The benefits of crying

by Rachel Anspach

Been Crying (2) by Toni Blay

Crying is often the result of feelings of sadness and frustration, but after crying many people experience a feeling of release and catharsis (Byslma, 2008).  Humans are the only species that shed tears emotionally.  Crying is something that all people of all ages and cultures do (Hendriks, 2008).  Since crying is a trait that has evolved solely in humans, there must be some sort of evolutionary advantage to emotional crying.  Many studies have been done which examine the effect that crying has on the body, and most of them have actually found that crying actually has a negative impact physiologically (Hendriks, 2008).  However, many people including psychologists have always believed that crying is good for you (Hendriks, 2008).  Perhaps crying  developed evolutionarily for a non-physiological reason.  “Attachment Theory” suggests that crying is a behavior that is natural to humans from birth.  As an infant, babies learn that crying will result in comforting, which creates a relationship bond.  This behavior is continued to create attachments in life (Hendriks, 2008).

Dr. Oren Hasson, a professor at Tel Aviv University, recently conducted a study in which he studied different types of crying and the benefits of crying.  He speculated that the evolutionary advantage of crying comes from crying with your peers.  When you cry, you show vulnerability because your vision is blurred.  This allows someone who cares about you to take care of you while you are in a weakened state. According to Hasson, this is beneficial to both the caretaker and receiver because it creates a stronger relationship bond.  This means that a positive comes out of the negative situation which caused the crying in the first place.

What Broca didn’t know

By Laura Bowles

Pierre Paul Broca from Wickipedia Commons

For most people, language is taken for granted.  When they have a thought, they just speak their minds.  Little do they know that a specific area in the brain, called Broca’s area, plays a major part in speech production and language expression.

Broca’s area was first discovered by Pierre Paul Broca in 1861.  Broca encountered a man called “Tan” staying in a hospital in France.  “Tan” had lost the use of most of his speech, and could only speak one syllable: “tan.”  While he retained much of his intelligence, but could only express himself by moving his left hand after becoming paralyzed.  After his death, it was found that he had lesioning in his left frontal lobe, implying that this area is instrumental in speech and language processes.

Broca’s findings were later supported and expanded upon.  However, the nature of how Broca’s area functions remained a mystery.  A study conducted at the University of California, San Deigo, led by Dr. Ned Sahin, provided some potential and surprising answers.  By placing electrodes into the brains of patients, the Sahin and fellow researchers utilized a procedure known as ICE, or Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology.  The procedure was only used on patients undergoing neurosurgery for epilepsy.  The patients also had a history of having language and cognitive skills that can be classified as above average.  Sahin et al. were able to see how the brain processes grammar and produces words.  The subjects were required to change phrases from the present to past tense and nouns from the singular to plural form.  The results of the ICE indicated that different parts of Broca’s area handle different aspects of language, and that the production of speech is layered.  Certain pieces of Broca’s area overlap with others, and the timing of how they compute information is essential to the expression of language.  Ultimately, the researchers at UCSD found that Broca’s area is crucial in the calculation of grammar, pronunciation, and word identity;  furthering the theory that Broca’s area does not just deal with one function of language.

These findings have fueled even more curiosity about the true function of Broca’s area and its role in language and speech production.  So next time you are about to speak your mind, first appreciate how Broca’s area is helping you do something so complex.

References:

Sahin, Ned et al. (2009, October 15).  New Light on Nature of Broca’s Area: Rare Procedure Documents How Human Brain Computes Language. Science Daily. Retrieved October 15, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015141500.htm

Broca, Pierre Paul. (1861). Loss of Speech, Chronic Softening and Partial Destruction of the Anterior Left Lobe of the Brain. (Christopher D. Green Trans.).Bulletin de la Société Anthropologique, 2, 235-238.  Retrieved October 15, 2009.

Sahin, N. T. et al. (2009). Sequential processing of lexical, grammatical, and phonological information within broca’s area. Science, 326(5951), Retrieved December 2, 2009, from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;326/5951/445?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=broca&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

Watch the dangling gold coin, and read on

by Samuel Ballard

Alhambra the Great. Thereses 1906.

Every couple of years, an act called “The Comic Hypnotist” has made an appearance at the Kansas State Fair. I have watched a couple of times as Ron Diamond, the hypnotist, had people do hilarious things…search for their lost belly-buttons, act as world-class body-builders, and fall madly in love with each other.  Although it was very entertaining, I always imagined how funny it might be if “the people were really doing those things instead of just acting.” Like many people, I thought that hypnotism was like any dime-a-dozen magic show that was set up in advance and based on acting and illusions. I, however, stand corrected.

For hypnotism to be understood, some common misconceptions need to be addressed first. Hypnotism is not magic or any sort of special power coming from the hypnotist. It is, however, a psychological, trance-like state of consciousness (Myers, 2007). While in this state, your mind is more focused, making it clear of distractions and open to suggestions.

Hypnosis is also not “mind control,” so to speak. It is simply more of an open mind—a mind that will not worry about embarrassment, but rather focus on what is possible with regard to what is being suggested to it. When the subject of hypnosis is brought up, many picture a man dangling a pocket watch in front of someone’s face, saying, “You are getting sleepy.” This is a perfect example of suggestibility. The brain of the person being hypnotized says, “Sleepy? Why yes I am!” and makes itself align with the suggestion.

Hypnosis is not effective on everyone, but the vast majority of people are suggestible. A  2004 study by Barnier and McKonkey suggest that those who are more suggestible have rich imaginations and fantasies—they are the ones who are more likely to be drawn into a good book or movie (Barnier & McKonkey, 2004).

Hypnotism actually has been documented in helping to alleviate pain. There are two theories to why this is. The first is dissociation: hypnosis makes the mind ignore the emotional reaction of pain, leaving the actual nervous workings for the brain to sort out. The other theory suggests that when you are hypnotized, you just focus on something else too much to notice pain, like when a dancer finishes a show without realizing she is hurt. Studies by Lang & others and Patterson & Jensen in 2000 and 2003, respectively, suggest that many people can be put in a deep enough state of hypnosis that they don’t need anesthesia for major surgery (Lang et al, 2000 and Patterson & Jensen, 2003). It can work both ways, though, too. A hypnotized indivuidual can be made to believe that he or she is in pain, in somewhat of the same way that persons with Munchausen syndrome can convince themselves they are sick (Jensen, 2009).

Hypnotism is now used for many purposes. Light hypnotism has been used for entertainment (Thank you, Mr. Diamond), to help in diverting addictions, and even to relieve stress in the dentist’s office. Deep hypnotism has been used for major medical operations and corresponding recoveries, such as having a burn patient stay in the same position for a long period of time.

So, while hypnosis may not turn you into some kind of religious oracle or master magician, it certainly can be useful in relieving aches and pains or making you the laughingstock of Kansas for a night.

References

Barnier, A. M., McConkey, K. M. (2004). Defining and identifying the highly hypnotizable person. In: M. Heap, R. J. Brown, D. A. Oakley (Eds.), The Highly Hypnotizable Person. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Lang, E. V., Benotsch, E. G., Fick, L. J., Lutgendorf, S., Berbaum, M. L., Berbaum, K. S., Logan, H., Spiegel, D. (2000). Adjunctive non-pharmacological analgesia for invasive medical procedures: a randomised trial. The Lancet, 355, 1486-1490.

Jensen, M. P. (2009). Hypnosis for chronic pain management: A new hope. Pain, 146 (3), 235-237

Myers, D. G. (2007). Psychology, Eighth Edition, in Modules. New York: Worth Publishers.

Patterson, D. R., Jensen, M. P. (2003). Hypnosis and clinical pain. Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 129, pp. 495-521.

Innocent bystanders?

By Caitlin Bull

An Apparently Homeless Young Woman Sits Crying in a Doorway, Ignored by the World. Photo by Arty Smokes

On March 13th, 1964, 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was attacked by a man with a knife as she arrived home from her late night shift as a bar manager in Queens.  For the next half hour, Kitty’s deafening screams of, “I’ve been stabbed!  Please help me!” pierced the air around her apartment complex.  The attacker, Winston Moseley, was startled by signs of activity in nearby apartments and fled the scene twice before he finally killed Kitty during his third attack.  He would later confess that, “It didn’t seem like anyone was going to stop me!”  Moseley was right; of the 38 witnesses that were aware of the murder as it progressed, not a single one called the police until Kitty was already dead.

After the New York Times published an article revealing the apathetic behavior of the 38 witnesses, moral outrage erupted in the city.  Life magazine wondered if people were becoming callous and immoral.  Newspapers blamed the bystanders for the murder, threatening to print their names and addresses.  People refused to believe that the witnesses were not abnormal barbarians.

In response to this hysteria, two Columbia University researches, John Darley and Bibb Latane, delved further into the idea of bystander apathy, or “not helping.”  In a 1973 experiment, recruited participants had to walk from one building to another, where they would give a lecture.  In some scenarios, these students were told that they were in a hurry or that they had a few minutes to spare.  The experimenters positioned a moaning man along the students’ path.  The amount of students who helped along their way was highest in the low hurry situations (63%) and lowest in high hurry (10%).   Ironically, students who believed that they were about to give a talk on being a Good Samaritan went as far as to step over the injured man.  Darley and Latane concluded that ethics might simple become a luxury as our lives become more hectic.

Further studies reveal that the explanation for bystander apathy may have less to do with human callousness and more to do with a tendency to take social cues from those around us.  In a 1969 experiment by Darley and Daniel Batson, subjects were placed in a room to fill out questionnaires.  The room slowly filled with smoke. There were three conditions: one in which the subject was alone, one in which three naïve subjects were in the room, and one in which one naïve subject was placed with two confederates who noticed and ignored the smoke.  The alone subjects calmly reported the smoke 75% of the time.  In the confederate and naïve bystander conditions, only 10% and 38% of subjects reported the smoke, respectively.  In some of the confederate instances, the smoke grew so thick that the subject look concerned, got up, and checked the vent.  However, upon seeing the how calm the confederates remained, they went back to their forms.

More recent studies have demonstrated the effect of social priming on degree of generosity.  In 2002 study titled “Crowded minds: The implicit bystander effect,” researchers  discovered that subjects in a group consistently pledged less money to a charity than those with one other person.   It was easier for the grouped people to give less money because chances were the entire group would follow suit; when only one other person is involved, mob mentality does not exist.

Psychotherapist Mark Tyrrell describes a situation in which he witnessed a boy having an epileptic fit at school.  Though the boy was writhing and foaming, Tyrrell and every other classmate failed to get help. Bystander apathy is prevalent in children. Thornberg (2007) observed that children often run by others who have fallen down during a game, watch as other children harass a mentally handicapped student, or passively witness fights break out. Children experience what researchers refer to as a diffusion of responsibility; because no other student takes the initiative to be the first helper, chances of the other students helping are reduced.  Children also tend to place a lot of importance on social roles.  When interviewers asked children why they did not help others, many said that the teacher is supposed to help.

Scientific studies have shown that group size often reduces an individual’s propensity to act.  Just as in the case with the smoke, individuals will often take cues from those around them rather than apply their own logic to the situation.  When someone is alone, such as in one condition of the smoke case, they are more likely to act because doing so does not involve “breaking rank.” The people who watched Kitty Genovese die were not monsters; they simply told themselves that “Someone else must be dealing with this!”

References

Darley, J. M., & Batson, C.D. (1973) “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior. JPSP, 27, 100-108.

Garcia, Stephen M.; Weaver, Kim; Moskowitz, Gordon B.; Darley, John M. (2002) Crowded minds: The implicit bystander effect, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 843-853

Latane, B., & Darley, J. (1969) Bystander “Apathy”, American Scientist, 57, 244-268.

Martin, Douglas (1989, March 11). About New York; Kitty Genovese: Would New York Still Turn Away? [Electronic Version]. The New York Times. Retrieved February 24, 2009 from <http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/11/nyregion/about-new-york-kitty-genovese-would-new-york-still-turn-away.html>

Thornberg, Robert (2007) A classmate in distress: schoolchildren as bystanders and their reasons for how they act, Social Psychology of Education, 10, 5-28.

Tryyell, Mark. Bystander apathy – it’s none of my business! [Web Page] Uncommon Knowledge. Retrieved February 24, 2009 from  <http://www.uncommon-knowledge.co.uk/articles/bystander-apathy.html>.

Using magnets to read minds

By Jamee Bateau

the powerful magnet of your charms by jamelah

Mind-readers exist! No, I’m no referring to street-corner psychics with crystal balls and elaborate antique shops, but to today’s scientists and how they can now get a glimpse at what people are thinking. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists can now tell which items are being thought of in a person’s visual short-term memory (VSTM) based only on patterns of activity in the brain.

Visual short-term memory is a memory system that stores visual information for a few seconds so that it can assist long-term cognitive tasks. Some usually think of VSTM as the visual storage component of the broader working memory system / short-term memory system. Compared with iconic memory, VSTM representations are longer-lasting, more durable, and more conceptual. Items in VSTM can survive eye movements, eye blinks, and other visual disturbances, and they may play an important role in preserving links across these disturbances. Unfortunately, VSTM has a highly limited storage capacity and mainly produces rapid schematic representations. On the other hand, Long-Term Memory (LTM) has a nearly infinite storage capacity and produces richly detailed representations over a reasonably long time period.

VSTM studies are generally categorized into four classes of tasks. In one class of tasks, subjects are asked to create a mental image. In a second class, scientists use a recall procedure.  A third class of VSTM tasks uses a sequential comparison procedure. Finally, a fourth class of VSTM tasks, used most often in monkeys, requires the observer to withhold a response after seeing a target. But today, scientists are taking VSTM studies to the next level, not by testing how much or how long information can be held in VSTM, but by reading the patterns of blood flow in the brain to determine what the person is thinking of.

There have been two recent studies, one led by neuroscientist Frank Tong of Vanderbilt University and the other by psychologists from the University of Oregon and the University of California, San Diego.

Sleepless

By Haley Tanenbaum

Sleepless by pittaya

Everyone can remember a frustrating night of sleeplessness.  You are lying in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep.  Perhaps you were preoccupied with worries from the day before, over energized, or simply just not able to doze off.  Whatever the reason, sleepless nights are unbearable, and for years scientists have been working to develop medicines that can help people fall asleep and stay asleep.  There are countless sleeping medications on the market today.  The question is: are these sleeping pills helpful or harmful?
Here’s a little bit of background—sleep consists of alternating periods of what scientists refer to as REM sleep and of non-REM sleep.  REM sleep is classified by rapid eye movement, which is absent in non-REM sleep.  Non-REM sleep consists of stages 1 through 4, which feature increasingly slow and steady brain waves.   REM sleep occurs in the 5th and final stage of sleep.   Most commonly, when people fall asleep they have a long period of non-REM sleep and then a short period of REM sleep .
Why is sleep so important?  First of all, sleep gives the brain time to heal.  While a person is sleeping, the brain repairs and restores brain tissue as well as neurons (Myers, 2007).  Sleep also helps our memories.  In a study by Kimberly Fenn and others in 2003, it was shown that people who were trained to remember tasks recalled them better after a good night’s sleep than after hours of being awake.
Sleeping pills are a fast and easy way for the typical sleep-deprived student or workaholic to catch up on their z’s.  Though these pills may help you maintain your energy on a day-to-day basis, in the long run, they are harmful.  A six-year study conducted by Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego  used more than a million adults between the ages of 30 to 102.  Kripke found that those who took sleeping pills every night had a greater risk of death than those who only took them occasionally.  In addition, the risk of death for people who took sleeping pills occasionally was 10 to 15 percent higher than people who never used sleeping pills at all.
So, the next time you find yourself tossing and turning in the dead of night, don’t reach for the pill bottle. Instead of popping an Ambien, try some warm milk or the good old counting sheep trick…
References

Myers, David G. (2007). Psychology (eighth edition in modules). New York:
Worth Publishers.

WebMD (2005-2006). Sleep 101. Retrieved October 8, 2008, from

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/sleep-101.

Nature International Weekly Journal of Science. Consolidation During Sleep of
Perpetual Learning of Spoken Language.  Retrieved October 8, 2008, from

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6958/full/nature01951.html.

Live Science.  Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth. Retrieved October
8,2008, from

http://www.livescience.com/health/060323_sleep_deprivation.html

OK, so you haven’t been sleeping much. How bad could that be?

By Leksi Kolanko

Dr. Insomnia's, #2 by Thomas Hawk

We all suffer an occasional restless night of sleep here and there, whether it is the result of stressful events occurring in our lives, jetlag, pain due to a physical injury, or simply the overuse of caffeine.  For some people, however, insomnia, a sleep disorder in which an individual has recurring problems in falling or staying asleep, can become chronic.  Multiple studies have been conducted showing a strong relationship between insomnia, depression, and anxiety.  For instance, a longitudinal study conducted by Dag Neckelmann of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, surveyed 25,130 adults.  The results of the general health surveys showed that the group of participants with chronic insomnia had increased depression and anxiety, as compared to the group without chronic insomnia.  Another study, carried out by Daniel Taylor, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues, sampled 722 adults of age 20 to 89.  This cross-sectional and retrospective study reported that people with insomnia were 10 times more likely to have clinically significant depression and 17 times more likely to have clinically significant anxiety.

The wonders of dreaming

By Nick Johnson

Sleeping EEG Monitor by cobalt123

Why do we dream? Is it necessary to dream? Dreaming occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, during which the brain does not recognize any sensory input. One experiment concerning dreams studied REM sleep and how subjects reacted when they were awoken during REM sleep. (Dement, 1960). To establish a baseline percentage of REM sleep per total sleep time, the subjects were observed for a few nights. When they were woken up during non-REM sleep they showed no increase in dream time on the nights after the night when they were woken up continually. However, when the subjects were woken up frequently during REM sleep, they entered REM sleep more often on the recovery nights than on the baseline nights, indicating that the brain needed to make up for lost REM sleep time. Furthermore, subjects that had been woken up repeatedly during REM sleep showed changes in behavior that included anxiety and difficulty concentrating.

A similar experiment involved waking rats up during REM sleep. The observers placed a rat in a bucket full of water on an upside-down flower pot. When the rat wanted to sleep, it had to climb onto the flower pot, but when it entered REM sleep, muscular paralysis made the rat fall into the water and wake up. After several of these dreamless nights the rats were put into survival situations to test their reactions. Though rats have innate responses to threatening situations, the dream-deprived rats could not complete the tasks. According to the article, the rats, when placed in an open area, would not dash for cover, as an alert rat would, but instead would roam aimlessly. Furthermore, after each rat failed the basic survival tests, they were given amphetamines to determine if it was merely sleep-deprivation that was causing their behavior or if it was dream-deprivation that was the culprit. If sleep-deprivation was the cause then the amphetamines would have counteracted the rats’ tiredness but the experimenters found that the rats did not perform better on the survival tests, indicating that dream-deprivation caused their failure on the tests. Just as with the human subjects, the rats could not concentrate on the proper tasks and could not react correctly when they were deprived of REM sleep and therefore deprived of dreaming.  Consistent with the results of this study, some  scientists theorize that dreams served as a sort of theater to prepare one for situations one might encounter when awake.

Another hypothesis (Siegel, 2003) is that REM sleep may be necessary to prevent an overabundance of certain neurotransmitters. The release of monoamines, including the mood-related neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, stops during REM sleep.  An overabundance might lead to desensitization and a lack of ability to regulate mood. Furthermore, during REM sleep there is a lot of brain activity that may help in allowing the brain to develop properly.  The platypus, which is blind at birth and receives little sensory input, has a lot of REM sleep, whereas the dolphin which is active from birth has very little. The platypus’ greater amount of REM sleep could possibly allow its brain to develop more since it did not have the chance to develop much at birth. The evidence from the results from both the experiments and observations shows the brain needs a certain amount of REM sleep per night to allow the brain to develop and to allow the organism to act properly in its waking hours.

References:
Dement, W. (1960, June 10). The Effect of Dream Deprivation. Science, 131, 1705-1707. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1705755?origin=JSTOR-pdf

Dixit, J. (2007, Nov. – Dec.). Dreams: Night School. Psychology Today. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071029-000003&print=1

Siegel, J. (2003, November). Why We Sleep. Scientific American, 289. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://moodlepilot.vassar.edu/file.php/51/articles/html_files/Siegel%202003.html

Why do we dream? – The REM state. (n.d.). Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.why-we-dream.com/remstate.htm

Attached to love

By Cecilia Solis

Hands by .michael.newman.

If you were to ask a girl to describe the perfect man, her answer would most likely be something along the lines of- caring, loving, comforting, supporting, sensitive, and good to his mother.  These are often the top qualities sought out it in man but do we really know where they come from?  Are they adaptive traits that give humans a selective advantage in finding sexual partners? Or does something else help to determine them?

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to suggest the idea that contact comfort has always served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectionate responses. The value and influence of a secure base was further explored by John Bowlby who developed the theory of attachment (Meyers, 2007). The theory of attachment tries to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who are separated from their parents. From an ethological perspective Bowlby concluded that crying and searching were adaptive responses to a separation from the attachment figure associated with protection and care- giving. His colleague Mary Ainsworth was influential in expanding the basic understanding of attachment behaviors through her study of infant-parent separations. Her research showed that there are three different categories of infant-parent attachments: secure, anxious resistant, and anxious avoidant. Not all infant-pair bonds, however, can be classified into these categories. Presently these categories have been modified and expanded by different researchers to describe attachment in terms of romantic partners. Ainsworth demonstrated that these differences were connected to the quality of the parent-infant interactions during the first year of life. But just how much of an effect does the quality of early life attachments affect an individual?

Bowlby for example believed that attachment characterizes human experience from “the cradle to the grave”. His theory that adult relationships could be attachment relationships was not empirically tested until later. Research on adult attachment was conducted by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in 1987. Their study explores the association between differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their romantic and filial relationships.

Hazan and Shaver (1987) tested the attachment-theory approach to romantic love through diverse questionnaire studies. The first questionnaire known as the “love quiz” sought to measure the three-attachment styles by translating Ainsworth’s descriptions of infants into terms of adult romantic partners. The quiz asked individuals about their most important relationship, whether it was current or past, about their childhood relationships with their parents and about how they generally felt in relationships. One portion of the questionnaire asked individuals to classify themselves as avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, or secure in their most important romantic relationship by having to choose from fairly simple descriptions of the three attachment styles. The resulting figures from the study were comparable to proportions reported in other studies of infant-mother attachment (62% secure, 23% avoidant, 15% anxious/ ambivalent) displaying a relative pervasiveness of attachment patterns in adulthood similar to those in childhood.

Hazan and Shaver found that adults who were secure in their romantic relationships were likely to report having had affectionate, caring, and accepting relationships with their parents. Other research on adult attachment has shown that secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. They are also more likely to seek support from their partners and to provide the same support in situations of distress.  It is possible however for a person’s early attachment pattern to change or to show inconsistencies over time. Hazan and Shaver concluded that romantic relationships, like infant-parent relationships are closely-related forms of attachments. R. Chrish Fraley also found a fair degree of overlap in individual’s self-report measures of their current attachment style both with a parent and with a current romantic partner. He found correlations ranging from .20 to .50 (small to moderate) between the two kinds of  attachments. So, although on a different behavioral dimension, our experiences in childhood can influence our attachment styles as adults (Fraley & Shaver, 2000). It might not be such a bad idea thus, to ask potential partners about what kind of relationship they have with their parents.

References:
Fraley, C. (2004). A brief Overview of Attachment Theory and Research. Retrieved february 27, 2009 from  http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm.

Carey, B. (June 29, 2004). Addicted to Mother’s Love: It’s Biology, Stupid. The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2009 from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E5D91438F93AA15755C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2.

Hazan, C., Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 52(3), pp. 511-52. Retrieved March 27, 2009 from psycINFO (CSA) database.

Myers, D. (2007). Psychology: Eight Edition in modules. New York: Worth Publishers.

Reaching the child with autism, through music

By Emma Schaeffer

Music Therapy With The Developmentally Handicapped (Folkways)

Conversation and music-making have a number of things in common—the rhythm of the words, the rise and fall of tone, the changing of pitch, the back and forth turn-taking.  Despite this, most of us would not choose to communicate with each other through singing and playing instruments rather than speaking.  Spoken conversation is what is most natural to us.  But for those suffering from autistic spectrum disorder, ordinary communication, or even verbal communication, may not be an option.

People suffering from autism are essentially characterized as being “shut-in” from the rest of the world.  They have difficulties with social communication and interaction, restrictions of imagination and social repertoire, and behavioral problems.  Lower functioning autistics may be speech impaired, or incapable of verbal communication.  Higher functioning autistics may have normal development aside from social issues, and even show advanced skill in an area such as mathematics or art.  However, in either of these cases, communication with others poses an issue. This is where music therapy may prove useful (Graham, 2001).

Music therapy is designed to be very personalized, in order to promote one-on-one interaction and demonstrate a functioning two-person relationship.  It tends to focus on spontaneous improvisation—the idea is not to enhance musical ability; any musical talent that is acquired is merely a side effect (Bell, 2008).  The basic intent is to create an environment in which the client feels comfortable making their own contributions, mixing those contributions with those of the therapist (taking turns), and exploring.  This environment provides the client with a place in which they can connect and communicate on a more advanced level than they usually would, and works to improves their communication issues in everyday life.  Music is effective as a communication device on multiple levels.  Not only does it imitate social interactions, its patterned nature also appeals to the autistic mind, which tends to form patterns and gravitate towards patterns and structure in the external world.  For this reason, even patients with sound sensitivities may benefit from and enjoy music therapy (Gold, Wigram, & Elefant, 2006).