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As U.S. election looms, this ‘rumor researcher’ tracks—and combats—falsehoods in real time | Science | AAAS

After the war, Japanese American researcher Tamotsu Shibutani helped change how rumors were seen, casting them as a rational response to disasters and uncertainty. To Shibutani, who had spent the war imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in California, rumor was more of a verb than a noun, a collective process of making sense of the world. His view was heavily influenced by his experience in the camp, Starbird notes, where the community used rumors to try and cope with the “horrible uncertainty” they faced. “In times of crisis and anxiety and these kinds of conditions, to participate in rumoring is a natural thing to do, and then there’s other folks that are going to exploit that,” she says. “Those dynamics have always been there.” Starbird initially expected her research to tell a positive story: how rumors spread by some users are quickly fact checked and corrected by others. “I’d sort of seen that in the early data, where we would see rumors and misinformation, but they were quickly corrected,” Starbird says. “They weren’t causing a lot of damage, as far as we could tell.” It was the idea of a self-correcting crowd, a kind of Wikipedia in the wild. But her first few studies quickly disabused her of this notion. “We could really see, especially between 2013 and 2015, that rumors and misinformation were becoming a larger and larger part of the discourse online during these crisis events,” she says. Rumors were rarely being corrected—and when they were, the correction usually came too late and reached far fewer people than the original, false information. A rumor that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack by Navy SEALs, for instance, circulated on Twitter (now X) for days. Social media algorithms, designed to keep people’s attention, often advantaged the sensational. “And it turns out that falsehoods and conspiracy theories tend to be more sensational than the truth,” Starbird says.
#narratives #history #stress #cult #rumors - science.org

Bone, not adrenaline, drives fight or flight response

The researchers found in mice and humans that almost immediately after the brain recognizes danger, it instructs the skeleton to flood the bloodstream with the bone-derived hormone osteocalcin, which is needed to turn on the fight or flight response. "In bony vertebrates, the acute stress response is not possible without osteocalcin," says the study's senior investigator Gérard Karsenty, MD, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
#stress #cortisol - phys.org

New doctors' DNA ages six times faster than normal in first year: Long work hours of intern year associated with accelerated shortening of telomere regions of chromosomes -- ScienceDaily

Published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the new study is the first to measure telomere length before and after individuals faced a common prolonged intense experience. It involved 250 interns from around the country who volunteered for the Intern Health Study, based at the University of Michigan, and a comparison group of college students from U-M. "Research has implicated telomeres as an indicator of aging and disease risk, but these longitudinal findings advance the possibility that telomere length can serve as a biomarker that tracks effects of stress, and helps us understand how stress gets 'under the skin' and increases our risk for disease," says Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D., the U-M neuroscientist and psychiatrist who is the study's senior author and heads the Intern Health Study. He adds, "It will be important to study how telomere changes play out in larger groups of medical trainees, and in other groups of people subjected to specific prolonged stresses such as military training, graduate studies in the sciences and law, working for startup companies, or pregnancy and the first months of parenting."
#academia #aging #doctors #medicine #stress #telomeres - sciencedaily.com

Heavy drinking may change DNA, leading to increased craving for alcohol: Genetic vicious cycle may reinforce risky drinking behavior -- ScienceDaily

Scientists at Rutgers and Yale University School of Medicine focused on two genes implicated in the control of drinking behavior: PER2, which influences the body's biological clock, and POMC, which regulates our stress-response system. By comparing groups of moderate, binge and heavy drinkers, the researchers found that the two genes had changed in the binge and heavy drinkers through an alcohol-influenced gene modification process called methylation. The binge and heavy drinkers also showed reductions in gene expression, or the rate at which these genes create proteins. These changes increased with greater alcohol intake. Additionally, in an experiment, the drinkers viewed stress-related, neutral or alcohol-related images. They also were shown containers of beer and subsequently tasted beer, and their motivation to drink was evaluated. The result: alcohol-fueled changes in the genes of binge and heavy drinkers were associated with a greater desire for alcohol.
#addiction #circadian #DNA #alcohol #stress #methylation - sciencedaily.com

What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick? - The New York Times

The discovery of this genetic correlation to placebo response set Hall off on a continuing effort to identify the biochemical ensemble she calls the placebome — the term reflecting her belief that it will one day take its place among the other important “-omes” of medical science, from the genome to the microbiome. The rs4680 gene snippet is one of a group that governs the production of COMT, and COMT is one of a number of enzymes that determine levels of catecholamines, a group of brain chemicals that includes dopamine and epinephrine. (Low COMT tends to mean higher levels of dopamine, and vice versa.) Hall points out that the catecholamines are associated with stress, as well as with reward and good feeling, which bolsters the possibility that the placebome plays an important role in illness and health, especially in the chronic, stress-related conditions that are most susceptible to placebo effects.
#dopamine #placebo #stress #COMT - nytimes.com

In depression the brain region for stress control is larger -- ScienceDaily

So far, it is known that people more predisposed to depression show a dysregulation of the endogenous stress response system, otherwise known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis), which is normally triggered when we are faced with a stressful situation. This response increases the amount of cortisol, providing the body with more energy when faced with a potential threat or challenge. Once the challenging situation has passed, several control mechanisms in the HPA axis normally ensure the system returns to a balanced state. In people who suffer with depressive disorder or who are more predisposed, this is not the case. Instead, a malfunction of the feedback mechanism results in a stress response operating at full throttle, even when there is no apparent stressful situation. Until now, the underlying reason for this hyperactive stress response system and the role of the hypothalamus as its overall control unit has remained unclear.
#depression #stress #cortisol #hypothalmus #HPA - sciencedaily.com

Living close to urban green spaces is associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer: Residential proximity to agricultural areas is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, study shows -- ScienceDaily

"found a linear correlation between distance from green spaces and breast cancer risk. In other words, the risk of breast cancer in the population declines, the closer their residence is to an urban green space. These findings highlight the importance of natural spaces for our health and show why green spaces are an essential component of our urban environment, not just in the form of isolated areas but as a connective network linking the whole urban area and benefitting all its inhabitants."
#paleotherapy #cancer #stress #cities #trees #green - sciencedaily.com

Exercise Can Help Beat Cocaine Addiction - Neuroscience News

Using animal models, Thanos found that regular aerobic exercise (one hour on a treadmill, five times a week) decreased stress-induced cocaine-seeking behavior. Exercise also altered behavioral and physiological responses to stress. Individuals who are addicted to cocaine have altered neural, behavioral and physiological responses to stress. Recent research by Thanos demonstrated how exercise can alter the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine pathway, which is linked to the rewarding and reinforcing properties of drugs such as cocaine. In addition, exercise has been shown to reduce stress hormones and elevate mood, which could assist in alleviating anxiety and negative emotions associated with withdrawal.
#exercise #paleotherapy #addiction #dopamine #stress - neurosciencenews.com

Neural inflammation plays critical role in stress-induced depression -- ScienceDaily

These results show that repeated social defeat stress activates microglia in the medial prefrontal cortex via the innate immune receptors TLR2/4. This triggers the expression of inflammation-related cytokines IL-1? and TNF?, leading to the atrophy and impaired response of neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, and causing depressive behavior. Professor Furuyashiki says: "These findings demonstrate the importance of neural inflammation caused by the innate immune system for stress-induced depression. This could lead to the development of new antidepressant medication targeting innate immune molecules."
#depression #stress #prefrontal-cortex #cytokines - sciencedaily.com

Stress helps unlearn fear: New findings on extinction learning may prove useful for therapies -- ScienceDaily

"Pharmacological studies have demonstrated that the treatment of anxiety disorders can be improved if the stress hormone cortisol is administered to the patients," says Oliver Wolf. "Our study has produced evidence for an underlying mechanism." Under the umbrella of the Collaborative Research Centre 1280, several research groups from Bochum are planning to investigate if an exposure to stress prior to exposure therapy may improve its efficacy.
#anxiety #stress #cortisol #extinction - sciencedaily.com

Could stress (exercise?) help unlearn anxiety?

On the following day, 50 per cent of the cohort were exposed to a stressful situation: they had to hold one hand in ice water and were filmed and monitored by a supervisor. The other 50 per cent of the cohort were not subjected to the stress test. Subsequently, all participants were shown pictures of the lamp emitting coloured light, which were not followed by electric stimulations; however, the lamp was no longer located in an office but in a library. On the third day, the team presented the office and the library photos of the lamp emitting coloured light without following it up by electric stimulations. In both the office and the library context, participants in the stress group responded less anxiously to the colour of light, which had preceded electric stimulations on the first day. They had transferred the knowledge that no unpleasant stimulus would follow from the library context to the office context. This was not the case in the non-stress cohort. The participants of this group continued to present an anxious response when they saw the colour of light in the office context that had been accompanied by electric stimulations on the first day. When presented library photos, they responded in the same way as the control group, i.e. showing no anxiety. For them, extinction learning occurred only in one specific context.
#exercise #anxiety #stress #extinction - sciencedaily.com

Running helps brain stave off effects of chronic stress: Exercise protects vital memory and learning functions -- ScienceDaily

"Exercise is a simple and cost-effective way to eliminate the negative impacts on memory of chronic stress," said study lead author Jeff Edwards, associate professor of physiology and developmental biology at BYU. Inside the hippocampus, memory formation and recall occur optimally when the synapses or connections between neurons are strengthened over time. That process of synaptic strengthening is called long-term potentiation (LTP). Chronic or prolonged stress weakens the synapses, which decreases LTP and ultimately impacts memory. Edwards' study found that when exercise co-occurs with stress, LTP levels are not decreased, but remain normal.
#paleotherapy #running #hippocampus #stress #LTP - sciencedaily.com

Three genes essential for cells to tell time -- ScienceDaily

"Many researchers in this field have long suspected oxidative stress and circadian rhythms are somehow connected because of the cycles of photosynthesis and DNA replication we see even in ancient organisms; photosynthesis requires sunlight and creates free radicals that could damage DNA, so cells postpone DNA replication and cell division until nighttime when photosynthesis has stopped. We are very excited about our results because we can approach the origin of the circadian clock by connecting oxidative stress and circadian regulation through the Ask genes," said Fukada.
#circadian #DNA #stress #epigenetics - sciencedaily.com

Is your stress changing my brain? Stress isn't just contagious; it alters the brain on a cellular level -- ScienceDaily

The study's lead author, Toni-Lee Sterley, a postdoctoral associate in Bains' lab said, "What was remarkable was that CRH neurons from the partners, who were not themselves exposed to an actual stress, showed changes that were identical to those we measured in the stressed mice."
#synchronize #neurons #stress - sciencedaily.com

The link between circadian rhythms and aging: Gene associated with longevity also regulates the body's circadian clock -- ScienceDaily

Last year, Guarente found that a robust circadian period correlated with longer lifespan in mice. That got him wondering what role SIRT1, which has been shown to prolong lifespan in many animals, might play in that phenomenon. SIRT1, which Guarente first linked with aging more than 15 years ago, is a master regulator of cell responses to stress, coordinating a variety of hormone networks, proteins and genes to help keep cells alive and healthy.
#sleep #circadian #aging #stress #death - sciencedaily.com

Why do healthy children die from the flu? Study offers new insights -- ScienceDaily

The study examined specific immune pathways known to be activated during flu infections in both humans and mice, which makes the findings relevant to children. Coates and colleagues focused on the initial immune response to the flu, using healthy adult and young mice who have not had previous exposures to the virus. They discovered that in the young, more immune cells called monocytes were recruited to the lungs, and that the gene expression profiles of these cells had more inflammatory features, causing greater inflammation and more severe lung injury. "Our findings provide new targets for developing effective medicines to treat the flu in children," says Coates. "We can seek ways to prevent monocytes from coming to the lungs, or we can target monocyte behavior in the lungs to reduce dangerous inflammation."
#inflamation #immune-system #stress - sciencedaily.com

OCD treatment could someday start with a brain scan -- ScienceDaily

Using a functional MRI machine, or fMRI, the researchers scanned the brains of 42 people with OCD, ages 18 to 60, before and after four weeks of intensive, daily cognitive behavioral therapy. Researchers specifically analyzed how different areas of the brain activate in sync with each other -- a property called functional connectivity -- during a period of rest. Functional MRI does this by measuring blood flow in the brain, which correlates with neurons' activity levels. In addition, the scientists assessed the severity of participants' OCD symptoms before and after the treatment, using a scaled system in which a lower score indicates less severe or less frequent symptoms.
#stress #fMRI #CBT - sciencedaily.com

Running helps brain stave off effects of chronic stress: Exercise protects vital memory and learning functions -- ScienceDaily

"Exercise is a simple and cost-effective way to eliminate the negative impacts on memory of chronic stress," said study lead author Jeff Edwards, associate professor of physiology and developmental biology at BYU. Inside the hippocampus, memory formation and recall occur optimally when the synapses or connections between neurons are strengthened over time. That process of synaptic strengthening is called long-term potentiation (LTP). Chronic or prolonged stress weakens the synapses, which decreases LTP and ultimately impacts memory. Edwards' study found that when exercise co-occurs with stress, LTP levels are not decreased, but remain normal.
#exercise #paleotherapy #memory #hippocampus #stress - sciencedaily.com

Researchers 'dismantle' mindfulness intervention to see how each component works -- ScienceDaily

As health interventions based on mindfulness have grown in popularity, some of the field's leading researchers have become concerned that the evidence base for such practices is not yet robust enough. A new study shows how a rigorous approach to studying mindfulness-based interventions can help ensure that claims are backed by science. One problem is that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) sometimes blend practices, which makes it difficult to measure how each of those practices affects participants. To address that issue, the researchers took a common intervention for mood disorders -- mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) -- and created a controlled study that isolated, or dismantled, its two main ingredients. Those include open monitoring (OM) -- noticing and acknowledging negative feelings without judgment or an emotional secondary reaction to them; and focused attention (FA) -- maintaining focus on or shifting it toward a neutral sensation, such as breathing, to disengage from negative emotions or distractions. "It has long been hypothesized that focused attention practice improves attentional control while open-monitoring promotes emotional non-reactivity -- two aspects of mindfulness thought to contribute its therapeutic effects," said study lead and corresponding author Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior in the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. "However, because these two practices are almost always delivered in combination, it is difficult to assess their purported differential effects. By creating separate, validated, single-ingredient training programs for each practice, the current project provides researchers with a tool to test the individual contributions of each component and mechanism to clinical endpoints." In the study, the researchers randomized more than 100 individuals with mild-to-severe depression, anxiety and stress to take one of three eight-week courses: one set of classes provided a standardized MBCT that incorporated the typical blend of OM and FA. The two other classes each provided an intervention that employed only OM or only FA. In every other respect -- time spent in class, time practicing at home, instructor training and skill, participant characteristics, number of handouts -- each class was comparable by design. At the beginning and end of the classes, the researchers asked the volunteers to answer a variety of standardized questionnaires, including scales that measure their self-reported ability to achieve some of the key skills each practice is assumed to improve. If the researchers saw significant differences between the FA group and the OM group on the skills each was supposed to affect, then there would be evidence that the practices uniquely improve those skills as intervention providers often claim. Sure enough, the different practices engaged different skills and mechanisms as predicted. The FA-only group, for example, reported much greater improvement in the ability to willfully shift or focus attention than the OM-only group (but not the MBCT group, which also received FA training). Meanwhile, the OM-only group was significantly more improved than the FA-only group (but not the MBCT group) in the skill of being non-reactive to negative thoughts.
#ADHD #stress #emotion #mindfulness #rumination - sciencedaily.com

Effects of exercise with or without light exposure on sleep quality and hormone reponses

Cycling adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) gets released by the stimulus of adrenocortical hormones due to intake of coffee, tea, chocolate, or stress. Excessive cAMP release accelerates energy release to reach excitement condition that leads us to be nervous and unsettled. However, sunlight exposure decreases cAMP, leading to peaceful and settled conditions [53].
#paleotherapy #sunlight #stimulants #stress #CAMP - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

REM launders emotion

One of the things that's been emerging over the past five or six years in the literature is that REM sleep seems to serve an almost sort of overnight therapy benefit in terms of our emotional well-being and our mental health. And what's interesting is that REM sleep chemically, in terms of the anuric transmitters that swirl around the brain, REM sleep is perhaps the only time during the 24-hour period where a particular stress neurochemical called norepinephrine or noradrenaline is actually suppressed and it's completely shut down from the brain. And it seems to be that REM sleep is a perfect chemical environment, almost like a therapy session, where you can take emotional events from the prior day and perhaps just smooth the sharp edges off those experiences, and almost like an overnight soothing balm, as it were.
#sleep #stress #emotion #REM - npr.org

The Heroism of Incremental Care - The New Yorker

Headaches rank among the most common reasons for doctor visits worldwide. A small number are due to secondary causes, such as a brain tumor, cerebral aneurysm, head injury, or infection. Most are tension headaches—diffuse, muscle-related head pain with a tightening, non-pulsating quality—that generally respond to analgesics, sleep, neck exercises, and time. Migraines afflict about ten per cent of people with headaches, but a much larger percentage of those who see doctors, because migraines are difficult to control.
#medicine #stress #headaches - newyorker.com

Keeping up the pressure: New neural mechanism is found to regulate the chronic stress response -- ScienceDaily

The newly discovered nerve cells express a receptor, CRFR1, on their outer walls, which enables them to take in the message of the CRF neurotransmitter. The scientists' experiments showed that, in mice, the cortisol actually increases the number of CRFR1 receptors on these nerve cells, suggesting a positive feedback loop that could be self-renewing, rather than abating.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #brain #stress #complexity - sciencedaily.com

Mindful Meditation Training Lowers Biomarkers of Stress Response in Anxiety Disorder – Neuroscience News

HomeFeatured Mindful Meditation Training Lowers Biomarkers of Stress Response in Anxiety Disorder Neuroscience NewsJanuary 27, 2017 FeaturedPsychology6 min read Summary: According to researchers, mindful meditation can reduce stress hormones and inflammatory responses to stressful situations in people with GAD. Source: Georgetown University Medical Center. Hormonal, inflammatory reactions to stress were reduced after meditation training, in rigorous NIH-sponsored trial. Mindfulness meditation is an increasingly popular treatment for anxiety, but testing its effectiveness in a convincing way has been difficult. Now a rigorously designed, NIH-sponsored clinical trial led by a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher has found objective physiological evidence that mindfulness meditation combats anxiety. The researchers found that anxiety disorder patients had sharply reduced stress-hormone and inflammatory responses to a stressful situation after taking a mindfulness meditation course–whereas patients who took a non-meditation stress management course had worsened responses. “Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Elizabeth A. Hoge, MD, associate professor in Georgetown University Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry. The study, published January 24 in Psychiatry Research, included 89 patients with generalized anxiety disorder, a condition of chronic and excessive worrying. The disorder is estimated to affect nearly 7 million Americans during any one year. Hoge and her colleagues randomly divided the patients into two groups: One took an eight-week mindfulness based stress reduction course, the other — the control group — took an eight-week Stress Management Education course, which included general tips on the importance of good nutrition, sleep habits and other wellness topics. Both courses had similar formats but only the former included training in meditative techniques. Many prior tests of meditation-based therapies have compared a meditation group to an untreated control group. Because participants in such studies are not “blinded” — they know if they are getting treatment or not–they are likely to be influenced by the placebo effect and other forms of expectancy bias. “The FDA would never approve a drug based on such a clinical trial design,” said Hoge. In this study, she added, participants would have had little or no expectancy bias, because they were all assigned to a treatment, and were not told which was the treatment of interest to the researchers. Before and after the training course, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, a standard experimental technique for inducing a stress response, in which the participants are asked at short notice to give a speech before an audience, and are given other anxiety-inducing instructions. “Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Elizabeth A. Hoge. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Photodune. “We were testing the patients’ resilience,” Hoge said, “because that’s really the ultimate question–can we make people handle stress better?” For the stress test, the team monitored blood-based markers of subjects’ stress responses, namely levels of the stress hormone ACTH and the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-α. The control group showed modest rises on the second test compared to the first, suggesting a worsening of their anxiety from having to endure the test again. By contrast, the meditation group showed big drops in these markers on the second test, suggesting that the meditation training had helped them cope. Hoge and colleagues also found — as they reported in an earlier paper on this study — that the meditation group patients, compared to controls, experienced significantly greater reductions in self-reported measures of stress after their course. The study adds to evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in treating anxiety, Hoge said. She noted too that with its rigorous “active control” design, it provides a good paradigm for the future study of interventions such as meditation, to which patients cannot be blinded.
#meditation #stress - neurosciencenews.com

Super Bowl Psychology: Why Athletes "Choke" — and How to Avoid It - Scientific American

The cerebellum, the area below and behind the cerebrum responsible for motor control, coordinates complex actions when we are on autopilot. But as soon as we start focusing on the individual steps, the cerebral cortex, which controls higher-order conscious thought, takes over and we stumble into trouble. […]“My work really suggests that there is a toolbox of techniques that we can use to perform better in stressful situations,” she says, “And some people happen to utilize those better than others. But I think it’s something that can be learned.” She suggests practicing skills under pressure, in conditions close to those of the actual event. “That means for everyday people, if you’re going to be playing in front of your friends and family, you should probably practice that way, too,” she says. She also recommends not dwelling on the task ahead of time, adding that it can be helpful to distract yourself by singing a song or repeating a key word: “Something that takes your mind off the mechanics of what you're doing.” Her work has shown that in high-stress situations, the best athletes are able to succeed by focusing on the overall outcome rather than on the individual steps.
#psychology #stress - scientificamerican.com

Mindfulness Meditation Helps You Handle Stress Better | Time.com

Not only did the people who learned to meditate report feeling less stressed than people in the other class, but their blood measurements of ACTH, a stress hormone released in the brain and then into the bloodstream, were lower too, as well as markers of inflammation called pro-inflammatory cytokines. But in the control group, people were actually more stressed the second time they did the test, possibly because they knew and anticipated how bad the it would be.
#inflamation #meditation #stress - time.com