A child who spends at least two hours a day in front of a TV screen or computer monitor has a significantly higher risk of developing psychological problems, no matter how much physical activity they do, researchers from the University of Bristol's Centre for Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences, England reported in an article published in the American Journal of Pediatrics. The more physically active children who were in front of a screen for at least two hours a day appeared to do better than their sedentary peers in emotional and peer problems, but fared worse in behavioral areas, including hyperactivity.
This latest study, called The PEACH project, assessed over 1,000 kids aged ten and eleven years. The investigators gathered data on how long they spent in front of a computer monitor and/or TV screen, as well as their mental health. The children's levels of physical activity were measured and recorded using an activity monitor.
The researchers found that those children who spend at least two hours watching TV and/or using their computer for non-homework use (recreational use) had higher psychological difficulty scores compared to their peers who spent less time in front of screens. The investigators add that the difficulty scores persisted, irrespective of how physically active the children were.
In other words, it appears that regular prolonged exposure to monitors/screens increases the risk of psychological problems, and exercise does not seem to get rid of the problem.
The authors believe that limiting a child's exposure to TV/Computer screens could play an important role in protecting their current and future mental health and well-being.
Source: "Children's Screen Viewing is Related to Psychological Difficulties Irrespective of Physical Activity"
Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teens. Show all posts
Monday, October 11, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Teenage Competition: Helpful or Harmful?
By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 7, 2010
Teenage Competition: Helpful or Harmful?Are teenagers too competitive? Does being competitive influence teenage girls more than boys? Is being competitive a good or a bad thing when you’re a teenager?
New research suggests the answer is: “it depends.”
Researchers say competing to win is detrimental to girls’ social relationships and has been linked to higher levels of depression, whereas this was much less the case for boys.
However, competing to excel is beneficial to the well-being of both genders.
A new study by Dr. David Hibbard from California State University and Dr. Duane Buhrmester from the University of Texas finds that the influence of competitiveness on psychological well-being and social functioning in adolescents depends on both the type of competitiveness and the teenager’s gender.
Their findings are published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
Competitiveness can be both a virtue and a vice. One person’s win can be another person’s loss and the drive to be better than others, when taken too far, can appear ruthless and selfish.
Consequently, competitiveness may have social and emotional downsides and its effects are likely to differ for males and females. Indeed, research shows that competitiveness is rated both as more typical of adult males and as more desirable for males than for females.
To date, the implications of competitiveness for males and females during late adolescence – a time when high school seniors are looking to assert their identities for jobs that involve varying levels of ambition and competition, while at the same time working to establish close friendships and romantic relationships – have not been investigated fully.
Hibbard and Buhrmester’s work looks at the effect of two types of competitiveness on teenagers’ psychological well-being and social functioning in late adolescence: competing to win (that is, to dominate and outperform others), and competing to excel (that is, to perform well and surpass personal goals).
A total of 110 twelfth-grade high school students from the Richardson Independent School District in Dallas, Texas, their best same-gender friends and their parents completed questionnaires assessing a combination of competitiveness, gender-role orientation, self-esteem, depressive symptoms, loneliness, aggression, empathy, close relationship qualities, and school grades.
The authors found that teenage boys scored higher on ‘competing to win’ than girls but there were no gender differences for ‘competing to excel’ scores.
For girls, competing to win was linked to higher levels of depression and loneliness and to fewer and less close friendships. Competing to excel was linked to higher self-esteem and less depression for both genders, but was largely unrelated to social functioning.
Hibbard and Buhrmester conclude: “The overarching issue this study explored was whether competitiveness as a motivational orientation is good or bad for males and females. The findings clarify, to some degree, western cultures’ ‘ambivalence’ about competitiveness. The view that competitiveness is the road to emotional well-being is supported to the extent that one is talking about competing to improve oneself or excel. On the other hand, if one is talking about competing to win or show dominance over others, then females seem to pay a socio-emotional price.”
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 7, 2010
Teenage Competition: Helpful or Harmful?Are teenagers too competitive? Does being competitive influence teenage girls more than boys? Is being competitive a good or a bad thing when you’re a teenager?
New research suggests the answer is: “it depends.”
Researchers say competing to win is detrimental to girls’ social relationships and has been linked to higher levels of depression, whereas this was much less the case for boys.
However, competing to excel is beneficial to the well-being of both genders.
A new study by Dr. David Hibbard from California State University and Dr. Duane Buhrmester from the University of Texas finds that the influence of competitiveness on psychological well-being and social functioning in adolescents depends on both the type of competitiveness and the teenager’s gender.
Their findings are published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
Competitiveness can be both a virtue and a vice. One person’s win can be another person’s loss and the drive to be better than others, when taken too far, can appear ruthless and selfish.
Consequently, competitiveness may have social and emotional downsides and its effects are likely to differ for males and females. Indeed, research shows that competitiveness is rated both as more typical of adult males and as more desirable for males than for females.
To date, the implications of competitiveness for males and females during late adolescence – a time when high school seniors are looking to assert their identities for jobs that involve varying levels of ambition and competition, while at the same time working to establish close friendships and romantic relationships – have not been investigated fully.
Hibbard and Buhrmester’s work looks at the effect of two types of competitiveness on teenagers’ psychological well-being and social functioning in late adolescence: competing to win (that is, to dominate and outperform others), and competing to excel (that is, to perform well and surpass personal goals).
A total of 110 twelfth-grade high school students from the Richardson Independent School District in Dallas, Texas, their best same-gender friends and their parents completed questionnaires assessing a combination of competitiveness, gender-role orientation, self-esteem, depressive symptoms, loneliness, aggression, empathy, close relationship qualities, and school grades.
The authors found that teenage boys scored higher on ‘competing to win’ than girls but there were no gender differences for ‘competing to excel’ scores.
For girls, competing to win was linked to higher levels of depression and loneliness and to fewer and less close friendships. Competing to excel was linked to higher self-esteem and less depression for both genders, but was largely unrelated to social functioning.
Hibbard and Buhrmester conclude: “The overarching issue this study explored was whether competitiveness as a motivational orientation is good or bad for males and females. The findings clarify, to some degree, western cultures’ ‘ambivalence’ about competitiveness. The view that competitiveness is the road to emotional well-being is supported to the extent that one is talking about competing to improve oneself or excel. On the other hand, if one is talking about competing to win or show dominance over others, then females seem to pay a socio-emotional price.”
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Study links bullying to cognitive deficits, brain changes
By ANNE MCILROY, Toronto Globe and Mail
They lurk in hallways, bathrooms, around the next blind corner. But for the children they have routinely teased or tormented, bullies effectively live in the victims' brains as well -- and not just as a terrifying memory.
Preliminary evidence shows that bullying can produce signs of stress, cognitive deficits and mental-health problems.
Now University of Ottawa psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt and her colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario plan to scan the brains of teens who have been regularly humiliated and ostracized by their peers to look for structural differences compared with other children.
"We know there is a functional difference. We know their brains are acting differently, but we don't know if it is structural as well," said Vaillancourt, an expert in the biology of bullying.
She says she hopes her work will legitimize the plight of children who are bullied, and encourage parents, teachers and school boards to take the problem more seriously.
Vaillancourt has been following a group of 17-year-olds since they were 12. All 70 of the children were routinely bullied during those years -- teased, harassed, threatened or excluded.
Physical violence is relatively rare, she says, because their tormentors are smart enough to know it will get them into trouble.
"For many of these kids, every day is a nightmare," she said. They go to school and no one will talk to them. Someone deliberately bumps into them in the hallway, and all the other children laugh. They get called horrible names.
The researchers will start with brain scans of 15 of the extreme cases, like the child who stood in her gym uniform while other kids put her school clothes in the toilet and urinated on them.
There are also teenagers in the study who have been bullied for five straight school years.
The scientists have already shown that children who are bullied are more likely than other kids to have cognitive deficits.
They score lower on tests that measure verbal memory and executive function, a set of skills needed to focus on a task and get the job done. Mental-health problems, such as depression, are also more common.
Vaillancourt suspects they will also have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory. Depression has been shown to be related to a smaller hippocampus. As well, animal studies have shown that chronic high levels of stress can kill brain cells. Vaillancourt says this kind of damage may help explain why children who are bullied often perform poorly academically.
She will also be looking for a smaller prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in being able to pay attention and other executive functions.
These kinds of differences have been documented in functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, studies of children who have been neglected or abused. Vaillancourt suspects the chronic stress of being bullied will have a similar impact.
She and her colleagues have already published research showing that boys who are bullied tend to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol. It is as if their system is in permanent overdrive.
It's the opposite for the girls; they tend to produce less cortisol than average, as though their stress response system is overly subdued.
"At some point, their brains stop reacting," said Vaillancourt, who holds a Canada Research Chair in children's mental health and violence prevention.
These changes to the brain's stress response system may be linked to the higher rates of depression among children who are regularly picked on by their peers, especially girls. The adolescent years are when peer relations are most important and when girls, more than anything, want to belong, Vaillancourt says.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
They lurk in hallways, bathrooms, around the next blind corner. But for the children they have routinely teased or tormented, bullies effectively live in the victims' brains as well -- and not just as a terrifying memory.
Preliminary evidence shows that bullying can produce signs of stress, cognitive deficits and mental-health problems.
Now University of Ottawa psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt and her colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario plan to scan the brains of teens who have been regularly humiliated and ostracized by their peers to look for structural differences compared with other children.
"We know there is a functional difference. We know their brains are acting differently, but we don't know if it is structural as well," said Vaillancourt, an expert in the biology of bullying.
She says she hopes her work will legitimize the plight of children who are bullied, and encourage parents, teachers and school boards to take the problem more seriously.
Vaillancourt has been following a group of 17-year-olds since they were 12. All 70 of the children were routinely bullied during those years -- teased, harassed, threatened or excluded.
Physical violence is relatively rare, she says, because their tormentors are smart enough to know it will get them into trouble.
"For many of these kids, every day is a nightmare," she said. They go to school and no one will talk to them. Someone deliberately bumps into them in the hallway, and all the other children laugh. They get called horrible names.
The researchers will start with brain scans of 15 of the extreme cases, like the child who stood in her gym uniform while other kids put her school clothes in the toilet and urinated on them.
There are also teenagers in the study who have been bullied for five straight school years.
The scientists have already shown that children who are bullied are more likely than other kids to have cognitive deficits.
They score lower on tests that measure verbal memory and executive function, a set of skills needed to focus on a task and get the job done. Mental-health problems, such as depression, are also more common.
Vaillancourt suspects they will also have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory. Depression has been shown to be related to a smaller hippocampus. As well, animal studies have shown that chronic high levels of stress can kill brain cells. Vaillancourt says this kind of damage may help explain why children who are bullied often perform poorly academically.
She will also be looking for a smaller prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in being able to pay attention and other executive functions.
These kinds of differences have been documented in functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, studies of children who have been neglected or abused. Vaillancourt suspects the chronic stress of being bullied will have a similar impact.
She and her colleagues have already published research showing that boys who are bullied tend to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol. It is as if their system is in permanent overdrive.
It's the opposite for the girls; they tend to produce less cortisol than average, as though their stress response system is overly subdued.
"At some point, their brains stop reacting," said Vaillancourt, who holds a Canada Research Chair in children's mental health and violence prevention.
These changes to the brain's stress response system may be linked to the higher rates of depression among children who are regularly picked on by their peers, especially girls. The adolescent years are when peer relations are most important and when girls, more than anything, want to belong, Vaillancourt says.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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