Human Emotions and Physical Health

In January, we posted an item, “Linking Emotional and Physical Health.” On March 4, 2009, the University of Kansas (KU) announced that the results of a joint study with the Gallup World Poll into the connection between emotions and health were to be presented that day at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society.

The study includes data from more than 150,000 adults in over 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world’s population. Participants reported emotions such as happiness, enjoyment, worry and sadness. They also described their physical health problems such as pain and fatigue.

According to Sarah Pressman, assistant professor of psychology at KU and a Gallup senior research associate, positive emotions unmistakably are linked to better health. The inverse holds true as well: Negative emotions were a reliable predator of worse health.

KU reports, “Most strikingly, the association between emotion and physical health was more powerful than the connection between health and basic human physical requirements, like adequate nourishment. Even without shelter or food, positive emotions were shown to boost health.”

Original Link: www.news.ku.edu/2009/march/4/emotion.shtml

In June 2008, the Gallup World Poll reported findings that underscore the crucial role of spending time with friends and family in determining the daily emotional well-being of the American public.

See:  “Social Time Crucial to Daily Emotional Well-Being in U.S.“

Autism & Recognizing Emotions

In December, in an entry titled, “The Look On Your Face,” we described a program designed to help save children from lifelong emotional problems by helping youngsters ages 3 to 5 to read facial expressions.

Children with autism have difficulty recognizing emotions. The number of children diagnosed with autism has increased nearly tenfold in the past twenty years.

The Transporters is a DVD devoted to helping children ages 4 to 8 with ASC (autistic spectrum condition) to recognize emotions. It was developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge, England.

The DVD was released in the U.K. two years ago. An American version was released in January 2009. It includes 15 five-minute episodes, plus 30 interactive quizzes and a written guide for parents.

Original Source:  thetransporters.com

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The Power of Emotional Connection – Raphael Cushnir

Raphael Cushnir is the author of, “The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection.”  This new book describes how you can incorporate emotions into your daily life and offers ways to identify and release specific emotions that have been blocking your success and well being.

On the Media Clips page of his web site, you can watch a seven minute TV interview with Raphael Cushnir conducted in January 2009.  The podcast section of his web site enables you to listen to a series of sessions recorded with clients facing specific challenges.  The audio podcasts enable you to observe “the process of emotional connection in an up-close, unedited fashion, applied to practical, everyday concerns.”

The author of three previous books, Cushnir is also a contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine and BeliefNet.  He describes his e-mail newsletter as containing “articles and tips to dissolve resistance and create real, lasting breakthroughs.”

Cushnir says his life changed in 1996 when a mentor convinced him to embrace the pain he was experiencing instead of turning away from it, suggesting it was a perfect opportunity to “wake up.”

See:  www.cushnir.com

Emotional Freedom – Dr. Judith Orloff

Dr. Judith Orloff, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, has written a new book, “Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life.”  She describes the book as “a guide to staying brave and positive during stressful times.”

Dr. Orloff says, “Emotional freedom is being able to transform negative emotions into positive ones and not be reactive.”

In her book, “Emotional Freedom,” she combines “traditional psychiatry with spirituality, emotions and intuition to help us understand ourselves better.”  The book presents practical ways to empower one’s emotional life and offers advice on how to face fear, how to stop absorbing the emotions of others, and how to communicate with compassion.

Borrowing from chapter one of her book, Dr. Orloff’s web site includes a 20 question quiz to help assess your level of emotional freedom.  Dr. Orloff says, “Emotional freedom isn’t some place you arrive at and just stay there. It’s an ongoing blossoming.”

Dr. Judith Orloff’s web site:  www.drjudithorloff.com

National Eating Disorders Week

In the United States, as many as 10 million females and 1 million males are fighting a life and death battle with an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia. Millions more are struggling with binge eating disorder.

The last week in every February is National Eating Disorders Week.

The aim of NEDAwareness Week is to ultimately prevent eating disorders and body image issues while reducing the stigma surrounding eating disorders and improving access to treatment. Eating disorders are serious, life-threatening illnesses – not choices – and it’s important to recognize the pressures, attitudes and behaviors that shape the disorder.

For more information, see the National Eating Disorders Association.

The Eating Disorders Research Society is an international organization of researchers in the field of eating disorders interested in anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder and obesity. The 15th Annual Meeting of the Eating Disorders Research Society will be held September 24-26, 2009 in Brooklyn, New York.

Media Use and Depression

This month’s issue of the Archives of General Psychology includes the results of a seven year study investigating the association between media exposure in adolescence and depression in young adulthood.  Of the 4,142 participants (47.5% female and 67.0% white) who were not depressed at baseline and who underwent follow-up assessment, 308 (7.4%) reported symptoms consistent with depression at follow-up.

Participants reporting more television use had significantly greater odds of developing depression for each additional hour of daily television use.  The same was true for participants reporting more total media exposure.  However, the study did not find a consistent relationship between development of depressive symptoms and exposure to videocassettes, computer games, or radio.

The study, performed by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, concludes that television exposure and total media exposure in adolescence are associated with increased odds of depressive symptoms in young adulthood, especially in young men.

Although Dr. Brian Primack who led the study has been careful to say the results don’t prove that viewing television causes depression, we know time spent watching television often replaces time that could be beneficially devoted to social, academic and athletic activities that facilitate an emotionally healthy sense of accomplishment, teamwork/cooperation and self-respect.

– Frank Mannarino of emoshuns.com

Becoming Emotionally Aware – Vocabulary for Emotions

Two months ago, in an entry titled, “The Look On Your Face,” this blog described a $2.7 million grant for an intervention program designed to help save children from lifelong emotional problems by helping youngsters ages 3-5 to read facial expressions.

Just as reading facial expressions is important, so is recognizing and expressing one’s feelings.  It’s all part of becoming emotionally aware.

A page in the web site for Sesame Street says, “Expressing feelings opens up a whole new world. Children who understand their feelings have a way of coping with both positive and difficult situations. They feel more empathy for others and are better able to cooperate and to learn from them.  Giving your child a vocabulary for his feelings sets the stage for a very deep level of learning.”

Frank Mannarino of emoshuns.com says, “That’s the key: providing and teaching the vocabulary of emotions!”

Tom Drummond of North Seattle Community College published a >vocabulary of emotions that was downloadable as a .pdf file from the web site for Portland State University.

The Journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children published an article in November 2006, “Teaching Children a Vocabulary for Emotions.”  The authors, Lise Fox and Harper Lentini, describe a number of fun activities to teach children a vocabulary for emotions.

In 2001, the Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching published an article, “The Emotions: A Vocabulary before Language.”  The authors, John E. Lennon and Paul F. Barbato, describe how child therapists can enter into the world of child’s play to help children talk about feelings. “Helping them to separate feelings of frustration from feelings of anger, and feelings of disappointment from loneliness aids in the process of getting a handle on being vulnerable and out of control.”

In his 2006 book, “Healthy Anger,” author Bernard Golden wrote (see page 112), “The more you provide children with appropriate vocabulary and concepts to discuss anger and help them make distinctions among emotions, the more sensitive they can be to the complexity of emotional life.”

The Sesame Street web site lists five ways you can help children express their emotions.

The importance of becoming (more) emotionally aware, including the ability to (better) recognize and express one’s feelings, is not limited to children.  To become more emotionally aware is to become more emotionally mature and emotionally healthy.

Suicide: Pain, Suffering, and Prevention

In a comedic piece about euphemisms, George Carlin reminded us that what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, was called “shell shock” in World War I and “battle fatigue” in World War II and “operational exhaustion” during the Korean War.  Carlin reminded us that buried under all this jargon is the pain and suffering of humanity.

In widely distributed news articles published last week, we learned that the U.S. Army believes 24 American soldiers committed suicide in January 2009.  This is more than the number who were killed in combat.  It’s six times the number who committed suicide in January 2008, although the Pentagon points out there were more American soldier suicides in 2008 than any year since the Pentagon began tracking the suicide rate some 28 years ago.

The American Association of Suicidology says suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among young people ages 15-24, and is the 11th leading cause of death overall.

Through a network of more than 130 crisis centers across the nation, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has answered over one million calls in the past four years.

Yesterday, a new video was posted on the Lifeline YouTube Channel in which Dr. Phil encourages people to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.  In the video, he talks about why people should reach out if they are in suicidal crisis or emotional distress and he says there is no shame in asking for help.

LifelineGallery.org enables suicide survivors, attempt survivors, and suicide prevention supporters to share their stories of hope and recovery. Personal stories (spoken through avatars) illustrate the many ways in which suicide affects others and offer comfort to those who may be suffering alone.

FamilyAware.org helps families “recognize and cope with depressive disorders to get people well and prevent suicides.”

Humor is healthy and depression is treatable, but there’s nothing funny about real pain and suffering.

– Frank Mannarino