Dr. X's Free Associations

Somatic Symptoms Disorder

Doug Bremner says that this new DSM-5 disorder will include about 20% of Americans. I don't doubt that he's right.

Dysphemic Euphamisms

A new term for me, and I just can't even imagine using a dysphemic euphamism with a friend.  Maybe my memory is whitewashed, but I don't think I did it even as an adolescent or as a college student. Not that I'm unfamiliar with practice.

WT...?

I do believe that we experience a great deal of nervous system-to-nervous system communication, but I'd really like to see a few replications of this, because I'm not ready to believe it just yet.

Emilio Ferrer, a UC Davis psychology professor who has conducted a series of studies on couples in romantic relationships, found that couples connected to monitors measuring heart rates and respiration get their heart rate in sync, and they breathe in and out at the same intervals. To collect the data, the researchers conducted a series of exercises, sitting 32 heterosexual couples a few feet away from each other in a quiet, calm room. The couples did not speak or touch. "We've seen a lot of research that one person in a relationship can experience what the other person is experiencing emotionally, but this study shows they also share experiences at a physiological level," Ferrer said. The couples, in one of the exercises, were asked to sit across from each other and mimic each other, but still not speak, and researchers collected very similar results. The researchers also mixed up the data from the couples. When the two individuals were not from the same couple, their hearts did not show synchrony, nor did their breathing closely match.

Perhaps we'll see this happen.

If we were to assume that the effect will stand up, this I could believe:

both partners showed similar patterns of heart rate and respiration, but women tended to adjust theirs to their partners more.

H/T: Laura Freberg

Argo

Suspense, a thriller, well-crafted, but didn't otherwise do much for me. The characters were utterly one-dimensional. Entertainment more than art. Fine for what it was, but Best Picture? Really?

How to do suspense and really bring character into play? Homeland.

The Fearless Brain Disease

Mo at Neurophilosophy:

The patient known as S.M. has not experienced fear since she was a child, and has fascinated brain researchers for many years. In 2010, one team noted that she makes risky financial decisions in experimental economics games, because she isn't afraid of losing money. Another tried everything they could to frighten the life out of her – but failed. They showed her clips from some of the scariest horror films ever made, asked her to handle large spiders and snakes, and took her to a haunted house. On no occasion did she show the smallest sign of fear, even when faced with traumatic events and potentially life-threatening threats.

Now in her mid-40s, S.M. is one of fewer than 300 people to be diagnosed with Urbach-Wiethe disease, a genetic condition that causes a brain structure called the amygdala to gradually harden up and shrivel away.

Researchers recently found something that causes intense fear in people with this condition.

An Unusual Death Notice

In the New York Times:

SHUCHMAN--Amos, of New York, on February 1, 2013. [...] Loved his family, his birth and adopted countries, finance, skiing, opera, ballet and biking in Central Park. Loved everything about NYC, except the New York Times.

Doing More Harm Than Good By Pathologizing Grief

Cheryl Fuller:

It seems like such a good thing, doesn't it, offering grief counselors to those who suffer a tragic event? After all, who doesn't want and need some comfort then? But research reveals that really we should leave it to the people who suffer to determine what if anything they need. Scientific American, in one of their "60 second science" features, reports on a study  which appears to replicate the findings of a study from at least a decade ago in the UK -- namely that grief counseling after traumatic events may be more harm than help. Again this finding seems obvious if we consider that grief and other uncomfortable emotions are normal following such events. It is only when, by community consensus, such emotions and reactions persist and interfere with normal life that treatment may be called for. In this study

The researchers were studying the mental and physical toll of grappling with a community-wide trauma—in this case, 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, they offered participants an opportunity to share their thoughts. Some did, some didn’t. Two years later, the scientists found that people who kept it inside were better off than those who let it all hang out.

Random Local-ish

The woman on the left asked me if I would answer a "lighthearted question" and have my photo taken for inclusion in one of those person-on-the-street newspaper thingys they ridicule in The Onion. I declined. The next person she asked, agreed.

Lurid Fantasy Or Intent To Commit Murder?

New York Times:

One day last September, the wife of a New York City police officer opened her laptop computer and discovered that her husband had used it to visit a fetish Web site on the Internet. She said she went to the site and saw a photograph of a dead girl.

And that, she testified on Monday, was only the beginning.

The wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, said that when she later delved into her husband’s electronic chat history, she found he had been communicating with others about plans to torture and kill women, including herself.

Gratis Open Access For U.S. Government Funded Research

Nature:

In a long-awaited leap forward for open access, the US government said today that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay — expanding a policy that has, until now, applied only to biomedical science.

About time.