Listening audioscript

Example Question 6, Listening Passage B, Page 301
[ mp3 131]
Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class. 
(Professor)
While we’re on the subject of depression, I’d like to discuss a condition 
called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or S-A-D…um…that spells “sad,” and 
as you’ll see, it’s a very appropriate term for the condition. It generally 
occurs in the fall and winter, but then it tends to disappear when spring 
comes. It can be relatively mild, or severe enough that the sufferer 
becomes dangerously depressed. The cause seems to be a lack of light 
during the late fall and winter months. The evidence for this is that SAD 
occurs during the darker months of the year, and it is more common at 
higher latitudes like Alaska or Norway—it’s almost unknown in sunny 
tropical climates. And, the final piece of evidence is the effectiveness of 
phototherapy as a treatment, which I’ll get to in a moment. So, OK, it’s 
believed that light suppresses—uh, holds down the production of a 
specific chemical in our bodies. On the other hand, this naturally 
occurring chemical increases during the times of year when there is less 
light, which is what triggers the symptoms of depression in SAD. We 
don’t know the exact mechanism, but some treatments can often greatly 
reduce the symptoms. One treatment, called phototherapy, is to use a 
special kind of a light box in your home…now, the light in this box is 10 
to 20 times brighter than a regular lamp…and you keep the light turned 
on and pointed at you while sitting in front of it for a specific period of 
time. For most people, there are no side effects, but you may have to 
spend up to 2 hours a day in the light. Some studies indicate that certain 

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LPREP IBT 3 E AudioScript 
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medications can be just as effective as light therapy, but of course the 
side effects of some of these are often serious. And so you can see that 
we have established a cause for this type of depression and some rather 
effective ways to treat it. However, we are not so clear on the exact 
mechanisms that result in individual variations in the symptoms and in 
the responses to the treatments