Normal sexual changes with age

Our bodies change as we get older. Naturally, then, we may experience changes in our sexual lives: our thoughts, desires, and needs. When we know about the sexual changes that can come with older age, it can help us to understand our bodies and decide if we want to seek professional help. But we need to bear in mind that what is normal for one person may not be normal for another. There can be huge differences in people’s levels of sexual activity, and in what they find sexually desirable. Some people have no interest in sex but enjoy acts of intimacy, whereas others prefer no physical contact at all.






Common changes in women



Women can experience physical sexual changes with age. Due to hormonal changes that come with the menopause, it can take longer for the vagina to lubricate, and vaginal tissues can become thinner. This can make penetrative sexual activity painful (dyspareunia) and in turn affect sexual desire. Orgasms can also change, and become less intense or take longer to reach.

During the menopause transition, women may experience symptoms that have an impact on their sex lives. The daily difficulties associated with menopause, such as hot flashes, brain fog, and tiredness, can be stressful. The disrupted sleep from night sweats can be exhausting. All of these can affect mood which in turn affects interest in sex. It is not unusual for women to lose sexual desire at this time, but the reason may be a combination of emotional and physical factors. For example, women might have caring duties which can be tiring, particularly if they are still in work.

Some physical changes are less common but can still affect women’s sex lives. For example, vaginal prolapse as a result of decreased muscle tone, again related to changing hormone levels. And some women find that their orgasms have become painful, which can be due to spasm of the uterus.










Common changes in men



It is not uncommon for men to notice changes in their erections as they get older. Some men find that their erections are less firm, and that they take longer to achieve. Some men find that they cannot get an erection, while others cannot maintain an erection for very long.

Changes to orgasm and ejaculation can also occur. In particular, there can be reduced semen at ejaculation, and the chances of experiencing non-ejaculatory orgasm (dry orgasm) increases with age. The ejaculation itself may feel less forceful, and the urgency to orgasm can reduce. The recovery period after orgasm extends which means there is a longer period between orgasms.

Men may experience physical changes that are less common including prostate disease. Some men undergo prostatectomy which can affect their ability to get an erection.






Emotional issues



Emotional issues are important to our sexuality. Factors such as stress or relationship difficulties can influence our sex lives at any age: our desire, arousal, and satisfaction with sex. Also, relationships can change over time, along with our priorities, and adults may find that they place less importance on sex as they get older.

Depression and anxiety can affect our sex lives in different ways. They can make us lose interest in sex, and can cause erection problems. Sexual changes themselves can impact psychological well-being, and some women describe feeling less of a woman because they do not desire sex, and some men feel de-masculinised when they cannot get an erection.

As adults we can feel differently about our bodies as we get older, especially if we have a visible difference caused by illness or disability. A changed appearance, including the general changes to physical appearance that come with older age (baldness, grey hair, weight gain) can affect self-esteem which in turn can affect interest in sex.










Health conditions and disability



Many health conditions can have an impact on our sex lives, including those we are most likely to encounter as we get older (e.g. dementia, stroke, heart disease). Health conditions can affect our sexuality in physical and emotional ways. For example, we may experience a disability that limits the sexual positions we can hold, and feel fatigue due to illness which then affects sexual desire.

Many prescribed medicines, including those for long-term conditions and common cancer treatments, can have sexual side-effects in women and men. For example, they can cause erection problems, ejaculation difficulties and vaginal dryness. They can also prevent arousal orgasm and reduce sexual desire.






Sexually transmitted infections



We can get a sexually transmitted infection (STI) at any age. It is important to protect yourself during sex, especially if you do not know your partner’s sexual history. Condoms create a barrier to STIs and should be used during oral, anal, and vaginal penetrative sex. Common STIs include HIV, chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhoea.








Dr Sharron Hinchliff

Reader in Psychology and Health
The University of Sheffield



Sharron leads a programme of research which explores ageing, sexual health, sexual well-being, intimate relationships, and psychological factors of health. Established in 2001, the aim is to better understand these issues so that we can improve patient quality of life and inform healthcare practice.

Sharron’s work sits within a framework of sexual rights. She is the founder of #SexRightsAge: a national campaign to recognise the sexual rights of older adults.

Age, Sex and You is the first website in the UK dedicated solely to adults aged 50 and older.

Have you found this website useful? If so let us know. We also want to hear from you if you have suggestions for topics to add to this site.

Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 2045

Email: s.hinchliff@sheffield.ac.uk

SOURCE:

http://www.agesexandyou.com/#age(accessed 28.11.22)

Sharing an article makes us feel more knowledgeable - even if we haven’t read it

Sharing information can even influence our behaviour: participants made different financial decisions depending on whether they had shared an article on investing.


By Emily Reynolds


One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you’re interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example.

And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we’ve searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased – even if we haven’t read it.

In the first study, participants were given the opportunity to read online news articles shared with them by prior participants and share articles with future participants. They could read and/or share as many or as few as they wanted. Following this, they indicated their subjective knowledge for each article topic on a seven point scale (“compared to most people, I know more about this topic”) , before answering questions about them, measuring their objective knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, those who read the articles both knew more objectively and felt more knowledgeable. But those who shared the articles also felt they knew more than those who didn’t, whether or not they had actually read the article. However, they didn’t actually know any more objectively.

A second study established that people don’t simply share articles because they already know about the topic, but rather that the very act of sharing boosts beliefs about how knowledgeable they are.

The next study looked at whether participants’ still believed that they were more knowledgeable about a topic when sharing under a false identity. This time, participants shared articles without reading them. In one condition, they wrote down their initials, which would appear with any article they chose to share with future participants, while in the other they were instead asked to imagine they were pranking a friend by sharing articles under that friend’s initials instead of their own.

Again, people felt more knowledgeable about the content of articles they shared compared to those they didn’t, even though they hadn’t actually had the opportunity to read any of the stories. However, this was only true when people shared under their own identity, and not when they shared under somebody else’s. When we share articles under our own name, the researchers suggest, we are effectively identifying ourselves as the source of that information, and so come to believe that we do actually have relevant knowledge. A further study also found that the effect of sharing on our subjective knowledge is stronger when we share with close friends as opposed to strangers.

A final study looked at whether people act as if they are more knowledgeable after sharing articles, rather than simply feeling more knowledgeable. Participants were asked to read an article on investing, with those in the sharing condition instructed to share it on their Facebook page, and those in the non-sharing condition proceeding without sharing. All participants were then given investment advice by an AI adviser and took part in an investment planning simulation, in which they chose the level of risk for their investment, before responding to self-report measures of financial knowledge and questions measuring objective knowledge.

The results showed that those in the sharing condition took significantly more risk in the investment planning exercise than those in the no-sharing condition, suggesting that sharing articles can change our behaviour as well as our feelings about things.

Overall, the research shows that sharing online content makes us feel like we know more about that topic, although the strength of this effect shifts depending on who we are sharing with and through what means. The final study also suggests that this can change how we act, making decisions differently based on having shared information.

If we are indeed sharing without reading, we may therefore believe we are more knowledgeable about particular topics. This could be particularly problematic when it comes to “clickbait” headlines, which often don’t accurately reflect the content of an article. As we frequently witness during elections across the world, clickbait headlines often pertain to politics, so sharing these kinds of stories without reading them could make us believe we know a lot about particular politicians, policies, or movements, while actually only having misleading information from the headline we’ve read.

Social media companies have, in recent years, sought to counteract people sharing information they haven’t read through automatic pop ups: Twitter, for example, introduced a feature in 2020 to encourage people to read before they retweet. Later that year, the company claimed that the feature had led to 40% more article opens, though the full impact of such features is not clear; research into such features could further explore how it affects people’s beliefs about their own knowledge.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/sharing-article-makes-us-feel-more-knowledgeable-even-if-we-havent-read-it(accessed 28.11.22)

HR professionals offer women better salaries when reminded of their role in reducing the gender pay gap

HR specialists offered male candidates a higher salary than female candidates - but highlighting egalitarian social norms made this gap disappear.



By Matthew Warren


Giving Human Resources professionals simple messages about their role in promoting equality could help narrow the gender pay gap, according to research in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

HR specialists tended to offer male candidates a higher salary than female candidates in the new study. But when participants were reminded that they had a collective responsibility to reduce the gender pay gap, this difference disappeared.

“Norm messages that lead HR professionals to pay attention to more equitable behavior may be a way to reduce the gender pay gap that undervalues women’s labor without placing the burden of change on women”, the authors write.
The burden of change

Although the gender pay gap is gradually getting smaller, there are still major disparities in how much men and women are paid. In the UK, the most recent figures show that women in full-time employment earn 8.3% less than men on average.

Plenty of psychology research has attempted to identify the causes of, and solutions to, the gender pay gap. But much of this work has focused on what women themselves can do to improve their chances of getting paid well, effectively putting the onus on women to combat a systemic problem.

So in their new paper, Carolin Schuster from Leuphana University Lüneburg and colleagues instead studied the people who actually make decisions about salaries. The team asked more than 200 HR specialists to read a CV for a job candidate. The CV was identical for all participants, except for the gender of the candidate: their title was either given as “Mr M” or “Ms M”.

Some participants who were given a female candidate’s CV also read a short paragraph highlighting that it is a social norm for HR professionals to help tackle the pay gap. This stated that HR specialists have recently begun helping to reduce the gender pay gap by changing their behaviour to ensure equal treatment of men and women.

Finally, all participants learned that the candidate had asked for a salary of €44,000, and had to come back with a counteroffer. They also indicated the maximum salary that they would be willing to pay the candidate.
Working to a common goal

Schuster’s team found that participants who had seen the man’s résumé offered a significantly higher salary than those who had seen the woman’s résumé without the message about social norms: male candidates were offered €39,251 and female candidates €38,097. (The maximum that participants were willing to pay was similar for both male and female candidates).

However, participants who had seen the social norm message alongside the female candidate’s CV offered her a significantly higher salary. In fact, this intervention brought offers made to women in-line with those made to men, effectively eliminating the gender gap. The gender of the participants themselves didn’t influence any of these effects.

In a second study, the team again found that HR professionals offered female candidates a higher salary after reading the social norm message. In contrast, an “awareness” message, which mentioned the gender pay gap without explicitly stating that HR workers’ behaviour helps to combat it, had more ambiguous results, raising pay offers but not significantly so.

The researchers also found that after reading the social norm message, participants felt more strongly that they were working towards a common goal of reducing the gender pay gap, and this could help to explain why they offered the candidate more money.
Unintended consequences?

In this second study, some participants given the man’s CV also read the social norm message. And this produced a surprising result: these participants offered male candidates a lower salary compared to those who had read the man’s CV without the social norm message. This effectively reversed the gender pay gap, with men getting offered less than women.

However, this effect could be down to the design of the study. Each participant only dealt with a single candidate, and so the only way they could attempt to reduce the gender pay gap was to offer a higher-than-usual salary to a woman or a lower-than-usual salary to a man. In the real world, HR professionals won’t be making decisions in isolation like this – so would hopefully make decisions that would better lead to pay equality.

This unexpected result aside, the results suggest that a really simple message about the role played by HR professionals in helping to reduce the gender pay gap can boost pay offers to women. These messages seem to work by establishing a sense that HR professionals are part of a group with a common goal of working towards equality.

It remains to be seen whether this intervention works outside of the lab, and it’s unclear when in the process HR professionals need to see these messages or how long their effects last. But if they do work in real world hiring processes, they could help narrow a gap that current estimates suggest will take more than a century to close.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/hr-professionals-offer-women-better-salaries-when-reminded-their-role-reducing(accessed 23.11.22)

Test anxiety makes it harder to absorb information while preparing for an exam

Study suggests that test anxiety doesn't simply impair performance during an exam, but rather makes it harder to acquire knowledge in the first place.
2

By Emma Young


Many students find taking exams stressful. “They worry about whether they will be able to recall their knowledge; their hearts beat faster; they sweat and they want to escape the exam room,” write Maria Theobold at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany and colleagues in their new paper in Psychological Science. These are all symptoms of what’s known as ‘test anxiety’. Test anxiety is thought to interfere with a person’s ability to retrieve knowledge from their memory during a test, and has been widely linked to poorer exam performance.

But Theobald and her colleagues wondered whether instead test anxiety might be impairing people’s preparation for an exam, rather than affecting performance during the exam itself. To explore this, they turned to data on 309 medical students in Germany who had used a digital learning platform to prepare for their crucial final university exam. The team was able to track each student’s level of knowledge, starting 100 days before the exam itself. This was revealed in their performance on practice questions, as well as in mock exams that took place shortly before the real thing. The students also all completed a measure of their ‘trait’ (background) levels of test anxiety. And, throughout a 40-day period, they repeatedly reported on their levels of ‘state’ anxiety regarding their exam preparation.

The researchers found that greater trait test anxiety was indeed linked to a poorer performance in the final exam. However, it was also linked to poorer performance on the practice questions, and a lower percentage in the mock exam. So, students with the most test anxiety went into the final exam with less knowledge. In fact, when the researchers took into account performance on the mock exam or the pre-exam practice questions, test anxiety no longer predicted their final exam scores.

The researchers further explored why people with test anxiety might have poorer knowledge. They first looked at each student’s level of trait test anxiety and their performance on practice questions across the course of the pre-exam period. They found that students with higher trait anxiety showed a smaller increase in knowledge over time. This suggests that greater trait test anxiety makes it harder to acquire knowledge.

Finally, the team found evidence that awareness of gaps in one’s own knowledge may trigger more anxiety. During the preparation period, higher state anxiety in the morning was not linked to poorer scores on practice questions that day. However, fewer correct answers on one day was linked to greater test-related anxiety the next morning.

Earlier work has suggested that anxiety during an exam can particularly impair the performance of students with relatively low vs high working memory capacities (worries are thought to take up some working memory, leaving less for the task at hand). The participants in this study were high-performing medical students with presumably capacious working memories. Perhaps this buffered them against any impacts of worries during the exam on performance.

It is possible that anxiety during an exam may interfere with performance in some academic scenarios, but “our work suggests that this interference is not as pervasive as previously believed,” the team writes. Overall, “the results of the present study suggest that the reasons for the negative association between anxiety and test performance are complex and begin well before the final test situation.”

And this has important implications for test-anxious students, they note. There is research suggesting that training sessions designed to improve study strategies can help students who are anxious about an exam. But, as this work found that test anxiety begins to exert its effects early on in exam preparation, these interventions would need to come early, too. (In fact, the new findings might explain why some interventions designed to relieve test anxiety right before an important exam, such as getting students to write about their worries, have not improved exam performance.)

“Future research should focus on the development of interventions that facilitate effective knowledge acquisition during exam preparation, or even earlier, to improve the educational prospects of highly test-anxious students,” the team concludes.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/test-anxiety-makes-it-harder-absorb-information-while-preparing-exam(accessed 14.11.22)

Feeling Better About Our Bodies

link:

https://megjohnandjustin.com/bodies/feeling-better-bodies/

Content note. We discuss how we might feel better about our bodies. So we touch on the social messages we get about bodies and this includes us talking about fatphobia, diets, ‘health’, disablism, but we don’t go into much detail. It’s a long one — sorry about that.



Around the time of year that we recorded this podcast – early Spring – it’s easy to feel bad about our bodies. Cultural scripts suggest that we should overindulge and hibernate over the Winter, but that after new year we should be follow resolutions to diet and ‘get in shape’ for the summer ‘beach body’.



The media doesn’t help. At the moment there are a number of billboard adverts and makeover TV shows focusing on weight-loss and ‘improving appearance’. Particularly problematic are the links that are made between looking a certain way and ‘health’ and ‘fun’. Not only are we meant to have a certain appearance in order to be attractive and sexy, but also we’re blamed and shamed for being ‘unhealthy’ if we don’t conform to cultural beauty ideals, as well as often internalising the idea that caring about ‘looks’ is a fun and pleasurable thing to do, and to do otherwise would mean being a killjoy.

But the beauty ideal is incredibly limited. Looking around at the aspirational bodies that surround us they’re overwhelmingly young, thin, white, ‘flawless’, non-disabled, and gendered to match the ideals of rugged masculinity and delicate femininity, and a good deal of wealth is required to buy all the products necessary for maintaining such an ideal. We scientifically estimate on the podcast that 97% of people will not match these ideals for one reason or another, and all of us will move away from them as we age of course.
Love your body?

Most of us are likely to feel bad about our bodies if we’re surrounded by such narrow body ideals that we can’t possibly match up to. But what can we do about this? There has been a move among some people to replace the ‘change your body’ message of so much advertising and other media with a ‘love your body’ message.

This is pretty risky because it still locates the problem in us as individuals – rather than wider society. It’s bloody hard to love your body when the whole world is implicitly – or explicitly – telling you not to. If we receive the message that we should be able to easily love our bodies, that gives us yet another thing to feel bad about.

There’s a real tension when we live in a very individualising culture to know how to address things like this without continuing to individualise our struggles. At megjohnandjustin.com, we find the following diagram helpful – for all kinds of things – to think through how they work on multiple levels, and how we might address them on all those levels too. We can’t just try to relate differently to our body on an individual level if the people around us, our communities, and wider culture simply stay the same.

In the podcast we explore what we might do at each of these levels:Society – We could notice the images around us and be critical of them. We could confront fat-shaming remembering that it’s actually poverty, type of diet, and fitness that relate to health – not fatness; that being ‘underweight’ is generally more risky health-wise than being ‘overweight’; that these categories are based on an old model of measurement that doesn’t relate to how bodies are these days; and that shaming people about their bodies makes everything far worse – not better – for them. We could engage in body-related activism. We could seek out different subcultures that incorporate more diversity of bodies or expand our ideas of what is beautiful.
Communities – We could deliberately share materials that are critical of body ideals, or which incorporate a wider range of bodies. We could curate our social media accounts to avoid body-shaming from others, and to put out different messages ourselves, including filters and content notes. We could find communities which are trying to cultivate different ways of engaging with bodies. We could deliberately follow communities online which challenge narrow body ideals, including fat activists, disability activists, dwarf community activists, age activists, etc.
Interpersonal Relationships – We could keep an eye on whether we shame people in our lives for aspects of their bodies or bodily practices and try to stop doing that. We could have consent conversations about how we like to be treated in relation to our bodies, and what we find difficult from others.
Yourself – We could try to incorporate more embodied experiences into our lives where we feel ‘at one’ with our bodies rather than separate to them and scrutinising of them. These can include activities where the body is in motion, being alone, being in nature, etc.


Acceptance and Change

The ‘love your body’ message risks replacing the idea that we should always change our bodies to fit beauty ideals with the idea that we should always accept our bodies as they are and that changing them in any way is a bad thing that’s always about conforming to cultural norms.

Actually each person needs to find their own way of navigating the possibilities of change and acceptance in relation to their bodies (and in other areas). For example bodily changes of various kinds can be extremely helpful in decreasing physical pain and discomfort and/or improving mental health and/or opening up new possibilities in our lives.

Many trans people, disabled people, people with chronic health conditions, fat people, and others face a constant barrage of messages from one group of people telling them they should make changes to their bodies, while another group of people tell them they shouldn’t and that they should accept their bodies as they are. It’s not for anybody else to tell us how we should relate to our bodies, and – as a culture – we should help everyone to navigate these complex decisions about change/acceptance and support them through the various options instead of telling people what they should or should not do with their bodies.

© Meg-John Barker & Justin Hancock, 2018

SOURCE:

https://megjohnandjustin.com/bodies/feeling-better-bodies/(accessed 10.11.22)

Study finds little evidence that particular scents help people sleep better

But the research also suggests that smells you personally like could be beneficial.


By Emma Young


The idea that certain scents promote sleep has been popular for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians believed that myrrh increased sleep quality, for example, while recent studies have suggested that citrus smells may help sleep by improving mood, and a lavender scent is often touted as the perfect pillow spray. However, there has been little systematic objective investigation of the impact of specific odours on sleep, write the authors of a new paper in Scientific Reports. Agnieszka Sabiniewicz at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany and colleagues now report just such a study.

The participants were 139 healthy men and women. They first went into the lab to complete a batch of tests, including measures of their smelling ability and also symptoms of anxiety and depression. They were then given a nose clip to take home with them. Each clip delivered one of: an orange odour; l-Laurinal (a sweet floral scent); a perfume with citrus, floral, musky and orange scents; no scent at all.

Over a two week period, the participants wore their clip each night and completed a sleep diary each morning. (The diary asked about their quantity and quality of sleep.) A subgroup of 66 participants also used wrist-worn devices that measured their minutes of REM, deep sleep and light sleep.

After two weeks, the participants went back into the lab for repeat testing. They also reported on how pleasant or otherwise they had found their scent. Then they went home and, without wearing the nose clip this time, completed a sleep diary each morning for the following two weeks. At the end of this period, they went back into the lab, to re-take the key tests for a final time.

The team found a few small differences in the impact of specific odours on participants’ depression and anxiety scores. Those who’d sniffed the perfume tended to report less anxiety than those who’d smelled the Laurinal, although this effect was only marginally significant. And those who’d sniffed either the perfume or no odour had better depression scores than those who’d sniffed the Laurinal.

But the main aim of the study was to investigate impacts on sleep. The team found that, whatever the nose clips delivered, the participants generally reported feeling better rested as the study period went on. (So even the zero-odour, control group felt that they benefited.) Also, participants who found the odour they had been assigned particularly pleasant tended to report feeling better rested at the end of the study, compared with the beginning.

However, when the team compared the sleep quantity and quality data for each of the four nose clip groups, they found no differences — none of the odour groups had slept any better than the control group. As some earlier studies have suggested that certain odours can improve sleep (the scent of bitter orange has been linked to better sleep quality, for example), why did this research find no odour benefits? One possibility is that perhaps it had something to do with how the scent was delivered— via nose clip, rather than a spray or a scented candle, for example.

Some researchers have suggested that certain scents (including lavender and citrus odours) may act via the central nervous system to exert a direct relaxing or mood-boosting effect, and affect sleep in this way. However, this new work does suggest that how much you like a smell is what matters, rather than the odour itself.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/study-finds-little-evidence-particular-scents-help-people-sleep-better(accessed 10/11/22)

Ένα εκατομμύριο ορφανά από μητέρα παιδιά ετησίως, λόγω του καρκίνου

Ο καρκίνος αποτελεί μείζον πρόβλημα δημόσιας υγείας με προφανείς αρνητικές συνέπειες για τα άτομα που διαγιγνώσκονται με τη νόσο και το περιβάλλον του.


Σε πρόσφατη ανακοίνωση στο Παγκόσμιο Συνέδριο για τον Καρκίνο (World Cancer Congress 2022) ερευνητές παρουσίασαν τα δεδομένα για τον αριθμό των παιδιών που μένουν ορφανά από μητέρα εξαιτίας του καρκίνου. Συγκεκριμένα, το έτος 2020 καταγράφηκαν 4,4 εκατομμύρια θάνατοι γυναικών από καρκίνο. Το 78% αυτών των θανάτων αφορούσαν γυναίκες ηλικίας κάτω των 50 ετών. Οι ερευνητές χρησιμοποίησαν τα δεδομένα του Οργανισμού Ηνωμένων Εθνών για τον παγκόσμιο πληθυσμό αλλά και τον μέσο αριθμό ζώντων παιδιών ανά γυναίκα σε κάθε χώρα καθώς και τα ποσοστά γονιμότητας ανά πενταετία ηλικίας των γυναικών σε κάθε χώρα για τα προηγούμενα 18 έτη. Με βάση τα στοιχεία αυτά, εκτιμήθηκε ότι περίπου 1 εκατομμύριο παιδιά έμειναν ορφανά από μητέρα λόγω των θανάτων από καρκίνο σε όλο τον κόσμο.

Οι περισσότεροι από αυτούς τους θανάτους αφορούσαν την ήπειρο της Ασίας (49%) και της Αφρικής (35%) και σχετιζόταν συχνότερα με τον καρκίνο του μαστού (25% των περιπτώσεων), του τραχήλου της μήτρας (18%) και του ανώτερου γαστρεντερικού (13%). Μάλιστα φαίνεται να υπάρχει αντίστροφη σχέση ανάμεσα στον δείκτη ανθρώπινης ανάπτυξης και τον αριθμό των ορφανών από μητέρα ανά 100 θανάτους γυναικών. Συγκεκριμένα, η Ευρώπη που έχει τον υψηλότερο δείκτη ανθρώπινη ανάπτυξης είχε τον μικρότερο αριθμό ορφανών ανά θάνατο γυναικών από καρκίνο.

Τα στοιχεία αυτά είναι σημαντικά γιατί αποτυπώνουν για πρώτη φορά την έκταση του προβλήματος που μπορεί να έχει σημαντικές επιπτώσεις για τα παιδιά. Όπως αναφέρουν οι Καθηγητές της Θεραπευτικής Κλινικής της Ιατρικής Σχολής του Εθνικού και Καποδιστριακού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών, Μιχάλης Λιόντος (Επ. Καθηγητής), Φλώρα Ζαγουρή (Καθηγήτρια), Θεοδώρα Ψαλτοπούλου (Καθηγήτρια) και Θάνος Δημόπουλος (Καθηγητής και Πρύτανης ΕΚΠΑ), είναι γνωστό από μελέτες σε ορφανά παιδιά ότι χαρακτηρίζονται σε μερικές περιπτώσεις από χαμηλότερο επίπεδο εκπαίδευσης και μεγαλύτερη θνησιμότητα από τους συνομηλίκους τους. Προφανώς πρέπει να εντατικοποιηθεί η έρευνα για τον καρκίνο για να μειωθεί η θνησιμότητα από τη νόσο. Τα δεδομένα αυτής της μελέτης όμως δείχνουν ότι αυτό μπορεί να βοηθήσει και την επόμενη γενιά, σημειώνουν οι Καθηγητές του ΕΚΠΑ.


Επιπλέον, προσθέτουν, περίπου οι μισοί θάνατοι γυναικών σχετίζονταν με νοσήματα που μπορούν να προληφθούν ή να διαγνωσθούν πρώιμα όπως ο καρκίνος του μαστού και του τραχήλου της μήτρας. Επομένως, τέτοιες μελέτες αυξάνουν την ευαισθητοποίηση του κοινού για τις επιπτώσεις του καρκίνου μεταξύ των γενεών και υπογραμμίζουν την ανάγκη μείωση του αριθμού των θανάτων από καρκίνου από αίτια που μπορούν να προληφθούν.

Πηγή:

https://www.kathimerini.gr/life/health/562112065/ena-ekatommyrio-orfana-apo-mitera-paidia-etisios-logo-toy-karkinoy/(accessed 2.11.22)

Past experience of adversity can lead to feelings of guilt - and more compassion for others

Heightened feelings of guilt seem to be key to previously found association between personal experience of hardship and increased empathy.



By Emma Young


There are reasons to view guilt as a damaging emotion. It does not feel good. It’s also a key feature in major depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. And when someone feels personal guilt in relation to a trauma that they have suffered, such as abuse, they’re more likely to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress. However, recent research also shows that this emotion can have upsides.

Guilt is generally viewed as stemming from a belief that you have done something wrong, either morally or socially, and as a result, caused harm to others. And there is work finding that people will make pro-social, unselfish choices to avoid feeling it.

A new paper in Emotion identifies another upside of guilt. Past work has found that people who have suffered more adversity feel more empathy and compassion for others in need. Now Daniel Lim at Adelphi University and David DeSteno at Northeastern University find that feelings of guilt associated with personal experience of past hardship and trauma are the key driver of this effect.

In the first study, 127 US-based adults kept a three-week record of daily feelings of a variety of emotions, including guilt and compassion. Afterwards, they completed a survey that asked about any past life adversity, including bereavements, illnesses and difficulties in relationships. The researchers found that feelings of guilt and compassion tended to track each other — so on a day when someone felt more guilt, they also tended to feel more compassion. They also found that people who’d suffered more adversity tended to feel both more guilt and more compassion than the other participants.

To build on this, the pair ran a second study involving 126 online participants. They read a passage about the impact of conflict in Darfur on local people, and saw eight images of suffering children. This was intended to evoke compassion. The participants then reported on feelings of compassion and guilt. Again, the researchers found that levels of compassion were associated with levels of guilt — and that levels of both were linked to levels of past adversity. Their analysis suggested that feelings of guilt at least helped to explain the link between levels of past adversity and levels of compassion.

In the third, lab-based study on 100 participants, the pair directly manipulated feelings of guilt. Half of the participants were set up to physically collide with someone who they believed to be a fellow participant (but who was in fact a confederate). This ‘accident’ caused the confederate to drop a set of puzzle blocks that they had just spent time carefully arranging. The other half only witnessed the confederate dropping the puzzle blocks.

The researchers found that, as they’d expected, those who’d been led to cause the accident felt more guilt. They also found that, within this group, those who’d experienced more past adversity felt the most guilt. What’s more, there was a stronger link between past adversity and feelings of compassion for the confederate among these participants than among those who’d only witnessed the accident. So, as the pair writes, people who’d suffered greater past adversity were more likely to experience a large spike in guilt from their involvement in the accident, and this prompted more compassion for the ‘victim’.

Why would people who’d experienced greater adversity feel more guilt? It could be that knowing themselves what it is like to suffer, witnessing suffering in others leads them to feel more guilt at not having known about this suffering, or not already having done anything to help – or, in the case of the type of scenario in the second study, feel more guilt at causing someone else to suffer.

"The current set of studies offers an important insight related to the general notion that having experienced adversity in life can lead to increased compassion," the researchers write. The research also suggests a fresh social upside of guilt. Greater compassion could, the researchers write, "nudge people toward engaging in greater efforts to assist those in need".

Of course, there are factors that will influence how much guilt and compassion that someone who has experienced past adversity will feel in any given situation. People who are suffering from post-traumatic symptoms may be able to feel only limited compassion for others. And if they feel that the victim is in some way to blame for their suffering, this clearly could limit compassion. “Nonetheless,” the pair concludes, “in general, it does appear that an adversity-induced propensity for guilt enhances compassion in most.”

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/past-experience-adversity-can-lead-feelings-guilt-and-more-compassion-others(accessed 2.11.22)