TOPIC 4: Mental Health
Money can't buy love or friendship
While researchers have suggested that individuals who base their self-worth on
their financial success often feel lonely in everyday life, a newly published study
by the University at Buffalo and Harvard Business School has taken initial steps
to better understand why this link exists.
"When people base their self-worth on financial success, they experience
feelings of pressure and a lack of autonomy, which are associated with negative
social outcomes," says Lora Park, an associate professor of psychology at UB
and one of the paper's co-authors.
"Feeling that pressure to achieve financial goals means we're putting ourselves
to work at the cost of spending time with loved ones, and it's that lack of time
spent with people close to us that's associated with feeling lonely and
disconnected," says Deborah Ward, a UB graduate student and adjunct faculty
member at the UB's psychology department who led the research on a team that
also included Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business
School, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, at the University of Western Australia, and
Han Young Jung, a former UB graduate student.
The findings, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, emphasize the role of social networks and personal relationships in
maintaining good mental health and why people should preserve those
connections, even in the face of obstacles or pursuing challenging goals.
"Depression and anxiety are tied to isolation, and we're certainly seeing this now
with the difficulties we have connecting with friends during the COVID-19
pandemic," says Ward. "These social connections are important. We need them
as humans in order to feel secure, to feel mentally healthy and happy. But much
of what's required to achieve success in the financial domain comes at the
expense of spending time with family and friends." Ward says it's not financial
success that's problematic or the desire for money that's leading to these
associations.
At the center of this research is a concept psychologists identify as Financial
Contingency of Self-Worth. When people's self-worth is contingent on money,
they view their financial success as being tied to the core of who they are as a
person. The degree to which they succeed financially relates to how they feel
about themselves – feeling good when they think they're doing well financially,
but feeling worthless if they're feeling financially insecure.
The research involved more than 2,500 participants over five different studies
that looked for relationships between financial contingency of self-worth and
key variables, such as time spent with others, loneliness and social
disconnection. This included a daily diary study that followed participants over a
two-week period to assess how they were feeling over an extended time about
the importance of money and time spent engaged in various social activities.
"We saw consistent associations between valuing money in terms of who you
are and experiencing negative social outcomes in previous work, so this led us
to ask the question of why these associations are present," says Ward. "We see
these findings as further evidence that people who base their self-worth on
money are likely to feel pressured to achieve financial success, which is tied to
the quality of their relationships with others."
Ward says the current study represents the beginning of efforts to uncover the
processes at work with Financial Contingency of Self-Worth.
"I hope this is part of what becomes a longer line of research looking at the
mechanisms between valuing money and social-related variables," says Ward.
"We don't have the final answer, but there is a lot of evidence that pressures are
largely playing a role."
Reading test
Write True, False, Not Given in front of each statement relevantly:
1.People relating their own value with Money believe that they are lonely
2.Having good mental health is not related with having strong relationships
3.Some people feel unhappy and worthless when they have financial problems
4.2500 participants were involved to the research
5.Most of the participants were students at UB
6.There was evidence previously showing that some people feel under pressure
to have financial success
7.The researchers identify that certain mental disorders are derived from desire
to spend more Money
Complete the sentences using only one word from the text
1.Deborah Ward is a graduate student and …….. of faculty at UB.
2.Role of social …….. and …….. are stated in the research published in the
journal of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
3.Social connections are important. Isolation is linked to …….. and ……..
4.Financial Contingency of Self-Worth means that some people perceive that
their …….. success defines who they are as a ……..
5.According to Ward, current study would …….. the processes making
connection between financial success and self-worth.
6.Although there is no final conclusion, but much …….. is available showing
the important role of pressure.
Second type of schizophrenia discovered
Penn Medicine researchers are the first to discover two distinct neuroanatomical
subtypes of schizophrenia after analyzing the brain scans of over 300 patients.
The first type showed lower widespread volumes of gray matter when compare
to healthy controls, while the second type had volumes largely similar to normal
brains. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Brain, suggest that, in
the future, accounting for these differences could inform more personalized
treatment options.
"Numerous other studies have shown that people with schizophrenia have
significantly smaller volumes of brain tissue than healthy controls. However, for
at least a third of patients we looked at, this was not the case at all – their brains
were almost completely normal," said principal investigator Christos
Davatzikos, PhD, the Wallace T. Miller Professor of Radiology in the Perelman
School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "In the future, we're not
going to be saying, 'This patient has schizophrenia,' We're going to be saying,
'This patient has this subtype' or 'this abnormal pattern,' rather than having a
wide umbrella under which everyone is categorized."
Schizophrenia is a poorly understood mental disorder that typically presents
with hallucinations, delusions, and other cognitive issues – though symptoms
and responses to treatment vary widely from patient to patient. Up until now,
attempts to study the disease, by comparing healthy to diseased brains, has
neglected to account for this heterogeneity, which Davatzikos says has
muddled research findings and undermined clinical care.
To better characterize the distinct brain differences within the schizophrenia
patient population, Davatzikos established a research consortium that spanned
three continents – the United States, China, and Germany. The international
cohort of study participants included 307 schizophrenia patients and 364 healthy
controls, all of whom were 45-years-old or younger.
Davatzikos and engineering colleagues then analyzed the brain scans using a
machine learning method developed at Penn called HYDRA (Heterogeneity
Through Discriminative Analysis). The approach helps to identify "true disease
subtypes" by limiting the influence of confounding variables, such as age, sex,
imaging protocols, and other factors, according to the study authors.
"This method enabled us to sub-categorize patients and find how they differed
from the controls, while allowing us, at the same time, to dissect this
heterogeneity and tease out multiple pathologies, rather than trying to find a
dominant pattern," Davatzikos said.
After applying this machine learning method to the brain images, the researchers
found that 115 patients with schizophrenia, or nearly 40 percent, did not have
the typical pattern of reduced gray matter volume that has been historically
linked to the disorder. In fact, their brains showed increases of brain volume in
the middle of the brain, in an area called the striatum, which plays a role in
voluntary movement. When controlling for differences in medication, age, and
other demographics, the researchers could not find any clear explanation for the
variation.
"The subtype 2 patients are very interesting, because they have similar
demographic and clinical measures with subtype 1, and the only differences
were their brain structures," said Ganesh Chand, PhD, a lead author and
postdoctoral researcher in the radiology department at Penn.
There are a variety of antipsychotic medications available to manage the
symptoms of schizophrenia, but how they will affect a particular patient – both
positively or negatively – is often a shot in the dark, according to study cosenior author Daniel Wolf, MD, PhD, an associate professor of Psychiatry at
Penn.
"The treatments for schizophrenia work really well in a minority of people,
pretty well in most people, and hardly at all in a minority of people. We mostly
can't predict that outcome, so it becomes a matter of trial and error," Wolf said.
"Now that we are starting to understand the biology behind this disorder, then
we will hopefully one day have more informed, personalized approaches to
treatment."
As to why an entire subset of patients with schizophrenia have brains that
resemble healthy people, Davatzikos is not willing to speculate.
"This is where we are puzzled right now," Davatzikos said. "We don't know.
What we do know is that studies that are putting all schizophrenia patients in
one group, when seeking associations with response to treatment or clinical
measures, might not be using the best approach."
Future research, he said, will provide a more detailed picture of these subtypes
in relation to other aspects of brain structure and function, clinical symptoms,
disease progression, and etiology.
Reading test
Write True, False, Not Given in front of each statement relevantly:
1.The brain shows no difference when peope have first type of schizophrenia.
2.There have been other research works that similar to findings of the study
published in Brain
3.Scientists have a little information on schizophrenia
4.Symptoms of schizophrenia have changed in 100 years
5.Davatzikos created a research collaboration in order for understanding
schizophrenia better
6.The subtype 1 and 2 are categorized based on demographic differences
7.Etiology of schizophrenia will be the most important research topic in future
Complete the sentences using only one word from the text
1.According to Davatzikos, `schizophrenia` term will be changed with `……….`
in the future.
2.Cognitive issues such as …….. and …….. are reckoned main indicators of
schizophrenia, while symptoms show difference on patients.
3.A machine learning method called …….. is used for analyzing brain scans by
the researchers.
4.Implementing this machine method has changed some traditional beliefs.
Namely, the brain area referred as ……… is measured that its volume has been
increased.
5.Various …….. drugs are used to reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia which
has both positive and negative effects to the patients.
6.Wolf hopes that there will be a ……… treatment in future which is needed.