OCD and Its Many Uses
Anxiety is involved in concentration, memory and even test-taking behavior. OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is an extremely difficult and complex anxiety disorder to manage for both the patient and the healthcare provider. Not being able to stop thinking about something or to stop doing something prevents those with the disorder from doing the things in life which appeal to them. Fun seems to vanish as the anxiety takes over evermore aspects of their lives.
It's similar in some ways to a very famous 20-year study by the famous Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria. The individual about whom Luria wrote was known simply as "S" and he was the subject of Luria's book, "The Mind of a Mnemonist." While most of us are anxious about our memory, S was a man who couldn't forget.
Luria, who was studying the question of forgetting at the time, had S remember pages from the phone book and then, many years later, would ask him to recall a specific page. S always produced the correct information. Since we know that anxiety is involved in both memory and forgetting, it would have been interesting if Luria would have given S some form of anxiety testing. Did he have any specific genetic inheritance that made this possible? We don't know because the technology wasn't available during his lifetime.
Did S obsess? We don't know, but it almost seems to indicate that he must have been doing something to keep that information in his memory all that time. For most people, we call it rehearsal and you do it each time you keep repeating something like a phone number until you can write it down. This repetition keeps it from slipping out of our short-term memory bank.
Anxiety and memory was also found in "The Zeigarnik Effect" where another psychologist (Bluma Zeigarnik) showed that a waitress would not forget the orders of all her customers, even though she hadn't written them down, until they paid. Anxiety kept the information in place until the paying of the check released it.
So, did the waitress keep repeating something to herself to hold on to that check information? Did she obsess? Bluma, after leaving the restaurant, went back and asked the waitress to repeat the orders for which she had just been paid. Somewhat surprised, the waitress told her she couldn't do it because the bills had been paid.
A new study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology may have found another relationship of great interest in OCD anxiety. Some women who had both an eating disorder and OCD had a specific genotype that appears to affect their eating behavior. The researchers believe that two specific sections of genes were working together to inhibit eating or promote OCD.
The genetic connection may, the researchers think, be a promising route to producing medications that can normalize cell functioning. The researchers also indicated that there is a known relationship between bulimia and a variant of a serotonin gene portion.
Related Topics: WebMD Video: Success Over Stress, Brain Chemical May be Key in Eating Disorders
Technorati Tags: OCD, anxiety, eatingdisorders, bulimia, serootonin
It's similar in some ways to a very famous 20-year study by the famous Russian psychologist, Alexander Luria. The individual about whom Luria wrote was known simply as "S" and he was the subject of Luria's book, "The Mind of a Mnemonist." While most of us are anxious about our memory, S was a man who couldn't forget.
Luria, who was studying the question of forgetting at the time, had S remember pages from the phone book and then, many years later, would ask him to recall a specific page. S always produced the correct information. Since we know that anxiety is involved in both memory and forgetting, it would have been interesting if Luria would have given S some form of anxiety testing. Did he have any specific genetic inheritance that made this possible? We don't know because the technology wasn't available during his lifetime.
Did S obsess? We don't know, but it almost seems to indicate that he must have been doing something to keep that information in his memory all that time. For most people, we call it rehearsal and you do it each time you keep repeating something like a phone number until you can write it down. This repetition keeps it from slipping out of our short-term memory bank.
Anxiety and memory was also found in "The Zeigarnik Effect" where another psychologist (Bluma Zeigarnik) showed that a waitress would not forget the orders of all her customers, even though she hadn't written them down, until they paid. Anxiety kept the information in place until the paying of the check released it.
So, did the waitress keep repeating something to herself to hold on to that check information? Did she obsess? Bluma, after leaving the restaurant, went back and asked the waitress to repeat the orders for which she had just been paid. Somewhat surprised, the waitress told her she couldn't do it because the bills had been paid.
A new study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology may have found another relationship of great interest in OCD anxiety. Some women who had both an eating disorder and OCD had a specific genotype that appears to affect their eating behavior. The researchers believe that two specific sections of genes were working together to inhibit eating or promote OCD.
The genetic connection may, the researchers think, be a promising route to producing medications that can normalize cell functioning. The researchers also indicated that there is a known relationship between bulimia and a variant of a serotonin gene portion.
Related Topics: WebMD Video: Success Over Stress, Brain Chemical May be Key in Eating Disorders
Technorati Tags: OCD, anxiety, eatingdisorders, bulimia, serootonin
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