesty” study presented at the American Psychological Association’s 120th Annual Convention.

“Recent evidence indicates that Americans average about 11 lies per week. We wanted to find out if living more honestly can actually cause better health,” said lead author Anita E. Kelly, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. “We found that the participants could purposefully and dramatically reduce their everyday lies, and that in turn was associated with significantly improved health.”

Kelly and co-author Lijuan Wang, PhD, also of Notre Dame, conducted the honesty experiment over 10 weeks with a sample of 110 people, of whom 34 percent were adults in the community and 66 percent were college students. They ranged in age from 18 to 71 years, with an average age of 31. The just-completed study has not yet undergone peer review and has yet to be published.

Approximately half the participants were instructed to stop telling major and minor lies for the 10 weeks. The other half served as a control group that received no special instructions about lying. Both groups came to the laboratory each week to complete health and relationship measures and to take a polygraph test assessing the number of major and white lies they had told that week.

Over the course of 10 weeks, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. For example, when participants in the no-lie group told three fewer white lies than they did in other weeks, they experienced on average about four fewer mental-health complaints, such as feeling tense or melancholy, and about three fewer physical complaints, such as sore throats and headaches, the study found. In contrast, when control group members told three fewer white lies, they experienced two fewer mental-health complaints and about one less physical complaint. The pattern was similar for major lies, Kelly said.

Compared to the control group, participants in the more truthful group told significantly fewer lies across the 10-week study, and by the fifth week, they saw themselves as more honest, Kelly said. When participants across both groups lied less in a given week, they reported their physical health and mental health to be significantly better that week.

In weeks when participants told fewer lies, they reported that their close personal relationships had improved and that their social interactions overall had gone more smoothly that week, the study revealed. “Statistical analyses showed that this improvement in relationships significantly accounted for the improvement in health that was associated with less lying,” said Wang, who is a statistician.

At the end of the 10 weeks, participants in the no-lie group described their efforts to keep from lying to others in their day-to-day interactions. Some said they realized they could simply tell the truth about their daily accomplishments rather than exaggerate, while others said they stopped making false excuses for being late or failing to complete tasks, Kelly said. Others said that they learned to avoid lying by responding to a troubling question with another question to distract the person, she said.

The study sample was 63 percent women, 87 percent white, 4 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian-American and 2 percent of another race. Annual family income for the participants was fairly evenly distributed over a range of less than $25,000 to more than $160,000.

Because the findings are new they will be submitted for scientific review and publication later this year, Kelly said.

###

The “Science of Honesty” project was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Opinions presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

Related articles

• Honesty boosts mental, physical health, study shows (wjla.com)
• Study finds that avoiding lies can improve your health (usatoday.com)
• Study finds that avoiding lies can improve your health – USA TODAY (drugstoresource.wordpress.com)

 

Geographic information systems demonstrate links between health and location

From the 10 April 2012 Eureka news alert

San Diego, CA, April 10, 2012 – The neighborhoods in which children and adolescents live and spend their time play a role in whether or not they eat a healthy diet, get enough exercise or become obese, concludes a collection of studies in a special theme issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Each of the six studies uses the latest concepts and methods in geographic information systems (GIS)-based research to determine how the geographic location affects physical health. A study titled “Spatial Classification of Youth Physical Activity Patterns” shows, for example, that while rural youth get the largest proportion of their physical activity while at school, urban and suburban youth are most active when commuting. Not only does this finding suggest that the walk to school might be just as important to some children’s health as is the physical education they receive as part of the school curriculum, it is also important given that adolescent health behaviors are predictive of behaviors in adults.

Another study by researchers in the United Kingdom concludes that adolescents in rural areas ate fast food more often when fast-food outlets were easily accessible, whereas the opposite was true for adolescents living in urban areas. The researchers, led by Lorna J. Fraser of the University of Leeds, conclude that although the need continues to exist for nutritional education regarding fast food, placing restrictions on the location of fast-food outlets may not decrease consumption of fast food in the same ways in all areas.

Brian E. Saelens and Lawrence D. Frank, along with their colleagues, authored two papers for the theme issue. “Obesogenic Neighborhood Environments, Child and Parent Obesity: The Neighborhood Impact on Kids Study” evaluated child and parent weight status across neighborhoods in Seattle and San Diego and ultimately found evidence that GIS-based definitions of obesogenic neighborhoods that consider both physical activity and the availability of healthy food options were strongly related to childhood obesity.

In a second study, the researchers used GIS-based measures to determine the ‘walkability’ and proximity to healthy food of certain neighborhoods in the San Diego and Seattle regions. The study recommends that such measures be used to study physical activity, nutrition and obesity outcomes.

In a paper titled “Obesogenic Environments in Youth: Concepts and Methods from a Longitudinal National Sample,” Janne Boone-Heinonen and colleagues describe the challenges inherent to longitudinal neighborhood environment research, as well as the insights they gained and the advances and remaining gaps in study design. The researchers note that understanding which neighborhood environment features influence weight gain in various age groups is essential to effectively prevent and reduce childhood obesity.

Two commentaries included in the theme issue examine the ways that computer-based GIS systems—which transform geospatial data into visual representations of the real world—can help prevent childhood obesity. “Thinking About Place, Spatial Behavior, and Spatial Process in Childhood Obesity” by Stephen A. Matthews, outlines the content of the theme, concluding that although GIS is not a panacea, it “offers an important means of better understanding and dealing with some of the most pressing problems of our time, and provides valuable tools for researchers and policymakers alike.”

The second commentary, providing a perspective from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, notes that while GIS is still in the relatively early stages of application in the field, it might one day enhance understanding of the complex and dynamic connections between people, their health and their physical and social environments.

The Health Impacts Of Comparing Yourself To Others

umm….yes, I do compare myself. Always knew it wasn’t quite healthy at times,  this article seems to make sense..
On another note, this article may provide good tools in analyzing commercial advertisements (as radio, television, print media, and those pesky Web-based pop-ups). And perhaps to a degree public service announcements. No communication content is completely true!

 

The Health Impacts Of Comparing Yourself To Others

From the 9th February 2012 Medical News Today article

Comparing yourself to others with the same health problem can influence your physical and emotional health, according to researchers who conducted a qualitative synthesis of over 30 studies focusing on the relationship between social comparisons and health.

“If you’ve ever looked at another person and thought, ‘Well, at least I’m doing better than he is,’ or ‘Wow, I wish I could be doing as well as she is,’ you’re not alone,” said Josh Smyth, professor of biobehavioral health and of medicine, Penn State. “This phenomenon – first proposed in the 1950s – is common in daily life. When we’re unsure of how we’re doing, we can reduce uncertainty by getting information from others. People with chronic illnesses are particularly likely to compare themselves to others with the same illness.”

In their qualitative synthesis published in the current issue of Health Psychology Review, Smith and the researchers at Syracuse University and the University of Iowa found that people who compare “downward” to others who are worse off, are less depressed than people who compare “upward” to people who are better off. Downward comparisons often are associated with immediate positive feelings such as relief and gratitude.

But nearly as often, studies show the exact opposite. People who compare upward do better on physical health measures and report feeling hopeful about their ability to improve. Still other studies demonstrate the negative effects of both types of comparisons – downward comparisons can lead to sadness or worry and upward comparisons can lead to dejection. ,,,,

Related articles

• Comparing yourself to others can have health impacts (eurekalert.org)
• ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ can seriously damage your health, say scientists (dailymail.co.uk)