Colds are a common curse of winter, bestowing the miseries of coughing, congestion and assorted aches and pains. But few people realize that the viruses may affect their brains as well as their bodies.
"The sort of cognitive impairment you see from a common cold is in the same ballpark with the consumption of alcohol, working at night or working for prolonged hours," says Andrew Smith, PhD, a psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales who has researched the cognitive effects of colds for more than 25 years. "Activities where safety is critical, like driving or operating dangerous machinery, may be impaired when you have a cold."
Researchers have explored not only the cognitive effects of colds but also how some people may be more or less susceptible to catching them. New research finds that parenthood and a positive outlook may help protect against colds, while stress can undermine the immune system's effectiveness in fighting off viruses.
Cognitively impaired
In a study published last year, Smith had 189 participants complete a series of baseline cognitive tests. Then, over the next 90 days, one-third of them returned to the lab after they had developed a cold, while the remaining healthy participants served as the control group. The participants with colds reported less alertness, more negative moods and sluggish thinking. A second round of tests showed they also had slower reaction times and were slower at learning new information and completing tasks involving verbal reasoning and semantic processing (Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2012).
Research suggests that cold viruses cause sluggishness by interfering with neurotransmitters, perhaps affecting the transmission of noradrenaline, choline and dopamine. Noradrenaline is associated with reaction times. Choline has been linked to the encoding of new information, while dopamine affects working memory speed.
Previous studies have found that cognitive impairment can occur for people with infections from cold viruses even if they have no physical symptoms and that their decline in alertness can have serious consequences. Smith also conducted a study of 15 participants with colds and 10 healthy participants who completed a simulated driving task. Those with colds responded more slowly to unexpected events on the road and were less likely to detect collisions (BMJ Open, 2012). Another study, commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance, estimated that in 2008, more than 125,000 accidents in Great Britain were caused by drivers who had a cold or the flu.
The power of parenthood
While viruses can infect anyone, a new study finds that parents may have some extra resistance to colds, says Sheldon Cohen, PhD, who directs the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease at Carnegie Mellon University. In a study with 795 participants, Cohen found that parents age 25 or older were less likely to develop colds after they were exposed to viruses than were people with no children, although parenthood didn't help protect parents ages 18 to 24 from colds (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2012). Older parents were less susceptible to colds regardless of whether they were married or whether their children still lived at home. The benefit of being a parent was independent of antibody levels to the cold virus, indicating that the association was not attributable to parents' developing more immunity by being exposed to viruses their children brought home.
The study didn't explain why older parents were less susceptible to colds, but the researchers theorize that parenthood may produce feelings of purpose in life and positive emotional experiences that help boost their immune systems. Younger parents may not receive the same protective benefit against colds because they are less prepared psychologically and economically to be parents and may feel more overwhelmed, Cohen says.
A positive emotional style or outlook on life may also help ward off colds, according to another of Cohen's studies. His research team measured emotional styles of 193 participants who were later exposed to a cold or flu virus through nasal drops. Although 81 percent of the participants were infected, only a third developed colds with physical symptoms. The people with more positive emotional styles were less likely to get colds or the flu and reported fewer symptoms than expected when they did get sick (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2006).
A wealth of research has explored how stress can wreak havoc on the immune system, which may lead to more colds and more severe physical symptoms. "There is a really potent effect for people who have suffered from stress that lasts a month or longer," Cohen says. "They are basically more likely to get sick."
In one of Cohen's studies, people who suffered from long-term interpersonal stressors, such as a bad marriage or work conflicts, were two-and-a-half times more likely to get a cold than people without those stresses (Health Psychology, 1998). People who were unemployed or underemployed had it even worse: They were almost five times as likely to develop a cold.
The stressed participants often engaged in unhealthy activities, such as smoking or skipping exercise, but those factors didn't explain the relationship between stress and colds, Cohen says. That relationship may be triggered at the molecular level by cytokines, proteins that serve as messengers to help stimulate the immune system's response to infection. The physical symptoms of a cold aren't caused directly by the virus, but instead by the immune system's response to the foreign invaders, which includes the release of cytokines, Cohen says. These protein molecules help fight the cold virus, but they also cause runny noses and congestion.
When people are chronically stressed, they produce too much cortisol, a hormone that usually helps regulate the level of cytokines. The heightened hormone levels cause immune cells to gradually become insensitive to cortisol, triggering the release of more cytokines that exacerbate the cold symptoms, Cohen says.
Of course, the impact that stress has on the common cold is just one facet of the research psychologists are doing in the field of psychoneuroimmunology — exploring the relationship between the mind and the immune system. In today's era of more integrated care, psychologists now have broader opportunities to do interdisciplinary work in that field.
"The biomedical community is more accepting of the fact that behavioral influences on the immune system make a difference," says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD, a psychology and psychiatry professor at Ohio State University who studies the effects of stress on the body. "Behavior is really recognized now as an important player in terms of health."
Brendan L. Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C.( http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/02/colds-cognition.aspx)
Like' it, or not
Meet Cliff Stroop, a teaching assistant who administers a Facebook page for psychology 101 courses at Phoenix College in Phoenix. He posts spirited study tips for students — dubbed "Cliff Notes" — such as avoiding 11th-hour cramming for an exam, and "Cliff Hangers," or teasers about what's coming up in class, such as, "Is it possible to die of fear? Find out in class on Wednesday!" He's on Facebook all night before a test to answer students' last-minute questions. Students adore him. Freshman Rafael Rosales posted on his timeline, "Cliff, you're cool."
If Cliff sounds like a dream teaching assistant, he is. Phoenix College psychology professor Amy Marin, PhD, conjured him up as her school Facebook persona in hopes of engaging her students in a more playful way.
Her students know she's Cliff, but they don't care. They gush about how his advice helped them study and say his posts make them eager to come to class, says Marin.
For Marin, it's simply an effort to "do whatever I can to go where the students are."
Increasingly, other instructors agree. While some begrudge the ubiquitous distraction of social media, others are using Facebook to build community in their classes. Hosting a class page, they say, promotes solidarity in large classes in particular, by providing a place where students who might not otherwise connect outside of class share digital flash cards and encourage each other to study harder.
"They're not competing, they seem to be saying, ‘Look, we are in this together,'" says University of Kentucky psychology professor Jonathan Golding, PhD. He uses Facebook to answer questions about labs and assignments, highlight deadlines and post psychology humor and YouTube videos that reinforce course concepts for his classes. "As an instructor, that's a very gratifying feeling."
Engaging with psychology at a new level
It's equally satisfying to see students connect course concepts to their lives or to news events when they're not in class, says Regan A.R. Gurung, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He posts links to articles from The New York Times and other publications that highlight new psychology research and videos he doesn't have time to screen during class.
At first, he and his teaching assistants posted all the content. But he found that, after a few weeks, students were the ones keeping the news feed fresh with their own news links and comments. "These students are using [Facebook] to engage with psychology at a level I had never seen when I used course management systems" such as Desire2Learn, he says.
To find out whether the Facebook content affected his students' learning, Gurung surveyed them at the semester's end. He found that those who had joined the class's Facebook discussion (65 percent of the class "liked" his page) had developed a deeper appreciation for psychology as a science compared with those who had never joined. Even when he controlled his findings for grade point average to make sure high performers weren't the same ones embracing the Facebook page, he found that all levels of students were reaping its benefits. "We weren't getting just the slackers or just the smart students" on the Facebook page, he says.
His class surveys echo recent findings that show that reinforcing course content via social media can boost learning. In one 2012 study, published in Teaching of Psychology, Stephen Blessing, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Tampa found that using Twitter to reinforce concepts introduced in class via daily tweets helped students remember information better on a test than those who didn't get the tweets.
More work, more reward
Depending on how you look at it, creating a class community on Facebook also brings another benefit: feedback for teachers. Students who frequent Facebook tend to comment daily on what they find most compelling from lectures.
"Students rarely make a special trip to my office to tell me they found class interesting that day, but a quick posting on Facebook is giving me a glimpse into how my classes are being received," says Marin.
Such feedback also helps professors with huge lecture-hall classes feel more connected to students.
"It is frustrating to stand on a stage in a huge auditorium," says University of Massachusetts–Amherst professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, who has 440 students in her intro to psychology course. Her Facebook dialogues with students "help bring the course into their lives a little more."
For Marin, "Cliff" has also allowed her to maintain professional boundaries, all while having fun with her students. "I tend to be formal in the classroom. I don't have lunch with students or chat after," she says. "This is a way for me to connect with them differently."
How to start your own page
For those who may want to create a class Facebook page, Marin and others share this advice:
"It's a way to improve on the class and experiment in ways you couldn't in the past," he says. "Students know how to use Facebook well, so why not take advantage?"
accessed from : http://www.apa.org on 04/03/2013
Colds are a common curse of winter, bestowing the miseries of coughing, congestion and assorted aches and pains. But few people realize that the viruses may affect their brains as well as their bodies.
"The sort of cognitive impairment you see from a common cold is in the same ballpark with the consumption of alcohol, working at night or working for prolonged hours," says Andrew Smith, PhD, a psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales who has researched the cognitive effects of colds for more than 25 years. "Activities where safety is critical, like driving or operating dangerous machinery, may be impaired when you have a cold."
Researchers have explored not only the cognitive effects of colds but also how some people may be more or less susceptible to catching them. New research finds that parenthood and a positive outlook may help protect against colds, while stress can undermine the immune system's effectiveness in fighting off viruses.
Cognitively impaired
In a study published last year, Smith had 189 participants complete a series of baseline cognitive tests. Then, over the next 90 days, one-third of them returned to the lab after they had developed a cold, while the remaining healthy participants served as the control group. The participants with colds reported less alertness, more negative moods and sluggish thinking. A second round of tests showed they also had slower reaction times and were slower at learning new information and completing tasks involving verbal reasoning and semantic processing (Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2012).
Research suggests that cold viruses cause sluggishness by interfering with neurotransmitters, perhaps affecting the transmission of noradrenaline, choline and dopamine. Noradrenaline is associated with reaction times. Choline has been linked to the encoding of new information, while dopamine affects working memory speed.
Previous studies have found that cognitive impairment can occur for people with infections from cold viruses even if they have no physical symptoms and that their decline in alertness can have serious consequences. Smith also conducted a study of 15 participants with colds and 10 healthy participants who completed a simulated driving task. Those with colds responded more slowly to unexpected events on the road and were less likely to detect collisions (BMJ Open, 2012). Another study, commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance, estimated that in 2008, more than 125,000 accidents in Great Britain were caused by drivers who had a cold or the flu.
The power of parenthood
While viruses can infect anyone, a new study finds that parents may have some extra resistance to colds, says Sheldon Cohen, PhD, who directs the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease at Carnegie Mellon University. In a study with 795 participants, Cohen found that parents age 25 or older were less likely to develop colds after they were exposed to viruses than were people with no children, although parenthood didn't help protect parents ages 18 to 24 from colds (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2012). Older parents were less susceptible to colds regardless of whether they were married or whether their children still lived at home. The benefit of being a parent was independent of antibody levels to the cold virus, indicating that the association was not attributable to parents' developing more immunity by being exposed to viruses their children brought home.
The study didn't explain why older parents were less susceptible to colds, but the researchers theorize that parenthood may produce feelings of purpose in life and positive emotional experiences that help boost their immune systems. Younger parents may not receive the same protective benefit against colds because they are less prepared psychologically and economically to be parents and may feel more overwhelmed, Cohen says.
A positive emotional style or outlook on life may also help ward off colds, according to another of Cohen's studies. His research team measured emotional styles of 193 participants who were later exposed to a cold or flu virus through nasal drops. Although 81 percent of the participants were infected, only a third developed colds with physical symptoms. The people with more positive emotional styles were less likely to get colds or the flu and reported fewer symptoms than expected when they did get sick (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2006).
A wealth of research has explored how stress can wreak havoc on the immune system, which may lead to more colds and more severe physical symptoms. "There is a really potent effect for people who have suffered from stress that lasts a month or longer," Cohen says. "They are basically more likely to get sick."
In one of Cohen's studies, people who suffered from long-term interpersonal stressors, such as a bad marriage or work conflicts, were two-and-a-half times more likely to get a cold than people without those stresses (Health Psychology, 1998). People who were unemployed or underemployed had it even worse: They were almost five times as likely to develop a cold.
The stressed participants often engaged in unhealthy activities, such as smoking or skipping exercise, but those factors didn't explain the relationship between stress and colds, Cohen says. That relationship may be triggered at the molecular level by cytokines, proteins that serve as messengers to help stimulate the immune system's response to infection. The physical symptoms of a cold aren't caused directly by the virus, but instead by the immune system's response to the foreign invaders, which includes the release of cytokines, Cohen says. These protein molecules help fight the cold virus, but they also cause runny noses and congestion.
When people are chronically stressed, they produce too much cortisol, a hormone that usually helps regulate the level of cytokines. The heightened hormone levels cause immune cells to gradually become insensitive to cortisol, triggering the release of more cytokines that exacerbate the cold symptoms, Cohen says.
Of course, the impact that stress has on the common cold is just one facet of the research psychologists are doing in the field of psychoneuroimmunology — exploring the relationship between the mind and the immune system. In today's era of more integrated care, psychologists now have broader opportunities to do interdisciplinary work in that field.
"The biomedical community is more accepting of the fact that behavioral influences on the immune system make a difference," says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD, a psychology and psychiatry professor at Ohio State University who studies the effects of stress on the body. "Behavior is really recognized now as an important player in terms of health."
Brendan L. Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C.( http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/02/colds-cognition.aspx)
Like' it, or not
If Cliff sounds like a dream teaching assistant, he is. Phoenix College psychology professor Amy Marin, PhD, conjured him up as her school Facebook persona in hopes of engaging her students in a more playful way.
Her students know she's Cliff, but they don't care. They gush about how his advice helped them study and say his posts make them eager to come to class, says Marin.
For Marin, it's simply an effort to "do whatever I can to go where the students are."
Increasingly, other instructors agree. While some begrudge the ubiquitous distraction of social media, others are using Facebook to build community in their classes. Hosting a class page, they say, promotes solidarity in large classes in particular, by providing a place where students who might not otherwise connect outside of class share digital flash cards and encourage each other to study harder.
"They're not competing, they seem to be saying, ‘Look, we are in this together,'" says University of Kentucky psychology professor Jonathan Golding, PhD. He uses Facebook to answer questions about labs and assignments, highlight deadlines and post psychology humor and YouTube videos that reinforce course concepts for his classes. "As an instructor, that's a very gratifying feeling."
Like' it, or not
Meet Cliff Stroop, a teaching assistant who administers a Facebook page for psychology 101 courses at Phoenix College in Phoenix. He posts spirited study tips for students — dubbed "Cliff Notes" — such as avoiding 11th-hour cramming for an exam, and "Cliff Hangers," or teasers about what's coming up in class, such as, "Is it possible to die of fear? Find out in class on Wednesday!" He's on Facebook all night before a test to answer students' last-minute questions. Students adore him. Freshman Rafael Rosales posted on his timeline, "Cliff, you're cool."
If Cliff sounds like a dream teaching assistant, he is. Phoenix College psychology professor Amy Marin, PhD, conjured him up as her school Facebook persona in hopes of engaging her students in a more playful way.Her students know she's Cliff, but they don't care. They gush about how his advice helped them study and say his posts make them eager to come to class, says Marin.
For Marin, it's simply an effort to "do whatever I can to go where the students are."
Increasingly, other instructors agree. While some begrudge the ubiquitous distraction of social media, others are using Facebook to build community in their classes. Hosting a class page, they say, promotes solidarity in large classes in particular, by providing a place where students who might not otherwise connect outside of class share digital flash cards and encourage each other to study harder.
"They're not competing, they seem to be saying, ‘Look, we are in this together,'" says University of Kentucky psychology professor Jonathan Golding, PhD. He uses Facebook to answer questions about labs and assignments, highlight deadlines and post psychology humor and YouTube videos that reinforce course concepts for his classes. "As an instructor, that's a very gratifying feeling."
Engaging with psychology at a new level
It's equally satisfying to see students connect course concepts to their lives or to news events when they're not in class, says Regan A.R. Gurung, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He posts links to articles from The New York Times and other publications that highlight new psychology research and videos he doesn't have time to screen during class.
At first, he and his teaching assistants posted all the content. But he found that, after a few weeks, students were the ones keeping the news feed fresh with their own news links and comments. "These students are using [Facebook] to engage with psychology at a level I had never seen when I used course management systems" such as Desire2Learn, he says.
To find out whether the Facebook content affected his students' learning, Gurung surveyed them at the semester's end. He found that those who had joined the class's Facebook discussion (65 percent of the class "liked" his page) had developed a deeper appreciation for psychology as a science compared with those who had never joined. Even when he controlled his findings for grade point average to make sure high performers weren't the same ones embracing the Facebook page, he found that all levels of students were reaping its benefits. "We weren't getting just the slackers or just the smart students" on the Facebook page, he says.
His class surveys echo recent findings that show that reinforcing course content via social media can boost learning. In one 2012 study, published in Teaching of Psychology, Stephen Blessing, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Tampa found that using Twitter to reinforce concepts introduced in class via daily tweets helped students remember information better on a test than those who didn't get the tweets.
More work, more reward
Depending on how you look at it, creating a class community on Facebook also brings another benefit: feedback for teachers. Students who frequent Facebook tend to comment daily on what they find most compelling from lectures.
"Students rarely make a special trip to my office to tell me they found class interesting that day, but a quick posting on Facebook is giving me a glimpse into how my classes are being received," says Marin.
Such feedback also helps professors with huge lecture-hall classes feel more connected to students.
"It is frustrating to stand on a stage in a huge auditorium," says University of Massachusetts–Amherst professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, who has 440 students in her intro to psychology course. Her Facebook dialogues with students "help bring the course into their lives a little more."
For Marin, "Cliff" has also allowed her to maintain professional boundaries, all while having fun with her students. "I tend to be formal in the classroom. I don't have lunch with students or chat after," she says. "This is a way for me to connect with them differently."
How to start your own page
For those who may want to create a class Facebook page, Marin and others share this advice:
"It's a way to improve on the class and experiment in ways you couldn't in the past," he says. "Students know how to use Facebook well, so why not take advantage?"
accessed from : http://www.apa.org on 04/03/2013
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