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Media Watch for November 2007 (Issue 72)
Feel Better – Talk about It: Matthew Libermean of The University of Southern California Los Angeles says when feelings like sadness and anger are put into words they become less intense. Leberman scanned the brains of thirty people who were shown pictures of faces expressing strong emotions. When people attached a word like “angry” to an angry-looking face, the response in the portion of the brain that handles fear, panic and other strong emotions, decreased. The findings of the study published in the Journal Psychological Science helps explain why talking to a therapist or some other sympathetic listener makes people feel better. From: “Putting Feelings Into Words Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli,” by Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom,Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way, University of California, Los Angeles www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/AL(2007).pdf
Winning Nobel Prize has Side Benefits: Research done at the University of Warwick in England analyzed 524 nominees for the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry between 1901 and 1950. It showed that the group’s 135 winners lived about two years longer then the also-rans. The finding points to the health benefits of social status, at least for Nobel Prize winners, upon whom status is suddenly dropped. From: LiveScience.com, “Nobel Prize Winners Live Longer,” by Health SciTech Senior Editor, Robin Lloyd.
Puerto Rican Mediums Healing Work: In his article, “Mediums at Large,” Patrick Huyghe says that mediums are regarded as therapists and healers in large parts of Central and South America, Africa and Asia. Jesus Soto Espinosa, of the Spiritist Confederation of Puerto Rico, is quoted as saying that patients suffering from alcoholism, cancer and depression have been treated by their physician or mental health professional along with the assistance of a medium. Huyghe writes, “the mediums become possessed by spirits and experience visions in order to heal the patients.” From: “Mediums at Large,” by Patrick Huyghe, Fate Magazine, April 2007. The Quality of Mediumship: In an interview for the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies bulletin, The Searchlight, Michael Tymn asked professor of philosophy Dr. Neal Grossman why the quality of mediumship was not what it was a hundred years ago. Grossman replied that he was not sure that he agreed that the quality of mediumship was higher back then. He did feel that the medium research was a bit higher stating, “…there was not then the kind of intense fundamaterialist bias against this kind of research. Even though James et al were ridiculed and marginalized by materialist colleagues, just as researchers are today, they could still do their work and publish their findings. Today, there are not many psychology departments that would grant a Ph.D. to any graduate student doing this kind of research. No university would give tenure to any faculty who took medium research seriously. So it is virtually impossible in the present climate for someone with both the interest and the credentials to do this research and function within the current academic establishment.” From: “Philosophy Professor Discusses Resistance to Survival Research,” by Michael E. Tymn, The Searchlight, Volume 16, No. 2, www.aspsi.org/index.php.
Some Mediums Giving the Rest a Black Eye: In the June 2007 Searchlight, Carla Wills-Brandon, Ph.D. discuses how the inaccuracies and behavior of some well-known mediums is making her job of educating the public and medical community about deathbed visions and related experience more difficult. She wrote, “Several of the ‘Hollywood’ mediums do not act with humble graciousness. They instead … rip grieving people open before millions of television viewers. While appearing … as experts in the ‘unknown’ they appear intoxicated with their own perception of self importance.”
Carla talks about watching a show in which a famous medium was shown telling the parents of a missing boy that he was dead. She wrote, “I remember how shocked I was as I watched the grief—grief which should have been private, well up in the eyes of these very distraught, vulnerable parents.” The information given to the parents by this famous medium turned out to be untrue as the boy was later found alive and reunited with his parents. Carla continues with, “When this happens, the doors are thrown wide open for the ‘Randis’ of the world to walk on through with a big ‘I told you so’…. When they are able to debunk one in need of debunking, they then work even harder at taking undeserved wild stabs at the rest of us.” From: “Why some ‘Hollywood’ Mediums Give the Rest a Black Eye,” by Carla Wills-Brandon, PhD. The Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies Searchlight Volume 16, No 2, June 2007.
Religious Doctors are Not More Likely to Care for the Poor: A new study done by Dr. Farr Curlin of the University of Chicago shows that religious physicians are not disproportionately caring for the underserved. Curlin, who considers himself religious, said he undertook the study because many religions include a call to serve the poor. The study appeared in the Annals of Family Medicine. Curlin and colleagues at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut mailed research surveys to 1,820 practicing doctors. The researchers ranked the “intrinsic religiosity” of the participants according to how they answered questions about the role religion played in their lives, how often they attended religious services, how spiritual they considered that they were and whether they believed that the practice of medicine was a calling.
The study found that physicians who were deemed more religious by intrinsic religiosity or frequency of attendance of religious services were not more likely to report caring for underserved patient populations like those that tended to be poor, uninsured or those on Medicaid. From: “Do Religious Physicians Disproportionately Care for the Underserved,” Annals of Family Medicine, www.annfammed.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/353
Clairvoyant Princess: In July, Norwegian Princess Martha Lousie announced that she was clairvoyant and that she wanted to help people by teaching them how to talk to angels. The thirty-five-year old princess is a trained physical therapist. She wrote, “It was while I dealt with horses that I first got in touch with angels. I later came to understand the value of this enormous gift and would like to share it with others.” Astarte Education, an alternative education centre which she co-founded, promises to teach students to “create miracles” in their lives “with angels and with your own force.” From: the Sidney Morning Heald “Norwegian royal 'creates miracles'” www.smh.com.au/
MyDeathSpace.com is a Web site that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members, although anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day. The site seems to have more bad points then good ones. The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. They come in every form from senseless and indiscriminate to often brutally graphic. Bob Thompson a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University says, “This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness … We see those kinds of things that we try not to think about, which is how we are all dancing on the edge—how quickly mortality can come in and claim us.” Although most of the site seems to promote morbid curiosity, many families of the deceased leave the profiles up as memorials and this becomes a way to communicate with their loved ones with post-mortem birthday wishes or simply life updates. From: Chron.com, Houston Chronicle, “Deceased MySpace members got own Web site,” by Meghan Barr Associated Press: www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5010217.html
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