18 August 2010

Climate Change and Mental Health

Climate is known to affect human health in
different ways. The health impacts of climate
change can occur through a number of direct
and indirect causal pathways, and the severity
is in part determined by the adaptive capacity
of the population.People living in poverty,
those geographically vulnerable to extreme
weather events, those highly dependent on
agriculture for their livelihood and those
vulnerable to develop mental illness are at
high risk. The principal and direct concerns
include injuries and fatalities related to severe
weather events and heat waves; infectious
diseases related to changes in vector biology,
water and food contamination; allergic
symptoms related to increased allergen
production; respiratory and cardiovascular
diseases related to worsening air pollution;
and nutritional shortages related to changes in
food production. Major concerns, for which
data to support projections are less robust,
more complex and have multiple determinants
are the mental health consequences,
population dislocation and civil conflict
following the above-mentioned direct
sequels.Mental health consequences need
to be studied from several dimensions:
psychological distress per se; consequences of
psychological distress including proneness to
physical diseases as well as suicide; and
psychological resilience and its role in dealing
effectively with the aftermath of disasters.

05 August 2010

Culture affects how our brain works=

Washington, Aug 4 (ANI): Where you grow up can have a big impact on how your brain works, according to a study by psychological scientists Denise C. Park from the University of Texas at Dallas and Chih-Mao Huang from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The researchers have discussed ways in which brain structure and function may be influenced by culture.

There is evidence that the collectivist nature of East Asian cultures versus individualistic Western cultures affects both brain and behaviour.

East Asians tend to process information in a global manner whereas Westerners tend to focus on individual objects.

There are differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to attention, categorization, and reasoning.

For example, in one study, after viewing pictures of fish swimming, Japanese volunteers were more likely to remember contextual details of the image than were American volunteers.

Experiments tracking participants' eye movements revealed that Westerners spend more time looking at focal objects while Chinese volunteers look more at the background.

In addition, our culture may play a role in the way we process facial information.

Research has indicated that when viewing faces, East Asians focus on the central region of faces while Westerners look more broadly, focusing on both the eyes and mouth.

Examining changes in cognitive processes-how we think-over time can provide information about the aging process as well as any culture-related changes that may occur.

When it comes to free recall, working memory, and processing speed, aging has a greater impact than does culture-the decline in these functions is a result of aging and not cultural experience.

Park and Huang note that, "with age, both cultures would move towards a more balanced representation of self and others, leading Westerners to become less oriented to self and East Asians to conceivably become more self-focused."

"This research is an important domain for understanding the malleability of the human brain and how differences in values and social milieus sculpt the brain's structure and function," concluded the authors.

The study has been published in a special section on Culture and Psychology in the July Perspectives on Psychological Science. (ANI)