Happy thoughts may dampen cravings

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

Want to quit smoking? Next time the urge to light up strikes, think of snow-capped peaks instead of the fleeting pleasure of a white cigarette. That's the conclusion of a new brain study which shows that thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings.

Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and his colleague Elizabeth Phelps of New York University measured the brain activity of 15 volunteers as they played a simple game.

The researchers told their subjects to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing

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Drug eases cravings in stressed alcoholics

sumsung submitted, created time 9 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

Researchers have found a drug that reduces responses to stress in some recovering alcoholics, and eases their cravings to have a drink.The results, published online today in Science, were obtained from a small clinical study of 50 recovering alcoholics, all of whom reported high levels of anxiety at the start of the study. The 25 randomly selected to be given the drug reported fewer cravings than those assigned to receive a placebo, and they had a lessened response to stressful situations.

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