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More than half of people using cannabis for pain experience multiple withdrawal symptoms: Minority experience worsening of symptoms over time, especially younger people -- ScienceDaily

In addition to a general craving to use cannabis, withdrawal symptoms can include anxiety, sleep difficulties, decreased appetite, restlessness, depressed mood, aggression, irritability, nausea, sweating, headache, stomach pain, strange dreams, increased anger and shakiness. Previous research has shown that the more symptoms and greater severity of symptoms a person has, the less likely they are to be able to reduce their use of cannabis, quit using it or stay away from it once they quit. They may mistakenly think that the symptoms happen because of their underlying medical conditions, and may even increase the amount or frequency of their cannabis use to try to counteract the effect -- leading to a cycle of increasing use and increasing withdrawal.

High and low exercise intensity found to influence brain function differently: Study suggests that exercise could play a role as a therapeutic strategy in neurological and psychiatric disorders -- ScienceDaily

The behavioral data showed a significant increase in positive mood after both exercise intensities and no significant change in negative mood. The results of the Rs-fMRI tests showed that low-intensity exercise led to increased functional connectivity in networks associated with cognitive processing and attention. High-intensity exercise, on the other hand, led to increased functional connectivity in networks related to affective, emotional processes. High-intensity exercise also led to a decreased functional connectivity in networks associated with motor function.

How Feeling Unhappy Affects Your Friendships - The Atlantic

If someone were especially unhappy at noon on a Saturday, that person would be almost two times more likely to see a friend that afternoon than if he or she were especially happy at noon. Meanwhile, if that person were particularly happy, his or her odds of interacting with a stranger that afternoon would go up by 20 percent. Those interactions might then feed on each other, with strangers making the person uncomfortable and less happy and close friends cheering him or her up again—and make the person eager to spend time with more strangers.

Adult-born hippocampal neurons bidirectionally modulate entorhinal inputs into the dentate gyrus | Science

Young adult-born granule cells (abGCs) in the dentate gyrus (DG) have a profound impact on cognition and mood. However, it remains unclear how abGCs distinctively contribute to local DG information processing. We found that the actions of abGCs in the DG depend on the origin of incoming afferents.

An Amygdala-Hippocampus Subnetwork that Encodes Variation in Human Mood: Cell

The most common subnetwork, found in 13 of 21 subjects, was characterized by β-frequency coherence (13-30 Hz) between the amygdala and hippocampus. Increased variability of this subnetwork correlated with worsening mood across these 13 subjects. Moreover, these subjects had significantly higher trait anxiety than the 8 of 21 for whom this amygdala-hippocampus subnetwork was absent.

The Truth About Prescription Pills: One Writer's Story of Anxiety and Addiction — Vogue - Vogue

Like me, she wasn’t a vodka-in-the-morning drinker, but when she drank—usually California Chardonnays—she couldn’t stop. She’d get high and silly and then, at the drop of a dime, she’d turn mean, lashing out at those closest to her. It was so contrary to her fundamental nature—kind, compassionate, sensitive—and she hated herself for the times she hurt our family. But ultimately, no pill or drink, no amount of love, could soothe her sadness. When I was 22, she took her life. I worried that her suffering was a warning, a glimpse of what my future might be if I didn’t change things.

Man's Bipolar Mood Cycles Linked to the Moon | American Council on Science and Health

The author observed the behavior of a 51-year-old man with bipolar disorder. Patients with bipolar disorder experience manic-depressive cycles. The depressive cycles resemble those of patients suffering from severe depression, while during manic cycles, patients are hyperactive. Sleep patterns are abnormal, with patients sleeping too much during depressive episodes and not enough during manic episodes. In a sort of vicious cycle, disturbances in sleep pattern appear to be both a cause and effect of manic-depressive episodes.

ADHD drugs do not improve cognition in healthy college students -- ScienceDaily

Results of the new study, published last month in the journal Pharmacy, show that the standard 30 mg dose of Adderall did improve attention and focus -- a typical result from a stimulant -- but that effect failed to translate to better performance on a battery of neurocognitive tasks that measured short-term memory, reading comprehension and fluency. Weyandt has a theory about why working memory would be adversely affected by the medication. Brain scan research shows that a person with ADHD often has less neural activity in the regions of the brain that control executive function -- working memory, attention, self-control. For people with ADHD, Adderall and similar medications increase activity in those regions and appear to normalize functioning. "If your brain is functioning normally in those regions, the medication is unlikely to have a positive effect on cognition and my actually impair cognition. In other words, you need to have a deficit to benefit from the medicine," Weyandt said. Participants in the study also reported their perceived effects of the drug and its impact on their emotions, with students reporting significant elevation of their mood when taking Adderall. In contrast to the small, mixed effects on cognition, the drug had much larger effects on mood and bodily responses, increasing positive mood, emotional ratings of the drug effect, heart rate and blood pressure. "These are classic effects of psychostimulants," said White. "The fact that we see these effects on positive emotion and cardiovascular activity, in the same individuals for whom cognitive effects were small or negative in direction, is important. It indicates that the cognitive and the emotional impact of these drugs are separate. How you feel under the drug does not necessarily mean that there is an improvement in cognition; there can be a decrease, as seen here in young adults without ADHD."

Tick tock: Study links body clock to mood disorders | AFP.com

or the new study, an international team led by University of Glasgow psychologist Laura Lyall analysed data -- taken from the UK Biobank, one of the most complete long-term health surveys ever done -- on 91,105 people aged 37 to 73. The volunteers wore accelerometers that measured patterns of rest and activity and had this record compared to their mental history, also taken from the UK Biobank. Individuals with a history of disrupting their body's natural rhythm -- working night shifts, for example, or suffering repeated jetlag -- also tended to have a higher lifetime risk of mood disorders, feelings of unhappiness, and cognitive problems, the researchers found.

Chemical imbalance boosts negative viewsof mentally ill

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

In a Host of Ailments, Seeing a Brain Out of Rhythm - The New York Times

Dr. Llinás, the chairman of neuroscience and physiology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, believes that abnormal brain rhythms help account for a variety of serious disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, tinnitus and depression. His theory may explain why the technique called deep brain stimulation — implanting electrodes into particular regions of the brain — often alleviates the symptoms of movement disorders like Parkinson’s.

Analysis shows wearable data could help identify mental health conditions in diabetic populations | MobiHealthNews

Kumar said that individuals with mental health illnesses (MHI) are also at a higher risk for developing diabetes than those without. This is because MHI is associated with unhealthy eating habits, less physical activity and a potential increase in weight.  The analysis, which was complied by using data from general Achievement use, found that diabetes patients that self-reported symptoms of MHI walk on average 1,469 steps less per day than those without MHI symptoms. The mean daily steps taken by diabetes patients with no MHI symptoms was 7,032, compared to patients with MHI symptoms who walked 5,663 steps a day.  Participants with MHI symptoms had a lower frequency of days with high activity levels and more frequent days with lower activity levels than their counterparts without MHI symptoms. There was little difference in sleep between the two groups; patients with MHI symptoms slept an average of 6.48 hours and those with MHI symptoms slept an average of 6.72 hours.  The analysis looked at survey results from 1,330 participants with diabetes. Three hundred and thirty-six or 25.3 percent reported having some MHI in the last year. Of that 77 percent reported having anxiety symptoms and 23.7 percent reported having some form of depression.

Parents with bipolar benefit from self-help tool -- ScienceDaily

"This online parenting support programme combines self-management strategies for bipolar disorder. It looks at the impact of extremes of mood on parenting and how to maintain consistency in parenting." As this intervention requires very little professional support, it could be offered as a supplement to current services without significant additional investment.

Green is good for you

In one study, for instance, he asked participants to complete a 40-minute sequence of stroop and binary classification tasks designed to exhaust their directed attention capacity. After the attentionally fatiguing tasks, the randomly assigned participants spent 40 minutes walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music. After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proofreading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger. "These are not spectacular natural environments or horribly oppressive urban environments," says Hartig, an associate professor of applied psychology at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Gävle, Sweden. "We try to represent typical local conditions, using what's available to people in the way of places they can enter if they're feeling stressed and want some relief."

Bird contagion

This week, scientists report that New Zealand parrots can spread positive emotion, too — or at least behaviour that could indicate their state of mind. The researchers recorded the play calls of keas (Nestor notabilis) and played them back to groups of wild keas. When the birds heard the sounds, they played more vigorously and longer — certainly more than when they heard the calls of a South Island robin (Petroica australis). The calls did not, however, seem to act as an invitation to join existing birds at play. Some keas that heard them preferred to start their own play — typically embarking on feats of aerial acrobatics. With self-confessed anthropomorphism, the scientists suggest that the play calls of these birds act in the same way as infectious laughter in people (R. Schwing et al. Curr. Biol. 27, R213–R214; 2017). In its homeland, the playful kea is called the clown of the mountains. And as every good clown knows: cry and you cry alone. But laugh and the world laughs with you.

Stop running, start sobbing

Participants reported to the lab on Monday following their regular workout and completed a series of questionnaires, and these same questionnaires were completed at the same time of day on the next 4 d. The dependent variables consisted of state and trait anxiety (STAI), and tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion, and overall mood (POMS). Increases in total mood disturbance, state anxiety, tension, depression, and confusion across days were significant (P < 0.05), and vigor decreased. The pattern of increasing mood disturbance with exercise deprivation was followed by mood improvement to baseline levels when exercise was resumed. We concluded that a brief period of exercise deprivation in habitual exercisers results in mood disturbance within 24-48 h.

Bad timing is depressing: Disrupting the brain's internal clock causes depressive-like behavior in mice -- ScienceDaily

Inherent circadian clocks help us function throughout the day, by telling us when to sleep, wake and eat, as well as by synchronizing our bodily processes. "It is perhaps not surprising that disruptions of our natural synchronization can have heavy impacts on our physical and mental health," Dr. Landgraf added. However, until now researchers did not know if disturbed circadian rhythms were a cause or consequence of mood disorders. In the new study, a team led by David K. Welsh has shown for the first time a causal relationship between functioning circadian clocks and mood regulation.

Mind of blue: Emotional expression affects the brain's creativity network: Study of jazz pianists finds 'happy' and 'sad' music evoke different neural patterns -- ScienceDaily

"There's more deactivation of the DLPFC during happy improvisations, perhaps indicating that people are getting into more of a 'groove' or 'zone,' but during sad improvisations there's more recruitment of areas of the brain related to reward," said McPherson, a classical violist and first-year graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology. "This indicates there may be different mechanisms for why it's pleasurable to create happy versus sad music."

Hypo start-ups

Business owners are "vulnerable to the dark side of obsession," suggest researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. They conducted interviews with founders for a study about entrepreneurial passion. The researchers found that many subjects displayed signs of clinical obsession, including strong feelings of distress and anxiety, which have "the potential to lead to impaired functioning," they wrote in a paper published in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal in April. Reinforcing that message is John Gartner, a practicing psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. In his book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, Gartner argues that an often-overlooked temperament--hypomania--may be responsible for some entrepreneurs' strengths as well as their flaws. A milder version of mania, hypomania often occurs in the relatives of manic-depressives and affects an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of Americans. "If you're manic, you think you're Jesus," says Gartner. "If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing. We're talking about different levels of grandiosity but the same symptoms."

Music has a hardwired mood?

People's emotional response to music is visceral: It is, in part, ingrained in some of the oldest regions of the brain in terms of evolutionary history, rather than in the large wrinkly human cortex that evolved more recently. One patient—a woman known in the research literature as I. R.—exemplifies this primal response. I. R. has lesions to her auditory cortices, the regions of the cortex that process sound. When I. R. hears the normal version of a song and a horribly detuned version, she cannot tell the difference, explains Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies music at Western University's Brain and Mind Institute in Ontario. But when I. R. hears a happy song and a sad song, she immediately distinguishes them from one another.

Running as medicine for ADD

Back in the early '80s, a marathoner came to me and said, look, I think I have adult-onset attention deficit disorder[…]the guy was - had a dual appointment at MIT and Harvard as a professor, was a MacArthur Fellow, had all the credentials in the world; and he was a marathoner. And he had to stop marathoning because he hurt his knee and couldn't run his typical seven to eight miles a day. So he said that at first, he got depressed, which happens to most marathoners. But secondly, after his depression resolved, he couldn't pay attention. He was like a child with attention deficit disorder - was always off in dreamland or would forget things, would get aggressive too easily, ignored his friends; all the things that we see in attention deficit disorder. […]I put him on medicine and that helped quite a lot but then, eventually, he got back to running, and he dropped the medicine because it was no longer necessary. And that's what we see at times with many of the people who have attentional issues or mood issues; that exercise can be self-medicating.
Drawing pizzas improved the subjects' mood by 28%, while sketching cupcakes and strawberries boosted spirits by 27% and 22%, respectively. Mood in the pepper group improved by only 1%. There were no significant differences in hunger or excitement levels between the groups.