UC Science Today

How much stress can you take? Maybe you’re OK with a small bump in the road, like a parking ticket or a spat with your neighbor. But what about more serious troubles?

“Things like going through a divorce, financial troubles, unemployment. Those are pretty big stressors.”

That’s Irene Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In her recent study, she discovered that you will be much better off if you accept your negative emotions, no matter how bad they are.

“We found the same positive effect of emotional acceptance. I don’t know at this point where the upper boundary is, but from other research we can speculate that actually there is no upper boundary in terms of the intensity of stressors."

But Mauss says accepting your negative emotions doesn’t mean accepting negative reality. You should still work on making positive changes in your life if things took a wrong turn.

What really makes you happy or sad? According to Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley it is not so much about what’s happening to you, but how you perceive the situations you are in.

"How you relate to your own emotions, transforms the experiences that you have in some way."

Mauss says the right way of thinking is the best way to protect yourself from moodiness, depression and anxiety.

"If you accept your negative emotions as just a natural response, you are going to pay less attention to them and so while they exist and happen, they blow over pretty quickly. Another idea is if you accept the negative emotions you have, you basically don’t punish yourself for feeling them and you avoid piling negativity upon negativity."

Or if you simply don’t chalk up your misfortunes to “bad luck,” this alone might cheer you up.

If your home has furniture that contains flame retardant materials, you may want to consider getting rid of it. A study by Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has shown that exposure to flame retardant chemicals, or PBDEs, may affect your health.

"The thing about the flame retardants use in a polyurethane foam is that they are not bound to the polyurethane, so they can get out and they can get into dust, and then they can migrate through dust, and people can get exposed through the dust, and they can also get into food. Another thing about PBDEs is that their chemical structure is such that it makes them persistent: once they get out they don’t break down, they hang around in the environment."

According to Woodruff, pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable. PBDEs may slow down children’s neurodevelopment, lower their IQ and possibly increase the risk of ADHD.

"Children may be more highly exposed to PBDEs, as it gets out in dust, because they are lower to the ground, they crawl around, they put their hands in their mouth."

So, not having furniture with these chemicals is the safest bet.

About a quarter of all the global climate change problems we’re seeing today can be attributed back to our food system and the dietary choices we’re making on a daily basis.

"This is greater than all of the cars on the planet; in fact it’s about twice as much global warming pollution as the cars."

That’s Benjamin Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He studies the connection between climate and diet. For instance, just switching from a meat-heavy American diet to a Mediterranean diet, which has less meat, more fish and lots of vegetables is not only good for your health, it’s good for the planet’s health, too.

"If we all switch to a diet like the Mediterranean diet – that is equivalent to taking somewhere around a billion cars off of the streets in terms of vehicle emissions each year. So, it’s a huge number that has a tremendous amount. In terms of percentages, it could solve up to 15 percent of global warming pollution by 2050. We thing these are really important things to understand; our dietary choice does matter and it’s something we can do every day."

How do you handle stress? Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to learn how people deal with stressors, so she ran an experiment that involved exposing study participants to uncomfortable situations.

“We stressed everybody out by having them giving an impromptu speech that we said would be videotaped and later scrutinized by judges. It’s an experience that people find very unpleasant. ”

But the way one reacts to a stressful situation like this changes the outcome.

“We found that people who tend to be more accepting of their negative emotions actually responded with less stress to that experience.”

According to Mauss, their study refutes previous notions that fewer bad things happen to happier people. It’s just that these people often see their negative experiences in a positive light.

Exposure to flame retardant chemicals or PBDEs during pregnancy can affect children’s neurodevelopment. That’s according to Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“There’s been studies in multiple locations including the United States and in other countries around the world and what was found was that women with higher exposures to PBDEs during pregnancies, their children had lower IQ scores.”

Woodruff says they measured IQ scores of 5 to 7-year-old exposed to these chemicals in infancy.

“For about 10-fold increase in PBDEs there was a drop of IQ score of about 4 IQ points."

But how did women get exposed to the chemicals? Turns out, through furnishings at home.

“PBDE flame retardants are the class of chemicals that were used primarily in upholstered furniture, so polyurethane foam. They were put in as a requirement to flammability standards. They are also used sometimes in electronics."

Can pregnant women be cured of insomnia? Jennifer Felder, a clinical phycologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is testing out a therapy called cognitive behavioral treatment, which could help expecting mothers fight sleep disorders.

“There is not currently much research on how best to treat insomnia during pregnancy. We know that cognitive behavioral treatment is effective for insomnia generally, but we don’t yet know if it is effective during pregnancy. “

Felder’s study shows that insomnia during pregnancy put women at a higher risk for delivering before 34 weeks of gestation. But according to Felder, doctors don’t always see lack of sleep as a problem.

“Insomnia is often going undetected. It maybe dismissed as part of the normal process of pregnancy.”

Yet, In the United States one in 10 women deliver their babies preterm, so Felder hopes the insomnia therapy could reduce the rate of preterm birth.

Can parents protect their children from developing asthma and eczema? Michael Cabana, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, believes it could be possible if parents follow these recommendations very early in their children’s lives, starting from birth.

“Longer duration of breastfeeding might be helpful, avoiding the use of antibiotics is also important and it seems to be a beneficial effect of vaginal delivery."

Cabana’s recent study also showed that positive health effects of probiotics might be overstated, despite a widely accepted belief that they help prevent eczema or asthma in kids. Cabana says researchers need to take a closer look at children’s microbiota.

“I think as we develop better tools to understand microbiota and how that microbiota evolves and what is a normal microbiota in a normally developing child I think that is the type of background information we still need to continue and develop."

Do you feel bad when you’re moody, upset or depressed? Well, don’t be. Negative emotions are not so bad. So says Iris Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We found that some people regard their negative emotions with some suspicion. But some people actually have what we call emotionally excepting stance. They regard their negative emotions as something very natural, part of life that doesn’t need to be avoided or altered or pushed away.”

Turns out, this type of thinking may work in your favor.

"Paradoxically, people who actually accept their own negative emotions more, tend to have less negative emotions when they face stressful events, and then overtime sort of like a healthy diet this decreased experience of negative emotions adds up to better psychological health, more well-being, satisfaction with life and also less depression.”

When we think about our food system, we need to factor in that about 33 percent of the land area is now used for animals for food. And according to Ben Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis, that has a huge influence on the global climate cycle.

"We have to think about the methane that’s being released from animals and rice patties and areas where we’re growing food. And we have to consider this nitrous oxide gas that’s being produced from the fertilizers we’re feeding to the microbes that live in the soil."

Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is the third largest contributor to global warming. Houlton and his colleagues identified nitrogen ‘fingerprints’ in soil samples to trace its journey and model how it moves through ecosystems and escapes into the air or water. Without adding the nitrogen cycle, Houlton says previous climate models were underestimated.

"Our discovery helped improve that understanding greatly so that we can now put this into our global models and help policymakers make better informed decisions."