Latest Health News Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD Sep 17, 2006 | Get updates: Subscribe Now Lost in Thought Can we literally lose ourselves in an experience? Science tests the notion. The Mystery Behind Love-Hate Relationships What is the scientific difference between love and hate? Can people both love and hate the same person at different times? School of Hard Knocks Impairs Judgement Responding to life's hard lessons doesn't make you wiser, just the opposite researchers claim. ADHD Drugs Send Thousands to ERs New study warns of danger of commonly prescribed ADHD drugs, including chest pains, strokes and high blood pressure. Heart Attacks Linked to Jobs Loss Losing a job late in life can be stressful, researchers have found. Workplace ageism is a major factor. Childhood Experience Influences Mood New research emphasizes the importance of parents' life outlook on children's development. Video Games Desensitize People to Real-Life Violence What parents feared about violent video games is proven to be true. Health Topics | Back Issues | View latest newsletter: September 2006 Lost in Thought Prof. Rafael Malach, Ilan Golberg and Michal Harel of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department found a scientific means of addressing this question--by scanning the brains of volunteers performing various mental tasks. The results of their study, which were published recently in the journal Neuron, were unanticipated: When subjects were given outwardly-focused tasks that demanded their full attention, areas of the brain that relate to the self were not only inactive--they appeared to be vigorously suppressed. The functional brain scans were done with an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) system, which maps brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow and oxygenation. Volunteers either viewed photos or listened to short music segments. For each stimulus, however, participants were asked to perform two different tasks. In one, "introspective" assignment, they were asked to think about themselves and how the image or musical selection made them feel. In the second, "sensory-motor" task, they performed quick recognition exercises--such as identifying pieces that included a trumpet's sound. The scientists were particularly interested in certain regions in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain known to be involved in personality and self-knowledge, among other things. Indeed, the fMRI confirmed that these regions were active during introspection but, when subjects were absorbed in the recognition task, activity in these areas was silenced. (fMRI readings in these areas fell below those measured when subjects were resting.) "It is tempting," says Malach, "to put these findings in a broader perspective, one that veers away from traditional western thought, with its emphasis on self-control and for which 'someone is always minding the store,' and toward more eastern perspectives, in which the 'self must be abandoned in order to fully engage with the outside world.'" On a more scientific level, their study suggests that the brain's self-awareness centers do not function as a critical element that allows perceptual awareness of the outside world. Rather, the self-related areas of the prefrontal cortex appear to be engaged specifically when we are aware both of the sensory experience and of ourselves as the observers of this experience. When we are so occupied with the outside world as to "forget ourselves," only local, sensory-specific systems seem to be needed. Read more in Neuron Top of page The Mystery Behind Love-Hate Relationships

We have often noted that people can love and hat the same person at different times. Sometimes these people can be sufferers from a personality disorder such as borderline personality disorder. But Yale researchers wondered if there could be something else that makes people do this.

One of the strange things that the Yale researchers found was that people who see their relationships as either all good or all bad tend to have low self-esteem. Their results were recently published in theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In two of the studies participants were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether each of 10 adjectives applied to their relationship partner, adjectives such as caring and warm or greedy and dishonest. Partners in this study included college roommates and mothers. Individuals low in self-esteem were considerably slower to respond when negative and positive adjectives were alternated than when similar adjectives appeared in blocks. Those high in self-esteem were equally quick to respond to the adjectives no matter how they were presented.

"This suggests it was hard for them to think of their partners as a mix of positive and negative characteristics at a given point in time," said Margaret Clark, a professor in the Department of Psychology and senior faculty author of the study. "We do not think these results are limited to any one type of relationship. We think they apply to any close relationship."

Clark said the effects were obtained only when people judged relationship partners. There was no delayed response when judging an object, in this case, their computer.

The researchers first measured self-esteem by asking participants to fill out the Rosenberg self-esteem inventory. The reaction time task was administered weeks later by an experimenter who did not know their evaluation results.

"Those low in self-esteem are chronically concerned about whether or not their close relationship partners will or will not accept them," Clark said. "In good times, those low in self-esteem tend to idealize partners, rendering those partners safe for approach and likely to reflect positively upon them. At the first sign of a partner not being perfect, however, they switch to focusing on all possible negatives about the partner so as to justify withdrawing from that partner and not risking vulnerability."