Psychologists Share Findings at Their Annual Mind Meld

Mothers, fathers, teenagers, boys, girls, grandparents, employees, bosses--no psyche is spared scrutiny when 10,000 psychologists gather as they did this week for the annual American Psychological Assn. convention.

Some of the highlights:

* The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program is the most widely used drug prevention program, but it isn’t nearly as effective as policymakers had hoped, said a team of psychologists, including Judith A. Stein and Jodie B. Ullman of UCLA. The study compared 356 sixth-graders who completed the DARE program with 264 students who did not. The students were reexamined six years later.

“The only clear effect that DARE had six years after the program was that male high school seniors who participated in the program used harder drugs like amphetamines / barbiturates, cocaine, LSD, significantly less than those males who weren’t in the program. The program failed in lessening male and female students’ use of alcohol, cigarettes or marijuana,” the authors concluded.

* A study that examined a mother’s relationship with her child when the child was 5 and again 45 years later found that rocky relationships can improve over time--especially if Mom lets go.

Psychologist Sarah Holmes of Boston University found that mothers who described their young children as “easy to raise” also tended to be close to them as adults. Mothers who were authoritarian with their young children and found them difficult to raise tended to experience conflict and emotional distance with their adult children. These mothers often stated that neither mother nor child seemed to understand each other.

The final major category Holmes found consisted of mothers who said their relationship with their child improved over time and became more satisfying. These mothers seemed to have gained a sense of psychological maturity and were willing to let their children lead their own lives, the study found.

* Add frustration and reduced performance to the list of negative effects (bad mood, hostility, higher blood pressure, etc.) on people who have lengthy commutes to work. A study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University in North Miami found that people who commuted about 30 miles to work were weaker on complex tasks and were more easily frustrated. The negative effects were present among both people who drove to work and those who took a bus.

* Why is an older worker more valuable than the younger hotshot at the company? It’s because the veteran employee has more practical intelligence, says psychologist Regina Colonia-Willner of Smyrna, Ga.

According to her study of bank managers, intellectual capacity does decline with age, but older workers can still be successful because they have good old experience. The older workers who were successful tended to be valued because they understood things such as how a particular department operated, its internal dynamics, the interplay of various personalities and the differences in people’s working styles.

* Six out of 10 girls with eating disorders do not believe they need counseling for their behavior, says Ohio State University psychologist Dinah Meyer. Eating disorders are so common among adolescent girls, she says, that girls often do not consider them a problem.

“Eating disorders have almost become normalized in our culture because of the emphasis on thinness,” Meyer said.

The study of 238 junior and senior high girls found that 16% had full-blown eating disorders and that an additional 33% exhibited serious symptoms of the disorders.

The girls tended to deny that they had a problem or said that it didn’t worry them or that they didn’t want anyone to know about it.

“I think a lot of young girls start to believe disordered eating is normal because they see their friends doing it,” she said. “Just as parents are taught to look for drug use in their teens, they should be taught to look for eating disorder behaviors too.”