Sleepwalking and Night Terrors

While insomnia, sleep apnea, and narcolepsy are most common among adults, sleepwalking and night terrors occur far more commonly among children. Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is experienced by about 25 percent of all children at least once in their life. During one of these episodes, the child will leave his bed and walk around in a slow, uncoordinated manner. Night terrors are intense, vivid, and usually brief periods of fear. Symptoms include sweating, restlessness, increased heartbeat, and thrashing. While night terrors are dramatic and frightening, they are generally not viewed as a sleep disorder unless they occur on a regular, frequent basis.

http://www.netplaces.com/psychology/altered-states-of-consciousness/sleep-disorders.htm

How we moved out from grief.

A month before Deborah's diagnosis we had a huge bash to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, with our four children and a sea of friends and relations. Life could not have tasted sweeter. I was busy directing commercials as Debs wrote on health, psychology, colonies anything that fascinated her. As health editor of Vogue for most of her career and author of books on how to look after oneself, she had a firm grasp of how to make the best of lite. She had smoked for seven years, from her late teens, unconcerned in those days, as was society. But we never could have anticipated what was to come.

In June of 2004 Debs had suffered an unusual spontaneous fracture in a rib. Her regular running was becoming more of an effort, and in November headaches led her to a neurologist. X-rays revealed a snowstorm of white shadows clouding her chest. It took four days to confirm the dreaded news that Deborah had stage IV cancer. There is no stage V.

I felt desperate for Debs. How could we possibly tell our children? But she quietly and simply announced there was only one way to deal with this, 'to face it with grace and dignity'. And so she did. Her strength was ours as a family.

Meanwhile neighbours helped out wherever and whenever: visits to the chemotherapy clinic, distractions for the children, regular deliveries from the 'Collander Girls' - 20 local busy mums who took it in turns to make us meals three times a week. The help and support raised our spirits. We often reflected on how lucky we were, having so often seen the despair written on the faces of those unaccompanied in the oncology waiting room. In fact, it was what inspired Debs to write her book, What Can I do to Help?, in those last months.

Debs never shrank from the truth, however unpalatable. She became increasingly thin, bringing the idea of her dying very close at times, while at others we clung to the tentative promise of some new unproven drug.

It became apparent that Debs needed us as someone, seeing things from her point of view so she was not alone on her journey. We, too, had to acknowledge that death could be just around the corner. This may have seemed a tough way to deal with it, especially for our children who had from the start been told more or less everything: most significantly that we were only ever buying time.

Looking after Deborah, being at her side through interrupted nights of restless discomfort, led to conversations that left no stone unturned. We discussed the children's future, how they'd remember her, how she didn't want to die in hospital, how she wanted me to find happiness with someone else... but not too soon. We were acknowledging the truth of what lay ahead and yet their intensity drew us even closer. We talked of the mystery, that 'black door' and, though I am still left without answers, she did all she could to find them.

Throughout our happy lives together, we had both been lucky enough to feel independent, eminently strong, even a little competitive. But at the end we had both dropped out guard to show each other our true fears.

She died just after the launch of her book. We all felt its valedictory nature. Three days later I woke to find her at peace by my side. The light of my life had gone out.

Acknowledging the depth of my sadness has been a very important part of this strange feeling that has come home to roost. I have found that honesty is vital in grief. I now realise that children will accept the truth of any situation, however dire, and adapt.

Now, more than a year later, the odd wave of sadness still catches me out. I think of Debs often in the day and we talk of her every day at home, referring to mum's this or mum's that. The children and I have set up The Deborah Hutton Campaign to promote anti-smoking, in particular amongst young girls, led by my daughters Romilly and Clemmie.

At home, I think we have all felt the grief has not been as unbearable as at first we thought it would be. Laughter has not left us by any means as a family. There is a loss of innocence in being a close witness to death. Though I have no beliefs in which to find comfort or enlightened understanding, it has made death less of an irrational rear for me.

I would give anything to see her walk through our lives again, but that's how it is, and it is alright. Debs showed us how to live with cancer and the proximity of death, and in some ways has shown me how to live without her. Luckily, for us as a family, most of life's daily rhythms remain the same. It just feels very different.

Parent partner

One of the advantages of being a parent is that you know what it's like to be a child. You have your own checklist of things your parents got wrong which you are never going to repeat with your own children. So when your 12-year-old asks for a TV in her bedroom or wants to stay out late for a party, you know what the right answer is and you assume your partner will agree. After all, you both want the best for your child, don't you?

But suppose his idea of what's 'best' is different from yours? You're opposed to children watching TV alone in their room, but your partner feels equally strongly that you have to trust your child. Suddenly your united front is in pieces, you're having a row that you never saw coming, and now it's your child and your partner who are united against you. Whatever the outcome, someone will end up angry and aggrieved.

According to Susanna Abse, director of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, in such a situation everyone loses out. It's disconcerting for children if you argue about them in front of them — even if they are the victors. They feel triumphant, but also carry a burden of guilt because they realise they've caused a rift between you - and that can be a worry for them1 she says.

Remember that your partner is trying to do his best,' says Abse. 'Discuss with him what he is thinking and why he is doing the things he does.'

If, however, you do feel your partner is being abusive and discussing it hasn't helped, then you may need outside help.

In different situations, you need to square off in your own mind the fact that your partner has as much say over your child's upbringing as you have. 'Ask "why do I feel like this?'" says Abse. Try to become more self-reflective and less reactive.' Often these feelings are driven by your own earlier experiences; perhaps you were bullied yourself, and you are transferring these feelings from the past. 'You have to try to unpick what belongs in this situation and what belongs elsewhere.' In an ideal situation, parents present a united front. Yet this doesn't have to mean agreeing with your partner unquestioningly. It's more important that you're able to discuss freely what you think. Whether you can then present a united front despite your differences is really about your philosophy of parenting, says Janet Reibstein, professor of psychology at The University of Exeter. 'If you have chosen a partner with similar values then there will be fewer disputes between you.' But if you do have disputes, acknowledging that you have a relationship separate from the child can help. 'Spend time together listening to each other and thinking things through. Couples who do best are those who give time to each other, despite having children.'

By avoiding any show of disunity in front of the child, you also avoid giving him or her a chance to exploit the situation.

Disagreements can be healthy for a child to see, but not if the argument concerns the child. If this happens, Penny Mansfield, director of One Plus One Marriage and Partnership Research, advises extricating yourself as soon as possible. 'Say to the child, "Dad has just come in from work — give us five minutes." Then take your partner to one side and say, "shall we just deal with this?" Try to resolve things so the child sees you can have your differences, debate them and come to a conclusion.'

If you can manage this, then holding different views from your partner can even be beneficial, says Mansfield. 'It isn't that couples who manage their differences well don't have differences, but they talk about them and know how to deal with the disagreement. Showing that we can express our views and accept someone else's without being intimidated - that's one of the best lessons parents can give their children.' Perhaps it's also one of the best gifts we can share with our partners.

Adapted from the article 'PARENT PARTNER' 'Psychologies, January 2007

When bad moods are good for you

Over the past decades, in particular, psychologists have been using such laboratory experiments to investigate what moods are and why it is that they can fire us up one moment and drain us of energy the next.

Moods, and bad moods in particular, often appear to come from nowhere. We all have a tendency to notice the negative rather than the positive feelings, but the good news is that we are happier than we tend to think. When the Canadian psychologist Keith Oatley asked people to keep a diary of every mood they experienced throughout the day, it was the negative moods that predominated. But when he paged the people at random intervals and asked them to write down how they were feeling at that exact moment, it was clear that they felt good most of the time. The problem with negative moods is that we are far more likely to notice and remember them.

Rapid response

Whether it's anger, fear or pure joy, moods can feel overwhelming and beyond our control. Just one careless comment or email can trigger a new mood. They change very fast and with good reason. Fear in an emergency would not be very useful if it only crept up on you gradually. Emotions provide us with a ready-made way of responding to a situation without having to work out from scratch what we should do. This is why they can appear to hijack us so fast.

Moods are not just feelings we experience; they affect the way our minds work. If you're phobic about spiders, once you realise you're in a room with a spider, you focus on that and disregard almost everything else. Moods even influence the way we retrieve memories, whether recent or past. A person feeling sad finds it easier to remember other sad occasions, while a happy person remembers other happy times.

Emotional energy

Hope — the feeling that good things might happen in the future — is so powerful that it can even affect our health. Hope gives us energy, and research has shown that hopeful people are more likely to succeed at work, in sport, in academia and in politics. They are also happier and better at both persevering with a task and solving problems. One reason why hopeful people succeed is that they set themselves higher goals while setting more goals at a time, which buffers them against disappointment if one plan does not work out.

Positive emotions have clear and tangible benefits — hope can even make you live longer. But however destructive they seem, even temper tantrums and sulks have their uses. Emotions are all about communication. They give us information about the way other people feel.

The US psychologist James Averill asked people to think back to specific situations where they had either lost their temper or had been the target of someone else's anger. He found that, provided excessive aggression had not been used, the majority of the targets thought that the anger had been beneficial. They said it helped them to recognise their own faults and even strengthened their relationship with the angry person. Without anger at the world's injustices, would any one ever campaign for change?

Keeping it short

Even though a negative mood may have its uses, if it goes on too long it becomes very unpleasant to live with. When it comes to snapping out of a bad mood some people find it much easier than others. Children who have frequent tantrums at the age of eight tend to become adults who lose their tempers unusually often. Feeling at the mercy of our moods too much and too often is difficult and unpleasant for us, and alienating for people around us. But, with the help of our parents, we do gradually learn the skill of emotional regulation from babyhood onwards. This is the ability to control your mood.

It is hard to see why such an unpleasant sensation could be useful, but anxiety does provide an adrenaline rush that a lot of performers would not want to be without. Anxiety also prepares the body. Research conducted at Thames Valley University found that if people about to undergo surgery were given relaxation techniques to reduce their anxiety, their bodies actually found it harder to cope with the operation. A small amount of anxiety prepares us for what is to come. Looking at the research on moods, it's clear that we don't need to be afraid of our negative emotions. We imagine that it's essential to get control of our bad moods, or we risk being helpless in their grasp, and it's true that emotional management is a crucial part of our personal development and relationships. But there is another aspect to our emotional ups and downs: our feelings have important things to tell us, and we do well to listen to them.

Claudia Hammond is the author of 'Emotional Roller coaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings'

Adapted from the article ''When bad moods are good for you”.

‘’Psychologies,” January,2007.

Explanations for Forgetting

by Kendra Cherry

From forgetting to return an important phone call to not being able to remember where you left your car keys, forgetting is a common complaint that everyone shares. Forgetting is the inability to retrieve information from a memory due to a problem with encoding, storage, or retrieval. Forgetting can be very frustrating, especially since you are usually aware of forgetting when you really need to remember something — such as when taking an exam — or when you should have done something but the moment has passed — such as getting milk from the store before it closed.

Even though forgetting is natural to most people, if you are fed up with forgetting, there are some techniques you can use to help you remember, such as rehearsal and mnemonics. These techniques will be explained in detail later in this chapter.

Though you don't often think of it as such, forgetting can also be a blessing. For instance, do you really want to remember the pain you experienced in that car accident five years ago? Forgetting allows you to continue your life without giving focus to past painful, embarrassing, stressful, or unhappy experiences. Even so, most people still want to know why they forget. Researchers have come up with various theories to explain this.

Replacement Theory

The replacement theory holds that new information entering the memory replaces old information already stored. Studies that support this theory show that misleading information replaces the original memories of people. For instance, one study showed pictures of a car accident to two groups of people. In one group, the researches asked leading questions to make the people think they had seen a yield sign, when the picture had actually shown a stop sign. Those in the other group were not asked leading questions and therefore remembered seeing the stop sign. When both groups were later gathered together, they were told the purpose behind the experiment and asked to guess if they thought they had been part of the group that was misled. Nearly everyone in the group that was misled claimed that they had truly seen the yield sign and were not deceived. This led researchers to conclude that the implanted memory replaced the actual one.

Decay Theory

The decay theory holds that some memories will dissipate if not retrieved every once in a while from the long-term memory. According to this theory, the formation of a new memory creates what is known as a memory trace, or a change in brain cells. If this memory is not periodically refreshed, the memory trace gradually fades. Why waste space with information you aren't going to use? Fortunately, decay doesn't affect all memories. Many procedural memories will remain in the long-term memory for as long as you live. For instance, even if you haven't ridden a bike in fifteen years, you can still remember how once you get back on. There isn't a specific time limit on when a memory has to be recalled before it decays; some memories will be forgotten the next day, and others may take years to forget.

Memory loss can also be attributed to brain damage. If you were to suffer a blow to the head, the memories stored in that particular area may be lost. Depending upon the type of damage suffered, the memory loss can be either temporary or permanent.

Cue-Dependent Theory

The cue-dependent theory holds that the retrieval of some memories are dependent upon cues that help to locate that information in the brain; if these cues are missing, then you may not be able to remember. Because the mind organizes information based on associations with other things, if you are able to recall an association, that increases your likelihood of recalling the particular information you are seeking. For instance, if you have forgotten the last name of a classmate, cues for remembering may be her first name, where she sat in class with you, her nickname, or even the circumstances surrounding the situation in which you first met her. Without these cues, you may not be able to recall her last name.

Interference Theory

According to interference theory, information within the memory can interfere with other bits of information during storage or retrieval, thus causing you to forget. This can occur when incoming information is similar to information that is already stored, which can cause confusion when later trying to recall the first-stored information. Or vice versa. The formerly learned information can interfere with the recollection of the recently learned information. For instance, if you've recently met two people with similar names, you might confuse the two names later when meeting one of them again. While this may seem like the replacement theory, it is different in that the new information does not replace the old. Both bits of information are still there; they just become confused.

Psychogenic Amnesia Theory

The psychogenic amnesia theory holds that you forget experiences because of the need to escape the feelings associated with a painful, embarrassing, or otherwise unpleasant experience. In essence, you force the memory to the back of your mind so you do not have to face it. However, this doesn't mean that the memory can never be retrieved. Certain cues can be used to retrieve those memories. This concept began with Freud's theory of repression, which is the involuntary act of moving information that is deemed traumatic or threatening into the unconscious so as to avoid dealing with it. Because the person is unaware of the memory stored in the unconscious, he does not recall the events or feelings associated with the experience. In other words, it is blocked from the conscious memory, so the individual forgets it. The repression theory has become a topic of debate among professionals, as you will soon see.

If you tell someone to “forget it,” chances are you have just helped that person to remember. While the information normally may have just resided in short-term memory and then eventually been discarded, your drawing attention to that information may have given it greater meaning and thus helped it to reach the long-term memory.

http://www.netplaces.com/psychology/how-you-remember-why-you-forget/explanations-for-forgetting.htm

Theories of Love

5 Ways Psychologists Describe and Explain Love

By Kendra Cherry

Psychologists and researchers have proposed a number of different theories of love. Love is a basic human emotion, but understanding how and why it happens is not necessarily easy. In fact, for a long time, many people suggested that love was simply something that science couldn't understand.

The following are four of the major theories proposed to explain love and other emotional attachments.

Liking vs. Loving

Psychologist Zick Rubin proposed that romantic love is made up of three elements: attachment, caring and intimacy.Attachment is the need to receive care, approval, and physical contact with the other person. Caring involves valuing the other persons needs and happiness as much as your own. Intimacy refers to the sharing of thoughts, desires, and feelings with the other person.

Based upon this definition, Rubin devised a questionnaire to assess attitudes about others and found that these scales of liking and loving provided support for his conception of love.

Compassionate vs. Passionate Love

According to psychologist Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues, there are two basic types of love: compassionate love and passionate love. Compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection and trust. Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and shared respect for one another.

Passionate love is characterized by intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety, and affection. When these intense emotions are reciprocated, people feel elated and fulfilled. Unreciprocated love leads to feelings of despondence and despair. Hatfield suggests that passionate love is transitory, usually lasting between 6 and 30 months.

Hatfield also suggests that passionate love arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal love, and when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person.

Ideally, passionate love then leads to compassionate love, which is far more enduring. While most people desire relationships that combine the security and stability of compassionate with the intensity of passionate love, Hatfield believes that this is rare.

The Color Wheel Model of Love

In his 1973 book The Colors of Love, John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel. Just as there are three primary colors, Lee suggested that there are three primary styles of love. These three styles of love are: (1) Eros, (2) Ludos and (3) Storge.

Continuing the color wheel analogy, Lee proposed that just as the primary colors can be combined to create complementary colors, these three primary styles of love could be combined to create nine different secondary love styles. For example, a combination of Eros and Ludos results in Mania, or obsessive love.