When You Sense Nothing At All

I learned how to do my make up from youtube!

Let's dream big.

ANYTHING. I wake up super hungry after 8 hours of not eating. And I grab some coffee and ONMONMON

Let's dream big.

We all know that candies are good reinforcement for kids. Actually, kids usually like sweet food. This is what we just know about them. It was because we, too, experienced this kind of preference in sweet candies when we were still a child. But, there were researchers that stated that children preferred not only sweet taste but also sour. And so, recently, there is a rising market for sour candies made especially for children. This is what new researchers were trying to find out.

Liem and Mennella conducted an experiment regarding the heightened preference of children on sour taste. In this experiment, the participants were mothers and their children. Mothers were 37.8 ± 0.7 years old on average (31 Caucasian, 26 African American, 1 Asian, and 3 from other ethnic group). Average of children’s age is 7.4 ± 0.2 years old (29 girls and 32 boys). During the experiment mothers and children were given four lemon-flavored gelatins (three has citric acid: 0.02, 0.08, and 0.25 M; one has none) each. A game-like task was done to examine sour preferences. They tasted each of the four gelatins and were asked to point what they liked best. Here, the experimenters used rank-by-elimination and randomized ordered procedure. The first gelatin chose by the participants was removed. With the remaining three, they were again asked to point which among the three was most preferred. This procedure continued until the rank preference was done. To determine reliability, they were given the two most preferred gelatins and were asked to point which they liked best.

After week s later, 24 children and their mothers were selected to participate in the first session. They were trained to distinguish basic tastes: sweet (0.30 M glucose); salty (0.30 M Na gluconate); and sour (0.01 M citric acid). They were then given three pairs of solution that differed in sour intensity. They were asked to focus on the sour taste and to indicate which of the pair tested more sour. Another procedure was done; they were given four gelatins like the first session (three has citric acid: 0.02, 0.08, and 0.25 M; one has none) and were asked to rank them from most to least sour using rank-by-elimination again.

Mothers were given questionnaire about food neophobia (fear of new experience), general neophobia in adults, and five temperament dimensions (emotionality, shyness, activity, sociability, and negative reaction to foods in general) in their children.

Results showed that there were some children who preferred the gelatin with the highest concentration of citric acid while there were children who preferred not as well as the mothers. These results just show that, unlike adults, some children can indicate the sourest taste and would like it than tastes with lower or no sourness.

This study contributes a lot for the people who make food for the children. They now know what taste, beside sweet, children like. And of course it would be a great help for mothers knowing that they could give an alternative food for sweet candies, for example, sour fruits and vegetables as a snack or even rewards or reinforcements. And aside from nutrients they can get, they could also have increased immunity in fighting sicknesses. Heightened preferences in sweetness and sour taste of children may also be a part of their development. Because children at young age need so much sugar for metabolism and acids to be immune for them to grow big and strong. And also these preferences decline through aging. So, children need the sweet and sour food they can eat to be ready for the exhaustive adulthood.

Reference:

Liem, D. G. & Mennella, J. A. (2003). Heightened Sour Preferences During Childhood. Chemical Senses, 28 (2), 173-180. doi: 10.1093/chemse/28.2.173

http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/tags/candy/default.aspx?PageIndex=2

http://wallpaperstock.net/colored-candy_wallpapers_10629_1920x1440_1.html

http://wallpaperstock.net/green-lemon_wallpapers_7346_1024x768_1.html

Nobody wants to feel pain. In fact, the word itself is filled with so much negativity that if something is thought to have caused pain, then we try everything to avoid it. In one of the lectures that we had, pain is considered as our body's way of telling us that something is wrong. What's great about it is that once we have learned about the problem, then we can easily find a solution before things get worse.

However, experience tells us that not all pain can be resolved right away. Pain could get worse and may interfere with our normal day-to-day functioning. Even a toothache could make a child skip school. Additionally, negative emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger relates closely with pain. But, the causal relationship between pain and negative emotions is still unclear. Does pain cause us to have those negative emotional states, or does the negative emotion that we have worsen the experience of pain? It's like the dilemma on which came in first, the chicken or the egg, that if resolved could have serious implications.


A group of researchers lead by Gabriel Tan (2008) studied the relationship between negative emotions (depression, anxiety and anger) with chronic pain and functioning. Using a structural equation modeling approach (LISREL) the hypothesis that negative emotions are significantly associated with pain and functioning was tested.

126 patients with chronic noncancer pain (referred to the Integrated Pain management Program (IPMP) of the Houston VA Medical Center) participated in the study. The negative emotional states measured were depression, anxiety and anger symptoms using The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (LES-D), the State Anxiety and the State Anger subscales of the State-Trait Personality Inventory, respectively. Likewise, disability, pain interference and severity were measured. Then, the relationship between the said variables was examined through the Linear structural relations (LISREL) program.

Results are consistent with the hypothesis that negative emotuional states are closely related with pain and functioning. More specifically, results support a model that pain severity directly affects interference, and indirectly influences disability, depression, anxiety and anger. Moreover, disability is directly affected by anxiety and indirectly influenced by depression. Thus, when a person is suffereing from pain, he/she may avoid work for fear of exacerbation. The more a person reports depression, anxiety, pain severity and interference, the more the person is likely to become disabled.


Although the findings prove to be useful in the treatment of pain and disability, the generalizability of the results are limited because the sample used mainly include male veterans with a long history of chronic pain.

Finally, this research tells us that pain interacts with other emotions, specially negative ones, that if left alone could lead to disability. This reminds us that one thing we could do to help those suffering from pain is to support them and give them no reason to develop those negative emotions. It is also inspiring to see people that despite their pain and disability continues to live a meaningful and happy life.
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References:

Tan, G., Jensen, M. P., Thornby, J., & Sloan, P. A., Negative emotions, pain, and functioning. Psychological Services, Vol 5(1), Feb, 2008. pp. 26-35. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Images:

http://www.ehealthyland.com/health/dental-care/dental-care-what-is-toothache-in-children-children-toothache.html

http://topnews.net.nz/content/210483-chronic-pain-could-be-treated-blocking-enzyme-researchers

Pain has been very helpful to us people. It warns us against painful stimuli that can be damaging to our body. Aside from this function, there are so much to learn from pain. And it is very complex like any other topic in perception. From the classic studies about pain, they said that pain actually starts from the skin then going to the brain. It is a bottom-up process of pain, but pain perception has other factors that may affect our experience of pain. How we perceive pain is also affected by our attention, experience, distraction, and other cognitive functions. In recent studies, there were significant results that had concluded the gender and age differences in perceiving pain. To make the story short, pain has been very subjective to people and it is different among contexts and these are proved by recent studies.

Aside from the physical aspect of pain (sensory component), there is an affective aspect (affective component) that is mostly the subjective part for people. As the intensity is for physical, the unpleasantness is for affective. Studies showed that theses two aspects or components, not just the physical or sensory, have stimulation in particular aspect of the brain. The physical aspect has stimulation in the primary somatosensory cortex while the affective is in the anterior cingulated cortex.

And aside from directly experiencing pain, there are also studies that show pain of other people can be experienced by the self. This process is called empathy wherein the stimulation in the brain of physical aspect or component is overlapping with the stimulation from the looking at a person experiencing pain.

From these differences from previous studies, it was became an interest for Cheng and coworkers (2007) to study if empathy had been existing to most people or just some? And if people who see other people undergo pain eventually became habituated and experience no pain at all from other’s experience. They conducted an experiment wherein

A week before scanning the brain, participants, who were physicians with experience with acupuncture and people with no experience, were asked to fill out a series of self-report dispositional measures, including the situational pain questionnaire (SPQ) that assess sensitivity to pain, the emotional contagion scale (ECS), the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI), and the empathy quotient (EQ). Functional MRI scanning consisted of three runs: (1) one with the mouth region, (2) one with the foot region, (3) one with the hand region. The visual stimuli were shown randomly in each run included three repetitions of the situations with body parts being either touched by Q-tip (nonpainful)or pricked by a needle (painful).

After being scanned, participants were asked to rate pain intensity and pain unpleasantness with the same visual dynamic situations that they had seen in the scanner with no pain to extreme pain and no effect to extreme unpleasantness as target words.

Results showed the difference in the neurohemodynamic response between two groups of participants who were physicians with practice in acupuncture, experts; and age and educational matched individuals, controls. Physicians had detached perspective in distressing and painful situations of other people, which they achieved through years of practice.

Therefore, the anterior insula and anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), which were important in affective component, would not show increased activation in the physician group. But instead, regions associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control, such as the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, were predicted to show selective activation in brains of physicians.

This study demonstrates that learned experience play a role in the way we perceive other people’s pain . Stimulation and activation in the regions associated with the affective aspects of pain perception, which was detected in the control group, was not observed or seen in physician group.

This knowledge is very important because we can regulate our feelings of unpleasantness from the perception of pain in others, and would be necessary for being successful in our profession, if we were to pursue medicine. But even we are not in the field of medicine or other related fields, we can still use this in our everyday situation and not always in physical situation. Like for example, parents punishing their children, a guy or a girl dumping his or her significant other, a boss scolding his employees, and any other social situations. So therefore, we can say that pain’s importance is just like how complex it is.

References:

Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8th ed.). California, USA: Wadsworth.

Cheng, Y., Decety, J., Hsu, Y., Hung, D., Lin, C. Liu, H., Lim, K. (2007). Expertise Modulates the Perception of Pain in Others. Current Biology, 17, 1708-1713.

Photos from:

http://www.123rf.com/photo_2852632_details-aggressive-doctor-injecting-a-funk-patient.html

Have you ever wondered why you can perceive two or more objects by only seeing one picture? Seems ambiguous right? Just like the picture in the right part of your screen. You may interpret the woman to be old or young. You might be wondering why your visual perception is unstable, perceiving alternating images of a young and an old woman especially when you’ve been exposed to it for a long time.

The mechanisms essential to spontaneous perceptual reversals is still debatable even if it has been studied for more than 200 years already. However, I found a study that that shows how reliability affects interpretation. Two groups of males and females took part in the experiment of Kornmeier and Bach. One group of nine women and five men were assigned to the lattice experiment and a group of eight women and five men were assigned to the face experiment. Geometric stimuli and face stimuli were presented to the participants with two unambiguous variants. The slides were flashed to the participants while the EEG measures their brain activities. The experimenters used MANOVA to interpret their data.

Through the experiment conducted by Kornmeier and Bach, we better understood that the more reliable our percept is rated, the faster and more accurate our action will be. On the other hand, if we’re unsure of our percept, we move slower and we’re more prone to errors.

Now, we know what to do if we’d want to move efficiently and decide quickly. We must then familiarize ourselves first with our task. If our visual perception is not taking second looks, it also helps our brain to be sure of what we’re doing.

Kornmeier, J. & Bach, M.(2009). Object perception: When our brain is impressed but we do not notice it. Journal of Vision January 12, 2009 vol. 9 no. 1 article 7. Retrieved from http://www.journalofvision.org/content/9/1/7.full