Mentally Trapped in Your Past

Summary: Cognitive immobility is a form of mental entrapment that leads to conscious or unconscious efforts to recreate past instances in familiar locations.

Source: The Conversation

If you have moved from one country to another, you may have left something behind – be it a relationship, a home, a feeling of safety or a sense of belonging. Because of this, you will continually reconstruct mental simulations of scenes, smells, sounds and sights from those places – sometimes causing stressful feelings and anxiety.

This describes what I have dubbed “cognitive immobility”, outlined in my new research article, published in Culture & Psychology.

The study used autoethnography, a research method in which the author is also the topic of investigation. The research was partly based on my feelings, thoughts and experiences while living in the UK and Germany, far from my ancestral home in Igbo land, Africa.

Cognitive immobility is a stressful mental entrapment that leads to a conscious or unconscious effort to recreate past incidents in one or more locations that one lived in or visited in the past. By doing so, we are hoping to retrieve what is missing or left behind.

When people cannot remain in locations because of conditions beyond their control, such as a war or family or work commitments, their bodies may physically move to a new world, while their minds are left behind – trapped in the previous location.

Thus, these people might be described as being “cognitively immobilised”. During this time, such individuals may seek consolation through the reconstruction of events or physical movement to the locations that they migrated or departed from.

This may be related to homesickness, but it is actually different. Homesickness is a feeling of longing for a previous home, whereas cognitive immobility is a cognitive mechanic that works on our attention and memory to mentally trap us in a place – whether it is a previous home or just a place we’ve visited.

Our conscious memory (made up of semantic and episodic memories) allows us to remember not just what happened in the past, but also basic knowledge of things around us. Specifically, episodic memory helps us remember or reconstruct events we experienced or events that could have happened in the past but didn’t.

Indeed, research shows that recalling memory is a process of imagination – we often recreate past events in a way that isn’t necessarily accurate, but rather affected by our current beliefs and emotional state. This can make our past look even better than it was.  READ MORE...

Hair Growth & Immune System Link

Source: Salk Institute

Salk scientists have uncovered an unexpected molecular target of a common treatment for alopecia, a condition in which a person’s immune system attacks their own hair follicles, causing hair loss.

The findings, published in Nature Immunology on June 23, 2022, describe how immune cells called regulatory T cells interact with skin cells using a hormone as a messenger to generate new hair follicles and hair growth.

“For the longest time, regulatory T cells have been studied for how they decrease excessive immune reactions in autoimmune diseases,” says corresponding author Ye Zheng, associate professor in Salk’s NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis.

“Now we’ve identified the upstream hormonal signal and downstream growth factor that actually promote hair growth and regeneration completely separate from suppressing immune response.”

The scientists didn’t begin by studying hair loss. They were interested in researching the roles of regulatory T cells and glucocorticoid hormones in autoimmune diseases. (Glucocorticoid hormones are cholesterol-derived steroid hormones produced by the adrenal gland and other tissues.) They first investigated how these immune components functioned in multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and asthma.

They found that glucocorticoids and regulatory T cells did not function together to play a significant role in any of these conditions. So, they thought they’d have more luck looking at environments where regulatory T cells expressed particularly high levels of glucocorticoid receptors (which respond to glucocorticoid hormones), such as in skin tissue.

The scientists induced hair loss in normal mice and mice lacking glucocorticoid receptors in their regulatory T cells.

“After two weeks, we saw a noticeable difference between the mice—the normal mice grew back their hair, but the mice without glucocorticoid receptors barely could,” says first author Zhi Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Zheng lab.  READ MORE...

God and Psychological Distress

Summary: Researchers report religious people who relate to a God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience psychological distress disorders, including anxiety, paranoia, and obsessive compulsions. Findings reveal how different styles of attachment to a deity may be associated with poorer mental health outcomes.

Source: Westmont College

A national study examines the link between a perceived relationship with God and mental health from a sample of more than 1,600 Americans.

The research suggests that religious believers who relate to God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience symptoms of psychological distress, including anxiety, paranoia, obsession and compulsion.

The study, “Attachment to God and Psychological Distress: Evidence of a Curvilinear Relationship” appears in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. It relies on data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey, a national survey of American religious beliefs, values, and behaviors. The research sheds light on how different styles of connecting to God—or attaching to God—may be related to poorer mental health.

“Most research on attachment to God has suggested a simple linear relationship, where a less avoidant—or secure—relationship is associated with better mental health and a more avoidant relationship with worse,” said Blake Victor Kent, assistant professor of sociology at Westmont College. “But there have been hints in the research that the relationship may actually look more like an upside down U-shaped curve. So that’s what we looked for, and that’s what we found.”

The inverse curve was found in a scale composed of six items measuring avoidance and non-avoidance in relationship with God. Sample items read:

• “I have a warm relationship with God.”
• “God knows when I need support.”
• “God seems to have little or no interest in my personal affairs.”

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