Can Your iPod Help You Lose Weight, Reduce Your Blood Pressure, and Alleviate Pain?

The last thing Steve Jobs needs is more hype, but there still may be a market that he hasn't fully tapped. All of us are intuitively aware that music can alter behavioral patterns -- who hasn't experienced that wonderful moment when a soothing lullaby stops a baby's cries or the rousing feeling we get when listening to John Williams' Star Wars score?

I recently discovered that there was an organized field of health care called music therapy. According to the American Music Therapy Association, programs designed by trained professionals and specifically tailored to medical issues (pain or stress management, for instance) can improve the quality of a person's physical, emotional, or cognitive health. And since 1994 Medicare has covered many of these treatments.

But what I find really exciting is that a slew of new studies are providing hard scientific validation of our anecdotal insights.

1.    Music and Weight Loss

Christopher Capuano, the director of the school of psychology at Farleigh Dickinson University, reported that "exercising can be difficult for someone who is obese. Walking to music seemed to really motivate women in our study to get out there and stick with the commitment they made." As part of an overall weight reduction program for women who were overweight to moderately obese (BMIs ranged from 26.1 to 41.7) that included dieting, aerobic exercise, and participation in group meetings, his team also gave a portable CD player to half the women to use when they walked. The other half did not walk to music. The women who played music lost significantly more weight and fewer of them dropped out of the program.

2.    Music and Pain

Dr. Mark Liponis, the medical director of the Canyon Ranch spa, reports in his upcoming book, Ultra-Longevity, on a Korean study that found that music therapy actually reduced the pain of fractures in people with broken legs. He also cites a study in the journal Clinical Research in Cardiology of heart patients who listened to music while undergoing uncomfortable catheterization -- their anxiety levels were significantly reduced if music was played during the procedure.

3.    Music and Blood Pressure

Mark Jude Tramo, a musician and neuroscientist at the Harvard Medical School, is exploring how the biology of music has benefits far beyond entertainment. According to Tramo, "one study showed that the heart muscle of people exercising on treadmills didn't work as hard when people listened to music as it did when they exercised in silence." Other studies have shown that patients in intensive cardiac care units where music is played need lower doses of blood pressure-lowering drugs than patients in units where no music is played.

I personally use a device called Resperate that coordinates my breathing with musical sequences as an aide in controlling my blood pressure.

4.    Music and Alzheimer's

One of the most active areas of research is in using music as a tool to help soothe Alzheimer's patients. A month-long music therapy study at the University of Miami School of Medicine discovered that blood levels of melatonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine -- all natural mood-enhancing substances -- rose significantly in all patients during the study. The participants in the study slept better and became more cooperative and active.

5.  Music and Cancer

According to the Ayurvedic practitioner Pratima Raichur, "preliminary studies at Ohio State University have found evidence that the primordial sounds of the Veda [spoken Hindu scriptures] decreased growth of cancer cells in rats."

A study of adults -- humans, that is! -- undergoing highly toxic high-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation, conducted at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Integrative Medicine Service demonstrated that trained musical therapists could significantly reduce patient anxiety.

When my father was dying of multiple myeloma, a form of bone-marrow cancer, I made sure to supply him with recordings of his favorite music. Had I known then about the benefits of professionally administered music therapy, I surely would have made use of their skills as well. I can tell you one thing -- I'm going to start listening to my iPod in the gym with a new set of ears.

Would You Pay $100K for a Year of Life?

The Mastercard ads say it all - "time with your family or loved ones, priceless." And if any of us were asked if we'd spend every penny we'd earned to save the life of a child or spouse, we'd say (perhaps) without batting an eye, "Whatever it takes, and then some." But unsentimental economists and health care consultants don't agree. And surprisingly, even the average American doesn't necessarily agree.

It turns out, according to a recent piece by Alex Berenson in the New York Times, that the average American values a year of life at between $100,000 and $300,000.

Health care economists derived this number by a variety of means - comparing the cost of dialysis versus blood pressure medicine, the inconvenience and pain associated with sleep apnea versus blindness and something called the standard gamble test.

In the test, "people are asked to imagine having the symptoms of a certain disease - the pain, loss of function and shortened life expectancy," according to Berenson, and then "the people are told that an operation exists that would cure them. But if the operations fails, the patient will die."

The more profound the disease (leukemia, severe diabetes) the more likely it is that the person will choose the risky operation.    And of course, the more severe the disease, the more likely it also will be that the costs associated with its treatment will be higher.

All this matters to each of us because "once they know how to rank the ‘costs' of various diseases, economists can determine the worthiness of a particular treatment." And if the treatment is not deemed worthy, health care won't cover its use.

I understand this from personal experience. When my father was dying in the early '90s of multiple myeloma, a type of cancer, some of the medicines that were used to keep him alive for a few more days costs thousands of dollars a day.

And many of those drugs were experimental (such as monoclonal antibodies) so, although we did not know it at the time, were not going to be covered by his health insurance. I know if you've also been through this situation, the last thing you feel capable of handling when someone you love is dying is deciding if a treatment is "worth" it.

But we don't live in a world with bottomless pockets and in America, land of an increasingly dysfunctional and unjust health care system, the question of who gets what treatment is enormously important.

As our society ages and as health care treatments and technology become ever more expensive, we need to create non-arbitrary and objective means to help us navigate the really hard choices that are coming.

And the health care industry needs to make the judgments and information transparent and available to everyone - before someone gets really sick and emotion clouds the choices we need to make.

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Botox and Emotional Expression

In Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris wrote: "Modern psychologists have supported Darwin's idea that extreme emotions -- great joy, rage, disgust, fear -- are registered on the face, and that these facial expressions are universally recognized (and therefore biologically wired in). We should be happy for this bit of adaptvie advantage, too, these researchers add, because it means we will always be able to tell whether a stranger is happy or about to attach us in a fury."

Hmmm.....what does botox do to our ability to interpret facial cues? Are we be able to tell if our boss is upset?  Or pleased?

Because Botox prevents frowns, Rob Horning wondered what are the consequences if people always seem content?

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/65037/forced-smiles/

Seems like the face of life experience might be evolving in unhelpful ways. What do you think?

Transformational Leadership

As I watched the last Presidential debate last night I couldn't stop thinking of the behavior of the two candidates in connection with my research on emotion at work. In the book, Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory and Practice, the authors presented the following insight: "...there is evidence that undesirable emotional states limit our cognitive functioning (Avia, 19917). Stress, for instance, hampers our ability to think (Zaccaro, 1995) and increases the tendency to make decisions based on experience rather than intelligence (Feidler, 1995)."

McCain sure seems stressed. To my mind, what otherwise might be construed as passion for his country comes across as anger. Anger at pretty much everything. Of the rabid dog kind. The behavior is not reassuring during a period of global chaos.

On the other hand, according to research found in Emotions in the Workplace, "The abilities to create and to test trust quickly are important. This forces one in the direction of reliable behavior. The final acid test then becomes: how comfortable is the other person, is he or she playing tricks, is there a hidden agenda, does he or she play games, and I at ease?"

I don't know about you, but Obama's measured, reliable behavior speaks to a quality of leadership that is tailored-made for these tough times. We need transformational leadership and Neal Ashkanasy, Charmine Hartel and Wilfred Zerbe, the author of the Emotions in the Workplace, presented this insight:

"...that transformational leadership is intrinsically associated with emotional intelligence. The resulting propositions are:

Proposition 11a: Compared to other leaders, transformational leaders have a clear understanding of their own emotions, and are more in touch with their own emotions.

Proposition 11b: Compared to other leaders, and because they are more in touch with their own emotions (P11a), transformational leaders are more able to regulate their own emotions.

Proposition 11c: Since they are more able to regulate their own emotions (P11b), transformational leaders are more emotionally stable and less stressed than other leaders.

Proposition 11d: Compared to other leaders, transformational leaders are better able to understand others' emotions.

Proposition 11e: Since they are better able to understand others' emotions (P11d), transformational leaders are more able than other leaders to emphasize with their followers.

Proposition 11f: Partly because they are better able to emphasize with their followers (P11e), transformational leaders are more able than other leaders to engender affective commitment among their followers."

Hmmm, based on the above, is there any question who has the right stuff to lead the charge for change?

Politically Incorrect Gender Equality

Eight years ago Barbara and Allan Pease wrote the following: "The education system favors boys and disadvantages girls in mathematical exams because studies show that girls suffering PMS have testosterone levels that are significantly lower during this phase. One study showed that girls with PMS scored 14 percent lower on mathematical exams when they had PMS than girls who weren't suffering PMS. A fairer system would be to arrange exams to take place at a time that is biologically more suitable for girls. Boys can take the tests at any time."

I was disturbed by this finding. Could it be that in our push for equality, we've ended up supporting a system that penalizes us for a biological difference? All I know is that I sure wish I'd read their book, Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, when it was first published. As the mother of two daughters in college, think of the advantage such a simple fact might have provided them during their punishing two years of standardized test taking. And for those of you with daughters taking the SATs, it might behoove you to focus on the test date a little bit more intimately.

Don't you think this is something our educators should discuss?

Emotion and the Markets

David Brooks was onto something interesting in today's op-ed column in The New York Times. This was the first piece I've come across addressing how emotional distance may have contributed to the financial crisis. He wrote: The economists talk about mispriced risk and illiquidity in the system. But many economists are trained to downplay emotion, social psychology and moral norms, and so produce bloodless and incomplete descriptions of what's going on. The truth is, decision-making is an inherently emotional process, and the traders in charge of these trillions become bipolar as a result of their uncertainty.

Brooks point?

1. Traders don't see reality directly they view its shadow in technical models on their computers. 2.  Social and emotional contagion fuel increasingly irrational decisions.

It's time to get real. Maybe we should stop looking at complex financial scenarios and start using common sense. Maybe we should stop listening to on-air hysteria-inducing bloviators and start trusting our emotional gut if it feels too good to be true, that's probably the case. And if you're frightened out of your wits, step back, and take a deep breath before jumping.

Women and Tears

Have you ever wondered why you feel like crying during a well-executed AT&T advertisement, even when you know you're being emotionally manipulated? Do you think you cry more often because you were socialized growing up to feel that emotions mattered and women are more naturally care-givers? Sure, society certainly plays a role in how we develop, but perhaps more importantly, women are, biologically wired to cry more. We have higher levels of the hormone, prolactin, which controls, among other things, the development of tear glands. That means that we are 4 times more likely to cry than men. And our tear glands are even constructed differently from men. According to Dr. William Frey, who studies tears, when men cry 73 percent of the time tears do not fall down their cheeks  they get misty-eyed. Tears, on the other hand, almost always flow down women's cheeks.

Are there times at work when you've cried and you wish you had not?

Can Women Grow Success at Work?

Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis reported the following in their book Leadership and the Sexes, Catalyst Corporation has found that the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than the group of companies with the lowest women's representation. This finding holds for both financial measures analyzed: Return on Equity (ROE), which is 35.1 percent higher, and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS), which is 34.0 percent higher.

Do you know any companies where this might be true?

The Brain Gender Gap

I love quizzes of al most any sort. Where do I fall in the political spectrum? Do I like Venice or Florence better? Am I high maintenance (see Fountain of Youth Index). I found this test purporting to reveal the gender of my brain interesting. 

Turns out my brain is pretty evenly male/female. My husband's brain is slightly female, one of my daughter's is typically female and the other daughter is the most male in the family.

I'm not sure if this reveals a weakness in the quiz or in the underlying assumptions of hard-wired gender-ness. Or if it shows the folly of binary thinking.

What do you think?